by Joe McNally
‘I’ll try.’
‘Thanks, Mave.’
‘Want me to call you back?’
‘It’ll hold until we reach Dil’s. I’ll ring you from there.’
‘Okay.’
Prim called out, ‘Mave, would you be able to find out if there are any travellers camped in that area?’
‘Just around Aintree?’
I butted in, ‘Go for Merseyside, Mave, will you?’
‘Will do.’
I turned to Prim, ‘Anything else you want to ask Mave?’
She shook her head, then, realizing Mave couldn’t see that said, ‘No. No, thanks.’
‘Alice?’ I called.
‘No…well, just anything else you can think of, Mave. Please.’
‘I’ll get right on it,’ Mave said, ‘speak to you all soon.’
We choired a goodbye, which brought the first smile of the evening. Alice leant forward until her head was past the back of our seats. She said to Prim, ‘Is that how gypsies really live, travelling around all the time?’
I sensed Prim preparing herself to answer. She said, ‘My family were Roma. Are Roma, I should say. They used to travel, mostly in Romania, then in Europe, but my grandfather settled on a farm in the mountains in Spain. There was no more travelling then for us.’
Alice said, ’So are the gypsies here not Roma, then?’
’I think most of them are Irish travellers. They were Ireland’s version of Roma, if you like. But not many travel any more. Things are too hard for them.’
Alice said, ‘So, would they mix, the Roma and the Irish ones?’
‘Not really, I don’t think they would. I don’t know all that much about them, but if you’re asking if I know anyone who might be able to help find your Dad, then I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t be hopeful about that.’
I watched Alice in the rearview mirror, her face in deep shadow, but her eyes bright. She seemed to be thinking up the next question. I said, ‘Let’s wait and see what Mave comes up with’
49
It was almost 2 a.m. when we got to Dil’s. I switched off the headlights and we stepped out under a clear sky into the silent, sparkling blackness.
Dil had waited up and he hurried toward us across the cobbled yard, his heel-clicks reminding me of that hospital visit, which seemed so long ago.
Dil’s thick hair shone under the gallery of security lights, each firing up as we tripped the sensors, and when he reached us, he smelt of fresh pinewood, and the lamp glare shone on a newly shaven jaw as he fixed his gaze on Prim. So, before he spoke, I knew that Vita had gone.
Dil spoke, ‘Are you all okay?’
Alice nodded, and Prim and I said we were fine, Dil stretched a welcoming arm, ‘Come in! Come in out of the cold!’
I began walking, as did Alice. Prim stayed where she was.
Dil looked at her for a few seconds, ‘Aren’t you coming in?’
Prim said, ‘Vita’s gone then?’
’She left yesterday. She has business in New York.’
Prim watched him, ‘And when she comes back, will you be so keen to ask me into your house again?’
The harsh chemical light spared no shades of red as he blushed and said nothing. Prim said, ‘Then I’m not coming in now.’
Dil said, ‘Well, we can’t stand here all night.’
‘Go and get the keys to the cottage,’ Prim said. I suspected it was the first command she’d ever given him, but he didn’t hesitate and two minutes later, we were inside Arnie’s cottage, where Prim had been living until she’d left.
Dil hurried around, turning radiator dials and switching on lights and Prim filled the kettle, then took Alice upstairs to her bedroom.
Dil stood with his back to the sink, leaning against it, looking at me. I said, ‘Well, you couldn’t have made that more obvious if you’d come charging out with a silk dressing gown on and a band of violinists behind you.’
He smiled and did the hair sweep, ’She’ll come round.’
'I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘We’ll see. Tell me what happened, you were a bit vague on the phone.’
I told him. He said, ‘Did Mave come up with anything?’
‘The guy who phoned Alice was using a throwaway phone. No CCTV close enough to catch anyone on foot.’
Dil stood up straight and swept his fringe again, ‘You’re not having much luck on this, Eddie.’
‘We, Dil. We’re not having much luck. You, me and Vita, who’s decided to get out of the country just when the man she hired to do some dirty work goes missing.’
He spread his hands, ‘Listen, it was sudden. She told me she’d be here for the duration. She’ll be back in a week. Vita’s not one for running away, you should know that.’
‘Good, because she’s probably going to have to put some money on the table. If we can get a handle on this gypsy story she can offer a reward.’
‘I’m sure she will.’ He looked to the ceiling at the sound of footsteps on creaking floorboards. Prim led Alice downstairs, asking if she was hungry.
‘I’m fine,’ Alice said, then, to me, ‘what’s next? Can Mave still keep trying to track those phones?’
I said, ‘I’m heading home now. Mave will work through the night. I think she’s done all she can for now on phones and CCTV, but we’ll stay on the gypsy angle and see what we can find out. And in the morning I’ll call Monty and ask if his man at the Blue Anchor picked anything up.’
She had watched unblinking as I spoke, but the doubt about me had gone from her eyes. Alice detested violence, and it annoyed me that she appeared to find no irony in the fact that she had needed to see me beat DJ up before she felt I was worth her full respect. Then I chided myself silently for expecting too much. She was tough and independent, but she was still little more than a child.
I said, ‘You look knackered. Try and get some sleep. I’ll call you in the morning and let you know what’s planned.’
Alice said, ‘Call me through the night if Mave finds anything. I’ll leave my phone on.’
‘Okay,’ I turned toward Prim. Alice grabbed my arm and turned me back. She said, ‘Promise?’
‘I promise! Lord help the man you marry!’
‘Amen to that,’ said Prim and we all laughed…even Alice.
50
Next morning, Mave had to remind me what day it was, and that I was riding at Newcastle. She’d been up all night, with nothing to show for it. ‘Try and get some sleep,’ I said.
‘I will.’
‘Do me a favour and call Alice first or she’ll be on the phone to me. Try to persuade her that no news is good news.’
‘Yes, boss.’ I smiled and kissed her.
I’d just started the car when Mac rang, ‘Eddie, can you talk?’
‘Sure. What’s up?’
‘Ever heard of Kelman Hines? Used to be a vet.’
’Name rings a bell from somewhere, but I don’t know the guy.’
‘He used to work on-course in the midlands and the north, then set up a big practice in Ripon, and began providing vets that were registered with him to work the tracks throughout the UK. Gave that up three years ago to open a lab in Newmarket. He specializes in equine nutrition now, though his company has various spin-offs.’
‘Is this the Hines of Byerley Hines, the big company?’
‘Same one. Listen, Hines contacted Bangor out of the blue the week before Montego Moon ran to say he was considering getting back into the business of supplying vets to tracks, and would they like to help him out.’
‘Well, well, well…and Bangor booked him?’
‘They did. Well they booked his company. And he pulled the same stunt with Cheltenham, and Aintree and Uttoxeter.’
‘His guys were on duty at every track?’
‘One guy, Mike Boffo. He covered every raceday where a horse bolted.’
I slapped the steering wheel in celebration. ‘This is looking good, Mac! What’s Boffo’s background?’
�
�I don’t know yet. I’m more interested in pulling all the CCTV footage from the stables when he was in there.’
‘How long will that take?’
‘A couple of hours.’
‘And you’re keeping this quiet as agreed?’
‘As agreed,’ he said.
‘What about Hines? Any sign of him being less than pure?’
‘Not so far, but it’s early days. He’s certainly ambitious. Byerley Hines is a private company, so there’s not much information in the public domain. Aside from nutrition they do portable blood testing machines, GPS-based exercise monitoring, non-invasive scoping, blah, blah, blah.’
‘So going backwards to hiring out their guys piecemeal to tracks for a couple of hundred quid doesn’t quite sit right?’
‘Exactly.’
‘And he has a lab, a lab full of high-tech kit including GPS stuff, so getting hold of some tiny speakers and some bandwidth is hardly a major challenge, eh?’
‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Mac said, ‘and sending the same guy each time.’
I said, ‘Was this guy, Boffo, on that list you emailed last night?’
‘No. Just the regular vets on the long term roster.’
‘Okay. And the powers that be at Bangor and Uttoxeter etcetera who usually work off the roster, ask no questions when this top businessman rings them up out of the blue to say he’d love to be back in the business of collecting horse piss in plastic fucking buckets?’
‘Well, they do more than dope testing, Eddie, but I take your point. I suspect he called the chairman in each case. They’d be old friends of his, or, at least, they’d be aware he was a big shot now. Human nature at work.’
‘Well, one thing you could find out, is when Boffo’s due back on track. That would give us a chance of nailing him with the radio kit.’
‘I’ll check on the rosters.’
‘You sure you can ask these questions without anyone at your end sussing this?’
He sighed long and loud and I said, ‘Okay! Okay, Mac, I’m sorry. I’ll leave it with you. Let me know if there’s anything on the CCTV footage, will you?’
‘Where are you today?’
‘Newcastle. Do me a favour and check if Boffo’s going to be there. Oh, and double check that whoever is on duty doesn’t work for Hines.’
‘Boffo is not on duty anywhere today. The vets at each track are locals. Been on the books for donkeys’ years.’
‘In that case, see if you can get a price off a bookie that there’ll be no wild horses taking off today. Then we can all retire on the winnings.’
‘Good luck at Newcastle.’
‘Thanks, Mac.’
Newcastle was east of home, almost a straight drive to the opposite coast. I arrived at the start on my first ride of the day to see Jon Vogel’s fixed smile as he raised a hand to greet me.
I hadn’t bothered checking who was on duty at the start. That was an old theory, filed under “failed”. But still, I watched Vogel as he went cheerily about his job.
As we circled, and the sun broke through, Vogel moved toward a brown mare for his final check. He twanged the girth and smiled and slapped the mare’s rump, and she reacted by lashing out with her near-hind and connecting with Vogel’s left leg bang on the side of his knee joint. The cracking sound was so loud some of the horses spooked and every jockey turned as Vogel howled and went down.
Five minutes later, as the ambulance pulled slowly away, with a sedated Vogel strapped onto the bed, Bomber Harries said, ‘Strange to see the ambulance heading back when all of us are still in the saddle.’
A few nodded, but nobody spoke and as the ambulance trundled toward the stand, another one lined up behind us ready to follow for this three-mile steeplechase.
Most jockeys are superstitious and many believe bad things come in threes. Vogel was the first casualty of the day. Looking around at some worried faces, I wished I could at least offer them the reassurance that there would be no horses in this race going wild.
51
Dusk was just giving way to darkness as I turned at the end of the barn, and I saw in the cottage window the spark of a match, then Mave’s face in the flare before she leant to light the homecoming lamp. I smiled.
Inside, I said, ‘The shortest burning.’
‘Indeed,’ she said, holding the spent match between her raised fingers, ‘I could have saved a match.’
‘And a pennyworth of wax.’ We smiled, and hugged and she said, ‘Another winnerless day, I see?’
‘There’s always tomorrow,’ I said, as I dropped my kitbag, ‘At least I left the course under my own steam which is more than can be said of our old friend, Jon Vogel.’
‘What happened?’
‘He slapped one female rump too many. A mare kicked him. Apparently, when the doctor looked at his x-ray he described Vogel’s knee as “mush”. Probably not the precise medical term, but it gives you a good picture.’
‘A mare. Ironic, in a way, for the anthropomorphic among us, at least.’
‘Indeed. I believe she was American bred too, rubbing salt into the mush.’
‘Karma.’
We settled over Mave’s laptop, the steam from our coffee mugs drifting beyond the small desk lamp into the darkness. She turned to me, ‘This could take half an hour.’
I shrugged, ‘I’m not doing anything else.’ I had asked Mave to try and get into the IT system at Byerley Hines and take a look at Kelman Hines’s email.
‘Go away,’ she said, ‘You’ll fidget and you’ll mumble and you’ll sniff and I’ll slap you.’
‘I don’t sniff!’
‘You always sniff when you’re waiting for me to find something. You just don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s like sniffing something on the cooker to see if it’s ready.’
‘I promise not to sniff.’
‘Go away! Light the stove. In fact, Call Kim. You haven’t spoken to him for ages.’
‘Because I feel like I’m intruding on the big family reunion. If he’s missing home, he’ll call,’ I stood up, ‘but I take the hint, I’m going. I’ll check tomorrow’s runners.’
Half an hour later, Mave brought her laptop to the kitchen table. I shifted my chair closer to hers and she paged through what she’d found, ’This is a list of the people Hines has spoken to in the last three months, by mobile phone. Here are the companies he’s called. The yellow highlights link person to company.’
She clicked the next tab and rolled the cursor down through lines of text, ‘These are the emails with his company address on, originating or terminating at the company server.’
‘Good. What about his home email address?’
‘You won’t need those.’
I knew that look of Mave’s and I felt a nervous jolt of anticipation, ‘What did you find?’
‘Hines travels a lot, mostly to North and South America. He uses software that pulls together his itinerary, you know, taxi pickup at seven, flight check-in at eight, land Chicago at eleven, and so on. It collates everything and sends him one email.’
‘Uhuh?’
‘On the first Thursday in February, he made a one-day trip to Spain. A chauffeur met him at Malaga Airport and drove him up into the Sierra Nevada. The final leg of his journey was by donkey.’
She waited for my reaction. I just nodded. She said, ‘The donkey carried him up a long and steep cliff path to here…’ she clicked on another tab, which opened showing an aerial picture of what looked like a ranch set on a vast plateau. The buildings looked dangerously close to the cliff edge which dropped into a ravine so deep and dark, the bottom couldn’t be seen. In what looked like a paddock of about five acres, was a herd of white horses, maybe a hundred in all.
I said, ‘I’m guessing Hines wasn’t there on a vet call.’
‘You’d have to ask the owner of said horses.’
‘Who is?’
’Senor Valentino Romanic.’
52
My instinct was to jump up and gra
b the car keys, but I forced myself to stay seated, still staring at the clifftop residence of Prim’s father.
Mave was watching my face. She said, ‘We’re not done yet.’ She brought up a YouTube page and clicked play on a video with the title: The Gypsy King Horse Whisperer. A white horse was being led around a large circular enclosure by a smiling young girl. A crowd lined the wooden rails of the enclosure. Ten seconds in, the horse went crazy and took off and began racing around the ring as the girl tumbled in the dirt and rolled theatrically before coming to rest on her front, apparently unconscious, as the horse ran and bucked and the crowd took fright.
Then a long-haired man in a jewelled waistcoat and flapping white trousers jumped from the top rail into the enclosure and held his right hand high as he moved to stand by the girl. The man watched the racing animal, turning on his heel, his arm still high, his lips moving…then he walked slowly toward the perimeter of the ring until he was right in the path of the galloping horse. As it rounded the bend, ten strides from him, he lowered his right arm, put both hands on his hips and spread his feet.
The horse stopped so quickly that dust rose in a cloud, drifting around the man as he walked slowly toward the shaking animal and touched it gently between the eyes.
The horse lowered its head and was still. The man turned to look at the girl and she stirred and slowly sat up. The crowd cheered and the girl got to her feet and went to the man, who hugged her to his side and stroked her head.
The horse moved forward gently to join the man and the girl, who reached to touch the horse’s nose as she smiled. Mave hit pause and zoomed the screen to an enlargement of the girl’s face. Much pixelated as it was, there was no mistaking the beauty of a teenage Primarolo Romanic.
I turned slowly from the screen to look at Mave, ‘Prim?’
‘Looks very like her.’
‘How old? How long ago would that be?’
‘She looks younger than Alice there…maybe twelve, thirteen.’