Дик Фрэнсис - Decider

‘Not any more,’ I sighed. I’d forgotten, in the urgency of the moment, that he’d been standing behind me. ‘It’s the cuts on my legs that have made walking difficult, but they’re all getting better.’

‘You gave Keith a shock, catching that walking stick.’

I had made him more careful, I thought ruefully, which might not be a good thing, from my point of view.

‘Where are we going?’ Dart asked. He’d turned out of the gates in the direction of the racecourse, automatically. ‘Back to the Gardners?’

I tried to think, to pull together a few scattered wits.

I asked, ‘Is Rebecca racing today, do you know?’

He answered as if bewildered, ‘No, I don’t think so. She was at the meeting, of course.’

‘I need to talk to Marjorie,’ I said. ‘And to go to Stratton Hays.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘No, but will you take me?’

He laughed, ‘I’m your chauffeur, now?’

‘You’re a better chauffeur than look-out.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘Or lend me your car,’ I suggested.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you. Life’s never boring, with you around.’

‘The Gardners first, then.’

‘Yes, sir .’

In the Gardners’ kitchen Mrs Gardner greeted my return with friendly dismay, saying I’d lent her the five cooks for less than an hour, not long enough. I offered their services for another few hours. Accepted, she said.

‘Tell me if I’m leaving them with you too much,’ I begged her.

‘Don’t be silly. I love it. And besides, Roger says that but for you he’d be halfway out of his job and we’d be sick with worry.’

‘Does he think so?’

‘He knows it.’

Grateful and partially comforted I left Dart in the kitchen and went over to the bus, and there in the privacy of the cab fed the tape I’d stolen into the tape-playing slot of the radio.

It proved to be a recording of a telephone call made on a cellular phone: the sort of spying that was diabolically easy if one listened on a scanner close to the transmitting and receiving cell.

I’d always had misgivings about the randomness of overheard conversations that had come to public light: what sort of person listened in to other people’s privacy day in and day out and taped it all , hoping to overhear marketable secrets? Someone apparently had, in this case.

The conversation was between a voice provisionally identifiable as Rebecca’s and a man speaking in a south-east accent, not cockney, but all glottal stops where ‘d’s, ‘t’s or ‘c’s occurred in the centre of words. Stratton came out as ‘Stra-on’. Rebecca as ‘Rebe-ah’.

‘Rebe-ah Stra-on?’ said the man’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘What have you got for me, darlin’?’

‘How much is it worth?’

‘Same as usual.’

After a short pause, speaking quietly, she said, ‘I’m riding Soapstone in the fifth, it’s got no chance, it’s only half fit. Lay off all you can on Catch-as-Catch, it’s jumping out of its skin and they’re putting a bundle on it.’

‘That’s the lot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thanks, darlin’.’

‘I’ll see you at the races.’

‘Same place,’ the man agreed. ‘Before the first.’

The tape clicked and fell silent. I ejected it grimly and returned it to my pocket and, climbing back into the body of the bus, unzipped my trousers and retrieved the glossy photograph and also the packet of dangerous knowledge.

From that I took out the interior, fatter brown envelope and slit it open with a knife. Inside were yet another envelope, white this time, and another short letter from William Stratton, third baron, to his son Conrad, fourth.

It read:

Conrad,

This grieves me beyond measure. Remember always that Keith, to my despair, tells lies. I sought out knowledge, and now I don’t know how to use it. You must decide. But take care.

Apprehensively, I slit open the white envelope and read its lengthier contents and by the end found my hands trembling.

My non-grandfather had shown me a way, once and for all, of dealing with Keith.

I reassembled the packet in its original order and, finding some sticky-tape, sealed the outside brown envelope so that no one could open it by chance. Then I sat for a while with my head in my hands, realising that if Keith knew what I’d got he would kill me immediately, and also that saving myself from him posed a dilemma I’d never imagined.

Dangerous knowledge. Not dangerous: deadly.

Dart drove me to Stratton Hays. On the way, using my own mobile phone (anyone listening?) I got through to Marjorie’s house and found her at home, forthrightly displeased.

‘You didn’t come to the meeting!’

‘No. Very sorry.’

‘It was a shambles,’ she said crossly. ‘Waste of time. Keith shouted continually and nothing got done. He couldn’t ignore the gate receipts, which were excellent , but he’s fanatical about selling. Are you sure you cannot uncover his debts?’

‘Does Imogen know them?’ I asked.

‘Imogen?’

‘If I got her paralytically drunk, would she know anything at all of her husband’s affairs?’

‘You’re disgraceful!’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I wish she did. But don’t try it, because if Keith caught you at it...’ She paused, then said without pressure, ‘Do you take his threats seriously?’

‘I have to.’

‘Have you thought of... retreat?’

‘Yes, I have. Are you busy? I need to tell you a few things.’

She said if I gave her an hour I could come to her house, to which I agreed. Dart and I continued to Stratton Hays, where he parked in the same place as on my first visit and as usual left the key in the ignition.

The great graceful pile, full of forgotten lives and quiet ghosts, stood peacefully in the mottled sunlight, a house built for hundreds, lived in by one.

‘What now?’ the one said; Darlington Stratton, fifth baron to be.

‘We’ve got almost an hour. Can we look at the north wing?’

‘But it’s a ruin. I told you.’

‘Ruins are my business.’

‘I forgot. Well, OK.’ He unlocked the rear door and took me again across the vast unfurnished, uncurtained front hall and along a wide windowed passage proportioned like a picture gallery, but with bare walls.

At the end of it we came to a heavy door, unpanelled, unpolished and modern, fastened by bolts. Dart wrestled with the bolts and creaked open the door, and we walked into the sort of desolation I went looking for: rotting wood, heaps of debris, saplings growing.

‘They took the roof off sixty or more years ago,’ Dart said glumly, looking upwards to the sky. ‘All those years of rain and snow... the upper floor just rotted and fell in. Grandfather asked the National Trust and the Heritage people... I think they said the only thing to do was to demolish this wing and save the rest.’ He sighed. ‘Grandfather didn’t like change. He just let time run on and nothing got done.’

I clambered with difficulty over a hillock of weathered grey beams and looked along a wide storm-struck landscape flanked by high, still standing, but unbuttressed stone walls.

‘Do be careful,’ Dart warned. ‘No one’s supposed to come in here without hard hats.’

The space gave me no creative excitement, no desire to restore it. All it did give me, in its majestic proportions, and its undignified death, was an interval of respite, of nerve-calming patience, a deep breath-taking perception of life passing, a drawing-in of the faith and industry that had designed and built here four hundred years earlier.

‘OK,’ I said, stirring and rejoining Dart in the open doorway. ‘Thanks.’