by Joe McNally
It was one of those rare decisions I got right. Blane Kilberg took the deadline literally. By the time it expired, so had he.
28
Driving up the single track road from my house next morning, I met a rolling police roadblock coming downhill. They stopped. I stopped and got out. Sergeant Middleton stepped out, His passenger made to do the same, but the sergeant waved him inside.
We looked at each other, and I knew the game had changed.
I could see a curtain of rain approaching from the far southwest. The wind gusted through the old trees, rattling the branches.
The sergeant walked toward me … ten paces. ‘Eddie.’
‘Sergeant.’
He gazed down at me from his uphill stance.
I said, ‘I’m trying to find the word for how you look, sergeant. Grave is the first one that comes to mind. What’s up?’
He gestured at the police car. ‘DS Wilmslow is with me. When he joins us, he’ll caution you. I asked for a minute first.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Blane Kilberg is dead. Another suicide. He sent an email to us claiming you were harassing him and Bayley Watt…and Jimmy Sherrick. That you’d driven them all to suicide.’
‘Harassing? How?’
‘Threatening them because you lost the rides on Watt’s horses.’
‘I didn’t lose the rides on anybody’s horses, least of all Bayley Watt’s. It was me that gave them up for Jimmy.’
‘I know you did. That’s why we’re standing here talking…just you and me. But you’re going to have to go through the process; formal questioning, statements. At the station or at your house.’
I checked my watch. ‘How long will it take?’
‘We’ll try and do it in an hour.’
‘I’m supposed to be at Plumpton.’
‘Look, let’s get it done. It’ll be quicker at your house.’
I sighed and shook my head. ‘Okay. I’ll reverse.’
DS Wilmslow was much younger than Sergeant Middleton. He looked about the same age as I was. I offered tea or coffee and he asked for boiled water and did I mind if he added a touch of cold from the tap. I turned it on and was about to move the steaming mug under the running water when he stood up quickly. ‘No! Please. I prefer to do it myself, if you don’t mind.’
I handed him the mug. He adjusted the flow to a trickle then passed the mug below in a smooth movement. I glanced at the sergeant. He raised an eyebrow.
We settled at the kitchen table. Wilmslow moved the mug on the coaster until it sat dead centre. A man of precision or one with OCD. Yet his tie knot was askew, his brown hair untidy. His hazel eyes had a vacancy about them, suggesting his thoughts were elsewhere, despite staring at me while I talked.
Few things throw me, or make me feel uncomfortable, but DS Wilmslow’s way of using his eyes was unsettling. Whether I was answering his questions or Sergeant Middleton’s, Wilmslow would scan different parts of my face like he was looking for a route into my skull.
He asked questions in the style of a doctor, as though trying to diagnose rather than convict. He read from what I took to be Kilberg’s email.
‘Can I read that?’ I said.
‘Not at the moment. Do you keep a diary?’
‘Only for rides.’
‘You have notes of your conversations with Jimmy Sherrick or Bayley Watt or Blane Kilberg?’
‘Why would I have kept notes?’
‘Could your conversations, any of them, have been interpreted as threatening?’
‘Yes.’
‘In what way?’
‘In the way that I told Bayley Watt that he had the choice of me calling you guys first, or the BHA’s integrity chief.’
‘Did you seek a reward from him for not calling in the authorities?’
‘Well, I sought the use of his front step to get a phone signal so I could make the call. Then Bayley sought a wok weighing half a stone before seeking a spot on my head to whang me with it.’
Middleton smiled. Wilmslow just made a note and said, ‘Did you offer Blane Kilberg a deal due to expire at noon today, promising not to expose him, so to speak, if you could ride a horse called Fruitless Spin in its remaining races this season?’
‘I offered him a deal in exchange for information about what he and Bayley Watt had done with Jimmy Sherrick’s body.’
‘And what was his response?’
‘He nodded.’
‘Did you construe a meaning from that?’
‘I construed that he’d give it some consideration.’
‘Did he say anything else?’
I went through everything Kilberg had told me. Wilmslow wrote it all down, occasionally saying ‘Hold!’, while his writing hand caught up. He used block capitals for everything.
While Wilmslow was writing, I was stacking things up in my head…many questions.
The rain reached us, coming at the big window straight on, causing the only noise in the house as Wilmslow conducted a check of what he’d written, his silver pen moving from line to line. I signed it as my statement, and walked them to the door.
The sergeant asked where I’d be for the rest of the week. ‘Racing every day. I can email you my schedule.’
‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ he said, glancing at Wilmslow then back at me, his mouth and eyebrows contorting in some kind of blame-shifting semaphore that was meant to keep me on his side.
It wasn’t working, and he knew it. ‘Am I allowed to know how Kilberg killed himself?’
The sergeant turned to Wilmslow, who said, ‘We’re awaiting the autopsy results.’
‘I don’t think I’ll need three guesses,’ I said. ‘Have you checked Watt’s place for a stock of cyanide pills?’
Wilmslow walked away. Sergeant Middleton said, ‘We’ll be in touch, Eddie.’ He raised a hand as he left, half a goodbye, half an apology from a man who’d reached the limit of his competence.
On the long drive to Plumpton, I had time to take in the fact that another person had died. When the sergeant had told me, he must have thought me callous. All I’d been interested in was saying ‘It wasn’t me.’
Wilmslow would have been watching from the car for my reaction. At least I hadn’t staggered in a dead faint like some ham actor. But I’d shown zero surprise, so where did that leave me in the suspicion stakes?
It was only now, alone in the car, heading for east Sussex that I realized the news about Kilberg had come as no shock. Nothing in this crazy case was shocking anymore. Yet, it should have been. Because I was becoming used to deaths, didn’t mean I shouldn’t question them.
Kilberg was a relatively young man. Why commit suicide within twelve hours of me asking him some questions? He was implicated in betting fraud not some child sex ring. Many in racing had been guilty of much worse crimes than Blane Kilberg or Bayley Watt.
Suicide made no sense here, however you looked at it. Kilberg’s story about Bayley’s leukaemia and his own liver could be grouped in the ‘possible terminal illness’ category that had loomed in my mind with Bayley and with Jimmy.
But Jimmy hadn’t committed suicide, had he? Someone had tried to make it look as though he had.
So if Jimmy had been killed, why assume that Watt and Kilberg had not been killed too? If someone was capable of putting together a recorded suicide message, it wouldn’t be beyond him to hack the email accounts of two men and send fake suicide notes from them.
A triple murder? Over a ringer fraud. A fraud where no unusual betting patterns had been found? That made no sense either.
Had they been killed for something other than being involved with the ringer? No. I couldn’t go there. Things were complicated enough. I had to stick to this line. It was all I had and I was on my own.
I liked the sergeant, but he was little more than a beat Bobby. Wilmslow wouldn’t be giving me help anytime soon.
Picking the brains of Peter McCarthy would be worthwhile, and Mave would help me. But that wa
s it. I slowed and found McCarthy’s number and counted the rings. I’d never known him to pick the phone up until at least the sixth ring. Seven this time. ‘Eddie.’
‘Mac.’
‘The Racing Post tells me you should be at Plumpton.’
‘I’m on my way.’
‘You’re running late.’
‘I was delayed by a corpse.’
‘A hearse?’
‘Kilberg hasn’t reached the hearse stage yet.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Blane Kilberg is dead. Haven’t the police been in touch?’
‘Hold on.’
I heard footsteps and muffled conversation, which told me Mac was in his London office at the British Horseracing Authority. He was head of security there. I heard a mild curse from him then his voice, clear again. ‘Eddie, who told you this?’
‘Sergeant Middleton of Thames Valley police, about an hour ago.’ I filled in the rest of the story and told Mac there were eight horses at Watt’s place with nobody to look after them.
‘I’ll call you back,’ he said before I could tell him about the ringer. Two hours later, as I sat on the scales to weigh out for the handicap hurdle, I saw him standing just inside the entrance to the weighing room. He touched his hat brim and I nodded acknowledgment. On the way to the paddock, I slowed as I approached him, but he frowned and said, ‘Keep walking. I’ll meet you in the car after your last ride.’
My mind was not on the job. The south coast was ten miles distant and I could smell the sea in the cold wind, as I crouched sheltering on a tough old bay gelding called Supermaster, his mane flowing and swirling, and me wishing I could climb into it and get warm and get away from the bloody world for a while. And he won. With little assistance from me, powering clear from horses he’d raced against season after season, many of them getting their turn at least once a year if the handicapper took pity and reduced their mark enough.
It remained a small wonder to me that many veteran jumpers had an uncannily exact level at which they could win. Each was given a handicap rating which was reconsidered after each run. A horse who won when rated 115 might be raised to 120 for winning. That meant he would have to carry five pounds more in his next race. Often, such a horse would not win again until his mark slipped back to 115. These animals weighed half a ton. They’d galloped hundreds of miles on Britain’s tracks for years, yet a pound on their backs could make the difference between winning and losing.
Supermaster was my third and final mount of the day and I posed for pictures with the delighted owners, Jan and William Cuthbert, an aged couple who’d bred the horse and raised him and, I’d heard, sold their house so they could afford to keep him in training. Jan Cuthbert proudly held his reins with one hand and her pale blue hat with the other as the wind strengthened. Then she hugged me and gazed at me with such happiness in her wet eyes that I saw how she’d been as a young woman, and how age had done nothing to her spirit but strengthened it.
Her image stayed with me as I returned to the changing room under darkening skies. It reminded me why I’d come into this sport, this world of hope, this Never Never Land. Only optimists survive in racing, and that fact was exhibit A in the prosecution case against the suicide of Jimmy Sherrick. And Bayley Watt, and even Blane Kilberg.
Mac was in his BMW in the corner of the car park, his big face and brown wavy hair blurred by the steady rain on the windshield. The clouds sailing in from the coast now were big and dark. Lights were on in all the buildings. The wind carried parts of the final race commentary over the stands and into the car park as I approached Mac’s car. He leant across and pushed open the passenger door. I got in and the wind slammed it shut.
‘You’re wet,’ he said.
‘Rain tends to do that to me.’
‘You should get a hat.’
‘Time enough for hats and slippers when I’m your age.’
‘I could never see you in slippers, Eddie.’
‘You’re probably right. Riding boots and running shoes. Anyway, what do you know?’
Mac tried to turn toward me but his bulk made him grunt and he settled for lowering the arm rest and leaning on it. ‘You said there were eight horses at Watt’s yard. Our guys counted seven.’
I’d have bet my life on knowing the one that had disappeared. But I was in a spot. Was there any advantage in not telling Mac about the ringer scam? The removal of Fruitless Spin or whatever that good horse was, had just sent a spool of information at me. The horse had been taken by whoever was running the racket. He’d done it or arranged in the short time between Kilberg dying and the cops getting there. Or had the horse already gone when Bayley sent his email?
That was another thing…three men commit suicide, supposedly. None leaves a written note. All ‘communications’ about the deaths are electronic.
I recalled Mave’s warning about how smart this guy was. Smart enough to persuade three people to kill themselves? Or was he giving them the cyanide himself? Had he been on that ferry with Bayley Watt? Was Watt supposed to meet him there and try and plan a way out? Had the horse been taken to move him to another trainer and carry on the swindle?
‘Eddie?’
Mac was watching me while I tried to process all this and decide whether to tell him everything. What had I to lose?
For once in his life, he didn’t interrupt me. But as he listened, those facial giveaways I’d become so familiar with worked through their repertoire; closed eyes, chin droops, head shakes. The audio kicked in at the end with a deep sigh. ‘Who else knows?’
‘The cops,’ I said.
‘Jockeys?’
‘No. It would have been mentioned.’
‘Do you think the bookies suspect Watt was running ringers?’
‘I’m pretty sure they don’t.’
Mac nodded. He knew of my friendship with Gerry Waldron, the PR rep for the biggest bookmaker.
‘You won’t be able to keep this quiet, Mac. The cops have nothing. They’ll be appealing to the public etcetera, etcetera.’
‘I can probably wrangle a week or two out of it. I know a superintendent at Thames Valley quite well.’
‘But can you find who’s behind it in a week or two?’
‘We can try.’
‘We being?’
He pushed his hair back. ‘Come on, Eddie. You’ve been in the thick of it, and that’s where you’re happiest.’
‘Maybe. But I haven’t the faintest idea who’s behind this and I’ve even less of an idea of where to start trying to find out.’
‘Is Mister Sherrick still wearing the bugged watch?’
‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? The horse has bolted. The horse. Literally. All I had was Watt and Kilberg. I thought they were running this between them. Whoever the top man is, Watt was shit scared of him.’
‘Has Watt’s autopsy been done?’
‘I doubt it. He’s dead less than forty eight hours.’
‘I’ll go and see Sara Chase in the morning.’
‘Who’s she when she’s at home?’
‘Superintendent at Thames Valley. Nice woman.’
‘Appropriate name.’
He smiled. ‘It’ll be a while since Sara chased anyone down a street.’
‘Let’s see how she does in blind alleys.’
Mac flipped his wipers on and they opened the watery curtains for long enough to let us see the crowds hurrying out, many making for the train station next to the racetrack. He turned to me: ‘What’s your next move?’
‘I’m going to try to find out the identity of the missing horse.’
‘How?’
‘I haven’t worked that out yet. Can I take it you’ll be putting your resources at my disposal with your usual generosity?’
‘Softly, softly. Through me only.’
‘I never talk to the monkey when I can reach the organ grinder, Mac.’
‘Does anybody?’
‘True. Anything else?’
‘Nope. J
ust call me when you’ve got something.’
‘I will. Listen, ask Sara Chase for a copy of the files on Jimmy and Watt and Kilberg.’
He nodded. ‘Okay.’
‘That was easier than I thought.’
‘I know her well.’
‘Do I detect a tone of romantic longing there, Mister McCarthy?’
He smiled slowly and laid his head back on the rest, the courtesy light reflecting in his eyes as I opened the door. ‘I’m a happily married man, Mister Malloy.’
‘I never doubted it. No harm in dreaming. Many folk get by on dreams.’
‘You being dreamer-in-chief.’
‘That’s me, Mac. See ya.’
29
On the stroke of midnight I pinged Maven Judge and saw the lamplight on her left jawbone, sharp as a shelf below sunken cheeks. Her eyes, as ever, were on her screen, fingers rattling the keyboard. ‘Edward. What ails you?’
‘Where should I start?’
‘Anywhere. It needn’t be the beginning. I can usually piece together your ramblings.’
‘Your brain being fresh at the start of another working day?’
‘The dead of midnight is the noon of thought.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Anna Letitia Barbauld. Had there been a Cheltenham Festival in 1825, she’d have died the week before it.’
‘An interesting piece of trivia.’
‘It might be trivial to you, my friend, not to me. The woman was inspiring. “The most characteristic mark of a great mind is to choose some one important object, and pursue it for life.”‘
‘Like a betting software programme.’
‘Correct.’
‘Good. I could use some help from your great mind and from your programme.’
‘Shoot.’
‘How far back does your video archive go?’
‘Seven years three months.’
‘Could some software be written to trawl all those races for the identity of a horse, on looks alone?’