Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,14

there were even great splashes of it on the ceiling. The tables had been thrown up against the back wall by the explosion and I had to pick my way over broken chairs to get through the door and into the room that I had so recently vacated with ease.

When I was a child, my father had regularly complained that my bedroom looked like a bomb had gone off in it. Like every other little boy, I had tended to dump all my stuff on the floor and had happily lived around it.

However, my bedroom had never looked like the inside of the two glass-fronted boxes at Newmarket that day. Not that the boxes had remained glass-fronted. The glass in the windows and doors had now completely vanished, and along with it large chunks of the balconies and about a third of the end wall from the side of box 1.

I thought that if the blast could do such damage to concrete and steel, the occupants must have stood no chance.

Carnage was not too strong a word for the scene.

There had been thirty-three guests at lunch, two others having unexpectedly failed to appear, much to MaryLou’s frustration and displeasure. Then there were my two staff. So there must have been at least thirty-five people either in that room or on the balconies when the bomb exploded, not counting any that might have been invited in to watch the race after lunch.

Most of them seemed to have disappeared altogether.

A whimper to my left had me scampering under the upturned tables to find the source.

MaryLou Fordham lay on her back close to the rear wall. I could only see her from the waist up as she was half covered with a torn and rapidly reddening tablecloth. The blood that was soaking into the white starched cotton was an exact colour match with her bright scarlet chiffon blouse that had fared rather badly and now hung as a tattered mass around her neck.

I knelt down beside her on my right knee and touched her forehead. Her eyes swivelled round in my direction. Big, wide, frightened, brown eyes in a deathly pale face, a face cut and bleeding from numerous shards of flying glass.

‘Help will be on the way,’ I said to her, somewhat inadequately in the circumstances. ‘Just hang on.’

There was a lot of blood below her waist so I lifted the tablecloth a little to check what damage had been done. It was not easy to see. There was not much light under the blood-soaked cloth and there was a tangle of broken chairs and tables in the way. I shuffled down to get a better look and only then did my confused brain take in the true horror. Both of MaryLou’s lovely legs were gone. Blown away.

Oh my God, what do I do now?

I stupidly looked around me as if I could find her missing legs and snap them back into place. Only then did I see the other victims. Those who had lost not only their legs and feet, but arms and hands too, and their lives. I began to shake. I simply didn’t know what to do.

Suddenly the room filled with voices and bustling people in black and yellow coats and big yellow helmets. The fire brigade had arrived. None too soon, I thought. I started to cry. It was unlike me to cry. My father had been one of the old school who believed that men shouldn’t. ‘Stop blubbing,’ he would say to me when I was about ten. ‘Grow up, boy. Be a man. Men don’t cry.’ And so I had been taught. I hadn’t cried when my father had been killed by the brick lorry. I hadn’t even cried at his funeral. I knew that he wouldn’t have wanted me to.

But now the shock, the tiredness, the feeling of inadequacy and the relief that the cavalry had arrived were just too much, and so the tears streamed down my face.

‘Come on, sir,’ said one of the firemen into my ear as he held my shoulders, ‘let’s get you out of here. Are you in any pain?’

My tongue felt enormous in my mouth, stifling me. ‘No.’ I croaked. ‘Well, my knee hurts a bit. But I’m fine… But she…’ I pointed at MaryLou, unable to say anything further.

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ he said to me, ‘we’ll look after her.’

He helped me to my feet and turned my shoulders away. My gaze remained on where Mary Lou’s legs should