Opening out of the weighing room on the opposite side to the changing room was the Stewards’ room, where in the past like all jockeys I’d been involved in cases of objections-to-the-winner. It was a bare room: large table, chairs round it, sporting pictures, small threadbare carpet. A few of the Stewards’ personal possessions lay scattered about, but there was no concealment.
A few doors here and there were locked, in spite of Oxon having left the keys in his flat. As usual I had the bunch of lock-pickers in my pocket and with shortened breath I spent several sticky minutes letting myself into one well secured room off the Members’ bar. It proved to be the liquor store: crates of spirits, champagne, wine and beer. Beer from floor to ceiling, and a porter’s trolly to transport it. It was a temptation to lock myself in there, and wait for the caterers to rescue me in the morning. This was one door that Oxon would not expect to find me on the far side of.
In the liquor store I might be safe. On the other hand, if I were safe the racecourse might not be. Reluctantly I left again; but I didn’t waste time locking up. With the pursuit out of sight, I risked a look upstairs. It was warm and quiet, and all the lights were on. I left them on, figuring that if the watchers in the cars saw them go out they would know too accurately where I was.
Nothing seemed to be wrong. On one side of a central lobby there was the big room where the executive held their meetings and ate their lunch. On the other side there was a sort of drawing-room furnished with light armchairs, with two cloakrooms leading off it at the back. At the front, through double glass doors, it led out into a box high up on the stands. The private box for directors and distinguished guests, with a superb view over the whole course.
I didn’t go out there. Sabotaging the Royal Box wouldn’t stop a race meeting to which royalty weren’t going anyway. And besides, whoever was in my car would see me opening the door.
Retreating, I went back, right through the dining-board room and out into the servery on the far side. There I found a storeroom with plates, glass and cutlery, and in the storeroom also a second exit. A small service lift down to the kitchens. It worked with ropes, like the one in the office in the Cromwell Road… like the office lift had worked, before the bomb.
Kraye and Oxon were down in the kitchen. Their angry voices floated up the shaft, mingled with a softer murmuring voice which seemed to be arguing with them. Since for once I knew where they all were, I returned with some boldness to the ground again. But I was worried. There seemed to be nothing at all going wrong in the main building. If they were organising yet more damage somewhere out on the course itself, I didn’t see how I could stop it.
While I was still dithering rather aimlessly along the passage the kitchen door opened, the light flooded out, and I could hear Kraye still talking. I dived yet again for the nearest door and put it between myself and them.
I was, I discovered, in the ladies’ room, where I hadn’t been before: and there was no second way out. Only a double row of cubicles, all with the doors open, a range of washbasins, mirrors on the walls with a wide shelf beneath them, a few chairs, and a counter like that in the bar. Behind the counter there was a rail with coat hangers.
There were heavy steps in the passage outside. I slid instantly behind and under the counter and pressed myself into a corner. The door opened.
‘He won’t be in here,’ said Kraye. ‘The light’s still on.’
‘I looked in here not five minutes ago, anyway,’ agreed Oxon.
The door closed behind them and their footsteps went away. I began to breathe again and my thudding heart slowed down. But for a couple of seconds only. Across the room, someone coughed.
I froze. I couldn’t believe it. The room had been empty when I came in, I was certain. And neither Kraye nor Oxon had stayed… I stretched my ears, tense, horrified.
Another cough. A soft, single cough.
Try as I could, I could hear nothing else. No breathing. No rustle of clothing, no movement. It didn’t make sense. If someone in the room knew I was behind the counter, why didn’t they do something about it? If they didn’t know, why were they so unnaturally quiet?
In the end, taking a conscious grip on my nerves, I slowly stood up.
The room was empty.
Almost immediately there was another cough. Now that my ears were no longer obstructed by the counter, I got a clearer idea of its direction. I swung towards it. There was no one there.
I walked across the room and stared down at the wash basin. Water was trickling from one of the taps. Even while I looked at it the tap coughed. Almost laughing with relief I stretched out my hand and turned it off.
The metal was very hot. Surprised, I turned the water on again. It came spluttering out of the tap, full of air bubbles and very hot indeed. Steaming. How stupid, I thought, turning it off again, to have the water so hot at this time of night…
Christ, I thought. The boiler.
SIXTEEN
Kraye and Oxon’s so-called methodical end to end search which had just failed to find me in the ladies’, was proceeding from the Members’ end of the stands towards Tattersalls. The boiler, like myself, was in the part they had already put behind them. I switched out the ladies’ room lights, carefully eased into the passage, and via the kitchen, the Members’ dining-room, the gentlemen’s cloaks and another short strip of passage returned to the boiler room.
Although there was no door through, I knew that on the far side of the inside wall lay to the left the weighing room and to the right the changing room, with the dividing wall between. From both those rooms, when it was quiet, as it was that night, one could quite clearly hear the boiler’s muffled roar.
The light that I had switched off was on again in the boiler room. I looked round. It all looked as normal as it had before, except… except that away to the right there was a very small pool of water on the floor.
Boilers. We had had a lesson on them at school. Sixteen or seventeen years ago, I thought hopelessly. But I remembered very well the way the master had begun the lesson.
‘The first thing to learn about boilers,’ he said, ‘is that they explode.’
He was an excellent teacher: the whole class of forty boys listened from then on with avid interest. But since then the only acquaintance I’d had with boilers was down in the basement of the flats, where I sometimes drank a cup of orange tea with the caretaker. A tough ex-naval stoker, he was, and a confirmed student of racing form. Mostly we’d talked about horses, but sometimes about his job. There were strict regulations for boilers, he’d said, and regular official inspections every three months, and he was glad of it, working alongside them every day.
The first thing to learn about boilers is that they explode.
It’s no good saying I wasn’t frightened, because I was. If the boiler burst it wasn’t simply going to make large new entrances into the weighing room and changing room, it was going to fill every cranny near it with scalding tornadoes of steam. Not a death I looked on with much favour.
I stood with my back against the door and tried desperately to remember that long ago lesson, and to work out what was going wrong.
It was a big steam boiler. An enormous cylinder nine feet high and five feet in diameter. Thick steel, with dark red anti-rust paint peeling off. Fired at the bottom not by coke, which it had been built for, but by the more modern roaring jet of burning oil. If I opened the fire door I would feel the blast of its tremendous heat.