Дик Фрэнсис - Decider

‘No.’

‘Wilson Yarrow drilled the holes and set the charges, with you acting as look-out.’

‘No!’

‘He couldn’t do it without a look-out. If you go in for crime, it’s much best to post a look-out you can trust.’

Dart squirmed. Then he grinned. Irrepressible.

‘You sat on watch in Dart’s car,’ I said.

Rebecca’s eyes opened wide, abruptly. The ‘no’ she produced lacked the fire of the other denials.

‘You thought,’ I said, ‘that if you went in your own bright scarlet Ferrari, and any stray groundsman, perhaps, saw it on the racecourse on that non-racing day, he would remember it and report it after the stands had exploded. So you drove to Stratton Hays, and parked your car there, and took Dart’s, which always has the keys left in, and you drove that car into the racecourse, because Dart’s car is so familiar there as to be practically invisible. But you didn’t reckon with Harold Quest, actor and busybody, who wouldn’t have been at the gates there anyway on that day if he’d been a genuine protestor, and you must have been shattered when he said Dart’s car had been there, and described it to the police. But not as shattered as you would have been if Harold Quest had reported your Ferrari.’

‘I don’t believe all this,’ Conrad said faintly; but he did.

‘I imagine,’ I said to Rebecca, ‘that somewhere you picked up Yarrow and took him and the explosive to the racecourse, because the police tested the car and found traces of nitrates.’

Rebecca said nothing.

I said, ‘Dart has known all along that it was you — or you and Yarrow — who blew up the stands.’

‘Dart told you!’ Rebecca shouted, furiously turning to Dart, who looked staggered and hurt. ‘You gave me away to this... this...’

‘No, he didn’t,’ I said fiercely. ‘Dart was unswervingly loyal to you. He went through a considerable grilling from the police yesterday and didn’t say a word. They accused him of setting the explosives himself, and he’s still their chief suspect, and they’ll question him again. But he won’t tell them about you. He’s proud of you, he has mixed feelings, he thinks you’re crack-brained, but he’s a Stratton and he won’t give you away.’

‘How do you know ?’ Dart wailed, agonised.

‘I stood next to you when she won on Tempestexi.’

‘But... you couldn’t tell from that .’

‘I’ve lived and breathed Strattons for a week.’

‘ How did you know?’ Rebecca demanded of her brother.

‘I saw your Ferrari from my bathroom, parked where my old car was supposed to be.’

She said helplessly, ‘It was there for less than an hour.’

Conrad’s shoulders sagged.

‘I was back in Lambourn long before the explosion,’ Rebecca said crossly. ‘And Yarrow was putting himself about in London by then.’

‘I want to know,’ Marjorie said to me, after a silence, ‘what made you first suspect Rebecca?’

‘Such small things.’

‘Tell them.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘she fanatically wanted things changed.’

‘And?’ Marjorie prompted, when I stopped.

‘She mentioned new stands made of glass. There are stands in Britain with glassed-in sections, aren’t there, but not sheeted altogether in glass, as Yarrow’s plans are, and I wondered if she had seen the plans, which Conrad had locked away so secretively. And then...’

‘Then what?’

‘Rebecca said she was the only one in the family who knew a rabbet from a raceway.’

They all, except Rebecca, looked uncomprehending.

‘I don’t follow,’ Marjorie said.

‘It’s not a racing term,’ I explained. ‘It meant nothing to Roger Gardner.’

‘Nor to me,’ Conrad interposed, ‘and I’ve owned and ridden horses all my life.’

‘It’s clear to an architect,’ I said, ‘and to a builder, to a carpenter, to an engineer. Not, I wouldn’t have expected, to a jockey. So I wondered, but not very conclusively at that point, if she’d been talking a good deal to an architect, and if that architect might not be Yarrow. Just a vague passing speculation, but that sort of thing sticks in your brain.’

‘So what are a rabbit and a raceway?’ Dart asked.

‘A rabbet, with an ‘e’, is a tongue and groove joint, mostly in wood, to enable you to slot boards, say, together, as in a fence, or floorboards, without using nails. Like the floor in the big top, in fact.’

Marjorie looked bewildered, Conrad not.

‘And a raceway?’ she asked. ‘Not a racecourse?’

‘I suppose it could be. But otherwise it’s either a sort of gully for draining fast-flowing fluids, or it could be a sort of collar that houses ball-bearings. In either case, it’s not common racecourse parlance.’

‘A rabbet from a raceway,’ Dart said thoughtfully. ‘Wasn’t your youngest son chanting that?’

‘Quite likely.’

‘I should have killed you when I had the chance,’ Rebecca said to me bitterly.

‘I thought you were going to,’ I agreed.

‘She was aiming straight at you,’ Dart said. ‘Father snatched the gun away from her. If you ask him, he’ll probably say that shooting you once in the chest might have been passed off as an accident, but putting a second shot into your back couldn’t be anything but murder.’

‘Dart!’ Marjorie remonstrated severely; but there was no doubt he’d got it right. Dart was one of them. He knew.

Conrad had a question for his daughter. ‘Where did you meet Yarrow in the first place? How did you get to know him?’

She shrugged. ‘At a party. He was doing stupid imitations in the accent you heard on the tape. Rebe-ah Stra-on, darlin’. Someone told me he was an exceptionally good architect, but flat broke. I wanted new stands. He wanted a job badly and he wasn’t fussy how he got it. We did a deal.’

‘But you don’t usually like men.’

‘I didn’t like him,’ she said brutally. ‘I used him. I despise him, as a matter of fact. He’s in a blue funk now, predictably.’

‘So... what next?’ Conrad asked me wretchedly. ‘The police?’

I looked at Marjorie. ‘You,’ I said, ‘are the one who pulls the levers in the family. You’ve ruled them all for forty years. You ruled even your own brother, in the gentlest of ways.’

‘How?’ Dart said, avid.

Marjorie beseeched me with wide open eyes, but it was for Perdita Faulds’ sake that I said to Dart, ‘Your grandfather’s secret was his alone, and died with him. I can’t tell you it.’

‘Won’t,’ Dart said.

‘Won’t,’ I agreed. ‘Anyway, to go to the police or not must be Marjorie’s decision, not mine. My brief was to give her a lever against Yarrow, and she has it. That’s where I finish.’ I paused. ‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘for what it’s worth, that the police haven’t got, and won’t find, enough for a prosecution against you, Dart. Just go on knowing nothing, and you’ll be all right.’

‘What about Yarrow, though?’ Dart asked.

‘Marjorie must decide,’ I said. ‘But if you prosecute Yarrow, you give away Rebecca’s schemes and your own involvement. I can’t see her doing it.’

‘But Keith?’ Marjorie said, not dodging the burden I’d placed on her. ‘What about him ?’

Keith .

I turned to Conrad. ‘Did you tell Marjorie that Keith sent you here?’

‘I did, yes.’

‘Sent you... with a gun?’

He looked faintly shamefaced. ‘You can’t really blame me. I mean, after you and Dart had gone, Keith and I were standing in my room talking about you breaking into my cupboard, and we found that key sort of thing of yours in the lock and I was saying what a risk you’d taken just for a look at some plans... and it simply flashed into my mind that you’d been so involved in things, and although I couldn’t believe you’d been searching for anything else, or that you knew enough , I went into the cupboard and looked into the box where I’d put the photograph and the tape, and I was so devastated that Keith asked what was the matter, and I told him. He said — we both thought — you would of course blackmail me.’