Horseracing was now a seven-day-a-week business with some 1,500 days of racing annually, spread across the sixty official British racecourses, to say nothing of hundreds of point-to-point meetings in addition. Indeed, there were only a couple of blank days in the whole year, at Christmas.
I took the two plastic bags into the medical room to find that only one of the nurses remained, everyone else having already gone to tea.
‘I’m just locking up,’ said the nurse.
‘I just want to check that everything’s been entered on the computer,’ I said. ‘I’ll only be a minute. You go on. I’ll lock up.’
She handed me the bunch of keys and put on her coat over her uniform scrubs.
‘See you in a minute then,’ she said. ‘You know where to put the keys?’
I nodded. ‘In the key-safe in the Clerk of the Course’s office.’
I checked that all three of the jockeys sent to hospital had been given a Red Entry on RIMANI and that they were all CMA-Red, meaning that each would need clearance from the Chief Medical Adviser before riding again.
Satisfied all was in order, I checked that all the equipment cupboards were closed and also that the medicine cabinet on the wall was properly secured. It was where we kept our supply of morphine, the ultimate painkiller.
Then I picked up the bags from Whizz, locked the door, put the keys in the Clerk of the Course’s office and went to tea . . . not that I ate anything.
I smiled.
Another highly interesting and rewarding day at the races.
Little did I realise that the excitement wasn’t yet over.
29
I walked into Cheltenham Hospital at a quarter to eight as the setting sun cast long shadows of the college buildings across the open expanse of their cricket ground.
I adored the coming of summer when the days were lengthening and the evenings getting warm enough to sit outside in the garden, sipping chilled white wine spritzers with ice cubes clinking in the glass. Every year it did wonders for my mood and, this year in particular, it was a welcome release from the misery and gloom of the preceding winter.
I’d already picked up the boys and I left them sitting in my Mini in the staff car park while I took the bags in through the hospital main entrance. ‘I won’t be long,’ I said to them. ‘Just dropping off some things.’
Dick McGee was the only occupant of a two-bedded side ward and he appeared to be asleep when I quietly walked in.
Thank goodness, I thought. I can just dump his stuff and go.
I placed the bag gently on the floor next to the wall but he obviously sensed my being there and opened his eyes.
‘Hello, doc,’ he said.
‘Hi, Dick,’ I replied. ‘How are you doing?’
‘Not great, but I’ll live. And I’ll walk again thanks to you. It seems I owe you an apology.’
‘Just doing my job,’ I said.
‘Thanks anyway.’
‘I brought your stuff,’ I said, indicating towards the bag on the floor, ‘and Whizz said to not worry about your car. He’ll get someone to drive it to your home tomorrow. He also asked me to say hi from him.’
Dick smiled but it turned into a grimace of pain.
‘Hurts?’ I asked.
‘Only when I breathe,’ he said, trying to make a joke of it. ‘It comes in waves and it’s got worse since I got here.’
‘Pain is sometimes like that, especially in the back. The bruising causes swelling that comes on later and presses on the spinal nerves. Haven’t they given you something for it?’
‘Doped to the bloody eyeballs,’ he said. ‘It’ll soon pass.’
He closed his eyes but the pain was still clearly visible in his features.
I looked down at him lying there, small and vulnerable in the hospital bed, very different from his godlike status as a fearless champion when sitting astride an impressive charger.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’d better be off.’
Dick opened his eyes and then his mouth as if he was about to say something. But he closed it again without uttering a sound.
‘Your phone’s in the bag,’ I said. ‘Do you want it?’
‘Yeah. Great.’
I took it out and handed it to him. ‘Bye then,’ I said, and turned towards the door.
‘He was some sort of investigator,’ Dick said quietly but clearly.
I turned back. ‘Who was?’
‘The man in the car park, the one who died. The man in the photo.’
Ten minutes later one of the nurses came to tell me she’d had a call from the hospital main reception desk. My son was there and he wanted to know how much longer I was going to be.
I’d completely forgotten about the twins.
‘Not much longer,’ I said. ‘Please tell him I’m sorry and will he wait in the car.’
The nurse went away and I turned back to Dick McGee.
‘Will you tell the police or the racing authorities what you’ve just told me?’
‘No way,’ he said. ‘I’d tell them I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think I’m stupid or something? My life would be over. I’d be hounded out of the jockeys’ changing room for a start. No one likes a snitch.’
‘So why are you telling me?’ I asked.
‘Because I reckon you’ve earned it,’ he said, waving a hand at his supine body. ‘If I’d had my way earlier this afternoon, I’d have ended up in a wheelchair or worse, although I’m not sure being dead is actually worse than being paralysed. Anyway, I reckon I owe you, but I’m not telling anyone else and I’ll deny ever having said it.’
‘So what am I meant to do with the information?’ I asked.
‘I don’t care, just don’t involve me.’
‘But you are involved,’ I said.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m totally clean and above board. Always have been and always will be. OK, I’m fiercely competitive, but I’m fair with it. Not like some others I could mention.’
‘Mike Sheraton, for example?’
He stared at me. ‘I’ve said enough. I think you’d better go now.’
I walked out of the room into the main body of the ward and then along the corridor towards the lift thinking about the conversation I’d just had with Dick McGee.
‘The man was an investigator working for Indian racing,’ he’d told me. ‘He was looking into an allegation that an Indian bookmaker was paying jockeys in Britain to fix races.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He said so. He was asking if anyone knew of a man called Geronimo. I remember because it seemed odd – a Native American Indian rather than an Indian from India as I’d thought.’
‘Was Geronimo the bookmaker?’
Dick shook his head. ‘Apparently he’s some sort of intermediary. According to the dead man, Geronimo is English. The fixer.’
‘But the dead man was an Indian from India, not from America or England. The police finally found out who he was. His name was Rahul Kumar from Delhi.’
‘So the name Geronimo must be just a joke, a nickname. A play on the Indian thing.’
‘What else did the man say?’
‘Not much.’
‘So why were Mike Sheraton and Jason Conway arguing with him?’
‘I don’t know but it wasn’t the first time. He’d been at Sandown the previous Saturday asking questions and both JC and Sheraton had been arguing with him then too.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before? Or tell the police? Why did you lie?’
‘I didn’t lie. You only asked me the man’s name and I told you I didn’t know. And I don’t. I’m no grass. I don’t want to get involved. It’s none of my business.’
‘But the integrity of your sport is at risk.’
‘Integrity! Don’t make me laugh. Far too many people in racing are on the make.’
‘But not you?’
‘Not me.’
I wasn’t at all sure I believed him. But he hadn’t had to tell me what
he knew. My question now was: what did I do about it? Did I tell anyone else? Would it make any difference? If Dick McGee would deny ever having told me then any evidence would be dismissed as mere hearsay and not admissible in a court.
I was still pondering these questions when I arrived back at the Mini. So preoccupied had I been thinking about what Dick had said that only then did I realise I was still carrying the bag containing Jason Conway’s clothes.
‘Sorry, boys,’ I said to the twins, ‘I’ve got to go back in for something else, but I promise I won’t be as long this time.’
‘Oh, come on, Mum,’ Toby whined. ‘We’re starving.’
‘How about us stopping at McDonald’s on the way home?’ I said.
That cheered them up.
‘I won’t be long.’
‘That’s what you said last time,’ Oliver complained.
‘I mean it this time,’ I said. ‘I promise.’
I went back into the hospital main entrance and found out from reception which ward Jason Conway was in. Needless to say, it was the farthest away.
As a concussion case, he was also in a side ward with the light dimmed. Total rest, read the sign on the door. I’d been tempted just to leave the bag of his things at the nurses’ station but things had a habit of disappearing, especially phones, so I slipped into his room as quietly as I could.
Jason was lying on his back in the semi-darkness but he wasn’t asleep. He rotated his head towards me.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ he asked.
Charming, I thought, and wondered why I’d bothered to come back. I was beginning to wish I’d just dumped his stuff in a rubbish bin in the car park and driven the boys straight home.
‘Whizz asked me to bring in your clothes,’ I said, holding up the bag. ‘Your phone’s in here too. Whizz says not to worry about your car. He’ll get someone to drive it home for you tomorrow.’
‘I intend being out of here first thing in the morning. I’ll drive it home myself.’
‘You’ll have to sort that out with him,’ I said. ‘He has the keys.’
I put the bag down on the end of his bed.
‘You can sod off now,’ he snarled, without a hint of thanks. ‘If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be in this bloody dump of a hospital.’
‘You were concussed in a fall,’ I said. ‘It had nothing to do with me.’
‘You sent me here.’
‘Not just me,’ I said. ‘The ambulance crew said you were concussed before I even got to you.’
‘You could have stopped it.’ He was angry.
‘Now, why would I do that when you were clearly confused? It was for your own good. You are just lucky that the scan showed no bleeding into your brain.’
Maybe, if the scan had showed something amiss, it would have improved his temper, if not his prognosis.
‘If you want my advice you should just rest and do what the medical staff tell you. The quicker you try and get up and about, the longer it will take for you to recover fully and get back to riding.’
It was good advice – not that I’d taken it myself back in March when I’d been hit by the bus.
‘I don’t need your fucking advice,’ Jason said with real venom. ‘Now get the hell out of here.’
The ungrateful, good-for-nothing, spot-fixing scumbag, I thought.
Now I was getting angry – furious in fact.
I started to go but my anger got the better of me.
I turned back to him.
‘Who is Geronimo?’ I asked.
I knew instantly I’d made a big mistake.
Jason Conway stared at me with such hatred in his eyes that my anger transformed from rage into sheer terror, and a shiver ran down my spine.
I wished I’d never asked the question. Indeed, I more than wished it. I longed to have that moment back again, to be more composed, more controlled.
But, of course, I couldn’t.
What was done was done.
I hurried along the endless hospital corridors, back towards the main entrance, my feet seemingly unattached to my body.
How could I have been so foolish?
I had promised, not just to Grant but also to myself, that I’d ask no more questions.
Stop asking questions. Next time I’ll run over your kid, not just his bike.
What had I done?
I rushed out into the car park desperate to get back to my boys, to check that they hadn’t been kidnapped, or worse.
They were both in the car, of course they were.
Calm down, I said to myself. Get a grip.
I stood by the open Mini door, scanning the car park through 360 degrees, trying to convince myself I wasn’t searching for a long black Mercedes with dark-tinted rear windows.
I was hyperventilating and could feel the beginnings of a panic attack in my fingers.
Calm down.
Breathe – in through my nose and out through my mouth – long deep breaths.
Slowly, things began to recover.
‘Come on, Mum,’ shouted Toby. ‘Get in the car. Olly and I are, like, ravenous.’
‘Sorry, boys,’ I said, sitting down in the driver’s seat and forcing a smile. ‘So, who wants a McDonald’s?’
‘We do,’ they chorused, bouncing up and down excitedly on the seats.
They might be fourteen but they could still be little boys again when they wanted.
They were my pride and joy. My reason for living.
How could I possibly have put them in so much danger?
30
We went to the McDonald’s Drive-Thru on Tewkesbury Road for a double order of Big Mac, large fries and banana milkshake.
Identical meals for identical boys.
‘What are you having, Mum?’ Toby said.
‘Nothing. I’ll get myself some fish when we get home.’
But, if the truth be known, I was feeling too ill to eat anything, and especially not a Big Mac and fries. The very thought of it made me feel sick.
‘How about Dad?’ Oliver shouted from the back seat. ‘Hadn’t we better get something for him?’
‘Your father’s at a work do this evening,’ I said. ‘That’s why I had to pick you up.’
I drove home as the boys ate their food and noisily slurped their milkshakes. I spent almost as much time looking in the rear-view mirror as I did watching the road ahead but, by now, the sun had long gone and it was almost totally dark, so all I could see were headlights anyway.
I drove all the way round the roundabout twice at Bishop’s Cleeve to check if we were being followed, and received a very strange look from Toby for doing so.
‘You all right, Mum?’ he asked.
‘Perfectly,’ I said. ‘My mind was just on something else.’
I could tell it didn’t reassure him much. Whereas Oliver had pretty much taken my psychiatric hospital stay in his stride, Toby had been seriously concerned that I would die.
For many years as a child, Toby had equated being in hospital with dying, ever since the mother of a good friend of his at primary school had gone into hospital for a supposedly routine hernia repair only to perish on the operating table from complications with the anaesthetic. The fact that I worked at a hospital didn’t seem to shake this conviction and he was desperate that I shouldn’t have to be readmitted as a patient.
So it did nothing to relieve his anxiety when, immediately after turning into the lane towards our village, I quickly pulled over and switched the lights off.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’ he asked with concern.
What could I say? It surely wouldn’t help if I told him the truth – that I was checking we hadn’t been followed.
But I was being crazy, I thought.
The man in the long black Mercedes didn’t have to follow us – he’d left Oliver’s broken bicycle on our driveway so he must already know where we lived. Not that the thought was particularly encouraging.
‘Nothing, darling,’ I said.
&n
bsp; I restarted the car, turned the lights back on, and drove home.
Not that my worries were over. Not by a long way.
The house was in darkness and I imagined all sorts of evils lurking in the deep shadows cast by the solitary streetlight across the road. It was as much as I could do not to drive away altogether, and I had to force myself to park the Mini on the driveway.
No sooner had the wheels stopped turning than Oliver was out of the rear passenger door with Toby close on his heels.
Had they no idea of the potential danger?
No, of course not. It was me, not them, who was paranoid.
Needless to say, we all made it safely inside and I went round double-checking that the doors and windows were all properly closed and locked.
The boys started watching a DVD on the television in the sitting room while I sat in the kitchen wondering what the hell I should do now.
Should I call the police?
But what could I tell them?
Grant arrived home after ten o’clock and found he couldn’t get in through the front door. So he rang the bell and made me jump.
‘Why did you double-lock it when you knew I was still out?’ he demanded when I let him in.
‘Have you had a nice evening?’ I asked, ignoring his question.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Complete waste of time. It was meant to be a working supper, a brainstorming session, but as soon as the wine came out it degenerated into a whingeing session about the company. I knew we should never have had it at a restaurant.’
Grant was cross.
It had been his idea to have the evening session in the first place, so that the design team couldn’t drift off back to their workstations rather than participate in the discussion. It had clearly not been the success he had hoped for.
‘How about you?’ he asked. ‘How was your day?’
‘Busy,’ I said.
‘What have you had to eat?’
He always asked.
‘Not much,’ I said.
‘What did you have for supper?’
‘The boys had a McDonald’s on the way home.’
‘And you?’
‘I was going to have some fish,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t feel like it.’
‘Chris,’ he implored, ‘you really must have something to eat. You know what Stephen Butler said. Do you want to end up back in that hospital?’
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