by Joe McNally
Sitting at my PC, I sent the file to Mave. ‘Okay. Leave it with me.’
‘How long?’ I asked.
‘Depends what’s on it.’ She stopped typing and stared at her screen. ‘You look like shit.’
‘Feel like it.’
‘A couple of hours sleep might be a good idea before a trip to hospital.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘You were out for a long time, Eddie.’
‘I’m okay. Just need a day’s rest.’
‘Go to A and E. I’ll have this done by the time you’re home.’
All right. I’ll call you.’
She closed the link. I had no intention of getting a formal medical check. If the racing authorities found out, they might not let me ride for a while. A fall on the track that resulted in loss of consciousness, even for ten seconds, would get you stood down.
I still had a headache but no nausea, no dizziness. Tired and sore and somehow back to square one. I lay awake trying to find gaps in the gonging headache in which I could think. Why call the police? What good had that done so far?
If I called in Peter McCarthy, the director of racing’s Integrity Department, there’d be a shitstorm of panic in case the word got out to the betting public. Mac would try and shut me up for months.
I had to find out where Watt had gone. The only one likely to know would be Blane Kilberg, his so-called assistant trainer. That would never sit right with me, or anyone who knew about racing. An experienced vet, acting assistant in a yard with just eight horses?
No way.
Kilberg was in on the ringer scam. He had to be. Fissure Splint was also Spiritless Fun. Each had a passport, each had a microchip in his neck confirming his identity against the passport. Kilberg’s job was to implant and remove the chips, it had to be.
Could Kilberg be Mr. Big? Had Bayley Watt feared him so much he’d risked killing me, then bolted, leaving behind a yardful of horses, a house and land worth upwards of a million pounds? A business he’d spent years building?
Blane Kilberg was nothing to look at. Well nothing that would scare you. He was something of a fitness freak. At dusk he was often seen on the gallops, without a horse. He’d be wearing lycra, and carrying silver dumbbells as he ran up the steady slopes of the all-weather strip, like running on sand dunes. Then he would jog down again, backwards. He was fit and foxlike, light on his feet and fancied himself a dancer. There were stories of him doing ballet moves in the gym at Oaksey House, working at the Barre, close enough to steam up the mirrors, black headphones over his buzzcut blonde hair he’d paid thousands for.
Hair transplant, lasered eyes, new teeth, everything above his collarbone must have cost close to fifty grand. Some would do that to boost confidence, but a man that was happy to do ballet in full view of stable lads and jockeys, didn’t need much of a confidence boost. He’d been the butt of enough jokes last year when his teenage bride had taken off in her three litre wedding present, all the way home to Romania.
Kilberg had bet some people he would bring her home, but her gypsy family had circled the wagons and the vet was soon home complaining about “Third world gangsters”.
So, that was what I knew of Blane Kilberg. Narcissist? Definitely. Delusional? Probably. The man who had terrorized Bayley Watt? I doubted it. But I had seen stranger things.
Anyway, Kilberg was the first port of call. Not the sergeant. Not McCarthy. I had one advantage: I was the only one, apart from Kilberg, and whoever Watt was running from, who knew what the trainer had been up to. Why surrender that advantage at this stage?
I’d go to Watt’s yard on the pretext of doing some schooling for him. If Kilberg wasn’t there, I’d call McCarthy, to make sure the horses were looked after, and play dumb. If I told Mave that was the plan, playing dumb, she’d have said “You won’t find that difficult, Edward.”
26
Kilberg’s black Mercedes was at the yard when I drove in, it was parked at an angle, nose-up to the sandstone gable end of the house, as though he’d roared in and pulled a handbrake stop.
I parked alongside, at the same angle.
Kilberg was in the feed room, filling a battered old black plastic bowl with feed. His parking suggested he’d arrived in a hell of a hurry, but his boots gleamed as black and shiny as his Mercedes. He was clean shaven and I could smell his cologne through the sweetness of oats and bran.
He glanced up at me, as though I was the hired help. ‘Morning’ he said.
‘Good morning, you landed breakfast duty then?’
‘And lunch and dinner,’ He continued to scoop feed.
‘Where’s Bayley?’
‘Dead.’ He shook the bowl, looking into it.
I waited, watching him being Mister Cool, wondering where he was at in whatever script he’d prepared in his head. He marched out, obviously expecting me to follow like some apprentice, eager to discover the secret of becoming a full-fledged cool dude.
I stayed in the feed room, listening to him snapping the bolt on the door of a box, slapping the hungry horse, knocking the plastic bowl against the manger to get the last few flakes out. Then his leather boot heels on concrete, as he came back and my nose took over from my ears as that sweet scent he’d rubbed on his shining jaw came at me like the jet stream.
His manicured hand gripped the door, then his short spikes of blonde hair appeared as he peered in at me, round the edge of the door. ‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘Fucking powdered shit.’ Kilberg said, spooning coffee from a jar into pale blue mugs, ‘Why would a man spend a hundred grand a year running a yard, and not buy a decent coffee maker?’
I looked around the kitchen I’d been in last night. My dried footprints were still on the tiles. The weapon Watt had used sat on the stove, looking harmless in the daylight.
I was sitting where Watt had sat, unwilling to wait for Kilberg’s invitation, to sit down.
He brought the coffee, then opened the fridge door and rooted around, tutting. He closed the door. ‘No cream either.’
‘Listen,’ I said ‘Quit the Cool Hand Luke stuff, will you? I’m not impressed, and as far I can see, there is nobody else here. Sit down and tell me what’s going on.’
Coffee mug in his left hand he reached in the back pocket of his black jods and pulled out some paper that had been folded into a square. He handed it to me.
It was a copy of an email from Bayley Watt:
“I’m done. Malloy came to the house just after you left. He knows everything, so we’re fucked. Do me a favour and see to the horses. Then you do what you think is best for yourself. If you decide to run, make arrangements for the horses first, please. I panicked and thought I’d get out of the country. I’m on a ferry to Ireland, but I’ve been sitting in this cabin asking myself where I’m running to with whatever time I’ve got left. Running’s for horses and young men. I’m going Jimmy Sherrick’s way, poor bastard. No hanging. That still fucking haunts me. But I’ve got enough Cyanide. When they find me at Cork, it’ll be the worst case of seasickness in history. I’ve emailed my last wishes to my lawyer, there’s something in it for you so long as you look after the horses. Good luck.”
The final line was “Sent from my android phone” It was timed 3.37. I checked my watch: Watt had sent it while I was here rooting around his PC.
Kilberg was sitting now, hands clasped on the table. He raised his eyebrows when I looked at him but his eyes told me nothing. He seemed determined to play the part all the way through, and it dawned on me that this wasn’t some act, it was no bold facade. Blane Kilberg saw himself this way. In his own reality, he was some big time star or hero or gangster or something. Anything but a middle aged vet in a village rabid with ambitious people, many delusional, like Kilberg.
I lay the paper flat and drank some coffee. ‘You were moving the microchips then, on that horse?’
He nodded, ‘That was me.’
I had been trying to pin down his accent. It had something of that Boston twang I re
called from the newsreel footage of J.F.K. Maybe he’d lived in Boston or gone to college there. ‘What’s the horse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Bayley wouldn’t tell you?’
‘I never asked.’ His eyes said “I was too smart to ask” And he was expecting me to press him on it, but I denied him the pleasure.
‘How much did you make?’
‘Not enough.’
‘It’s never enough, is it?’
‘We needed it. We had plans.’
‘And Jimmy Sherrick was about to scupper those plans?’
‘Jimmy Sherrick killed himself. Bayley was there to help him.’
‘How?’
‘Jimmy arranged a meeting with you. He wanted to be sure he was found quickly so his Dad wouldn’t suffer so much.’
‘So why did Bayley need to be there?’
‘Jimmy had asked Bayley to be there. He told him he was scared of getting it wrong, scared of hanging kicking and choking for ten minutes. Bayley told him where he could get cyanide and helped him order it online.’
‘Sounds like Bayley was hardly rushing to talk Jimmy out of it.’
‘Jimmy had cancer. Pancreatic cancer. Bayley had leukaemia. He tried a couple of courses of chemo, but he couldn’t hack it. He wanted the money from betting to go abroad and have all his blood replaced.’
I thought back to last night, to what I’d said: “What’s he doing, collecting terminal cancer patients?” Now it seemed as though there was no “He,” no mister big. Watching Kilberg, and listening to him, and thinking of Watt’s email, I knew Kilberg wasn’t in charge of anything.’
‘What about you?’ I said ‘What’s your angle?’
‘Liver. I need a new liver in the next three months or I’ll be joining Jimmy and Bayley.’
‘You on the list, the waiting list?’
‘Here? No, what’s the point? Ninety two percent of people waiting for a transplant die. My plan was to go overseas and buy my way to the top.’
I watched him, unable to make my brain work quick enough to sieve all this stuff about cancer and cyanide and suicide. Incapable of filtering my instinct to sniff out inconsistencies.
My head hurt.
Kilberg unclasped his hand and put his thumbs in the waistband of his jods, then sat back until his nose pointed at the ceiling, he tilted his eyes, looking at me through the narrow slits. And I noticed a jowly flabbiness about him, a softness, similar to the way Bayley had looked these past few weeks.
‘What are you going to do?’ He said.
‘I don’t think I’m going to have to do anything. They could be opening the cabin on that ferry as we speak. If Bayley’s sent a note to his solicitor like he said, it’s a matter of time before the police turn up, then the BHA’S Integrity guys. The question is what are you going to do?’
‘Bayley won’t have given them any details, he’s left the yard and horses to me. That was part of the agreement if he died first. He wanted me to have the chance of saving myself.’
It was slowly dawning on me. ‘You want me to keep quiet so you can carry on with this ringer scam?’
He looked straight at me now, thumbs still stuck in his waistband. ‘If you stay quiet, I swear I’ll run the horse straight for the rest of the season. That’s assuming the BHA grant me a licence. I believe Fruitless Spin can win the Supreme in March and I think you already know he can. I’ll run him straight. I’m not saying I won’t bet him, because I have to or I’m a dead man. He runs straight, and you ride if you want to, I’ll understand if you don’t.’
‘Bayley tried to bribe me. Now you.’
He just watched me.
His story about Jimmy’s death had been told with conviction. Bayley had told him and Kilberg had swallowed it. ‘Did you know Jimmy’s taped suicide messaged was faked?’ I said.
He shook his head, ‘The opposite,’ he said ‘Jimmy was afraid that if he left a note, people might say it was forged. Bayley told me Jimmy had asked for his help to make the recording.’
I shifted in my chair and it screeched on the floor tiles. ‘Did you believe everything Bayley told you?’
‘Why would he lie?’
‘Why did he give Jimmy’s father a bugged watch? Did Jimmy get one too? One that disappeared that night in the cellar after Bayley had patched together a so called suicide message from it?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I know it. Bayley didn’t deny it. Did you get a watch from him?”
He raised his right hand and a thick black leather strap slipped half an inch down his wrist. He turned it to let me see the silver chunky face, ‘I’ve worn this since I was twenty-one. My father gave it to me on my birthday.’
‘So why would Bayley Watt give Jim Sherrick a bugged watch?’
‘Who knows? Bayley was with Jimmy when he died. He helped Jimmy kill himself. That’s a pretty serious crime. Maybe he just wanted to make sure Jimmy’s Dad wasn’t suspicious about anything.’
‘But he found out he was, and Jimmy’s house burned down. Then his corpse was stolen. What did Bayley do with Jimmy’s body?’
‘How would Bayley Watt have dug a grave and hauled out a coffin?’
‘Maybe someone helped.’
‘You mean me?’
‘There was no one closer to Bayley.’
‘Not guilty, Eddie.’
I finished the coffee and got to my feet. ‘I’ll tell you what, if I find out where Jimmy Sherrick’s body is by this time tomorrow, I’ll ride that horse for you and keep my mouth shut until the end of the season.’ Kilberg stayed seated, looking at me. ‘I don’t know where Jimmy’s corpse is, and I’m pretty sure Bayley doesn’t, or didn’t, either. So it looks like I’m in trouble.’
‘Think about it. About what you’re asking me to believe. I can just about swallow the cancer story, but if you and Bayley didn’t steal Jimmy’s body it means somebody else was involved. Somebody with an awful lot to lose.’
He just kept staring. I noticed again the loose flesh on his jowls. I said ‘I’ll hold until noon tomorrow.’
He nodded. No shrug of ignorance No final plea. A nod, which told me he knew where Jimmy was.
27
I rode a winner at Stratford in the afternoon, finished last in the novice hurdle, then had a lucky fall in the novice chase. The fall to rides ratio in our business is about one in ten. You get straight to your feet from most of them. The occasional tumble results in an ambulance trip, and once in a while somebody dies.
On firm summer ground I might have ended up in hospital rather than in the showers trying to remove the mud stain from my thigh with a scrubbing brush I’d borrowed from Vernon Siddal, a valet.
As I dried off and got dressed, Vernon was the only person in the changing room. Through the window, the last of the winter light was fading. I was amazed that the racing grapevine hadn’t yet picked up on the death of Bayley Watt. I watched Vernon work away at the deep sink, grinding the worst of the mud from several pairs of breeches, before putting them in a washing machine.
I walked over and nodded at the dirty pool of tangled legs, ‘Didn’t someone once call mud glorious?’ I said.
He glanced at me, smiling, then back into the swirling mass ‘For hippos I believe that was,’ he said.
‘I shouldn’t complain, I suppose, it was a nice squelchy cushion for me in the novice chase.’
‘Aye, I saw that. You lot should have the longest slide competition. You know, the way golfers have the longest drive competitions?’
I laughed ‘I think I’d have won today’s’
‘Definitely.’
‘I’m getting too used to riding in the ambulance, the only walking I seem to do these days is to and from the car. I might start doing the early morning runs up the all-weather like Blane Kilberg.’
‘There’s a few doing it now. Always were. It was just that Kilberg was the only one in lycra.’
‘I think I’d draw the line at the lycra, keen as I am to get fitt
er.’
‘They must have embarrassed Kilberg out of it too, he’s been in baggy cotton gear this season. More like a mad monk now.’
‘That won’t do much for his free flowing style. Still, there’s always the ballet.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Maybe he’s getting more sensible since he got that assistant trainer’s job with Bayley Watt,’ I said.
‘I doubt it, old Bayley’s on the eccentric side himself, isn’t he? They’ll make a good pair.’
‘I better get dressed and head for home. You got much more to do?’
‘Another hour should see it finished.’
‘Plumpton tomorrow?’
‘Aye. Drive, wash, polish, sew, wash, drive, sleep, drive…Groundhog day.’
‘But you love it?’
He laughed ‘Most of the time.’
It was dark when I got in the car, I took my phone from the glove box. Jim Sherrick had left a message, using the coded sentence we’d agreed if he wanted to see me: “Eddie can you pick me a few things up from the shops?”
I called him. We small-talked. He asked for milk and eggs.
His television was on when I arrived. We chatted about racing for a few minutes, then he asked me to stay for tea.
‘I won’t, if you don’t mind, Jim. I need to do ten stone at Plumpton tomorrow.’
‘Ah, who’d be a starving jockey?’
‘I often ask myself the same question.’
‘Take care, Eddie. See you soon.’
‘And you. Goodbye.’
He eased off his watch and laid it softly on the chair, and followed me out.
We sat in my car. ‘Did you hear about Bayley Watt?’ he said.
‘Blane Kilberg told me this morning. Who told you?’
‘The sergeant called by this afternoon.’ Mister Sherrick told me that Watt’s solicitor had contacted Thames Valley police who called the police in Cork. The Irish cops found Bailey’s body in his cabin. Time of death was estimated at 4a.m., not long after his email to Kilberg.
I told Mister Sherrick about the email, although I mentioned nothing else Kilberg had said to me. I wanted to wait for that deadline of noon tomorrow. Kilberg knew where Jimmy Sherrick’s body lay. I was sure of that. But I wasn’t so sure he’d admit to it, so I didn’t want to give Jimmy’s dad false hope.