Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931)

by Francis, Felix

  “So what do you tell them to do?”

  “Go home earlier and stay out of the office at weekends.”

  “And do they listen?”

  “Not often,” he said with a laugh. “In the City, money equates to testosterone. All of them are driven to get more and more of it, irrespective of the human cost.”

  I knew some people in racing who were just like that, people for whom winning was like a Class A drug, and they were addicted.

  I took a tray of sandwiches and offered them around to the miserable bunch of my relatives who were sitting in the drawing room. Conversation topics, it seemed, were minimal, and the food provided some relief, something to talk about. Nicholas followed me with the wine that I hoped might lighten the gloom.

  I went back to the kitchen to find Brendan helping himself to a large glass of red.

  “Just what I need,” he said, taking a sizable slug. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought the kids. They’re quite distressed by it all. Their first funeral.”

  “How old are they now?” I asked, not really that interested.

  “Christopher is sixteen and Patrick will be fourteen next week.”

  “Mmm,” I said, “maybe they are still a bit young.” Nicholas and Angela hadn’t brought Tatiana, and she was older than both of Brendan’s boys.

  “But the boys were so eager to come.” He laughed. “Probably just to get a day off school. But I think they might be regretting it now though. There’s not much fun in this family.”

  I poured myself a large glass of red as well.

  “How often did Clare ride for you?” I asked. I was thinking of one of the definites I had found in the database, the race when she had stopped Brendan’s horse, Jasmine Pearls, in the Chester City Plate.

  “Not that often,” he replied. “Most of mine are ridden by Dennis Wilson, and Clare was always riding for Grubby.”

  “Don’t I remember her riding one for you at Chester back in July?”

  “Jasmine Pearls,” he said, nodding. “She should have won too. I don’t think Clare was at her best that day. She went to the front too soon, and the horse stopped itself. Pearly obviously didn’t like being in front. Some horses don’t. She’s won since, though, at Leicester, having been held up to the last moment.”

  “Did Clare ride her then?”

  “No. Dennis. And he should also have been riding her at Chester, but he’d been thrown the previous day and hurt his ankle.”

  “So how many times did she ride for you altogether?”

  “Maybe a dozen or fifteen over the years. Perhaps more. She last rode for me a couple of weeks ago at Doncaster on a difficult sod of a colt called Cotton House Boy. He always seems to go better with a girl up. Strange, that.”

  He took one of the cheese-and-pickle sandwiches off the tray I was still holding.

  “Suppose I’d better get these kids back home,” he said with his mouth full.

  “I went to the hotel yesterday,” I said.

  “Hotel?”

  “The London Hilton, on Park Lane.”

  “Oh?” he said. “And?”

  “It seems that Clare met two men in her room before she died, and one of them might even have been there when she fell.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “No,” I said, “but I certainly intend to find out. The police took away some of the hotel CCTV video. I’ve asked them if I can have a look, but the detective in charge is on leave this week and, unbelievably, no one else seems to know anything about it. I’ll just have to wait until he comes back, but it’s bloody frustrating.”

  “Would it make any difference if you knew who the men were?”

  I sighed. “I suppose not, but I’d like to understand why she did it. And I’d like to know if one of the visitors was her mystery boyfriend. Maybe they’d had a tiff, or perhaps it was something else to do with him that was troubling her.”

  Or, I thought, had she jumped because of what I had seen at Lingfield and because of what I’d said to her at dinner?

  Oh God, I hoped not.

  Perhaps I was desperate to find some other reason for her death just to relieve the burden of guilt that weighed so heavily on my chest.

  9

  On Tuesday morning I went back to work again, this time properly. Life, it seemed, had to continue, and Clare’s death was last week’s news. The world, and racing, went on regardless without her.

  I was due to be the racetrack commentator at the jumps meeting at Stratford-upon-Avon, so I left my apartment early and drove clockwise around the London orbital, then up the freeway to Warwickshire. I spent the journey thinking back to the previous afternoon and, in particular, my rather strange encounter with my father at the conclusion of the proceedings.

  With Nicholas’s wise words still fresh in my memory, and also with his troubles over the on/off nature of Tatiana’s birthday party, I had sought out my father for a quiet chat.

  At first I hadn’t been able to find him anywhere, but eventually I discovered him sitting in his high-backed desk chair in his study, in the quiet, facing the window.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. “You OK?”

  He’d swiveled slowly around to face me.

  “Not really. You?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “I’ve been a fool,” he said. He rotated the chair back so that he was again looking out at the garden and he sat silently for some time.

  “In what way?” I asked finally. But he’d been a fool in all sorts of ways.

  “Please leave me,” he replied. “I’d rather be alone.”

  I could tell from his voice that he’d been close to tears.

  “No, Dad. Talk to me.”

  “I can’t.” His whole body was shaking with sobs.

  Not only had that day been a first for him ever praising me, it was also the first time I had ever seen my father cry. He had always believed, and had stated loudly and often through my childhood, that crying was a sign of weakness. Yet there he was, sobbing like a baby.

  I didn’t really know what to do. I was sure that he was embarrassed. Perhaps I should have left him alone to recover. Instead, I grabbed the back of his chair and spun him around to face me.

  “Talk to me,” I almost shouted at him. “We never communicate. We just argue.”

  “She didn’t say good-bye,” he said suddenly.

  “What?”

  “Clare. She never said good-bye to me.”

  “Dad, she was hardly likely to ring you up to say good-bye before she killed herself.”

  “No, not that,” he said, now openly crying. “I mean, she never said good-bye to me when she left here that evening. We had argued. We always seem to, these days. I can’t even remember what it was about. Something about the house, or the garden. She kept telling me I was getting too old to look after it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we argued about—suffice to say, we did. And I told her that she was an insufferable spoiled brat who should know better than to speak to her parent like that.”

  I could imagine the exchange. I’d had them myself with the old git.

  “She just walked out without another word,” he said miserably. “She didn’t even say good-bye to your mother. I followed her outside, telling her not to be so bloody stupid, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at me. She got in her car and drove away without a backward glance.” He sobbed again. “I feel so guilty.”

  Join the club, I thought.

  —

  IT WAS ONLY about twelve o’clock when I turned in through the gates of Stratford racetrack and parked in one of the spaces reserved for the race officials. Terence Feynman, the judge for the day, pulled in beside me.

  “Hello, Terence,” I said, climbing out of my car.

  “Hi, Mark. I�
��m so sorry about Clare.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not great.”

  “No. And just as she had made the breakthrough into the big time. Funny old world.”

  I didn’t feel like laughing.

  “Are you commentating or presenting?”

  “Commentating.”

  “See you later then up top.” He rushed away across the parking lot as if he were late even though nearly two hours remained before the first race.

  The judge’s booth was alongside the commentator position at the top of the grandstand, his being directly in line with the winning post to enable him to accurately call the winner, assisted if necessary by the photo-finish camera that sat immediately above him.

  Prior to 1949 there were no such cameras, and the judge was the sole arbiter of who had won and who hadn’t.

  Infamously, in the 1913 running of the 2,000 Guineas, the judge, Charlie Robinson, announced a horse called Louvois as the winner when every single other person at Newmarket that day believed Craganour had passed the post in front and won easily by a length.

  Nevertheless, Louvois was declared the winner because the judge said so.

  There was speculation and rumor at the time that Robinson had been influenced by the fact that he’d had friends who had died on the Titanic the previous year. Craganour was owned by C. Bower Ismay, younger brother of J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, the company that had owned the Titanic. And it had been widely reported at the time, albeit wrongly, that J. Bruce Ismay had saved himself by securing a place in one of Titanic’s lifeboats by disguising himself as a woman.

  But whatever anyone else might have thought, the judge’s decision was final, and Louvois remained the official winner, and his name is still in the record books.

  Not until 1983 were photo-finish cameras used at all British racetracks, and the first colored images were not available until 1989.

  And it hasn’t been just the judge’s role that has changed due to modern technology.

  The very first racetrack commentary in England was at Goodwood on July 29, 1952. For the previous eight hundred years, since the first documented racetrack at Smithfield in London in the twelfth century, races had been run in silence, the only sounds being the thudding of the horses’ hooves on the turf and the cheering of the crowd.

  Even as late as 1996, races at Keeneland, a premier racetrack in Lexington, Kentucky, were run without any public address other than a bell being rung when the race began. At Ascot, they still ring a bell to alert the crowd when the runners enter the finishing stretch even though there has been race commentary at the track since the mid-1950s.

  I walked into Stratford racetrack through the main entrance only to come face-to-face with Toby Woodley from the Daily Gazette.

  “Have you seen my piece today?” he asked in a loathsomely self-satisfied manner.

  “No,” I replied. “I never read your rag.”

  “You ought to,” he sneered. “You might learn something. Especially today.”

  He walked off toward the bar, and I watched him go. I wondered if he could have been Clare’s secret boyfriend. No, surely that was impossible.

  I walked around behind the stands to the press room, which fortunately was deserted long before the first. In common with most racetracks, Stratford looked after members of the press pretty well, providing them with tea and coffee, a tray of sandwiches, and occasionally hot soup. However, I was in search of the newspapers that they regularly left in a stack by the door. In particular, I was looking for a copy of the Daily Gazette, which I spread out on one of the wooden desks.

  My blood ran cold.

  CLARE SHILLINGFORD WAS A RACE FIXER, ran the headline in bold type across the back page.

  However, the story beneath was speculative at best and related to a race the previous April when Clare had ridden a horse called Brain of Brixham into second place on the all-weather Polytrack at Wolverhampton. It had been at an evening meeting under lights, and Clare claimed she had mistakenly thought that a pole used to support a TV camera on a wire had been the winning post. Hence she had stopped riding hard some twenty yards short of the finish and had been subsequently overtaken and beaten by another horse right on the line.

  I’d seen the video of the race at the time and I remember thinking that Clare had been rather foolish, but it had definitely not been like the others I had found. As far as I could recall, it had been just a silly, but genuine, error.

  But could I be totally sure?

  The stewards at Wolverhampton had accepted Clare’s explanation that it had been accidental and they had given her a fourteen-day suspension for careless riding. Now Toby Woodley was claiming that she had done it on purpose and been paid handsomely by a betting syndicate for her trouble.

  I heard the door open behind me.

  “So she wasn’t such an angel after all,” said Woodley with his distinctive squeak.

  I spun around. “You’re a bloody liar!” I shouted. “That race was simply an error of judgment and you know it.”

  “How about the betting syndicate?” he said. “They made a fortune laying that horse.”

  “Says who?” I demanded. “This rubbish doesn’t name anyone.” I waved my hand at the spread-out paper.

  “Sources,” he said, tapping the side of his nose with his finger. “I have my sources.”

  “Your imagination, more like it. You’ve made the whole thing up.”

  “You may think so,” he sneered, “but this story will run and run.”

  “I’ll sue,” I said.

  “On what grounds?”

  “Libel.”

  “Don’t you know?” He grinned, showing me his nicotine-stained teeth. “Under English law, you can’t libel the dead.” He laughed. “You should have spoken to me yesterday at her funeral. I was treated like dirt.”

  So was that the story? Was he simply piqued by being shouted at by my father and brushed off by me?

  “Not treated like dirt,” I said. “More like shit.”

  “You’ll regret that.”

  I picked up the newspaper and waved it at him. “And is this what you meant by saying yesterday that you’d been good to me. Ha! Don’t make me laugh. You don’t know what being good means.”

  He was about to say something further when the door opened and Jim Metcalf walked in. Jim was the senior racing correspondent for UK Today, one of the country’s best-selling national newspapers, which prided itself on its coverage of horseracing.

  “Hi, Mark,” said the newcomer. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said, meaning it. “And thank you for your note last week.”

  “No problem,” he said. “We’re all going to miss Clare. She was a lovely girl.” He shook his head slightly, as if not knowing what else to say. Instead, he turned to Toby Woodley. “What do you want, you little runt? I thought we’d made it clear you weren’t welcome in the press rooms.”

  “I have as much right to be here as you do,” Toby whined.

  “Right, maybe,” said Jim. “But we don’t want you here, understand? You make the place smell. Now, clear off.”

  I thought for a moment that Toby was going to stand his ground, but Jim was even taller than my six-foot-two and he’d once been a Royal Marine Commando. Toby, at about five-foot-six, would have been no match.

  “Good riddance,” Jim said, smiling, as the door closed. “He’s a nasty piece of work.”

  “Have you seen his piece today in the Gazette?” I handed it to him.

  “Is it true?” Jim asked after reading it.

  “No,” I said with certainty.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” I said.

  But was I really sure? After what I’d seen on the films, could I be sure of an
ything concerning Clare’s riding?

  “What can I do about it?” I asked. “I can’t sue him because it seems you can’t libel the dead.”

  “That’s right,” Jim said, nodding. “But you could call him a liar on the air. Then he’d have to sue you or else be laughed out of his job. You’d then get your day in court. He’d have to prove he wasn’t lying and that the facts of the story were accurate. But, sadly, even if you won, you wouldn’t get any damages from the little weasel, and you might not get your costs because he’d be sure to claim it was fair comment even if the story wasn’t true.”

  “Do you do the legal work for UK Today as well as the racing?” I asked with a smile.

  “Not if I can help it.” He smiled back. “But if you want my advice, I would say nothing and do nothing. Everyone knows that the Gazette is just a rumor mill. No one believes what it says even when it’s true.”

  “But the Daily Gazette sells millions of copies.”

  “I know they do,” he said. “But millions also watch soap operas on the telly and they don’t really believe those either.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I knew people who believed all sorts of crazy things.

  I left Jim Metcalf tucking in to a ham-and-mustard sandwich while I went out to wander around the parade ring and the enclosures. It was still an hour before the first, but the crowd was beginning to fill the bars and restaurants, encouraged out from their houses by the warm late-September sunshine.

  It was good to be back on a racetrack. The last week had seemed to drag on forever. Things might never be the same again without Clare, but at least today, at a jumping meeting, I could get my life back on track. Clare wouldn’t have been here today even if she were still alive.

  —

  I WAS UP in my commentator position well before the first race. I liked commentating at Stratford not least because it was one of the minority of racetracks with the parade ring in front of the grandstands. That gave me more opportunity to study the colors.