Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,16

I was utterly drained. I thought about Robert and Louisa, my staff. Had they survived? What should I do to find out? Who should I ask?

‘Taxi for Mr Moreton,’ said a voice, bringing me back to the present.

‘That’s me,’ I replied.

I realized I had no money in my pockets.

‘That’s all right, the National Health Service is paying,’ said the driver. ‘But they don’t tip,’ he added. He’s going to be unlucky, I thought, if he thinks he’s going to get a tip from me.

He looked me up and down. I must have been quite a sight. I still wore my chef’s tunic but my black and white checked trousers now had one leg long and one short with a blue knee brace and white stocking below.

‘Are you some sort of clown?’ asked the driver.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m a chef.’

He lost interest.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘Newmarket.’

The taxi arrived at my cottage on the southern edge of Newmarket at about eleven o’clock. I had slept the whole way from Bedford hospital and the driver had real difficulty waking me up to get me out of the vehicle. Eventually I was roused sufficiently for him to help me hop across the small stretch of grass between the road and my front door.

‘Will you be OK?’ he asked as I put the key in the lock.

‘Fine,’ I said, and he drove away.

I hopped into the kitchen and took a couple of the painkillers with some water from the sink tap. The stairs were too much, I decided, so I lay down on the sofa in my tiny sitting room and went eagerly back to my slumbers.

I was lying on a hospital trolley that was moving slowly along a grey-coloured, windowless corridor. I could see the ceiling lights passing by. They were bright rectangular panels set into the grey ceiling. The corridor seemed to go on for ever and the lights were all the same, one after another, after another. I looked up and back to see that I was being pushed by a lady in a red chiffon blouse with a mass of curly hair bouncing on her shoulders. It was MaryLou Fordham and she was smiling at me. I looked down at her lovely legs, but she didn’t have any legs and seemed to be floating across the grey floor. I sat up with a jerk and looked at my own legs. The bedding was flat where my legs should have been and there was blood, lots of blood, bright red pools of blood. I screamed and rolled off the trolley. I was falling, falling, falling…

I woke up with a start, my heart pounding, my face cold, clammy, sweaty. So vivid had been the dream that I had to feel with my hands to be sure that my legs were actually there. I lay in the dark breathing hard until my pulse returned to something near normal.

It was the first nightmare of a repeating pattern.

Two disturbed nights in a row left me totally exhausted.

I spent most of Sunday morning lying down, first on the sofa and then on the floor, which was more comfortable. I watched the twenty-four-hour news channels to find out more about what was being dubbed as ‘Terror at the Guineas’. There had been dozens of television cameras covering the races but only one had, peripherally, captured the scene on the balcony of the Head-On Grandstand boxes 1 and 2 at the moment the bomb went off. The fleeting footage was played over and over again on every news bulletin. It showed a bright flash with bits of glass, steel and concrete being flung outwards, along with the bodies. Many of the Delafield Industries guests had been literally blown from the balcony, falling rag-doll-like on to the flat roof below and then on to the unsuspecting racegoers in the viewing areas below that. They, apparently, had been the lucky ones, injured but alive. It had been those inside the rooms, like MaryLou, who had suffered the worst.

I thought again about Robert and Louisa. I knew I should call someone to ask what had happened to them. I also knew that I didn’t want to make the call because I was afraid of the answer. I went on lying on the floor.

I discovered from the television that, while I had been sitting obediently on my white plastic chair, wrapped in my red blanket, there had been much activity at the racecourse. The police had moved in en masse and had taken the