wire netting stretched up too high to climb: high enough to keep out the poorer customers from gate-crashing the expensive ring.
At the bottom of the steps lay a large expanse of Members’ lawn stretching to another metal mesh fence, chest high, and beyond that lay the whole open expanse of racecourse. Half a mile across it to the London road to Seabury, with yet another barrier, the boundary fence, to negotiate.
It was too far. I knew I couldn’t do it. Perhaps once, with two hands for vaulting, with a stomach which didn’t already feel as if it were tearing into more holes inside. But not now. Although I always mended fast, it was only two weeks since I had found the short walk to Andrews’ body very nearly too much; and Fred’s well-aimed attentions on the previous day had not been therapeutic.
Looking at it straight: if I ran, it had to be successful. My kingdom for a horse, I thought. Any reasonable cowboy would have had Revelation hitched to the rails, ready for a flying leap into the saddle and a thundering exit. I had a hundred and fifty mile an hour little white Mercedes: and someone else was sitting in it.
To run and be caught running would achieve nothing and be utterly pointless.
Which left just one alternative.
The security patrol hadn’t been drugged for nothing. Kraye wasn’t at Seabury for his health. Some more damage had been planned for this night. Might already have been done. There was just a chance, if I stayed to look, that I could find out what it was. Before they found
If I ever have any children, they won’t get me playing hide and seek.
Half an hour later the grim game was still in progress. My own car was now parked on the racecourse side of the stands, on the tarmac in Tattersalls where the bookies had called the odds that afternoon. It was facing the stands with the headlights full on. Every inch of the steps was lit by them, and since the car had arrived there I had not been able to use that side of the building at all.
The other car was similarly parked inside the racecourse gates, its headlights shining on the fronts of the weighing room, bars, dining-rooms, cloakrooms and offices.
Presuming that each car still had a watching occupant, that left only Kraye and Oxon, as far as I could guess, to run me to ground: but I became gradually sure that there were three, not two, after me in the stands. Perhaps one of the cars was empty. But which? And it would be unlikely to have its ignition key in place.
Bit by bit I covered the whole enormous block. I didn’t know what I was looking for, that was the trouble. It could have been anything from a plastic bomb downwards, but if past form was anything to go by, it was something which could appear accidental. Bad luck. A jinx. Open, recognisable sabotage would be ruinous to the scheme.
Without a surveyor I couldn’t be certain that part of the steps would not collapse the following day under the weight of the crowd, but I could find no trace of any structural damage at all, and there hadn’t been much time: only five or six hours since the day’s meeting ended.
There were no large quantities of food in the kitchen: the caterers appeared to have removed what had been left over ready to bring fresh the next day. A large double-doored refrigerator was securely locked. I discounted the possibility that Kraye could have thought of large scale food poisoning.
All the fire extinguishers seemed to be in their places, and there were no smouldering cigarette ends near tins of paraffin. Nothing capable of spontaneous combustion. I supposed another fire, so soon after the stables, might have been too suspicious.
I went cautiously, carefully, every nerve-racking step of the way, peering round corners, easing through doors, fearing that at any moment one of them would pounce on me from behind.
They knew I was still there, because everywhere they went they turned on lights, and everywhere I went I turned them off. Opening a door from a lighted room on to a dark passage made one far too easy to spot; I turned off the lights before I opened any door. There had been three lights in the passage itself, but I had broken them early on with a broom from the kitchen.
Once when I was in the passage, creeping from the men’s lavatories to the Tattersalls bar, Kraye himself appeared at the far end, the Members’ end, and began walking my way. He came in through the faint glow from the car’s headlights, and he hadn’t seen me. One stride took me across the passage, one jump and a wriggle into the only cover available, the heap of equipment the bookmakers had left there out of the weather, overnight.
These were only their metal stands, their folded umbrellas, the boxes and stools they stood on: a thin, spiky, precarious heap. I crouched down beside them, praying I wouldn’t dislodge anything.
Kraye’s footsteps scraped hollowly as he trod toward my ineffective hiding place. He stopped twice, opening doors and looking into the storerooms which were in places built back under the steps of the stands. They were mostly empty or nearly so, and offered nothing to me. They were too small, and all dead ends: if I were found in one of them, I couldn’t get out.
The door of the bar I had been making for suddenly opened, spilling bright light into the passage between me and Kraye.
Oxon’s voice said anxiously, ‘He can’t have got away.’
‘Of course not, you fool,’ said Kraye furiously. ‘But if you’d had the sense to bring your keys over with you we’d have had him long ago.’ Their voices echoed up and down the passage.
‘It was your idea to leave so much unlocked. I could go back and fetch them.’
‘He’d have too much chance of giving us the slip. But we’re not getting anywhere with all this dodging about. We’ll start methodically from this end and move down.’
‘We did that to start with,’ complained Oxon. ‘And we missed him. Let me go back for the keys. Then as you said before we can lock all the doors behind us and stop him doubling back.’
‘No,’ said Kraye decisively. ‘There aren’t enough of us. You stay here. We’ll go back to the weighing room and start all together.’
They began to walk away. The bar door was still open, lighting up the passage, which I didn’t like. If anyone came in from the other end, he would see me for sure.
I shifted my position to crawl away along the wall for better concealment, and one of the bookmakers’ metal tripods slid down and clattered off the side of the pile with an echoing noise like a dozen demented machine guns.
There were shouts from the two men down the passage.
‘There he is.’
‘Get him.’
I stood up and ran.
The nearest opening in the wall was a staircase up to a suite of rooms above the changing room and Members’ dining-room. I hesitated a fraction of a second and then passed it. Up those steps were the executive’s rooms and offices. I didn’t know my way round up there, but Oxon did. He had a big enough advantage already in his knowledge of the building without my giving him a bonus.
I ran on, past the gent’s cloaks, and finally in through the last possible door, that of a long bare dirty room smelling of beer. It was a sort of extra, subsidiary bar, and all it now contained was a bare counter backed by empty shelves. I nearly fell over a bucket full of crinkled metal bottle tops which someone had carelessly left in my way, and then wasted precious seconds to dart back to put the bucket just inside the door I’d come in by.
Kraye and Oxon were running. I snapped off the lights, and with no time to get clear through the far door out into the paddock, where anyway I would be lit by car headlights, I scrambled down behind the bar counter.
The door jerked open. There was a clatter of the bucket and a yell, and the sound of someone falling. Then the light snapped on again, showing me just how tiny my hiding place really was, and two bottle tops rolled across the floor into my sight.
‘For God’s sake,’ yelled Kraye in anger. ‘You clumsy, stupid fool. Get up. Get up.’ He charged down the room to the far door, the board floor bouncing slightly under his weight. From the clanking, cursing, and clattering of bottle tops I imagined that Oxon was extricating himself from the bucket and following. If it hadn’t been so dangerous it would have been funny.
Kraye yanked the outside door open, stepped outside and yelled across to the stationary car to ask where I had gone. I felt rather than saw Oxon run down the room to join him. I crawled round the end of the counter, sprinted for the door I had come in by, flipped off the light again, slammed the door, and ran back up the passage. There was a roar from Kraye as he fumbled back into the darkened room, and long before they had emerged into the passage again, kicking bottle tops in all directions, I was safe in the opening of a little offshoot lobby to the
