Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,31

ago.’ I spoke again into the microphone. ‘Boys, go down to the gate. It’s very very urgent. The stands are unsafe. They might blow up. Just run.’ I turned to Roger. ‘Could you unlock the gate for them?’

He said, ‘Why don’t you?’

‘I’d better check those wires, don’t you think?’

‘But –’

‘Look, I’ve got to make sure Neil is right, haven’t I? And we don’t know when the charges are set for, do we? Maybe five minutes, maybe five hours, maybe after dark. Can’t risk it for the boys, though. Have to get them out at once.’

Roger swallowed and made no more objections. Together we ran from his office round to the front of the stands, he taking the key with him, I wanting to check that all five were safe.

The little knot by the gate grew to four as Neil reached them. Four, not five.

Four. Not Toby.

I sprinted back to Oliver’s office and picked up the microphone.

‘Toby, this is not a game. Toby, get off the stands. The stands are not safe. Toby, for Christ’s sake do what I say. This is not a game.’

I could hear my voice reverberating round and through the building and out in the paddocks. I repeated the urgent words once more and then ran round the stands again to check that Toby had heard and obeyed.

Four boys. Four boys and Roger, walking across the track to the winning post. Not running. If Toby were watching, he’d see no reason for haste.

‘Come on, you little bugger,’ I said under my breath. ‘For once in your life, be told.’

I went back to the microphone and said it loud and baldly. ‘There are demolition charges in the stands, Toby, are you listening? Remember the chimney? The stands can blow up too. Toby, get out of there quickly and join the others.’

I went back yet again to the front of the stands, and yet again Toby failed to appear.

I was not a demolitions expert. If I wanted to take a building down to its roots I usually did it brick by brick, salvaging everything useful. I’d have felt happier at that moment if I’d known more. The first priority, though, was obviously to look at what Neil had seen, and to do that I needed to enter and climb the central stairway, off which led the bar with the smelly floor; the members’ bar which should have been much busier than it was.

It was the same staircase, I’d noticed, that on one landing led off through double-doors to the Strattons’ carpeted and cosseted private rooms. According to the plans and also from what I myself remembered of it, that staircase was the central vertical artery feeding all floors of the grandstand; the central core of the whole major building.

At the top was a large windowed room like a control tower from where the Stewards with massive binoculars watched the races. A modern offshoot from there ran up yet again to an eyrie inhabited by race-callers, television equipment and the scribbling classes.

At other levels on its upward progress, the staircase branched off inwards to a members’ lunch room and outwards to ranks of standing-only steps open to the elements. A corridor on the first floor led to a row of private balcony boxes where prim little light white wooden chairs gave respite to rich and elderly feet.

I went into the staircase from the open front of the stands and sprinted up to the level of the smelly members’ bar. The door of the bar was locked, but along the white-painted landing wall outside, at about eighteen inches from the ground, ran a harmless looking thick white filament that looked like the sort of washing line used for drying laundry in back gardens.

At intervals along the wall the line ran into the wall itself and out again, and finally a hole had been drilled from the landing through into the bar, so that the white line ran into it, disappearing from view.

Neil had made no mistake. The white washing line look-alike was in fact itself an explosive known as ‘det cord’, short for detonating cord, along which detonation could travel at something like 18,000 metres a second, blowing apart everything it touched. At every spot where the cord went into the wall and out again there would be a compressed cache of plastic explosive. All explosives did more damage when compressed.

Det cord was not like old fuses spluttering slowly towards a bomb marked ‘BOMB,’ as in comics and ancient westerns. Det