Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,67

had written:

Lee and Amanda’s party last night. Most of our year came. A rave up. Bit different from last week’s wedding!! They still look ecstatic. Beer and pizza this time. Lee was paying. I went to bed at six and slept through old Hammond’s lecture this morning. I miss Lee in our lodgings. Didn’t realise what I’d got. Better start looking for a replacement, can’t afford this place on my own, bleak though it is.

Watching lights flash by in the dark countryside outside the train’s windows, I wondered what Amanda was doing at that moment. Was she quietly alone at home with Jamie? Or was she, as I couldn’t help speculating, embarking on an adventure of her own; had she met a new man at her sister’s party? Had she been to her sister’s party? Why did she want me and the boys to stay away for two more days?

I wondered how I would deal with it if she had finally, after all these years, fallen seriously in love with someone else.

For all the fragile state of our marriage, I desperately wanted it to continue. Perhaps because I myself hadn’t been engulfed by an irresistible new passion, I still saw only advantages in staying, even unsatisfactorily, together; and top of that list came stability for six young lives. My whole mind skittered away from the thought of breaking everything up, from division of property, loss of sons, uncertainty, unhappiness, loneliness, acrimony. That sort of pain would disintegrate me into uselessness as nothing physical could.

Let Amanda have a lover, I thought: let her light up with excitement, go off on trips, even bear a child not mine; but, dear God, let her stay.

I would find out, I thought, when we went home on Thursday. I would see, then. I would know. I didn’t want Thursday to come.

With an effort I turned back to dipping into Carteret’s diaries for the rest of the journey, but Wilson Yarrow might never have existed for all I found of him.

It was after ten o’clock when I directed the Swindon taxi to drive into the racecourse by the back road and stop at the bus.

The boys were all there, drowsily watching a video, Neil fast asleep. Christopher, relieved, went off, as he’d promised, to tell the Gardners I’d come safely back. I lay down gratefully myself with an intense feeling that this was home, this bus, these children. Never regret that unwise wedding day, this had grown out of it. Now, keeping it together was all that mattered.

Sleep enfolded us all, peacefully; but there was a fire in the night.

CHAPTER 11

The boys and I surveyed the smoking ruins of the fence at the open ditch. Black, scorched to stumps and ash, it stretched across the course, smelling healthily of garden bonfire, thirty feet long by three feet wide.

Roger was there, unworried, with three groundsmen who had apparently dowsed the flames earlier and were now waiting with spades and a truck for the embers to cool to dismantling point.

‘Harold Quest?’ I asked Roger.

He shrugged resignedly. ‘His sort of thing, I suppose, but he left no signature. I’d have expected a “BAN CRUELTY” poster, at the least.’

‘Will you doll off the fence?’ I asked.

‘Lord, no. Once we get this mess cleared away, we’ll rebuild it. No problem. It’s just a nuisance, not a calamity.’

‘No one saw who set it alight?’

‘’Fraid not. The night watchman spotted the flames from the stands at about dawn. He phoned me, woke me up, and of course I drove up here, but there was no one about. It would have been handy to catch someone with a can of petrol, but no dice. It was a pretty thorough job, as you see. Not a cigarette. The whole width of the fence burned at once. There isn’t much wind. It had to be petrol.’

‘Or firelighters,’ Christopher said.

Roger looked interested. ‘Yes. I didn’t think of that.’

‘Dad won’t let us light fires with petrol,’ my son explained. ‘He says we could easily light ourselves.’

‘Firelighters,’ Roger said thoughtfully.

All the boys nodded.

‘Lots of twigs,’ Neil said.

‘Birch,’ Edward corrected.

Toby said, shuddering, ‘I don’t like this place.’

Roger and I both abruptly remembered that it was here that Toby had seen the racegoer with his eyes kicked out. Roger said briskly, ‘Jump in the jeep, boys,’ and as they tumbled to obey him, added to me, ‘You walked up here from the bus!’

‘It’s not far,’ I pointed out, ‘and it’s getting easier all the time.’ I’d taken only one stick: felt