Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,34

we’re here,’ I told Toby, and he shouted with his high voice, ‘We’re here. We’re up here.’

After a brief silence a man’s voice yelled, ‘Where?’

‘Tell them beside the Stewards’ box,’ I said.

Toby shouted the information and got another question in return.

‘Is your father with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he talking?’

‘Yes.’ Toby looked at me and spontaneously gave them more news. ‘He can’t move. Some roof fell in.’

‘Stay there.’

‘OK?’ I said to Toby. ‘I told you they would come.’

We listened to clanging and banging and businesslike shouting, all far away and outside. Toby was shivering, not with cold, as the midday sun still warmed us, but with accumulated shock.

‘They won’t be long,’ I said.

‘What are they doing?’

‘Putting up some sort of scaffolding, I should think.’

They came up from the racecourse side, where the reinforced concrete viewing steps on the steel girders had, it transpired, survived the onslaught pretty well unscathed. A fireman in a big hard hat and a bright yellow jacket suddenly appeared outside the broken windows of the Stewards’ box and peered inwards.

‘Anyone home?’ he cheerfully called.

‘Yes.’ Toby stood up joyfully and I told him abruptly to stay still.

‘But, Dad –’

‘Stay still.’

‘You stay there, young ‘un. We’ll have you out in no time,’ the fireman told him, and vanished as quickly as he’d come. Returning, he brought with him a colleague and a secure metal walkway for Toby to cross on to the window, and almost in no time, as he’d promised, he’d picked the boy out of the window and out of danger. As Toby disappeared from my view, I felt weak. I trembled from relief. A lot of strength seemed to drain away.

The colleague, a moment later, stepped through the window and crossed the walkway in reverse, stopping at the end of it, some several feet from where I lay.

‘Lee Morris?’ he asked. Dr Livingstone, I presume.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It won’t be long.’

They came in personal harnesses with jacks and cantilevers and slings and cutting equipment and a mini-crane, and they knew what they were doing, but the whole area where I was lying proved wickedly unstable, and at one point another big section of the Press box came crashing through the roof and, missing my feet by millimetres, bounced and plummeted down die five-storey hole where the stairs were meant to be. One could hear it colliding with wrecked walls all the way down until it reached the bottom with a reverberating disintegrating thud.

The firemen sweated and put jacks from floor to ceiling wherever they could.

There were three men working, moving circumspectly, taking no sudden unpremeditated steps. One of them, I slowly realised, seemed to be operating a video camera, of all things. The whirring came and went. I twisted my head round to check and found the busy lens pointing straight at my face, which I found deeply embarrassing but could do nothing about. A fourth man arrived, again in yellow, again with a rope to his waist, and he too brought a camera. Too much, I thought. He asked the first three for a progress report and I read his identification – ‘Police’ – in black on his yellow chest.

The building creaked.

The men all stopped moving, waiting. The sounds ceased and the firemen with extreme caution moved again, cursing, dedicated, brave, prosaically taking risks.

I lay gratefully inert on my stomach and thought I hadn’t had a bad life, if this should prove to be the end of it. The firemen had no intention of letting me come to the end of it. They brought up and slid a harness under my chest and fastened it round my arms and across my shoulders so that if I slid I wouldn’t go down the gaping hole and, bit by bit, they levered the extensive chunks of brick and plaster slightly off me and freed me from splintered beams until, by pulling on the harness, they could move me a couple of feet up the sloping floor towards the threshold of the Stewards’ box. The footing was more solid there, they said.

I wasn’t of much help to them. I’d lain squashed for so long that my muscles wouldn’t move properly on demand. Many of them developed pins and needles and then throbbed as if released from tourniquets, which I didn’t much mind. The cuts caused by spears of wood felt worse.

A man in a fluorescent green jacket came through the window, crossed the safe walkway and, pointing to the information lettered in black across his chest, told me he was a