Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931)

by Francis, Felix

  “So what are you going to do now?” I asked him, reducing my apparent threat by moving away to his right and perching on the corner of his desk.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you going to pay?” I asked.

  “Er . . . I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Ten thousand is a lot of money,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed.

  “And you’ve just burned the things I’d hoped to use to catch the bastard.”

  “I have to protect myself first.” He said it in a way that made me think he had rehearsed that line many times before in his head.

  “By breaking in to other people’s houses?”

  “If necessary, yes.”

  “Have you received the payment instructions?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let me know when you do.”

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  “Because if you don’t, we won’t be able to catch him, and he’ll simply ask for more next time.”

  Austin shivered.

  “And my advice would be,” I said, “don’t pay him this time either.”

  “But he could tell the authorities about me laying the horse.”

  “Indeed, he could,” I said, “but I don’t believe he has any evidence to back up his claims.” I thought about Toby Woodley’s stolen briefcase. “In fact, I don’t really believe that the person who sent you the note last week has the faintest idea what he’s blackmailing you for. I think he’s just an opportunist who’s taking advantage of something he found.”

  And, I thought, he’s being far too greedy. If he’d asked Austin Reynolds and Harry Jacobs for a thousand or two, they probably would have just paid and never said anything about it to me, or to anyone else. It had been the size of the most recent demand that had been the all-consuming factor in their behavior.

  “Are you certain about that?” Austin asked.

  “No,” I replied, “I’m not. But I am certain about something else. If you pay the ten thousand, the next demand will be for even more.”

  He looked absolutely miserable.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked pitifully.

  “I want you to pass the payment instructions to me as soon as you get them and then do nothing.”

  “Nothing?” he said. “How about the money?”

  “There will be no money,” I said. “You’re not paying.”

  “But . . . what if you’re wrong? What if he has got the evidence?”

  “What evidence could he have anyway?” I asked. “How did you lay the horse in the first place?”

  “I used my wife’s credit card account. It’s still in her maiden name.”

  “But isn’t her billing address the same as yours?”

  He said nothing and just looked down at his feet.

  How stupid could you get? I thought.

  The bloody man deserved to be blackmailed.

  —

  NEXT I WENT into Newmarket, to the offices of the Injured Jockeys Fund in Victoria Way. I’d already called and spoken to Mrs. Green, the lady who had organized the dinner at the Hilton Hotel on the night that Clare had died.

  “Did you have a nice holiday?” I’d asked her.

  “Oh yes, wonderful, thank you,” Mrs. Green replied. “The weather in Portugal was fantastic, just like high summer here.”

  “Good,” I said, laying on the charm.

  “But I was so sorry to hear about your dear sister. It was a real shock, especially as I was quite used to seeing her round the town. I live down near Mr. Grubb’s stables. She was always so lovely.”

  “Thank you,” I said to her, meaning it. “But the reason I called was that I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m trying to obtain the guest list for your charity night at the Hilton.”

  “Oh.” There had been a slight pause. “I suppose it would be all right to give it to you. The seating plan was on display on the night, so it can hardly be confidential, can it? One has to be so careful these days with that damn Data Protection Act. I wouldn’t be able to give you their addresses.”

  “Just the names will be great.”

  “I’d rather not e-mail it to you, if you don’t mind.” Mrs. Green clearly had not been completely convinced that she wasn’t breaking some rule or other. “But I could print out another copy of the seating plan, if you’d like. After all, we never had them back at the end of the evening, and you could’ve just taken it off one of the boards in the hotel.”

  “Indeed, I could have,” I said, playing along with her game.

  I had arranged to collect it from the charity’s offices and it was waiting for me at the reception desk, sealed in one of those ubiquitous white envelopes.

  I sat outside in the car and opened it.

  I didn’t really know what I was looking for, so I wasn’t too disappointed that nothing leapt out at me from the sheet of paper.

  Not that I didn’t recognize most of the names. I did.

  They included many of the great and the good of British racing, coming together to support one of the sport’s major charities.

  Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Stacey were listed, as expected, but the other guests at their table were not, at least not by name, simply denoted as “(+10)” after their hosts.

  And that was true for lots of the tables, many of which had been taken by the evening’s sponsors or by other companies, with only the sponsor or company name shown.

  I went back inside the offices to ask Mrs. Green if she had a complete list of everyone who had attended the event.

  “Sorry,” she said, “the seating plan is all I have. The table hosts put their own place cards out.”

  I thanked her anyway and drove the Honda back to Clare’s cottage to find that the man from the builder’s was just finishing the repair to the front door.

  “It looks great,” I said, inspecting his handiwork. “Thank you.”

  “Where shall I send the bill?”

  “Send it to Austin Reynolds.” I started to give him the address, but he already knew it.

  “Yeah, we do lots of work for Mr. Reynolds,” he said, packing up his tools. “The firm is currently building some new stables at his yard.”

  I wondered whether Austin would keep his trainer’s license long enough to use them.

  —

  “WELL?” said DS Sharp. “Do you recognize anyone?”

  “Quite a few,” I said.

  We were in a darkened video studio at Charing Cross police station and had spent over an hour looking through the CCTV footage from the hotel lobby the night Clare had died.

  “While I was driving down here,” I said, “I wondered if someone had been trying to kill me in order to stop me seeing these films.”

  “Kill you?” he said, surprised.

  “Yes. There have been two attempts on my life this last week and I’ve been trying to work out why.”

  I described the two incidents to him, including the murder of Emily, and he suddenly became more interested.

  “Have you spoken to the Cambridgeshire Police about the CCTV?”

  “No,” I said, “nor to the Surrey lot. I only thought that it might be the reason on the way here from Newmarket this afternoon.”

  “So?” he said eagerly. “Is there anything on the films that was worth killing to prevent you seeing?”

  “Nothing that’s very obvious,” I said.

  It had been very strange, and somewhat emotional, to see the silent images of Clare walking into the hotel lobby and up to the reception desk. I’d seen it from about four different angles, but none of them had shown a closeup of her face or given any indication of her state of mind.


  The hotel lobby had been relatively empty as she checked in, but later, as the Injured Jockeys dinner had evidently finished in the ballroom upstairs, large groups of dinner-jacketed guests could be seen making their way through to the hotel exit, and it was many of these that I recognized.

  Mitchell and Sarah Stacey had been in one of the groups, obviously saying their good-byes to the owners as they all collected coats from the cloakroom.

  One of the cameras even covered the area outside the hotel’s front door and it had clearly shown people queuing for taxis in a rather strange, silent green-tinged world.

  “That camera works on infrared after dark,” DS Sharp had said, “hence the greeny pictures and the rather zombie-like eyes.”

  I sat, looking once more at the moving images, and thought about what had been going on exactly fifteen floors above.

  “Did it capture Clare?” I asked.

  We both knew what I meant. Did it capture the impact of Clare’s body on the sidewalk?

  “Yes, it did,” he said. “But that has been cropped from this copy.”

  I was relieved. I didn’t have to make the decision to stop watching or not.

  I looked up at the clock on the wall. “I thought you were leaving at six.”

  “I was,” he said. “But I’ve nothing to go home to except an empty, cold apartment, so I’m quite happy to stay here as long as you want.”

  I, too, had nothing to go home to but an empty, cold apartment.

  An empty, cold life.

  A wave of pain and grief washed over me. Hold on, I told myself sharply, this was not the time or the place. I needed to make the most of this opportunity.

  “How about the cameras in the elevators?” I asked.

  “They’re not very good,” he said.

  “In what way?”

  “They don’t really show people’s faces. It’s all rather top-down.”

  He pushed some buttons on the machines, and, in turn, we watched the recordings from each of the four cameras.

  As he’d said, the results weren’t great. The images were a bit like those filmed for a “Spot the Mystery Guest” slot on television quiz shows, giving only tantalizingly brief glimpses of people’s faces, and from unusual angles.

  At least we could tell which way the elevator was going as the cameras just captured the lit-up down arrows in the top corner of the images whenever the elevators were going down.

  “I think this one is your sister,” said DS Sharp. “The timing is right.”

  I watched as a young woman in jeans, pink shirt, and blue baseball cap entered the elevator and turned around, leaning up against the back wall. After a while she left the elevator. She was alone throughout.

  “I timed the elevators,” DS Sharp said. “It takes precisely that long to get from the lobby to the fifteenth floor.”

  “It certainly looked like Clare,” I said, “but it’s not easy to be absolutely sure with that cap.”

  “It’s also not helped by the poor resolution of the cameras,” he said. “They have such small lenses, and that tends to distort the images.”

  So assuming it had been Clare in the film, she had gone up to the room on her own.

  “According to Carlos Luis Sanchez, one of the hotel porters, she was followed up to her room by two men, one after the other, and the first one was wearing a bow tie.”

  DS Sharp raised his eyebrows in my direction.

  “Been busy, have we?” he said.

  “I went there primarily to see where Clare died,” I said. “But while I was there, I asked some questions.”

  “Is this Carlos Sanchez the one who says there was someone in your sister’s room when she fell?”

  “No,” I said. “That was his friend Mario.”

  “Mario?” I could tell from his tone that he was somewhat skeptical.

  “Yes, Mario,” I said, ignoring him. “Apparently Mario is one of the night porters. According to Carlos, Mario saw the man leave the hotel after Clare had died.”

  While we had been talking, the CCTV footage from the elevators had continued to play on the screens, and I suddenly saw a face that I recognized.

  “Stop!” I said loudly. “Can you play that again?”

  He pushed some buttons on the desk in front of him, and the images went slowly backward.

  “There,” I said. “Stop.”

  There were three people in the elevator. A young man and a woman, who were too intent on fondling each other to notice anything going on around them, and a second, older man, wearing a dinner jacket and a black bow tie. This second man glanced ever so briefly up at the camera fixed above the kissing heads, allowing it to catch an image of him full face.

  “Do you know that man?” DS Sharp asked.

  “Yes, I do,” I said, continuing to stare straight into the eyes on the screen. “It’s a racehorse trainer called Austin Reynolds.”

  —

  “CAN YOU TELL which floor he got out on?” I asked.

  There was a time code superimposed across the top of all the video footage, and DS Sharp inched the images forward frame by frame, measuring the time between Austin entering the elevator and him leaving it.

  “Assuming the elevator is going up, it is about right for the fifteenth floor, but it’s impossible to say exactly. The camera position doesn’t allow us to see the doors, so we can’t be sure how long the elevator was actually moving.”

  “What time did he get in?”

  He wound the video back to the exact moment.

  “Twenty-two thirty-one and seventeen seconds.”

  Just after half past ten. Ten minutes after Clare had checked in.

  Was that a coincidence? As Lisa, The Morning Line’s producer, had said, coincidences did happen. But was this really one of them?

  “Do you have a list of those staying at the hotel that night?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not. But we could find out from the hotel.”

  “Let’s check first to see if he leaves.”

  We went on watching the video recordings.

  “Is that him?” I suddenly asked, seeing someone that resembled Austin enter the elevator. I shouted at the image, “Dammit, man, look up at the camera!”

  He didn’t, of course, and I wasn’t very certain it had been him.

  “Can you check the lobby films for that precise time?”

  DS Sharp again pressed his buttons, and the wide view of the lobby reappeared on one of the screens. He wound the recording on until the time code was the same as for the shot in the elevator. He then let it run.

  Austin Reynolds was clearly visible walking from the direction of the elevators to the main exit.

  Without being asked, DS Sharp pulled up the shot from outside with its zombie-like eyes. Austin Reynolds had to wait about four minutes in a queue before he climbed into a taxi and was driven away.

  “Twenty-two fifty-eight,” DS Sharp said, reading the time on the screen. “Mr. Reynolds left the hotel more than half an hour before your sister died.”

  Surely no one would kill to prevent me seeing that.

  “Unless he came back,” I said. But even I knew that was unlikely. “Carlos said there was a second man, so let’s keep looking.”

  We spent another twenty minutes looking at the videos from the elevators, but there was no one who I even remotely recognized getting into any of them.

  “According to Mario, the second man left the hotel during the commotion that followed Clare’s fall.”

  DS Sharp moved the recordings forward to twenty-three thirty.

  I never realized how busy hotel elevators could be. Hardly a second went past without each of the four having people in it, moving in one direction or the other, as the hotel
guests came back from the theater, or diners from the high-floor restaurant and bar descended to their rooms or to the street-level exits.

  But still there was no one I recognized.

  At precisely twenty-three thirty-two and fifteen seconds, a man wearing a dark overcoat and a blue baseball cap entered an elevator already half full with people going down. He didn’t look up at the camera—in fact, he seemed to be purposefully looking away from it, and also away from the other people.

  “Is that the same baseball cap that Clare had on when she checked in?” I asked.

  DS Sharp stopped and reran the film.

  “It might be.”

  “Did you find the cap in Clare’s room?” I asked. “Or was she wearing it when she fell?”

  The detective sergeant didn’t answer.

  “Where are her things?” I asked him. “Even if she didn’t have a handbag, she must have had her car keys.”

  “There was nothing left in the room except the note.”

  “How about her car? Where’s that?”

  No answer.

  “And her phone?” I asked. “Where did that go? And did she call anyone before she died?”

  Anyone other than me.

  “I’ll have to investigate,” DS Sharp said, clearly uncomfortable.

  Past time for that, I thought. Well past. He had obviously been so convinced by the note that it was straightforward suicide that he really hadn’t bothered looking for anything else.

  I watched on the screen as the elevator emptied, presumably at ground level.

  “OK,” I said, “can you find that man in the lobby?”

  He fiddled with the equipment, and a wide shot of the lobby appeared on a screen.

  “There,” I said, pointing.

  We watched as the man walked briskly across the lobby.

  Lots of other people were running toward the main doors, and some were staggering back inside with wide eyes, holding their heads or hugging one another. I didn’t want to think about what they had just witnessed on the sidewalk outside.

  The man appeared to be ignoring the disturbance just to his right, marching straight on toward the left-hand side of the main exit.