Dick Francis - Odds against

Shrugging, I turned away. I wouldn’t, I thought, ever be sitting there again. And no one walked over my grave.

Climbing into the car, I drove to the nearest town, looked up the whereabouts of Intersouth Chemicals, and an hour later was speaking to the personnel manager. I explained that on behalf of the National Hunt Committee I had just called in passing to find out if the driver of the tanker had fully recovered, or had remembered anything else about the accident.

The manager, fat and fiftyish, was affable but unhelpful. ‘Smith’s left,’ he said briefly. ‘We gave him a few days off to get over the accident, and then he came back yesterday and said his wife didn’t fancy him driving chemicals any more, and he was packing it in.’ His voice held a grievance.

‘Had he been with you long?’ I asked sympathetically.

‘About a year.’

‘A good driver, I suppose?’

‘Yes, about average for the job. They have to be good drivers, or we don’t use them, you see. Smith was all right, but nothing special.’

‘And you still don’t really know what happened?’

‘No,’ he sighed. It takes a lot to tip one of our tankers over. There was nothing to learn from the road. It was covered with oil and petrol and chemical. If there had ever been any marks, skid marks I mean, they weren’t there after the breakdown cranes had lifted the tanker up again, and the road was cleared.’

‘Do your tankers use that road often?’

‘They have done recently, but not any more after this. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember it was Smith himself who found that way round. Going over the racecourse missed out some bottle-neck at a junction, I believe. I know some of the drivers thought it a good idea.’

‘They go through Seabury regularly, then?’

‘Sure, often. Straight line to Southampton and round to the oil refinery at Fawley.’

‘Oh? What exactly was Smith’s tanker carrying?’

‘Sulphuric acid. It’s used in refining petrol, among other things.’

Sulphuric acid. Dense; oily; corrosive to the point of charring. Nothing more instantly lethal could have poured out over Seabury’s turf. They could have raced had it been a milder chemical, put sand or tan on the dying grass and raced over the top. But no one would risk a horse on ground soaked with vitriol.

I said, ‘Could you give me Smith’s address? I’ll call round and see if his memory has come back.’

‘Sure.’ He searched in a file and found it for me. ‘Tell him he can have his job back if he’s interested. Another of the men gave notice this morning.’

I said I would, thanked him, and went to Smith’s address, which proved to be two rooms upstairs in a suburban house. But Smith and his wife no longer lived in them. Packed up and gone yesterday, I was told by a young woman in curlers. No, she didn’t know where they went. No, they didn’t leave a forwarding address, and if I was her I wouldn’t worry about his health as he’d been laughing and drinking and playing records to all hours the day after the crash, his concussion having cured itself pretty quick. Reaction, he’d said when she complained of the noise, against not being killed.

It was dark by then, and I drove slowly back into London against the stream of headlights pouring out. Back to my flat in a modern block, a short walk from the office, down the ramp into the basement garage, and up in the lift to the fifth floor, home.

There were two rooms facing south, bedroom and sitting-room, and two behind them, bathroom and kitchen, with windows into an inner well. A pleasant sunny place, furnished in blond wood and cool colours, centrally heated, cleaning included in the rent. A regular order of groceries arrived week by week directly into the kitchen through a hatch, and rubbish disappeared down a chute. Instant living. No fuss, no mess, no strings. And damnably lonely, after Jenny.

Not that she had ever been in the place, she hadn’t. The house in the Berkshire village where we had mostly lived had been too much of a battleground, and when she walked out I sold it, with relief. I’d moved into the new flat shortly after going to the agency, because it was close. It was also expensive: but I had no fares to pay.

I mixed myself a brandy with ice and water, sat down in an arm-chair, put my feet up, and thought about Seabury. Seabury, Captain Oxon, Ted Wilkins, Intersouth Chemicals, and a driver called Smith.

After that I thought about Kraye. Nothing pleasant about him, nothing at all. A smooth, phony crust of sophistication hiding ruthless greed; a seething passion for crystals, ditto for land; an obsession with the cleanliness of his body to compensate for the murk in his mind; unconventional sexual pleasures; and the abnormal quality of being able to look carefully at a crippled hand and then hit it .

No, I didn’t care for Howard Kraye one little bit.

‘Chico,’ I said. ‘How would you overturn a lorry on a pre-determined spot?’

‘Huh? That’s easy. All you’d need would be some heavy lifting gear. A big hydraulic jack. A crane. Anything like that.’

‘How long would it take?’

‘You mean, supposing the lorry and the crane were both in position?’

‘Yes.’

‘Only a minute or two. What sort of lorry?’

‘A tanker.’

‘A petrol job?’

‘A bit smaller than the petrol tankers. More the size of milk ones.’

‘Easy as kiss your hand. They’ve got a low centre of gravity, mind. It’d need a good strong lift. But dead easy, all the same.’

I turned to Dolly. ‘Is Chico busy today, or could you spare him?’

Dolly leaned forward, chewing the end of a pencil and looking at her day’s chart. The cross-over blouse did its stuff.

‘I could send someone else to Kempton…’ She caught the direction of my eyes and laughed, and retreated a whole half inch. ‘Yes, you can have him.’ She gave him a fond glance.

‘Chico,’ I said. ‘Go down to Seabury and see if you can find any trace of heavy lifting gear having been seen near the racecourse last Friday… those little bungalows are full of people with nothing to do but watch the world go by… you might check whether anything was hired locally, but I suppose that’s a bit much to hope for. The road would have to have been closed for a few minutes before the tanker went over, I should think. See if you can find anyone who noticed anything like that… detour signs, for instance. And after that, go to the council offices and see what you can dig up among their old maps on the matter of drains.’ I told him the rough position of the subsiding trench which had made a slaughterhouse of the hurdle race, so that he should know what to look for on the maps. ‘And be discreet.’

‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ he grinned.

‘Our quarry is rough.’

‘And you don’t want him to hear us creep up behind him?’

‘Quite right.’

‘Little Chico,’ he said truthfully, ‘can take care of himself.’

After he had gone I telephoned Lord Hagbourne and described to him in no uncertain terms the state of Seabury’s turf.

‘What they need is some proper earth moving equipment, fast, and apparently there’s nothing in the kitty to pay for it. Couldn’t the Levy Board…?’

‘The Levy Board is no fairy godmother,’ he interrupted. ‘But I’ll see what can be done. Less than half cleared, you say? Hmm. However, I understand that Captain Oxon assured Weatherbys that the course would be ready for the next meeting. Has he changed his mind?’

‘I didn’t see him, sir. He was away for the day.’

‘Oh.’ Lord Hagbourne’s voice grew a shade cooler. ‘Then he didn’t ask you to enlist my help?’

‘No.’