Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

  “Only a bit,” he said.

  “And you were aware that it was illegal?”

  He nodded.

  Of course he knew it was illegal, he had a law degree from Oxford and he’d taken the Bar final.

  “How often?” I asked.

  “That was the only time. I swear it. I was talked into it. Bullied, even.”

  “Who by?” I asked.

  “Daniel,” he said, “and some of the others. They were all taking it. They said it gave them increased sexual performance. Just like Viagra, only more so. I didn’t want to be the odd one out. It was only a bit of fun.”

  His “bit of fun” would probably cost him his career. And quite possibly destroy his father’s as well.

  6

  I caught the train from Euston Station to Chester at nine-thirty on Friday morning after a busy week at my desk.

  I had managed to close two of my outstanding cases. One concerned a registered owner who had been suspected of contacting an excluded person and supplying insider information. The owner had submitted cell telephone records that indicated that no such contact existed. I had been asked to carry out some surveillance of the owner, during which I had discovered—simply by looking into the said owner’s Jaguar when it was parked at a racetrack—that he had a second pay-as-you-go cell that he had failed to declare to the authorities. The records for the second phone had arrived on my desk, proving that the suspected contact had indeed occurred. I had now written my report and passed the whole file to the relevant section so that a Disciplinary Panel inquiry could be convened.

  The second case was of a jockey whose routine urine test had proved to be positive for benzodiazepine—or benzo, as it is also known—a notifiable substance under the Rules of Racing. The jockey had claimed that he had taken one of his girlfriend’s sleeping pills to help him sleep after a bad fall and he had been unaware that it contained a banned substance. An inquiry, however, had dismissed this excuse due to a sizable amount of benzo in his system and had found him guilty. He had been suspended from riding for three months.

  I had subsequently been asked to conduct a covert investigation to ensure that the jockey in question did not have a prescription drug problem prior to him being relicensed to ride again.

  In the week before Cheltenham I had acted like his shadow, following him everywhere he went and watching everything he did. I was certain he hadn’t known I was there. I’d photographed everyone he’d met or talked to, and I’d even been through his rubbish to look for thrown-away prescription pill containers.

  More than ten years previously, when I’d been a trainee in the British Army Intelligence Corps, for our final test in surveillance, three of us, wearing civilian clothes, had been taken to Victoria Station during the morning rush hour. Our examiner had selected three individuals at random, each of them hurrying from their trains. He had instructed us to use the rest of the day to determine as much as we could about them without speaking to them directly and without their knowledge.

  I’d been allocated a smartly dressed woman. By midnight I had discovered not only her name but also her address, her job, her date of birth, her Social Security number, her tax code, her bank details, her bank card PIN, her husband’s name and those of her two children and her parents. I found out what she’d had for lunch and dinner, that she secretly smoked Marlboro Light cigarettes, was taking the pill, and even the balance in her checking account. I also knew that she’d met a man called Charlie for a drink after work at a wine bar in Grosvenor Gardens and that they had held hands under the table so that no one would see. Except, of course, I had.

  And all of that was simply from watching, listening, a little rummaging in her trash bin, plus a touch of subterfuge on the telephone.

  I had first followed her to work on the Tube and read her name from an airline frequent-flier tag attached to the handle of her briefcase. Once I had her name and the company she worked for, a call to their payroll department, supposedly from the tax authorities, had produced the tax code, the SSN, and her date of birth. The PIN came from careful observation of her obtaining cash from an ATM at lunchtime. Most of the rest came from observing her purchases at a city convenience store and from what I found at her home in the garbage, including an empty plastic pill strip, some of her husband’s old birthday cards, and a discarded bank statement.

  It never ceased to amaze me what information people put in their trash that should have been kept confidential.

  Of course, if I’d used any of the information for gain or reward, I would have been breaking the law, and maybe the telephone call had sailed rather close to the mark. But watching, listening, and even an inspection of what people throw away was not illegal, provided you didn’t remove anything. It was just good surveillance, and I had passed the test.

  My shadowing of the suspect jockey had produced not a shred of evidence to suggest that he had an ongoing drug problem, prescription or otherwise, and I had reported so to the BHA licensing department. He would soon be back riding and earning his living again.

  I sat on the speeding train gazing out at the northern suburbs of London as they passed by in a blur.

  My week had not only been busy on the work front. Family matters had also been prominent.

  Faye had come home from the hospital the previous day. Lydia and I had been to visit her on Tuesday evening and had been much encouraged by both her condition and the news. The surgeon had removed only her gallbladder, rather than anything further, and he had been confident that the cancer had not grown through the wall. It didn’t mean she was out of danger—far from it—but she had much brighter prospects than we had all originally feared. She would be starting chemotherapy just as soon as she had recovered from the operation, maybe even as soon as the following week.

  On the Kenneth Calderfield front, I had also made some pleasing headway.

  First, I had searched for anyone called Jubowski on Facebook.

  Fortunately, people called Jubowski were rare, with only a total of six of them having Facebook pages and only one of those was a Daniel, who appeared to live in London, which was promising. I went through Daniel’s page, looking at all his posted photographs and noting down the names of those who had made any comments about them. I read through his profile and made a list of those people he was following. His status was given as Single, but there was no clear indication that he was gay other than the fact that none of his photos showed anyone who was female.

  But was this the right Daniel Jubowski?

  The clincher was tucked away in his Likes.

  Way down at the bottom was the Fit Man gym in Greek Street, Soho, which, according to its website, had the biggest men’s sauna in London.

  Facebook gave me not only what Daniel looked like but also where he worked. He had posted that he was a market analyst at the City of London office of an international finance company called Hawthorn Pearce.

  Quentin had told me in Richmond that Daniel had disappeared, gone walkabout and moved out of his flat, but he was still at work. I’d called Hawthorn Pearce at half past twelve on Wednesday and asked to be put through to him. A colleague had answered and confirmed that Daniel Jubowski was in the office that day.

  “He’s nipped out to buy his lunch,” the colleague had explained.

  “Will he be long?” I’d asked.

  “I doubt it,” said the colleague. “He’s most likely in the deli round the corner. Do you want to leave a message?”

  “No thanks. I’ll try again later.”

  I had no particular wish to talk with Daniel directly. Not yet.

  Instead, I’d been waiting close to the front door of Hawthorn Pearce in King Street when he appeared at five-twenty, turning left and hurrying towards Bank tube station.

  He was in his late twenties or early thirties, slim, clean-shaven, with short brown hair, appearing just as he did in his Facebook pro
file photo. He was wearing a business suit, white shirt and striped tie, and he carried a black briefcase with his right hand, as he hurried down the steps from street level.

  It is always simpler to follow someone covertly when there are lots of people around and I was easily able to track him down the crowded escalators and onto a Northern Line tube train. We were in the same car only about three or four yards apart, but I was certain he had no idea that I was interested in him.

  Tube passengers in general live in their own little bubble, thinking their own thoughts, neither communicating with, nor even noticing, their fellow travelers. It made my life so much easier.

  I was able to watch his reflection in the train window, making sure that as I couldn’t actually see his face, he couldn’t see mine.

  He alighted at King’s Cross, and I was the third person behind him as we both rode the escalator to the mainline station. But he was not catching a train. He walked straight across the crowded concourse and out of the station, heading north on York Way.

  Here, following unobserved was much more difficult as there were not as many other people to hide among. I crossed over the road to walk parallel to him but on the far side. He didn’t once glance over towards me as he hurried along, but then he too crossed over and turned right into Wharfdale Road. I hung back a little before continuing.

  I tailed him to the far end of New Wharf Road, where he used a key to enter a smart new block of flats at number 17. I scanned through the names next to the bell buttons. There was no Daniel Jubowski listed, but half of the buttons had no names alongside them or perhaps he was sharing. Short of pushing each bell in turn, there was no way of telling which flat he had entered.

  He may have moved out of the flat that Kenneth had visited in Tiber Gardens, but he hadn’t gone far. Just across the Grand Union Canal, in fact. And he seemed to have moved up in the world. Flats hereabouts were hardly cheap, especially in a smart new apartment block overlooking the canal.

  Hawthorn Pearce must pay well.

  Offering him a few hundred quid to retract his statement might not be enough.

  —

  THE TRAIN ARRIVED into Chester Station on time at twenty-five minutes to twelve and the man from the rental car company was waiting for me at the station exit, holding a white board with Jefferson written across it in black letters.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  And it was.

  The name in my passport was Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley. I often thought my parents must have been going through an “American presidents” phase when I was born. But things could have been worse. I might have been called Madison McKinley. Or even Eisenhower Coolidge.

  As it was, I was known universally by my colleagues, my friends, and family as Jeff, but that didn’t stop me using my full first name when it was convenient, like when I didn’t particularly want the name Hinkley on public view.

  I completed the rental paperwork for a Toyota and then walked across to the Queen Hotel, resplendent with its statue of Queen Victoria balanced high on a portico above the front door.

  —

  WHEN I WALKED out of the hotel later, the young woman behind the reception desk didn’t recognize me as the guest she had checked in just an hour earlier.

  My short bright-blond hair was hidden beneath a somewhat-tousled mousy brown wig that covered my ears, and my previously clean-shaven chin now sported a matching beard and mustache. The black-rimmed spectacles I had been wearing earlier had been consigned to the suitcase in my room, and the blazer, gray pants and tie had been swapped for a black roll-neck sweater, dark-blue jeans and a brown leather bomber jacket.

  There was a time when I had avoided wearing jeans as they might prevent me following a target into a smart location, like some five-star London hotels, where a top-hatted doorman would try to bar the way. However, even these grand establishments were having to admit defeat in the sartorial stakes, with the likes of millionaire Hollywood film stars, multimillionaire computer software entrepreneurs and even some billionaire Russian oligarchs, all wearing jeans as their standard dress code, sometimes with a business suit jacket and tie.

  For me, hoping to pass the evening unobtrusively in the local Tilston pub with the grooms from Graham Perry’s yard, blue jeans and a bomber jacket were perfect.

  Next for a makeover was the rental car.

  I always booked the most basic model and asked for silver or gray as they were the least conspicuous or memorable colors. Invariably, however, the cars were always delivered sparkling clean all over, which, to my mind, marked them as being rented. Most people drove cars that were slightly dirty, and even those that had been through an automated car wash had grubby bits in the recesses of their wheels.

  I drove the brand-new Toyota Yaris out of Chester south on the A41. As soon as I was clear of the town, I turned down a farm track and spent some minutes splashing muddy water into the wheel wells and over the silver bodywork until the new-car look had gone forever. With apologies to the rental company, I also wiped my muddy feet all over the pristine carpets, scattered a few candy wrappers over the backseat and placed some crumbled-up old leaves into the driver and passenger footwells.

  It may have all been unnecessary, but those were the sorts of things I would have looked out for if I suspected someone of not being who they claimed to be. And if I would check, so might somebody else. It was all about not standing out and thus remaining unnoticed. For good measure, I wiped my muddy hands on the seat of my jeans.

  Satisfied, I drove on towards Tilston.

  —

  ACCORDING TO the Ordnance Survey map I’d studied on the train, Graham Perry’s yard was off the beaten track at the end of a half-mile lane. Driving down there would have surely courted attention, so I decided to make an initial inspection on foot, approaching from the hill behind via a public path through the woods.

  All was quiet as I stood close to the tree line and studied the layout of the place through high-powered binoculars. I hadn’t expected to see much movement, not at half past two on a Friday afternoon, but I wanted to be aware of the physical setup of the house and stables in case the information might be useful later.

  The stables themselves appeared to be two U-shaped blocks, both with traditional facing rows of separate stalls, with the horses’ heads poking out through the open top halves of the stall doors.

  There were two separate residential buildings, one a substantial box-shaped house with large Georgian-style windows on the far side of the stable yards, the other a smaller red-brick bungalow set to the right-hand side as I looked. There also was a two-story building between the two stable blocks, with what seemed to be garages below and six dormer-style windows above. I wondered if it might be accommodation for stable staff.

  Running around the left side was a railed all-weather training gallop, which started at the lane beyond the house, curved around the buildings and ran up the hill to near where I sat at the edge of the woods. The gallop was about half a mile in total length and would be where the horses were exercised in the mornings.

  I sat down on the damp grass and ate the cheese-and-pickle sandwich that Lydia had made for me the previous evening.

  I was used to doing nothing for long periods, simply watching and waiting, but I did wonder about the purpose of this current surveillance. I could hardly tell from here if Graham Perry was or was not doping his horses with amphetamines. If it were up to me, I’d have sent in the testing teams. But Crispin must have his motives for asking me to watch, so watch I did.

  After some time, a woman in a blue coat came out of the big house and began placing bedding plants into some window boxes.

  Mrs. Perry, I assumed.

  She moved from window to window, filling each box in turn with compost from a wheelbarrow before pricking out the seedlings from plastic trays. Finally, she used a dainty white watering can to give her new brood a
drenching, no doubt in the hope that nighttime frosts were finally over for the winter.

  I sat and daydreamed for a while, watching Mrs. Perry and wondering if she and Mr. Perry were happy in their marriage.

  Would marrying Lydia be the sensible thing to do? Was I simply hanging back in the vain hope that things might change for the better? Perhaps this was as good as it gets and I’d be a fool to let such happiness I had slip through my fingers.

  It was not as if Lydia and I argued at all. We didn’t. It just seemed to me that we had lost the passion and excitement from our relationship, and I grieved for it. Sex had become routine rather than spontaneous and less satisfying as a result.

  Maybe, I thought, I was having a midlife crisis. But, at thirty, surely I was too young for that.

  But what was the alternative? Force the relationship to a close, along with all its inherent problems, both emotional and financial, and then start the long process of finding a new mate?

  I’d always wanted children; I suppose almost everyone did. To re-create the next generation in one’s own image is a powerful human instinct, to perpetuate the species. But if I had to start all over again, might I be too old to be the active young father I always thought I’d be. Body clock ticking and all that. True for dads as well as moms.

  What, I wondered, would happen if and when the scientists found the magic potion to prevent aging so human beings could live for much longer, maybe even forever? What would happen to fertility? The world is very nearly full of people now, with hardly enough productive land available to feed us all here already. If we continued in the future to procreate at the present rate and nobody died, the human species would very quickly be in deep trouble.

  My thoughts of impending doom were interrupted by a small car that drove along the lane towards the house. I raised my binoculars and watched as Mrs. Perry waved at the driver. I couldn’t see if the wave was returned, but I watched as the car pulled into the courtyard between the house and the stables. Two men got out and then disappeared from view into the two-story building. Perhaps some of the stable staff returning to their digs above the garages.