Dick Francis's Damage

by Dick Francis

  The great race had been murdered and I hadn’t even been close enough to kill the assassin.

  In truth, I’d been a pretty useless bodyguard.

  I walked down to the viewing areas in front of the County Stand and watched as several police officers isolated the area around the water jump with blue-and-white Police—Do Not Cross tape. It had become a crime scene.

  Not only had the race been disrupted but one of the horses that had tried to jump the fence wing had broken a leg and had been put down in full view of the grandstands. And two of the jockeys had left the scene, flat-out, in ambulances, one with his neck immobilized in a cervical collar.

  There was a sort of numbness about the crowd.

  All the excitement of the day had vanished in that instant and there had been nothing to fill the vacuum. No winner to applaud, no trophy presentation to watch and nothing to discuss, other than the obvious, and even that was not really being spoken of. There wasn’t much to say. People just shook their heads in disbelief and resignedly set off for the parking lots and home.

  I remained while all those around me departed, my legs somehow refusing to take me away. Perhaps I would soon wake up and find it had only been a nightmare after all and all was fine.

  Of course, I didn’t. And the reality of the situation slowly began to sink in.

  Now what should I do?

  “Our friend” Leonardo had horseracing by the short and curlies.

  I stood and watched as Roger Vincent, Piers Pottinger, Howard Lever and Stephen Kohli were escorted down the track to the water jump by two policemen in uniform with silver braid on their peaked caps. The top brass.

  They stood near the point where the runners should have landed and were clearly having something explained to them by one of the policemen, who kept pointing at either side of the fence.

  I looked closely at the jump itself. It was only about three feet high but had a nine-foot-wide pool of water on the landing side. Consequently, the horses had to extend as they jumped to clear the water. Many years ago the pool had been two or three feet deep, but safety concerns now meant that the water depth was only six inches so that horses that dropped their hind legs in the water didn’t injure their backs.

  The Grand National fences are unique in British racing insofar that they are bright green rather than the usual dark brown of birch. That is because they are dressed each year with a thick coat of fresh spruce foliage laid over an inner core. Until recently the cores were constructed of solid, unyielding timber but are now more horse-friendly flexible plastic.

  All of them, that is, except the water jump, the center of which is a live, growing yew hedge. On either end, where the wings met the fence, the hedge had been allowed to grow taller so that there were pillars of yew that extended above the normal height of the fence by a couple of feet. From the manner in which the policeman was pointing, I surmised that the fireworks had been hidden in these pillars, facing inwards.

  I continued to watch as the group went around the fence to the takeoff side.

  The six men stood there for a while, talking and pointing, before finally walking back up the track, past the winning post and on towards the tunnel between the Earl of Derby and the Lord Sefton stands.

  I stayed where I was for a little longer, not knowing exactly what to do.

  My mission to Aintree had been an unmitigated disaster. Not only had my negotiation plan proved to be an abject failure in preventing the disruption of the great race but I was no nearer in determining who was responsible.

  Far from my boast to Lydia that I’m going to catch the bastard myself, I felt personally humiliated and broken.

  I was also angry.

  Angry with myself for my own failings. But also with our non-friend, Leonardo.

  I won’t forget this feeling, I thought, as I drove home.

  And I would use my anger in revenge when I determined to whom I should direct it.

  —

  MY PHONE rang at half past six on Sunday morning, but I wasn’t asleep.

  “Do you have any body armor?” Crispin asked without even saying hello. “If you do, wear it. We have been summonsed to appear before the Board at the BHA offices at eleven this morning.”

  “On a Sunday?” I asked.

  “On a Sunday. Have you seen today’s papers? They’re not good.”

  “I’m still in bed.”

  “Tut-tut, dear boy,” Crispin said. “The condemned man should be up early on the morning of his execution.”

  “Shut up, will you. You’ll be in the same shit as me.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But everyone knows it was your idea to ignore him before Ascot. And also your idea to offer such a low sum.”

  “You agreed to it.”

  “Only under sufferance. I told you Howard wanted to offer a quarter of a million.”

  He was right, but I’d been hoping for a touch more loyalty. I could see that contrary to what he’d told me before about us both being in this together, Crispin was going to ensure that I took all the blame.

  “What do the papers say?”

  “Incompetence is the word they like to use most. Applied about equally to the BHA, Aintree management and the Merseyside Police. And the Racing Post reminds everyone this is not the first time this month that racing has been disrupted and abandoned. They mention the food poisoning incident at Ascot as a further example of the BHA’s inability to run racing properly.”

  “Do they actually link the events?” I asked.

  “Not specifically, but I’d have thought it was only a matter of time. I’ll see you at eleven. Have a hearty breakfast, dear boy, and wear two vests.”

  “Two vests?”

  “So as not to shiver.”

  “What are you on about?”

  “History, man, history,” Crispin replied. “Don’t you know your history?”

  With that, he hung up.

  “Trouble?” Lydia asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I reckon I may well be sacked properly this time.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault!”

  “Maybe not. But I’ll still get the blame, you wait and see. Crispin said to wear two vests.”

  “Two vests?”

  “Something about history and not shivering.”

  “Charles the First,” Lydia said. “He wore two vests at his execution so the crowds wouldn’t see him shiver from cold and assume he was afraid of the ax.”

  “Oh, great,” I said. “That’s all I need. Either I have to come up with something pretty amazing by eleven o’clock this morning or it will be a one-way trip to the scaffold. Or to the Job Center.”

  “Well, get up, then,” she said, pushing me out of bed with her feet. “Get to your desk immediately and think of something pretty amazing. We have a bloody mortgage to pay and I don’t earn enough.” She didn’t say it with a smile and a laugh. She was deadly serious.

  I’d been anticipating a bit of nooky to cheer me up, but that was obviously a fruitless hope. I put on my dressing gown and walked down to my study.

  I woke up my computer from its slumbers.

  You have 4 new messages, I was informed by my e-mail server.

  Three of them were junk mail, but the other was from Roger Vincent and had been sent late the previous evening. It wasn’t particularly friendly.

  For a start, he addressed me as Hinkley, rather than Jeff or Jefferson.

  I wondered if it was because he was angry with me. Or maybe it was a class thing. Roger Vincent had always believed that as chairman, he was somehow superior in class to the average BHA staff member.

  “Hinkley,” it read. “Be at the BHA offices at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning (Sunday) for a meeting with the Board. Don’t be late.”

  No please, no salutation, not even his name at the end.

 
It was a command, not a request.

  I looked at my watch. It was five to seven. I had just four hours to come up with something amazing.

  —

  ACCESS. That was the key.

  Who had access to the water supply tanks at Cheltenham and Newbury, someone who also had access to the jockeys’ changing room at Ascot before racing, and also to the water jump at Aintree?

  The water tank at Cheltenham was not exactly secure. Anyone with a stepladder would have been able to gain access, although doing so without being seen would be more difficult.

  I’d called Fergus Hunter, the stables manager, and he’d said that he hadn’t seen anyone climbing through the hatch, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t occurred. He wasn’t there all the time, and hardly ever in the evenings.

  The Cheltenham stables had opened on the Friday before the racing started on the following Tuesday, with some of the Irish runners arriving early in order to get over the journey. So from Friday onwards there had been security staff at the stable entrance, which was right next to the manager’s office.

  But the security was for the stable area itself, not the space above the office. Anyone dressed as a water company employee, carrying a ladder over his shoulder, wouldn’t have been stopped from climbing up to the tank even if he’d had a large bag of Ritalin tablets dangling from his belt.

  Similarly, access to the water jump at Aintree would have been easy. Whereas the grandstands may have been lit up at night, the track itself would have been in darkness, and it was impossible to patrol the whole perimeter to prevent someone climbing in.

  However, access to the weighing room and jockeys’ area at Ascot would not have been available to all, even early in the day before racing had started.

  The gates of Ascot racetrack, those that allowed the public to enter, had been opened on that particular Saturday at ten-thirty, by which time the Clerk of the Scales in the weighing room had arrived.

  Anyone out of place would have surely been challenged.

  No one other than jockeys, their valets and those persons authorized by the BHA were officially allowed into the changing room, except that in recent years TV crews and all sorts of others in the media also had access, especially on big race days, but only with the permission of the Clerk of the Scales.

  And why had our friend used Ritalin in the water at Cheltenham?

  In the Unwin case the drug had been Dexedrine.

  I looked up Dexedrine on the Internet. Dexedrine was a trade name of the drug dextroamphetamine sulfate. According to the various websites I visited, Dexedrine was one of the medications widely used in the treatment of hyperactivity—just as Ritalin was.

  Was that a coincidence? Maybe not.

  Two very different drugs, two very different chemical formulae, but both treatments for the same disorder.

  Was the perpetrator himself hyperactive? Or did he have hyperactive children?

  —

  I WAS still researching the drugs when Quentin called me at nine o’clock. That was all I needed when time was short.

  “How’s Faye?” I asked.

  Quentin ignored such niceties. “Have you spoken to the friend about withdrawing his statement?”

  “No,” I said, “not yet.”

  “Why not?” he demanded.

  “Quentin, I’ve been busy. Didn’t you see what happened at Aintree yesterday?”

  “No.”

  I believed him, despite the disruption of the Grand National being the lead story on every TV and radio news bulletin and the topic of every newspaper headline. Quentin had less interest in sport than anyone else I knew. He was probably the only man in England who didn’t know that Manchester United was a soccer team.

  “I will try to get round to speaking with him later this week.”

  “I suppose that will have to do,” replied Quentin in a tone that left me under no illusion that I had not, in his eyes, fulfilled my obligations.

  “I may be able to convince him to withdraw his statement without there being any payment made. That way, we do not open ourselves up so much to a charge of perverting the course of justice.”

  “Just do what it takes,” he said. “And the sooner, the better. Kenneth is getting very depressed at the prospect of a trial.”

  Kenneth is getting depressed, I thought, not by the prospect of a trial but at the certainty that his father would then discover that he was gay.

  20

  I walked into the BHA offices at five minutes to eleven, but it was clear the Board meeting had been going on for some time before I arrived. I could see through the glass wall that even Crispin Larson was in the meeting ahead of me.

  Not good news for my mortgage, I thought.

  “Ah, Hinkley,” said Roger Vincent as I knocked on and opened the boardroom door. “Come in and sit down.” He indicated towards one of the empty chairs to his left.

  I sat down and looked around the table. I could almost feel the hostility. They were after a scapegoat and I was firmly in their rifle sights.

  “Now,” Roger Vincent said, turning to me, “we think this Grand National business is all a bit of a mess.”

  “It’s more than ‘a bit of a mess,’” said Ian Tulloch loudly from the far end. “It’s a fucking disaster.”

  “Now, now, Ian,” said Roger Vincent rather pompously. “There’s no need for that sort of language.”

  “Yes, there is,” said Piers Pottinger, leaning forward and banging the table with his fist. “Ian is absolutely right. It is a fucking disaster. One of my horses was in that race and he’s been completely traumatized. He was still sweating in the stables over an hour after the incident and it will take us ages to get him back on a racetrack, never mind the fact that he was going so well at the time, and that might be my only chance to win a Grand National. But, on top of that, this Board is a being ridiculed by the racing press. You’ve all read today’s Racing Post. Their front page is tantamount to a call for our collective resignation. They even advocate a return to the Jockey Club as the authority for racing.”

  “It’s not us that should resign,” muttered Ian Tulloch, “it’s young Mr. Hinkley there.”

  I looked at the other directors, but I couldn’t spot much support. Even Neil Wallinger was looking down at his hands rather than catching my eye.

  “We feel humiliated,” said Bill Ripley. “Perhaps it’s time for a change in policy and a change in personnel.”

  I was not going to walk calmly up the steps to my execution. If they thought I was going to resign, they were much mistaken.

  “You make it sound as if I was responsible for the fireworks,” I said loudly. “Let me remind you that I was in favor of bringing in the police right from the start.”

  There were nods from some, including Crispin Larson and Howard Lever.

  “But it was also you who suggested that we should ignore this man and now this has happened.” Bill Ripley was going in for the kill. “If we had paid what he wanted in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “You really think so?” I said sarcastically. “You’d be in a much worse mess if you’d paid the man the five million he originally demanded. The BHA would then not only be bankrupt but you’d still have had no guarantee that he wouldn’t disrupt the Grand National.” I paused and took a deep breath. “In fact, I think it highly likely that it would have made no difference what course of action we took, he would have carried through his disruption of the Grand National anyway just to make a point.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Ian Tulloch. “How can you possibly believe that?”

  “Because I’m starting to understand the way this man acts. There is no way he could expect the negotiations between him and the BHA to have been over by the time the National was run, and obtaining those fireworks would have taken quite a time. They were more like theatrical
pyrotechnics than regular fireworks. They are certainly not the sort you can simply go into a High Street shop and buy; they have to be obtained through a special supplier. He must have been planning to disrupt the race for weeks, if not for months. Certainly long before he sent us the first demand.”

  More sets of eyes were looking me in the face, but no one was saying anything, so I went on. “I think we are looking for a racing insider rather than a random member of the public.”

  “Why?” asked Howard Lever.

  “Mostly because of Ascot,” I said. “Someone had to have access to the changing room before the Clerk of the Scales arrived. And the gates didn’t open for the public until ten-thirty, by which time he was already there. Either that or it was someone who was entitled to enter the changing room after ten-thirty, so the Clerk wouldn’t challenge them. Maybe a jockey or a valet.”

  “The Clerk of the Scales wouldn’t have been there watching every minute of the time,” said Stephen Kohli. “He has other duties. He doesn’t have to be at his desk until about an hour before the first race. Anyone could have slipped into the changing room unnoticed before that.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But would you take the chance of being stopped with a poisoned ginger cake? I don’t believe this man leaves much to chance.”

  “Do we have CCTV at Ascot?” Neil Wallinger asked.

  “Yes, we have,” I said.

  “Well? What does it show?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It is only used as a record of what happens in the jockeys’ changing areas and in the weighing room with regards to the rules restricting the use of cell phones by jockeys during the period that begins half an hour before the first race and ends when the last race starts. Hence, the CCTV system wasn’t switched on until half past one, by which time the cake was in position.”

  There were a few mutterings of disbelief.

  “Who would know that?” asked Howard Lever.

  “It’s general knowledge, especially among the lady jockeys,” I said. “They have reluctantly accepted that CCTV is necessary in their changing rooms for the enforcement of the cell phone rules, but only on condition that it does not operate outside the restriction period. Otherwise, they rightly claim that it’s an excessive breach of their privacy.”