by Dick Francis
Needless to say, the Thames Valley Constabulary had not been greatly impressed by all the nocturnal activity that had been going on at Greystone Stables. I had called them using my mobile phone as soon as Isabella had been hit and they had subsequently arrived in convoy with an ambulance, and had promptly arrested everyone.
‘You should have called us immediately if someone had been kidnapped,’ the police said later at Newbury police station, their ill-disguised anger clearly directed at me for having taken things into my own hands.
‘But we couldn’t,’ my stepfather had said with conviction, coming to my defence. ‘The kidnappers told me that they would kill Josephine if the police were involved.’
The police, of course, had considered that to be an insufficient reason for not involving them, especially, as they had pointed out, since I appeared to know exactly where the kidnappers had taken their hostage.
Alex Reece had apparently wanted nothing to do with Warren and Garraway’s plan to recover the money, and had decided that flight would be a much better policy. He had consequently boarded a British Airways jumbo from Heathrow to New York just a few hours before the shoot-out at the Greystone Stables corral began.
Somewhat carelessly, however, he had failed to clean out his suitcase properly and had been apprehended by a US Customs sniffer-dog on his arrival at Kennedy Airport. He had subsequently been charged with importing cocaine into the United States, and was presently languishing in jail on Rikers Island in New York waiting to be served with extradition papers by the government of Gibraltar on fraud charges.
Garraway, meanwhile, had been singing like a canary and blaming everything on Jackson Warren, so much so that his lawyers had successfully persuaded a judge to grant him bail on the kidnapping and false-imprisonment charges. However, the judge had ordered that Garraway’s passport be confiscated and, as I heard unofficially from the tax inspector, the Revenue were greatly looking forward to the day, very soon, when Peter Garraway’s enforced extended stay in the United Kingdom would automatically make him resident here for tax purposes. The inspector had smiled broadly and rubbed his hands together. ‘We’ve been trying to get him for years,’ he’d said. ‘And now we will.’
‘So, who is taking over the training licence?’ It was Gordon Rambler who asked my mother the inevitable question at the Cheltenham press conference. ‘And what will happen to the horses?’
‘The horses will all be staying at Kauri House Stables,’ she said. ‘I spoke with all my owners yesterday and they are all supportive.’
That wasn’t entirely true. Some of her owners were decidedly unsupportive, but they had all been convinced, out of loyalty to her, to stay on board, at least for the immediate future. And Martin Toleron had helped here, too, vocally pledging his support, and his future horses, to the new training regime.
‘So who is it?’ Rambler was becoming impatient. ‘Who’s taking over?’
They were all expecting one of the sport’s up-and-coming young trainers to be moving into the big league.
‘My son,’ she said with a flourish. ‘My son, Thomas Forsyth, will henceforth be training the horses at Kauri Stables.’
I think it would be fair to say that there was a slight intake of breath, even amongst the most hardened of the racing journalists.
‘And,’ my mother went on, into the silence, ‘he will be assisted by Ian Norland, my previous head lad who has been promoted to assistant trainer.’
‘Can we all assume,’ Gordon Rambler said, recovering his composure, ‘that you will still be around to guide and advise them when necessary?’
‘Of course,’ she said, smiling broadly.
But one should never assume anything.