Crisis

26

It wasn’t just Kate who was crying. Janie had tears too, but hers were more in anger than in sorrow.

DCI Eastwood had kindly given me a lift down through the town to Park Paddocks and I was now sitting in one of Tattersalls’ meeting rooms with Kate and Janie.

‘I’ve been working at Castleton House Stables since I was sixteen,’ Janie said angrily. ‘Half my bloody life. And I always worked far more hours than I was paid for, especially since Ryan cut my wages last month. In fact, if you count all the hours I actually work, I’ve probably been getting less than the minimum wage.’

‘Then report him to an employment tribunal,’ Kate said. ‘And also take him to the cleaners for unfair dismissal.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Let’s not be too hasty. What reasons did Ryan give for letting you go?’

‘The bastard didn’t let her go,’ Kate said angrily. ‘He sacked her. He shouted at her and told her to collect her things and go immediately, and not to come back.’

‘He said he couldn’t afford me any longer,’ Janie said. ‘And also that he didn’t like me passing on personal information about his business to other people.’

‘Did he say which other people?’ I asked.

‘His exact words were “to your sister and her effing boyfriend”.’

Charming, I thought.

‘He’s a fool,’ Kate said.

‘He’s more than that,’ Janie said. ‘I don’t think he has the slightest idea how much I do to make that place run smoothly. I complete all the declarations and engage all the jockeys, to say nothing of the collection of the training fees, vets’ bills, transport costs and so on and so on. I do all the statutory HR stuff and the payroll for the stable lads. It’s even me that orders the horse feed and the bedding. Most yards have a whole team of people doing what I do. All Mr Ryan does is the entries. I reckon the whole place will grind to a halt now that I’ve gone.’

‘Does Oliver know?’ I asked. ‘He told me only last week that the place couldn’t operate without you.’

As if on cue, my phone rang and it was Oliver. I put him on speaker so the girls could hear.

‘Ah, hello, Harry,’ he said hesitantly. ‘We have a bit of a problem here and I was wondering if you could help?’

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

‘I’m trying to contact Janie Logan,’ he said. ‘I thought you might know where she is.’

‘Why do you want her?’ I asked.

‘Well, it seems that Ryan may have acted rather hastily.’

‘What, in sacking her?’

There was a slight pause from the other end.

‘Ah, I see that you already know.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m with Janie Logan right now. She is very upset. We are discussing making a claim for wrongful dismissal.’

‘Wrongful dismissal?’ he said sharply, repeating the words.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I believe Janie has worked at Castleton House Stables for sixteen years. That means she was entitled to a minimum of twelve weeks’ paid notice. In addition she will also be filing a case with an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, which I am quite sure she will win.’

‘But it’s all a mistake,’ Oliver said. ‘We want Janie to come back. Ryan should never have said what he did. She is not sacked.’

‘Oliver,’ I said. ‘I think if your employer shouts at you and tells you to get out immediately and not to come back, then you are sacked.’

‘But, as I said, it was all a big mistake. Heat of the moment stuff. We desperately want Janie back.’

‘Is that also what Ryan thinks?’ I asked.

‘Yes, of course.’

I could imagine Oliver and Ryan having had another one of their difficult discussions when Ryan had told his father that he’d fired the only person who really knew what was going on in their business.

Oliver was once again on a damage-limitation exercise for his eldest son.

‘I will consult with Janie and let you know,’ I said. ‘But, whatever happens, I assure you that she shall not be returning on the same terms as before. For a start, she would want last month’s cut in her pay reversed and she would also require a sizeable raise on top of that, as well as substantial compensation for her distress over this matter.’

‘Cut in her pay?’ Oliver said. ‘What cut in her pay?’

‘Ask Ryan,’ I said, and hung up.

I could foresee yet another difficult conversation between father and son.

‘Harry,’ Kate said, clapping her hands together. ‘You were brilliant.’

Indeed, the exchange seemed to have cheered them both up.

‘But the big question,’ I said to Janie, ‘is do you really want to go back to work there, even with a significant raise?’

‘More to the point,’ she said, ‘is there going to be a job to go back to anyway? Two of the owners called this morning to say that they were transferring their horses to other trainers. Sorry, they said, but Mr Ryan has been having too many recent losers.’

Owners of racehorses, it seemed, were only as loyal to their trainers as the owners of football clubs were to their team managers, i.e. not at all, not unless they were winning.

In racing or football, or in any professional sport these days, winning wasn’t just everything, it was the only thing.

‘Where are the horses going instead?’ I asked.

‘One I don’t know, the owner wouldn’t say, but the other is sending his horse to Declan. At least he’ll be keeping the horse in the Chadwick family, he said, as if that was a good thing! Mr Ryan went ballistic when I told him. That’s when he fired me.’

‘One should never shoot the messenger just because the news is bad,’ I said. ‘If you do, then no one will tell you what you don’t want to hear for fear of being killed. Hence you end up not being forewarned of approaching danger even when everyone else knows about it.’

‘That’s very profound,’ Kate said.

‘But true. Hitler got so angry when he was told things were going badly that his generals simply stopped passing on the bad news. He still believed he was winning the war right up to the point where the Russian army was fighting in the streets of Berlin. And, in England years ago, it was considered treason to attack a town crier because you didn’t like the news he was shouting.’

‘Perhaps we could get Ryan hung, drawn and quartered,’ Kate said with a laugh.

‘Too good for him,’ Janie said, which I thought just about answered the question about her going back to work at Castleton House Stables.

Leaving both Kate and Janie in far better humour than I’d found them, I walked back to the Bedford Lodge and checked in with the Simpson White office.

‘ASW is out to lunch,’ Georgina said. ‘But he left you a message.’ I could hear her rustling papers. ‘Here it is. He says you only have until the end of this week as he needs you back here because other projects are looming on the horizon. He’s fixed it all with the Sheikh, who is happy with the arrangement.’

‘Is that all?’ I asked. I’d rather hoped that the research wizards might have discovered a smoking gun by now, preferably one nestling in a Chadwick hand.

‘No, it’s not all,’ Georgina replied. ‘He also said to tell you to get an effing move on, stop pissing around, and put a thunderflash up their arses... there’s a good chap.’

I laughed at her impression. I could almost hear ASW saying it.

ASW loved his thunderflashes, metaphorically speaking that was. A real thunderflash was a pyrotechnic used for training in the army. It was like a firework ‘banger’ only bigger and louder. But an ASW thunderflash was anything that produced an explosive reaction.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do all three.’

I was still laughing when I checked my emails.

And there were two of interest. Big interest.

The first was from DCI Eastwood with Zoe Robertson’s medical records as an attachment.

Declan had said that Zoe suffered from psychosis, and Yvonne had told Kate that she had been initially hospitalised for schizophrenia, but her latest diagnosis, from the time of her most recent in-patient stay, was for BPD — borderline personality disorder. It was contained in a scanned letter from a Dr Alan Cazalet, consultant in psychiatry at University College Hospital, London.

I looked up BPD on the internet. In spite of its name, there was absolutely nothing borderline about it. It was a most serious condition characterised by long-term patterns of abnormal behaviour including difficult relationships with other people, inadequate sense of self, and unstable emotions. Sufferers frequently self-harmed and also regularly acted without any apparent concern for their own welfare.

Zoe had indeed been a troubled soul.

I searched back through the file for any triggers for her condition but, whereas the recent ten years of her medical history were covered in some detail, the older records were brief only to the point of providing just an illness title and a date, such as ‘Pertussis — May 1992’.

Whereas it was of some mild interest that Zoe had contracted whooping cough at age three and a half, there were no details of the severity of the infection or what treatment had been given.

Equally, her first admittance to a psychiatric hospital in February 2007 was recorded as just that, without clarification that she’d been sectioned, and certainly without any indication that it had been her father’s doing, as Yvonne had claimed. It made me think that only the bare facts of the pre-computer era had been transcribed onto the digital record, and maybe there were greater details to be found elsewhere.

I read through it all for a second time to ensure I hadn’t missed something, but there was nothing important that I didn’t already know.

However, the second email, the one from the Simpson White research team, was far more sensational.

Even though they had been unable to break into the online banking system, the wizards had somehow acquired a loan request from Peter to a finance company to buy a car. Attached to the application form were copies of three of the Robertsons’ joint-account bank statements from the previous autumn.

They weren’t so much the single smoking gun I’d been hoping for, more like a whole firing squad of them.

For all his lack of gainful employment, Peter Robertson was clearly no mug. He seemed to be making a good living from blackmailing his in-laws, all of them.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted to talk to me, even after the death of his wife. He probably had every intention of continuing the blackmail, and maybe upping the ante to cover murder.

But how was he doing it?

What was the hold he seemed to have over them all?

The bank statements clearly showed regular payments into his account not only from Oliver Chadwick but also from Ryan, Declan and Tony.

Not too much, of course. Just enough so that they would pay without squealing.

It was definitely time to put a thunderflash up their arses.

I went to see Oliver first but he was out.

‘Come on in,’ Maria said, opening the front door wide. ‘Oliver’s gone to see some foal or other at a stud farm out near Cheveley. He went some time ago. Probably won’t be much longer. Do you fancy a drink?’

She was already holding a glass of what I assumed was white wine.

‘Coffee would be nice,’ I said, stepping through the doorway.

She wrinkled her nose in distaste but led the way into the kitchen.

‘Help yourself,’ she said, waving at the kettle, and then poured herself a top-up from an open bottle of Chardonnay on the kitchen table.

I put the kettle on the Aga.

‘How about Ryan?’ I asked. ‘Is he about?’

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘I’m not his bloody keeper.’

There was clearly no love lost between them.

‘Why didn’t Ryan move in here when he took over the stables?’ I asked, spooning instant coffee into a cup.

‘Don’t be bloody stupid,’ Maria said. ‘Oliver didn’t want to give up his stables. He wasn’t about to hand over his house as well.’

‘Then why did he give up the stables?’ I asked. ‘Ryan could surely have started up somewhere else. Like Declan did.’

‘Apparently, it was always accepted that Ryan would eventually take over the yard from Oliver. But no one expected it to be quite so soon. Ryan broke his knee badly in a fall at Newbury and was forced to stop riding when he was only thirty-six. Most flat jockeys go on much longer than that, some well into their fifties.’

I poured boiling water over the coffee, and took some milk from the fridge.

‘Surely Oliver could still have said no.’

‘He should have done,’ Maria said with feeling. ‘Ryan taking over has been a disaster. If we’re not careful we’ll lose the whole bloody lot.’

I marvelled at her ability to be so indiscreet. Probably something to do with the wine. But I wasn’t about to stop her just to spare her blushes.

‘How well did you know Zoe?’ I asked.

‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I knew of her, of course. Everyone round here knows of Zoe Chadwick. Silly little bitch. Given us nothing but grief even in death.’

‘It was hardly her fault she was murdered,’ I said.

‘No? Whose fault is it, then? She should have stayed in London.’

‘What were you doing on Sunday afternoon and evening?’

‘What’s this,’ Maria said with a hollow laugh. ‘The bloody Spanish Inquisition? You can’t think I had anything to do with it?’

Did I?

‘In that case you won’t mind telling me where you were.’

‘The police have already asked me that.’

‘So what did you tell them?’

‘The truth,’ she said. ‘I woke on Sunday morning with a migraine so I took some strong painkillers and stayed in bed all day with a cold compress on my head.’

I unkindly wondered if it had been a hangover rather than a migraine.

‘Didn’t you eat anything?’ I asked.

‘I can’t really remember. I know I was zonked out for most of the day. Those painkillers are pretty strong, especially when you wash them down with Chardonnay.’ She laughed and raised her glass towards me.

‘Didn’t Oliver come and see you at all?’

‘He brought me up some tomato soup for lunch.’

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘Anything else what?’ she asked belligerently. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I just wondered if Oliver had spent any of the afternoon with you.’

‘Not that I can remember,’ she said. ‘I think he was catching up with EastEnders in the snug. He often does on Sunday afternoons. I could hear it coming up through the floorboards. He probably thought that, with me in bed, it was a good opportunity. I hate the damn programme. There are enough arguments and misery in my life already without having to watch more of it in a bloody soap opera.’

I looked at her. How sad, I thought.

‘How about during the evening?’ I asked.

‘More painkillers,’ she said. ‘First thing I knew Oliver was banging on the door shouting at me to get up because the stables were on fire.’

‘Was Oliver at home all evening?’

‘How the hell would I know? I was out of it.’ She smiled at me. ‘But you can’t possibly think that he’d burn down his own stables? Not with Prince of bloody Troy in there?’

‘Didn’t you like the horse?’ I asked, surprised at her outburst.

‘I had nothing against the horse, per se. I just wished I’d received half as much love and attention as it did. Bloody mollycoddled, it was.’

‘But the future of Ryan’s training business may have depended on it,’ I said.

‘Yeah, well, the horse has gone now so we’ll never know, will we?’

She didn’t sound especially sorry.

‘Did Oliver ever mention Zoe?’

‘Not recently, that’s for sure,’ Maria said. ‘A long time ago he told me that he no longer considered Zoe his daughter. He said she was not a part of his life and never would be again.’

‘Then why was he giving her five hundred pounds every month?’