Blood at the Bookies

Thirty-Nine

Hamish Urquhart was taken in for questioning by the police later that Saturday morning. Their suspicions had been moving towards him for some time, and these were confirmed by their interview with Andy Constant in the hospital. He had also been identified by CCTV camera footage on the campus of the University of Clincham. Soon after, the Maiden Avenue entrance to the campus was bricked up.

In police custody Hamish Urquhart made no attempt to deny his crimes and was quickly charged with the murder of Tadeusz Jankowski and the attempted murder of Andy Constant. His defence team were in a quandary as to whether they should put in a plea of insanity. He showed no remorse about his actions, and kept telling them that he had finally done something that would make his father proud of him.

While he was on remand, his sister Sophia visited him as often as she could. Their father didn’t. In Ewan Urquhart’s view, his son had always been unsatisfactory. Now he was no longer on the scene, the older man found it easier and more convenient to forget that he had ever had a son.

And, once her brother had been sentenced to life, Sophia’s visits to him ceased.

She dropped out of the University of Clincharri before the end of that academic year and went to join her father in the offices of Urquhart & Pease. She learnt the business quickly and her good looks went down well with the male clients. There were plenty of admirers around, but none of her relationships lasted for more than a few months. All of the aspiring swains failed for the same reason. They couldn’t match the impossibly high standards set by Ewan Urquhart for ‘the kind of man worthy of my little Soph’.

Magic Dragon broke up even before Sophia left the university and she didn’t sing much after that. The gold of her hair faded and her face and neck thickened out, as she reconciled herself to her fate of looking after her father until he died. Which, of course, suited Ewan Urquhart perfectly. And everyone appreciated the sterling work Sophia put in making teas at Old Carthusian cricket matches. Maybe after her father’s death she might be able to carve out a life for herself, but nobody was putting bets on it.

Bets continued, however, to be put on horses at the betting shop (though most of the shop’s income continued to come from the fixed-price gaming machines). Sonny ‘Perfectly’ Frank continued to ask ‘Know anything?’ to everyone who came in. The waiters from the Golden Palace regularly abandoned serving sweet and sour pork for the quick fix of a bet and kept up their high-pitched wind-chime banter. Pauline continued to enjoy the warm, while Wes and Vie continued to neglect their decorating work. They still shouted at every race, surprised like circling goldfish every time their latest brilliant fancy turned out to be a failure.

One regular ceased to attend. After his flu Harold Peskett had resumed going to the betting shop with his elaborate scribbled permutations of doubles and trebles. Then finally one day the results worked for him, and he won over a thousand pounds. So great was the shock that he died of a heart attack right there in the betting shop. Though it was rather inconvenient for Ryan and Nikki, there was a general view that it would have been the way he wanted to go.

Melanie Newton never went back into a betting shop. She didn’t need to. Her laptop offered everything she required. She could play the virtual casinos and roulette wheels twenty-four hours a day. Which she did. And as her credit card debts grew, she kept taking up offers of new credit cards. And kept moving to ever more dingy accommodation, one step ahead of her creditors.

Andy Constant was not the kind of man to change. He recovered completely from his stab-wound, and the scar became another part of his seduction technique. He told wide-eyed female freshers how a woman had once been so desolated by his ending their relationship that she had persuaded her brother to attack him. He continued to entice women into his little kingdom of the Drama Studio. And his wife Esther continued to think that they had a happy marriage, though Andy’s workload did mean he often had to stay late at the university.

Whenever Jude thought of Andy Constant, she felt very sheepish and shamefaced. She realized how near she had come to making a complete fool of herself. But she knew that, if the same circumstances were to arise, she might again prove susceptible.

So she continued to do some good by her healing. And to wonder whether she really ought at some point to move on from Fethering.

Zofia Jankowska stayed there, though, moving after a few weeks out of Woodside Cottage to a flat of her own. She enrolled in a journalism course at the University of Clincham, and subsidized her studies by continuing to work at the Crown and Anchor. Ted Crisp grudgingly admitted that she was the best bar manager he’d ever had, ‘even though she is foreign’.

Carole Seddon watched the miracle of her granddaughter Lily’s development with growing awe. The child’s existence brought her closer to Stephen and Gaby, but she resisted their ongoing attempts to include David in family encounters.

And she appreciated increasingly the sedate friendship of Gerald Hume. They didn’t often go out for meals or anything like that. Such activities would have had too much of the flavour of a ‘date’ about them. But they did quite often meet in the betting shop.

Carole became very quickly convinced that Gerald’s ‘system’ for applying his accountancy skills to gambling was just as ineffectual as every other ‘system’ that had been invented since mankind had first bet on horses. But logic did occasionally work, and she drew satisfaction from her own infrequent wins (though the largest sum she ever bet was two pounds).

Her attitude had changed, though. She could begin to see the appeal of gambling. In fact, one rainy day some weeks after Hamish’s arrest when she was sitting in the betting shop with Gerald Hume, she surprised herself. Looking at the wet window, Gerald had turned to her with a grin. “Two quid says the raindrop on the left reaches the bottom of the window frame before the one on the right.”

Carole assessed the relative size of the two raindrops. She knew a good thing when she saw it. “You’re on,” she said.