There must be a safety of sorts, I thought, in the presence of all those delivery men.

On my feet, then.

I slithered backwards and dropped down into the narrow gap between the bulk of the Pol Roger and the smaller block of Krug beyond.

I was trembling. It wouldn't do. I stepped from the champagne shelter numb with fright and went down to the men with the gin.

One of them broke off his denunciation of a deliberate kick at a knee cap and said/Blimey, where did you come from?'

'Just checking,' I said vaguely. 'Have you finished?'

'Near enough.' They expertly off-loaded the last few cases. 'That's the lot. You want to sign our chit?'

One of them picked a yellow folded paper from his top overall pocket and held it out.

'Er...' I said, fishing for a pen. 'Yes.'

I opened the yellow paper, leaned it against a case of gin, signed it illegibly in the space provided and gave it back to them.

'Right. We'll be off.'

They left the fork-lift truck where it was in the middle of the wide central aisle, and set off for the door. Almost without thought I grasped the truck's handle and pushed it along in their wake, and it was in that way that I came face to face with Vernon.

There was sweat on his forehead. He looked harassed, small eyes anxious above a flourishing moustache, mouth open, breath hurried and heavy.

He gave me the smallest frown. He was accompanying an incoming load of white boxes. I let go of the truck I was pushing and walked past Vernon and the Pol Roger and was out nto the passage with no sign of Paul Young, no shouts, no scalding pursuit.

I followed the brown-overalled gin men round the turn into the main passage with only a short way to go to the free open air... and there he was, Paul Young, outside the green entrance, lit by daylight, standing as if waiting, solid, shortish, unremarkable, a man without pity.

I glanced back the way I'd come. Vernon had peeled off from the champagne and was advancing after me, appearing undecided, enquiring, on the verge of suspicious.

'You, there,' he said. 'I didn't see you come in.'

'Maintenance,' I said briskly. 'Just checking.'

Vernon's frown deepened. Paul Young remained at the outer door motionless and in plain sight, watching something outside.

I turned towards the only alternative, the long passage leading deep under the stands. Vernon glanced to where I'd been looking and saw Paul Young, and his mouth tightened. I gave him no more time to crystallise his suspicions of me but set off down the long passage as if every step of the way was familiar. When I looked back after about fifteen paces Vernon was still there, still staring after me. I gave him a wave. Beyond him Paul Young still filled the way out. I continued to walk onwards, trying to control a terrible urge to run. At all costs, I told myself, don't look back again. Vernon would begin to follow.

Don't look back.

Don't actually run.

I went faster and deeper to I didn't know where.

EIGHTEEN.

The passage ended in kitchens: vast cavernous halls with stainless steel growing everywhere in monstrous mixing bowls and sink-like trays.

Empty, cold, clean, greyly gleaming: a deserted science-fiction landscape which on Tuesday must have been alive with warmth and smells and food and bustle. There were a few lights on, inadequate for the area, but no sign that anyone was working. I glanced back against all my good intentions as I turned away from the passage and saw that Vernon had indeed followed; that he was almost half way along.

I waved again as I stepped out of his sight, a brief and I hoped reassuring signal.

Vernon was not apparently reassured. I heard his voice shouting loudly from the distance, 'Hey!'

He didn't know who I was, but he was alarmed that I could have overheard what I had. His unease sprang from guilt and his persistence in following me from a wholly accurate instinct. If he thought I was a danger to him, he was right.

Damn him, I thought. He was a better prospect than Paul Young, but not much. I might be able to talk myself free of him with something like saying I was checking electric wiring... or I might not. Better by far to vanish as inexplicably as I'd appeared.

The ovens were big enough to crawl into... but they had glass doors... and gas jets inside... Where else?

Another way out... There had to be a way out for food. They wouldn't push it along that passage out into possible rain. There would be a way into bars, into dining rooms. Exit doors, somewhere.

I sped round two corners. More stainless steel monsters. Sinks like bathtubs for dishwashing. Floor to ceiling stacks of trays. No doors out.

Nowhere to hide.

'Are you there?' Vernon's voice shouted. 'Hey you. Where are you?' He was much nearer. He sounded determined now, and more belligerent. 'Come out of there. Show yourself.'

I went desperately round the furthest possible corner into a small space which looked at first like a short blank corridor leading nowhere. I began to turn to go back the way I'd come, feverishly trying to remember electricians' terms to flourish around like interrupted resistance and circuit overload and other such nonsense when I saw that one wall of the blank corridor wasn't blank.

One wall contained a row of four small lifts, each about a yard high, a yard wide, a yard deep. Constructed without fronts, they were of the sort especially designed for transporting food upwards from downstairs cooks. Dumb waiters the Victorians had called them. Beside each lift, selector buttons: 1, 2, 3.

I scrambled into the nearest lift, pressed button 3, not by choice but because my unsteady ringers hit it first, and wondered what on earth I would say now if Vernon at that moment appeared.

He didn't. I heard him still round a corner or two, calling angrily, 'Hey, you. Answer me.': and the food lift rose smoothly, quietly, taking me far upwards like a sandwich.

When it stopped I spilled hurriedly out, finding myself in a serving area high up in the stands. There was daylight from large windows and a row of food trolleys parked end to end along a wall.

No one about. No sound from below... but Vernon might have heard the lift's electric hum and be on his way... he knew every cranny... he belonged there. Out of a muddled thought that if the lift returned to the kitchens before he saw it had gone he might not think I'd used it, I pressed the down button and saw it disappear as fast as I'd come up.

Then I scorched out of the serving area and at any other time might have laughed, because I was up on the level of Orkney Swayle's box. Up where the waitresses had ferried the food whose origins I hadn't imagined.

I ran at last: softly but with terrible fear still at my heels. Ran past the big passenger lifts that might go down from there to the ground floor, but would go slowly with flashing lights announcing their progress and which might deliver me to Vernon waiting in anticipation at the doors... Ran past them to Orkney's box, because I knew it. Prayed the door wouldn't be locked.

None of the boxes was locked.

Marvellous.

Orkney's was ten or more along the glassed-in gallery, and I reached it at an Olympic sprint. I went in there and stood in the corner that couldn't be seen from the passage because of the out-jutting serving section just inside the door, and I made my breathing shallow and almost silent, and couldn't stop the noisy thump of my heart.

Nothing happened for a long long time.

Nothing at all.

There was no more voice shouting, 'Hey...'

No Vernon appeared like Nemesis in the doorway.

I couldn't bring myself to believe he'd given up. I thought that if I took a step into the gallery he would pounce on me. That somewhere, round a turning, he would be lying in wait. As in a childhood game I strained deep into a hiding place cringing from the heartstopping moment of capture... but this time for real, with a penalty beyond facing.

I wasn't good at this sort of thing, I thought miserably. I felt sick. Why couldn't I have courage like my father?

I stood in my corner while time stretched agonisingly and silently out... and I'd almost got to the point of thinking it would perhaps be safe to move, when I saw him. He was down below in front of the stands out on the far edge of the tarmac where the bookmakers raised their tempting racket on racedays. He had his back to the racecourse rails. He was scanning the length of stands, searching for movement... searching for a sight of me.

Beside him, looking upward, was Paul Young.

If I could see them they could see me... but to them I must be in darkness... I could see them through glass, through the glass of the doors leading from the box to the steps on the balcony.

I stood frozen, afraid almost to blink. It was movement they would see, not a stock-still shadow in the angle of two walls.

Why ever, I thought hopelessly, had I dived into such a small dead end so close to the lifts, so easy to track down and find? Why hadn't I searched for a staircase and run downwards? Going upwards was fatal... one could run out of up. I'd always thought it stupid for fugitives in films to start climbing, and now I'd done it myself. Escape always lay downwards. I thought it and knew it, and couldn't bring myself to move even though if I ran fast enough and if I could find the way, I might escape down the stairs and be away through some exit before they came in from the tarmac...

Very slowly I turned my head to look along to where my car was parked by the paddock entrance. I could see it all right, elderly and serviceable, ready to go. I could see also a car parked next to it, where no car had stood when I arrived.

My eyes ached with looking at the newly arrived car with its noble unmistakable lines and its darkened glass and sable paint.

Black Rolls-Royce... 'a black Roller with them tinted windows'... next to my way out.

Reason told me that Paul Young didn't know the car next to his was mine. Reason said he didn't know it was I he was looking for, and that the urgency of his search must be relative. Reason had very little to do with lurching intestines.

The two men gave up their raking inspection and walked towards the stands, going out of my line of sight below the outer edge of the balcony. If I'd been rushing downstairs I could have run straight into them... If they started searching methodically, and I didn't move, they would find me. Yet I didn't move. I couldn't.

For a whole hour I saw nothing, heard nothing.

They were waiting for me, I thought.

Listening for my footfall on a stairway, for the whine of a lift, for a door stealthily opening. The tension in my body went screaming along like a roller-coaster, winding up as soon as it began to die down, kept going only by my own wretched thoughts.

Cat and mouse...

This mouse would stay a long time in his hole.

Orkney's box, I thought; where the tartlets had waited so long in their wrapping and Flora had flushed uncomplainingly for Jack's sake. The sideboard was emptier than ever. Orkney's bad temper rested sourly in the memory. Breezy Palm had run in panic and lost. Dear heavens...

When I'd been in Orkney's box for two hours, Paul Young returned to his Rolls and drove it out of the car park.

I should have been reassured that it no longer stood next to my Rover, but I wasn't. I feared that he'd driven out, round and back through a service entrance from the main road, where the delivery vans must come in and out. I feared that he was still down there below me, claws ready.

When I moved in the end it was out of a sort of shame. I couldn't stand there quivering forever. If the cat was waiting right outside Orkney's door... then all the same I'd have to risk it.

I looked most delicately out... and there was no one in sight. Breathing shallowly with a racing pulse I stepped slowly into the gallery and looked down from the windows there into the wide tarmaced area behind the stands along which I'd walked to find the green door.

The green door itself was round a corner out of sight, and from my angle I couldn't see any delivery vans... or any Rolls-Royce.

No one was out in the rear area looking up to the gallery, but I crabbed along it with my back against the walls of the boxes, sliding past their open doors nervously, ready at any moment to stop, to dive into any shelter, to freeze.

No sound. I reached the place where the gallery opened into a wider concourse, and in the last yard of window and with my last glance downwards I saw Vernon walk into sight.

He was still looking around him. Still looking upward. Still unsatisfied, still worried, still persistent.

I watched him breathlessly until he began to walk back towards the buildings, then I ran through the concourse because at least he couldn't see me at that point, and at the far end with trepidation approached the stairs to the next lower level; and I went down them in a blue funk and from there out to the huge viewing balcony where tiered rows of seats stretched away on each side, turning their blank tipped-up bottoms to the empty track.

I walked along behind the top row of seats in the direction of the winning post and saw no one, and at the end hopped over a railing into a similar enclosure labelled firmly 'Owners and Trainers Only'. Not an owner or trainer in sight. Nor Vernon, nor Paul Young.

From the 'Owners and Trainers' a small staircase led downwards into the main bulk of the stands, and down there I went, heart thudding, trying to make myself believe that the smaller the place I was in, the less likely it was that I would be spotted from a distance.

The Owners and Trainers' staircase led into the Owners and Trainers' bar. There were rattan armchairs, small glass-topped tables, sporting murals, not a bottle or glass in sight: and at the far end, a wide tier of steps allowed one to see through a wall of glass to the parade ring. Outside and to the left, before one reached the parade ring, lay the weighing room and the office of the Clerk of the Course. Beyond the parade ring lay the gate to the car park and to freedom.

I was there. Nearly there. A door at the bottom of the Owners and Trainers' enclosed viewing steps led straight out to the area in front of the weighing room, and if only that door like every one else in the building were unlocked, I'd be out.

I approached the steps thinking only of that, and along from behind the stands, barely twenty paces away from me, marched Vernon.

If he had walked up to the glass and looked through he would have seen me clearly. I could see even the brown and white checks of his shirt collar over his zipped jacket. I stood stock still in shuddering dismay and watched him walk along to the Clerk of the Course's office and knock on the door.

The man who had been writing there came outside. I watched them talking. Watched them both look across to the stands. The man from the office pointed to the way he'd told me to go to find the caterers. Vernon seemed to be asking urgent questions but the office man shook his head and after a while went back indoors; and with clearly evident frustration Vernon began to hurry back the way he'd come.

The door at the bottom of the Owners and Trainers' Bar steps proved to be bolted on the inside, top and bottom. I undid the bolts, fumbling. The door itself... the knob turned under my hand and the door opened inward towards me when I pulled, and I stepped out feeling that if Vernon or Paul Young jumped on me at that moment I would scream, literally scream with hysterics.

They weren't there. I shut the door behind me and started walking with unsteady knees, and the man from the office came out of his door and said, i say, do you know the caterer's store manager is looking for you?'

'Yes,' I said. It came out as a croak. I cleared my throat and said again, 'Yes. I just met him along there.' I pointed to the way Vernon had gone... and I feared he would come back.

'Did you? Righto.' He frowned at me, puzzled. 'He wanted to know your name. Most odd, what? I said I didn't know, but mentioned that it was hours since you'd asked the way to his door. I'd have thought he would have known.'

'Most odd,' I agreed. 'Anyway, he knows now. I told him. Er... Peter Cash. Insurance.'

'Ah.'

'Not a bad day,' I said, looking at the sky. 'After yesterday.'

'We needed the rain.'

'Yes. Well... good day.'

He nodded benignly over the civility and returned to his lair, and I went shakily onwards past the parade ring, down the path, through the still open entrance gate and out to the Rover; and no one yelled behind me, no one ran to pounce and clutch and drag me back at the last moment. No one came.

The keys went tremblingly into the locks. The engine started. There were no flat tyres. I pushed the old gear level through the ancient gears, reverse and forward, and drove away over the cindery grass and through the main gates and away from Martineau Park with Pan at my shoulder fading slowly into the shadows on the journey.

When I went into the shop it was still only twenty-one minutes to four, although I felt as if I had lived several lifetimes. I headed straight through to the washroom and was sick in the washbasin and spent a long time wretchedly on the loo and felt my skin still clammy with shivers.

I splashed water on my face and dried it, and when I eventually emerged it was to worried enquiries from Mrs Palissey and open-mouthed concern from Brian.

'Something I ate,' I said weakly, and took a brandy miniature from the shelves, and despatched it.