Bloodline

6

It was a bit like the proverbial searching for a needle in a haystack.

During the past four months, the height of the flat-racing season, Clare had ridden almost every day, often four or five times in an afternoon and, sometimes, at an evening meeting as well.

According to the database, since the beginning of June, there had been four hundred and twenty-nine races run in which Clare had been one of the jockeys, and she’d been on the winner in thirty-seven of them, including her last ever ride at Lingfield the previous Friday on Scusami.

What was it that Clare had said when I asked her how often she had stopped a horse from winning? Three or four times, maybe five. And what had she written in her note? I don’t know what has been happening to me these last few months.

I assumed, therefore, that the three or four races, or maybe five, would have been in the last few months. I had better start at the beginning of the four hundred and twenty-nine and just go through them all, ignoring only the ones she had actually won. That left three hundred and ninety-two races to watch. I settled myself into the studio chair for a lengthy session.

But first I watched again her ride on Bangkok Flyer last Friday to remind me of exactly what I was looking for. The more I saw it, the more obvious it seemed. I was sure that I’d have no trouble spotting it again in a different race. All I really needed was to watch the final furlong.

I also looked to see who trained Bangkok Flyer. I knew most things about the horses that I watched regularly, including their owners and trainers, but Bangkok Flyer was a two-year-old maiden and Friday had been the first time I’d seen him run.

According to the database, he was trained in a Newmarket stable by Austin Reynolds, for a long time the nearly man of British flat racing. Austin was now in his mid to late fifties and he had never quite fulfilled his potential in the sport.

Perhaps too much had been expected of him because he’d enjoyed such phenomenal success very early, winning the Derby, the Oaks and the St Leger in only his second year as a young trainer. Since those heady days of more than twenty years ago, he had never again saddled a Classic winner and he’d precious few other big-race victories to his name either.

Nowadays he mostly sent his horses north to race on the Yorkshire circuits, marketing himself to businessmen from the area — prospective owners who might appreciate his fashionable Newmarket address.

Bangkok Flyer had raced three times prior to his run at Lingfield, once each at Redcar, Catterick and York, finishing second on all three occasions. But Clare hadn’t ridden him in any of those previous outings.

Nevertheless, I watched the VTs of all three. There was nothing untoward in any of them, at least there was nothing that I could spot. In fact, the colt had run exceptionally well last time out at York, beaten only half a length by a good horse that had itself recently gone on to win one of the major two-year-old races of the season. No wonder Bangkok Flyer had started as a red-hot favourite under Clare. On past form he should have won the race at Lingfield with ease, as he surely would have done without Clare’s untimely intervention.

Even with me watching only the final furlong of each one, the first two hundred races took me more than three hours to review. In them I found three ‘definites’ as well as a further two ‘possibles’. Perhaps Clare had been understating the reality when she had said she’d ‘stopped’ a maximum of only five.

By this stage, I had watched so many race finishes that the horses were beginning to dance before my eyes. I took a break for a coffee.

I felt absolutely wretched.

In a way, I suppose, I should be pleased to have at least found something but I was seriously dismayed to have had it confirmed that her irregular riding of Bangkok Flyer had not been an isolated incident.

The phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Sarah.

‘Hello, my darling,’ I said, answering it.

‘Where are you?’ she asked in a slightly pained voice.

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy I forgot.’

I looked at my watch. It was twenty past twelve and we’d agreed to meet at noon in a pub overlooking the River Thames just west of Oxford.

‘I’m on my way. Order me a glass of rosé. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

I told the database technician I’d be back later and skipped out to my car. I was still excited every time I was on my way to see Sarah. If I wasn’t, I suppose, I’d have moved on by now.

The lunchtime traffic was bad and it was a good fifteen minutes before I turned into the pub car park and pulled my battered old Ford into the space alongside Sarah’s brand-new BMW.

I hurried inside.

‘What was making you so busy in Oxford that you forgot to come and meet me?’ She wasn’t really cross, just curious.

‘I’ve been at the RacingTV studio.’

‘Doing what, exactly?’

‘Oh, bits and pieces. Sorting out my work schedule for the coming months.’

I wondered why I hadn’t told her the truth.

‘And I’m also looking at some past races that Clare rode in for a tribute that I’m making on Thursday for Channel 4.’

‘Well, in that case you’re forgiven.’ She patted my hand. ‘How have things been?’

‘Pretty awful,’ I said. ‘I seem to be wandering round in a daze. Nothing seems real.’

‘Have you fixed a date yet for the funeral?’

‘Monday, at three,’ I said. ‘But that’s another thing I’m not very happy about.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I spoke to my brothers last night. The coroner has given us the go ahead but my father wants it to be immediate family only, and near Oxted where he lives.’

‘Why is that a problem?’

‘Because Clare didn’t really get on with her immediate biological family. Racing was Clare’s world. They were her real family, and I think she would have preferred it if her funeral was held at Newmarket, where she lived, and all her racing friends able to be there.’

‘Darling,’ Sarah said, turning to me, ‘you can always have a memorial service in Newmarket later. And, in all honesty, it isn’t really what Clare would have wanted that’s now important.’

‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘And my father can be very obstinate. But for some goddamn reason, my brothers and sister seem to agree with him. I’ve tried my best but I’ve been voted down on this one. Personally, I think they only want a small quiet funeral because they’re embarrassed by the manner of her death.’

She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. There was nothing to say so we sat there in silence for a while. As always, I couldn’t get the image of Clare falling the fifteen floors out of my head. I was again close to tears.

‘Where’s Mitchell?’ I asked, purposely changing my thought pattern.

‘At Newton Abbot races, thank goodness.’ She shivered. ‘God, he was so horrible to me this morning before he went. He can be such a bully.’

‘Why don’t you just leave him?’

She didn’t answer and I tried to read her mind. Perhaps she was afraid of him, or had Clare been right and she simply couldn’t afford to leave?

‘When will he be back?’ I asked into the silence.

‘Not for hours. He’s got a runner in the last so he won’t be home until well after eight at the earliest.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy coming back with me for a while?’

In spite of everything, I was tempted.

‘How about Oscar?’ I asked. Oscar was the youngest of her stepchildren, the only one that still lived at home.

‘School play rehearsal. He won’t be home until at least ten. Please do come.’ She was almost pleading. ‘I need you. It’s been really dreadful knowing you’ve been in such pain and not being able to comfort you.’

I sighed. ‘I’ve got to go back to the RacingTV offices to finish what I’m doing. It’ll take another two or three hours at least.’

‘I’m only twenty minutes down the road. Come if you can.’

‘The offices close at six and the technician told me he wants to be gone by half past five, so I’ve got to be finished by then. I could come after that, for a little while, as long as you’re sure it’s safe.’

‘Safe as houses. I’ll watch Newton Abbot on the television just to make sure Mitch is still there for the last race.’

So would I.

Having been slightly irritated with me for arriving late, she now tried her best to hurry me away, so much so that I was back at the database studio reviewing more of Clare’s races well before two o’clock.

In all the races that Clare had ridden in, and not won, since the beginning of June, I found what I was pretty sure were seven examples of her purposely trying to lose, even though, in one of them, she didn’t really have much of a chance to win it anyway. And there were a further four races where I thought she’d not been doing her best to win when she might have done, although I couldn’t be sure that she was actively ‘stopping’ the horse.

I used the database system to make a copy of the eleven races in question onto a DVD, together with the information about all the horses that had run in each one.

There didn’t seem to be any common factors.

Of the seven definites, there was one pair that had the same trainer, but the five others were all different. Nine of the eleven had been trained in Newmarket, with one in Lambourn and the other at a stable near Stratford-upon-Avon. And all had different owners.

In addition to Bangkok Flyer, there was one other horse from the Austin Reynolds string, Tortola Beach, an exciting two-year-old prospect that Clare had ridden into third place at Doncaster in August when he had looked certain to win with just a furlong to go.

One of the others was from the Newmarket stable of Carla Topazio, a large domineering lady trainer of Italian descent who loved to sing operatic arias at every opportunity, mostly in the winners’ enclosure whenever her horses had won.

In another of the eleven, Clare had ridden a three-year-old filly called Jasmine Pearls, trained by our own cousin Brendan, which had finished a close fourth in the City Plate at Chester having led comfortably into the final furlong.

The only common thread I could see was that in none of the eleven suspect races had Clare been riding a horse trained by Geoff Grubb, her principal employer. Perhaps she had thought it would have been too great a risk. She had so much to lose if Geoff, for whatever reason, became unhappy with her riding — not just her stable-jockey job, but her home as well. Even though, at that final dinner, she had mocked me for not having bought my own house, she hadn’t done so either, choosing to live in Geoff’s rented Stable Cottage.

I sat staring at my list of definites and possibles, hoping that some other common denominator would leap out at me.

It didn’t.

Six of the eleven had started as the favourite, three at a price less than two-to-one, but two of the other five had been relative outsiders with odds greater than eight-to-one.

I looked up the trainers of the race winners, but they were mostly different as well. As were the jockeys, and the owners. Surely the eleven horses were not simply a random selection? Was there some shared characteristic that I wasn’t spotting? Maybe it was because I didn’t yet have all the necessary information to look at, and I needed to look at races earlier than June.

Perhaps Clare had been playing the ‘Race Fixing Game’ for much longer than just these last few months.

I glanced at my watch. It was ten past five and the technician was hovering and clearly itching for me to go. Any further searches would have to wait.

I quickly made another DVD with four of Clare’s big race victories on it, as well as her final race on Scusami. Sadly, I couldn’t find a VT of her first ever ride or even her first winner, but I still had more than enough to make the tribute piece for Channel 4.

I collected my two DVDs, thanked the technician, and left the studio.

The one thing that was certain about every TV company I had ever known was that, in their reception area, you would find a large-screen television showing the current output, and RacingTV was no exception.

I stood next to the office security desk and watched the sixth, and last, race from Newton Abbot. Mitchell Stacey’s horse won it easily at a canter, and the happy trainer was shown on the screen beaming from ear to ear as his victorious animal was led into the winners’ enclosure.

Newton Abbot racecourse to East Ilsley was about a hundred and sixty miles. Even taking into account that most of the journey was on motorways, and also allowing for the excessive speed at which Mitchell Stacey regularly drove, there was absolutely no way he could be at home within the next two hours.

I climbed excitedly into my old Ford, sped the twenty minutes down the A34, and jumped straight into bed with Sarah.

‘My poor darling,’ Sarah said as we lay together after lovemaking, ‘this is such a horrid business.’ She lightly stroked her fingertips across my bare chest, causing shivers to go right down my legs. ‘It’s so unbelievable.’

Indeed, it was unbelievable and I still hoped that I’d soon wake up from this nightmare and everything would be all right. Somehow it felt wrong that I could go on eating, sleeping, breathing, and even lying here with Sarah. Should I feel guilty for that too?

‘What I can’t understand,’ I said, ‘is what she was doing in London anyway. She told me she was going straight home.’

‘But people do change their minds,’ Sarah said.

I shook my head, not because I didn’t believe Sarah, but in distress at what Clare had done. ‘She also told me she would be riding work at Newmarket on Saturday morning. How was she going to do that if she was staying in London?’

‘Which hotel was it?’ Sarah asked.

‘The Hilton. You know, that tall one at the bottom of Park Lane.’

Too tall, I thought.

Sarah suddenly sat bolt upright in bed. ‘But Mitch and I were at the Hilton on Friday night for that big Injured Jockeys dinner. We had a table of our owners.’

‘Didn’t you see anything?’ I asked. ‘An ambulance or something?’

‘No. Nothing at all.’

‘What time did you leave?’ I asked.

‘Not very late. You know what racing people are like about going to bed early. The dinner started at seven and it was over by half past ten.’

‘Clare fell around eleven thirty.’

‘We’d gone long before then. We were back here by midnight.’

‘But did you see her in the hotel lobby? According to the police, she checked in at twenty past ten.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘I would have remembered if I’d seen her, because she always reminded me of you. You have the same cheekbones.’

She smiled and lay back down next to me again, putting her arm round my waist.

‘How many people were at the dinner?’ I asked.

‘Hundreds,’ she said. ‘The place was packed. They had that comedian with the funny spiky hair, you know, the one that does all those amazing impressions.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘I was actually quite surprised you weren’t there. I remember spending most of the evening looking out for you.’

‘The tickets had all gone by the time I got round to applying.’

‘You should have told me. We had a spare place at our table. Someone dropped out at the last minute.’

‘I couldn’t have come, anyway. By then, I’d arranged to have dinner with Clare.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘So you had.’

How different things might have been if only I’d been a bit more organized.

On Thursday morning I drove to Newmarket and went to Clare’s cottage.

I collected the spare key from the yard office, as Geoff Grubb had suggested, and let myself in through the front door.

There was a stack of unopened mail on the doormat, most of it addressed not to Clare, but to me. I knew what it would be. I’d spent most of the previous day answering condolence letters, and the people who’d sent these ones obviously didn’t know the address of my flat.

I collected it all together. There were only a couple of other items — a bill from a mobile phone company, and a notice from Suffolk County Council about a change to refuse collection in the area. I opened the telephone bill and scanned through the list of the numbers that Clare had called. I recognized my own and also that of my parents, but what I was really looking for was a number that she had called regularly, say every day, a number that might have belonged to her mystery boyfriend.

There was no single one that stood out but there were quite a few she had rung more than ten times or so during the monthly billing period. Sadly, the bill did not include the numbers she had called last Friday night after leaving me. Perhaps I would ask the phone company for those. I put the bill down on the desk in the sitting room to look at later, and went upstairs.

It was strange going through Clare’s things. It felt like I was invading her privacy.

Of course I’d been to this cottage many times during the preceding four years, regularly staying overnight whenever I was working at Newmarket or anywhere further north. But I’d been a guest, always sleeping in the spare room. Here I was searching Clare’s own bedroom, pulling open drawers overflowing with what Americans would call ‘intimate apparel’. And intimate it was too. She’d clearly had a fondness for sexy black-lace underwear and I was rather embarrassed to find it.

There was precious little else to find.

Even as a child, Clare had been frugal in the clothes department and her wardrobe, with the exception of the lace undies, was fairly sparse and consisted mostly of jeans, polo shirts, and sleeveless puffer jackets, her usual attire.

There were only a couple of dresses hanging in the closet, one of which she had worn to our parents’ golden wedding party. It was the only time in years I could recall her not wearing trousers, mostly blue denim jeans. She had always tried to avoid occasions where she was expected to dress up.

I knew that coming to her cottage would be difficult but I hadn’t realized just how much I would miss her. Every single thing I touched reminded me of the blissful times I had enjoyed in this place.

My heart ached and ached and ached for her.

I sat down wearily on the side of her bed and longed for her to come back, to be here once more, to laugh, to bounce up the stairs with her endless energy, to be alive again — oh, to be alive again, alive, alive.

The bout of grief lasted ten to fifteen minutes, my body plagued by both pain, and guilt. There was little I could do but let the session take its course with a continuous stream of tears pouring down my cheeks.

In a strange way, the experience made me feel a little better. Perhaps it was the body’s natural healing mechanism at work.

I would have to come back later though, I thought. Her loss was still too recent, too raw and too painful. I simply couldn’t do much sorting of her things at the moment.

I collected the condolence letters, went out to my car and drove away.

I was due to record my tribute to Clare at Newmarket racecourse.

Channel 4 was broadcasting both the Friday and the Saturday of the Cambridgeshire meeting and Thursday was the day that the equipment would be set up in preparation.

The tribute was to be a short piece of me talking straight to camera in front of the Newmarket weighing room, then my voice-over of the four VTs of her major race successes including her two Group One victories, her win in the Northumberland Plate, and also the Windsor Castle Stakes at Royal Ascot in June when her horse had won by a nose with a perfectly timed late run. Then there was to be another short piece to camera, then more voice-over of her last race on Scusami at Lingfield, with another very short piece to camera to finish. Three minutes and forty-five seconds in total.

I just hoped I would be able to get through it without breaking down.

I parked my car, as always, in the area reserved for the press, and walked through to the Channel 4 scanner, the huge blue truck that was already parked in the fenced-off compound behind the northern grandstand.

The technical team were busy laying thick black cables between the scanner and the signals-relay vehicle that was parked alongside, with its arrays of receiving domes and transmitting dishes on the roof. The images from each of the seven cameras around the racecourse, together with the pick-ups from the numerous microphones, would all be transmitted back here by microwave link ready for mixing in the scanner.

It was also from where the final fusion of sound and pictures was sent via far-away satellite to the Channel 4 main studios in London for broadcast through the ether to people’s televisions at home. And all in the blink of an eye, or maybe two blinks.

‘Are you ready?’ asked Neville, the Channel 4 Racing producer.

‘As I’ll ever be,’ I said, taking in a deep breath.

‘You’ll be fine,’ Neville said. ‘And we can always do it again.’

Yes, I thought. Thank goodness it wasn’t going out live.

But I needn’t have worried. As soon as the camera’s Cyclops-like lens pointed my way outside the weighing room, my professional instincts took over and I managed to do all the straight-to-camera pieces in just one take.

Afterwards, I sat in the scanner for over an hour putting together the whole thing, editing the VTs and doing the voice-overs, shuffling things around until both Neville and I were happy with the final tribute. I played it right through from start to finish and, once more, it made me close to tears. I hoped that it might have the same effect on those who watched it on Saturday.

By the time I emerged from the scanner into a light September drizzle, the Thursday afternoon races were well under way. But I’d had enough for one day and decided to take myself off home to Edenbridge. If I was lucky, I’d get round the M25 before the rush-hour.

Mitchell Stacey was waiting for me in the car park.

Oh shit, I thought. What the hell’s he doing here?

Mitchell trained nothing but steeplechasers or hurdlers, and there were only ever flat races at Newmarket. So why was he leaning on my car? I slowed to a halt about twenty yards away but he came over quickly towards me, sticking his right forefinger up under my chin.

‘Now listen to me, you bastard,’ he shouted at me from about ten inches’ distance. ‘Stop fucking my wife.’

There wasn’t much to say, so I kept quiet.

Sorry somehow seemed inappropriate.

‘If it wasn’t for this business with your sister,’ Mitchell went on, ‘I’d have had your legs broken. Do you understand me?’

I remembered what Sarah had said about him being a bully. I could see what she meant.

‘Do you understand me?’ he said again, pushing his ruddy face up close to mine.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He thrust a folded piece of paper into my hands.

I unfolded it. On the paper was printed a large colour photograph. It was rather grainy and slightly out of focus, but it was clear enough. The photograph showed Sarah and me in bed together the previous evening, and there was little doubt as to what we were doing.

‘I won’t divorce her, you know,’ he said. ‘And she won’t divorce me either because she knows she’d end up with nothing. Not a bean. We have a prenuptial contract.’

I wasn’t sure that prenups were legal documents under English law, but I decided against mentioning it to him at that particular moment.

‘If you ever come near my wife again, I’ll kill you.’ Mitchell said it with real menace.

He suddenly turned and walked away from me without looking back.

My skin felt cold and clammy, and I found I was shaking.

I stuffed the photograph into my pocket and made it over to my car, sitting down heavily in the driver’s seat.

Bloody hell! How did he get that picture?

I called Sarah’s mobile.

‘He knows,’ I said when she answered. ‘Mitchell knows about us. He’s just been here at Newmarket and he confronted me.’

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Then for God’s sake, why didn’t you warn me?’

‘He threatened me, that’s why.’ She was crying. ‘Told me he’d break my legs if I contacted you.’

I could believe it.

‘Mark, I’m so frightened.’

So was I.

‘He showed me a picture taken yesterday of us in bed.’

‘A picture?’ She sobbed. ‘He’s got the whole bloody video. He made me watch it this morning after Oscar went to school. He’d set up one of those spy cameras in our bedroom. It was awful. I thought he was going to hit me.’

‘Pack a bag and leave right now,’ I said. ‘Come and live with me at my place. Mitchell won’t be back for a good couple of hours, even if he goes straight home.’

‘He took my car keys.’

‘So what? Order a taxi and get the train from Newbury. I’ll collect you at Paddington.’

I could hear her sigh. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

There was no reply.

‘Why not?’ I asked her again.

‘I just can’t,’ she said again in a resigned tone. There was a long silence on the line. ‘I should have paid the little shit.’

‘Paid who?’ I asked.

‘Oh, nothing,’ she said dismissively. There was another silence. ‘It might be better if we didn’t talk again.’

Neither of us said anything. There may have been no actual words but the silence between us spoke volumes.

‘Bye, bye, my darling,’ she said finally. ‘And thanks for everything.’

She hung up, leaving me sitting there holding the dead phone to my ear.

My whole world seemed to be falling apart around me. My gorgeous twin sister had killed herself, I was arguing with the rest of my family, my lover of five years had just dumped me, and Iain Ferguson appeared to be taking over my job.