by Dick Francis
I went to St Thomas’s about four. I could sense that all was not well in Marina’s world. I stood by the window looking out across the Thames.
‘At least you’ve got a nice view,’ I said, trying to lighten the mood.
‘I can’t see it,’ said Marina. ‘The bed is too low. All I can see is the sky. And the nurses won’t let me get up. Not even to go to the loo. I have to use a bedpan. It’s disgusting.’
‘Calm down, my darling,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t be pushing your blood pressure up at the moment. Give the artery in your leg a chance to heal.’
The sooner I got her home, the better. I was also sure that her security would be better there, too.
‘OK, OK, I’m calm,’ she said. She took a few deep breaths and laid her head back on the pillow. ‘And what have you been up to that has kept you from me until four in the afternoon.’
Ah, the real reason for the fluster.
‘I’ve been with another woman,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said pausing for a moment. ‘That’s all right then. I thought you might have been working.’
We giggled.
‘I went to Lambourn this morning,’ I said.
‘What, to ride?’
‘No, I went to Juliet Burns’s cottage.’
‘What on earth for?’ she asked.
I pulled out the pictures of Juliet’s wardrobe. ‘Look at these,’ I said.
She studied the six photographs. It wasn’t easy to tell what they were of unless you had seen it live, as it were.
‘So?’
‘They’re pictures of Juliet Burns’s wardrobe, in her bedroom.’
‘So you were in her bedroom, were you?’
‘She wasn’t there at the time.’
‘So what’s so special about Juliet Burns’s wardrobe?’ she asked.
‘It contains at least thirty thousand pounds’ worth of designer dresses, Jimmy Choo shoes and Fendi handbags.’
‘Wow!’ she said. She took another look at the pictures. ‘I take it you don’t think she obtained them through hard work and careful saving.’
‘I do not.’
‘But how did you know they were there?’ Marina asked.
‘I saw them when I took Juliet home the morning she found Bill dead.’ I suddenly wondered whether she had, in fact, ‘found’ him dead.
‘How come?’
‘I hung her jacket up in that wardrobe. But I didn’t realise what I was looking at until Jenny told me yesterday how much designer clothes cost.’
‘It doesn’t make her a murderer,’ said Marina.
‘There’s more.’ I told her about the hairbrush and the hairs and about Rosie having done a DNA test on them. And I told her about the card that had been waiting at Ebury Street for me and also about its hand-written message.
She went very quiet.
‘Well, whoever licked the envelope on Thursday is the same person that left the hairs on the hairbrush, and that has to be Juliet Burns herself.’
‘I take it that she didn’t actually invite you into her bedroom this morning,’ Marina said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘She was at work.’
‘So what now?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t you tell the police about the clothes and the hairs and all that?’
‘The police are too busy with other things,’ I said. ‘As far as I can see, they aren’t even investigating your shooting. I was told they don’t have the resources. The Gloucestershire police are spending their time trying to find a child killer and Thames Valley believe that Bill killed himself anyway.’
‘Another policeman came to see me this morning,’ said Marina.
‘What did he want?’ I asked.
‘Just to know if I had remembered anything else,’ she said.
‘And have you?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I told him about the flashes on the motorbike fuel tank and gave him the drawings. He didn’t think it helps much. Apparently masses of bikes have flashes on their fuel tanks.’
And lots of riders have flashes on their trousers, I thought.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘and another thing.’
‘What?’
‘The policeman told me that you had told him that I was your fiancée.’
‘Never!’
‘Yes, you did. I asked the surgeon and he said, yes, definitely, Mr Halley told everyone he was my fiancé. Everyone but me, it seems.’
‘It was the only way they would let me in to see you.’
‘Oh. You didn’t mean it then.’
‘I did ask you to marry me, on Thursday night,’ I said. ‘But you didn’t answer.’
‘That’s not fair. I was unconscious.’
‘Excuses. Excuses.’
‘If you really meant it, then ask me again.’
I looked deeply into her eyes. Did I want to spend the rest of my life with this person, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part? Yes, I did, but I worried that, unless I found the gunman soon, death might us part rather more quickly than we would like.
‘Do you want me to kneel?’ I asked her.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Get down to my level.’
I knelt on one knee beside the bed and took her left hand in my right.
‘Marina van der Meer,’ I said smiling at her, ‘will you marry me?’
She looked away from my face.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
I spent all of Saturday evening researching the running of horses from Bill Burton’s yard.
How did we manage before computers?
I was able to find out more in one evening using digital technology than I would have done in a week using the old-fashioned small-printed pages of the form books.
The Raceform database with its almost instant access to a whole mass of statistics proved invaluable as I delved into the running of all Bill’s horses over the last five years.
I was not so much looking for a needle in a haystack, as looking for a piece of hay in a haystack that was slightly shorter than it should have been. Even if I found it, I might still not be sure it was what I was looking for.
The classic tell-tale signs of race fixing have always been short-priced losers followed by long-priced winners. A horse is prevented from winning until the betting price lengthens, and then a big gamble is landed at long odds when the horse is really trying. But the ability to use the exchanges to bet on a horse to lose has changed all that. The classic signs no longer exist. Indeed, I asked myself, what signs might exist?
Tipsters and professional gamblers use patterns in performance as tools to select where a horse will tend to run well, and where less so. A course may be close by to the home stables and many horses do better when they don’t have to travel long distances to the races. Trainers who use uphill training gallops may have more success with uphill finishes such as at Towcester or Cheltenham.
There are many other reasons why horses run better or worse at different venues. Some racecourses are flat and others are undulating, some have gentle curves while others have sharp ones. In America all tracks are left-handed, so the horses run anticlockwise, but in England some are left-handed and others right-handed, and at Windsor and Fontwell the horses have to run both right-and left-handed in the same race as the tracks are shaped like figures of eight.
The serious gambler needs to know where a trainer, or even a particular horse, does well and where not. And Raceform Interactive allows the user to look for hitherto unseen patterns in performance, to ask his own questions and use the huge data available to answer them. Could the system, I wondered, be used to look for dodgy dealing in the Burton yard? Could it show me that Huw Walker had been developing a pattern of fixing races?
I tried my best by asking what I thought were the right questions but my computer refused to serve up the hoped-for answers. Either there was no pattern to find or else the pattern was so long established that variations to it didn’t show up over the past five years. And there
had been no convenient, dramatic change to Bill Burton’s results when Juliet Burns had arrived in his yard three years ago.
Another dead end.
I went into the kitchen to make myself some coffee.
So what did I know about the race fixing allegations?
I knew that Jonny Enstone believed his horses had been running to someone else’s orders. He had told me so himself over lunch at the House of Lords. And the police had shown a list to Bill when they’d arrested him, which they said showed that the horses had not been running true to form.
I went back to my computer. Now I asked it to look only at the running of Lord Enstone’s horses. I spent ages giving every Enstone runner a user rating depending on whether it had run better or worse than its official rating would suggest. I then asked my machine if there was anything suspicious? Give me your answer do! Sadly, it was not into suspicion. Hard facts were its currency, not speculation.
However, the Raceform software did throw up a pattern of sorts.
I was so used to getting negative results that I nearly missed it. According to the data, Enstone’s horses tended to run fractionally above their form at the northern tracks, say north of Haydock Park or Doncaster.
I brought Huw Walker into the equation. I thought that Huw might not have ridden them in the north, but the machine told me that that wasn’t the case. There was no north/south divide by jockey. Every time in the past year that an Enstone horse had run north of Haydock Park, it had been ridden by Huw Walker.
Which is more than could be said for races run further south. Huw had been sidelined with injury for five weeks the previous September and eight of Lord Enstone’s horses had run in the south during that time. They didn’t appear to have run appreciably better for having had a different pilot.
What made running in the north so special? And was the improvement in their running really significant?
My eyes were growing tired from staring at on-screen figures. I looked at my watch. It was past midnight. Time for bed.
Early on Sunday morning, I called Neil Pedder, another trainer in Lambourn. His yard was down the road from Bill’s.
‘What’s special about the racecourses north of Doncaster or Haydock?’ I asked him.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘I hardly ever send runners up there.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. There are eighteen racecourses north of Haydock and Doncaster out of a total of fifty-nine in Great Britain. That was nearly a third of tracks that Neil didn’t send runners to.
‘Because it means the horses having to be away overnight,’ he said. ‘Haydock or Doncaster is as far from Lambourn as you can realistically send a horse on the morning of the race and still expect it to perform. So I won’t send my horses north of there unless the owner will pay for the extra costs of an overnight stay, and most of them won’t.’
Why, I wondered, did Jonny Enstone’s horses run slightly better whenever they had to stay away overnight?
‘Who goes away with the horses when they have to stay away?’ I asked.
‘It varies,’ said Neil. ‘If I absolutely have to send a horse away overnight, I will usually send at least two, sometimes three of my staff with it. Especially if it goes in my horsebox. There will be the lad who does the horse, then a travelling head lad and my box driver, though the driver often doubles up as the travelling head lad.’
‘Don’t you go as well, on the race day?’ I asked.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’ I asked
‘On whether the owner will be there, or if the race is televised, or if I have other runners somewhere else. I won’t go if I can help it. It’s a bloody long way up there, you know.’
‘How about your assistant trainer, would he go?’
‘Maybe, but it’s doubtful.’
‘But there doesn’t seem to be any standard practice?’ I said.
‘No, everyone does things differently. I know one trainer, who will remain nameless, who enters lots of horses up north. And he always goes. He doesn’t like what he calls “interfering owners” coming to the races so he sends their horses where he thinks they won’t be able to come and watch them, and also it gets him away from his wife for a night or two each week.’
And into the arms of his mistress. I had investigated the same nameless trainer for one of his owners who had thought that his trainer was up to no good because he could never get to see his horses run. He’d been convinced that the trainer had been swapping the animals around and running them as ringers. The truth had proved to be less exciting, at least for the horses. The owner in question had subsequently switched stables.
‘Thanks, Neil.’
‘Any time.’ He didn’t ask me why I wanted to know. He knew I might tell him in due course, or maybe not at all. Asking didn’t make any difference and Neil knew it.
Next I called Kate Burton.
‘Oh, Sid,’ she said, ‘how lovely of you to call.’
‘How are things?’ I asked.
‘Pretty bloody,’ she said. ‘I can’t even organise Bill’s funeral because the police won’t release his body.’
That was interesting, I thought. Perhaps after all the police are taking more notice of my murder theory than they were letting on.
‘And Mummy is being absolutely horrid.’
‘Why?’
‘She keeps going on and on about Bill being arrested for race fixing, and the disgrace he’s brought on the family. I tell you, I’m fed up with it. The stupid woman doesn’t understand that race fixing is the least of my worries.’ She paused. ‘Why is suicide so shameful?’
‘Kate,’ I said, ‘listen to me. I am absolutely certain that Bill didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. And I’m becoming equally convinced that he was not involved with any race fixing.’ Raceform didn’t show it.
‘Oh God,’ she was crying, ‘I do so hope you’re right.’
‘Believe it,’ I said. ‘It’s true.’
We talked for a while longer about the children and the future of the house. I managed to steer the conversation around to the stable staff.
‘What has happened to them all?’ I asked her.
‘Gone off to other jobs. Mostly in Lambourn,’ she said.
‘What about Juliet?’ I said.
‘She’s with Andrew Woodward now,’ said Kate. ‘It’s a good job, and she’s done really well to get it. I’m so pleased for her. I like Juliet Burns.’
Jesus had liked Judas Iscariot. They had kissed.
‘How about Fred Manley?’ I asked. Fred had been Bill’s head lad.
‘I’m not sure. He may have retired.’
‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘Fred is actually a lot younger than he looks. He’s not yet fifty.’
‘I don’t believe it!’ said Kate. ‘I always felt so sorry for him having to carry such heavy loads at his age.’ She laughed. It was a start.
‘Do you know where he lives?’ I asked.
‘In one of those cottages on the Baydon road. Next door to Juliet, I think.’
Wow!
‘Do you have his phone number?’
‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘But it’s in the den.’
‘Ah.’
‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘I have to go in there sometime. I suppose it had better be now.’
I heard her lay the phone down and I could hear her foot-falls on the wooden floor as she walked away. And again as she came back. She picked up the phone. There was a breathlessness in her voice as she gave me the number.
‘Well done, Kate,’ I said. ‘Be strong and believe what I told you.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Oh, and one more thing, Kate. Could you do me a favour?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
I explained at some length what I needed without giving away the whole truth.
‘It sounds a bit strange,’ she said after I told her, ‘but if that’s what you want
, I suppose it’s no problem.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It will probably be tomorrow afternoon. I’ll call you.’
I tried Fred Manley’s number but got his wife.
‘Sorry, Mr Halley,’ she said. ‘Fred’s not here just now.’
‘When will he be back?’ I asked.
‘He’ll be back for his dinner, at one.’
‘I’ll call again then.’
‘Right you are,’ she said and disconnected.
It was a quarter to ten.
Provided Marina received the ‘all clear’ from Mr Pandita during his round this morning, she would be free to come home around midday.
I spent an hour cleaning the flat and washing up the dishes that were stacked in the kitchen sink. I was genuinely excited by the prospect of Marina’s homecoming. I was about to leave for the hospital when the phone rang. It was Charles.
‘Do you really think it’s necessary for me to stay in London?’ he asked, clearly hoping to be given the green light to go home to Oxfordshire.
‘Are you still at Jenny and Anthony’s?’ I asked back.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m desperate for a decent single malt. I’m fed up with carrot juice and bean sprouts, I can tell you.’
I laughed. ‘It’ll do you good.’
I thought about what I was planning to do.
‘I think it might be safer for you to stay away from Aynsford for a while longer,’ I said. ‘A few more days.’
‘I’ll go to my club then,’ he said. ‘I’ve been with Jenny now for two nights and everyone knows that guests begin to smell after three. I’ll move into the Army amp; Navy tomorrow.’ The lure of the bar had become too great.
I arrived at St Thomas’s to find Marina dressed and sitting in a chair.
‘They’ve cleared me for release,’ she said. She made it sound like the parole board.
‘Great,’ I said.
A hospital porter arrived with a wheelchair and he pushed Marina along the corridors and down in the lift to the patient discharges’ desk near the main entrance. I retrieved the car from where I had parked it, legally this time, in the underground car park, and we were soon a distant memory at the hospital. Today’s dramas had taken over.
‘Stop fussing,’ Marina said as I shepherded her into the Ebury Street building and up in the lift to our flat. ‘I’m fine.’