Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,91

selector buttons: 1, 2, 3.

I scrambled into the nearest lift, pressed button 3, not by choice but because my unsteady ringers hit it first, and wondered what on earth I would say now if Vernon at that moment appeared.

He didn’t. I heard him still round a corner or two, calling angrily, ‘Hey, you. Answer me.’: and the food lift rose smoothly, quietly, taking me far upwards like a sandwich.

When it stopped I spilled hurriedly out, finding myself in a serving area high up in the stands. There was daylight from large windows and a row of food trolleys parked end to end along a wall.

No one about. No sound from below… but Vernon might have heard the lift’s electric hum and be on his way… he knew every cranny… he belonged there. Out of a muddled thought that if the lift returned to the kitchens before he saw it had gone he might not think I’d used it, I pressed the down button and saw it disappear as fast as I’d come up.

Then I scorched out of the serving area and at any other time might have laughed, because I was up on the level of Orkney Swayle’s box. Up where the waitresses had ferried the food whose origins I hadn’t imagined.

I ran at last: softly but with terrible fear still at my heels. Ran past the big passenger lifts that might go down from there to the ground floor, but would go slowly with flashing lights announcing their progress and which might deliver me to Vernon waiting in anticipation at the doors… Ran past them to Orkney’s box, because I knew it. Prayed the door wouldn’t be locked.

None of the boxes was locked.

Marvellous.

Orkney’s was ten or more along the glassed-in gallery, and I reached it at an Olympic sprint. I went in there and stood in the corner that couldn’t be seen from the passage because of the out-jutting serving section just inside the door, and I made my breathing shallow and almost silent, and couldn’t stop the noisy thump of my heart.

Nothing happened for a long long time.

Nothing at all.

There was no more voice shouting, ‘Hey…’

No Vernon appeared like Nemesis in the doorway.

I couldn’t bring myself to believe he’d given up. I thought that if I took a step into the gallery he would pounce on me. That somewhere, round a turning, he would be lying in wait. As in a childhood game I strained deep into a hiding place cringing from the heartstopping moment of capture… but this time for real, with a penalty beyond facing.

I wasn’t good at this sort of thing, I thought miserably. I felt sick. Why couldn’t I have courage like my father?

I stood in my corner while time stretched agonisingly and silently out… and I’d almost got to the point of thinking it would perhaps be safe to move, when I saw him. He was down below in front of the stands out on the far edge of the tarmac where the bookmakers raised their tempting racket on racedays. He had his back to the racecourse rails. He was scanning the length of stands, searching for movement… searching for a sight of me.

Beside him, looking upward, was Paul Young.

If I could see them they could see me… but to them I must be in darkness… I could see them through glass, through the glass of the doors leading from the box to the steps on the balcony.

I stood frozen, afraid almost to blink. It was movement they would see, not a stock-still shadow in the angle of two walls.

Why ever, I thought hopelessly, had I dived into such a small dead end so close to the lifts, so easy to track down and find? Why hadn’t I searched for a staircase and run downwards? Going upwards was fatal… one could run out of up. I’d always thought it stupid for fugitives in films to start climbing, and now I’d done it myself. Escape always lay downwards. I thought it and knew it, and couldn’t bring myself to move even though if I ran fast enough and if I could find the way, I might escape down the stairs and be away through some exit before they came in from the tarmac…

Very slowly I turned my head to look along to where my car was parked by the paddock entrance. I could see it all right, elderly and serviceable, ready to go. I could see also a car parked next to it, where