Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,84

urgency was over, and the striving, and the glories. The incredible weekend was folding its wings.

‘And for our next act…’ I declaimed like a ringmaster, waving an arm.

‘We go home to bed,’ Roger said.

He drove me and the boys good-naturedly down to the bus, but in fact he himself returned to the buildings and the tents to oversee the clearing up, the locking, and the security arrangements for the night.

The boys ate supper and squabbled over a video. I read Carteret’s diaries, yawning. We all phoned Amanda.

Carteret wrote:

Lee persuaded me to go to an evening lecture on the effects of bombing on buildings. (The I.R.A. work, more than air-strikes.) Boring, really. Lee said sorry for wasting my time. He’s got a thing about tumbledown buildings. I tell him it won’t get him bonus points here. He says there’s life after college…

‘Dad,’ Neil said, interrupting.

‘Yes?’

‘I asked Henry the riddle.’

‘What riddle?’

‘Do you know a rabbit from a raceway?’

I gazed in awe at my super-retentive small son. ‘What did he say?’

‘He said who wanted to know. I said you did, and he just laughed. He said if anyone knew the answer, you did.’

I said, smiling, ‘It’s like the Mad Hatter’s riddle in Alice in Wonderland: “What’s the difference between a raven and a writing desk?” There’s no answer at all.’

‘That’s a silly riddle.’

‘I agree. I always thought so.’

Neil, whose taste for Pinocchio had won the video fight (for perhaps the tenth time) returned his attention to the nose that grew longer with lying. Keith’s nose, I reckoned, would in chat line of fantasy make Cyrano de Bergerac a non-starter.

Carteret’s diary:

The ‘great’ Wilson Yarrow was there, asking questions to show off his own brilliance. Why the staff think he’s so marvellous is a mystery. He sucks up to them all the time. Lee will get himself chucked out for heresy if the staff hear his comments on Gropius. Better stop writing this and get on with my essay on political space.

Pages and pages followed in a mixture of social events and progress on our courses: no more about Yarrow. I fast-forwarded in time to the partially ripped note-book and read onwards from the exclamation marks about the Epsilon prize. There seemed, for all my searching, to be only one further comment, though it was damning enough in its way.

Carteret wrote:

More rumours about Wilson Yarrow. He’s being allowed to complete his diploma! They’re saying someone else’s design was entered in his name for the Epsilon prize by mistake!! Then old Hammond says a brilliant talent like that shouldn’t be extinguished for one little lapse! How’s that for giving the game away? Discussed it with Lee. He says choice comes from inside. If someone chooses to cheat once, they’ll do it again. What about consequences, I asked? He said Wilson Yarrow hadn’t considered consequences because he’d acted on a belief that he would get away with it. No one seems to know – or they’re not telling – how the ‘mistake’ was spotted. The Epsilon has been declared void for this year. Why didn’t they give it to whoever’s design it was that won it?

* Just heard a red hot rumour. The design was by Mies!!! Designed in 1925, but never built. Some mistake!!!

I read on until my eyes ached over his handwriting but nowhere had Carteret confirmed or squashed the red-hot rumour.

One long ago and disputed bit of cheating might be interesting, but even Marjorie wouldn’t consider Carteret’s old diaries a sufficient lever, all these years later, especially as no action had been taken at the time. To call Wilson Yarrow a cheat now would sail too close to slander.

I couldn’t see any way that a dead ancient scandal, even if it were true, could have been used by Yarrow to persuade or coerce Conrad into giving him, alone, the commission for new stands.

Sighing, I returned the diaries to their carrier bag, watched the last five minutes of Pinocchio and settled my brood for the night.

On Tuesday morning, with pressing errands of their own to see to, the Gardners took me and the boys with them to Swindon, dumping us outside the launderette and arranging a rendezvous later at a hairdressing salon called Smiths.

While almost our entire stock of clothes circled around washing and drying, we made forays to buy five pairs of trainers (difficult – and expensive – as, for the boys, the colours and shapes of the decorative flashing had to be right, though to my eyes the ‘Yuk, Dad’ shoes looked much