Дик Фрэнсис - Decider

Harold Quest looked baffled.

‘And it was pointless ,’ Roger added, ‘to be picketing the gates of a racecourse at that hour on a day none of the public would come.’

‘A day the TV cameras came, though,’ I said, ‘after the explosion.’

‘We saw you,’ Christopher said vehemently. ‘They said on the telly you’d done it. You nearly got my brother killed and you hurt my dad badly.’

‘I didn’t! ’

‘Who did, then?’ Henry roared. ‘You did it! You’ve been a bloody nuisance, you’re not a real protestor, you’ve destroyed racecourse property and you’re heading for jail. Colonel, fetch the police, they’re here already poking around behind that fence. Tell them we’ve caught their terrorist.’

‘ No! ’ Quest squealed.

‘Then give ,’ Henry commanded. ‘We’re listening.’

‘All right then. All right. I did burn the fence.’ Quest was not confessing, but pleading. ‘But I never touched the grandstand. I didn’t, as God’s my witness.’

‘As to God, that’s one thing. You’ve got to convince us .’

‘ Why did you burn the fence?’ Roger demanded.

‘Why?’ Quest looked around desperately as if the answer might be written on the walls.

‘Why?’ Henry bellowed. ‘Why? Why? Why? And don’t give us any shit about animal rights. We know that’s all crap as far as you’re concerned.’ He waved a hand at the hamburger relics. ‘So why did you do it? You’re in dead trouble unless you come up with the goods.’

Quest saw hope. ‘If I tell you, then, will that be the end of it?’

‘It depends,’ Henry said. ‘Tell us first.’

Quest looked up at the big man and at all of us staring at him with sharp hostile eyes and at the wrappers and the hamburger on the desk and, from one second to the next, lost his nerve.

He sweated. ‘I got paid for it,’ he said.

We met this announcement with silence.

Quest cast an intimidated look round the accusing faces and sweated some more.

‘I’m an actor,’ he pleaded.

More silence.

Quest’s desperation level rose with the pitch of his voice. You don’t know what it’s like, waiting and waiting for jobs and sitting by the telephone forever and living on crumbs ... you take anything , anything...’

Silence.

He went on miserably. ‘I’m a good actor...’

I thought that none of us, probably, would refute that.

‘... but you have to be lucky . You have to know people...’

He pulled off his askew woolly hat and began to look more credibly like Harold Quest, out-of-work actor, and less like Harold Quest, psyched-up fanatic.

He said, ‘I got this phone call from someone who’d seen me play a hunt saboteur in a TV film... only a bit part, no dialogue, just screaming abuse, but my name was there in the credits, hunt saboteur leader, Harold Quest.’

Extraordinarily, he was proud of it: his name in the credits.

‘So this phone caller said would I demonstrate for real, for money? And I wouldn’t have to pay any agents’ fees as he’d looked me up in the phone directory and just tried my number on the off-chance...’

He stopped, searching our faces, begging for understanding but not getting much.

‘Well,’ he said weakly, ‘I was being evicted from my flat for non-payment of rent and I’d nowhere to go and I lived rough on the streets once before and anything’s better than that.’

Something in this recital, some tinge in the self-pity, reminded me sharply that this was an actor, a good one, and that the sob-stuff couldn’t be trusted. Still, I thought, let him run on. There might be truth in him somewhere.

He realised himself that the piteousness wasn’t achieving an over-sympathetic response and reacted with a more businesslike explanation.

‘I asked what was wanted, and they said to come here and make a bloody intolerable nuisance of myself...’

‘They?’ Roger asked.

‘He, then. He said to try to get some real demonstrators together and persuade them to come here and rant and rave a bit, so I went to a fox hunt and got that loud-mouthed bitch Paula to bring some of her friends... and I tell you, I’ve spent nearly a week with them and they get on my wick something chronic...’

‘But you’ve been paid?’ I suggested. ‘You’ve taken the money?’

‘Well...’ grudgingly, ‘some up front. Some every day. Yes.’

‘Every day?’ I repeated, incredulously.

He nodded.

‘And for burning the fence?’

He began to squirm again and to look mulishly sullen. ‘He didn’t say anything about burning the fence, not to begin with.’

‘Who,’ Roger asked without threat, ‘is he ?

‘He didn’t tell me his name.’

‘Do you mean,’ Roger said in the same reasonable voice, ‘that you mounted a threatening demonstration here for someone unknown?’

‘For money . Like I said.’

‘And you just trusted you’d get paid?’

‘Well, I was .’ His air of defiance was of no help to him; much the reverse. ‘If I hadn’t been paid, all I’d have laid out was the bus fare from London, but he promised me, and he kept his promise. And every day that I caused trouble, I got more.’

‘Describe him,’ I said.

Quest shook his head, rear-guarding.

‘Not good enough,’ Roger said crisply. ‘The racecourse will lay charges against you for wilful destruction of property, namely burning down the fence at the open ditch.’

‘But you said ...’ began Quest, impotently protesting.

‘We promised nothing. If you withhold the identity of your, er, procurer , we fetch the police across here immediately.’

Quest, looking hunted, caved in.

‘He told me,’ he said, seeking to persuade us, ‘to stop every car and be as much nuisance as I could, and one of the cars would be his , and he would wind down the window and tell me my telephone number, and I would know it was him , and I would put my hand into the car and he would put money into my hand, and I was not to ask questions or speak to him — as God’s my judge.’

‘Your judge will be a damn sight nearer than God,’ Henry bellowed, ‘if you’re not telling us straight.’

‘As God’s my...’ Quest began, and collapsed into speechlessness, unable to deal with so many accusers, with such complete disbelief.

‘All right,’ Roger told him prosaically, ‘you may not have wanted to look at him in the face, to be able to identify him, but there’s one thing you do now know, which you can tell us.’

Quest simply looked nervous.

‘Which car?’ Roger said. ‘Describe it. Tell us its number.’

‘Well... I...’

‘After the first payment,’ Roger said, ‘you’d have been looking out for that car.’

I suppose that rabbits might look at snakes as Quest looked at Roger.

‘Which car?’ Henry yelled in Quest’s ear.

‘A Jaguar XJ6. Sort of silver.’ He mumbled the number.

Roger, slightly aghast but not disbelieving, said to me succinctly, ‘ Keith’s ’.

He and I digested the news. Henry raised his eyebrows our way. Roger flapped a hand, nodding. Henry, perceiving that the really essential piece of information had surfaced, looked more benignly upon his demoralised captive.

‘Well, now,’ he said, at only medium fortissimo, ‘when did you get hold of the firelighters?’

After a moment, meekly, Quest said, ‘I bought them.’

‘When?’ Roger asked.

‘Saturday.’

‘On his instructions?’

Quest said feebly, ‘There was a piece of paper in with the money. He said to burn the open ditch fence, where a horse had been killed on the Saturday. He said dowse it with petrol, to make sure.’