the others, if you think up the questions.’
CHAPTER 13
Keith’s rage, when he discovered that the runners in the second race would be jumping the open ditch as scheduled, verged on the spectacular.
Henry and I happened to be walking along behind the caterers’ tents when the eruption occurred (Henry having had to deal with a leak in the new water main) and we hurried down a caterer’s passage towards the source of vocal bellowing and crockery-smashing noises; into the Strattons’ private dining room.
The whole family had clearly returned, after their victory, to finish their lunch and toast the winner, and typically, but perhaps luckily, had invited no outsiders to join them.
Keith, legs astride, shoulders back, mane of hair flying, had flung the entire dining table over and swept an arm along the line of bottles and glasses on the serving sideboard. Tablecloths, knives, plates, cheese, champagne, coffee, whipped-cream puddings, lay in a mess on the floor. Wine poured out of opened bottles. The waitresses pressed their hands to their mouths and various Strattons grabbed napkins and tried to clean debris from laps, trousers and legs.
‘Keith!’ screeched Conrad, equally furious, quivering on his feet, thunderous as a bull before charging. ‘You lout’
Victoria’s cream silk suit ran with coffee and Bordeaux. ‘I’m presenting the Cup,’ she yelled, wailing, ‘and look at me.’
Marjorie sat calm, unspattered, icily furious. Ivan, beside her, said, ‘I say, Keith, I say…’
Hannah, trifle dripping down her legs, used unfilial language to her father and also to her son, who turned ineffectively to help her. The thin woman who sat beyond Ivan, unconcernedly continuing a relationship with a large snifter of brandy, I provisionally guessed to be Imogen. Dart wasn’t there. Forsyth, sullenly seeming to be relieved that someone other then he was the focus of family obloquy, made his way to the doorway into the main passage, where we’d arranged a flap of canvas that could be fastened across to give privacy.
People were pulling the flap aside, trying to see in, to find out the cause of the commotion. Forsyth shouldered his way out, telling people rudely to mind their own business which, of course, they didn’t.
The whole scene was laughable but, not far below the farcical surface, as each family member uneasily knew, lay the real cause of destructive violence, the melt-down in Keith that had so far gained most expression in hitting his wives and taking a belt at Lee Morris, but would one day go too far for containment.
Marjorie was holding in plain sight the copy of Harold Quest’s confession; the cause of the débâcle.
Keith suddenly seized it out of her hand, snatched the brandy glass rudely from his wife, poured the alcohol over the letter, threw down the glass and with economic speed produced a lighter from his pocket and put a flame to the paper. Harold Quest’s confession flared brightly and curled to ash and was dropped and stamped on, Keith triumphant.
‘It was only a copy,’ Marjorie said primly, intentionally goading.
‘I’ll kill you,’ Keith said to her, his lower jaw rigid. His gaze rose over her and fastened on me. The animosity intensified, found a more possible, a more preferred target, ‘I will kill you,’ he said.
In the small following silence I turned and went out the back way with Henry, leaving the poor waitresses to clear up the garbage.
‘That was only half funny,’ Henry said thoughtfully.
‘Yes.’
‘You want to be careful. He might just kill you next time. And why? You didn’t bring Harold Quest here. You didn’t suss out the hamburger.’
‘No,’ I sighed. ‘My pal Dart Stratton says logic never interferes with instinct, in Keith. But then, half the world’s like that.’
‘Including murderers,’ Henry said.
‘How inflammable,’ I asked, ‘is the big top?’
Henry stopped walking. ‘You don’t think he’d try –? He’s pretty handy with that lighter. And burning the fence…’ Henry looked angry but after a moment shook his head.
‘This big top won’t go on fire,’ he said positively. ‘Everything I brought here is flame-retardant, flame-resistant or can’t burn, like all the metal poles and the pylons. There were disasters in circuses in the past. The regs now are stringent. This big top won’t burn by accident. Arson… well, I don’t know. But we’ve got extinguishers all over the place, as you know, and I ran a bit of water main up to the roof in a sort of elementary sprinkler system.’ He took me along to see. ‘That bit of rising main,’ he pointed, ‘the pressure’s pretty good in it. I fed