Dick Francis - Odds against

They had made it. Done what they’d always wanted. Retired to a bungalow by the sea.

I drove straight in through the open racecourse gates and stopped outside the weighing room. Climbing out, I stretched and walked over to knock on the door of the racecourse manager’s office.

There was no reply. I tried the handle. It was locked. So was the weighing room door, and everything else.

Hands in pockets, I strolled round the end of the stands to look at the course. Seabury was officially classified in Group Three: that is to say, lower than Doncaster and higher than Windsor when it came to receiving aid from the Betting Levy Board.

It had less than Grade Three stands: wooden steps with corrugated tin roofs for the most part, and draughts from all parts of the compass. But the track itself was a joy to ride on, and it had always seemed a pity to me that the rest of the amenities didn’t match it.

There was no one about near the stands. Down at one end of the course, however, I could see some men and a tractor, and I set off towards them, walking down inside the rails, on the grass. The going was just about perfect for November racing, soft but springy underfoot, exactly right for tempting trainers to send their horses to the course in droves. In ordinary circumstances, that was. But as things stood at present, more trainers than Mark Witney were sending their horses elsewhere. A course which didn’t attract runners didn’t attract crowds to watch them. Seabury’s gate receipts had been falling off for some time, but its expenses had risen; and therein lay its loss.

Thinking about the sad tale I had read in the balance sheets, I reached the men working on the course. They were digging up a great section of it and loading it on to a trailer behind the tractor. There was a pervasive unpleasant smell in the air.

An irregular patch about thirty yards deep, stretching nearly the whole width of the course, had been burned brown and killed. Less than half of the affected turf had already been removed, showing the greyish chalky mud underneath, and there was still an enormous amount to be shifted. I didn’t think there were enough men working on it for there to be a hope of its being re-turfed and ready to race on in only eight days’ time.

‘Good afternoon,’ I said to the men in general. ‘What a horrible mess.’

One of them thrust his spade into the earth and came over, rubbing his hands on the sides of his trousers.

‘Anything you want?’ he said, with fair politeness.

‘The racecourse manager. Captain Oxon.’

His manner shifted perceptibly towards the civil. ‘He’s not here today, sir. Hey!.. aren’t you Sid Halley?’

‘That’s right.’

He grinned, doing another quick change, this time towards brotherhood. ‘I’m the foreman. Ted Wilkins.’ I shook his outstretched hand. ‘Captain Oxon’s gone up to London. He said he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow.’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I was just down in this part of the world and I thought I’d drop in and have a look at the poor old course.’

He turned with me to look at the devastation. ‘Shame, isn’t it?’

‘What happened, exactly?’

‘The tanker overturned on the road over there.’ He pointed, and we began to walk towards the spot, edging round the dug up area. The road, a narrow secondary one, ran across near the end of the racecourse, with a wide semi-circle of track on the far side of it. During the races the hard road surface was covered thickly with tan or peat, or with thick green matting, which the horses galloped over without any trouble. Although not ideal, it was an arrangement to be found on many courses throughout the country, most famously with the Melling Road at Aintree, and reaching a maximum with five road crossings at Ludlow.

‘Just here,’ said Ted Wilkins, pointing. ‘Worst place it could possibly have happened, right in the middle of the track. The stuff just poured out of the tanker. It turned right over, see, and the hatch thing was torn open in the crash.’

‘How did it happen?’ I asked. ‘The crash, I mean?’

‘No one knows, really.’

‘But the driver? He wasn’t killed, was he?’

‘No, he wasn’t even hurt much. Just shook up a bit. But he couldn’t remember what happened. Some people in a car came driving along after dark and nearly ran into the tanker. They found the driver sitting at the side of the road, holding his head and moaning. Concussion, it was, they say. They reckon he hit his head somehow when his lorry went over. Staggers me how he got out of it so lightly, the cab was fair crushed, and there was glass everywhere.’

‘Do tankers often drive across here? Lucky it’s never happened before, if they do.’

‘They used not to,’ he said, scratching his head. ‘But they’ve been over here quite regularly now for a year or two. The traffic on the London road’s getting chronic, see?’

‘Oh… did it come from a local firm, then?’

‘Down the coast a bit. Intersouth Chemicals, that’s the firm it belonged to.’

‘How soon do you think we’ll be racing here again?’ I asked, turning back to look at the track. ‘Will you make it by next week?’

He frowned. ‘Strictly between you and me, I don’t think there’s a bleeding hope. What we needed, as I said to the Captain, was a couple of bulldozers, not six men with spades.’

‘I would have thought so too.’

He sighed. ‘He just told me we couldn’t afford them and to shut up and get on with it. And that’s what we’ve done. We’ll just about have cut out all the dead turf by next Wednesday, at this rate of going on.’

‘That doesn’t leave any time for new turf to settle,’ I remarked.

‘It’ll be a miracle if it’s laid, let alone settled,’ he agreed gloomily.

I bent down and ran my hand over a patch of brown grass. It was decomposing and felt slimy. I made a face, and the foreman laughed.

‘Horrible, isn’t it? It stinks, too.’

I put my fingers to my nose and wished I hadn’t. ‘Was it slippery like this right from the beginning?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Hopeless.’

‘Well I won’t take up any more of your time,’ I said, smiling.

‘I’ll tell Captain Oxon you came. Pity you missed him.’

‘Don’t bother him. He must have a lot to worry about just now.’

‘One bloody crisis after another,’ he nodded. ‘So long, then.’ He went back to his spade and his heart-breaking task, and I retraced the quarter mile up the straight to the deserted stands.

I hesitated for a while outside the weighing room, wondering whether to pick the lock and go in, and knowing it was mainly nostalgia that urged me to do it, not any conviction that it would be a useful piece of investigation. There would always be the temptation, I supposed, to use dubious professional skills for one’s own pleasure. Like doctors sniffing ether. I contented myself with looking through the windows.

The deserted weighing room looked the same as ever: a large bare expanse of wooden board floor, with a table and some upright chairs in one corner, and the weighing machine itself on the left. Racecourse weighing machines were not all of one universal design. There weren’t any left of the old type where the jockeys stood on a platform while weights were added to the balancing arm. That whole process was much too slow. Now there were either seats slung from above, in which one felt much like a bag of sugar, or chairs bolted to a base plate on springs: in both these cases the weight was quickly indicated by a pointer which swung round a gigantic clock face. In essence, modern kitchen scales vastly magnified.

The scales at Seabury were the chair-on-base-plate type, which I’d always found simplest to use. I recalled a few of the before-and-after occasions when I had sat on that particular spot. Some good, some bad, as always with racing.