Silks

by Dick Francis

  ‘Sorry,’ she said in a high-pitched squeak, ‘I’m new here. You’ll have to ask one of the vets.’

  ‘OK,’ I said looking round the bare vestibule. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘We’ve got a bit of an emergency at the moment,’ she went on in her squeak. ‘They’re all in the operating theatre.’

  ‘How long are they going to be?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ she squeaked. ‘They have been in there for quite some time already. But you’re welcome to wait.’ I looked about me again, there were no chairs. ‘Oh,’ she said again with realization. ‘You can wait in the waiting room if you like. Through there.’ She pointed at a wooden door opposite.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Please will you let the vets know that I am here.’

  ‘Yes, OK,’ she said. ‘As soon as I can.’

  I didn’t have much confidence that she would remember.

  I went through the door into the waiting room. It reminded me of going to the dentist. Adozen pink upholstered armchairs with pale wooden legs and arms were arranged around the walls with a few occasional tables between some of them. There was another door at the far end with a half-full wire magazine rack standing beside it, and the hard floor was covered with a thin blue carpet. It was functional rather than comfortable.

  A man sat on one of the chairs on the right-hand side and he looked up as I entered. We nodded at each other in informal greeting and he went back to reading some of the papers he had spread out around him. I sat down opposite him and glanced through a copy of Country Life that someone had left on a chair.

  Ten minutes or so passed. I went back out to the receptionist, who assured me that the vets were still operating but shouldn’t be much longer. I was sure she actually had no notion how long they would be but, nevertheless, I went back into the waiting room and sat down.

  I had looked at all the estate agents’ adverts in the Country Life and was beginning to read the book reviews when someone came through the far door. It was a woman wearing green scrub tunic and trousers with short green wellington boots. Avet, I surmised, fresh from the operating theatre. But it wasn’t me she was after. The other man stood up as she entered.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he said eagerly.

  ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘I think we have managed to save most of the muscle mass in the shoulder. It shouldn’t greatly impair him after proper healing.’

  The man let out a sigh of relief. ‘Mr Radcliffe will be relieved to hear it.’ He didn’t sound to me like he was the only one.

  ‘I have to get back in there now,’ said the vet. ‘To finish off. We will keep him here overnight and see how he’s doing in the morning.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the man. ‘Thank you. I’ll call you around nine.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. The man knelt down and began to collect together some of the papers he had been working on. The vet turned to me and raised her eyebrows as a question. ‘Are you being looked after?’ she said.

  ‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I was hoping to talk to someone who knew one of the vets that used to work here.’

  ‘Which vet?’ she asked.

  ‘Millie Barlow,’ I said.

  The reaction from the man was dramatic. ‘Right little bitch,’ he said almost under his breath, but quite audibly in the quiet of the waiting room.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said to him.

  ‘I said that she was a right little bitch,’ he repeated standing up and looking at me. ‘And she was.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ the vet said to me. ‘I have to go and close up the wound on the horse we have been operating on. If you’d like to wait, I’ll talk to you when I’m finished.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and she disappeared through the door.

  The man had almost collected his stuff.

  ‘Why was she a right little bitch?’ I asked him.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m Geoffrey Mason, I’m a barrister.’

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You have horses with Paul Newington.’

  ‘I do indeed,’ I said. ‘But you now have the advantage over me.’ I looked at him quizzically.

  ‘Simon Dacey,’ he said holding out his hand.

  Ah, I thought, no wonder he thinks Millie Barlow was a little bitch, she had ruined his party by killing herself in one of his bedrooms.

  ‘Do you have a problem?’ I asked him, nodding towards the door through which the vet had disappeared.

  ‘One of my yearlings got loose,’ he said. ‘Gashed himself on a parked car. Always happens to one of the good ones.’

  ‘Will he be all right?’ I asked.

  ‘I sincerely hope so,’ he said. ‘He cost almost half a million at the sales last month.’

  ‘But he must be insured,’ I said.

  ‘Just for transport home and thirty days,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? That ran out last Monday.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘aren’t all racehorses insured?’ I knew mine was.

  ‘Mr Radcliffe, that’s the owner, he says that the premiums are too high. He has about a dozen with me and he says he would rather spend the money he saves on another horse. He maintains that’s the best insurance.’

  I knew that my insurance premium on Sandeman was quite high, more than a tenth of his value. But that was relatively small as he’d been gelded and there were no stud prospects. For a potential stallion with a good bloodline the premium would be enormous. But, even so, it was quite a risk.

  ‘Doesn’t he insure any of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Not normally, but I know he insured Peninsula against being infertile or being injured so he couldn’t perform at stud.’

  Oh, I thought, Mr Radcliffe owned Peninsula. He wouldn’t be short of a bob or two.

  ‘So tell me why Millie Barlow was a right little bitch,’ I said, bringing the subject back to what really interested me.

  ‘She ruined my party,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a bit ungracious,’ I said. ‘The poor girl was so troubled that she killed herself. She probably didn’t ruin your party on purpose.’

  ‘But she did ruin it, nevertheless,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t she go and do it somewhere else? That party for winning the Derby was the best day of my life until she spoiled it. How would you like it? Some of my guests were royalty. What chance do you think I have of them coming again? I’ll tell you. None. The damn police even ended up questioning a Crown Prince about his visa. I ask you.’

  I could see his point of view.

  ‘Do you know why she killed herself?’ I asked him.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I hardly knew her.’

  ‘Did you know she was having an affair with Steve Mitchell?’ I asked.

  ‘God, yes,’ he said. ‘Everybody knew that. Worst kept secret in Lambourn. Look, I really have to go now. Evening stables are already well under way.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Can I call you again if I need any more answers?’

  ‘Why?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m representing Steve Mitchell,’ I said, handing him one of my cards.

  ‘Oh, are you?’ He smiled, looking at it. ‘Seems you may have your work cut out there.’

  ‘Why does everyone think he did it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Because everyone in Lambourn would have heard them arguing at one time or another. They have been heard standing in the street shouting at each other. And word is that either of them would have thought nothing of putting the other through the wings.’ Putting someone through the wings of a fence by squeezing them for room was one of the worst crimes one jump jockey could do to another. Even though the wings were nowadays made of bendable plastic, it was still one of the most dangerous of falls, and one of the most likely to cause serious injury.

  ‘And no one much cares for either of them,’ he went on. ‘Barlow was slightly weird, and Steve Mitchell is arrogant.’

  ‘But do you really think he’s a murderer
?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I have to say I was surprised when I heard he’d been arrested. But people do funny things when they’re angry. They lose control.’

  How right he was. I’d once helped prosecute a psychopath who’s family had sworn that he wouldn’t normally have even said boo to a goose, but in a rage he had literally torn his wife limb from limb, with nothing more than his bare hands and a potato peeler.

  ‘So can I call you if I need to ask you anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘But I can’t think I would know anything that everybody else wouldn’t know. I didn’t have much to do with either of them. I don’t have jumpers in my yard.’

  ‘Sometimes even the smallest thing is important in a defence,’ I replied.

  ‘Do you really think he’s innocent?’ he asked me.

  ‘That’s not relevant,’ I said. ‘My job is to cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. I don’t have to prove his innocence, just create a reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind about his guilt.’

  ‘But surely,’ he said, ‘if you believe he’s guilty then you’re not doing the public any service by getting him off.’

  ‘It is the prosecution’s job to ensure that the jury have no reasonable doubt, not mine.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s a funny old system,’ he said.

  ‘I agree,’ I said. ‘But it has worked pretty well for hundreds of years.’

  The jury system had its origins in Roman times, when huge juries would vote on the guilt or innocence of the accused. The right to be judged by a jury of one’s peers was established under law in England as far back as the thirteenth century, although there were semblances of it even before then. Under English law there is a right to trial by jury for all but very minor offences, as there is enshrined in the United States Constitution. But that is not the case around the world, not even across Europe. There is no such thing as a jury trial in modern Germany, for example, where a judge or panel of judges decide alone on guilt or innocence.

  ‘I really must go,’ said Simon Dacey, collecting the last of his things.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Nice to have met you. Good luck with the yearling.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  We didn’t shake hands because his were full of papers, so we nodded again as we had done when I had arrived and he departed, me holding the door open for him on his way out.

  I sat down again on a red armchair. The clock on the wall read 6.15.

  What was I doing? I asked myself. I had now told far too many people that I was the barrister acting for the defence in Steve Mitchell’s case, but I knew that I shouldn’t act. I couldn’t act. I was a potential witness in the case, but only I was aware of that. No one, apart from Scot Barlow and I, knew of our little exchange at Sandown. Or did they? Had Barlow told someone that he had been seen by a ‘bloody amateur’ in the showers? I doubted it. So what should I do?

  All my training told me to go and make the incident known to the police, or at least to the prosecution. All my instincts as a barrister were to walk away from this case and never look back for fear of being turned to a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife. Maybe I should just let justice take its course and have nothing to do with it.

  But what was justice? I had been emphatically told by someone to take the case and then to lose it. Was that justice? If I walked away would someone else be frightened into ensuring that Steve Mitchell was convicted? Did the very fact that someone was so keen to see him sent down for the murder prove that he didn’t do it? Then where would justice be if I walked away? But even if I could successfully defend him, where would that then leave me? ‘Next time, I’ll smash your head,’ Trent had said. ‘Next time, I’ll cut your balls right off.’ If I walked away and Mitchell was convicted with someone else in the defence chair, would Trent and whoever was behind him still come after me? And that prospect brought a cold sweat to my brow and a tremor to my fingers.

  ‘Angela, my darling,’ I said quietly into the empty waiting room. ‘Tell me what to do?’

  She didn’t reply. Once again, I longed for her presence and her wisdom. She had always instinctively known what was right. We had discussed everything, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. She had trained as a psychologist and even the most mundane of family conversations between us could turn readily into a deeper analysis of meaning. I remember one year casually asking her whether we would be going to my father’s house or staying with her parents for Christmas. Several hours later we had delved into the inner feelings we each had for our parents, and more particularly our feelings for our parents-in-law. In the end we had remained at home for the festivities, and we had laughed about it. How I now missed laughing with her.

  Without warning my eyes began to fill with tears. I couldn’t help it.

  The lady vet in the green scrubs chose this moment to reappear. I quickly wiped my eyes on my sleeve and hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Now how can I help you?’ she asked wearily.

  ‘Busy day?’ It was more of a statement than a question.

  ‘You bet,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I think we saved Mr Radcliffe his money.’

  ‘Bad?’ I said.

  ‘Not life threatening,’ she said. ‘But it could have stopped him racing if we hadn’t been careful. We had to rejoin some tendons and sew back some muscle tissue. He’s young. He should heal as good as new. Stupid horse gashed its shoulder on a car wing mirror after breaking free.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Simon Dacey told me.’

  She raised her eyebrows in slight surprise.

  ‘And who are you exactly?’ she asked.

  ‘Geoffrey Mason,’ I said, pulling out another card from my pocket and handing it over.

  ‘Not selling, are you?’ she asked, glancing briefly at the card.

  ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘I’m after some information.’

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘What information?’

  ‘I’m a barrister and I’m representing Steve Mitchell.’ There I go again, I thought.

  ‘Arrogant little shit,’ she said, somewhat surprisingly.

  ‘Is he?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Thinks he’s God’s gift to women,’ she said. ‘Expects every female round here to drop their knickers on demand.’

  ‘And do they?’ I asked.

  She looked at me and smiled. ‘Remind me never to be in the witness box when you’re asking the questions.’

  ‘I’ll try.’ I smiled back. ‘But at least tell me your name so I can be sure.’

  ‘Eleanor Clarke,’ she said, reaching out a hand, which I shook. ‘I thought you said you wanted to ask about Millie Barlow.’

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘Did you know her?’

  ‘Certainly did,’ said Eleanor. ‘She lived in the house here with three others of us.’

  ‘House?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, there’s a house out the back where some of the staff who work here live. I live there and Millie lived there until…,’ she tailed off and looked down.

  ‘Until she killed herself?’ I asked, finishing her sentence.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking back at my face. ‘That’s right, until she killed herself. But she didn’t sleep there every night.’

  ‘Because she was with Steve Mitchell?’ I said it as a question.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied rather hesitantly.

  ‘Was she sleeping with anyone else?’ I asked.

  ‘God, you’re sharp,’ she said. ‘But I’m afraid our Millie would sleep with anyone who asked nicely.’

  ‘Any man, you mean,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Millie wasn’t really that choosy. But she was a sweet girl. We all missed her after…’

  ‘Why do you think she did it?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Lots of people said afterwards that she had been depressed but I didn’t think so. She was always so happy. She always had a plan to get rich quick.’

  ‘Was she sel
ling sex?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said with some emphasis. ‘I don’t think so. I mean, perhaps I exaggerated a bit. She didn’t sleep with everyone. She had her favourites. And she would say no occasionally, especially to some of the married ones. She wasn’t all bad.’

  ‘But she was living with Steve Mitchell?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Eleanor said. ‘She lived in the house here but she did spend nights away with Mitchell, yes. Him more than any other, I’d say. But they were hardly living together.’ I wondered if Mrs Barlow would be pleased or not. I wondered how strict Millie’s upbringing had been. Maybe as soon as she was free of her father’s control she went a little mad, sampling life’s pleasures in excess.

  ‘How did she get the anaesthetic?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, we have it here, of course, but it’s funny.’ She paused.

  ‘What’s funny?’ I encouraged.

  ‘The toxicology report on Millie indicated that she had injected herself with thiopental.’

  I looked at her quizzically. ‘Why is that funny?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t use thiopental in the hospital. We use ketamine, usually mixed with either xylazine or detomidine.’ I raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘They’re sedatives,’ she explained, leaving me none the wiser. ‘Both types will cause unconsciousness, but thiopental is a barbiturate anaesthetic and ketamine is a hydrochloride salt.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit odd that she used a different drug than you use at the hospital?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘a vet can get medicines from any drug supplier just by filling in a form. And anaesthetics are used by vets all the time.’

  ‘But it does mean she didn’t kill herself on the spur of the moment,’ I said. ‘Not if she had to order the stuff especially rather than just take some from here.’

  ‘She may have already had it,’ Eleanor said. ‘I have a few things in my bag that didn’t come from the hospital drug store. And barbiturate anaesthetics are used a lot. Thiopental is what’s used every day in most vets’ practices to put dogs and cats to sleep.’

  ‘Where does the hospital get its drugs?’ I asked her.

  ‘We have a specialist veterinary pharmacist in Reading,’ she said. ‘We have a delivery almost every day during the week.’