George had still found no chink in Kraye’s respectability, ex-sergeant Carter had given Bolt clearance, and Chico had come back from Seabury with no results all along the line.
We’d met in the office that morning, before I went to Kempton.
‘Nothing,’ said Chico. ‘I wagged me tongue off, knocking at every front door along that road. Not a soggy flicker. The bit which crosses the racecourse wasn’t closed by diversion notices, that’s for sure. There isn’t much traffic along there, of course. I counted it. Only forty to the hour, average. Still, that’s too much for at least some of the neighbours not to notice if there’d been anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Did anyone see the tanker, before it overturned?’
‘They’re always seeing tankers, nowadays. Several complaints about it, I got. No one noticed that one, especially.’
‘It can’t be coincidence… just at that spot at that time, where it would do most harm. And the driver packing up and moving a day or two afterwards, with no forwarding address.’
‘Well…’ Chico scratched his ear reflectively. ‘I got no dice with the hiring of lifting gear either. There isn’t much to be had, and what there was was accounted for. None of the little bungalows saw anything in that line, except the breakdown cranes coming to lift the tanker up again.’
‘How about the drains?’
‘No drains,’ he said. ‘A blank back to Doomsday.’
‘Good.’
‘Come again?’
‘If you’d found them on a map, the hurdle race accident would have been a genuine accident. This way, they reek of tiger traps.’
‘A spot of spade work after dark? Dodgy stuff.’
I frowned. ‘Yes. And it had to be done long enough before the race meeting for the ground to settle, so that the line of the trench didn’t show…’
‘And strong enough for a tractor to roll over it.’
‘Tractor?’
‘There was one on the course yesterday, pulling a trailer of dug up turf.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, strong enough to hold a tractor… but wheels wouldn’t pierce the ground like a horse’s legs. The weight is more spread.’
‘True enough.’
‘How fast was the turf-digging going?’ I asked.
‘Fast? You’re joking.’
It was depressing. So was Lord Hagbourne’s shilly-shallying. So, acutely, was the whole day, because I kept my promise to Zanna Martin. Pity, curiosity, surprise, embarrassment and revulsion, I encountered the lot. I tried hard to look on some of the things that were said as tactlessness or bad manners, but it didn’t really work. Telling myself it was idiotic to be so sensitive didn’t help either. If Miss Martin hadn’t kept her side of the bargain, I thought miserably, I would throttle her.
Half way through the afternoon I had a drink in the big upstairs bar with Mark Witney.
‘So that’s what you’ve been hiding all this time in pockets and gloves,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Bit of a mess,’ he commented.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Does it hurt still?’
‘No, only if I knock it. And it aches sometimes.’
‘Mm,’ he said sympathetically. ‘My ankle still aches too. Joints are always like that; they mend, but they never forgive you.’ He grinned. ‘The other half? There’s time; I haven’t a runner until the fifth.’
We had another drink, talking about horses, and I reflected that it would be easy if they were all like him.
‘Mark,’ I said as we walked back to the weighing room, ‘do you remember whether Dunstable ran into any sort of trouble before it packed up?’
‘That’s going back a bit.’ He pondered. ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t doing so well during the last year or two, was it? The attendances had fallen off, and they weren’t spending any money on paint.’
‘But no specific disasters?’
‘The Clerk of the Course took an overdose, if you call that a disaster. Yes, I remember now, the collapse of the place’s prosperity was put down to the Clerk’s mental illness. Brinton, I think his name was. He’d been quietly going loco and making hopeless decisions all over the place.’
‘I’d forgotten,’ I said glumly. Mark went into the weighing room and I leant against the rails outside. A suicidal Clerk of the Course could hardly have been the work of Kraye, I thought. It might have given him the idea of accelerating the demise of Seabury, though. He’d had plenty of time over Dunstable, but owing to a recent political threat of nationalisation of building land, he might well be in a hurry to clinch Seabury. I sighed, disregarded as best I could a stare of fascinated horror from the teenage daughter of a man I used to ride for, and drifted over to look at the horses in the parade ring.
At the end of the too-long afternoon I drove back to my flat, mixed a bigger drink than usual, and spent the evening thinking, without any world-shattering results. Late the next morning, when I was similarly engaged, the door bell rang, and I found Charles outside.
‘Come in,’ I said with surprise: he rarely visited the flat, and was seldom in London at week-ends. ‘Like some lunch? The restaurant downstairs is quite good.’
‘Perhaps. In a minute.’ He took off his overcoat and gloves and accepted some whisky. There was something unsettled in his manner, a ruffling of the smooth urbane exterior, a suggestion of a troubled frown in the high domed forehead.
‘O.K.,’ I said. ‘Whit’s the matter?’
‘Er… I’ve just driven up from Aynsford. No traffic at all, for once. Such a lovely morning, I thought the drive would be… oh damn it,’ he finished explosively, putting down his glass with a bang. ‘To get it over quickly… Jenny telephoned from Athens last night. She’s met some man there. She asked me to tell you she wants a divorce.’
‘Oh,’ I said. How like her, I thought, to get Charles to wield the axe. Practical Jenny, eager for a new fire, hacking away the dead wood. And if some of the wood was still alive, too bad.
‘I must say,’ said Charles, relaxing, ‘you make a thorough job of it.’
‘Of what?’
‘Of not caring what happens to you.’
‘I do care.’
‘No one would suspect it,’ he sighed. ‘When I tell you your wife wants to divorce you, you just say, “Oh.” When that happened,’ he nodded to my arm, ‘the first thing you said to me afterwards when I arrived full of sorrow and sympathy was, if I remember correctly, and I do, “Cheer up, Charles. I had a good run for my money.” ’
‘Well, so I did.’ Always, from my earliest childhood, I had instinctively shied away from too much sympathy. I didn’t want it. I distrusted it. It made you soft inside, and an illegitimate child couldn’t afford to be soft. One might weep at school, and one’s spirit would never recover from so dire a disgrace. So the poverty and the sniggers, and later the lost wife and the smashed career had to be passed off with a shrug, and what one really felt about it had to be locked up tightly inside, out of view. Silly, really, but there it was.
We lunched companionably together downstairs, discussing in civilised tones the mechanics of divorce. Jenny, it appeared, did not want me to use the justified grounds of desertion: I, she said, should ‘arrange things’ instead. I must know how to do it, working for the agency. Charles was apologetic: Jenny’s prospective husband was in the Diplomatic Service like Tony, and would prefer her not to be the guilty party.
Had I, Charles enquired delicately, already been… er… unfaithful to Jenny? No, I replied, watching him light his cigar, I was afraid I hadn’t. For much of the time, owing to one thing and another, I hadn’t felt well enough. That, he agreed with amusement, was a reasonable excuse.