Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,69

smiling.

‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘what fun.’ He transferred his gaze first to my walking stick and then up to my face. ‘Would you mind,’ he said awkwardly, ‘if I reconsidered a bit?’

‘In what way?’

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think Keith’s wrong about you, don’t you know.’ He turned away, embarrassed, and instructed his driver to get out of the cab and open the rear doors of the van. ‘I talked it over with Dolly – that’s my wife – last night,’ he went on, ‘and we thought it didn’t make sense. If you were meaning to blackmail the family, why would you help us by getting this tent? And then, don’t you know, you don’t seem a bad fellow at all, and Hannah has had bees in her bonnet about her mother – your mother – all her life. So we decided I might just, don’t you know, apologise, if the occasion arose.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

His face lightened, his errand achieved. His men opened the van’s rear doors and disclosed a packed blaze of colour inside. A whole army of flourishing pots.

‘Superb!’ Roger said, genuinely delighted.

‘You see,’ Ivan explained, pleased, ‘when I saw the big top yesterday I understood why you’d asked me for plants, and this morning I went along to the centre myself and told my manager to load not just green stuff, but flowers. Lots of flowers. The least I could do, don’t you know.’

‘They’re wonderful,’ I assured him.

He beamed, a heavy-set man in his fifties, not clever, not charismatic, polished in a way, but at heart uncomplicated. He hadn’t been much of an enemy and wouldn’t be much of a friend, but any neutralised Stratton could, in my terms, be counted a blessing.

Under Ivan’s happy direction, my children enthusiastically carried and positioned all the flowers. I guessed they would be missing when it became time to collect them up again, except that Ivan in good humour gave them a pound each for their labours, making anything possible.

‘You don’t have to,’ Christopher told him earnestly, pocketing his coin, ‘but thanks very much.’

‘Forsyth,’ Ivan told me wistfully, ‘was a nice little boy.’

I watched Toby stagger by with a huge pot of hyacinths. I would give almost anything, I thought, to have my own problem son grow into a well-balanced man, but it had to come from within him. He would make his own choices, as Forsyth had, as everyone did.

The plants positioned, Ivan and his van drove away and Roger asked if I would like to see the burned fence rebuilt. I glanced down at Neil who happened to be holding my hand and Roger resignedly yelled ‘Boys!’ in his parade-ground voice and waited while they came running and piled into the jeep.

Toby refused to get out when he found where we’d got to, but I and the others watched the ultimate in prefabrication.

‘It used to take days to put a new fence together,’ Roger said. ‘That was when we positioned poles as framework and filled the frame with bundle after bundle of birch, finally cutting the rough top edges into shape. Now we build fences in sections away in a separate area, take them to wherever’s needed, and stake them into the ground. We can replace a whole fence or part of one at very short notice. Today’s fire was at dawn and we don’t race over this fence until two-thirty this afternoon. Piece of cake!’

His men, already having cleared the embers, were busy manhandling the first of the new sections into place.

‘All our fences are built like this, now,’ Roger said. ‘They’re good to jump but not as hard and unforgiving as the old sort.’

I asked, ‘Did your men find any… well, clues… in the ashes to say who started the fire?’

Roger shook his head. ‘We always have trouble with vandalism. It’s hopeless bothering to find out who did it. It’s nearly always teenagers, and the courts hardly give them a slap on the wrist. We simply write vandalism into the budget and find ways to minimise the nuisance.’

‘How many people would know you could replace a fence this fast?’ I asked.

‘Trainers might,’ he said judiciously. ‘Jockeys, perhaps. Not many others, unless they worked here.’

Roger went to speak to his foreman who looked at his watch, nodded, and got on with the job.

‘Right,’ Roger said, returning and shepherding us back to his jeep. ‘Now, boys, muster at the jeep up by my office at eleven-thirty, right? I’ll drive you and your father down to the bus then, and