Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,5

the child who had died with her, unborn.

A fair few of Jack’s guests were also my customers, so that even in that racing gathering I found myself talking as much about wine as horses, and it was while an earnest elderly lady was soliciting my views on Côtes du Rhône versus Côte de Nuits that I saw Jimmy finally talking to Larry Trent. He spotted me too and waved for me to come over, but the earnest lady would buy the better wine by the easeful if convinced, and I telegraphed ‘later’ gestures to Jimmy, to which he flipped a forgiving hand.

Waitresses wove through the throng carrying dishes of canapés and sausages on sticks, and I reckoned that many more than a hundred throats had turned up and that at the present rate of enthusiasm the forty-eight original bottles would be emptied at any minute. I had already begun to make my way to the tent’s service entrance near the house when Jack himself pounced at me, clutching my sleeve.

‘We’ll need more champagne and the waitresses say your van is locked.’ His voice was hurried. ‘The party’s going well, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes, very.’

‘Great. Good. I’ll leave it to you, then.’ He turned away, patting shoulders in greeting, enjoying his role as host.

I checked the tubs, now empty but for two standing bottles in a sea of melting ice, and went onwards out to the van, fishing in my pocket for the keys. For a moment I glanced up the hill to where all the cars waited, to the Range Rover, the horsebox, the Sheik’s Mercedes. No gaps in the line: no one had yet gone home. There was a child up there, playing with a dog.

I unlocked the rear door of my van and leaned in to pull forward the three spare cases which were roughly cooling under more black bags of ice. I threw one of the bags out onto the grass, and I picked up one of the cases.

Movement on the edge of my vision made me turn my head, and in a flash of a second that ordinary day became a nightmare.

The horsebox was rolling forwards down the hill.

Pointing straight at the marquee, gathering speed.

It was already only feet from the rose-hedge. It smashed its way through the fragile plants, flattening the last pink flowers of autumn. It advanced inexorably onto the grass.

I leapt to the doorway of the tent screaming a warning which nobody heard above the din and which was anyway far too late.

For a frozen infinitesimal moment I saw the party still intact, a packed throng of people smiling, drinking, living and unaware.

Then the horsebox ploughed into the canvas, and changed many things for ever.

THREE

Total communal disbelief lasted through about five seconds of silence, then someone screamed and went on screaming, a high commentary of hysteria on so much horror.

The horsebox had steam-rollered on over the canvas side-wall, burying people beneath; and it had plunged forward into one of the main supporting poles, which snapped under the weight. The whole of the end of the tent nearest me had collapsed inwards so that I stood on the edge of it with the ruin at my feet.

Where I had seen the guests, I now in absolute shock saw expanses of heavy grey canvas with countless bulges heaving desperately beneath.

The horsebox itself stood there obscenely in the middle, huge, dark green, unharmed, impersonal and frightful. There seemed to be no one behind the driving wheel; and to reach the cab one would have had to walk over the shrouded lumps of the living and the dead.

Beyond the horsebox, at the far end of the tent, in the still erect section, people were fighting their way out through the remains of the entrance and rips in the walls, emerging one by one, staggering and falling like figures in a frieze.

I noticed vaguely that I was still holding the case of champagne. I put it down where I stood, and turned and ran urgently to the telephone in the house.

So quiet in there. So utterly normal. My hands were shaking as I held the receiver.

Police and ambulances to Jack Hawthorn’s stables. A doctor. And lifting gear. Coming, they said. All coming. At once.

I went back outside, meeting others with stretched eyes intent on the same errand.

‘They’re coming,’ I said. ‘Coming.’

Everyone was trembling, not just myself.

The screaming had stopped, but many were shouting, husbands trying to find their wives, wives their husbands, a mother her son. All the faces