Дик Фрэнсис - Bolt

‘He’s going to be,’ I said. ‘He’ll be fine.’

‘Oh...’

I put my arms round her. ‘It’s all right. Really it is. Nothing seems to be hurting him, he’s just had his breath knocked out.’

She slowly disengaged herself and walked away beside the stretcher when they lifted it onto a rolling platform, a gurney.

‘Are you his wife?’ I heard a first-aid man say.

‘No... a friend.’

The little boy’s father picked up his coat and shook my hand. The woman picked up her squashed mink, brushed dust off it and gave me a kiss. A Steward came out and said would I now please get on my horse and go down to the start, as the race would already be off late, and I looked at the racecourse clock and saw in amazement that it was barely fifteen minutes since I’d walked out of the weighing room.

All the horses, all the owners and trainers were still in the parade ring, as if time had stopped, but now the jockeys were mounting; death had been averted, life could thankfully go on.

I picked up my anorak. All the coats had been reclaimed, and it lay there alone on the tarmac, with my whip underneath. I looked up at the balcony, so far above, so deserted and unremarkable. Nothing suddenly seemed real, yet the questions hadn’t even begun to be asked. Why had he been up there? How had he come to be clinging to life by his fingertips? In what way had he not been careful?

Litsi lay on a bed in the first-aid room until the races were over, but insisted then that he had entirely recovered and was ready to return to London.

He apologised to the racecourse executive for having been so foolish as to go up to the balcony to look at the new, much-vaunted view, and said that it was entirely his own clumsiness which had caused him to stumble over some builders’ materials and lose his balance.

When asked for his name, he’d given a shortened version of his surname without the ‘prince’ in front, and he hoped there wouldn’t be too much public fuss over his stupidity.

He was sitting in the back of the car, telling us all this, Danielle sitting beside him, as we started towards London.

‘How did you stumble?’ I asked, glancing at him from time to time in the driving mirror. ‘Was there a lot of junk up there?’

‘Planks and things.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘I don’t really know how I stumbled. I stood on something that rocked, and I put a hand out to steady myself, and it went out into space, over the wall. It happened so fast... I just lost my footing.’

‘Did anyone push you?’ I asked.

‘Kit!’ Danielle said, horrified, but it had to be considered, and Litsi, it seemed, had already done so.

‘I’ve been lying there all afternoon,’ he said slowly, ‘trying to remember exactly how it happened. I didn’t see anyone up there at all, I’m certain of that. I stood on something that rocked like a see-saw, and totally lost my balance. I wouldn’t say I was pushed.’

‘Well,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘do you mind if we go back there? I should have gone up for a look when I’d finished racing.’

‘The racecourse people went up,’ Litsi said. ‘They came and told me that there was nothing particularly dangerous, but of course I shouldn’t have gone.’

‘We’ll go back,’ I said, and although Danielle protested that she’d be late for work, back we went.

Leaving Danielle and Litsi outside in the car, I walked through the gates and up the grandstand. As with most grandstands, it was a long haul to the top, up not too generous stairways, and one could see why, with a stream of people piling up that way to the main tier to watch the race, those going up to rescue Litsi from above had been a fair time on their journey.

The broad viewing steps of the main tier led right down to the ground and were openly accessible, on the side facing the racecourse, but the upper tier could be reached only by the stairways, of which there were two, one at each end.

I went up the stairway at the end nearest the weighing room, the stairway Litsi said he had used to reach the place where he’d overbalanced. Looking up at the back of the grandstand from the ground, that place was near the end of the balcony, on the left.

The stairway led first onto the upper steps of the main tier, and then continued upwards and I climbed to the top landing, where the refreshment room was in process of construction. The whole area had been glassed in, leaving only the balcony open. The balcony ran along the back of the refreshment room which had several glass doors, now closed, to lead eventually to the sandwiches. Inside the glass and without, there were copious piles of builders’ materials, planks, drums of paint and ladders.

I went gingerly forward to the cold, open, windy balcony, towards the place where Litsi had overbalanced, and saw what had very likely happened. Planks lay side by side and several deep along all the short passage to the balcony, raising one, as one walked along them, higher than normal in proportion to the chest-high wall. When I was walking on the planks, the wall ahead seemed barely waist-high and Litsi was taller than I by three or four inches.

Whatever had rocked under Litsi’s feet was no longer rocking, but several planks by the balcony wall itself were scattered like spillikins, not lying flat as in the passage. I picked my way among them, feeling them move when I pushed, and reached the spot where Litsi had fallen.

With my feet firmly on the floor, I looked over. One could see all the parade ring area beautifully, with magnificent hills beyond. Very attractive, that balcony, and with one’s feet on the floor, very safe.

I went along its whole length intending to go down by the stairway at the other end, nearest the car park, but found I couldn’t: the stairs themselves were missing, being in the middle of reconstruction. I walked back to the end where I had come up, renegotiated the planks, and descended to ground level.

‘Well?’ Litsi asked, when I was back in the car. ‘What did you think?’

‘Those planks looked pretty unsafe.’

‘Yes,’ he said ruefully, as I started the car and drove out of the racecourse gates. ‘I thought, after I’d overbalanced, and managed somehow to catch hold of the wall, that if I just hung on, someone would come and rescue me, but you know... my fingers just gave way... I didn’t leave go consciously. When I was falling, I thought I would die... and I would have done... it’s incredible that all those people took off their coats.’ He paused, ‘I wish I could thank them,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t think where you’d got to,’ Danielle reflected. ‘I was waiting for you on the stands, where we’d arranged to meet after I’d been to the ladies room. I didn’t imagine...’

‘But,’ said Litsi, ‘I went up to that balcony because I was supposed to meet you up there, Danielle.’

I stopped the car abruptly.

‘Say that again,’ I said.

Litsi said it again. ‘I got this message that Danielle was waiting for me up on the balcony to look at the view.’

‘I didn’t send any such message,’ Danielle said blankly. ‘I was waiting where we’d watched the race before, where we’d said we’d meet.’

‘Who gave you the message?’ I asked Litsi.

‘Just a man.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Well... an ordinary man. Not very young. He had a Sporting Life in his hands, and a sort of form book, with his finger keeping the place... and binoculars.’

‘What sort of voice?’

‘Just... ordinary.’

I let the brakes off with a sigh and started off towards Chiswick. Litsi had walked straight into a booby trap which had been meant either to frighten him or to kill him, and no one would have set it but Henri Nanterre. I hadn’t seen Nanterre at the races, and neither Litsi nor Danielle knew him by sight.