Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

“I think it must be me,” I said to Faye as we went through into the kitchen, “rather than Lydia.”

  “It takes two to make a marriage.”

  Indeed it did. And if the worst were to happen, how would Quentin ever fare without Faye? She was the only person I knew who could tame him.

  “How’s Quentin?” I asked.

  “Oh, the usual.”

  “Did he go with you to the Royal Marsden yesterday?”

  “You must be joking,” she said with a laugh. “Quentin hates hospitals more than I do. Daisy, our neighbor’s daughter, she drove me. She’s in a gap year and could do with the pocket money.”

  “How was it?”

  “Pretty awful. I can feel the damn stuff going into my arm like red-hot burning wires running through my veins.” She shivered.

  “Don’t you want to rant and rave at the situation? I certainly do.”

  “Not really. What good would it do? I’d be the first to scream and shout if it would make me well again.” She smiled. “I rather think it’s better just to take the medication and save my energy. Not that I have much of that anymore, thanks to the wretched drugs. They’d better be bloody working, that’s all I can say. They make me feel so sick all the time, especially at night. And it’s not particularly conducive to restful sleep, I can tell you.”

  I gave her a hug. “If you ever need me, or Lydia, to go with you to the hospital, please just ask. We’ll come at once.”

  “Thank you, my darling, but I’ll be fine with Daisy. Tough times require tough medicine, literally, so I’ve not got much choice, have I? Other than to lay down and die, of course, and I have no intention of doing that. Not for a while anyway.”

  “That’s my girl,” I said and gave her another hug.

  “So, how’s the sleuthing going?” she asked. “Arrested any villains since Friday?”

  “I’m not a policeman, you know.”

  “Same as,” she said. “You’re a horseracing policeman.”

  I suppose she was right, but I’d never thought of myself as such.

  Maybe D.S. Galley and I had more in common than we both realized.

  —

  THE REPLY from Leonardo came in the early mail to the BHA offices on Thursday morning addressed to Roger Vincent. Crispin Larson called me at a quarter to eight, when I was still in bed.

  Leonardo thanks Van Gogh for his interest but your sum is way too low. Three million minimum. Perhaps you need persuading. Watch out for the fireworks.

  “What do you think it means?” Crispin asked.

  “At least he’s moved away from five million, which is a big step forward. It shows he’s prepared to negotiate. But I don’t like the sound of his fireworks nor the fact he thinks we still need persuading. It means he’s not going to stop the disruption just because we are offering to pay.”

  “Oh God!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The National. It’s this coming Saturday.”

  Oh God indeed! Grand National Day—the one day in the year when horseracing displaces all other sport from the back pages of every newspaper. In Australia they advertise the Melbourne Cup as “The Race That Stops the Nation.” In England the equivalent was the Grand National, when every man, woman and their dog placed a bet and every office in the land ran a sweepstakes.

  But the history of the Grand National showed that it was not immune to disruption.

  In 1993 the race was voided after most of the field failed to stop after a second false start. Prior to the race, there had been a demonstration on the track by animal rights activists, who had delayed proceedings by some ten minutes. That had caused the horses to become stressed and agitated, which had largely contributed to the two false starts in the first place. When the second one unfolded, all but nine of the runners failed to respond to the instruction to stop and they went on to jump the first fence. Seven of them completed the whole four-and-a-half-mile race, jumping all thirty fences, while others, realizing something was amiss, pulled up at various points around the track.

  One of the key reasons the nine horses didn’t stop when people tried to flag them down was that the jockeys thought the officials were simply more protesters trying to disrupt the race.

  And in 1997 the race had to be restaged two days late after an Irish terrorist–coded phone call to police stated that a bomb had been planted in the grandstands.

  In the run-up to the day, there had been severe disruption due to explosive devices being left under several freeway bridges, so the police had no alternative but to order the evacuation of the racetrack just as the jockeys were preparing to mount the horses for the Grand National.

  Sixty thousand people had to leave the enclosures and go to the center of the track or the surrounding streets. The jockeys were still in their silks, and people in the restaurants and hospitality boxes were directed to leave immediately without even having time to collect their coats from the cloakrooms. Cars in the parking lots were impounded overnight as the police and army conducted a thorough search, while the cold and frustrated racegoers had to somehow make their way home or find lodgings in the city’s hotels that were already full to bursting. And to make things worse, the police shut down the cell phone networks to prevent them being used to detonate the bomb.

  To say there was confusion would be a major understatement, with some people trying to get away from the potential danger as quickly as possible while others initially refused to budge an inch. In the end, of course, everyone had to depart. There were some officials who never recovered from the experience in spite of it all being a hoax call.

  There had been no bomb, but, since that day, Aintree is still the only racetrack in England where each car is searched as it arrives at the parking lots, and everyone has their bags X-rayed before they enter through a metal detector.

  Could the Grand National afford another scene of such chaos?

  “I think we need to get another notice in tomorrow’s Times,” I said, “increasing our offer to a hundred grand, but only on condition there is no further disruption.”

  “I agree,” said Crispin. “Will you deal with it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll also go up to Liverpool today and go racing tomorrow and Saturday.”

  “Right,” he said. “But let’s not take our eyes off the other meetings. Our friend might expect us to be ultra-vigilant for the National, but there’s racing elsewhere.”

  “I still reckon the National’s the most likely,” I said.

  “You’re probably right.”

  “And, Crispin,” I said, “there’s an added complication. The police questioned me yesterday about the murder of Jordan Furness. They think I’m somehow involved because Matthew Unwin is claiming that he was being harassed by the BHA in general, and me in particular, and that Furness was working with us.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I told them so, but that idiot Paul Maldini informed them that I’ve been dismissed from the BHA for gross misconduct and they now think it had something to do with the harassment or the murder.”

  “But they didn’t arrest you or anything?” He sounded quite worried.

  “No, not quite, but at one point I thought they were going to. I told them to check with Howard or Roger Vincent.”

  “I hope you didn’t tell them anything about our friend.”

  “No,” I said, “of course I didn’t.”

  “I’d better warn Howard so that he doesn’t have a fit if they call him.”

  “Good idea,” I said. “I think that’s all for now. Let’s speak soon.”

  I hung up and lay back on the pillow with a sigh.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been questioned by the police?” Lydia asked.

  I’d forgotten she was still lying next to me.

  “I didn’t want to worry
you.”

  “But now I am worried.”

  “Don’t be,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Are you in some sort of trouble?” The concern was clearly evident in her voice.

  “I promise you, I’m not in any trouble.”

  “So tell me why the police questioned you. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Of course I trust you,” I said, turning towards her.

  “Tell me, then,” she said.

  “It’s all to do with the same problem I told you about before. The man who put the stuff in the water at Cheltenham also put some poison in a ginger cake the jockeys ate at Ascot last Saturday. He’s demanding money or he’ll keep on disrupting racing.”

  “A hundred grand? That’s what you said to Crispin.”

  “That’s what we are going to offer. He initially demanded five million, but there’s no way the BHA will pay that much. He now says he wants three. I’m doing the negotiation and I’ve been told by the BHA Board that half a million is the absolute limit.”

  “And what did the police say about that?”

  “Ah, well, therein lies the problem. The BHA Board won’t tell the police anything.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “I agree with you,” I said. “I’ve tried to tell the Board, but they seem to believe that bringing in the police would make the whole thing known by everyone and then the betting public will lose confidence in racing at a time when finances in the sport are pretty shaky.”

  “But didn’t you tell the police all about it when they questioned you yesterday?”

  “No, I’ve been specifically told not to by the BHA Board.”

  “Then you’re all stupid,” she said. “Don’t you see that this man will never go away? He’ll be back for more next year. And then more again the year after that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve told the Board that, but they think that informing the police doesn’t guarantee the man will be caught, and the demands may come again anyway, so what will they have gained?”

  “But the police must have a better chance of catching the bastard. Surely that should outweigh any negatives.”

  She was right.

  I knew she was right, and so would almost every other sane person if they were aware of the circumstances. But Howard Lever, Stephen Kohli and Roger Vincent didn’t and, so far, they had carried the BHA Board with them. Whether that fragile alliance would survive disruption of the Grand National was another matter.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” Lydia asked.

  I rolled over and smiled at her.

  “I’m going to catch the bastard myself.”

  17

  I sat eating a leisurely Full English without feeling guilty. Two rashers of bacon, a sausage, fried egg, mushrooms, even a portion of black pudding and a slice of fried bread smothered with baked beans—and there was no one around to tell me about how unhealthy it all was.

  I smiled to myself.

  Lydia always ate only muesli for breakfast, together with some fruit-and-yogurt concoction she made fresh each morning in the blender, which I was also forced to consume whenever I was at home. I knew she did it for my own good, because she loved me, but hotel breakfasts when I was away alone could be so liberating.

  I opened The Times to the personals page and checked our notice in the announcements:

  Van Gogh wants speedy marriage with Leonardo. Proposed dowry of 100K. Conditional on no further persuasion. Down payment offered to demonstrate good faith.

  “Do you think it will work, dear boy?” Crispin had asked when he’d called me at eight o’clock.

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  “I fear not, but we have to try. Perhaps we should have offered more or even given him what he wants.”

  Crispin and I had discussed the amount at considerable length the previous day. I was sure that if we went up in too large a step, we would end up paying far more than our half-a-million limit.

  I had added the offer of a down payment as a bit of an afterthought to try to flush Leonardo out into the open.

  I knew from my Afghanistan experiences that a kidnapper was at his most vulnerable when collecting the ransom. That was the moment to identify him, although an actual arrest might place the victim at greater risk. Better to leave alone and covertly follow him in the hope that he would lead you back to where the victim was being held.

  Freeing the victim would then become the priority as, all too often, they were in more danger after the ransom was paid than before. In nearly half the cases I had dealt with, the victims were kept alive only long enough to make heart-wrenching phone calls to their families imploring them to pay up. After the payment was received, they would be shot and their bodies dumped from a speeding car in the dead of night.

  Here there was no victim, other than racing, and that was in great danger only while Leonardo was free. There would be absolutely no reason not to detain him at the drop, provided he was careless enough to show himself.

  I popped the last piece of sausage into my mouth and washed it down with the dregs of my second cup of coffee.

  I was staying in a very modest motel in a service area just off the M6 freeway near Wigan. It wasn’t particularly close to Aintree, but this was the only place I’d been able to find a room after two and a half hours of trying by telephone. A combination of the Grand National meeting at Liverpool and the quarter final of a European football competition in Manchester had filled almost every available bed within a hundred miles.

  It also meant that I’d been forced to hire a car to drive north rather than using the train as I preferred.

  I had discovered from experience that it was almost impossible to follow someone away from a racetrack in a car unless you happened to be parked right next to him. By the time you went to collect your own vehicle the target had long gone. And, if you followed someone away on a bus or by train, you had the major inconvenience of having to return later to collect your own car or have it towed away.

  And parking at the Grand National meeting was a particular nightmare.

  Poor financial circumstances at the racetrack in the 1980s and ’90s had resulted in the sell-off of much of the surrounding space for retail and industrial use as the city of Liverpool swelled to embrace its famous racing suburb. Now the racetrack had to hire back the local retail center’s parking lots on race days, but even that did not satisfy the recent demand for parking as the popularity of the race grew year by year.

  Of course, I always had my BHA parking pass in my pocket, but I was loath to use it. Crispin had told me that as far as he knew, three other members of the integrity team would be present at Aintree on Friday, including my friend Nigel Green, and I didn’t especially want to bump into any of them in the parking lot reserved for the officials. It would take too much explaining.

  In the end, I decided to drive to the town of Ormskirk and catch the local train to Liverpool that stopped conveniently just across the road from the racetrack. And, to be on the safe side, I would go in disguise.

  —

  AINTREE on the Friday of the Grand National meeting was when the people of Liverpool came in their tens of thousands to have a flutter at the races, the women in particular dressing in their best outfits and outrageous hats for the occasion.

  And, for a change, the weather was kind to them.

  Instead of freezing half to death in their short skirts and sleeveless dresses as was normal in early April, the problem this year would be sunburn, with acres of bare flesh reddening under the cloudless sky.

  The menfolk, meanwhile, came in shiny suits and skinny ties, and the heat of the day would drive them early to the bars for iced champagne or a cooling beer. The day was going to be bonanza time for both the booze and the ice-cream salesmen.

  I waited patiently in the line to pass through the
turnstiles and rather hoped that the two security personnel were being more vigilant than their devil-may-care manner would tend to suggest.

  They weren’t.

  Both of them laughed and joked with the racegoers as they passed through the metal detectors and seemed unconcerned that I had loose change, the rental-car keys and a pair of metal-rimmed reading glasses in my pockets, all of which together caused the machine to bleep loudly.

  I showed the man the keys from my right-hand pant pocket and he waved me in without checking that I wasn’t carrying anything more sinister in my left.

  I would have to have words with Stephen Kohli.

  I drifted around the enclosures, watching but not knowing what I was actually looking for. Crispin Larson had assured me that the security at both the racetrack stables and in the weighing room would be extreme, but if the security at the entrances was anything to go by, extreme was a relative term.

  The racetrack stables had been extensively searched before the horses started arriving and no one had been allowed to enter since unless cleared by two different people. Much the same was true of the weighing room, where there were now two officials standing guard with strict instructions that no food or drink was to be provided to the jockeys other than produced under supervision by a specified chef.

  I was sure it was all necessary and I was glad it was in place, but I was also acutely aware that Leonardo was far from stupid and he would know exactly what we would do. If he had plans to disrupt the meeting, I predicted it wouldn’t involve either the stables or the weighing room. So, where else?

  I walked around, looking at the grandstands and other buildings in a fresh light. What would I do if I wanted to disrupt everything? Fireworks—that was what he’d said. Setting fire to the grandstands would certainly produce some fireworks. It would also likely cause the National to be cancelled.

  Back in 1985, the whole of Arlington Park racetrack, situated in the northern suburbs of Chicago, burned to the ground, but they still held the Arlington Millions race, albeit twenty-five days later, where thirty-five thousand people watched from tents and temporary scaffold-built bleachers.