Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931)

by Francis, Felix

  “No,” I said. “Quite the reverse. She was looking forward to riding today at Newmarket. And she was hopeful of being the first lady jockey to win a Classic next May. I can’t believe she would kill herself.”

  “She wouldn’t,” my father said decisively from over by the window. “Clare was here only yesterday, and she was talking about coming back to see us in two weeks. Why would she do that if she was contemplating suicide? It’s all nonsense.”

  “And,” I said, “she hardly ate anything at dinner last night because she was due to be riding very light today. Why would she bother?”

  The phone vibrated in my pocket. In my business, ringing phones on the air were severely frowned upon, and I had been caught out too often in the past. Nowadays I permanently left mine on “vibrate only.”

  It was Sarah, the lady Clare had called my non-proper girlfriend.

  “Excuse me a moment,” I said, walking out into the hallway.

  I answered the phone. “Hello.”

  “Mark, my darling, I’ve been watching The Morning Line. I can’t believe it. Oh my love, I’m so sorry.” She was crying.

  “Thank you for calling,” I said inadequately. “I’m at my parents’ house, and it’s a bit bloody here at the moment.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ll be at Newbury, then?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “OK. I’ll call you later,” Sarah said.

  “Right. Bye, now.”

  She disconnected, and I stood for a moment in the hallway, thinking. What was it that Clare had said? When are you going to realize she won’t ever leave Mitchell? She can’t afford to.

  Mitchell was her husband—Mitchell Stacey—her much older husband. He was one of the country’s leading steeplechase trainers, with over eighty top horses in his yard in the village of East Ilsley, north of Newbury.

  It had been five years now since that Friday night at Doncaster when Sarah and I had carelessly ended up in bed, professing undying love for each other.

  We had both been there for the two-day Christmas National Hunt Meeting. I had been commentating at the course, and Mitchell had had runners on both days. He and Sarah had stayed over in the same hotel as me, where we had all dined together in a large party of racing folk. Mitchell and the others had gone straight to bed after dinner, as was the norm, in my experience, with racehorse trainers, while Sarah and I had shared, first, another bottle of red wine, then a nightcap liqueur or two, followed by a passionate sexual encounter in my bedroom.

  Since then we had survived on snatched hours here and there, sometimes even a night or two together whenever Mitchell was away at the sales, and I had run up huge telephone bills calling her cell.

  We had been due to see each other at the Newbury races this afternoon and then for a while afterward at a carefully selected, discreet motel near Hungerford, one more fleeting assignation in our ongoing dangerous liaison.

  Another of Clare’s pearls of wisdom came floating into my mind—Tell her it’s now or never and you’re fed up waiting. You’re wasting your life.

  Was I?

  I was thirty-one, and Sarah was four years my senior. Mitchell, however, was now in his sixties, having been married twice before. How he had wooed and won the then-twenty-one-year-old Sarah remained a mystery to me, but perhaps it was something to do with his immense wealth, most of which he had inherited as a baby from his grandfather, an eccentric oil magnate.

  They didn’t have any children of their own—Sarah told me that Mitchell had had a vasectomy before they met—but there were three boys from his previous marriages, and Sarah was being the dutiful stepmother. The youngest was about to finish school, and Sarah told me that then she would leave Mitchell and come and live with me. But, in truth, it was the latest in a long list of prospective departure dates, and maybe Clare had been right: Sarah never would leave Mitchell. She couldn’t afford to.

  But did I care? Was I, in fact, not content with how things were? The old joke—I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure—seemed to have been written for me. As things stood, sex was fairly frequent and exciting, but I also quite enjoyed the freedom of living on my own.

  However, there was also the worry of being found out. Mitchell Stacey was a hugely influential character in racing, and I wasn’t at all sure my job would be safe if he discovered that I’d been seducing his wife behind his back. But would it be any better if we came clean and Sarah left him for me? Probably not. The best thing, I decided, was simply to carry on as before and not get caught.

  Nicholas, my brother-in-law, came out of the drawing room, looking for me. “This policeman needs to ask you some more questions.”

  “Sorry. I’m coming.”

  —

  DETECTIVE SERGEANT SHARP remained for another two hours, asking mundane questions and annoying us all. My brother James, the eldest of the Shillingford offspring, arrived in the middle with his scatterbrained wife, Helen, so much of the ground had to be covered again.

  Finally, the policeman seemed content with the answers he had, not that any of us were able to give him any reason why Clare should have thrown herself to her death from the balcony of a hotel room on the fifteenth floor.

  “Are you sure that’s a suicide note?” I’d asked him as he’d shown it to James. “It doesn’t say anything about dying.”

  He’d said nothing, but his expression had shown that he thought I was grasping at straws. Maybe I was.

  “I’m afraid there will need to be a formal identification of the body,” he said in the hallway.

  To his credit, Nicholas volunteered immediately.

  “It would be better to be a blood relative,” said the detective, “rather than an in-law.”

  “Can’t you do it by DNA?” I asked.

  “We can, sir, yes. But that takes time.”

  And money, I thought.

  “The coroner will likely want to open an inquest first thing on Monday, and he will want evidence of identification at that point.”

  “The policeman who came last night told me that you were one hundred percent certain it was Clare. He said there were witnesses. Who were they?”

  The detective somehow seemed reluctant to tell me.

  “Who were they?” I pressed.

  “There had been a charity gala dinner in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel. Most of the guests had left before Miss Shillingford fell.” He paused. “But there were a few that had stayed on after the dinner for a drink in the bar. She narrowly missed landing on this group as they were waiting for a taxi.”

  Oh God, I thought.

  “The gala dinner,” he went on, “had been in aid of the Injured Jockeys Fund.”

  Of course. I remembered getting an invitation to buy tickets for the event, but, as usual, I had left it so late before deciding that all the spaces had already gone.

  “And the group had included a Mr. Reg Nicholl, an ex–police superintendent who, I understand, is now the head of the racing security services. It was he who confirmed the identity of Miss Shillingford.”

  “I still can’t understand what she was doing there in the first place,” I said, “let alone having booked a room. I feel this is just a huge mistake and that Clare is at home, safe, in Newmarket.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not a mistake, sir. It would appear that your sister turned up at the hotel without having made a reservation. There had been a cancellation, and Miss Shillingford checked in using her credit card at . . .”—he consulted his notebook—“. . . ten-twenty p.m.”

  An hour and ten minutes after leaving me. She must have gone almost straight from Haxted Mill to the hotel. But why?

  In the end it was decided that James would go with Detective Sergeant Sharp to perform the gruesome task of making a formal identification, and Nicholas would go with
him for support.

  I couldn’t decide whether I should go as well. Part of me really wanted to in order to see Clare for one last time, but I was frightened. Fifteen floors was a long way down, and I didn’t like to think about what the impact might have done to her. But, equally, I was distressed by my memory of the last time I had seen her alive, staring straight ahead in anger as she drove away from the restaurant.

  —

  THE AFTERNOON dragged by, with my mother taking herself off to bed, while my father wore a groove in the carpet, endlessly pacing up and down the drawing room. Helen and Angela, meanwhile, adjourned to the kitchen to find us all something to eat, and I settled down in the small sitting room on my own to watch the racing on Channel 4 from Newmarket and Newbury.

  The program started with a short tribute to Clare, showing video clips of her winning many races on a variety of horses. The flags at Newmarket racetrack were flying at half-mast, and there was even a minute’s silence before the first race, with some racegoers clearly in tears.

  I watched the races, but less than half my mind was on the action. I kept coming back to the same two questions. Why had Clare gone to a hotel in central London? And why had she killed herself?

  So distracted was I that I only remembered my hundred-pound bet on Raised Heartbeat when the horse was being loaded into the starting gate at Newbury. As I had predicted last evening, his price had shortened from thirteen-to-two to five-to-one, but with my computer still at my apartment it was too late now to lay the horse on the Internet exchanges. My money would just have to take its chances on the nose.

  The horses broke from the gate in an even line, and I found myself commentating on the race inside my head. However, as was always the case, my eye was drawn unintentionally toward the horse I had backed. It was why I almost never had a bet in those races on which I was commentating, it was simply too distracting.

  Raised Heartbeat lived up to his name, lifting my own pulse a notch or two, as he fought out a tight finish with the favorite, going down to defeat only in the final stride.

  My hundred pounds was lost, but it was a minor inconvenience compared to the greater loss of my twin sister.

  I sat there alone for quite a while and wept.

  I cried in grief, but also I cried in frustration. Death was so final, so permanent. There was no “undo button” like there was on my computer.

  Why oh why hadn’t I answered the phone when Clare had called me? Perhaps I could have prevented this disaster.

  —

  STEPHEN AND TRACY arrived from Saint-Tropez at four o’clock, just as James and Nicholas returned from the morgue, looking drawn and shell-shocked.

  I didn’t need to ask how it had been, and I was suddenly thankful that I’d decided not to go with them.

  James just nodded at me before disappearing into the cloakroom. I wondered if he was going to be sick.

  “Bloody awful,” said Nicholas. “Literally, bloody awful. But it was her. No mistake.”

  I hadn’t really expected there to be a mistake, but the confirmation of what we already knew was, nevertheless, another cause of distress, especially for my mother, who had come down to greet the new arrivals.

  We sat once more in the drawing room, this time for some tea, except that my father refused to sit down, again pacing back and forth near the French windows.

  None of us could imagine why Clare would have taken her own life. We speculated about what might have been troubling her but came up short providing any answers.

  “I absolutely refuse to believe she committed suicide,” said my father resolutely. “It had to have been an accident.”

  “Or murder,” said Stephen.

  Everyone looked at him. Even my father ceased his pacing.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Why on earth would anyone want to kill our Clare? Everyone loved her.”

  But who would think that anyone would have wanted to kill John Lennon? People had loved him too.

  “What about the note?” said scatterbrained Helen. “It certainly looked like a suicide note to me.”

  I watched as my father, over her head, gave Helen a contemptuous stare. He had never been slow in expressing his disapproval of James’s choice of wife, and she clearly was not endearing herself to him right now.

  “But why would she kill herself?” Angela wailed, putting into words once more what we were all asking ourselves.

  “Maybe because living in this family is not always easy,” Helen said somewhat tactlessly.

  I thought my father was going to explode behind her.

  “Shut up, you silly woman,” he bellowed from somewhere close to her ear.

  Helen instantly burst into tears and was comforted by James, who tried to defend his wife.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Helen is right. We are all so competitive.”

  Yes, I suppose we were.

  It was how we had been brought up. Top of the class, top of the class, you must strive to be top of the class. It had been drummed into us as children. School, university, first-class degree, job in the City. It had been like a mantra for our father.

  He had been appalled and outraged when both Clare and I had announced that we had no wish to follow our older siblings to Oxford or Cambridge, or to any other university, but were determined to go straight into racing. Not that racing had been a departure for the Shillingford family.

  Prior to his retirement to a villa in southern Spain, our uncle, my father’s younger brother, had been a multi-Classic-winning Newmarket trainer, and he had himself taken over the stable from our grandfather. Two of my cousins were also in the racing business, one as a trainer in the family yard and the other as the owner of a racehorse transport firm. Indeed, the Shillingfords were a much respected racing family and had been owners, trainers, and occasionally jockeys, in and around Newmarket since the days of Charles II and the founding of the Jockey Club.

  It had been my father who had been the one to take a different route, becoming the first Shillingford of record to get a university degree, let alone a first-class from Merton College, Oxford.

  But there was no doubt that the family as a whole, whether in the City of London or on the racetrack, had a huge competitive streak in its makeup. Clare certainly had, and she’d said so at our dinner at Haxted Mill.

  Only I amongst the Shillingford clan, it seemed, hadn’t been born with fire in his belly to be The Very Best of the Best. But even I could be pretty competitive if pushed, and I didn’t like it much when people said that I wasn’t the best commentator in racing, although I knew what they were saying was true.

  “Perhaps we drove her to it,” James said gloomily.

  “What utter nonsense,” my father stated, resuming his pacing. This time, however, he didn’t pace aimlessly back and forth but made a beeline for the liquor cabinet in the corner. “I need a drink,” he said, sloshing a hefty slug of whisky into a tumbler and knocking it back in one gulp.

  I looked at my watch. It was only a quarter to five, but it felt much later. I’d already been up for almost fourteen hours, and I’d had far less than a full night’s sleep before that.

  I, too, could have done with a drink, but I didn’t say so.

  And I did tend to agree with my father on one point: I also couldn’t envisage how the family could have driven Clare to kill herself. Sure, we were all competitive, but, if anything, Clare was more competitive than the rest of us put together. And she had thrived on it.

  People who took their own lives, I’d always believed, were driven to it by failure and rejection, not by success and widespread affection. But I knew that wasn’t universally true. I could recall several high-profile suicides whose deaths had staggered the public, where an outward persona of joy, happiness, and huge achievement had masked some inner depression and hopelessness.
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  The real truth was that one never knew what was going on in someone else’s head.

  And the big question that wouldn’t leave mine was whether Clare’s death was related to me confronting her about her riding of Bangkok Flyer and her subsequent admission of race fixing.

  Her note might seem to imply this, but her unconcerned, almost blasé reaction at dinner hardly seemed to fit with her being so tormented by it that she had thrown herself from a balcony only two and a half hours later. However, I decided that now was neither the time nor the place to introduce this new factor into the discussion.

  Nothing prepares a family for death, particularly the death of one of its youngest members. But my family had responded in true Shillingford fashion, shouting one another down and refusing to countenance any opinion but their own. Only Nicholas demonstrated any real decorum, and I realized he was the only one amongst them I actually liked.

  I finally escaped from this hotbed of accusation and blame, using the excuse that there were insufficient bedrooms for us all to stay and, as I lived closest, it was easiest for me to come and go.

  So I went, and just as soon as I could.

  5

  On Monday I went to the races and back to work. It seemed like the logical thing to do.

  I had sat at home alone all day Sunday, feeling miserable, answering the hundreds of e-mails that kindly people had sent, and dealing with the fifty or so voice messages on my phones. How I wished Clare had left a message on Friday evening.

  Why hadn’t I answered her call?

  By Monday morning I’d been desperately in need of some human contact, but the thought of going back to my family in Oxted had filled me with horror. So much so that I’d invented a sudden nasty cold in order to escape from them.

  “Are you sure you can’t come?” my mother had asked when I’d called early Sunday morning.

  “Quite sure,” I’d replied while holding my nose. “I don’t want to give this cold to Dad.”

  I’d been on safe ground. She knew as well as I did that my father was obsessive about avoiding people with colds. Indeed, he was obsessive about lots of things. How she had put up with him for fifty-two years I couldn’t imagine.