Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,1

he was your grandfather.’

I said patiently, ‘No. They got it wrong. My mother was once married to his son. They divorced. My mother then married again, and had me. I’m not actually related to the Strattons.’

It was unwelcome news, it seemed. Roger tried again.

‘But you do own shares in the racecourse, don’t you?’

Ah, I thought. The feud. Since the old man had died, his heirs, reportedly, had been arguing to a point not far from murder.

‘I’m not getting involved,’ I said.

‘Look,’ Roger said with growing desperation, ‘the heirs are going to ruin the racecourse. You can see it a mile off. The rows! Suspicion. Violent hatreds. They set on each other before the old man was even cold.’

‘It’s civil war,’ Oliver Wells said miserably. ‘Anarchy. Roger is the manager and I’m the Clerk of the Course, and we are running things ourselves now, trying to keep the place going, but we can’t do it much longer. We’ve no authority, do you see?’

I looked at the deep concern on their faces and thought about the difficulty of finding employment of that calibre at fifty-something in the unforgiving job climate.

Lord Stratton, my non-grandfather, had owned three-quarters of the shares in the racecourse and had for years run the place himself as a benevolent despot. Under his hand, at any rate, Stratton Park had earned a reputation as a popular well-run racecourse to which trainers sent their runners in dozens. No Classics, no Gold Cups took place there, but it was accessible and friendly and had a well laid out racing circuit. It needed new stands and various face-lifts but old diehard Stratton had been against change. He appeared genially on television sometimes, an elder conservative statesman consulted by interviewers when the sport lurched into controversy. One knew him well by sight.

Occasionally, out of curiosity, I’d spent an afternoon on the racecourse, but racing itself had never compulsively beckoned me, nor had my non-grandfather’s family.

Roger Gardner hadn’t made the journey to give up easily.

‘But your sister is part of the family,’ he said.

‘Half-sister.’

‘Well, then.’

‘Mr Gardner,’ I explained, ‘forty years ago my mother abandoned her infant daughter and walked out. The Stratton family closed ranks behind her. Her name was mud, spelt in capitals. That daughter, my half-sister, doesn’t acknowledge my existence. I’m sorry, but nothing I could say or do would carry any weight with any of them.’

‘Your half-sister’s father…’

‘Particularly,’ I said, ‘not with him.’

During the ensuing pause while the bad news got chewed and digested, a tall fair-headed boy came out of one of the bedrooms on the gallery, skipped down the stairs, waved me a flapping hand and went into the kitchen, to reappear almost at once carrying the baby, now clothed. The boy took the baby upstairs, returned with him to his bedroom and shut the door. Silence fell.

Questions hovered on Roger’s face but remained unasked, to my amusement. Roger – Lt. Colonel R.B. Gardner, according to the Stratton Park racecards – would have been a thorough flop as a journalist, but I found his inhibitions restful.

‘You were our last hope,’ Oliver Wells complained, accusingly.

If he hoped to instil guilt, he failed. ‘What would you expect me to do?’ I asked reasonably.

‘We hoped…’ Roger began. His voice faded away, then he rallied and manfully tried again. ‘We hoped, do you see, that you might knock some sense into them.’

‘How?’

‘Well, for one thing, you’re big.’

‘Big?’ I stared at him. ‘Are you suggesting I literally knock some sense into them?’

It did seem that my appearance had given them instant ideas. It was true that I was tall and physically strong; very useful for building houses. I couldn’t swear I’d never found those facts conclusive in swinging an argument. But there were times when to tread softly and shrink one’s shoulder-span produced more harmonious results, and I leaned by nature more to the latter course. Lethargic, my wife called me. Too lazy to fight. Too placid. But the ruins got restored and left no trails of rancour in local official minds, and I’d learned how to get round most planning officers with conciliation and reason.

‘I’m not your man,’ I said.

Roger clutched at straws. ‘But you do own those shares. Can’t you stop the war with those?’

‘Is that,’ I asked, ‘what you mainly had in mind when you sought me out?’

Roger nodded unhappily. ‘We don’t know where else to turn, do you see?’

‘So you thought I might gallop into the arena waving my bits of paper and crying “enough”, and they would all throw