Bloodline

9

On Tuesday morning I went back to work again, this time properly. Life, it seemed, had to continue and Clare’s death was last week’s news. The world, and racing, went on regardless, without her.

I was due to be the racecourse commentator at the jumps meeting at Stratford-upon-Avon, so I left my flat early and drove clockwise round the M25, then up the M40 to Warwickshire. I spent the journey thinking back to the previous afternoon and, in particular my rather strange encounter with my father at the conclusion of the proceedings.

With Nicholas’s wise words still fresh in my memory, and also with his troubles over the on/off nature of Tatiana’s birthday party, I had sought out my father for a quiet chat.

At first I hadn’t been able to find him anywhere but, eventually, I’d discovered him in his high-backed desk chair in his study, sitting in the quiet, facing the window.

‘Hi, Dad,’ I’d said. ‘You OK?’

He’d swivelled slowly round to face me.

‘Not really. You?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘I’ve been a fool,’ he’d said. He had rotated the chair back so that he was again looking out at the garden, and he’d sat silently for some time.

‘In what way?’ I’d asked finally. But he’d been a fool in all sorts of ways.

‘Please leave me,’ he’d replied. ‘I’d rather be alone.’

I could tell from his voice that he’d been close to tears.

‘No, Dad. Talk to me.’

‘I can’t.’ His whole body had shaken with sobs.

Not only had the day been a first for him ever praising me, it was also the first time I had ever seen my father cry. He had always believed, and had stated loudly and often through my childhood, that crying was a sign of weakness. Yet there he had been, sobbing like a baby.

I hadn’t really known what to do. I was sure that he’d been embarrassed. Perhaps I should have left him alone to recover. Instead I’d grabbed the back of his chair and spun him round to face me.

‘Talk to me,’ I’d almost shouted at him. ‘We never communicate. We just argue.’

‘She didn’t say goodbye,’ he’d said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Clare. She never said goodbye to me.’

‘Dad, she was hardly likely to ring you up to say goodbye before she killed herself.’

‘No, not that,’ he’d said, now openly crying. ‘I mean she never said goodbye to me when she left here that evening. We had argued. We always seem to these days. I can’t even remember what it was about. Something about the house, or the garden. She kept telling me I was getting too old to look after it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we argued about, suffice to say we did. And I told her that she was an insufferable spoiled brat who should know better than to speak to her parents like that.’

I could imagine the exchange. I’d had them myself with the old git.

‘She just walked out without another word,’ he’d said miserably. ‘She didn’t even say goodbye to your mother. I followed her outside telling her not to be so bloody stupid, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at me. She got in her car and drove away without a backward glance.’ He had sobbed again. ‘I feel so guilty.’

Join the club, I’d thought.

It was only about twelve o’clock when I turned in through the gates of Stratford racecourse and parked in one of the spaces reserved for the race-day officials. Terence Feynman, the judge for the day, pulled in beside me.

‘Hello, Terence,’ I said, climbing out of my car.

‘Hi, Mark. I’m so sorry about Clare.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not great.’

‘No. And just as she had made the breakthrough into the big time. Funny old world.’

I didn’t feel like laughing.

‘Are you commentating or presenting?’

‘Commentating.’

‘See you later then, up top.’ He rushed away across the car park as if he was late, even though there was nearly two hours to pass before the first race.

The judge’s box was alongside the commentary position at the top of the grandstand, his being directly in line with the winning post to enable him to accurately call the winner, assisted, if necessary, by the photo-finish camera that sat immediately above him.

Prior to 1949 there were no photo-finish cameras, and the judge was the sole arbiter of who had won and who hadn’t.

Infamously, in the 1913 running of the Two Thousand Guineas, the judge, Charlie Robinson, announced a horse called Louvois as the winner when every single other person at Newmarket that day believed that Craganour had passed the post in front and had won easily, by a length.

Nevertheless, Louvois was declared the winner because the judge said so.

There was speculation and rumour at the time that Robinson had been influenced by the fact that he’d had friends who’d died on the Titanic the previous year. Craganour was owned by C. Bower Ismay, younger brother of J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, the company that had owned the Titanic. And it had been widely reported at the time, albeit wrongly, that J. Bruce Ismay had saved himself by securing a place in one of Titanic’s lifeboats disguised as a woman.

But, whatever anyone else might think, the judge’s decision is final and Louvois remained the official winner, and his name is still in the record books.

Not until 1983 were photo-finish cameras used at all British racecourses, and the first colour images were not available until 1989.

And it hasn’t been just the judge’s role that has changed due to modern technology.

The very first racecourse commentary in England was at Goodwood on 29 July 1952. For the previous eight hundred years, since the first documented racecourse at Smithfield in London in the twelfth century, races had been run in silence, the only sounds being the thudding of the horses’ hooves on the turf, and the cheering of the crowd.

Even as late as 1996, races at Keeneland, one of America’s premier racetracks in Lexington, Kentucky, were run without any public address, other than a bell being rung when the race began. At Ascot, they still ring a bell to alert the crowd when the runners enter the finishing straight even though there has been race commentary there since the mid 1950s.

I walked into Stratford racecourse through the main entrance only to come face to face with Toby Woodley from the Daily Gazette.

‘Have you seen my piece today?’ he asked in a loathsome, self-satisfied manner.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I never read your rag.’

‘You ought to,’ he sneered. ‘You might learn something. Especially today.’

He walked off towards the bar and I watched him go. I wondered if he could have been Clare’s secret boyfriend. No, surely that was impossible?

I walked round behind the stands to the Press Room, which was fortunately deserted so long before the first. In common with most racecourses, Stratford looked after members of the press pretty well, providing them with tea and coffee facilities, a tray of sandwiches and, occasionally, a supply of hot soup. However, I was in search of the newspapers that they regularly left in a stack by the door. In particular, I was looking for a copy of the Daily Gazette, which I spread out on one of the wooden desks.

My blood ran cold.

CLARE SHILLINGFORD WAS A RACE FIXER ran the headline in bold type across the back page.

However, the story beneath was speculative at best and related to a race the previous April when Clare had ridden a horse called Brain of Brixham into second place on the all-weather Polytrack at Wolverhampton. It had been at an evening meeting under lights and Clare claimed she had mistakenly thought that a pole used to support a TV camera on a wire had been the winning post. Hence she had stopped riding some twenty yards short of the finish and had been subsequently overtaken and beaten by another horse right on the line.

I’d seen the video of the race at the time and I remember thinking that Clare had been rather foolish, but it had definitely not been like the others I had found. As far as I could recall, it had been just a silly, but genuine, error.

But could I be totally sure?

The stewards at Wolverhampton had accepted Clare’s explanation that it had been accidental, and they had given her a fourteen-day suspension for careless riding. Now, Toby Woodley was claiming that she had done it on purpose, and had been paid handsomely by a betting syndicate for her trouble.

I heard the door open behind me.

‘So she wasn’t such an angel after all,’ said Woodley in his distinctive squeak.

I spun round. ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ I shouted. ‘That race was simply an error of judgement and you know it.’

‘How about the betting syndicate?’ he said. ‘They made a fortune laying that horse.’

‘Says who?’ I demanded. ‘This rubbish doesn’t name anyone.’ I waved my hand at the spread-out paper.

‘Sources,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose with his finger. ‘I have my sources.’

‘Your imagination, more like. You’ve made the whole thing up.’

‘You may think so,’ he sneered, ‘but this story will run and run.’

‘I’ll sue,’ I said.

‘On what grounds?’

‘Libel.’

‘Don’t you know?’ He grinned, showing me his nicotine-stained teeth. ‘Under English law, you can’t libel the dead.’ He laughed. ‘You should have spoken to me yesterday, at her funeral. I was treated like dirt.’

So was that what the story was about? Was he simply piqued by being shouted at by my father, and brushed off by me?

‘Not treated like dirt,’ I said. ‘More like shit.’

‘You’ll regret that.’

I picked up the newspaper and waved it at him. ‘And is this what you meant by saying yesterday that you’d been good to me. Ha! Don’t make me laugh. You don’t know what being good means.’

He was about to say something further when the door opened and Jim Metcalf walked in. Jim was the senior racing correspondent for UK Today, one of the country’s best-selling national newspapers, which prided itself on its coverage of horseracing.

‘Hi, Mark,’ said the newcomer. ‘Welcome back.’

‘Thanks, Jim,’ I said, meaning it. ‘And thank you for your note last week.’

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to miss Clare. She was a lovely girl.’ He shook his head slightly as if not knowing what else to say. Instead, he turned to Toby Woodley. ‘What do you want, you little runt? I thought we’d made it clear you weren’t welcome in the press rooms.’

‘I have as much right to be here as you do,’ Toby whined.

‘Right, maybe,’ said Jim. ‘But we don’t want you here. Understand? You make the place smell. Now, clear off.’

I thought for a moment that Toby was going to stand his ground, but Jim was even taller than my six foot two, and he’d once been a Royal Marine Commando. Toby at about five foot six would have been no match.

‘Good riddance,’ Jim said, smiling, as the door closed. ‘He’s a nasty piece of work.’

‘Have you seen his piece today in the Gazette?’ I handed it to him.

‘Is it true?’ Jim asked after reading.

‘No,’ I said with certainty.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ I said.

But was I really sure? After what I’d seen on the films, could I be sure of anything concerning Clare’s riding?

‘What can I do about it?’ I asked. ‘I can’t sue him because it seems you can’t libel the dead.’

‘That’s right,’ Jim said, nodding. ‘But you could call him a liar on air. Then he’d have to sue you, or else be laughed out of his job. You’d then get your day in court. He’d have to prove he wasn’t lying, and that the facts of the story were accurate. But, sadly, even if you won, you wouldn’t get any damages from the little weasel, and you might not get your costs because he’d be sure to claim it was fair comment, even if the story wasn’t true.’

‘Do you do the legal work for UK Today as well as the racing?’ I asked with a smile.

‘Not if I can help it.’ He smiled back. ‘But, if you want my advice it would be to say nothing, and do nothing. Everyone knows that the Gazette is just a rumour mill. No one believes what it says, even when it’s true.’

‘But the Daily Gazette sells millions of copies.’

‘I know they do,’ he said. ‘But millions also watch soap operas on the telly and they don’t really believe them either.’

I wasn’t so sure. I knew people who believed all sorts of crazy things.

I left Jim Metcalf tucking into a ham and mustard sandwich while I went out to wander round the parade ring and the enclosures. It was still an hour before the first but the crowd were beginning to fill the bars and restaurants, encouraged out from their houses by the warm late September sunshine.

It was good to be back on a racecourse. The last week had seemed to drag on for ever. Things might never be the same again, without Clare, but at least today, at a jumping meeting, I could get my life back on track. Clare wouldn’t have been here today even if she was still alive.

I was up in my commentary position well before the first race. I liked commentating at Stratford not least because it was one of the minority of racecourses with the parade ring in front of the grandstands. That gave me more opportunity to study the colours.

I used my binoculars to scrutinize the horses as they walked round and round. I habitually used the race cards as printed in the Racing Post, with their reproduced colour diagrams of the jockeys’ silks. Now I made notes in black felt-tip pen of which horses had white marks on their faces, or had sheepskin nosebands, or blinkers, or visors, or white bridles, or breast girths, or anything else that might help me recognize them if I couldn’t distinguish the colours, something that was not unknown if the track was very muddy.

Not that that would be an issue today, I thought, not on a fine September afternoon when the problem for the racecourse had been too little water, not too much. Indeed, the dry conditions and the firmness of the track meant that the number of declared runners in each race was small. It made my life easy but it wasn’t good for racing in general.

I watched as the jockeys came out of the weighing room and into the paddock. I couldn’t help but think back to the last time I’d seen Clare doing the same thing at Lingfield. If only, I thought for the umpteenth time, if only I had known then what would happen later. I could surely have prevented it.

Suddenly the horses were coming out onto the racecourse and I had been daydreaming instead of learning the colours. Get a grip, I told myself.

Fortunately there were only eight runners in the novice hurdle and many of them I knew well from having seen them run before. It would be an easy reintroduction to commentary for me. It seemed like longer than just the eleven days since I’d last done it at Lingfield.

I switched on my microphone and described the horses as they made their way to the two-mile start on the far side of the course.

‘Hi, Mark,’ said Derek’s voice into my ears through the headphones. ‘Coming to you in one minute.’

Derek, sitting in the blacked-out RacingTV scanner truck, was at Chepstow racecourse, some seventy miles away to the south-west in Wales. He would be watching the same pictures that I had on the monitor in front of me, pictures that showed the eight runners here at Stratford circling while they had their girths tightened by the starter’s assistant.

‘Ten seconds,’ said his voice into my ears. ‘Five, four, three...’ He fell silent.

‘The starter is moving to his rostrum,’ I said into the live microphone. ‘They’re under starters orders. They’re off.’

The race was uneventful with the eight horses well strung out even by the time they passed the stands for the first time. On the second circuit three of them pulled up and the other five finished in an extended line astern with not a moment’s excitement between them.

I tried my best to sound upbeat about the winner as he strode away after the last hurdle to win by twenty lengths, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. He’d been a well-backed favourite and most of the punters were happy.

‘Thanks, Mark,’ said Derek into my ears. ‘Back with you for the next.’

I sighed. The fun suddenly seemed to have gone out of my job.

I stayed in the commentary box between the first two races and thought about what Toby Woodley had written in the Gazette. Was he just trying to get even for being humiliated by my father, or was there more to his story? Did he really have his sources and knowledge of a betting syndicate, or had he made up the whole thing?

If so, he was a bit too close to the mark for my liking.

I decided that perhaps I shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about it. The last thing I wanted was to attract any unwelcome scrutiny of Clare’s recent riding. I just hoped that the story was a one-day wonder that would quickly fade away to nothing, and that everybody would soon forget about it.

Fat chance of that.

Thankfully, the second race was more exciting than the first, this time with seven runners battling it out over fences in a two-and-half-mile Beginners’ Steeplechase.

‘Beginners’ were horses that had never won a steeplechase before, either on a racecourse proper, or at a recognized point-to-point meeting, and it showed, with two of the seven falling at the first fence. However, the remaining five put up more of a contest, with three of them still in with a chance at the last and fighting out a tight finish to the line.

That was more like it, I thought, smiling as I clicked off my microphone.

‘First number one, Ed Online,’ Terence the judge called over the public address from his box next door, ‘second number three, third number six, the fourth horse was number two. Distances were a neck, and half a length.’

‘Well done, Mark,’ said Derek through my headphones. ‘That was more like it. Back with you for the next.’

‘OK,’ I replied to him, pushing the right button on my control box. ‘I’ll be here.’

There was a thirty-five-minute gap between the second and third races, which gave me about twenty minutes until I was needed back in my position, so I decided to go down to the weighing room for a cup of tea. However, I was intercepted by Harry Jacobs, my leisurely friend whom I’d last seen at Lingfield the day Clare had died.

‘Hello, Mark,’ he said, shaking my hand warmly. ‘You must come and have a drink.’

‘I’m working,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he replied with a smile. ‘I’ve been listening to your dulcet tones through the loudspeakers. But surely you’ve got time for a quick one?’

I looked at my watch. ‘All right,’ I said, smiling back. ‘But it will have to be quick.’

‘But they can’t start the race without you anyway,’ he said, chuckling.

‘Oh, yes they can,’ I assured him. ‘The race will start on time, with or without the commentary.’

‘We’d better be quick, then.’

He put his hand on my shoulder and guided me round behind the stands towards the pre-parade ring. ‘I’ve got a box,’ he said as we climbed a metal staircase. ‘In here.’ He opened a door and we went into a room almost full to overflowing with people who all seemed to be talking at once. The noise was almost overwhelming.

‘Are all these your guests?’ I asked him, shouting.

‘Yes,’ he shouted back. ‘Stratford’s my local course so I’ve asked along a few chums from home. Plus a few others I’ve, sort of, picked up since we arrived.’ He grinned broadly at me. ‘Now, what will you have?’

‘Do you have a Diet Coke?’ I asked.

His face showed that he didn’t approve of any of his guests drinking non-alcoholic beverages. ‘Are you sure you won’t have champagne?’

‘Oh, all right then,’ I said with a laugh. ‘I’ll force it down.’

A waiter miraculously moved through the throng and delivered two slender glasses of bubbles into our hands.

‘Cheers,’ I said, lifting mine to my lips.

We were still standing close to the door and Harry decided to dive deeper into the room. ‘Come on,’ he said, reaching out his hand and grabbing my jacket.

I didn’t have much choice so I followed him.

We struggled through and out onto the balcony on the far side, overlooking the parade ring.

‘That’s better,’ Harry said. ‘More air out here.’ He looked over my shoulder. ‘Hi, Richard,’ he shouted and dived back into the melee, leaving me alone.

I turned to my right just as the lady behind me turned to her left so that the two of us ended up standing face to face, crammed together by the crowd.

‘Hello, Sarah,’ I said.

Her irate husband, Mitchell Stacey, stood behind her looking at me and, I swear, I could see steam emanating from his ears.

I turned away from him and left, forcing my way through the mob without much finesse or consideration for their toes, and I didn’t look back to see if Mitchell was following. I almost ran down the metal stairs and then back to the commentary box where I remained, holed up for the rest of the afternoon.

I left immediately after the last race and hurried out to the car park, but Mitchell Stacey was ahead of me, waiting for me at my car. I stopped ten yards away.

‘I told you to stay away from my wife,’ he hissed at me through clenched teeth. ‘And I warned you.’

I decided to say nothing. I could have tried to explain to him that Sarah and I had come together by accident, that I hadn’t even known she was at Stratford until we had ended up nose to nose on Harry Jacobs’s balcony. But I didn’t think it would help. Saying nothing was surely the best policy. Allow the volcano to subside, I thought. Don’t go poking it with a stick.

He’d told me at Newmarket that he would have had my legs broken, but he could hardly do it on his own. For a start, I was half his age. I was also a good four or five inches taller than he, and I kept myself fairly fit, not least by climbing stairs to the commentary boxes at the tops of all the racecourse grandstands.

If he was going to break my legs, he’d need help.

I glanced around but there were no Stacey henchman lurking in the shadows. Rather there was a group of inebriated racegoers making their unsteady way towards a line of coaches.

‘I warned you,’ he said again.

He suddenly strode towards me so I moved quickly to the side to put a car between us, but he didn’t follow. He simply marched past where I’d been standing and continued in a straight line back towards the racecourse enclosures.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The confrontation was over for now, but I would be naïve if I thought it would be over for ever.