Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,49

lying twins,’ Dart said.

‘Maybe.’

I tried to imagine easy-going Dart, with his thickening frame and his thinning hair, his ironic cast of mind and his core of idleness, ever caring enough about anything to blow up a grandstand. Impossible. But to lend his car? To lend his car casually for an unspecified purpose, yes, certainly. To lend it knowing it would be used for a crime? I hoped not. Yet he would have let me open the locked cupboard in his father’s study. Had taken me there and given me every illegal chance. Hadn’t cared a jot when I’d backed off.

A sloppy sense of right and wrong, or a deep alienation that he habitually hid?

I liked Dart; he lifted one’s spirits. Among the Strattons, he was the nearest to normal. The nearest, one should perhaps say, to a rose among nettles.

I said neutrally, ‘Where’s your sister Rebecca today? I’d have thought she’d have been here, practically purring.’

‘She’s racing at Towcester,’ he said briefly. ‘I looked in the newspaper. No doubt she’s thrilled the stands have had it, but I haven’t spoken to her since Wednesday. She’s talked to Father, I think. She’s riding one of his horses here on Monday. It’s got a good chance of winning, so no way would she have put the meeting in jeopardy, with dynamite shenanigans, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Where does she live?’ I asked.

‘Lambourn. Ten miles away, roughly.’

‘Horse country.’

‘She lives and breathes horses. Quite mad.’

I lived and breathed building. I got fulfilment from putting brick on brick, stone on stone: from bringing a dead thing to life. I understood a single-minded encompassing drive. Not much in the world, for good or for evil, gets done without it.

The rest of the Strattons came round from the racecourse side of the grandstands, bringing Conrad’s architect with them. The police and the bomb expert seemed to be sifting carefully through the edges of the rubble. The moustached local authority was scratching his head.

Roger came over to Dart’s car and asked where we’d been.

‘Feeding the children,’ I said.

‘Oh! Well, the Honourable Marjorie wants to demolish you. Er…’ He went on more prudently in the presence of Dart, ‘Mrs Binsham wants to see you in my office.’

I clambered stiffly onto the tarmac and plodded that way. Roger came along beside me.

‘Don’t let her eat you,’ he said.

‘No. Don’t worry. Do you happen to know that architect’s name?’

‘What?’

‘Conrad’s architect.’

‘It’s Wilson Yarrow. Conrad calls him Yarrow.’

‘Thanks.’

I stopped walking abruptly.

Roger said, ‘What’s the matter? Is it worse?’

‘No.’ I looked at him vaguely, to his visible alarm. I asked, ‘Did you tell any of the Strattons that I’m an architect?’

He was perplexed. ‘Only Dart. You told him yourself, remember? Why? Why does it matter?’

‘Don’t tell them,’ I said. I did a one-eighty back towards Dart, who got out of his car and came to meet us.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

‘Nothing much. Look… did you happen to mention to any of your family that I’m a qualified architect?’

He thought back, frowning. Roger, reaching us, looked thoroughly mystified. ‘What does it matter?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Dart echoed, ‘what does it matter?’

‘I don’t want Conrad to know.’

Roger protested. ‘But Lee, why ever not?’

‘That man he’s brought here, Wilson Yarrow, he and I were trained at the same school. There’s something about him…’ I dried up, thinking hard.

‘What’s odd about him?’ Roger demanded.

‘That’s the trouble, I can’t quite remember. But I can easily find out. I’d just rather find out without his knowing about it.’

‘Do you mean,’ Dart asked, ‘that he blew up the stands to get the commission to build the new ones?’

‘God,’ Roger said. ‘You do jump to conclusions.’

‘Keith thinks so. He said so.’

‘I think they just know you’re a builder,’ Roger said to me thoughtfully, ‘and, to be honest, at the moment that’s just what you look like.’

I glanced down at my loose checked shirt and my baggy faded working jeans and acknowledged the convenient truth of it.

‘Won’t he know you,’ Roger asked, ‘if you trained at the same place?’

‘No. I was at least three years behind him and not very noticeable. He was one of the flashing stars. Different firmament to me. I don’t think we ever spoke. People like that are too wrapped up in their own affairs to learn the faces and names of junior intakes. And it wasn’t last week. It’s seventeen years now since I enrolled there.’

When two architects met, the most normal opening gambit between them was, ‘Where were you taught?’ And one took preconceived ideas from the answer.

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