Tip Off

by John Francome

  ‘Yes, we did.’

  ‘Then why have you ignored it?’ he rasped.

  ‘We haven’t,’ I said simply. ‘We sent a final report and account and, as far as we’re concerned, we aren’t acting for the Jockey Club in any capacity at all.’

  ‘Why, then, were you interfering with a Jockey Club official going about his business at Newbury today?’

  I was annoyed that he’d already worked that out, but there didn’t seem to be any point in denying it was us. ‘We’ve been instructed by another client to examine the circumstances surrounding Toby’s death,’ I said calmly. ‘We had no idea the man you’re talking about was one of your people. We’d never seen him before.’

  ‘You’d never seen him before because he’s newly appointed. I deliberately wanted a new face to handle this because you people got nowhere and this absurd string of winners hasn’t dried up. I’ve come in for some very sharp criticism for hiring you and your gung-ho partner. And now, just when one of our own people looks as though he’s getting somewhere, you stick your oar in and we lose our suspect.’ He glared at me. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ I said. ‘But do you think the people responsible will still try to carry on what they were doing?’ I was fishing; I wanted to know just how much Tintern’s appointee had discovered.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he said, ‘for the moment, but we need to produce a culprit and thanks to you, that’s going to be very difficult.’

  ‘I can only say I’m sorry if we’ve hampered your investigations, but I think you’ll find we did nothing we weren’t entitled to.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. Somebody assaulted our man, and I strongly suspect you had other people out on the course where they shouldn’t have been.’ He paused. When he started to speak again, his manner was milder. ‘Now listen, Simon. I don’t want you interfering in Jockey Club business, but if you do find out anything at all connected to this tipping business, let me know. We really do need to get to the bottom of it.’

  ‘Of course,’ I agreed. ‘And I may well need your help. For instance, do you happen to know much about the personnel at the Equine Forensic Lab?’

  ‘I remember distinctly giving you all relevant information about that. There’s a man called Rupert Greeves who’s responsible for security there. He’d have told us long ago if we had anything to worry about there.’

  To my relief, at that moment Emma burst into the study.

  She ignored the annoyance in Tintern’s face. ‘Sorry, Dad.’ I could hear her forcing out the word. ‘I’ve got to drag Simon off or we’ll be late for dinner.’

  I shrugged my shoulders and gratefully followed her from the room.

  ‘Late?’ I asked, once we were in my car and driving away from the house. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Who cares?’

  I looked at her; she was on the verge of tears. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head.

  I put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a squeeze. ‘It’s seeing Frank again, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sure he knows who I am.’

  ‘Maybe you should face him with it.’

  ‘I couldn’t. Suppose I’m wrong?’

  ‘But if you want to know the truth it might be your only course. After all, unless your mother told Gerald about her affair there’s no reason for him to assume you’re not his daughter.’

  ‘I think he knows bloody well I’m not his. And for some reason, he seems to want me to know it too.’

  ‘Look, Emma, let’s get this business of Toby out of the way then we’ll deal with your problem, I promise. But in the meantime don’t let yourself get uptight about it; that’ll only make it worse for you.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she sniffed, ‘but seeing Frank again . . .’

  ‘I understand.’ I nodded gently. ‘But let’s concentrate on Toby first, for Jane’s sake.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  By the following morning there had still been no sign of Lincoln at the West London flat. The photographer, though, had been trailed by Jack and Dougie to a small house on the edge of Windsor.

  ‘I’ve told them to leave it for the time being,’ Matt said. ‘Now we know where to get him when we want him.’

  ‘Have they found out anything else about him?’

  ‘They’ve checked with the electoral list. The house is registered to someone called Frederick Tresidder, and a neighbour’s confirmed it. I suppose that must be him. He lives there with his wife apparently.’

  ‘That sounds a bit too cosy and suburban,’ I said, trying to reconcile it to the bizarre contraption he’d been carrying at the races.

  We agreed then that our first move that morning should be to pay a visit to Connor McDonagh’s house to try to establish once and for all just how much he knew about what was going on and to see if he could be persuaded to co-operate with us.

  I drove the five or six miles over the downs in bright, crisp sunshine, feeling patches of ice beneath my wheels in some of the narrower lanes. I met Matt at the crossroads in East Garston and we drove on up the side of the valley in my car to Connor’s place. It was a large Victorian house, handsome in the bright winter sun against a backdrop of artfully sited cedars and beeches.

  In all the time I’d known Connor, I’d visited his home perhaps four or five times for drinks parties and once for dinner.

  We’d always got on well enough and I’d decided to risk showing up with Matt unannounced.

  Although Connor wasn’t a notably sociable man, he liked animals, and the grounds of his house provided living space for an eclectic collection of domestic fowl, dogs, cats and goats. A pair of timber gates, lined with chicken wire, were closed across the entrance.

  Matt jumped out of the car and opened them to let us in, taking care to close them once I was through.

  We parked on a wide area of gravel in front of the house and walked to the short flight of steps that led up to a colonnaded porch.

  Our footsteps made a loud crunching sound in the still, cold air which gave a deserted feeling to the isolated place.

  I pushed a big china button beside the front door and heard the distant sound of an electric bell. But no one came to the door. I tried again, and backed it up with a few resonant raps of a large brass knocker.

  This time we heard distinct sounds of activity and relaxed while we waited for the door to be opened.

  Still no one came.

  ‘Maybe he hasn’t heard us. Let’s just go in,’ Matt suggested.

  I didn’t want to abuse my scant friendship with Connor. ‘We’ll give it a little longer.’

  Matt raised his eyebrows in an impatient expression which changed to alertness, then alarm as a door was banged at the back of the house, and we heard the sound of a car being started.

  We both stiffened.

  ‘Something’s going on.’ As he spoke, a small red Peugeot shot into sight from the side of the house.

  I couldn’t see clearly, but whoever was driving, it wasn’t Connor. We leaped down the steps from the porch and raced across the lawn towards the gate at the end of the drive.

  For an agonised second, I thought the car was going straight through it, but at the last moment the brake lights came on and it shuddered to a halt.

  A man in jeans, black donkey jacket and a woollen watch cap jumped out and sprinted away across the broad lawn towards a fence which separated it from a dense wood of young ash and birch. He leaped over it like a steeple-chaser, half a dozen strides ahead of Matt. I took a few paces after them before some instinct told me not to follow but to get inside the house.

  I ran back up the steps and tried the handle to the front door. It was locked and immovable. I didn’t waste any more time on it but instead ran down the steps and round to the rear where Matt’s quarry must have left by a back door.

  I found it and pushed through into a dark, narrow passage, stopping for a moment to listen for any noises.
r />   After a few seconds of silence broken only by the raucous calls of the crows outside, I heard a faint but distinctly human moan.

  I advanced quietly to the door in front of me and pushed it open. Beyond was a gloomy hall. Through another door, I heard a second moan, sharper than the first.

  Nervously, wishing Matt were with me, I edged cautiously into a small sitting room which, by my fleeting assessment, was Connor’s everyday snug. He was in there, half lying across a canary-coloured sofa. His eyes were open, but rolling wildly so they showed almost all white.

  I couldn’t begin to guess what had been going on, but it was clear that Connor’s condition was more than serious. His breathing was coming fast and stertorous from his heaving chest. He was motioning to me with his left arm.

  ‘Connor!’ I crouched down on one knee by his head. ‘What happened?’

  He shook his head, closing his rolling eyes in pain and resignation. ‘Gone,’ he whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘No . . . no.’ The words were little more than an expulsion of air. With a visibly supreme effort he tried to speak again. But it was too much for him.

  I remembered that Connor was a diabetic, but I knew next to nothing about the condition, other than that in extreme cases the need for a significant infusion of insulin could be critical.

  ‘Do you need insulin? Have you got any, anywhere?’ I asked urgently.

  His only reply was a faint shake of his head.

  I straightened my legs and looked around the room until I found a phone. I grabbed the receiver and lifted it.

  The line was dead. I jabbed the button, but still nothing.

  I ran from the room. Using my skimpy knowledge of the house I found his study, and another useless telephone. The man in the donkey jacket must have cut the line outside. I ran back to the snug where Connor had stopped writhing. His chest moved only faintly. ‘Have you got a mobile phone?’ I asked. ‘I’ve got to get you an ambulance.’

  I could just detect a shake of the head.

  I raced outside and round the house to the Audi, pulling my own phone from the arm rest.

  Fumbling with panic, I pressed in nine nine nine; I had to do it twice more to get through.

  Finally I was able to blurt out to someone what had happened. A woman’s calm voice asked me to tell her again, and to give precise details of the victim’s condition and the location of the incident.

  I clicked off the phone, shaking but confident that help was on the way. Still clutching it like a life belt, I ran round the house, through the back door and into the room where Connor lay.

  With intense relief, I saw that his eyes were still open. I detected a faint effort to turn them towards me as I came in. I squatted down beside him again. ‘There’s an ambulance coming.’

  He didn’t give any perceptible reaction.

  ‘What happened?’

  This time Connor blinked with the strain of getting the words out. ‘The naps,’ he gasped.

  ‘He was asking you how they won?’

  Connor barely nodded.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ I asked, breathless myself now.

  He closed his eyes and lay very still. It was thirty seconds before I realised he’d stopped breathing.

  I simply hadn’t known that his condition was so serious. In a haze of guilt, I wondered if an ambulance was coming from Newbury or if the operator had contacted the doctor in Lambourn, who would take half the time to arrive. I guessed that was more likely, and set about trying to revive Connor, pumping at his chest for all I was worth.

  I knew it wasn’t working; I thought about applying my mouth to his pale, open lips, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. I stood up and gazed down at him with horrified fascination. I thought of the doctor, or an ambulance, already on their way, arriving pointlessly, too late.

  What was I going to tell them?

  Should I phone the police?

  I couldn’t decide; instead, I went out to look for Matt. There was no sign of him, or any sound from the woods where he’d plunged after the intruder. Without thinking about it, I ran to the end of the drive where the Peugeot had been abandoned, and drove the car back behind the house to make way for the ambulance when it arrived.

  In the silence after I’d switched off the motor, I steeled myself to go back inside the house and see if, against all likelihood, Connor had revived in some way.

  I put my head through the door of the snug and saw no sign of life in the sprawled body.

  Shaking, I forced myself to walk across the hall to Connor’s study which looked out across the front lawn. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but felt intuitively that there must be more of a link between Connor and Toby than just their spectacular success as tipsters.

  I made myself rummage through the papers on his desk and in the drawers, but my mind kept returning to the body lying on the floor, ten yards away.

  I felt guiltily certain there must have been more I could have done to help him.

  Maybe, I thought, I should have tried to get him into my car as soon as I’d found him, and driven him straight to the village.

  But I hadn’t wanted to move him; I hadn’t known what to do. And it was too late now.

  I carried on fumbling through the uninformative contents of the desk and was slipping some bank statements, showing a healthy but not especially large balance, back into their folder, when an ambulance turned into the drive, hurtled up to the house and slithered to a halt across the sea of gravel.

  Two men in green uniforms leaped out carrying medical bags.

  Although there was no hurry now, I ran to the front door and beckoned them into the room where Connor’s body lay.

  I waved them at it and they clustered around, assessing the position at once, immediately applying standard revival procedures.

  As they did it, I wondered how warm the pale flesh was now. Had there been sufficient time for the body to cool?

  Perhaps it had only been four or five minutes; I had no idea. I’d lost all sense of time in the stark surrealism of this second death, occurring exactly a week after Toby’s.

  Meanwhile, the paramedics heaved and pumped, grunting words of encouragement at Connor’s body, until one of them turned to me with an implicit shrug.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s already gone. Do you know when he stopped breathing?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I lied, not wanting to get involved in long, drawn out explanations. ‘That’s how I found him; there was nothing I could do, so I dialled nine nine nine.’

  ‘We’ll take him back to hospital so they can have a look at him. Are you all right to make your own way there?’

  ‘Me? Why do you want me to come?’ I realised that I’d spoken a little more hastily than I should have done.

  ‘You found the gentleman. You called us; now he’s dead. They’ll need to know how he was when you came. Perhaps you’d better come with us.’

  ‘No, that’s okay. I’ve got my own transport. I ought to secure this place first.’

  The younger of the two men had brushed past me from the room, I guessed to fetch a stretcher.

  ‘Ought I to tell the police as well?’

  ‘Oh, yes, sir. We’ll have to put in a report, too.’

  As I watched the ambulance disappear into the lane at the end of the drive, I picked up the sounds of human presence in the woods across the lawn. A moment later, Matt was clambering over the fence, tugging a belt wrapped around the wrists of the man who’d leaped from the Peugeot twenty-five minutes earlier. The small, hard-looking individual had lost his woollen hat. His mousy hair was cut short, with long sideburns. I guessed he was about forty but his face was bruised and his mouth swollen so it was hard to tell. There was a trickle of blood over his temple and his narrow tawny eyes slid resentfully from side to side.

  Matt only spoke when he was standing in front of me. ‘Was that Connor in the ambulance?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded.

 
‘What’s happened to him?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  I noticed the sudden look of alarm on the prisoner’s face.

  ‘How?’ Matt asked. ‘This little shit says he hardly touched him.’

  I shrugged a shoulder. ‘Connor was a diabetic.’

  Matt turned on his scowling prisoner. ‘What did you do to him, you little bastard?’

  ‘I din’ touch the wanker. I tol’ you – he had some kind of fit.’ The man rubbed the side of his face. ‘And I’ll report you to the police for what you done,’ he growled.

  Matt gave him a sideways glance. ‘Oh, really?’ As he spoke, he threw a fist so hard and fast into the side of the man’s head that he buckled to the ground, unconscious for a few seconds.

  I looked sharply at Matt, not hiding my disapproval. ‘Why did you do that?’

  He shrugged, as if he’d just brushed a speck of dust from his jacket. ‘Well, if he’s going to report us,’ he tried to justify his action, ‘he may as well have something to tell them. And when he comes round, it’ll be easier to find out what he was really doing here.’

  We found a coal cellar below Connor’s house. Access to it was by a flight of outside stone steps at the back of the building. I went down to open the heavy door and held it while Matt bundled our prisoner down. Once he was in I banged it shut behind us.

  There was a single, naked electric bulb hanging in the dank space, just enough to light the way to the heap of coal in the far corner below the chute.

  Matt picked up a billhook he found beside a pile of chopped wood. He crouched next to the man and pressed it into his neck.

  ‘Now, let me tell you,’ he said in an icy voice that it would have been impossible to take lightly, ‘we’re a very long way from anyone here, and any sounds you or I make aren’t going to be heard by anybody else. If I chop your fingers off, one at a time, the only living creatures who’ll hear are a few sparrows outside, and maybe some of the rats that live down here. Now, I don’t want to have to hurt you, but if you waste my time or lie to me, I’ll have no choice and no one to stop me.’ He paused for a few seconds. ‘Understand?’

  The bowed head nodded twice.