Dick Francis's Front Runner

23

I was following Faye’s instructions and taking things easy at home, my feet up on the sofa, watching highlights of cricket from Australia, when Detective Inspector Galvin telephoned around lunchtime on Thursday.

‘I think we may have Darryl Lawrence’s accomplice in custody,’ he said. ‘I’m not certain, but his height and shape fit the man in the hospital CCTV images.’

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘But can you hold him on such flimsy evidence?’

‘Currently, he’s under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Darryl Lawrence. CCTV footage at Victoria shows him entering the Tube station with Lawrence but leaving it again on his own after the incident.’

‘Does it actually show him pushing Lawrence under the train?’

‘Sadly not, but we do have a couple of eyewitnesses. The transport police have now handed the case over to us. We’ve arranged an old-fashioned line-up for this afternoon. Would you come and see if you recognize him from the attack at your flat?’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Charing Cross police station. Come to the main entrance on Agar Street at three o’clock.’

‘I’ll be there.’

Charing Cross police station is built in a triangular shape with a fully enclosed courtyard in the middle. Eight men were standing in a line across the centre of the courtyard, each of them holding a card with a number on it, from 1 to 8.

‘Now, take your time, sir,’ said the uniformed police sergeant who’d accompanied me outside. ‘Walk down the full line and have a good look at each man. If you recognize anyone, please go back and touch him on the shoulder or you may come and tell me his number.’

I started walking slowly along the line of men, looking at their faces.

All of them were of roughly the same height and build, and each was dressed in everyday clothes and an anorak. None of them was conveniently wearing red baseball boots.

But I didn’t need that clue. I easily recognized the man who had held me in my hallway as Darryl Lawrence had repeatedly thrust his knife into my torso. Even though I’d been unable to provide DI Galvin with a description at the time, and I’d said that I couldn’t remember what he looked like, I knew him instantly. He was holding card number 3.

I went on down the whole line, looking closely at each of them in turn. I was quite certain that I had never seen the other seven men before.

I went back to number 3 and touched him on the shoulder.

‘Are you sure?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Positive,’ I said. ‘This is the man who held me in my flat while I was being stabbed.’

The man had previously been standing up very straight and looking into the distance well above my head. Now he moved his eyes down to meet mine. They were cold, like ice, with no emotion in them whatsoever. Eyes are sometimes described as the windows to the soul. If so, this man had no soul at all. The windows were black and uncaring.

I wondered what was going on in the brain behind them.

He said nothing as he was led away by two burly constables back into the building.

DI Galvin, who had been watching proceedings from the far side of the courtyard, now walked over to join me.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You picked out the right one.’

‘There was absolutely no doubt,’ I said. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Gary Banks. He has previous for violence.’

‘How about the other two witnesses?’ I asked. ‘Did they pick him out?’

‘One did, one didn’t.’

‘Is that enough?’ I asked.

‘Probably not. But identification evidence on its own is never enough.’

‘Does that mean he’ll walk?’ I asked with concern. I didn’t fancy Mr Banks coming after me again. ‘I’d feel a lot safer knowing he’s locked up.’

‘That will be up to the CPS and the magistrates. We do have a little bit more on him — the hospital CCTV images and the fact that he was arrested wearing red baseball boots with white soles and laces might help.’

‘I looked for those,’ I said with a smile.

‘That would have been a bit too obvious. We needed you to pick him out without those to help you.’ He smiled back at me. ‘And we will continue to interview him, of course. So far he’s replied No comment to every question he’s been asked, but we’ll see. We have a few alternatives to try.’

‘Thumbscrews?’ I asked.

‘Only verbal ones, sadly.’

On Friday morning I caught a train to Ascot races for the first day of the last major meeting before Christmas. It had been almost two weeks since I’d been on a racecourse. That had been at Sandown on the day before I’d been stabbed.

That was also where I had first met Henrietta Shawcross, the day of the giggles over lunch in Derrick and Gay Smith’s box.

Thirteen days ago.

In some respects, it felt like much longer, in others, like only yesterday.

I hadn’t seen Henri since she’d been to Richmond on Monday evening, and I’d spoken to her only on the telephone for a few minutes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she’d said when I complained I was being neglected. ‘It’s my busiest time of the year. Everyone is having Christmas parties and needing staff. I’ve worked solidly every day this week, and every evening except Monday. All I want to do afterwards is go home and go straight to sleep.’

Sleep, I’d thought.

All I wanted to do was ‘sleep’ with her.

‘We will spend lots of time together next week,’ she’d said.

‘Shouldn’t I be booking my flights?’ I’d asked.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve done all that. We leave on Wednesday.’

‘Where to?’ I’d asked.

‘The Cayman Islands.’

It all seemed surreal as I struggled up the hill to the racecourse on a typical December day of dampness and wind. The Cayman Islands seemed as far away as the moon.

I had to stop at least twice to rest.

I was beginning to wish that I had heeded my sister’s advice to take things more easily, and to watch the racing on the television.

But there was nothing like actually being where the action was happening. On television one saw only what the producer decided was relevant, whereas I preferred to look elsewhere, perhaps to see what someone didn’t want me to.

I went through the racecourse entrance turnstiles using my official BHA pass and made a direct line for the coffee bar on the concourse level of the imposing grandstand. It wasn’t so much a drink that I needed but a place to sit down. The walk up from the station had tired me out more than I’d thought it would.

‘Now, you must be careful,’ the nurse had said at the hospital clinic the previous morning, when I’d gone to have the stitches out. ‘We don’t want you back in here again, now do we?’

No, I’d thought. We don’t.

As I was sitting, drinking my coffee, my phone rang. It was DI Galvin.

‘Banks has been charged with manslaughter,’ he said.

‘Why not murder?’ I asked.

‘He says he didn’t push Lawrence under the train on purpose. It was an accident.’

‘And you believe him?’ I asked, with sarcasm in my voice.

‘Of course not. But we were in danger of getting nothing and having to let him go as our time was almost up. Everything was circumstantial. The fact that the second witness couldn’t pick him out rather negated the one that could. He wasn’t saying anything at all, so we offered him a deal and he took it.’

‘I didn’t think plea bargaining was allowed in the UK.’

‘It wasn’t like one of those US deals. There was no mention of a specific sentence or anything. We simply gave Banks the opportunity to agree with us that Lawrence’s death was manslaughter, not murder. His solicitor must have thought we had a stronger case than we actually did, because he advised Banks to agree. He has since been chatting away telling us all about how, in the crush on the platform, he only slightly nudged his dear old friend Darryl, who then stumbled accidently, falling under the train.

‘It’s all a load of old hogwash. Banks knows it, the solicitor knows it, and I know it. But it does mean that Banks has confirmed his association with Lawrence and that was crucial for your case. What the solicitor doesn’t know is that we are now going to arrest Banks for the attempted murder of you, twice over. We’ll see what he has to say about that.’

‘Ask him if he knows a man called Leslie Morris,’ I said.

‘Why?’

I told him briefly about my inquiries into the fixed races and how Morris had placed the suspect bets at Sandown.

‘The attempts on my life may have been to stop me investigating.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try it.’

‘Will Banks be remanded in custody?’ I asked. That was far more important to me than anything else at the moment.

‘Sure to be.’

‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Please keep me informed.’

‘Will do.’

He hung up.

With Lawrence dead and Banks in jail, I suddenly felt a lot safer.

Part of the reason I’d come to Ascot was because I thought I’d detected a pattern in the races that had been lost on purpose.

Dave Swinton had ridden Garrick Party at Haydock Park in a lesser race on the day of the Grade 1 Betfair Chase. The same had been true for Bill McKenzie’s ride on Pool Table, on the same card as the Paddy Power Gold Cup. True, Wisden Wonder’s race at Sandown had been on a Friday, not a Saturday, but it had been the first day of the Tingle Creek Festival and a sizable crowd had attended, plus there had been a large number of bookmakers in the betting ring.

Someone trying to bet seventeen thousand pounds in cash would have stuck out like a sore thumb at, say, Newton Abbot on a Wednesday, when the seagulls would have outnumbered the genuine punters, and there would be only a half-dozen or so bookies to bet with. But amongst a big crowd, and with some serious money about, no one would raise an eyebrow.

Were there more races than just the three I had spotted? Were more jockeys involved than just Dave Swinton and Bill McKenzie?

I had spent most of Thursday afternoon researching race results and watching video recordings. I was looking for favourites that hadn’t won on days when large crowds would have been present.

Somewhat surprisingly, it was quite common for even very short-priced favourites not to win. Looking back for the past four months, I found seventeen horses that had started at odds shorter than two-to-one that had failed to win a race on the same card as the week’s main feature.

My list included two at Newbury on the same day that Dave Swinton had won the Hennessy Gold Cup on Integrated. One of those, Global Expedition, had started the Grade 2, Long Distance Hurdle at the incredibly short price of seven-to-four-on and had then finished a bad third of the six runners, well beaten by seven and eighteen lengths.

It was the first time Global Expedition had not won in his seven starts over hurdles and I remember the result being a considerable shock. However, I had been at Newbury that day, had watched the race live, and I hadn’t noticed anything questionable about the horse’s running at the time.

I studied the video of the race over and over again but, however many times I watched it, and from whichever camera position, I couldn’t establish that the horse had been deliberately prevented from winning by its rider. The jockey appeared to have made every effort to stay in touch with the leader, but to no avail.

I concluded that there was nothing suspicious. Global Expedition simply hadn’t performed on that day in the same way as he had done in the past.

Perhaps the horse had been feeling a touch unwell or was merely not in the mood to race. Racehorses were not machines. If they always ran exactly as their ratings suggested, racing would quickly die, as everyone would pick the same horse to back.

It was the healthy dose of unpredictability that made racing so exciting.

But there had been another heavily backed loser that had run on Hennessy day, in the first race, a two-and-a-quarter-mile novice handicap chase.

Electrostatic had started as the six-to-four favourite but, not only did he fail to win the race, he failed to jump even two of the thirteen fences. He’d been pulled up immediately after the first with, as the jockey claimed, a saddle that had slipped to the side.

The racecourse stewards had questioned the trainer about the care that had been taken when saddling the horse. The trainer had blamed the starter’s assistant, who had supposedly tightened the horse’s girth down at the start. He, in turn, was adamant that the girth had been both tight and secure.

The jockey, Willy Mitchell, had told the inquiry that he’d had no alternative but to pull up Electrostatic. He would have fallen off if the saddle had slipped any farther, perhaps causing some of the other runners to be brought down.

No action had been taken by the stewards, other than to warn both the trainer and the starter’s assistant to be more vigilant of the problem in future, and to commend the jockey for his quick reactions in preventing a serious incident.

I watched the video of the race, many times, and from every available angle.

There was no doubt that, in some of the TV images, the saddle was shown having slipped to the left, but they were taken long after the horse had stopped. It was impossible to tell if the slipping had occurred prior to the horse being pulled up. The footage seemed to show that the saddle had been in the right position as the horse had taken off at the first, although I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t moved on landing, as that wasn’t shown.

Was it just my suspicious mind, or had the jockey moved the saddle on purpose, only after he’d pulled up at the most conveniently distant point from both the start and the grandstand? There was no real way of knowing without confronting Willy Mitchell, and hoping for some sort of reaction.

And hence the real reason I had come to Ascot was that Electrostatic was declared to run in the two-mile novice chase, the second race of the day, and Willy Mitchell was again down to ride. All the morning papers had suggested that the horse would start once more as a short-priced favourite, his failure on his last outing having being put down to just bad luck rather than any deficiency on the animal’s part.

Electrostatic lived up to his past form and his high-voltage name, winning the second race at a canter.

I’d wandered around the betting ring beforehand but, as far as I could tell, no one was placing large bets on all the horses other than the favourite. There was certainly no blue fedora visible. No sign at all of Mr Leslie Morris.

Perhaps the summons to the disciplinary panel and my unwelcome visit to his house had frightened him away. Paul Maldini would be pleased.

Willy Mitchell was all smiles as he unsaddled the horse in the space reserved for the winner.

‘No slipped saddle this time, then?’ I said to him as he walked past me into the weighing room to weigh in.

He looked at me and the smile disappeared from his face faster than a bargain TV on Black Friday. Willy Mitchell knew exactly who I was. He’d also been part of my investigation into the misuse of jockeys’ mobile telephones.

‘No,’ he managed to say. ‘Not this time.’

‘Come out and see me,’ I said. ‘After the presentation.’

There was a slight touch of panic in his eyes. Not that it was necessarily an indication of wrongdoing. It was the sort of panic that sweeps over everyone, myself included, when a police car comes up behind you when you’re driving. It was a reaction I was quite used to generating in the innocent, as well as in the guilty.

Willy came out wearing a thick-padded grey anorak over his racing silks.

‘I have a ride in the fifth,’ he said. ‘I can’t be long.’ He looked out at the parade ring where the horses for the third race were circulating. ‘Is there some place more private? I don’t want to be seen talking to you. Especially not by my gaffer.’

His ‘gaffer’ was the trainer for whom he rode, the trainer of Electrostatic.

‘He doesn’t have a runner in this one,’ I said.

‘Maybe not, but he’ll be around here somewhere.’

We went into the stewards’ room.

In the media, Willy Mitchell was often referred to as one of the up-and-coming young jockeys. Sadly for him, he had been up-and-coming for some time now, ever since he was seventeen, and he was in some danger of being relabelled as come-and-going. But he was still only twenty-one. Being the retained jockey for a horse as good as Electrostatic might just be his ticket to the big time.

‘Tell me about the slipped saddle at Newbury,’ I said to him.

He was clearly very uncomfortable talking to me.

‘What about it?’ he asked with only a very slight tremor in his voice.

‘How did it happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘The girth obviously wasn’t tight enough. My saddle started sliding left as I was jumping the first fence. I tried standing on the right stirrup but it wouldn’t go back.’

I didn’t say anything, I just looked at him.

In spite of the coolness of the room, he started sweating. ‘It’s true, I tell you.’

I didn’t believe him. But I still said nothing. I let him do his own digging.

‘Why would I do it on purpose?’ he said. ‘You’ve seen what a great little novice old Electro is. I reckon he’ll win the big novice chase on the Thursday of the Festival at Cheltenham. Why would I jeopardize my ride on him for that?’

Indeed, why would he? Was I wrong?

‘I’ve studied the video of the race at Newbury,’ I said. ‘Together with the footage that was not broadcast.’

He sweated some more. He wasn’t to know that it showed nothing suspicious.

‘Do you know a man called Leslie Morris?’ I asked, trying to pile on the pressure.

He thought for a moment.

‘Never heard of him,’ Willy said confidently, without so much as a flicker around the eyes. If he did know Morris he was a much better liar than I took him for.

Instead of adding to the pressure, I’d just released it.

‘Don’t you have a young family?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer. I’d done my research.

‘Twins,’ he said, nodding.

He looked like a child himself, hardly old enough to have kids of his own.

‘What about them?’ he asked.

‘Must be expensive,’ I said.

I also knew that Willy didn’t have that many rides, certainly not on horses as good as Electrostatic. In fact, he’d had only fifteen rides in the preceding month, including the one at Newbury. He was riding two here this afternoon but that was a rarity. Usually it was a maximum of one ride per day, if he was lucky. That didn’t leave much to live on, not after travelling expenses and valet fees.

‘You can check my bank balance if you like,’ he said more confidently. ‘I’ve not received anything I shouldn’t have.’ He laughed. ‘Chance would be a fine thing.’

I thought back to what Dave Swinton had said to me during our journey to Newbury races on the day before he died.

‘Willy,’ I said slowly, ‘are you being blackmailed?’

He stared at me for what felt like an age, without moving so much as a single muscle in his face, not even a blink.

Finally, he turned away. ‘Can I go now?’ he said.

‘Is it to do with tax?’ I asked.

He turned back to face me.

‘Tax?’ He laughed. ‘I hardly earn enough to pay any tax.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’

He pushed past me to the door.

He had as good as admitted to me with that stare that he was being blackmailed. I suppose I couldn’t really blame him for not telling me why. If he was prepared to lose a race when riding the best horse he’d ever been on, with all the possible consequences for his career, then it must be something that he was very determined to keep a secret.

I wouldn’t have told me either.

In a strange way, I was pleased when Willy Mitchell won the fifth race as well. I don’t suppose that he’d had many ‘doubles’ in his career and even the sight of me standing by the unsaddling enclosure couldn’t wipe the smile from his face entirely.

I left him alone to enjoy his success.

But I’d be back.