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 forever and living on and living on crumbs crumbs... you take anything 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 lucky. You have to know know people...' 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 phone directory and just tried my number on the off-chance...'

He stopped, searching our faces, begging for understanding but not getting much.

'Well,' he said weakly, 'I was being evicted from my flat for non-payment of rent and I'd nowhere to go and I lived rough on the streets once before and anything's better than that.'

Something in this recital, some tinge in the self-pity, reminded me sharply that this was an actor, a good one, and that the sob-stuff couldn't be trusted. Still, I thought, let him run on. There might be truth in him somewhere.

He realised himself that the piteousness wasn't achieving an over-sympathetic response and reacted with a more businesslike explanation.

'I asked what was wanted, and they said to come here and make a b.l.o.o.d.y intolerable nuisance of myself...'

'They?' Roger asked.

'He, then. He He said to try to get some real demonstrators together and persuade them to come here and rant and rave a bit, so I went to a fox hunt and got that loud-mouthed b.i.t.c.h Paula to bring some of her friends... and I tell you, I've spent nearly a week with them and they get on my wick something chronic...' said to try to get some real demonstrators together and persuade them to come here and rant and rave a bit, so I went to a fox hunt and got that loud-mouthed b.i.t.c.h Paula to bring some of her friends... and I tell you, I've spent nearly a week with them and they get on my wick something chronic...'

'But you've been paid?' I suggested. 'You've taken the money?'

'Well...' grudgingly, 'some up front. Some every day. Yes.'

'Every day?' I repeated, incredulously.

He nodded.

'And for burning the fence?'

He began to squirm again and to look mulishly sullen. 'He didn't say anything about burning the fence, not to begin with.'

'Who,' Roger asked without threat, 'is he he?

'He didn't tell me his name.'

'Do you mean,' Roger said in the same reasonable voice, 'that you mounted a threatening demonstration here for someone unknown?'

'For money money. Like I said.'

'And you just trusted you'd get paid?'

'Well, I was was.' His air of defiance was of no help to him; much the reverse. 'If I hadn't hadn't been paid, all I'd have laid out was the bus fare from London, but he promised me, and he kept his promise. And every day that I caused trouble, I got more.' been paid, all I'd have laid out was the bus fare from London, but he promised me, and he kept his promise. And every day that I caused trouble, I got more.'

'Describe him,' I said.

Quest shook his head, rear-guarding.

'Not good enough,' Roger said crisply. 'The racecourse will lay charges against you for wilful destruction of property, namely burning down the fence at the open ditch.'

'But you said said...' began Quest, impotently protesting.

'We promised nothing. If you withhold the ident.i.ty of your, er, procurer procurer, we fetch the police across here immediately.'

Quest, looking hunted, caved in.

'He told me,' he said, seeking to persuade us, 'to stop every car and be as much nuisance as I could, and one of the cars would be his his, and he would wind down the window and tell me my telephone number, and I would know it was him him, and I would put my hand into the car and he would put money into my hand, and I was not to ask questions or speak to him as G.o.d's my judge.'

'Your judge will be a d.a.m.n sight nearer than G.o.d,' Henry bellowed, 'if you're not telling us straight.'

'As G.o.d's my...' Quest began, and collapsed into speechlessness, unable to deal with so many accusers, with such complete disbelief.

'All right,' Roger told him prosaically, 'you may not have wanted to look at him in the face, to be able to identify him, but there's one thing you do now know, which you can tell us.'

Quest simply looked nervous.

'Which car?' Roger said. 'Describe it. Tell us its number.'

'Well... I...'

'After the first payment,' Roger said, 'you'd have been looking out for that car.'

I suppose that rabbits might look at snakes as Quest looked at Roger.

'Which car?' Henry yelled in Quest's ear.

'A Jaguar XJ6. Sort of silver.' He mumbled the number.

Roger, slightly aghast but not disbelieving, said to me succinctly, 'Keith's'.

He and I digested the news. Henry raised his eyebrows our way. Roger flapped a hand, nodding. Henry, perceiving that the really essential piece of information had surfaced, looked more benignly upon his demoralised captive.

'Well, now,' he said, at only medium fortissimo, 'when did you get hold of the firelighters?'

After a moment, meekly, Quest said, 'I bought them.'

'When?' Roger asked.

'Sat.u.r.day.'

'On his his instructions?' instructions?'

Quest said feebly, 'There was a piece of paper in with the money. He said to burn the open ditch fence, where a horse had been killed on the Sat.u.r.day. He said dowse it with petrol, to make sure.'

'But you didn't.'

'I'm not daft daft.'

'Not far off it,' Henry told him.

'Where do I get petrol?' Quest asked rhetorically. 'Buy a can from a garage, buy five gallons of petrol, then burn a fence down? I ask you! He took me for daft.'

'Eating a hamburger was daft,' 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 Spotlight with the name of your agent.' 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 rea.s.sure 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 s.h.i.t'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 part.i.tioning 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 rea.s.sembling 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 part.i.tion 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 in time for that afternoon, though many that could be achieved afterwards, before the next meeting.