'Watching Chester races on television.'
'Stands to reason,' he said resignedly. 'Well, look, I've done the recce, and we can get in all right, but you'll have to be through the main doors before four o'clock. I've scrubbed the little bleeders. Look, this is what you do. You go in through the front door, right, as if you'd got pukka business. Now, in the hall there's two lifts. One that goes to a couple of businesses that are on the first and second floors, and as far as the third, which is all Jockey Club, as you know.'
'Yes,' I said.
'When all the little workers and Stewards and such have gone home, they leave that lift at the third floor, with its doors open, so no one can use it. There's a night porter, but after he's seen to the lift he doesn't do any rounds, he just stays downstairs. And oh yes, when he's fixed the lift he goes down your actual stairs, locking a door across the stairway at each landing, which makes three in all. Got it?'
'Yes.'
'Right. Now there's another lift which goes to the top four floors of the building, and up there there's eight flats, two on each floor, with people living in them. And between those floors and the Jockey Club below, there's only one door locked across the stairway.'
'I'm with you,' I said.
'Right. Now I reckon the porter in the hall, or whatever you call him, he might just know you by sight, so he'd think it odd if you came after the offices were closed. So you'd better get there before, and go up in the lift to the flats, go right up to the top, and I'll meet you there. It's O.K., there's a sort of seat by a window, read a book or something.'
'I'll see you,' I said.
I went in a taxi, armed with a plausible reason for my visit if I should meet anyone I knew in the halclass="underline" but in fact I saw no one, and stepped into the lift to the flats without any trouble. At the top, as Chico had said, there was a bench by a window, where I sat and thought unproductively for over an hour. No one came or went from either of the two flats. No one came up in the lift. The first time its doors opened, it brought Chico.
Chico was dressed in white overalls and carried a bag of tools. I gave him a sardonic head-to-foot inspection.
'Well, you got to look the part,' he said defensively. 'I came here like this earlier, and when I left I told the chap I'd be back with spare parts. He just nodded when I walked in just now. When we go, I'll keep him talking while you gumshoe out.'
'If it's the same chap.'
'He goes off at eight. We better be finished before then.'
'Was the Jockey Club lift still working?' I said.
'Yeah.'
'Is the stairway door above the Jockey Club locked?'
'Yeah.'
'Let's go down there, then, so we can hear when the porter brings the lift up and leaves it.'
He nodded. We went through the door beside the lift, into the stair well, which was utilitarian, not plushy, and lit by electric lights, and just inside there dumped the clinking bag of tools. Four floors down we came to the locked door, and stood there, waiting.
The door was flat, made of some filling covered on the side on which we stood by a sheet of silvery metal. The keyhole proclaimed a mortice lock set into the depth of the door, the sort of barrier which took Chico about three minutes, usually, to negotiate.
As usual on these excursions, we had brought gloves. I thought back to one of the first times, when Chico had said, 'One good thing about that hand of yours, it can't leave any dabs.' I wore a glove over it anyway, as being a lot less noticeable if we were ever casually seen where we shouldn't be.
I had never got entirely used to breaking in, not to the point of not feeling my heart beat faster or my breath go shallow. Chico, for all his longer experience at the same game, gave himself away always by smoothing out the laughter lines round his eyes as the skin tautened over his cheekbones. We stood there waiting, the physical signs of stress with us, knowing the risks.
We heard the lift come up and stop. Held our breaths to see if it would go down again, but it didn't. Instead, we were electrified by the noise of someone unlocking the door we were standing behind. I caught a flash of Chico's alarmed eyes as he leapt away from the lock and joined me on the hinge side, our backs pressed hard against the wall.
The door opened until it was touching my chest. The porter coughed and sniffed on the other side of the barrier, looking, I thought, up the stairs, checking that all was as it should be.
The door swung shut again, and the key clicked in the lock. I let a long-held breath out in a slow soundless whistle, and Chico gave me the sickly grin that came from semi-released tension.
We felt the faint thud through the fabric of the building as the door on the floor below us was shut and locked. Chico raised his eyebrows and I nodded, and he applied his bunch of lock-pickers to the problem. There was a faint scraping noise as he sorted his way into the mechanism, and then the application of some muscle, and finally his clearing look of satisfaction as the metal tongue retracted into the door.
We went through, taking the keys but leaving the door unlocked, and found ourselves in the familiar headquarters of British racing. Acres of carpet, comfortable chairs, polished wood furniture, and the scent of extinct cigars.
The Security Section had its own corridor of smaller workadays offices, and down there without difficulty we eased into Eddy Keith's.
None of the internal doors seemed to be locked, and I supposed there was in fact little to steal, bar electric typewriters and other such trifles. Eddy Keith's filing cabinets all slid open easily, and so did the drawers in his desk.
In the strong evening sunlight we sat and read the reports on the extra syndicates that Jacksy had told me of. Eleven horses whose names I had written down, when he'd gone, so as not to forget them. Eleven syndicates apparently checked and accepted by Eddy, with Rammileese's two registered-owner pals appearing inexorably on all of them: and as with the previous four, headed by Philip Friarly, there was nothing in the files themselves to prove anything one way or the other. They were carefully, meticulously presented, openly ready for inspection.
There was one odd thing: the four Friarly files were all missing.
We looked through the desk. Eddy kept in it few personal objects: a battery razor, indigestion tablets, a comb, and about sixteen packs of book matches, all from gambling clubs. Otherwise there was simple stationery, pens, a pocket calculator and a desk diary. His engagements, past and future, were merely down as the race meetings he was due to attend.
I looked at my watch. Seven forty-five. Chico nodded and began putting the files back neatly into their drawers. Frustrating, I thought. An absolute blank.
When we were ready to go I took a quick look into a filing cabinet marked 'Personnel' which contained slim factual files about everyone presently employed by the Jockey Club, and everyone receiving its pensions. I looked for a file marked 'Mason', but someone had taken that, too.
'Coming?' Chico said.
I nodded regretfully. We left Eddy's office as we'd found it and went back to the door to the stairway. Nothing stirred. The headquarters of British racing lay wide open to intruders, who were having to go empty away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On Friday afternoon, depressed on many counts, I drove comparatively slowly to Newmarket.
The day itself was hot, the weather reportedly stoking up to the sort of intense heatwave one could get in May, promising a glorious summer that seldom materialised. I drove in shirtsleeves with the window open, and decided to go to Hawaii and lie on the beach for a while, like a thousand years.
Martin England was out in his stable yard when I got there, also in shirtsleeves and wiping his forehead with a handkerchief.
'Sid!' he said, seeming truly pleased. 'Great. I'm just starting evening stables. You couldn't have timed it better.'