Дик Фрэнсис - Decider

His men, already having cleared the embers, were busy manhandling the first of the new sections into place.

‘All our fences are built like this, now,’ Roger said. ‘They’re good to jump but not as hard and unforgiving as the old sort.’

I asked, ‘Did your men find any... well, clues ... in the ashes to say who started the fire?’

Roger shook his head. ‘We always have trouble with vandalism. It’s hopeless bothering to find out who did it. It’s nearly always teenagers, and the courts hardly give them a slap on the wrist. We simply write vandalism into the budget and find ways to minimise the nuisance.’

‘How many people would know you could replace a fence this fast?’ I asked.

‘Trainers might,’ he said judiciously. ‘Jockeys, perhaps. Not many others, unless they worked here.’

Roger went to speak to his foreman who looked at his watch, nodded, and got on with the job.

‘Right,’ Roger said, returning and shepherding us back to his jeep. ‘Now, boys, muster at the jeep up by my office at eleven-thirty, right? I’ll drive you and your father down to the bus then, and go on to my house. We all change for racing. At noon precisely I drive you back to the paddock. Understand?’

The boys were near to saluting. Roger, the peak of his tweed cap well pulled down over his eyes like a guards officer was, with his clipped, very civilised voice and his spare decisive manner, the sort of senior soldier it was natural to obey. I could see I was never going to achieve such effortless mastery of my children’s behaviour.

We returned to Roger’s office to find a flourishing row in full progress out on the tarmac. All the protesters from outside the gate were now inside, all of them clustered round Henry who held Harold Quest’s elbow in an unyielding grip. The fierce woman was using a placard saying ‘ANIMAL RIGHTS’ to belabour Henry as with a paddle. Four or five others howled verbal abuse with stretched ugly mouths and Henry shook Harold Quest without respect or mercy.

When he saw us Henry yelled, his voice as effortlessly rising above the screeching din as his height above everyone else, ‘This fellow’s an imposter! A bloody imposter. They all are. They’re rubbish.’

He stretched out the hand not busy with shaking Quest and tweaked the placard away from the harpy attacking him.

‘Madam,’ he roared, ‘go back to your kitchen.’

Henry stood eighteen inches above her. He towered over Quest. Henry’s beard was bigger than Quest’s, Henry’s voice mightier, Henry’s strength double, Henry’s character — no contest.

Henry was laughing. Harold Quest, the scourge of entering vehicles, had met more than his match.

‘This man,’ Henry yelled, shaking Quest’s elbow, ‘do you know what he was doing? I went over to the Mayflower and when I came back I found him eating a hamburger .’

My sons stared at him in perplexity. Eating hamburgers came well within normal behaviour.

‘Animal rights!’ Henry shouted joyously. ‘What about hamburgers’ rights? This man was eating an animal .’

Harold Quest squirmed.

‘ Three of these dimwits,’ Henry yelled, glancing at the screeching chorus, ‘were dripping with hamburgers. Animal rights, my arse .’

My boys were fascinated. Roger was laughing. Oliver Wells came out of Roger’s office primed to disapprove of the noise only to crease into a smile once he understood Quest’s dilemma.

‘This jacket he’s wearing,’ Henry yelled, ‘feels like leather.’

‘No.’ Quest shook his head violently, tipping his woolly hat over one ear.

‘And,’ Henry yelled, ‘when I accused him of eating an animal he put the hamburger in his pocket .’

Alan jumped up and down, loving it, his freckled face grinning.

Henry flung the ‘ANIMAL RIGHTS’ placard far and wide and plunged his hand into the pocket of Harold Quest’s leather-like jacket. Out came a wrapper, a half-eaten bun, tomato ketchup and yellow oozing mustard and a half-moon of meat with the Quest bite marks all over it.

Out of the pocket, too, unexpectedly, fell a second ball of plastic wrapper which had never seen a short-order cook.

In the general mêlée, no one saw the significance of the second wrapper until Christopher, from some obscure urge to tidiness, picked it up. Even then it would have meant nothing to most people, but Christopher was different.

‘Come on,’ Henry yelled at his hapless captive, ‘you’re not a real protestor. What are you doing here?’

Harold Quest didn’t answer.

‘Dad,’ Christopher said, pulling my sleeve, ‘look at this. Smell it.’

I looked at the ball of wrapping material he’d picked up, and I smelled it. ‘Give it,’ I said, ‘to the Colonel.’

Roger, hearing my tone of voice, glanced at my face and took the crumbled ball from Christopher.

There were two brown transparent wrappers scrunched together, with scarlet and yellow printing on them. Roger smoothed one of them out and looked up at Henry who, no slouch on the uptake, saw that more had been revealed than a hamburger.

‘Bring him into the office,’ Roger told Henry.

Henry, receiving the message, roared at Quest’s followers, ‘You lot, clear off before you get prosecuted for being a nuisance on the highway. You with the leather shoes, you with the hamburgers, next time get your act right. Shove off, the lot of you.’

He turned his back on them, marching Quest effortlessly towards the office door, the rest of us interestedly watching while Quest’s noisy flock collapsed and deserted him, straggling off silently towards the way out.

The office filled up again: Oliver, Roger, myself, five boys trying to look unobtrusive, Harold Quest and, above all, Henry who needed the space of three.

‘Could you,’ Roger said to Henry, ‘search his other pockets?’

‘Sure.’

He must have loosened his grip a little in order to oblige because Quest suddenly wrenched himself free and made a dash for the door. Henry plucked him back casually by the collar and swung his arm before leaving go. With anyone else’s strength it wouldn’t have much mattered, but under Henry’s easy force Quest staggered across the room and crashed backwards against the wall. A certain amount of self-pity formed moisture round his eyes.

‘Take the jacket off ,’ Henry commanded, and Quest, fumbling, obeyed.

Roger took the jacket, searched the pockets and laid the booty out on the desk beside the blotter where Henry had parked the half-eaten hamburger. Apart from a meagre wallet with a return bus ticket to London, there were a cigarette lighter, a box of matches and three further dark brown transparent wrappers with scarlet and yellow overprinting.

Roger smoothed out one of these flat on the desk and read the writing aloud.

‘ “Sure Fire”,’ he announced. ‘ “Clean. Non-toxic. Long-burning. Infallible. A fire every time. Twenty sticks.”’ He did brief sums. ‘Five empty wrappers; that means one hundred firelighters. Now what would anyone want with one hundred firelighters on a racecourse?’

Harold Quest glowered.

Henry stood over him, a threat simply by size.

‘As you’re unreal ,’ he boomed, ‘what were you up to?’

‘Nothing,’ Quest weakly said, mopping his face with his hand.

Henry’s loud voice beleaguered him, ‘People who burn fences can blow up grandstands. We’re turning you over to the force.’

‘I never blew up the grandstand,’ said Quest, freshly agitated.

‘Oh really? You were here, Friday morning. You admitted it.’

‘I never... I wasn’t here then.’

‘You definitely were ,’ I said. ‘You told the police you saw Dart Stratton’s car drive in through the gates between eight and eight-thirty in the morning.’