by Joe McNally
The two heavies looked at each other, seeming unsure if they should be on red alert. All five filed in past Mac. ‘This way,’ he said, and led them right in among us in the living room. Kerman and Guterson looked around at me, Candy, Phil and Don, bewilderment giving way to anger then worry on both their faces.
Still smiling, Mac said, ‘I think you both know Mister Malloy and Mister Loss. These other two gentlemen are from Cambridge CID.’ Phil and Don smiled and nodded pleasantly. Kerman turned and looked at Guterson, whose face and head were reddening by the second. He reached up to loosen his gaudy tie.
Mac said, ‘Now maybe your chaps and Mister Spindari could go into the kitchen and have a nice cup of tea. Would you both like one?’ Kerman and Guterson shook their heads in unison.
‘Coffee?’ Mac offered pleasantly. He was better at this than I’d expected.
‘No, thanks!’ Kerman said bitterly.
Phil and Don walked forward. ‘We’ll show you where the kitchen is.’ Guterson turned to his guys and nodded. They left. A smiling Spindari followed. They went to the kitchen and closed the door. A few moments later Phil and Don rejoined us. Mac said to Kerman and Guterson, ‘There’s one person you haven’t met yet, if you’d like to come this way?’ He moved along the hall toward the office, saying, ‘Well, you have met him but not today.’ Candy and I followed.
Mac turned the key and eased the door open. Kerman and Guterson moved into the doorway to look. I watched their faces go pale as Mac said, ‘Mister Ken Rossington, alias Paul Cantrell.’
He closed and locked the door again before anyone could speak and we all returned to the living room. Kerman sat down on a chair, straight-backed, knees clamped, looking defiant, but Guterson slumped on the sofa, beaten and dejected.
Mac pulled some papers from his inside pocket. He looked at Guterson. ‘Cantrell spent much of yesterday dictating this statement to our CID friends here.’ Mac started reading everything Candy and I had put together, all the theories starting from Kerman’s setting up of Ben Campbell, Summerville and Spenser through to the recruiting of Dunn and his methods of implanting the horses.
Every so often Kerman would splutter, ‘Nonsense! Ridiculous!’
But when Mac started listing the dates that Dunn had visited the racecourse stables and implanted the Sheikh’s horses, she seemed finally to give up, physically to deflate as though the weight of evidence had crushed the fight from her.
Shaking his head, Guterson said to no one in particular, ‘Cantrell didn’t know half of this. How the hell…?’
Kerman glared at him. ‘He was obviously a damn sight smarter than you thought, you stupid bastard!’
Guterson was still shaking his head. ‘But why? Why drop himself in it after what he’s done?’ He grunted then as he pushed himself to his feet, becoming more animated as the instinct for self-preservation took over. He went toward Phil and Don and said, ‘Look, I don’t know what else is in that statement but I was only acting as an agent for Simeon Prior. He’s the main man. He thought the whole thing up.’
‘Shut up!’ Kerman yelled. ‘Shut up, you silly bastard!’ Guterson said, ‘Ignore her, she’s his daughter!’
Then began a long cursing argument, all of which was caught on tape along with everything else that had been said. Mac excused himself politely and went to call a police inspector he knew in Cambridge.
A proper one.
54
The cops had to let Guterson’s heavies go, as they’d done nothing. When Guterson, Kerman and Cantrell were being led out, Kerman turned to me, spite contorting her face. ‘You’ll regret this for the rest of your life, Malloy!’
I smiled. ‘I don’t think that even The Examiner will publish your stuff anymore, Mrs. Kerman.’
‘There’ll be someone else, don’t worry.’
And there was.
The Examiner made no announcement about the departure of Jean Kerman. It simply trumpeted the arrival of the most ‘exciting voice in investigative journalism: Cynthia Clarke. Look out for her debut story on Wednesday which will shock the racing world’.
Cynthia Clarke rang me on Monday evening just after I’d returned from visiting my father, who seemed coldly determined now to stay in hospital as long as he could. He’d been moved to a new ward and had effectively trained Mother into this routine where she was with him for more than half the day, coming and going at his bidding.
Clarke was quiet-voiced, polite but unshakeable. She told me there was a story on file which she planned to run on Wednesday and she wanted to make sure I was aware of the contents, and to give me ‘a chance to comment’.
She read it through to me and though I knew it word for word, my heart dropped a step closer to hell with every line she spoke. I told her that I thought that The Examiner was the last paper to be moralizing, bearing in mind the charges its previous columnist now faced. But Clarke was unmoved. ‘It’s news, I’m afraid, Mister Malloy. If we don’t run it, someone else will. Now can I speak to your father?’
‘He’s very ill. If this story runs it could kill him.’
‘Is he in hospital?’
My hopes rose for a moment. ‘Yes.’
‘Which one?’
‘Will you put a hold on the story?’
‘I can’t, but I must give him the chance to comment.’
‘He won’t comment. Doesn’t it make any difference to you that this might kill him?’
‘I’m only doing a job, Mister Malloy.’
‘I’d rather shovel shit!’ I said, and banged the phone down, that familiar feeling of desolation engulfing me quickly. Filled with impotent rage, I drove at speed to the hospital to warn my mother.
We sat in the coffee lounge. She looked completely worn out. ‘Is there anything we can do?’ she asked weakly.
I shook my head. She bowed hers, accepting defeat for the first time in her life, then unexpectedly her hand reached across the tabletop for mine. Gently I clasped the warm, wrinkled skin, the fragile bones, and squeezed softly. Her head was down and a tear dripped silently into her lap.
I arranged to be with her at the hospital when the paper was due out on Wednesday. She warned Father about it, and suddenly he decided he’d discharge himself on Tuesday afternoon. He couldn’t bear the thought of everyone at the hospital knowing.
First thing Wednesday I drove to a petrol station where nobody knew me and bought a copy of the newspaper. It was on the front page. I folded the paper and headed for the derelict farm Candy and I had used as a meeting place.
I got out of the car and went to lean against the ruined wall. The sun was beginning to warm the morning, but inside I was cold as I opened the paper. There was a smiling picture of me under a banner headline: Top Jockey ‘Killed’ His Brother.
“The father of top jump jockey Eddie Malloy believes Malloy killed his younger brother, Michael. When Malloy was just ten years old and living on a farm near Penrith, Cumbria, he was in charge of young Michael, six, when the child fell into a swollen river and was swept away.
Eddie Malloy, apparently unable to face his parents with the terrible news, returned home to tell them Michael had disappeared into the woods. It was two days before Malloy admitted to police and search parties what had happened.
Edward Malloy Snr. has always believed that had Eddie acted immediately to report his brother’s fate, Michael could have been saved.”
The story was continued on page three. Dry-mouthed and shaking, I turned to it with a picture in my mind of a million others doing the same thing.
“Malloy Snr.’s resentment of his eldest son led to the boy becoming an outcast. He was cruelly banished from his parents’ house and sent to live with the horses in the stable block. For the next six years, the young Malloy’s bed was among straw bales and his only companions were the horses he came to love and trust.
His mother, Constance, brought him meals three times a day in a regime that was almost prison-like. But there was to be no remission for the frightened ten-yea
r-old. Malloy Snr. duped the local authorities into believing that his son was being educated at home.
But the only education Eddie found was in the racing books his mother smuggled out to him during the early period of his ‘imprisonment’, a privilege that stopped the moment his father found out about it.
The boy’s misery ended on his sixteenth birthday when he was finally banished permanently from the farm and sent out to make his own way in the world.
But the years of living so close to horses served Malloy well, and maybe today he looks back with less resentment than some might expect. Within a week of being thrown out, he took a job with the late Peter Sample, a top trainer in Lambourn, and less than five years later he was champion National Hunt Jockey.
Eddie Malloy’s parents now run a small stud in Newmarket where they’ve lived for…”
Clarke rambled on about my parents and how deep and damaging family rifts could be. Tell me about it, Cynthia. Tell the whole world about it. You just have.
I sat on the wall staring at the front-page headline, at the colour picture of me smiling and punching the air as I came in on Cragrock at Haydock, the first big race winner after my comeback.
There I was three years ago, jubilant, delirious.
Here I was now, ashamed, empty, desolate.
I stood staring into the distance. The sun was well up, drying the night’s rain from the surrounding fields and raising a beautiful smell of freshness and newness. Away to my right, the road stretched straight and tempting toward the horizon, and I wished to God that I was in one of those old cowboy movies and could just get in the saddle and ride off to where nobody could ever find me.
Ride off to wherever our Michael was and tell him what I’d longed to tell him since that terrible day when I heard him shout and looked down through the thick branches of the tree I’d climbed, and sat there in horror, rooted as surely as the tree itself, unable to move as his fair head bobbed on the surface, as his little hands reached and scrabbled at the morning air. I could hear him crying in panic and confusion as he wondered what was happening to him and why his big brother wasn’t there to help him, to save him, to pull him out.
Sometimes he’d come to me in dreams and tell me it was all right, tell me he’d died quickly and quietly after a few minutes in the water, tell me that he didn’t blame me for what I’d done, tell me that heaven was a great place for kids, tell me that he loved me, tell me that someday he’d see me again.
And I’d tell him I was sorry.
‘I’m sorry, Michael…’
An animal-like howl rose from my chest and burst from my throat, and my legs gave way as I slid slowly down the side of the wall to lie slumped and weeping uncontrollably by the front wheel of the car.
I don’t know how long I lay there, but somehow I hauled myself up and drove, weak and shocked, to my parents’ place, carrying the newspaper into the house as though it was the corpse of our Michael himself.
55
The most heartening thing over the next week or so was the level of support everywhere from people I hardly knew. The warmth was unexpected and welcome. My parents didn’t fare quite so well. There were a number of terrible phone calls and poisonous letters, and no matter how much they’d tried to prepare themselves, the shock was nightmarish.
My father never recovered from it. His health deteriorated steadily throughout the autumn. On the 2nd of December, he died in that prison-like room. My mother and I were there, and my sister Marie came back. She too had been scarred by what happened all those years ago. Her exile had been self-imposed.
Guterson, Simeon Prior and Cantrell are on remand, charged with the murders of Brian Kincaid, Alex Dunn and William Capshaw. Jean Kerman was released on substantial bail. Brian Kincaid’s widow, Judy, made his funeral a true celebration of the life of a very good man. Afterwards, her concern for me showed in weekly telephone calls, and Judy has become as good a friend to me as Brian was.
Martin’s been off the booze for over two months and tells me he can’t wait for the birth of his baby. Candy’s a changed man, too. Alive again, happy, looking forward to the new breeding season as I guess his stallions are.
Things are going well for me. Charles’s horses are back to their best. I’ve ridden 67 winners for him so far.
My mother, at last, is showing signs of becoming her own person. Marie and I have stayed with her since Father died. On Christmas Eve, we travelled to Cumbria to visit our Michael’s grave. In the early frost we stood in silence, facing the grey marble with my brother’s name carved deep. My mother, standing between my sister and me, reached for our hands. A family again, what was left of us, but finally, I felt a sense of peace.
Thank you
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Best wishes
Joe and Richard