by Joe McNally
‘Don’t dig yourself deeper by patronizing me, Mister Buley. I’m not choosing any attitude. I was born with the inclination to resist being messed around by people who believe they’re better than I am.’
‘I don’t think that at all. I find that most offensive.’
‘Tough.’
Buley looked at McCarthy who looked at me. Sara Chase stood up. ‘Mister Malloy, I apologize. It was rude of me to seem so distracted when you arrived. Mister Buley and I were sharing a joke at the expense of an old colleague, and I got a bit carried away.’
She was taller than she’d seemed sitting, which sounds daft, but she must have been long-legged and short-spined. Her brown hair was tied back and she had a deep fringe. The tops of her ears stuck out - only the tops - and were inclined slightly forward as though Darwinism had bred a race of professional listeners, and I wondered if she kept her hair behind them to make the most of her hearing power.
Her brown eyes were narrow. Her mouth smiled, but for all her professional effort at repairing the social damage, those eyes couldn’t generate any warmth. The windows to the soul, right enough.
I nodded, the only response her ‘apology’ was worth, and she saw she hadn’t won me over so she did what she must always have done, she reached and patted my shoulder, the smile now a dismissive one. And she sat again, but noticeably farther from Buley than when she’d risen.
I looked at Buley. He couldn’t hold my stare and turned to Mac. ‘Mister McCarthy, would you care to sum up where we are?’
Mac did a tiny eye and head shift, a plea for me to sit down and listen. To my left was a glass-topped round table with five chairs. I took the six strides away from their cozy gathering, took a chair, and spun it to face them. Mac told the story, glancing at times not at his boss, Buley, but at Sara Chase. For what, I wasn’t sure; approval, or encouragement perhaps. But none of what he said was news to me. Buley took over, leaning toward me, elbows on knees. ‘We just wanted to give you the heads up first.’
The heads up. The fucking heads up. My most hated bite of management speak, and I had to swallow the curse and keep it down or I’d have strangled some plain English out of him.
He turned to Sara Chase and said, ‘The police want us to make sure we have all our ducks in a row.’
Aw, Jeez! I was going to kill this guy. I stared at my shoes, composing myself, then looked at him. ‘Three of your ducks are dead.’
‘And that’s why the police are going to be playing a bigger part from here on.’
‘So what do you want from me?’
‘We’re keen to get maximum leverage from your involvement so far.’
I stared at him, trying to imagine what his poor wife had to put up with. God help his kids. I tried irony. ‘Sweat the assets, eh?’
He beamed. ‘Exactly!’
Sara Chase sat back, crossing her long legs, and settled linked hands in her lap. ‘Who do you think might be behind this, Mister Malloy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If I put a gun to your head - not that I would,’ she smiled at the others. She’d used that line before. ‘What would your best guess be as to the motive, here?’
‘Money.’
Buley pitched in. ‘We’ve spoken to all the major bookmakers. The biggest bet on any of Watt’s ringers was fifty pounds, and that from an online customer they know well. A habitual loser.’
‘What about the exchanges? Were others being laid in those races?’
‘Nothing that was above the radar, and these guys have their radar set very low I can tell you.’
More bullshit. I turned back to Ms. Chase. ‘Have you anything on the origins of the bugged watch?’
‘Not yet.’
‘But you’re looking?’
She watched me. I thought she was trying to decide if it was worth persevering with the sidesteps. ‘I don’t hold out much hope on that line,’ she said.
Some straight talking at last. I nodded. ‘What about Jimmy Sherrick’s corpse?’
‘Nothing.’
I was warming to her. ‘Fingerprints in Jimmy’s house, or on the chain?’
‘No marks.’
‘Watt’s place? Kilberg’s?’
‘No indications they were involved in crime.’
‘Autopsies?’
‘Mister Watt’s body will be flown home tomorrow. I’ll make sure both autopsies are done by the end of the week. Did Peter tell you the outcome of the tests by Irish police on Mister Watt’s corpse?’
No Mister McCarthy for her. No Mac. Peter. ‘Not yet.’ I said.
She looked to him, and Mac said, ‘There was enough cyanide in his system to kill ten men.’
‘As per his supposed suicide message by email,’ I said.
‘Why do you say “supposed”?’ Sara Chase asked.
‘Because I don’t think he sent it. And I know Jimmy didn’t make the message he was supposed to have left. And Kilberg’s was by email too. Jimmy’s meant to have ordered cyanide online, which he didn’t… couldn’t. Whoever’s behind this had access to the PCs and phones of Jimmy and Watt and Kilberg. He could fake messages easily. And my bet is that he was there at each death, and he forced them to take the cyanide, then faked the notes. How many suicide notes are by email or voice recording? People just write them down with pen and paper, don’t they? Or don’t leave one at all.’
All three watched me. Now I felt superior. Sara Chase said, ‘Bayley Watt killed himself. He took cyanide by his own hand. I’m not saying his mobile phone wasn’t hacked, but he did commit suicide, for whatever reason.’
‘How can you be certain about that?’ I asked.
‘Because the Irish Police had to break down the door of his cabin on the ferry. It was locked from the inside.’
35
I drove home, helped by the arctic wind that had been forecast. I could feel it sweeping the car south almost as though it too was heading for Lambourn. It was. When I got out, long gusts swept through the woods, rattling the bare branches and making the limbs of the old trees groan. I had to lean against the car door to close it.
Even inside, behind the locked door, the house was surrounded by the groaning sounds of the forest resisting the wind. This little valley of mine became a whirlpool of air in times like these.
I switched on the lights in the Snug and watched what was left of the dead leaves of last summer come alive again, the sogginess they’d gathered being tumble dried or frozen stiff in the vortex of arctic blasts.
I boiled water for coffee. It had turned out a good day in the end. I’d come from that meeting with the promise of a direct line to Sara Chase. I wondered what it had cost Mac and that fool Buley to get her in on this personally. They’d been desperate for me to keep my mouth shut.
Racing looks a big industry from the outside, but it’s a compressed hive of people who know each other, who are looking for a way to the top, or maybe just to stay alive. Gossip can mean more than simply today’s main topic, it can mean someone is on the way down, or out and that his or her horses, are up for grabs among trainers, owners and jockeys.
Racing is a huge family that supports its members, celebrates with them and sometimes mourns. But there are many egos, much greed and envy and in-fighting. The one enemy many were ready to rally against was the ruling body, the British Horseracing Authority. It was rare to meet anyone who didn’t believe they could do a better job running racing than the BHA did.
And now that I’d spent an hour in Buley’s company, I realized a monkey could do a better job. He’d been in the post less than a year having come from some government position associated with the success of the London Olympics. But he was a bullshitter to anyone who wasn’t smitten with the King’s New Clothes syndrome.
All his Let’s Do It! Bollocks had permeated the BHA. His public statements were littered with buzzwords and choked by long sentences which meant nothing. And apart from all that, he had proved to me within a minute of being in his company that he regarded
most of his fellow human beings as lesser creatures. I hated that.
If it hadn’t have been for Jimmy Sherrick and his father, I’d have walked from that meeting promising nothing. What did I care about Watt or Kilberg, or Buley’s reputation?
But I cared about Jimmy and his memory, and his father. So I traded silence for some power; a direct line to Sara Chase. She was a tough woman, but she was practical and ultra-political.
I looked again at the swirling leaves. If wind behaved like water, so did Sara Chase, she flowed with the terrain until she reached a position of strength. And now she was flowing with me. I didn’t know why and I didn’t much care. Perhaps Buley still had friends in the House who could help advance her career.
I sipped black coffee and went to my PC. Buley couldn’t be altogether stupid. He was the type to tell jockeys to do something, not bargain with them. But Mac knew me as well as anyone did, and I smiled as I pictured him pleading with Buley not to try and bully me. It had taken Buley less than five minutes to discover that Mac had been dead right.
I sat at my desk and hit the link to Maven Judge, and she raised a thumb to the webcam and pushed it right up close.
‘A big fat thumbs up welcome from me to you, Mister Malloy. I hear you are getting a blast from the North Country.’
‘There’ll be trees down in the morning.’
‘A taste of reality for you soft southerners.’
‘I love wild weather, Mave, makes me feel alive.’
‘A rare sensation in the valley of the dead, my friend. In fact, someone ought to change that road sign outside Lambourn from The Valley of the Racehorse to the valley of the dead. Any more corpses to report?’
‘None. Three’s enough. What do you know?’
‘I know that many hours of footage from Watt’s CCTV cameras awaits your perusal. Doubtless ninety percent of it will be of trees and fields and weather, empty of villains, free of humans of any sort.’
‘Have you watched much of it?’
‘Five minutes. The most my boredom levels can stand. Seriously, if you intend sitting through this, even on fast forward, you will develop the mental equivalent of pins and needles.’
‘Is it all time stamped? I mean obviously time stamped. I don’t need to toggle things on and off?’
‘Date and time are there on the screen.’
‘The first thing I’ll check is the night I visited, the night Watt did a runner.’
‘You won’t, I’m afraid. The system was switched off a week ago today at thirty eight minutes past seven in the evening. There’s not a second of footage after that.’
‘January eighth.’ I counted back the days.
‘Eddie, are you okay? Your face has gone that awful contorted way it does when you try to think. I’ve warned you about overtaxing a very weak organ.’
I smiled at Mave, and she looked away from her screen, directly at her webcam and smiled back warmly. ‘Mave, I’ve got to make a call. Do you want to hold a minute or will I ping you back.’
‘I’ll hold. I love to hear the rusty cranking of your brain and I can see it is trying to grind something out.’
I phoned Mister Sherrick and asked him if he could recall exactly the day he’d told me the police had contacted him for permission to exhume Jimmy’s body. He confirmed what I had thought: January eighth. I told him I’d had a meeting with the police and was trying to help them double-check all their details. I tried to keep the excitement from my voice.
I hung up and Mave turned again to the webcam and raised an eyebrow.
I said, ‘Could the CCTV have been switched off remotely, or would Bayley Watt have to have done it?’
‘Either.’
‘Had it been off at any point before the eighth?’
‘No. It was installed and fired up on August eighteenth last year and ran non-stop until a week ago.’
‘A stupid question, but just to check, it recorded at night, too?’
‘Crisp and clear.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d like to get the next train down here and help me start digging in Watt’s fields for Jimmy Sherrick’s body?’
36
Next morning the air was still. The winds had moved south, leaving behind downed trees, broken power lines and the sorrowful family of a young girl who had died on the south coast. I switched off the car radio and drove on to Ben Tylutki’s to fulfil a promise to ride out.
From Ben’s I’d drive the seven miles to Grenville Tarrant’s to ride out third lot there. This was the dawn merry-go-round for so many jockeys seeking rides. Helping at morning exercise was an unpaid job. We did it in the hope of getting a call up, a favour returned if a jockey was needed, hopefully in that elusive big Saturday race.
There had been times, long past, when trainers called me, or my agent. Days when I had my pick without having to hurry from yard to yard like some salesman hawking invisible wares. But those days were long gone and, more sadly, had been unappreciated by me, a youth who thought it all came with the talent I had, and that it would last forever.
But there were millions with worse commutes to work. In Lambourn, getting from one trainer to the next is often no more than a matter of walking across the road. Planning laws keep the village looking much as it did in the eighteenth century, when the first trainers moved in. The downs above the village had never been ploughed, as the soil was too poor for agriculture. But the springy turf was easy on the legs of racehorses, and the sloping land rising from the River Lambourn ideal for fitness training.
I remembered my first time on Mandown gallops, looking around wondering where JRR Tolkien had sat with his family and his picnics. What part had this land played in his fiction? And what of the fiction of Bayley Watt and Blane Kilberg? Who or what had driven their lies and their actions, and what was I to do to get Bayley’s property checked for the corpse of Jimmy Sherrick?
I could ring Sara Chase, or Mac and ask them to send a team of diggers out there, but how was I to justify it? I couldn’t tell them a friend had hacked into the database of a major so-called security company. And even if I persuaded them to dig up an acre, was my hunch right? Had those cameras been switched off so Watt and Kilberg could drag Jimmy’s body from a van or a horsebox to bury it again somewhere on his land?
It would have made sense to them to bring a stolen corpse to somewhere they knew they wouldn’t be disturbed. Lord knows, there were thousands of acres of countryside and woods around here, but nowhere you could stop with the certainty of privacy, and begin digging. A grave of any depth would take hours to complete, and neither Watt nor Kilberg were hardened to manual work beyond mucking out a box.
As I drove northeast toward Wantage and Grenville Tarrant’s place, I pictured Bayley’s land and tried to estimate the acreage he’d have secure access to. He didn’t need to own it all, but I thought of that snowy day we’d ridden to the Ridgeway, across what seemed a wilderness of white. Bayley would have been intimately familiar with much of that land. Jimmy could be anywhere. I ditched the idea that had been growing that I could walk the area or ride it, quartering it like a gun dog, looking for ground recently disturbed.
But if Watt planned a burial away out in that open country, why switch off the cameras? Their range would be limited to the confines of the house and yard. Was Jimmy’s corpse hidden in the house, or the hay barn? Was there a cellar or an abandoned loft on his property? That would have been quickest and least messy; no hard dirty work.
The cold snap had been with us then. Digging through deep frost without a machine would have been close to impossible. They’d have managed it at the grave easily enough, given that the soil would barely have settled since the burial.
If I was right and Watt had stolen Jimmy’s corpse, there had to be a strong chance it had been hidden on the property rather than buried. If that was the case, maybe I could find it myself.
The gossip at Grenville’s was as it had been on Mandown gallops an hour before; the suicides of Watt and Kilberg. From sta
ble lads and jockeys I’d heard theories about serious illness. Someone knew someone else who’d seen medical records or had spoken to a doctor involved. Cancer was mentioned a few times, and one of Grenville’s grooms said she’d heard they both had Aids.
Given that Kilberg’s email to the police claimed he’d done it because I’d been harassing him and Watt, nobody asked me about it. There was a chance it hadn’t yet filtered into the gossip stream, but it was more likely that fingers were being pointed at me as I rode away.
From Grenville’s yard, I drove to Ludlow where I rode a winner. On the way back, I decided to call in at Watt’s in the hope it hadn’t yet been boarded up.
It had been. Roughly, but effectively with wooden boards and padlocks the size of my fist. I’d need to ask for access or break in.
I could phone my new contact, Sara Chase, but she’d be wary, she’d want to do things by the book, especially given my bolshie attitude yesterday. Maybe I should ring Mac, let him do the explaining and cajoling.
Should I warn Mister Sherrick first? I didn’t want to raise his hopes.
Raise his hopes.
Suddenly, it seemed an obscene expression. Raise hopes of finding the decomposing corpse of his son in an empty, shuttered house. That decided it for me. I’d keep it from him.
I’d be passing Mac’s house on the journey, but he always seemed uncomfortable at the prospect of visitors. His wife, Jean, was agoraphobic. Maybe Mac felt her domain had to be protected. Anyway, I called him when I got home.
‘Mac, can you ask Sara Chase to get a warrant, or whatever she needs to inspect Bayley Watt’s property? I think Jimmy Sherrick’s body might be hidden in there.’
‘You think?’
‘An educated hunch.’
‘Who’s the teacher?’
‘A contact with the security company that ran Watt’s CCTV system. It was switched off on the day Jimmy’s corpse was stolen.’
‘That could have been for any number of reasons.’
‘Mac, I’m not going to debate it with you. What about all that cooperation I was promised, everything we talked about yesterday?’