‘Where in the office?’ said Kraye.
‘Desk.’
‘Hit him,’ said Kraye. ‘My hand hurts.’
Bolt had a go, but it wasn’t his sort of thing.
‘Try with this,’ said Doria, offering Bolt the gun, but it was luckily so small he couldn’t hold it effectively.
Oxon let go of my elbows, came round to the front, and looked at my face.
‘If he’s decided not to tell you, you won’t get it out of him like that,’ he said.
‘I told you,’ I said.
‘Why not?’ said Bolt.
‘You’re hurting yourselves more than him. And if you want my opinion, you won’t get anything out of him at all.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Doria scornfully. ‘He’s so small.’
Oxon laughed without mirth.
‘If Fred said so, the negatives weren’t at his office,’ asserted Bolt again. ‘Nor in his flat. And he didn’t bring them with him. Or at least, they weren’t in his luggage at the hotel.’
I looked at him sideways, out of an eye which was beginning to swell. And if I hadn’t been so quick to have him flung out of my hotel room, I thought sourly, he wouldn’t have driven through the racecourse gate at exactly the wrong moment. But I couldn’t have foreseen it, and it was too late to help.
‘They weren’t in his car either,’ said Doria. ‘But this was.’ She put her hand into her shining white pocket and brought out my baby camera. Kraye took it from her, opened the case, and saw what was inside. The veins in his neck and temples became congested with blood. In a paroxysm of fury he threw the little black toy across the room so that it hit the wall with a disintegrating crash.
‘Sixteen millimetre,’ he said savagely. ‘Fred must have missed them.’
Bolt said obstinately, ‘Fred would find a needle in a haystack. And those films wouldn’t have been hidden.’
‘He might have them in his pocket,’ suggested Doria.
‘Take your coat off,’ Kraye said. ‘Stand up.’
I stood up, and the base-plate of the weighing machine wobbled under my feet. Oxon pulled my coat down over the back of my shoulders, gave a tug to get the sleeves off, and passed the jacket to Kraye. His own hand he thrust into my trouser pockets. In the right one, under my tie, he found the bunch of lock pickers.
‘Sit down,’ he said. I did so, exploring with the back of my hand some of the damage to my face. It could have been worse, I thought resignedly, much worse. I would be lucky if that were all.
‘What are those?’ said Doria curiously, taking the jingling collection from Oxon.
Kraye snatched them from her and slung them after the camera. ‘Skeleton keys,’ he said furiously. ‘What he used to unlock my cases.’
‘I don’t see how he could,’ said Doria, ‘with that… that… claw.’ She looked down where it lay on my lap.
A nice line in taunts, I thought, but a week too late. Thanks to Zanna Martin, I was at last learning to live with the claw. I left it where it was.
‘Doria,’ said Bolt calmly, ‘would you be kind enough to go over to the flat and wait for Fred to ring? He may already have found what we want at Aynsford.’
I turned my head and found him looking straight at me, assessingly. There was a detachment in the eyes, an unmoved quality in the rounded features; and I began to wonder whether his stolid coolness might not in the end prove even more difficult to deal with than Kraye’s rage.
‘Aynsford,’ I repeated thickly. I looked at my watch. If Fred had really taken his bombs to Aynsford, he should by now be safely in the bag. One down, four to go. Five of them altogether, not four. I hadn’t thought of Doria being an active equal colleague of the others. My mistake.
‘I don’t want to,’ said Doria, staying put.
Bolt shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter. I see that the negatives aren’t at Aynsford, because the thought of Fred looking for them there doesn’t worry Halley one little bit.’
The thought of what Fred might be doing at Aynsford or to Charles himself didn’t worry any of them either. But more than that I didn’t like the way Bolt was reasoning. In the circumstances, a clear-thinking opponent was something I could well have done without.
‘We must have them,’ said Kraye intensely. ‘We must. Or be certain beyond doubt that they were destroyed.’ To Oxon he said, ‘Hold his arms again.’
‘No,’ I said, shrinking back.
‘Ah, that’s better. Well?’
‘They were in the office.’ My mouth felt stiff.
‘Where?’
‘In Mr Radnor’s desk, I think.’
He stared at me, eyes narrowed, anger half under control, weighing up whether I were telling the truth or not. He certainly couldn’t go to the office and make sure.
‘Were,’ said Bolt suddenly.
‘What?’ asked Kraye, impatiently.
‘Were,’ said Bolt. ‘Halley said were. The negatives were in the office. Now that’s very interesting indeed, don’t you think?’
Oxon said, ‘I don’t see why.’
Bolt came close to me and peered into my face. I didn’t meet his eyes, and anything he could read from my bruised features he was welcome to.
‘I think he knows about the bombs,’ he said finally.
‘How?’ said Doria.
‘I should think he was told at the hotel. People in London must have been trying to contact him. Yes, I think we can take it for granted he knows about the bombs.’
‘What difference does that make?’ said Oxon.
Kraye knew. ‘It means he thinks he is safe saying the negatives were in the office, because we can’t prove they weren’t.’
‘They were,’ I insisted, showing anxiety.
Bolt pursed his full moist lips. ‘Just how clever is Halley?’ he said.
‘He was a jockey,’ said Oxon flatly, as if that automatically meant an I.Q. of 70.
Bolt said, ‘But they took him on at Hunt Radnor’s.’
‘I told you before,’ said Oxon patiently, ‘I asked various people about that. Radnor took him on as an adviser, but never gave him anything special to do, and if that doesn’t show that he wasn’t capable of much, I don’t know what does. Everyone knows that his job is only a face saver. It sounds all right, but it means nothing really. Jobs are quite often given in that way to top jockeys when they retire. No one expects them to do much, it’s just their name that’s useful for a while. When their news value has gone, they get the sack.’
This all too true summing up of affairs depressed me almost as deeply as my immediate prospects.
‘Howard?’ said Bolt.
‘I don’t know,’ said Kraye slowly. ‘He doesn’t strike me as being in the least clever. Very much the opposite. I agree he did take those photographs, but I think you are quite right in believing he doesn’t know why we want them destroyed.’
That, too, was shatteringly correct. As far as I had been able to see, the photographs proved nothing conclusively except that Kraye had been buying Seabury shares under various names with Bolt’s help. Kraye and Bolt could not be prosecuted for that. Moreover the whole of Seabury executive had seen the photographs at the meeting that morning, so their contents were no secret.
‘Doria?’ Bolt said.
‘He’s a slimy spying little creep, but if he was clever he wouldn’t be sitting where he is.’
You couldn’t argue with that, either. It had been fairly certain all along that Kraye was getting help from somebody working at Seabury, but even after knowing about Clerk of the Course Brinton’s unwilling collaboration at Dunstable, I had gone on assuming that the helper at Seabury was one of the labourers. I hadn’t given more than a second’s flicker of thought to Oxon, because it didn’t seem reasonable that it should be him. In destroying the racecourse he was working himself out of a job, and good jobs for forty year old ex-army captains weren’t plentiful enough to be lost lightly. As he certainly wasn’t mentally affected like Brinton, he wasn’t being blackmailed into doing it against his will. I had thought him silly and self important, but not a rogue. As Doria said, had I been clever enough to suspect him, I wouldn’t be sitting where I was.