Rat Race - By Dick Francis Page 0,2

clipped down, and the matching pale blue cowlings over the struts and wheels of the fixed undercarriage were as solid as rocks.

By the time I’d finished the other three passengers were coming across the grass. Goldenberg was doing the talking with steam still coming out of his ears, while the Major nodded agreement in unhappy little jerks and Annie Villars looked as if she wasn’t listening. When they arrived within earshot Goldenberg was saying ‘… can’t lay the horse unless we’re sure he’ll pull it…’ But he stopped with a snap when the Major gestured sharply in my direction. He need hardly have bothered. I had no curiosity about their affairs.

On the principle that in a light aircraft it is better to have the centre of gravity as far forward as possible, I asked Goldenberg to sit in front in the righthand seat beside me, and put the Major and Anne Villars in the centre two seats, and left Kenny in the last two, with the empty one ready for Colin Ross. The four rear seats were reached by the port side door, but Goldenberg had to climb in by stepping up on the low wing on the starboard side and lowering into his seat through the forward door. He waited while I got in before him and moved over to my side, then squeezed his bulk in through the door and settled heavily into his seat.

They were all old hands at air taxis: they had their safety belts fastened before I did mine, and when I looked round to check that they were ready to go, the Major was already deep in the Sporting Life. Kenny Bayst was cleaning his nails with fierce little jabs, relieving his frustration by hurting himself.

I got clearance from the Tower and lifted the little aeroplane away for the twenty mile hop across Berkshire. Taxi flying was a lot different from the airlines, and finding racecourses looked more difficult to me than being radar vectored into Heathrow. I’d never before flown a racecourse trip, and I’d asked my predecessor Larry about it that morning when he’d come into the office to collect his cards.

‘Newbury’s a cinch,’ he said offhandedly. ‘Just point its nose at that vast runway the Yanks built at Greenham Common. You can practically see it from Scotland. The racecourse is just north of it, and the landing strip is parallel with the white rails of the finishing straight. You can’t miss it. Good long strip. No problems. As for Haydock, it’s just where the M6 motorway crosses the East Lanes road. Piece of cake.’

He took himself off to Turkey, stopping on one foot at the doorway for some parting advice. ‘You’ll have to practise short landings before you go to Bath; and avoid Yarmouth in a heatwave. It’s all yours now, mate, and the best of British Luck.’

It was true that you could see Greenham Common from a long way off, but on a fine day it would anyway have been difficult to lose the way from White Waltham to Newbury: the main railway line to Exeter ran more or less straight from one to the other. My passengers had all flown into Newbury before, and the Major helpfully told me to look out for the electric cables strung across the approach. We landed respectably on the newly mown grass and taxied along the strip towards the grandstand end, braking to a stop just before the boundary fence.

Colin Ross wasn’t there.

I shut down the engine, and in the sudden silence Anne Villars remarked, ‘He’s bound to be late. He said he was riding work for Bob Smith, and Bob’s never on time getting his horses out.’

The other three nodded vaguely but they were still not on ordinarily chatty terms with each other, and after about five minutes of heavy silence I asked Goldenberg to let me out to stretch my legs. He grunted and mumbled at having to climb out onto the wing to let me past him and I gathered I was breaking Derrydown’s number one rule: never annoy the customers, you’re going to need them again.

Once I was out of their company, however, they did start talking. I walked round to the front of the aircraft and leant against the leading edge of the wing, and looked up at the scattered clouds in the blue-grey sky and thought unprofitably about this and that. Behind me their voices rose acrimoniously, and when they opened the door wide to get some