Dick Francis - Proof

None of the boxes was locked.

Marvellous.

Orkney’s was ten or more along the glassed-in gallery, and I reached it at an Olympic sprint. I went in there and stood in the corner that couldn’t be seen from the passage because of the out-jutting serving section just inside the door, and I made my breathing shallow and almost silent, and couldn’t stop the noisy thump of my heart.

Nothing happened for a long long time.

Nothing at all.

There was no more voice shouting, ‘Hey...’

No Vernon appeared like Nemesis in the doorway.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe he’d given up. I thought that if I took a step into the gallery he would pounce on me. That somewhere, round a turning, he would be lying in wait. As in a childhood game I strained deep into a hiding place cringing from the heartstopping moment of capture... but this time for real, with a penalty beyond facing.

I wasn’t good at this sort of thing, I thought miserably. I felt sick. Why couldn’t I have courage like my father?

I stood in my corner while time stretched agonisingly and silently out... and I’d almost got to the point of thinking it would perhaps be safe to move, when I saw him. He was down below in front of the stands out on the far edge of the tarmac where the bookmakers raised their tempting racket on racedays. He had his back to the racecourse rails. He was scanning the length of stands, searching for movement... searching for a sight of me.

Beside him, looking upward, was Paul Young.

If I could see them they could see me... but to them I must be in darkness... I could see them through glass, through the glass of the doors leading from the box to the steps on the balcony.

I stood frozen, afraid almost to blink. It was movement they would see, not a stock-still shadow in the angle of two walls.

Why ever, I thought hopelessly, had I dived into such a small dead end so close to the lifts, so easy to track down and find? Why hadn’t I searched for a staircase and run downwards? Going upwards was fatal... one could run out of up. I’d always thought it stupid for fugitives in films to start climbing, and now I’d done it myself. Escape always lay downwards. I thought it and knew it, and couldn’t bring myself to move even though if I ran fast enough and if I could find the way, I might escape down the stairs and be away through some exit before they came in from the tarmac...

Very slowly I turned my head to look along to where my car was parked by the paddock entrance. I could see it all right, elderly and serviceable, ready to go. I could see also a car parked next to it, where no car had stood when I arrived.

My eyes ached with looking at the newly arrived car with its noble unmistakable lines and its darkened glass and sable paint.

Black Rolls-Royce... ‘a black Roller with them tinted windows’... next to my way out.

Reason told me that Paul Young didn’t know the car next to his was mine. Reason said he didn’t know it was I he was looking for, and that the urgency of his search must be relative. Reason had very little to do with lurching intestines.

The two men gave up their raking inspection and walked towards the stands, going out of my line of sight below the outer edge of the balcony. If I’d been rushing downstairs I could have run straight into them... If they started searching methodically, and I didn’t move, they would find me. Yet I didn’t move. I couldn’t.

For a whole hour I saw nothing, heard nothing.

They were waiting for me, I thought.

Listening for my footfall on a stairway, for the whine of a lift, for a door stealthily opening. The tension in my body went screaming along like a roller-coaster, winding up as soon as it began to die down, kept going only by my own wretched thoughts.

Cat and mouse...

This mouse would stay a long time in his hole.

Orkney’s box, I thought; where the tartlets had waited so long in their wrapping and Flora had flushed uncomplainingly for Jack’s sake. The sideboard was emptier than ever. Orkney’s bad temper rested sourly in the memory. Breezy Palm had run in panic and lost. Dear heavens...

When I’d been in Orkney’s box for two hours, Paul Young returned to his Rolls and drove it out of the car park.

I should have been reassured that it no longer stood next to my Rover, but I wasn’t. I feared that he’d driven out, round and back through a service entrance from the main road, where the delivery vans must come in and out. I feared that he was still down there below me, claws ready.

When I moved in the end it was out of a sort of shame. I couldn’t stand there quivering forever. If the cat was waiting right outside Orkney’s door... then all the same I’d have to risk it.

I looked most delicately out... and there was no one in sight. Breathing shallowly with a racing pulse I stepped slowly into the gallery and looked down from the windows there into the wide tarmaced area behind the stands along which I’d walked to find the green door.

The green door itself was round a corner out of sight, and from my angle I couldn’t see any delivery vans... or any Rolls-Royce.

No one was out in the rear area looking up to the gallery, but I crabbed along it with my back against the walls of the boxes, sliding past their open doors nervously, ready at any moment to stop, to dive into any shelter, to freeze.

No sound. I reached the place where the gallery opened into a wider concourse, and in the last yard of window and with my last glance downwards I saw Vernon walk into sight.

He was still looking around him. Still looking upward. Still unsatisfied, still worried, still persistent.

I watched him breathlessly until he began to walk back towards the buildings, then I ran through the concourse because at least he couldn’t see me at that point, and at the far end with trepidation approached the stairs to the next lower level; and I went down them in a blue funk and from there out to the huge viewing balcony where tiered rows of seats stretched away on each side, turning their blank tipped-up bottoms to the empty track.

I walked along behind the top row of seats in the direction of the winning post and saw no one, and at the end hopped over a railing into a similar enclosure labelled firmly ‘Owners and Trainers Only’. Not an owner or trainer in sight. Nor Vernon, nor Paul Young.

From the ‘Owners and Trainers’ a small staircase led downwards into the main bulk of the stands, and down there I went, heart thudding, trying to make myself believe that the smaller the place I was in, the less likely it was that I would be spotted from a distance.

The Owners and Trainers’ staircase led into the Owners and Trainers’ bar. There were rattan armchairs, small glass-topped tables, sporting murals, not a bottle or glass in sight: and at the far end, a wide tier of steps allowed one to see through a wall of glass to the parade ring. Outside and to the left, before one reached the parade ring, lay the weighing room and the office of the Clerk of the Course. Beyond the parade ring lay the gate to the car park and to freedom.

I was there. Nearly there. A door at the bottom of the Owners and Trainers’ enclosed viewing steps led straight out to the area in front of the weighing room, and if only that door like every one else in the building were unlocked, I’d be out.

I approached the steps thinking only of that, and along from behind the stands, barely twenty paces away from me, marched Vernon.

If he had walked up to the glass and looked through he would have seen me clearly. I could see even the brown and white checks of his shirt collar over his zipped jacket. I stood stock still in shuddering dismay and watched him walk along to the Clerk of the Course’s office and knock on the door.