Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,90

find out.’

He grinned a shade uneasily. ‘What sort of pal are you, anyway?’

Roger said neutrally, ‘Keith swore to Lee only the day before yesterday that he would kill him. There’s no doubt he meant it. You can’t blame Lee for wanting to know if Keith blew up the stands.’

Dart gave me a long look. I smiled with my eyes.

‘I don’t think it was Keith,’ Dart said finally.

‘I search under my bus,’ I said to him. ‘I won’t let my children get into it before I’m as sure as I can be that it’s safe.’

‘Lee!’ It was a word full of shock. ‘No, he wouldn’t. Not even Keith. I swear to you…’ He stopped dead. He had, anyway, told me what I wanted to know. A fragment of truth, even if not whole knowledge.

‘From family feeling,’ I said, aiming at lightness, ‘would you consider helping me find a way of preventing Keith from carrying out his unpleasant threat? To save him and all of you, one might say, from the consequences?’

‘Well, of course.’

‘Great.’

‘But I don’t see what I can do.’

‘I’ll tell you a bit later. At the moment, where is your meeting?’

‘Holy hell, yes.’

He picked up the office telephone and got through, it was evident, to his parents’ home, where he talked to a cleaner who didn’t know where either Lord or Lady Stratton could be found.

‘Damn,’ Dart said, trying another number. ‘Ivan? Where’s this bloody meeting? In your house? Who’s there? Well, tell them I’m late.’ He put the receiver down and gave Roger and me the old carefree grin. ‘My parents are there, so are Rebecca and Hannah, Imogen and Jack, and they’re waiting for Aunt Marjorie. I could hear Keith shouting already. Tell you the truth, I’m not keen to go.’

‘Don’t then,’ I said.

‘It’s a three-line whip, Ivan says. The whole family. That means I have to.’

Carpe diem, they say. Seize the day. Seize the moment. I’d been handed an opportunity I had been wondering how to achieve.

‘How about,’ I said, ‘if you drive me to your parents’ house, tell the cleaner I’m a friend of the family, and leave me there while you go to the meeting?’

He said, puzzled, ‘What ever for?’

‘For luck,’ I said.

‘Lee…’

‘OK. For that look at the grandstand plans that I backed away from last time.’

Roger made the beginnings of a gesture to remind me I’d already seen the plans, and then, to my relief, subsided.

Dart said with furrowed brow, ‘I don’t honestly understand…’

As I didn’t want him to understand I said confusingly, ‘It’s for the sake of your family. Like I said, if you’re not keen for Keith to bump me off, just trust me.’

He trusted me more than anyone else in his family did, and his easy-going nature won the day.

‘If that’s what you want,’ he agreed, still not understanding – as how could he? ‘Do you mean now?’

‘Absolutely. Except, do you mind going down the back road, as I’d better tell my boys I’ll be off the racecourse for a while.’

‘You’re extraordinary,’ Dart said.

‘They feel safer if they know.’

Dart looked at Roger, who nodded resignedly. ‘Christopher, the eldest, told me that when they’re away from home, in that bus, they don’t mind their father leaving them, as long as they knows he’s gone, and roughly when he’ll be back. They look after themselves then without worrying. It does seem to work.’

Dart rolled his eyes comically at the vagaries of my domestic arrangements but accompanied me out to his car. Lying on the front seat, when I went round there, was a large glossy magazine entitled American Hair Club, with a young well-thatched model-type man smiling broadly on the cover.

Dart, removing it to the door pocket beside him, said defensively, it’s all about bonding hair on with polymers. It does seem to be a good idea.’

‘Follow it up,’ I suggested.

‘Don’t laugh at me.’

‘I’m not.’

He gave me a suspicious look, but drove me down amiably enough to report to my sons, who proved not to be in the bus, where I called to pick up a small tool or two, but to be elbow-deep in flour in Mrs Gardner’s kitchen, making her perfect pale fruit cake and eating most of it raw. She gave me a flashing smile and a kiss and said, ‘I’m having such fun here. Don’t hurry back.’

‘Where do you find a wife who’ll give you five sons?’ Dart asked moodily, driving away. ‘Who the hell wants a podgy going bald thirty-year-old with no talents?’

‘Who wants a good-natured easy-going nice