Dick Francis's Gamble

by Felix Francis

  I’d said as much to the detective inspector, but he hadn’t thought it particularly unusual. “Sometimes it is easier for an assailant to get away if there is a big crowd to hide in,” he’d said. “Also it can pander to their ego to do it in a public place with witnesses.”

  “But it must make it more likely that he would be recognized, or at least allow you to get a good description.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he’d said. “More witnesses often mean more confusion. They all see things differently, and we end up with a description of a black white man with straight curly hair, four arms and two heads. And everyone tends to look at the bleeding victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. We often get a great description of the corpse but nothing about the murderer.”

  “But how about CCTV?” I’d asked him.

  “It appears that the particular spot behind the grandstands where Mr. Kovak was shot is not in view of any of the racetrack security cameras and was also not visible from any of the cameras brought in by the television people to cover the event.”

  The assassin had known what he was doing in that respect. It had clearly been a professional hit.

  But why?

  Every line of thought came back to the same question. Why would anyone want to kill Herb Kovak? I knew that some of our clients could get pretty cross when an investment that had been recommended to them went down in value rather than up, but to the point of murder? Surely not.

  People like Herb and me didn’t live in a world of contract killers and hit men. We simply existed in an environment of figures and computers, profits and returns, interest rates and bond yields, not of guns and bullets and violent death.

  The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that, professional as the hit may have been, the killer must have shot the wrong man.

  I was hungry and weary by the time I pulled the Mercedes into the parking area in front of my house in Lichfield Grove, Finchley. It was ten minutes to midnight and just sixteen hours since I had left here this morning. It felt longer—about a week longer.

  Claudia had waited up, and she came out to the car.

  “I watched the television news,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Neither could I. It all seemed so unreal.

  “I was standing right next to him,” I said. “One moment he was alive and laughing about which horse we should bet on and the next second he was dead.”

  “Awful.” She stroked my arm. “Do they know who did it?”

  “Not that they told me,” I said. “What did it say on the news?”

  “Not much, really,” Claudia said. “Just a couple of so-called experts disagreeing with each other about whether it was as a result of terrorism or organized crime.”

  “It was an assassination,” I said firmly. “Plain and simple.”

  “But who on earth would want to assassinate Herb Kovak?” Claudia said. “I only met him twice, but he seemed such a gentle soul.”

  “I agree,” I said, “and the more I think about it, the more certain I become that it must have been a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps that’s also why the police haven’t yet revealed who was shot. They don’t want to let the killer know he hit the wrong man.”

  I walked around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. It had been a warm and sunny spring day when we had arrived at Aintree, and we had decided to leave our overcoats in the car. I looked down at them both lying there, Herb’s dark blue one on top of my own brown.

  “Oh God,” I said out loud, suddenly becoming quite emotional again. “What shall I do with that?”

  “Leave it there,” said Claudia, slamming the trunk shut. She took me by the arm. “Come on, Nick. Time to put you to bed.”

  “I’d rather have a stiff drink or two.”

  “OK,” she said with a smile. “A couple of stiff drinks first, then bed.”

  I didn’t feel much better in the morning, but that might have had something to do with the few more than a couple of stiff drinks I’d consumed before finally going to bed around two o’clock.

  I had never been much of a drinker, not least as a need to keep my riding weight down when I’d been a jockey. I had left school with three top grades at A level and, much to the dismay of my parents and teachers, I had forgone the offered place at the LSE, the London School of Economics, for a life in the saddle. So, aged eighteen, when many young men going up to university were learning how to use their newfound freedom to pour large amounts of alcohol down their throats, I’d been pounding the streets of Lambourn in a sweatsuit or sitting alone in a sauna trying to shed an extra pound or two.

  However, the previous evening, the shock of the day’s events had begun to show. So I had dug out the half bottle of single malt whisky left over from Christmas and polished it off before climbing the stairs to bed. But, of course, the spirit didn’t take away the demons in my head, and I had spent much of the night troubled and awake, unable to remove the mental image of Herb growing cold on a marble slab in some Liverpool mortuary.

  The weather on Sunday morning was as miserable as I was, with a string of heavy April showers blowing in on a bracing northerly breeze.

  At about ten, during a break in the rain, I went out for a Sunday paper, nipping up to the newsagent’s shop on Regent’s Park Road.

  “A very good morning to you, Mr. Foxton,” said the shop owner from behind the counter.

  “Morning, Mr. Patel,” I said in reply. “But I’m not sure what’s good about it.”

  Mr. Patel smiled at me and said nothing. We may have lived in the same place but we did so with different cultures.

  All the front pages on the shelves had the same story: DEATH AT THE RACES read one headline, MURDER AT THE NATIONAL read another, GUN HORROR AT AINTREE ran a third.

  I glanced quickly at them all. None gave the name of the victim, and, to me, there appeared to be far greater coverage about the aggravation and inconvenience suffered by the crowd rather than any commiseration or condolence towards poor Herb. I suppose some conjecture was to be expected as the reporters had so little real factual information from which to make a story, but I was surprised at their apparent lack of any sympathy for the target of the assassin.

  One paper even went so far as to suggest that the murder was likely to have been drug related, and then went on to imply that everyone else was probably better off with the victim dead.

  I bought a copy of the Sunday Times for no better reason than its headline—POLICE HUNT RACE-DAY ASSASSIN—was the least sensational, and the story beneath it didn’t immediately assume that Herb had probably deserved to be killed.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Mr. Patel, giving me my change.

  I tucked the heavy newspaper under my arm and retraced my tracks home.

  Lichfield Grove was a fairly typical London suburban street of mostly 1930s-built duplexes with bay windows and small front gardens.

  I had lived here now for the past eight years yet I hardly knew my neighbors other than to wave at occasionally if we happened, by coincidence, to arrive or leave our homes at the same time. In fact, I knew Mr. Patel, the newsagent, better than those I lived right next to. I was aware that the couple on one side were called Jane and Phil (or was it John?), but I had no idea of their surname or what either of them did for a living.

  As I walked back from the newsagent’s, I thought how strange it was that members of the human race could live here so cheek by jowl with their fellow beings without any meaningful reaction between them. But at least it made a change from the rural village life I had experienced before, where everyone took pains to know everyone else’s business and where nothing could be kept a secret for long.

  I wondered whether I should make more of an effort to be more community minded. I suppose it would depend on how long I intended to stay.

  Many of my racing friends had thought that Finchley was a strange choice, but I had needed a clean break from my former life. A clean break—that was a joke. It had been
a clean break that had forced me to stop race riding just as I was beginning to make my mark in the sport. The clean break in question was to my second cervical vertebra, the axis, on which the atlas vertebra above it rotated to turn the head. In short, I had broken my neck.

  I suppose I should be thankful that the break hadn’t killed or paralyzed me, either of which could have been a highly likely outcome. The fact that I was now walking down Lichfield Grove at all was due to the prompt and gentle care of the paramedics on duty at Cheltenham racetrack that fateful day. They had taken great pains to immobilize my neck and spine before I was lifted from the turf.

  It had been a silly fall, and I had to admit to a degree of carelessness on my part.

  The last race on Wednesday of the Cheltenham Steeplechasing Festival was what was known as the Bumper—a National Hunt Flat race. No jumps, no hurdles, just two miles of undulating rich green grass between start and finish. It is not the greatest spectacle the Festival has to offer, and many of the large crowd had already made their way to the parking lots, or the bar.

  But the Bumper is very competitive, and the jockeys take it very seriously. Not often do the jump boys and girls get to emulate Willie Shoemaker or Frankie Dettori. Judging the pace with no jumps to break up the rhythm is an art, and knowing where and when to make your final challenge to the finish can make all the difference to the outcome.

  That particular Wednesday, just over eight years ago, I had been riding a horse that the Racing Post had rather kindly called an outsider. The horse had just one speed—moderate—and absolutely no turn of foot to take it past others up the final climb to victory. My only chance was to go off fairly fast from the start and to try to run the “finish” out of the others.

  The plan worked quite well, up to a point.

  At about halfway, my mount and I were some fifteen lengths in front of the nearest challenger and still going reasonably well as we swung left-handed and down the hill. But the sound of the pursuers was getting ever louder in my ears, and six or seven of them swept past us like Ferraris overtaking a steamroller as we turned into the straight.

  The race was lost, and it was no great surprise to me, or to the few still watching from the grandstands.

  Perhaps the horse beneath sensed a subtle change in me—a change from expectation and excitement to resignation and disappointment. Or perhaps the horse was no longer concentrating on the task in hand in the same way that his jockey’s mind was wandering to the following day’s races and his rides to come.

  Whatever the real cause, one moment he was galloping along serenely, albeit one-paced, and the next he had stumbled and gone down as if shot.

  I had seen the television coverage. I’d had no chance.

  The fall had catapulted me over the horse’s neck and headfirst into the ground. I had woken up two days later in the neurosurgery and spinal-injuries department of Frenchay Hospital in Bristol with a humdinger of a headache and a metal contraption called a halo brace surrounding and literally screwed into my skull.

  Three uncomfortable months later, with the metal halo finally removed, I set about regaining my fitness and place in the saddle only for my hopes to be dashed by the horse-racing authority’s medical board, who decided that I was permanently unfit to return to racing. “Too risky,” they had said. “Another fall on your head could prove fatal.” I had argued that I was prepared to accept the risk and pointed out that a fall on the head could prove fatal even if you hadn’t previously broken your neck.

  I had tried at length to explain to them that all jockeys risked their lives every time they climbed aboard half a ton of horse and galloped at thirty miles per hour over five-foot fences. Jockeys were well used to taking risks and accepted the consequences without blaming the authorities. But it was all to no avail. “Sorry,” they said. “Our decision is final.”

  So that had been that.

  From being the new kid on the block, the youngest winning jockey of the Grand National since Bruce Hobbs in 1938 and widely tipped to be the next champion, I was suddenly a twentyone-year-old ex-jockey with nothing to fall back on.

  “You will need an education for when your riding days are over,” my father had once said in a last futile attempt to make me take up my place at university instead of going racing when I was eighteen.

  “Then I’ll get my education when I need it,” I’d replied.

  And so I had, applying again and being accepted once more by the LSE to read for a combined degree in government and economics.

  And hence I had come to live in Finchley, putting down a deposit on the house from the earnings of my last successful season in the saddle.

  Finchley Central Underground Station, around the corner from Lichfield Grove, was just ten stops up the Northern Line from the LSE.

  But it hadn’t been an easy change.

  I had become used to the adrenaline-fueled excitement of riding horses at speed over obstacles when winning was the thing. Winning, winning, winning—nothing else mattered. Everything I did was with winning in mind. I loved it. I lived it. It was like a drug, and I was addicted.

  When it was snatched away from me, I suffered badly from withdrawal symptoms. An alcoholic with the d.t.’s had nothing on me.

  In those first few months I tried hard to put on a brave face, busying myself with buying the house and getting ready for my studies, cursing my luck and telling everyone that I was fine; but inside I was sick, shaking and near suicidal.

  Another shower was about to fall out of the darkening sky as I hurried the last few yards along the road to my house with the newspaper.

  In keeping with many of my neighbors, I had arranged early on to concrete over my small overgrown front lawn, converting it into an off-road parking space that was now occupied by my aging Mercedes SLK sports car. I had excitedly bought the car brand-new with my percentage from the Grand National win. That had been ten years and more than a hundred and eighty thousand miles ago, and, in truth, I was well past needing a change.

  I opened the trunk and looked down at the two coats lying there. The previous evening the sight of Herb’s blue cashmere had almost been too much for me to bear, but now it appeared as just an overcoat without a home.

  I picked them both up, slammed the trunk shut and hurried inside as the first large drops of rain began to wet my hair.

  I hung my coat on one of the hooks behind the front door and wondered what I should do with Herb’s. He wouldn’t be needing it now but I supposed it belonged to his family and would go back to them eventually.

  In the meantime, I hung it up next to mine in my hallway.

  I am not quite sure why I went through the pockets. Maybe I thought that he might have left his flat key there as he had been wearing the coat when he had locked his door the previous morning.

  There was no key but there was a piece of paper deep in the left-hand pocket. It had been roughly folded over and screwed up. I flattened it out on the wall.

  I stood there in disbelief reading the stark message written on the paper in black ballpoint capital letters:

  YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE WHAT YOU WERE

  TOLD. YOU MAY SAY YOU REGRET IT, BUT

  YOU WONT BE REGRETTING IT FOR LONG.

  Did that mean Herb had been the real target? Had the assassin actually shot the right man? And if so, why?

  2

  I spent much of Sunday reading and rereading the message on the paper, trying to work out whether it actually was a prediction of murder or just an innocent communication with no relevance to the events at the Grand National the previous afternoon.

  YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE WHAT YOU WERE

  TOLD. YOU MAY SAY YOU REGRET IT, BUT

  YOU WONT BE REGRETTING IT FOR LONG.

  I dug out the business card that I had been given at Aintree by the detective: Inspector Paul Matthews, Merseyside Police. I tried the number printed there, but he wasn’t available. I left a message asking him to call me back.

  I wondered what it was that Herb sh
ould have done, what he had been told to do. And for what, and to whom, had he expressed regret?

  I gave up trying to work it out and read about the murder in the Sunday Times. I thought again about calling our boss, but he would read about it in the papers and would find out soon enough that the victim had been his senior assistant. Why spoil his Sunday?

  I knew all too well from my time as a jockey that one should never believe what one reads in newspapers, but, on this occasion, I was surprised how accurate the reports were as far as the factual information was concerned. The Sunday Times correspondent clearly had a good link direct to Merseyside Police headquarters, but not so good that he could actually name the victim. And he had little or no information about any motive, but that didn’t stop him speculating.

  “Such a clinical assassination has all the hallmarks of a gangland organized crime ‘hit.’” He went on to suggest that a reason the name of the victim was being withheld was possibly because he was a well-known criminal, and the police didn’t want potential witnesses not to bother coming forward.

  “That’s rubbish,” I said out loud.

  “What’s rubbish?” Claudia asked.

  I was sitting in our small kitchen with the newspaper spread out across the kitchen table while Claudia was baking a cake for her sister’s birthday, her long black hair tied back in a ponytail.

  “This in the paper,” I said. “They’re suggesting that Herb was a criminal and probably deserved to be killed.”

  “And was he?” Claudia asked, turning around.

  “Of course not,” I said firmly.

  “How do you know?” she asked, echoing the detective inspector.

  “I just do,” I said. “I worked at the next desk to him for the past five years. Don’t you think I’d have noticed if he was a criminal?”