Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

  He nodded. “It was stupid, I see that now. It was me that called the police on the night of the party. I went into the bathroom to phone them. I claimed to be an angry disturbed neighbor.”

  “Ken said you had to convince him to have the party in the first place. Was the whole thing a setup?”

  He nodded again, then he sobbed. “I’m sorry.”

  I had wondered if it had been someone trying to get at Quentin, but it was nothing more than a lovers’ tiff that had spiraled out of control.

  Such was the power of love and jealousy.

  25

  I arrived at Scrutton’s Club more than half an hour early for the meeting on Wednesday morning, but Crispin Larson was there ahead of me.

  “Any news?” I asked.

  “Our friend has been in touch again in the mail this morning and he’s pretty angry.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “It’s us who should be angry, not him. He has a hundred thousand pounds of our money.”

  “He says it’s not enough.”

  “Tough shit,” I said. “If it was up to me, he’d get nothing more. In fact, he’d have had nothing in the first place. What else can he do to us that’s worse than disrupting the Grand National?”

  The others started arriving, and we were taking our places around the table when Howard Lever came into the room, ashen-faced and visibly shaking.

  “What on earth is the matter?” Stephen Kohli said, standing up and offering Howard a steadying hand.

  “I’ve just had a call from the Press Association,” Howard said in a slightly quavering voice. “They want to know if there is any truth in the tip-off they have received that the winner of the Gold Cup has failed a dope test.”

  —

  CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT Dominic Allenby of the Metropolitan Police Homicide and Serious Crime Command sat impassively at the head of the table as Roger Vincent and Howard Lever, on either side of him, outlined the sequence of events that had occurred during the preceding three weeks, from the murder of Jordan Furness on Champion Hurdle Day right up to the payment of the hundred thousand pounds.

  On several occasions, Stephen Kohli, Crispin Larson and I were invited to add some details, while Ian Tulloch, Bill Ripley, Neil Wallinger and Piers Pottinger were not shy in coming forward with their opinions. The other two directors, Charles Payne and George Searle, both chose to sit quietly, listening intently.

  All the directors appeared rather uneasy at having had everything laid out bare in front of the chief superintendent.

  I was also feeling slightly anxious, but for a different reason.

  I kept remembering back to the meeting at the BHA office on the day after the Grand National. Something then had made me feel uncomfortable and I’d had the same feeling today, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.

  The chief superintendent was particularly interested in the payment of the money.

  “You said this was thrown from a moving train?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The seven-oh-three express from Paddington to Plymouth.”

  “And where exactly did this take place?” he asked.

  “Between Newbury and Taunton stations,” I said. “It was getting dark, so we are not quite sure where. We believe it may have been about halfway between the two, perhaps somewhere near the town of Westbury.”

  Crispin was sitting next to me and he glanced across, a quizzical look on his face. He was just opening his mouth to speak when I gently kicked his leg under the table. He shut his mouth again and stayed silent.

  “A hundred thousand pounds, you say?” said the policeman.

  “Yes,” I said, “in used fifty-pound notes.”

  “For what?”

  “Sorry?” said Roger Vincent.

  “It is normal to pay a ransom in return for something or somebody. You appear to have paid one for nothing.”

  He made it sound as if we had all been rather stupid.

  Perhaps we had.

  Some members of the Board squirmed in their seats from embarrassment. It was all too much like having our dirty laundry washed in public.

  “And what exactly do you expect of me?” the chief superintendent asked when we had finished.

  There was a moment of silence, then Ian Tulloch said what we were all thinking.

  “Why, Chief Superintendent, we expect you to catch this man, of course. Then put him in jail and throw away the key.”

  “Yes,” said Howard Lever, “and quickly. Before he totally destroys the integrity of the British Horseracing Authority. As I’ve previously said, the BHA governs racing in this country by consensus, not by statute. If that consensus is not self-evident, then . . . there could be anarchy.”

  I personally thought Howard was slightly overdramatizing the situation, but who knew what the outcome could be? I don’t suppose the then Football League had anticipated that the English Premier League would be formed in 1992 and siphon off nearly all the TV and sponsorship money.

  Could British racing afford half a dozen or so of the larger tracks to break away and run their own Premier League of Racing, retaining all the television proceeds for themselves? Most of the minor tracks, which presently received a share of such revenues, would go out of business overnight.

  We might end up with a situation similar to that in the United States, where Thoroughbred racing was administered on a state-by-state basis, with wide variations in the rules, especially with respect to which drugs were allowed and which weren’t, and each racetrack separately sold off its media rights to the highest bidder.

  Twenty-three of the fifty states have no Thoroughbred racing at all, and a further fifteen have only one track each. Only the mighty state of California has more than three racetracks, but even it has only six to serve a population of almost forty million people, and each track declares its own champion jockey.

  It could be argued that the BHA was more than just horseracing’s authority, it was also the glue that held the diversity of British racing together as a single entity.

  “Catching this man may not be as easy as you think,” said the chief superintendent. “I have been involved in several extortion cases before and none of them have been straightforward. I assume here that we are dealing with something you would like to remain confidential until such time as the perpetrator may be apprehended.”

  “Absolutely,” Roger Vincent said. “The whole future of racing depends on the confidence and trust of the betting public.”

  “That very confidentiality makes detection so much more difficult,” said the chief superintendent. “If one can’t even explain to people why they are being asked questions, then they are far less likely to answer them. And the very questions themselves have to be circumspect.”

  Tell me about it, I thought. That had been my trouble all along.

  I could sense a degree of disappointment from some members of the Board who had clearly thought that informing the police would hasten the end of the problem.

  But I could tell from his manner that a touch of extortion against the BHA didn’t appear that brightly on Chief Superintendent Allenby’s radar.

  The murder at Cheltenham was being investigated by the Gloucestershire Police, who undoubtedly had the killer in custody, and the disruption of the Grand National was being looked into by those in Liverpool.

  There had been no murders or any violence committed on the Met’s patch, and I could tell from the policeman’s body language that he didn’t consider the loss of reputation of the BHA a sufficient reason to mobilize his troops. In fact, he showed all the signs of believing that we’d been fools to pay the man anything at all and therefore probably deserved to lose our good standing.

  It was all a bit of a mess.

  “If you have certain information that is pertinent to the investigation being carried out by my Merseyside colleagues,”
the chief superintendent went on, “I would advise you to make it known to the investigating officer at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise, you might be accused of hindering the investigation and hence obstructing the police in the execution of their duty. That is an offense under Section 89 of the Police Act of 1996.”

  I wondered if there was a special school somewhere that taught policemen to speak in such a haughty and roundabout manner.

  “But what about this man?” said Roger Vincent with a degree of desperation in his voice. “How will he be caught?”

  “The Merseyside Police will be continuing their investigation into the events at the Grand National. I would suggest that might present the best opportunity.”

  “So you will do nothing?” Ian Tulloch’s tone was contemptuous. “I thought that extortion was a serious crime.”

  “And so it is,” said the policeman looking straight down the table at Tulloch, “in particular when it follows a kidnap or if it is backed by threats of violence against the person. But this situation surely has more to do with animal welfare than criminality. It is not a case for the Homicide and Serious Crimes Command.”

  He simply hadn’t grasped the enormity of the possible consequences for one of the largest employment sectors in the United Kingdom. Horseracing and bloodstock were not just sport, they were major industries.

  “Animal welfare?” Roger Vincent said in disbelief. “This isn’t about animal welfare. It’s about the whole future of racing in this country.”

  But he was on a road to nowhere if he thought he could convince the chief superintendent, who stood up and made his excuses, expressing the wish to be elsewhere chasing more important criminals like murderers and rapists.

  There was a stunned silence in the room after the door closed behind him.

  “Well, that was an utter waste of time,” said Bill Ripley.

  I had to agree with him. Far from my fear that the police would move in and try to take over, they had left us completely to our own devices.

  “So what do we do now?” Ian Tulloch asked.

  “We have to deal with the damn Press Association,” Howard Lever said. “It must be the same bloody man who told them. Who else would have leaked information about Electrode’s positive test?”

  “Could it have come from the labs?” asked Roger Vincent.

  “Most unlikely,” Stephen Kohli said. “All samples are coded with a number rather than by the name of the horse.”

  “Who has access to the codes?” I asked.

  “No one at the labs. They are kept locked in the Integrity Department’s safe.”

  “So who else knows that Electrode tested positive?” I asked. “Apart from the people in this room.”

  “Only the man who doped him,” said Ian Tulloch. “And now that policeman.”

  I looked around the table. Could someone here have leaked the information to the Press Association?

  It was not the sort of thing one could do accidentally.

  —

  THE MEETING broke up without any firm decisions about what to do next.

  We would neither confirm nor deny the Press Association’s tip-off, although, despite his earlier reservations, Piers Pottinger was now concerned about the PR implications of saying nothing.

  “The PR would surely be worse if we confirmed it,” said Roger Vincent. “Or if we denied it and then the truth came out later.”

  “We could declare the Gold Cup void,” said George Searle.

  “After doing the same to the Grand National only last week?” Howard Lever said sharply. “Our two most prestigious jump races of the year both void?” He shook his head. “We’d be a laughingstock.”

  I feared that we may be a laughingstock already.

  At Neil Wallinger’s insistence, it was agreed that Howard should speak to the Merseyside investigating officer to provide him, in confidence, with the information concerning the threats we had received, so as to avoid being accused of knowingly obstructing the police.

  Howard, however, wasn’t at all keen on the plan. “We have no actual proof that the man responsible for the disruption of the Grand National is the same person who has been sending us the demands for money. His use of the word fireworks might have been just coincidental. Isn’t it possible that they were set off by someone completely different? For all we know, the police may be right in thinking that it was done by animal rights activists.”

  More sticking-head-in-sand behavior by the chief executive.

  I was sure that no one else around the table believed it.

  26

  So what was all that about?” Crispin asked as we walked out of Scrutton’s together.

  “All what?” I said.

  “All that ‘somewhere near Westbury’ nonsense. And you kicking me under the table.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at some of the Board members who were leaving at the same time.

  “Do you fancy coffee?” I asked.

  Crispin and I walked up St. James’s Street to Piccadilly and went around the corner into The Wolseley.

  “I can give you a table for an hour,” said the maître d’, “but I must have it back by twelve-thirty.”

  He showed us to a small table in a far right-hand corner, under the balcony. The Wolseley, with its Italianate architecture, high-domed ceilings and marble floors, was always noisy and hence, strangely, it provided the ideal surroundings to talk privately even though we had to speak quite loudly to make each other heard.

  “So, dear boy, what is the reason why you didn’t tell the chief superintendent that we knew exactly to the inch where the drop was made?” Crispin asked after our coffee had been poured.

  “I just thought it may be prudent to keep that piece of information to ourselves, at least for the time being.”

  “And why is that, exactly?”

  I was silent for a moment wondering if I was crazy. In the end, I decided that I wasn’t.

  “How well do you know the individual members of the BHA Board?”

  He looked at me in astonishment.

  “Do you know something that I don’t?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Not really. I just felt uncomfortable at the meeting we had last Sunday in the office. I can’t explain what, but something happened there that has made me wonder. That’s all.”

  “Dear boy, surely you can’t think that the person doing all this is a member of the BHA Board?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. Or did I? “But I know that if we really want to keep something secret we shouldn’t tell anyone at all. Who do you think leaked the information about Electrode?”

  “Our friend Leonardo, obviously.”

  “But why would he?” I said. “What did he have to gain?”

  “It adds pressure onto us to pay up.”

  “Does it? Why? One of the reasons for us paying would be to keep him quiet, so why is he blabbing about it? Surely that makes us less likely to pay, not more.”

  “But who else would have done it?” Crispin asked.

  “If Stephen is correct in saying that someone at the labs couldn’t have, then it must have been either Leonardo or one of the people who was in that meeting this morning. We are the only people who knew.”

  “But what would any of the Board members have to gain by leaking the information to the press?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “And I also don’t know if we are dealing with one person or two. Leonardo is clearly after money, but is he the same person who leaked the story about the doping?”

  “He must be,” Crispin said with confidence.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Please don’t tell me we have two maniacs out to destroy the BHA.”

  —

  “I CAN’T thank you enough,” QC,QC said effusively, the relief clearly visible on his face an
d in his eyes.

  It was half past six and we were once again sitting in the small café in Brewers Lane, around the corner from his and Faye’s house, this time with glasses of wine rather than cups of coffee.

  I had just shown him the video that I’d recorded the previous evening.

  It showed Daniel Jubowski sitting on the leather sofa in his flat. He was facing the camera and he spoke clearly and precisely. “I withdraw any allegation that I may have made to police that Kenneth Calderfield was in possession of, or had ever supplied, any illegal drugs of any kind. I do this of my own free will and I deeply regret any hurt that I may have caused by my misguided actions in making such a false accusation.”

  “How much did you have to pay him?” Quentin asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Kenneth never did supply any drugs. Daniel Jubowski did that himself. I simply persuaded Daniel that he needed to tell me the truth.”

  Quentin looked at me sideways.

  “And no violence was involved?” he said.

  “Not even a threat of it,” I assured him.

  “Then why?” he asked.

  “There are some things you don’t need to know about,” I replied.

  “But why did he make such an allegation in the first place?”

  “That’s another thing you don’t need to know. Just be grateful that he has seen the light and will withdraw it.”

  “Do I need to do anything?” Quentin asked.

  “If Daniel does what he has promised, then he will have been to the police today to withdraw his statement. I’m sure Kenneth will find out soon enough.”

  “At this stage, the CPS may still decide to go ahead with the trial,” Quentin said. “Only there and then may they offer no evidence, at which point the case would collapse and Kenneth would be discharged, but there is a slim chance that they may still use the original statement and present it to the jury together with the search evidence.”

  “But surely the jury wouldn’t believe the statement if Daniel were to stand up in court and say that it was untrue?”

  “We could certainly call Daniel for the defense, even if his statement is presented as evidence for the Crown. There is no property in a witness. But can we be sure that he will keep to his new story any more than he kept to the previous one?”