Dick Francis's Front Runner

13

I never did get back to Derrick and Gay Smith’s box for afternoon tea, as I spent the next three hours at Kingston Hospital with Bill McKenzie.

The X-ray confirmed that he had, indeed, broken his collarbone and I silently berated myself for not having fully believed it. Perhaps I would have been slightly more sympathetic if I had realized he wasn’t just trying to find another way of avoiding having to talk to me.

In fact, the break was pretty severe with the ends of the bones overlapping, so surgery was needed to realign them, and to have a plate and screws fitted to keep it that way.

I sat next to him as he lay on a trolley in a curtained-off emergency cubicle while we waited for the on-call orthopaedic surgeon to be roused from his Saturday-afternoon slumbers.

‘If you are not being blackmailed,’ I said, ‘why did you do it?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he said for the umpteenth time. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I still didn’t believe him.

‘The BHA will demand to see your phone records, you know. And those of Leslie Morris. If there’s been any contact between the two of you or the slightest bit of evidence that you’ve been lying to me, well... you can kiss goodbye to your career as a jockey. How old are you? Twenty-six?’ He nodded. ‘You’d be banned for so many years that you’d be far too old to come back.’ I paused. ‘You have a wife, don’t you?’

He nodded. ‘And a kid. Plus another one on the way.’

‘What will they do if you lose your livelihood?’

He looked miserable. ‘Why would I tell you anything even if I was up to no good? You’d ban me anyway. Do you think I’m stupid or something?’

‘Actually, yes, I do. Otherwise you would never have got mixed up with race fixing in the first place.’

He sighed deeply, which was clearly not a good move as the pain in his shoulder made him wince. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Try me,’ I said.

He started to cry.

While it was not the response I had been expecting, it was a change from the continual denials he had been spouting since we arrived.

Bill McKenzie was a competent and experienced jockey who was, perhaps, never going to reach the ‘superstar’ level, but he was doing all right. He was generally more at home on the small Midland courses where he rode frequently for a number of different trainers, although he had recently had rides at some of the bigger tracks as well. He was having his best ever season and currently stood tenth on the jockeys list with forty or so winners from about three hundred rides.

As yet, he had no big-race wins under his belt but he should still be making a pretty good living from his riding, especially if one added in a share of prize money, plus regular schooling fees.

If I was right about the fix, Leslie Morris had pocketed about seven thousand pounds from Bill McKenzie falling off Wisden Wonder.

I wondered how much would be the jockey’s share.

Half, at best, or maybe a third? Probably even less.

Would he jeopardize his whole career for a couple of thousand pounds?

Did I really think he was that stupid?

My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon in blue theatre scrubs and a dishcloth hat, and he was carrying a green folder.

‘Mr McKenzie,’ he said, studying the folder, ‘I see that you’re a jockey.’

He’d hardly had to read that in the paperwork, I thought. The patient was still wearing his britches and the cut-off racing silks were draped over the end of the couch.

‘Is this injury as a result of a racing fall?’

‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘At Sandown.’

The surgeon made a note in the folder.

‘Have you broken your collarbone before?’

‘Not on this side,’ he said, pointing to his left shoulder. ‘But I’ve done the other one three times.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said the surgeon. ‘Why don’t you do something safer for a living?’

‘Because I’m no good at anything else,’ Bill said, and then he looked straight at me. ‘Racing is my life.’

I raised my eyebrows in response. He knew exactly what I was thinking — he was thinking it too.

The surgeon took a thick marker pen from his pocket and drew two big black arrows on Bill’s left shoulder, one on his front and the other on his back.

He smiled. ‘We don’t want to open you up on the wrong side, now do we?’

Next the surgeon produced a consent form from his folder.

‘How long will I be off?’ Bill asked him as he signed.

‘Bones generally take six to eight weeks to heal.’

‘Six to eight weeks! No way. I need to be back sooner than that. I’ve got a ride in the King George on Boxing Day.’

‘The plate might help. It will provide the support needed. When I plate a broken hip, I try to get the patient up standing on it the following day.’

‘So how long?’ Bill asked again.

‘A couple of weeks, maybe.’

‘A couple of days more like,’ said Bill with a grin.

‘See, you are crazy,’ the surgeon said again, smiling back at him. ‘Completely crazy.’

I went home shortly after, when they came to collect him for theatre. I suppose I could have waited for the operation to be over but it would probably have taken at least an hour and then he’d be woozy for a good few hours after that. Interviewing an injured jockey in an ambulance on the way to hospital had been one thing, but I’d be pushing my luck to be asking him more questions while he lay in the post-anaesthesia recovery room.

I let myself into my flat and sidled past the unopened cardboard boxes into my kitchen-cum-sitting room.

It was cold, the mercury having plummeted after the sun went down under clear skies. I flicked on the electric fire but kept my coat firmly in place on my back with my hands deep in its pockets.

It was eight o’clock on Saturday evening. Just three weeks before Christmas, when any sensible person was out at a party, or having dinner with friends.

But not me.

I thought about Henrietta Shawcross.

I hadn’t had an opportunity to go back to the Smiths’ box to say goodbye to her, or to anyone else for that matter. I hadn’t even been at the racecourse for the main event of the afternoon, the sixth race of the day, by which time I was well on my way to the hospital in the ambulance.

I opened my laptop computer and logged on to the Racing Post website to check the result.

Ebury Tiger had won the Tingle Creek Chase and there were reports of emotional scenes at the trophy presentation when the winning jockey had dedicated the victory to the memory of his dear friend, Dave Swinton, who, he said, should rightly have been standing there in his place.

Dave Swinton, alive or dead, was still everyone’s knight in shining armour. I would make myself no friends whatsoever if I tarnished that image with talk of him purposely losing races or committing other misdeeds, like the small matter of trying to kill me.

I also searched the internet for any mentions of a Henrietta Shawcross.

There were masses of them, and lots of photos too, many in the Bystander section on the Tatler magazine website.

If the images were anything to go by, Miss Shawcross was a socialite of some renown, being photographed at many of the most sought-after events and parties. But there was little actual information about her life in the magazine, just her looking beautiful for the camera lens while cuddling up to a variety of actors, singers and other A-list headliners at glamorous gatherings.

Next, I carried out searches for Sir Richard Reynard, her uncle, and for Martin Reynard, her first cousin.

Both were in shipping. To be more precise, Sir Richard was the sixty-nine-year-old chairman of Reynard Shipping Limited, a company set up by his grandfather, and Martin was forty-two and also a director. And they were loaded. The Sunday Times UK Rich List put the Reynard family at number 147 with a combined wealth in excess of half a billion pounds.

Reynard Shipping was almost a household name and everyone must have seen the trucks carrying containers with REYNARD SHIPPING painted on the side in big white letters. No wonder Derrick had thought I should know who Sir Richard Reynard was.

He would certainly be able to afford to buy a potential Derby winner. In fact, he’d be able to buy a whole stableful of them.

I wondered if Henrietta Shawcross was included in the calculation of the family wealth. Probably.

I sighed. Either way, she was out of my league, that was for sure. That’s if she would even speak to me again after my dreadful faux pas at lunch.

I dug a little deeper on the internet.

For some reason I couldn’t find any recent accounts for Reynard Shipping Limited on the Companies House website. It appeared from their records that the company had ceased to exist some three years previously although it was quite clearly still trading — their shipping containers were everywhere.

But there was some more detail about Henri.

According to some past newspaper articles, Henrietta Shawcross was an only child. Furthermore, she was an orphan, her parents having died together in a helicopter crash when she’d been a teenager. Her mother’s not inconsiderable fortune, including a twenty-five per cent stake in Reynard Shipping, had passed directly to her, to be held in trust by her uncle until her thirtieth birthday, which, I noted, was coming up in February.

No wonder Gay Smith had said that Henri didn’t need a sugar daddy.

I went to my freezer and selected a Chicken Madras from a stack of frozen ready meals, and popped it in the microwave.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’d be diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I knew I was pretty miserable. I didn’t take antidepressant drugs or anything, and I didn’t feel particularly suicidal — indeed, I had fought with all my strength to escape death in Dave Swinton’s sauna. There had been no question then of me giving up and lying down to die, when it would have been very easy to have done so.

It was just that I considered my life at present as meaningless.

I woke up each morning and went to work in my office at BHA headquarters, or at a racecourse somewhere, or I visited some training stables or an equine swimming pool, or one of a myriad of other racing venues, yet, wherever I had spent the day, I would return to the solitude and loneliness of my flat.

I sat in an armchair to eat my dinner and wondered what Henri Shawcross was doing. I may not have been a regular gambler but I’d bet an arm and a leg that she wasn’t eating a microwaved curry off her lap while watching Saturday-night drivel on the television.

I’d just finished my food when my landline telephone rang.

My heart leaped. Could it be her? Asking me out?

No, it couldn’t. I hadn’t given her my phone number.

‘Hello?’ I said, answering the call.

No one at the other end spoke, even though I could hear some noises in the background.

‘Hello?’ I said again. ‘Is anyone there?’

After two or three seconds, the line went dead.

How odd, I thought. I dialled 1471 to get the last number that had called and wrote it down on the back of an envelope that contained my gas bill. It wasn’t a number I recognized. I tried calling back but all I heard was a disembodied voice stating that the number did not receive incoming calls.

No sooner had I put the phone down than it rang again.

I picked it up. ‘Hello?’ I said slowly.

‘Jeff, is that you?’ said a voice.

‘Hello, Sis,’ I said. ‘Did you call me just now?’

‘No,’ Faye said, sounding concerned. ‘Should I have done?’

‘No. It’s all right. I had a call but no one was there. That’s all.’

‘Happens to me all the time,’ said Faye. ‘I blame the phone companies. They seem to spend so much of their time trying to sell us cheaper and cheaper broadband that they neglect the phone service.’

But the phone service had been working fine — I had been able to hear the background noise. It was the fact that the caller said nothing that had been strange.

‘Are you feeling any better than last Sunday?’ I asked her.

‘Much better, thank you,’ she said. ‘Brandy for breakfast has helped a lot.’ She laughed and I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.

‘Are you doing anything tomorrow lunchtime?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

Nothing other than moping around my flat feeling sorry for myself.

‘Good,’ Faye said. ‘Come to lunch. We have some guests and, to be honest, I could do with the help.’

‘What time?’

‘As early as you can. We’ve got twelve people coming.’

‘Who are they?’ I asked. I didn’t altogether trust Faye not to set me up to meet a dozen prospective girlfriends.

‘For some reason Q has decided that it is his turn to host the annual Christmas lunch for the QCs in his chambers, together with their wives. Someone does it every year. It would have been nice if he’d given me a bit more warning. It seems he asked them all ages ago but only sprung it on me last Tuesday.’

Suddenly being alone in my flat with my TV and a microwaved ready meal seemed quite attractive compared with spending the day with Quentin’s legal cronies. But I didn’t want to upset Faye.

‘That would be lovely,’ I lied. ‘Do you want me to bring anything?’

‘Just yourself. We’re having a buffet and I’ve got everything I need. I could just do with some help setting it all out and with the drinks when everyone arrives. Q is so hopeless when it comes to anything practical.’

I wondered if I was only being asked because Faye understood how lonely I had become, especially at weekends, and rather than actually needing any real help, she was simply trying to include me in something that involved other people, even if they were Quentin’s work colleagues.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Is eleven o’clock early enough?’

‘Eleven would be great. Thanks so much. I’ll see you in the morning.’

She hung up.

Was the highlight of my day to be acting as a servant to my brother-in-law and a bunch of his barrister friends? I suppose it might make a pleasant change from having someone try to kill me, as had happened the previous Sunday.

I wish.