Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,71

Quest suddenly wrenched himself free and made a dash for the door. Henry plucked him back casually by the collar and swung his arm before leaving go. With anyone else’s strength it wouldn’t have much mattered, but under Henry’s easy force Quest staggered across the room and crashed backwards against the wall. A certain amount of self-pity formed moisture round his eyes.

‘Take the jacket off,’ Henry commanded, and Quest, fumbling, obeyed.

Roger took the jacket, searched the pockets and laid the booty out on the desk beside the blotter where Henry had parked the half-eaten hamburger. Apart from a meagre wallet with a return bus ticket to London, there were a cigarette lighter, a box of matches and three further dark brown transparent wrappers with scarlet and yellow overprinting.

Roger smoothed out one of these flat on the desk and read the writing aloud.

‘ “Sure Fire”,’ he announced. ‘ “Clean. Non-toxic. Long-burning. Infallible. A fire every time. Twenty sticks.”’ He did brief sums. ‘Five empty wrappers; that means one hundred firelighters. Now what would anyone want with one hundred firelighters on a racecourse?’

Harold Quest glowered.

Henry stood over him, a threat simply by size.

‘As you’re unreal,’ he boomed, ‘what were you up to?’

‘Nothing,’ Quest weakly said, mopping his face with his hand.

Henry’s loud voice beleaguered him, ‘People who burn fences can blow up grandstands. We’re turning you over to the force.’

‘I never blew up the grandstand,’ said Quest, freshly agitated.

‘Oh really? You were here, Friday morning. You admitted it.’

‘I never… I wasn’t here then.’

‘You definitely were,’ I said. ‘You told the police you saw Dart Stratton’s car drive in through the gates between eight and eight-thirty in the morning.’

Harold Quest looked baffled.

‘And it was pointless,’ Roger added, ‘to be picketing the gates of a racecourse at that hour on a day none of the public would come.’

‘A day the TV cameras came, though,’ I said, ‘after the explosion.’

‘We saw you,’ Christopher said vehemently. ‘They said on the telly you’d done it. You nearly got my brother killed and you hurt my dad badly.’

‘I didn’t!’

‘Who did, then?’ Henry roared. ‘You did it! You’ve been a bloody nuisance, you’re not a real protestor, you’ve destroyed racecourse property and you’re heading for jail. Colonel, fetch the police, they’re here already poking around behind that fence. Tell them we’ve caught their terrorist.’

‘No!’ Quest squealed.

‘Then give,’ Henry commanded. ‘We’re listening.’

‘All right then. All right. I did burn the fence.’ Quest was not confessing, but pleading. ‘But I never touched the grandstand. I didn’t, as God’s my witness.’

‘As to God, that’s one thing. You’ve got to convince us.’

‘Why did you burn the fence?’ Roger demanded.

‘Why?’ Quest looked around desperately as if the answer might be written on the walls.

‘Why?’ Henry bellowed. ‘Why? Why? Why? And don’t give us any shit about animal rights. We know that’s all crap as far as you’re concerned.’ He waved a hand at the hamburger relics. ‘So why did you do it? You’re in dead trouble unless you come up with the goods.’

Quest saw hope. ‘If I tell you, then, will that be the end of it?’

‘It depends,’ Henry said. ‘Tell us first.’

Quest looked up at the big man and at all of us staring at him with sharp hostile eyes and at the wrappers and the hamburger on the desk and, from one second to the next, lost his nerve.

He sweated. ‘I got paid for it,’ he said.

We met this announcement with silence.

Quest cast an intimidated look round the accusing faces and sweated some more.

‘I’m an actor,’ he pleaded.

More silence.

Quest’s desperation level rose with the pitch of his voice. You don’t know what it’s like, waiting and waiting for jobs and sitting by the telephone forever and living on crumbs… you take anything, anything…’

Silence.

He went on miserably. ‘I’m a good actor…’

I thought that none of us, probably, would refute that.

‘… but you have to be lucky. You have to know people…’

He pulled off his askew woolly hat and began to look more credibly like Harold Quest, out-of-work actor, and less like Harold Quest, psyched-up fanatic.

He said, ‘I got this phone call from someone who’d seen me play a hunt saboteur in a TV film… only a bit part, no dialogue, just screaming abuse, but my name was there in the credits, hunt saboteur leader, Harold Quest.’

Extraordinarily, he was proud of it: his name in the credits.

‘So this phone caller said would I demonstrate for real, for money? And I wouldn’t have to pay any agents’ fees as he’d looked me up in the