Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [99]
‘You’re in charge here?’
‘Yes, sir. Can we talk privately?’
‘I suppose so, if it’s important.’
Sir William rose, glanced regretfully at his half-eaten lunch, and led the policeman to the outdoor section of his private box high in the grandstand. The two men stood hunched in the chilly air, and spoke against the background noise of the swelling crowd and the shouts of the bookmakers offering odds on the approaching first race.
Crispin said, ‘It’s about the Birmingham bank robbery, sir.’
‘But that happened more than a year ago,’ Westerland protested.
‘Some of the stolen notes have turned up here, today, on the racecourse.’
Westerland frowned, not needing to be told details. The blasting open of the supposedly impregnable vault, the theft of more than three and a half million, the violent getaway of the thieves, all had been given wider coverage than the death of Nelson.
Four men and a small boy had been killed by the explosion outwards of the bank wall, and two housewives and two young policemen had been gunned down later. The thieves had arrived in a fire engine. Before the crashing echoes died, they had dived into the ruins to carry out the vault’s contents for ‘safe-keeping’ and driven clear away with the loot. They were suspected only at the very last moment by a puzzled constable, whose order to halt had been answered by a spray of machine-gun bullets. Only one of the gang had been recognised, caught, tried and sentenced to thirty years; and of that he had served precisely thirty days before making a spectacular escape. Recapturing him, and catching his confederates, was a number one police priority.
‘It’s the first lead we’ve had for months,’ Crispin said earnestly. ‘If we can catch whoever came here with the hot money…’
Westerland looked down at the scurrying thousands.
‘Pretty hopeless, I’d have thought,’ he said.
‘No, sir.’ Crispin shook his neat greying head. ‘A sharp-eyed checker in the Tote spotted one of the notes, and now they’ve found nine more. One of the sellers remembers selling a ticket for a hundred early on to a man who paid in notes which felt new, although they had been roughly creased and wrinkled.’
‘But even so –’
‘She remembers what he looks like, and says he backed only one horse to win, which is unusual on Grand National day.’
‘Which horse?’
‘Haunted House, sir. And so, sir, if Haunted House wins, our fellow will bring his ticket with its single big bet to the pay-out, and we will have him.’
‘But,’ Westerland objected, ‘what if Haunted House doesn’t win?’
Crispin gazed at him steadily. ‘We want you to arrange that Haunted House does win. We want you to fix the Grand National.’
Down in Tattersall’s enclosure, Austin Dartmouth Glenn passed two hot bank notes to a bookmaker who stuffed them busily into his satchel without looking and issued a ticket to win on Spotted Tulip at eight to one in the first. In the noise, haste and flurry of the last five minutes before the first race, Austin elbowed his way up the stands to find the best view of his money on the hoof, only to see it finish lame and last. Austin tore up his ticket in disgust and threw the pieces to the wind.
In the changing-room, Jerry Springwood reluctantly climbed into his thin white breeches and fumbled with the buttons on his shiny red-and-white striped colours. His mind was filling like a well with panic, the terrible desire to cut and run growing deeper and deadlier with every passing minute. He had difficulty in concentrating and virtually did not hear when anyone spoke to him. His hands trembled. He felt cold. There was another hour to live through before he would have to force himself out to the parade ring, onto the horse, down to the start and right round those demanding four and a half miles with their thirty huge fences.
I can’t do it, he thought numbly. I can’t face it. Where can I hide?
The four stewards in charge of the meeting sat gloomily round their large table, reacting with varying degrees of incredulity and uneasiness to the urgings of Chief Superintendent Crispin.