Decider - By Dick Francis Page 0,73

Henry said.

‘Do you still have the paper with the instructions?’ I asked.

‘The paper said to burn the instructions.’

‘And you did?’

He nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Silly,’ I said. ‘You’re not much of a villain. Who’s going to believe you, without those instructions?’

‘But,’ he spluttered, ‘I mean, but…’

‘How did you actually do it?’ I asked, ‘I mean, how did you position the firelighters?’

He said matter of factly, ‘I pushed them into the fence in bunches. Then I lit a roll of newspaper and went along lighting the bunches all at once.’ He almost smiled, ‘It was easy.’

He should have burned the wrappers as well, I thought, but then people were fools, especially actors who weren’t practised criminals.

‘I think,’ I said to Roger and Henry and Oliver, ‘that we might do a spot of Strattoning here.’

‘How do you mean, exactly?’

‘Could I borrow your typewriter?’

‘Of course,’ Roger said, pointing to the inner office. ‘In there.’

I went through to the machine, switched on the electricity and typed a short statement:

I, Harold Quest, actor, agreed that in return for money I would mount nuisance demonstrations at the main gates of Stratton Park racecourse, ostensibly but not actually in support of a movement to discredit the sport of steeplechasing. For this service I received payments on several occasions from a man driving a silver Jaguar XJ6, registration number as follows, To comply with instructions received from this driver I also bought one hundred ‘Sure Fire’ firelighters and, using them, burned to the ground the birch fence at the open ditch in the straight, at approximately six a.m. Monday, Easter Bank Holiday.

Roger, Oliver and Henry read it and presented it to Quest for signing. He was predictably reluctant. We told him to add the date and his address.

‘You might as well,’ I said, when he shrank from it, ‘as you’re in the phone book and we can find you any time, I should think, if your photo’s in Spotlight with the name of your agent.’

‘But this is an admission of guilt,’ he protested, not disputing our ability to track him down, as one could with any actor, through their professional publication.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘but if you sign it, you can buzz off now, at once, and use your return bus ticket, and with luck we won’t give your confession to the police.’

Quest searched our faces, not finding much to reassure or comfort him; but he did sign the paper. He did, in his own handwriting, fill in the car registration (verified by Roger), and also his address and the date.

The others scrutinised the pages.

‘Is that everything?’ Roger asked me.

‘I’d think so.’

Roger said to Henry, ‘Let him go,’ and Henry opened the office door to freedom and jerked his thumb in that direction, giving Quest a last order, ‘Out!’

Quest, an amalgam of relief and anxiety, didn’t wait for a change of heart on our part but took himself off at the double.

Henry looked at the abandoned bits of hamburger and said disgustedly, ‘We should have rubbed the little shit’s nose in that mustard.’

I said with mock seriousness, ‘Quest’s not all bad. Remember, he did call Rebecca “ducky”.’

Henry guffawed. ‘So he did.’

Roger picked up the signed confession. ‘What do we do with this, then? Do we, in fact, give it to the police?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we give it to Marjorie Binsham.’

CHAPTER 12

Notwithstanding our threats to Quest, the police presence behind the partitioning wall had by that morning fallen to two constables, both there more to prevent the public from entering and hurting themselves in the unstable building than to investigate further for evidence.

As far as Roger and Oliver had been able to discover the previous afternoon, after I’d left, the higher ranks and the bomb expert had completed their work with the discovery and reassembling of a blown-apart clock face, and had said their further enquiries would be conducted ‘elsewhere’, unspecified.

‘They don’t know who did it,’ Roger baldly interpreted.

In front of the boring and forbidding partition fence there now rose an inflated Sleeping Beauty’s Bouncing Castle, complete with fairytale towers and a child-minder in the shape of Henry’s one remaining maintenance man.

Ivan, in a flush of generosity, had returned with a second vanload of (free) plants, this time young bushy trees in pots, which he spread out on each side of the castle, making the fence in consequence a tamer, even decorative, part of the scenery.

By the time Roger drove us towards his house at eleventhirty, neither he nor I nor Henry could think of any improvements that could be managed