Deadly Deceit

by Nancy Buckingham

  Heather laid a hand on Kate’s arm as they were drawing away. ‘My dear Kate - and Richard too - now that we know each other we really must keep in touch. As soon as I can get myself organised, perhaps you’ll come over to see me.’

  ‘That would be lovely, Heather.’

  ‘That would be lovely, Heather,’ mimicked Richard, as they got into his car.

  ‘Well, I had to be nice, didn’t I? The poor woman’s just lost her husband.’

  * * * *

  The next two weeks continued grey and very cold, with only the occasional burst of pale sunshine as a reminder that it was supposed to be summer.

  Superintendent Joliffe commented on the awfulness of the weather when he came to Kate’s office one morning. Normally, Kate was summoned to attend on him, so she wondered what was up.

  ‘Um . . . not busy, are you?’

  ‘I’m always busy, sir.’

  As Jolly sat down, his long face was tortured into a smile. Tacky job coming up, Kate.

  ‘There’s a little matter I must ask you to handle for me, er . . . Kate. Something the Chief Constable is wanting done, and he’s asked me to select an officer who can be trusted to use discretion. Naturally, you were the first person I thought of.’

  Kate sat without expression and waited. Why should she make it easy for the old bastard?

  ‘You’ll know the racing stables out at Larksworth?’

  ‘Slightly. I’ve never had occasion to go there.’

  ‘But you’ll understand the sort of thing they do. Take care of horses for their wealthy owners, and train ’em up ready for races and so forth. It’s run by a chappie named Blackwood. Fred Blackwood. Ex-jockey. These trainers often are.’

  ‘What’s he been up to, sir?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the point. Could be tricky, if there’s nothing amiss. One of his owners, who keeps several of her champion horses with him, suspects that Blackwood isn’t quite on the up and up.’ I

  ‘But she’s not sure enough to make a formal complaint?’

  ‘Exactly so. She has pots of money, apparently, but she’s the sort who hates being done down. One can’t really blame her for that, of course. She’s Spanish, by the way.’ Jolly glanced down at a slip of paper he was holding. ‘Dona Carlota Martinez. Belongs to one of those what-do-you-call-them? Grandee families.’

  ‘If she’s unhappy with the Blackwood set-up, why doesn’t she switch her horses to another trainer? Or if she’s not ready to go that far, she could employ a private eye to do a bit of sniffing around. We’ve got far more pressing things to get on with.’

  Jolly Joliffe looked pained. ‘This is a request from the Chief, Constable. The lady was talking to him at a dinner party the other evening . . . she’s often in this country, I gather. She was airing her suspicions about Blackwood, and the Chief said he’d have the man investigated. But what we can’t afford, er . . . Kate, is to have any hint of this getting out unless we’re sure of our ground.’

  Kate eyed him coldly. ‘You want me to talk to this Dona whatever? Find out exactly what it is she suspects?’

  ‘Good lord, no. Far too high-profile. No, you just sniff around a bit and see what emerges.’ Jolly gave her another smile of total insincerity. ‘In that inimitable style of yours.’

  Okay, so he was passing the buck. Kate wondered if she could do the same. Decided better not.

  ‘I’ll do what I can, sir. But I can’t promise a quick result if discretion is to be the byword.’

  ‘Speed is not expected. As long as I can assure the Chief that the matter is receiving attention at the proper level of seniority.’

  Kate said wickedly, ‘Do I report direct to the CC on this, sir?’

  ‘No, Mrs Maddox, you do not.’ He regarded her severely. ‘You report to me, as always.’

  In truth, Kate wasn’t particularly overloaded with work just then. But as a matter of principle she allowed a couple of days to go by before taking any action on the Blackwood business.

  She summoned Sergeant Boulter to her office to put him in the picture. Having worked together on a number of investigations, the two of them had by now reached a more or less harmonious modus vivendi. They understood each other. Like most men in the Cotswold division’s CID, Tim Boulter had been resentful and suspicious of a ‘bloody female’ detective chief inspector being put in authority over them. But he was fair-minded enough to acknowledge that this particular bloody female DCI could handle the job and get results.

  ‘Right, Tim.’ Kate leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs. ‘How much d’you know about racing stables?’

  ‘In a word, guv, absolutely bugger all.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  She told him about the superintendent’s directive concerning Blackwood. ‘It’s all so bloody vague. If we knew a bit more about horse racing, we might think up a good starting point. My Aunt Felix is the only person I happen to know who’s an expert on equine matters, so I think this requires a visit to her. I can trust her not to gossip - if I tell her not to. I’ll give her a tinkle.’

  Felicity Moore, professional photographer of all things horsey, lived at Chipping Bassett, which was a pleasant twenty-minute drive from Marlingford. A large, ungainly woman with a top-knot of loosely-pinned-up grey hair, Felix was given to wearing tent-like dresses and sensible shoes. At almost seventy years old, she was entitled. She greeted her niece affectionately, and Boulter with friendly informality.

  ‘I hope our coming hasn’t messed up your morning’s schedule,’ Kate said, as they were waved into the chintzy living room that was largely unchanged from Kate’s frequent childhood visits.

  ‘If so, I’d have told you. What I actually thought when you rang was, “Splendid, this gives me a good excuse to make some proper coffee for a change.’“

  ‘It smells delicious, Miss Moore,’ said Boulter. His eyes, though, were feasting on the plate of home-made shortcake on the small gate-legged table.

  ‘Sit down and help yourself, Sergeant . . . Tim, isn’t it? And for heaven’s sake call me Felix. Your chief inspector never shows one iota of respect for my venerable age, so why the dickens should you?’

  Boulter didn’t need telling twice to help himself. No flyweight at any time since Kate had known him, he’d recently been putting on extra pounds week by week, the consequence, she knew, of depression about his collapsing marriage. At present, for the second - or was it the third? - time, he and his wife were living apart, she having gone for another indefinite stay with her married sister in Marlingford, taking their two small daughters, Sharon and Mandy.

  Kate felt sorry for Tim, but she could understand something of Julie Boulter’s feelings. Theirs was a situation all too common with police officers, especially CID personnel. Tim Boulter was out all day and often late into the evening too, doing a job that was demanding, engrossing, and frequently rewarding on a personal level. By contrast Julie, who’d been a skilled laboratory technician before the children were born, felt neglected as a wife and unfulfilled as an individual. Even so, Kate felt sure that their problems could be sorted out with a bit of give and take, by talking things over calmly and sensibly and trying to see each other’s point of view. Some hope of that happening, though.

  Felix handed round the coffee, nudging cream and sugar in Boulter’s direction.

  ‘She can’t keep out of trouble, this niece of mine. Goes to Lisbon for a holiday, and stumbles onto a murder.’

  Boulter grinned. ‘I don’t think she did it on purpose, Miss M . . . Felix.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her. Have you seen anything more of that Bletchley woman since the funeral, Kate?’

  She shook her head. ‘Any day now, though, I’m expecting an invitation for Richard and me to visit her.’

  ‘You don’t sound too keen, girl.’

  ‘Frankly, I’m not. I can appreciate that Heather Bletchley feels a sort of bond with us, seeing as we were right on the spot when she found her husband’s battered body. But that’s no basis f
or a lifelong friendship. She’s a nice woman, but she lives in a totally different world from us. We had to pass the Bletchley residence on the way to the funeral the other day. Super place.’

  ‘You know, Kate, I met the Bletchleys a couple of times,’ Felix said. ‘Once at a point-to-point and another time at Newbury races. I was just the humble photographer.’

  Kate laughed. ‘You - humble? I should live to see the day.’

  Boulter was now on his fourth wedge of shortcake. Kate decided it was time to talk business.

  ‘Felix, what can you tell me about the Blackwood racing stables?’

  ‘Depends what you want to know, girl.’

  ‘Is the guy straight?’

  ‘You mean as in straight not crooked, I take it, rather than straight not gay?’

  ‘I did mean the first, but how about the second, as the subject’s cropped up?’

  Felix shook her head. ‘Not a whisper that I’ve ever heard. Sylvia Blackwood is known to sleep around, but according to rumour that’s because her husband hasn’t the taste for sex rather than because his interest lies in the opposite direction.’

  ‘And how about straight not crooked?’

  Felix scooped up a strand of hair that had slipped from its precarious moorings, and stabbed it savagely back into place with a pin. As long as Kate could remember, this action had punctuated her aunt’s day, but Felix appeared to be entirely unconscious of it.

  ‘Fred Blackwood is a good trainer, and most good trainers are basically honest. Oddball characters, a lot of them, but by and large they don’t wander far from the path of virtue. That being said . . . well, times are very hard, and trainers are exposed to big temptations.’

  ‘Tell me more. What temptations, exactly?’

  ‘Just think girl. A trainer has horseflesh in his tender care that is collectively worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Even millions. With a lot of owners who don’t know a horse’s arse from its elbow - if you’ll pardon the expression, Tim - the opportunities for a little gentle fiddling on the part of a trainer are endless. Time was when business was booming. Every Johnny-Come-Lately who’d made a packet playing the stock market or whatever wanted the prestige of owning a champion. But the racing world isn’t awash with money any more. As I said, times are hard and most stables have empty boxes. The vast majority of trainers struggle on and stay honest. The odd one doesn’t.’

  Maybe, Kate, Dona Carlota does have real grounds for suspicion!

  ‘This man Blackwood is an ex-jockey, I gather. Did he have a clean record?’

  ‘One or two minor scandals, but no more than is par for the course. It’s not all that uncommon for an ex-jockey to set himself up as a trainer. After all, he has the expertise and the right sort of contacts. But come to think of it, when Fred Blackwood opened his stables six or seven years ago, it wasn’t a case of starting off in a small way and gradually building the business up. He started with a bang, and that would have needed quite big money. Yet I never heard tell of him having a wealthy backer.’

  ‘A bank loan?’ Kate suggested.

  ‘A bank would first need to see someone risking his own money in such a chancy business as training gee-gees.’

  ‘So what are you saying, Felix?’

  ‘Just that Fred must have done pretty well out of his jockeying - in one way or another. And I don’t recall him being all that renowned as a winner.’

  ‘I get the picture.’

  As Boulter helped himself to the last piece of shortcake, Kate added with a laugh, ‘We’d better be getting along before Tim eats you out of house and home.’

  ‘I like to see a man with a healthy appetite.’

  Colour flooded into Boulter’s pleasantly open, squarish face, but her aunt hadn’t intended it as an unkind dig. There being no more coffee in the pot, Felix was clearly pondering whether hospitality required her to go and make some more. Kate signalled a quick ‘no’, and Felix leaned back again.

  ‘You still haven’t explained why you’re so interested in Fred Blackwood all of a sudden,’ she said.

  ‘A few vague suspicions have been voiced. I’ve been asked to do some unofficial sniffing around.’

  ‘To prove or disprove, eh? Who wants to know?’

  Kate shrugged. ‘One of his owners.’

  ‘Doesn’t surprise me. Owners can get a bit paranoid. So would any of us be, I suppose, if we had a fortune tied up in horseflesh and depended on the trainer to keep it all alive and kicking and winning races for us.’ Felix wrinkled her nose in thought. ‘Let me guess. One of Fred’s owners with more at stake than most. Would it perhaps be a certain Spanish lady? Aha, I’m right. The sergeant isn’t such a poker face as you are, Kate.’

  ‘Don’t let her get to you, Tim,’ said Kate, grinning. ‘My dear aunt enjoys showing how clever she is.’

  Felix lumbered her bulk out of the chair. ‘Come over to the studio, and I’ll sort out some pics of the Blackwood stables. I did a whole set for Fred a few years ago for a publicity brochure. He wanted to impress rich Arabs and suchlike.’

  As she led the way across the small patch of lawn behind her cottage, astonishingly light on her feet for one so bulky, the wind caught the voluminous dress and billowed it about her shapeless figure. She was like a yacht in full sail, Kate thought fondly. Her aunt never cared one jot about her appearance, yet somehow she achieved a certain style that made her impressive in any company.

  In the studio, which was a spacious extension to the rear of the garage, Boulter gazed around at Felix’s photographic equipment, clearly impressed. Felix spent a minute or two sorting through a box of prints, then handed Kate a small bunch of ten by eights.

  ‘You can keep these, if you think they’ll be of any use. They’re just proofs, and I’ve got the negs. And here’s something else I stumbled across yesterday and thought might interest you. Picture of the Bletchleys. He looks as miserable as sin, don’t you think? Was he like that in Lisbon?’

  ‘The poor man did have health problems.’ Kate glanced at the photograph. Alec and Heather Bletchley were in a small group of racegoers clustered around a winning horse that was being led into the paddock.

  Kate ran her fingers through her dark curly hair. ‘When was this taken, Felix?’

  Her aunt took the photo back and turned it over to read her identifying notes. ‘March this year. At Cheltenham. Gold Cup day.’

  ‘As recently as that? My God, Alec Bletchley was even more loaded than I thought. Would you believe, Heather seems to have two sable coats?’

  ‘What makes you say that, girl?’

  ‘She was wearing a sable at Alec’s funeral last week. But it wasn’t this one.’

  ‘How can you tell, guv?’ asked Boulter.

  ‘Give me some credit, Tim. The markings on the collar are different. And the cut. No, it’s definitely not the same coat.’

  The sergeant sniffed. ‘Seems daft to me, stinking rich or not. Like having two Rollers, two yachts. You can only use one at a time.’

  ‘You’ve got a point there,’ said Kate thoughtfully, handing back the Bletchley photo to her aunt. ‘Come on, Tim, we’d better get moving.’ She gave Felix a fond hug. ‘Thanks a lot. You’ve been a big help.’

  Felix winked at Boulter. ‘Is she like this with you, Tim? Sweet as apple cider when she’s extracted what she wants out of you?’

  ‘Not so I’ve ever noticed . . . Felix.’

  * * * *

  At DHQ a message awaited Kate saying that Mrs Bletchley had phoned, and would she call her back, please.

  When they’d exchanged courtesies, Heather said, ‘How about you and Richard coming over to dinner next Wednesday? Say, half past seven for eight. Nothing formal, of course, I couldn’t face that at the moment. But I’ve asked Alec’s business partner and his wife. It would be so nice for you to meet them.’

  Richard was going to love this. ‘Can I get back to you, Heather, when I’ve checked with Richard?’

  ‘Of course. I do hope you can come o
n Wednesday. But if not, I’m sure the Murdochs could manage another day.’

  It wasn’t going to be easy to wriggle out of this one.

  Richard said, when she rang him, ‘Can’t be done. Wednesday’s press day for the Gazette, as you damn well know.’

  ‘I also know that you’re normally through by seven on Wednesdays, and we don’t need to be there much before eight. You can make it.’

  ‘Oh, God. Do we have to, Kate?’

  ‘Gower, against all your natural instincts, try to be nice. Tell you what, I’ll drive so you won’t have to watch what you drink. I can’t say fairer than that.’

  Chapter Four

  The entrance to the Blackwood stables was a smart white five-barred gate, counterbalanced so it swung easily to the touch. Boulter drove through, and Kate shut the gate behind them.

  The tarmac drive was immaculate, the grass verges tidily clipped. The paddocks and the oval exercise circuit off to their right were all fenced with neat white rails, and the range of buildings ahead looked in good nick. A ranch style bungalow stood a little way apart.

  Times are hard, Kate, are they?

  Boulter drove into the stable yard and pulled up. No one was around, but from a line of buildings on the left came various sounds of activity. Kate and Boulter walked over to the nearest doorway and peered inside. A girl perched on a wooden stool was repairing a bridle. Scruffy jeans and T-shirt didn’t conceal the fact that she was very pretty.

  Boulter’s eyes appreciated her figure as he produced his warrant card for her to see. ‘Is the boss around, love?’

  The girl seemed to like the look of him, too, and Kate felt de trop. Boulter’s excess weight didn’t seem to have any adverse effect on his pulling power.

  ‘He’s way over,’ she said, gesturing with her thumb. ‘But he won’t be long. What d’you want to see him about?’

  ‘Oh, just routine. Nothing special. We’ll hang around, if that’s okay with you?’

  ‘Seeing as you’re coppers,’ she said with a grin, ‘you can be trusted not to nick anything, I s’pose.’

  Kate and Boulter wandered across the yard to the main building and stepped inside. There must have been fifty horse boxes all told, ranged on either side of a ten-foot-wide corridor with a glassed-in roof and a concrete floor. Inquisitive heads peered out at them from above some of the half-doors, and there were lots of huffing and snorting and stomping of hooves.