Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,68
stiff and creaky but definitely stronger.
Roger said, ‘Good. Well, get in the jeep yourself. Henry’s a genius!’
He drove up to the by now familiar roadway and parked outside his office and positively beamed at the sight before us.
The fine weather, though cooling, had lasted. The sky was a washed pale blue with a few streaky clouds slowly thinning and vanishing. The morning sun shone unhampered on strings of bright flags, which fluttered gently from the ridge lines of the big top’s spreading roof right down to the ground in a blizzard of strings, arcading the whole huge tent like an arch of honour. Merrie Englande come again to gorgeous light-hearted life, uplifting the spirits, making one laugh.
I breathed, ‘Oh, my boy,’ and Roger said, ‘There are your flags. Henry said he brought every last one. When his men unfurled them all less than an hour ago, and that big white spread of canvas blossomed like that… well, you’d have to have been a sneering misogynist not to have been moved.’
‘Colonel, you’re a sentimentalist!’
‘Who’s talking!’
‘I’m a hard-headed businessman,’ I said, only half truthfully. ‘The flags make people ready to spend more. Don’t ask for the psychology, it just happens.’
He said contentedly, ‘That’s the perfect squelch for possible cynics. Mind if I use it?’
‘Be my guest.’
Henry’s vast trucks had gone. Henry’s own personal van, Roger said, was now parked out of sight at the far end of the big top. Henry was somewhere about.
Two Portakabins now stood, neatly aligned end to end, where Henry’s trucks had been. Into one of them jockeys’ valets were carrying saddles and hampers from their nearby vans, setting up the changing room for the male riders. Through the open door of the other could be seen an official weighing machine, borrowed from an obliging Midlands course.
A row of caterers’ vans were drawn up outside the small feeder tents on the side of the big top furthest from the track, with busy hands carrying tables and trestles and folding chairs through the specially made passages into what would soon be fully-fledged dining rooms and bars.
‘It’s all working,’ Roger said in wonderment, it’s bloody amazing.’
‘It’s great.’
‘And the stables, of course, are OK. Horses have been arriving as usual. The canteen for drivers and lads is open, serving hot food. The Press are here. The stable security staff say that for once everyone seems to be in a holiday mood. Like the Blitz, there’s nothing like a bloody disaster to make the English good humoured.’
We climbed out of the jeep and went into the big top itself. Each ‘room’ now had a high-rising Moorish-looking tented ceiling of pleated peach ‘silk’ above white solid-seeming walls, some of which were in fact taut whitened canvas laced onto poles. The floor throughout was of brown matting glued onto wooden sections slotted levelly together, firm and easy to the feet. Lights shone everywhere, discreetly. The fans up by the high roof silently circled, changing the air. Each room had an identifying board at its entrance. It all looked spacious, organised and calm. A rebirth; marvellous.
‘What have we forgotten?’ I said.
‘You’re such a comfort.’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘You remember, a week or so ago, that you learned about the precise distribution of shares among the Strattons, that they wouldn’t tell you before?’
He flicked a glance at me, mentally a fraction off balance.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘You noticed.’
‘Was it Forsyth who told you?’
‘What does it matter?’
‘Was it?’ I asked.
‘As a matter of fact, yes. Why did you think it was him?’
‘He resents the way the others treat him, which makes him untrustworthy from their point of view. He knows he thoroughly earned the way they treat him. They think they control him, but they could compress him too far.’
‘Like plastic explosive.’
‘Yeah. Too close to home.’
Roger nodded. ‘He told me in a moment of spite against them, and then said he was only guessing. He’s not very bright.’
‘Very unhappy, though.’
‘I don’t like him, don’t trust him and, no, I really don’t know what he did. When the Strattons hide something, they do a good job.’
We walked out of the big top and found a van and a car parked near the entrance. The van, green with white lettering, announced ‘Stratton Garden Centre’. The car, door opening, disgorged Ivan.
He stood with his hands on his hips, head back, staring up in utter amazement at the sunlit splendour of flags. I waited for his disapproval, forgetting the little boy in him.
He looked at Roger, his eyes shiny with