‘What time…?’
‘The bomb in the office went off about an hour and a half ago, and the one in your flat was just after seven. The old man and I were round there with the police when they got the radio message about the office. The police seem to think that whoever did it was looking for something. The people who live underneath you heard someone moving about upstairs for about two hours shortly before the bomb went off, but they just thought it was you making more noise than usual. And it seems everything in your flat was moved into one pile in the sitting-room and the bomb put in the middle. The police said it meant that they hadn’t found what they were looking for and were destroying everything in case they had missed it.’
‘Everything…’ I said.
‘Not a thing was left. God, Sid, I wish I didn’t have to… but there it is. Nothing that was there exists any more.’
The letters from Jenny when she loved me. The only photograph of my mother and father. The trophies I won racing. The lot. I leant numbly against the wall.
‘Sid, are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was the same thing at the office. People across the road saw lights on and someone moving about inside, and just thought we were working late. The old man said we must assume they still haven’t found what they were looking for. He wants to know what it is.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You must.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘You can think on the way back.’
‘I’m not coming back. Not tonight. It can’t do any good. I think I’ll go out to the racecourse again, just to make sure nothing happens there too.’
‘All right. I’ll tell him when he calls. He said he’d be over in Cromwell Road all night, very likely.’
We rang off and I went out of the kiosk into the cold night air. I thought that Radnor was right. It was important to know what it was that the bomb merchants had been looking for. I leaned against the outside of the box, thinking about it. Deliberately not thinking about the flat, the place that had begun to be home, and all that was lost. That had happened before, in one way or another. The night my mother died, for instance. And I’d ridden my first winner the next day.
To look for something, you had to know it existed. If you used bombs, destroying it was more important than finding it. What did I have, which I hadn’t had long (or they would have searched before) which Kraye wanted obliterated.
There was the bullet which Fred had accidentally fired into the mirror. They wouldn’t find that, because it was somewhere in a police ballistics laboratory. And if they had thought I had it, they would have looked for it the night before.
There was the leaflet Bolt had sent out, but there were hundreds of those, and he wouldn’t want the one I had, even if he knew I had it.
There was the letter Mervyn Brinton had re-written for me, but if it were that it meant…
I went back into the telephone box, obtained Mervyn Brinton’s number from directory enquiries, and rang him up.
To my relief, he answered.
‘You are all right, Mr Brinton?’
‘Yes, yes. What’s the matter?’
‘You haven’t had a call from the big man? You haven’t told anyone about my visit to you, or that you know your brother’s letter by heart?’
He sounded scared. ‘No. Nothing’s happened. I wouldn’t tell anyone. I never would.’
‘Fine,’ I reassured him. ‘That’s just fine. I was only checking.’
So it was not Brinton’s letter.
The photographs, I thought. They had been in the office all the time until Radnor gave them to Lord Hagbourne yesterday afternoon. No one outside the agency, except Lord Hagbourne and Charles, had known they existed. Not until this morning, when Lord Hagbourne took them to Seabury executive meeting, and lost them.
Suppose they weren’t lost, but stolen. By someone who knew Kraye, and thought he ought to have them. From the dates on all those documents Kraye would know exactly when the photographs had been taken. And where.
My scalp contracted. I must assume, I thought, that they had now connected all the Halleys and Sids.
Suddenly fearful, I rang up Aynsford. Charles himself answered, calm and sensible.
‘Charles, please will you do as I ask, at once, and no questions? Grab Mrs Cross, go out and get in the car and drive well away from the house, and ring me back at Seabury 79411. Got that? Seabury 79411.’
‘Yes.’ He said, and put down the telephone. Thank God, I thought, for a naval training. There might not be much time. The office bomb had exploded an hour and a half ago; London to Aynsford took the same.
Ten minutes later the bell began to ring. I picked up the receiver.
‘They say you’re in a call box,’ Charles said.
‘That’s right. Are you?’
‘No, the pub down in the village. Now, what’s it all about?’
I told him about the bombs, which horrified him, and about the missing photographs.
‘I can’t think what else it can be that they are looking for.’
‘But you said that they’ve got them.’
‘The negatives,’ I said.
‘Oh. Yes. And they weren’t in your flat or the office?’
‘No. Quite by chance, they weren’t.’
‘And you think if they’re still looking, that they’ll come to Aynsford?’
‘If they are desperate enough, they might. They might think you would know where I keep things… And even have a go at making you tell them. I asked you to come out quick because I didn’t want to risk it. If they are going to Aynsford, they could be there at any minute now. It’s horribly likely they’ll think of you. They’ll know I took the photos in your house.’
‘From the dates. Yes. Right. I’ll get on to the local police and ask for a guard on the house at once.’
‘Charles, one of them… well, if he’s the one with the bombs, you’ll need a squad.’ I described Fred and his van, together with its number.
‘Right.’ He was still calm. ‘Why would the photographs be so important to them? Enough to use bombs, I mean?’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘Take care.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I did take care. Instead of going back into the hotel, I rang up.’
The manager said, ‘Sid, where on earth are you, people have been trying to reach you all the evening… the police too.’
‘Yes, Joe, I know. It’s all right. I’ve talked to the people in London. Now, has anyone actually called at the hotel, wanting me?’
‘There’s someone up in your room, yes. Your father-in-law, Admiral Roland.’
‘Oh really? Does he look like an Admiral?’
‘I suppose so,’ he sounded puzzled.
‘A gentleman?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Not Fred, then.
‘Well, he isn’t my father-in-law. I’ve just been talking to him in his house in Oxfordshire. You collect a couple of helpers and chuck my visitor out.’
I put down the receiver sighing. A man up in my room meant everything I’d brought to Seabury would very likely be ripped to bits. That left me with just the clothes I stood in, and the car…
I fairly sprinted round to where I’d left the car. It was locked, silent and safe. No damage. I patted it thankfully, climbed in, and drove out to the racecourse.
FIFTEEN
All was quiet as I drove through the gates and switched off the engine. There were lights on — one shining through the windows of the Press room, one outside the weighing room door, one high up somewhere on the stands. The shadows in between were densely black. It was a clear night with no moon.
I walked across to the Press room, to see if the security patrols had anything to report.
They hadn’t.
All four of them were fast asleep.
Furious, I shook the nearest. His head lolled like a pendulum, but he didn’t wake up. He was sitting slumped into his chair. One of them had his arms on the table and his head on his arms. One of them sat on the floor, his head on the seat of the chair and his arms hanging down. The fourth lay flat, face downwards, near the opposite wall.
The stupid fools, I thought violently. Ex-policemen letting themselves be put to sleep like infants. It shouldn’t have been possible. One of their first rules in guard work was to take their own food and drink with them and not accept sweets from strangers.
I stepped round their heavily breathing hulks and picked up one of the Press telephones to ring Chico for reinforcements. The line was dead. I tried the three other instruments. No contact with the exchange on any of them.
I would have to go back and ring up from Seabury, I thought. I went out of the Press room but in the light pouring out before I shut the door I saw a dim figure walking towards me from the direction of the gate.
‘Who’s that?’ he called imperiously, and I recognised his voice. Captain Oxon.
‘It’s only me, Sid Halley.’ I shouted back. ‘Come and look at this.’
He came on into the light, and I stood aside for him to go into the Press room.
‘Good heavens. What on earth’s the matter with them?’
‘Sleeping pills. And the telephones don’t work. You haven’t seen anyone about who ought not to be?’
‘No. I haven’t heard anything except your car. I came down to see who had come.’
‘How many lads are there staying overnight in the hostel? Could we use some of those to patrol the place while I ring the agency to get some more men?’
‘I should think they’d love it,’ he said, consideringly. ‘There are about five of them. They shouldn’t be in bed yet. We’ll go over and ask them, and you can use the telephone from my flat to ring your agency.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s fine.’
I looked round the room at the sleeping men. ‘I think perhaps I ought to see if any of them tried to write a message. I won’t be a minute.’
He waited patiently while I looked under the head and folded arms of the man at the table and under the man on the floor, and all round the one with his head on the chair seat, but none of them had even reached for a pencil. Shrugging, I looked at the remains of their supper, lying on the table. Half eaten sandwiches on grease-proof paper, dregs of coffee in cups and thermos flasks, a couple of apple cores, some cheese sections and empty wrappings, and an unpeeled banana.
‘Found anything?’ asked Oxon.
I shook my head in disgust. ‘Not a thing. They’ll have terrible headaches when they wake up, and serve them right.’
‘I can understand you being annoyed…’ he began. But I was no longer really listening. Over the back of the chair occupied by the first man I had shaken was hanging a brown leather binoculars case: and on its lid were stamped three black initials: L.E.O. Leo. Leo.
‘Something the matter?’ asked Oxon.
‘No.’ I smiled at him and touched the strap of the binoculars. ‘Are these yours?’
‘Yes. The men asked if I could lend them some. For the dawn, they said.’
‘It was very kind of you.’
‘Oh. Nothing.’ He shrugged, moving out into the night. ‘You’d better make the phone call first. We’ll tackle the boys afterwards.’
I had absolutely no intention of walking into his flat.
‘Right,’ I said.
We went out of the door, and I closed it behind us.
A familiar voice, loaded with satisfaction, spoke from barely a yard away. ‘So you’ve got him, Oxon. Good.’
‘He was coming…’ began Oxon in anxious anger, knowing that ‘got him’ was an exaggeration.
‘No,’ I said, and turned and ran for the car.
When I was barely ten yards from it someone turned the lights on. The headlights of my own car. I stopped dead.
Behind me one of the men shouted and I heard their feet running. I wasn’t directly in the beam, but silhouetted against it. I swerved off to the right, towards the gate. Three steps in that direction, and the headlights of a car turning in through it caught me straight in the eyes.
There were more shouts, much closer, from Oxon and Kraye. I turned, half dazzled, and saw them closing in. Behind me now the incoming car rolled forward. And the engine of my Mercedes purred separately into life.
I ran for the dark. The two cars, moving, caught me again in their beams. Kraye and Oxon ran where they pointed.
I was driven across and back towards the stands like a coursed hare, the two cars behind inexorably finding me with their lights and the two men running with reaching, clutching hands. Like a nightmare game of ‘He’, I thought wildly, with more than a child’s forfeit if I were caught.
Across the parade ring, across the flat tarmac stretch beyond it, under the rails of the unsaddling enclosure and along the weighing room wall. Sometimes only a foot from hooking fingers. Once barely a yard from a speeding bumper.
But I made it. Safe, panting, in the precious dark, on the inside of the door into the trainers’ luncheon room and through there without stopping into the kitchen. And weaving on from there out into the members’ lunch room, round acres of tables with upturned chairs, through the far door into the wide passage which cut like a tunnel along the length of the huge building, across it, and up a steep stone staircase emerging half way up the open steps of the stands, and sideways along them as far as I could go. The pursuit was left behind.
I sank down, sitting with one leg bent to run, in the black shadow where the low wooden wall dividing the Members from Tattersalls cut straight down the steps separating the stands into two halves. On top of the wall wire netting stretched up too high to climb: high enough to keep out the poorer customers from gate-crashing the expensive ring.
At the bottom of the steps lay a large expanse of Members’ lawn stretching to another metal mesh fence, chest high, and beyond that lay the whole open expanse of racecourse. Half a mile across it to the London road to Seabury, with yet another barrier, the boundary fence, to negotiate.
It was too far. I knew I couldn’t do it. Perhaps once, with two hands for vaulting, with a stomach which didn’t already feel as if it were tearing into more holes inside. But not now. Although I always mended fast, it was only two weeks since I had found the short walk to Andrews’ body very nearly too much; and Fred’s well-aimed attentions on the previous day had not been therapeutic.
Looking at it straight: if I ran, it had to be successful. My kingdom for a horse, I thought. Any reasonable cowboy would have had Revelation hitched to the rails, ready for a flying leap into the saddle and a thundering exit. I had a hundred and fifty mile an hour little white Mercedes: and someone else was sitting in it.
To run and be caught running would achieve nothing and be utterly pointless.
Which left just one alternative.
The security patrol hadn’t been drugged for nothing. Kraye wasn’t at Seabury for his health. Some more damage had been planned for this night. Might already have been done. There was just a chance, if I stayed to look, that I could find out what it was. Before they found me. Naturally.
If I ever have any children, they won’t get me playing hide and seek.