by Joe McNally
‘Possible, but it would take a long time.’
‘How long?’
‘A year. Maybe longer.’
‘What about by winner only. By clear winner only.’
‘You’d be as well doing a form book search with the term ‘drew clear’ and checking by eye. I assume it’s this hurdler you rode for Watt?’
I told her about Kilberg and the horse going missing. She said, ‘Well restricting it to hurdlers, and assuming the horse is no older than four, maybe five, my guess is there will be fewer than a hundred races involved, and you’d probably only need to watch the finish of each.’
‘Could you run that query for me tonight?’
‘What’s the name of the horse you rode?’
‘It doesn’t matter, does it? It was a false name.’
‘But you’ll want the video clip of that finish for comparison with the others.’
‘Duh! Of course. It was at Taunton, he was called Spiritless Fun. He came out at Warwick the week after and won as Fissure Splint.’
‘Anagram. Your man has a sense of humour. Running a ringer and he names it with the same letters.’
‘Mave, you could shave with the edge of your brain.’
‘You trying to say I should start shaving?’ She rubbed her jaw and stroked her top lip.
I laughed. ‘I meant, I could shave with the edge of your brain. Fruitless Spin. That fits too, doesn’t it?’
‘It does.’
‘That was Watt’s star performer for Jimmy Sherrick. The busiest guy in the yard must have been Blane Kilberg moving microchips in and out of this horse.’
I gazed at Mave in admiration. Not once had her keyboard gone silent. She processed multiple streams of thought without pause or glance at her webcam. A very unusual woman.
‘You could have half a chance now, you know,’ she said. ‘Your man obviously thinks he’s much cleverer than anyone else, to take the chance of using anagrams. Complacency. Never a good idea. I’d have bet against you up to this point, but you just might have a squeak. You got that email?’
I clicked. The list of winners of hurdle races in the past two seasons who’d earned the comment ‘drew clear’ in the official form book totalled 77. Every name was there. ‘Thanks, Mave.’
‘Scroll down. You’ll find a link to my video vault. Search by name and date. Happy viewing.’
‘Okay to ping you if I need anything else?’
‘Ping away, my friend, ping away.’
I made coffee and settled at my PC. My first choice was to discount everything but bays. Bay was his natural colour, that reddish-brown coat you see in so many horses, with black mane and tail. Adding the odd patch of white would be fairly simple. Changing the whole body colour would be a major challenge.
I reviewed my Taunton victory a few times, then his win at Warwick. Horses can be as distinctive as humans in the way they move. This one had the type of action not uncommon in classy horses in that he tracked very straight. His hind feet followed his front ones on a true path. Most horses have some small defect preventing them using all four limbs in the perfect fashion. The power from this one’s hindquarters drove through straight, even limbs, wasting little energy. A true athlete.
There was nothing like him among the 77. I cleared quickly through the bays then, in frustration, watched all the winners. Nothing.
On my fourth coffee and my hundredth curse word, I took a break, and tried to figure out the next move.
There was the faintest chance he’d never raced before joining Bayley. Two things made that unlikely. To bet him with confidence, the man in charge would need to know the extent of his capabilities on the racecourse. Some horses seem champions at home, beating quality stablemates in a gallop, then, for whatever reason, they cannot reproduce the gallops form on course.
The second factor was that when I rode him, even cantering to the start at Taunton, he felt and acted like an experienced racehorse. Okay, he’d won before as Fruitless Spin under Jimmy, but a horse can show greenness in even its fourth or fifth run.
I doodled. Cash signs. Betting slips. How were they getting their money on? Gerry Waldron had said there were no unusual betting patterns on the Warwick or Taunton victories. He’d told me Bayley wasn’t a gambler. That should have given me my first big clue that someone else was running this. But how was he making money?
Kilberg had said they’d made some money but not enough. But was he telling the truth or spinning the tale to go with his request for more time?
And where had the horse learned his trade?
Ireland?
All the races I’d watched were on British tracks. I knew Mave avoided Irish racing, claiming there were ten times the number of non triers there than at home. It wouldn’t be that high, but the Irish stewards sometimes took a more relaxed view of horses who weren’t putting in a hundred percent.
The clock chimed four.
I had plenty contacts in Ireland who might be able to highlight a very promising horse who’d stopped racing there in the past couple of seasons, but asking would mean drawing in more people. That would raise the risk of alerting this guy that I was on his trail.
Too tired to think straight, I laid down my pen and wandered off to bed. My last waking thought was about where Bayley had chosen to run to. Ireland.
30
I woke feeling hung over through lack of sleep and a gauntlet of bad dreams. It was Monday. I had no rides booked. I’d planned to drive to Stratford on the chance of landing a spare. But I lay dazed and troubled. Frustrated. Stratford could get by without me. I’d use the day to herd my thoughts and form some plans, to pick at my intuition and try to figure out which way it was pointing.
I had coffee and poached two eggs which bled yellow onto the plate. I mopped the yolk with half a dry pitta bread, chewing, chewing, chewing, and wondering how I would eat when I hung up my boots and stopped counting calories.
Twenty minutes later I slalomed on foot among the wet trees, running on auto, aware only of that rhythmical footfall that always helped calm me.
The oxygenated blood fed my brain and it began sorting through the options.
Three dead men. All supposed suicides. Jimmy’s wasn’t. How likely then that the others were? All three spun on the hub of terminal illness. Of the three, I knew where two bodies were. The next step had to be verifying the reason for suicide.
Showered, shaved and shivering after forcing myself to count out a minute standing underneath freezing jets of spray, I towelled myself dry and checked my watch. I considered calling the sergeant. I wanted the autopsies on Kilberg and Watt to include a check for liver disease and leukaemia respectively. But the sergeant would be too low down the pecking order to organize that. I wondered if McCarthy could swing it with his friend the superintendent.
I phoned him and asked and he said it was a good idea and he’d go and see Sara Chase about it. ‘Mac, you’ve become so amenable, especially when Sara Chase is mentioned.’
‘Eddie, you’re pushing your luck.’
‘I’m kidding.’
‘Don’t kid. Rumours are easy to start.’
‘Mac, I’m kidding you, okay? You know that. Take it easy.’
I hung up wondering at his sensitivity to Ms. Chase. Or was it Mrs.? Mac would be no more likely to have an affair than the pope. He’d be the type for a late crush on somebody though. I smiled at the thought and wondered what Sara Chase looked like.
I considered calling Mister Sherrick to ask about Jimmy’s medical history. But I remembered the care we had to take because of the bugged watch he still wore. Sergeant Middleton’s idea, and I hadn’t questioned it. Until now.
What was the point of him wearing the watch? It had brought us no benefit. Mave was confident that the bug in it would be transmitting recordings through a maze of hijacked PCs. The cops weren’t willing to put a trace on the transmitter in case it alerted Mister Big that they’d discovered the bug.
But our man would have sussed things by
now. He was bugging Mister Sherrick, and he’d bugged Jimmy. Surely Watt and Kilberg were being listened to as well? I’d mentioned Mister Sherrick’s watch to both of them. So this guy would have heard me, and that made it pointless for Mister Sherrick to continue wearing the watch.
All it would have been transmitting since the bug had been discovered was bland stuff and long silences. Maybe it was time to try and stir up some action.
I typed a note then drove to Mister Sherrick’s flat. He opened the door and looked at me then at the watch. He seemed confused and anxious. I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and gave him the note, saying loudly, ‘Mister Sherrick, I’m really sorry, can I use your toilet? Caught short and couldn’t quite make it home.’
‘Sure, of course. Come in. You know where it is, don’t you?’
I went down the hall and opened and closed the toilet door, watching as he read the note. He raised his thumb. I waited a minute then quietly opened the door again, closed it, flushed the toilet, washed my hands and came out as Mister Sherrick was filling the kettle.
I stood with him in the kitchen, small talking for a minute then said, ‘Listen, not much point in you wearing that watch anymore.’ He slid the watch off and handed it to me as I’d asked him to do in the note. I said, ‘Watt and Kilberg were bugged too, although not with watches. He did it with…’ I took the lid off the boiling kettle and dropped the watch in. Mister Sherrick smiled.
We made do without tea, leaving the kettle to boil the watch, and we sat by the fire. Mister Sherrick nodded toward the kitchen, ‘I bet you didn’t clear that with the sergeant?’
I smiled. ‘You know me too well. He’s got some sidekick now with OCD. It would have taken them six months to approve “Removal of watch, 1, stainless steel, owner Mister James Sherrick senior.” Better this way. And quicker. It’ll leave our man wondering if we really have found out how he bugged the others.’
‘And have you?’
‘Nope. Not yet. But I will.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Good. It must have been pretty miserable having to wear it knowing this guy could hear everything, everywhere. I should have thought of that at the start and not let the cops bully you into it.’
‘Well, I’m not sorry to be rid of it, Eddie, although as you get older you find you can adjust to pretty much anything, except, as the man wisely said, a nail in your shoe. So after a day or two I kind of adjusted, I suppose.’
‘Well, you’re rid of it now.’
‘What’ll I tell the sergeant?’
‘I’ll tell him. I’ll take it with me. I’ll tell him the truth, that I dropped it in the kettle. Accidentally, of course.’
‘I guess they got nothing from those pictures they took of it to try and trace where it was bought?’
‘Not that I heard of. They might not even have started yet.’
‘What about you? Isn’t it time to pack this in and get on with your riding career?’
‘Not yet. And I don’t have a career anymore. Not really. I’ve got a job I like doing. Careers are for people with a chance of moving upward. I’ll be happy to tread water until my muscles or bones or whatever goes first finally give out.’
He nodded in that wise way men his age are entitled to nod, and said, ‘You’ve never been one for treading water, Eddie, never will be. You just need the right horse to come along.’
I thought back to the turmoil Watt’s horse had caused in me when I won on him at Taunton. My Mister Hyde leapt from the cupboard that day and kicked Doctor Jekyll aside, just as the old doc was growing comfortable in my skin. And I knew Mister Sherrick was right. The craving returned, and I wondered where the hell that horse had gone and what his name was.
31
It was a ten minute drive from Mister Sherrick’s to Watt’s yard. I could spend half an hour wandering around there on my own. I called McCarthy. ‘Mac, what happened with Watt’s horses, have they been moved somewhere?’
‘Hold on.’ He half covered the mouthpiece but I heard him yelling a name. He came back on. ‘Eddie, I’m seeing the superintendent in the morning.’
‘Good. Will you ask her if they ever got anything from trying to trace where Mister Sherrick’s watch came from?’
‘The watch you told me was bugged?’
‘That’s the one. I’m about to call the sergeant and tell him the bug’s not working anymore.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I dropped it in boiling water. By accident.’
‘The bug?’
‘The watch.’
‘By accident?’
‘Correct.’
‘Hold on.’
I held. He came back. ‘Watt’s horses have been collected by the RSPCA.’
‘What are they going to do with them?’
‘Look after them, I hope.’
‘What about your guys? The BHA, don’t they have arrangements in place for when stuff like this happens?’
‘No. We have arrangements in place to prevent stuff like this happening, but Watt lied in his application. For eight horses he’s supposed to have a minimum of two stable staff and one person responsible in his absence.’
‘Who did he name on the application?’
‘The responsible person in his absence was Blane Kilberg.’
‘Since when?’
‘Hold on…since August first last year.’
‘Right.’
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Just let me know what the superintendent says about those autopsies. And the bugged watch.’
‘Leave it with me.’
The sun was low when I pulled into Watt’s place. I walked round the back into the quadrangle of the main yard. Sixteen empty boxes, half-doors still open on those that had been occupied. When there had been horses in the yard, I had never noticed the eight empty boxes.
Old lights were secured by rusting bolts in the sandstone between each box. I counted nine which worked, leaking weak light through thick casings. They’d be burning power for nothing now. Open boxes. Four windows in the redbrick wall of Watt’s house which formed the southern section of the quadrangle. Unprotected windows awaiting vandals. I’d better have a word with the sergeant about getting the property boarded up.
The last of the sun glinted on something high up. A chimney stood at the far end of the building, on the eastern corner. At the top of it was what looked like a CCTV camera with a lens pointing into the yard. I went to the front where I could look almost straight up at the chimney. Another lens covered the drive and approach road. When had that been installed? Where was it recording to?
A square of thick glass was set into the entry door, moulded in four triangular sections and swelling out into a small globe. I went up the step to try and peer through it. I held onto the door handle. It turned. Open. I hesitated, wary. Whoever had come for that horse might have been in the house. Might still be in the house.
But why? What would the point be? The door had been left unlocked because the only two men with keys were dead.
The first thing I checked was Watt’s PC. It was still in place. We already had all the data from it. I wandered around hoping to find something I didn’t know I was looking for, some clue. What the hell did a clue look like, especially when you’d no idea what the crime was, what puzzle you were trying to figure out.
I went upstairs. I thought back to the night I was parked along the road talking to Gerry Waldron on the phone when I’d seen Blane Kilberg prowling around a bedroom. That had been on the western side of the property. I walked along the hall to the room. No bed. No furniture. No carpet. It smelled damp. In the corner stood a set of stepladders and a pile of rolled up dust sheets. I opened the dust sheets. All that clung to them were paint blotches and small mounds of plaster.
What could Kilberg have wanted in this room? Or had there been something here then that had been taken out? I opened the door of a cupboard: five shelves, all bare. On the floor, sitting on a small rug was a pair of
silver dumbbells. I picked them up. Was Kilberg using this room as a gym?
I went back along the hall to the eastern wall, passing three other doors. The door of the room on the corner, the one which would sit below the chimney, was standing open. The brass lock housing from the door frame lay on the bare floorboards. I looked at the gouged wood; three screws stuck out. In the corner, an electric fire had been hauled from the wall. I crouched beside it. Five cables hung from the chimney void into the old fireplace, the stripped wire at their ends still bright. I took a picture with my phone of the hanging cables which had, I assumed, been feeding the CCTV footage into whatever machine had been there.
That told me I needn’t spend any more time searching the house. Whoever had taken the horse had taken the evidence with him. And what else had been on there?
In the car I called Sergeant Middleton and told him Watt’s property was open to vandals and anyone else who happened along.
I sensed he was about to ask what I’d been doing there and then thought better of it. No point in getting all formal about someone who was on your side. He said he’d see what he could do about securing it.
‘Do you think there’ll be a problem getting it boarded up?’
‘Well, it’s not a police matter, really. We don’t own it.’
‘It’s a crime scene, isn’t it?’
‘In what way?’
‘Didn’t Kilberg die there?’
‘Suicide.’
‘Didn’t you tell me all suicides are treated as suspicious?’
He sighed. ‘I did.’
‘Also, Kilberg claimed suicide. We know different.’
‘You know different, Mister Malloy, or you think you do. You can’t prove it.’
‘Sergeant, you’ve got three dead men since Christmas, all relatively young. Correction one dead man you don’t have is Jimmy Sherrick because you’ve no idea where his body is. Come to think of it, there’s every chance your two most recent corpses could have told you where Jimmy is, but it’s a bit late to be asking them any questions. Kilberg is-’