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.
Half an hour later the grim game was still in progress. My own car was now parked on the racecourse side of the stands, on the tarmac in Tattersalls where the bookies had called the odds that afternoon. It was facing the stands with the headlights full on. Every inch of the steps was lit by them, and since the car had arrived there I had not been able to use that side of the building at all.
The other car was similarly parked inside the racecourse gates, its headlights shining on the fronts of the weighing room, bars, dining-rooms, cloakrooms and offices.