Proof - By Dick Francis Page 0,92
no car had stood when I arrived.
My eyes ached with looking at the newly arrived car with its noble unmistakable lines and its darkened glass and sable paint.
Black Rolls-Royce… ‘a black Roller with them tinted windows’… next to my way out.
Reason told me that Paul Young didn’t know the car next to his was mine. Reason said he didn’t know it was I he was looking for, and that the urgency of his search must be relative. Reason had very little to do with lurching intestines.
The two men gave up their raking inspection and walked towards the stands, going out of my line of sight below the outer edge of the balcony. If I’d been rushing downstairs I could have run straight into them… If they started searching methodically, and I didn’t move, they would find me. Yet I didn’t move. I couldn’t.
For a whole hour I saw nothing, heard nothing.
They were waiting for me, I thought.
Listening for my footfall on a stairway, for the whine of a lift, for a door stealthily opening. The tension in my body went screaming along like a roller-coaster, winding up as soon as it began to die down, kept going only by my own wretched thoughts.
Cat and mouse…
This mouse would stay a long time in his hole.
Orkney’s box, I thought; where the tartlets had waited so long in their wrapping and Flora had flushed uncomplainingly for Jack’s sake. The sideboard was emptier than ever. Orkney’s bad temper rested sourly in the memory. Breezy Palm had run in panic and lost. Dear heavens…
When I’d been in Orkney’s box for two hours, Paul Young returned to his Rolls and drove it out of the car park.
I should have been reassured that it no longer stood next to my Rover, but I wasn’t. I feared that he’d driven out, round and back through a service entrance from the main road, where the delivery vans must come in and out. I feared that he was still down there below me, claws ready.
When I moved in the end it was out of a sort of shame. I couldn’t stand there quivering forever. If the cat was waiting right outside Orkney’s door… then all the same I’d have to risk it.
I looked most delicately out… and there was no one in sight. Breathing shallowly with a racing pulse I stepped slowly into the gallery and looked down from the windows there into the wide tarmaced area behind the stands along which I’d walked to find the green door.
The green door itself was round a corner out of sight, and from my angle I couldn’t see any delivery vans… or any Rolls-Royce.
No one was out in the rear area looking up to the gallery, but I crabbed along it with my back against the walls of the boxes, sliding past their open doors nervously, ready at any moment to stop, to dive into any shelter, to freeze.
No sound. I reached the place where the gallery opened into a wider concourse, and in the last yard of window and with my last glance downwards I saw Vernon walk into sight.
He was still looking around him. Still looking upward. Still unsatisfied, still worried, still persistent.
I watched him breathlessly until he began to walk back towards the buildings, then I ran through the concourse because at least he couldn’t see me at that point, and at the far end with trepidation approached the stairs to the next lower level; and I went down them in a blue funk and from there out to the huge viewing balcony where tiered rows of seats stretched away on each side, turning their blank tipped-up bottoms to the empty track.
I walked along behind the top row of seats in the direction of the winning post and saw no one, and at the end hopped over a railing into a similar enclosure labelled firmly ‘Owners and Trainers Only’. Not an owner or trainer in sight. Nor Vernon, nor Paul Young.
From the ‘Owners and Trainers’ a small staircase led downwards into the main bulk of the stands, and down there I went, heart thudding, trying to make myself believe that the smaller the place I was in, the less likely it was that I would be spotted from a distance.
The Owners and Trainers’ staircase led into the Owners and Trainers’ bar. There were rattan armchairs, small glass-topped tables, sporting murals, not a bottle or glass in sight: and at the far end, a wide tier of steps allowed one