Dick Francis's Front Runner

6

Faye didn’t look very well when she opened the front door of her house overlooking Richmond Green.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked with concern.

‘You know that I have good days and not-so-good days?’ she said. ‘Well, this is one of the not-so-good, that’s all. It’s all to do with the drugs I have to take. They make me feel sick.’

‘I thought you were off the chemo.’

‘I am. These are drugs designed to boost my red-blood count. The chemo does more than kill the cancer — apparently it’s not too good for my bone marrow either.’ She sighed. ‘Such is life... and death. Anyway, enough about me. What have you been up to?’

‘Same old stuff,’ I said to her. ‘Nothing very interesting.’

Nothing very interesting except someone trying to kill me.

We went through into her kitchen.

‘Tea?’ she asked. ‘Or coffee? Or would you prefer wine?’

I looked at my watch. It was twenty past four.

‘It’s never too early on a Sunday,’ Faye said, smiling. ‘I’d like some.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘So would I.’

She took a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge and poured two generous glasses.

‘I need this,’ she said. ‘Somehow, alcohol helps reduce the feeling of nausea I get from the pills. I often have a brandy if it gets too bad.’

‘Why don’t you take the pills with a glass of brandy?’ I said. ‘Then you probably won’t feel sick in the first place.’

She laughed. ‘I can hardly have a glass of brandy to take pills when I wake up in the morning.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘It must be better than feeling ill all day.’

She laughed again. ‘Perhaps I’ll try it, though I’m not sure what Q would say.’

‘Tell him it’s medicinal.’

‘What’s medicinal?’ Quentin asked, coming into the kitchen.

‘Having brandy for breakfast,’ I said.

‘British soldiers in the First World War were given tots of rum for breakfast,’ Quentin said. ‘And most of the officers had cases of brandy sent out to them from home. Or whisky. Masses of it. It helped them cope.’

‘So were they all drunk when they went over the top?’

‘Absolutely,’ Quentin said. ‘A double ration of rum was issued to the men before the off. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone.’

‘There you are,’ I said to Faye with a smile. ‘So you can have brandy for breakfast.’

‘To help me cope?’ She burst into tears.

It was a reminder of how close to the edge Faye’s life had become, always living in dread of a return of the cancer. Treatment was ever more effective and the statistics were steadily improving but, deep down, even those patients given the final all-clear from the disease lived with the fear that it would get them in the end. That it would only be a matter of time. This year, next year, sometime — but not never.

I waited a second for Quentin to move but, when he didn’t, I went over and put my arm round Faye’s shoulders.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. ‘Occasionally it all gets to be too much.’

‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ I said. ‘It’s us who should be sorry for making light of something so serious.’

Faye took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine now,’ she said. ‘Now, what would you like for tea?’

The three of us ate hot buttered crumpets, washed down not with Earl Grey but with Sauvignon Blanc.

I felt the whole situation was unreal. Just six hours ago I had been fighting for my life and yet here I was genteelly eating crumpets in Richmond upon Thames.

‘Quentin,’ I said between mouthfuls, ‘what’s the maximum prison sentence for attempted murder?’

‘Life,’ he said confidently. ‘Attempted murder, by definition, indicates a conscious resolve to take someone’s life. In fact, tariffs can sometimes be longer for attempted murder than for murder itself. Some murder convictions occur when there was no desire to cause a death, for example when an accused only intends to injure, but the victim then dies. Intent to actually kill is crucial and is a requirement for an attempted murder conviction.’ Quentin never answered a question in five words if fifty could be used. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No real reason,’ I said. ‘It’s just something to do with a case I’m investigating for the BHA.’

He lost interest. Racing was not high on Quentin’s agenda, as he regularly told me. He considered all sport to be the recreation of the proletariat and not worthy of someone of his standing.

‘And how was your game of golf this morning?’ I asked pointedly.

‘Humph!’ he snorted. ‘What a waste of time.’

‘Did you win?’ I asked, enjoying his discomfort.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The Lord Chief Justice won, but only because I let him. I had no idea he was so bad at golf. I thought I was the world’s worst player, but even I had to four-putt from eight feet on the last green to ensure he won by a stroke.’

I laughed.

‘It’s not that funny,’ he said. ‘I was trying to get myself noticed.’

I actually thought that Quentin Calderfield, QC, couldn’t fail to get himself noticed. He was one of the most successful and flamboyant Queen’s Counsels around. QC, QC was how he was known by everyone at the Bar, but he was also renowned for some of his conservative opinions.

But what he really meant by getting himself noticed was that he was trying to get himself promoted to be a judge and, in his assessment, the promotion was well overdue. It seemed never to occur to him that some of his more old-fashioned views on modern life, in particular to do with sexuality and race, may have been a factor in his current omission from the bench.

‘And were you noticed?’ I asked.

Quentin clearly didn’t like the tone of my voice, which, in truth, was slightly mocking. ‘We will have to wait and see,’ he said, tight-lipped. He then excused himself and went back to his study.

‘I wish you two got on better,’ Faye said after he’d gone.

‘We get on all right,’ I said, although it wasn’t true. ‘And I’ll definitely call him if I ever need a lawyer.’

‘Do you think that you will need a lawyer?’ she asked.

‘Probably, one day.’

She pulled a face at me. She didn’t like my line of work.

‘Do you want to stay for supper?’

I knew that she was only asking because she felt sorry for me. Lydia’s departure had been almost as big a disappointment for Faye as it had been for me. She desperately wanted me to be happy and saw it as her job to get me married off before she succumbed to the cancer. In her eyes, Lydia would have made the perfect sister-in-law.

‘Thanks, but no thanks. I’d better get back.’

I wondered why I’d said that. My flat would be cold and lonely. I’d become used to domestic life as a couple and I missed the homely comforts of having a mate, especially one who enjoyed cooking as much as Lydia had.

‘You’re welcome to stay,’ Faye said. ‘We’re only having pasta and pesto. I can easily make enough for three.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Pasta and pesto would be lovely.’

Dave Swinton’s apparent suicide was the only topic of conversation at the BHA offices on Monday morning and there was genuine sadness amongst the staff.

Dave had been popular with everyone in racing, not least because of his famed good looks together with the humility that had accompanied his stunning ability on a horse. The previous December there had been a huge surge of support from the racing community to vote for him in the Sports Personality of the Year contest and it had carried him to an easy victory. It was something that had given the whole of racing a boost.

There was not only sorrow for his loss but also bewilderment that he could kill himself, and especially in such a horrendous fashion.

‘But why would he do such a thing?’ said one of the young female receptionists, who was in tears. ‘He surely had everything to live for.’

I decided not to enlighten her about Dave’s attempt to kill me. Not so much out of any sense of not wishing to speak ill of the dead or to add to her pain, but more because I doubted that she would believe me. In fact, I reckoned that no one would believe me, so I kept quiet.

While the collective grief caused others to spill out into corridors and stairwells to share their anguish, I shut myself away in my office and spent the morning studying the videos of all the races Dave Swinton had ridden in, but not won, during the preceding week.

I thought back to what he had said to me in his Jaguar at Newbury races: I had twenty-eight rides and ten winners last week, so I lost eighteen races.

Finding the eighteen races was easy using the BHA database and I watched the RaceTech video recordings of each of them.

Dave had finished second in six, third in four, and had been unplaced in the other eight, falling in two of them, once at the last fence when clear in front.

I watched all the available footage including the side and head-on angles but there was nothing I could see that indicated that a horse had been prevented from winning on purpose. But that was not to say it hadn’t happened. Dave Swinton was a genius in the saddle and, I was sure that if he had wanted to lose a race deliberately, he could have done so in such a manner that no one would have easily been able to spot.

I studied the starting prices to see if there was a particularly unusual result but that line of inquiry wasn’t especially fruitful, not least because, such was his following amongst the punters, all Dave Swinton’s mounts tended to start at much shorter prices than their past form might warrant. Indeed, of the eighteen horses on which Dave had failed to win last week, fourteen had started as favourite or joint-favourite.

I delved further into the archives, looking at the recordings of other races to compare how his recent mounts had run previously.

After four hours glued to the screen, I came up with three possibles, although I had my doubts about each of them.

The first was at Haydock Park the previous Saturday. He’d ridden a horse called Garrick Party into third place in a three-mile chase. There was little or no doubt that, going to and after the last fence, Dave had tried his best to achieve the best possible result, but the damage had already been done by then.

Garrick Party was a well-known front runner who had won a couple of races before by setting off in front and trying to hold on to a lead all the way to the line. Timeform described him as being ‘one-paced with no finishing turn-of-foot’.

As far as I could tell from the database, Dave had ridden him in three of his previous runs, including one of the victories. On all those occasions he had set off in front and established a lead, in one case such a lead that, at the halfway point in the race, he had been a whole fence ahead of the other horses.

Why then, at Haydock, had Dave opted to ride a waiting race, holding him up in the pack in a slowly run affair?

The racecourse stewards on the day had called in both trainer and jockey to explain the running of the horse. According to the notes in the file, the stewards had accepted the explanation offered that the horse had been held back due to a concern that the heavy going would have burnt him out too quickly in such a long race if he had been allowed to run more freely in the early stages.

But the horse had run exactly in that manner, and won, in a three-mile chase at Fontwell Park in September when the ground had been almost waterlogged and the going was described as ‘bottomless’. And Dave Swinton had ridden it that day too.

The second possible race had been at Ludlow, two days after the one at Haydock. Dave had ridden a horse called Chiltern Line and he had become badly boxed-in on the final turn and had been forced to drop back to get round other horses. He had subsequently failed to make up the lost ground, finishing second by half a length.

The only thing that made it of note was that Dave Swinton was such a good tactician in a race that getting himself badly boxed-in was something almost unheard of. If it had been almost anyone else in the saddle, I wouldn’t have looked at it twice.

Had Dave allowed himself to get boxed-in on purpose? But, if he’d been determined not to win the race, how could he have been sure that such a boxing-in would have occurred? Perhaps that was the genius of the man.

The third race was the one in which he had fallen at the last fence, even though part of me couldn’t understand how anyone, stuntmen aside, would cause a horse to fall on purpose, especially when the fall in question had been such a bad one.

Dave had been well in front on a horse called Newton Creek in a novice chase, also at Ludlow, when he had asked the horse to shorten and put in an extra stride when coming towards the last fence. The horse had run only once before over fences and was still very green in his jumping. The message for an extra stride got through to him far too late, which then left him perilously close to the fence. Newton Creek did his best to rise but caught the obstacle square across his shoulders, causing Dave Swinton to be ejected forwards from the saddle. The horse, meanwhile, completed a spectacular half somersault over the fence before landing heavily on its back.

Dave had been extremely fortunate not to have had half a ton of horse landing right on top of him.

The only reason I was slightly suspicious was that, in my opinion, there had been no need to put in the extra stride in the first place. Again, it was the proven consummate skill of the jockey that made me think that Dave had either not been concentrating properly or he had caused the horse to fall on purpose.

But falls of that nature were almost always nasty, so why anyone would cause one intentionally was beyond me. Maybe it had been out of desperation not to win. Such was the severity of the fall that, according to the stewards’ official report of the race, Newton Creek had lain winded and motionless on the ground for nearly five minutes. The spectators in the stands must have feared the worst before the horse finally rose to its feet and walked away.

I leaned back in my chair and surveyed the notes I had made.

Was one of these races really fixed? The more I studied them, the less certain I became that anything untoward had occurred at all. But then, Dave Swinton’s skill on a horse was such that it was never going to be easy to spot an intentional indiscretion on his part.

Detective Sergeant Jagger from Thames Valley Police called me at home at seven o’clock on Monday evening but he wasn’t able to give me much of an update. In fact, he was only calling to tell me that the police investigation into my attempted murder had been placed on hold pending their inquiries into the vehicle fire at Otmoor.

‘The human remains in the car have now been removed and taken to the morgue at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford for a post-mortem examination. There is still no word as yet on an official identification. There will have to be DNA tests.’

‘I’m amazed that any DNA would survive that inferno.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘I know of an instance a couple of years ago where residual DNA testing was carried out on the ashes in an urn of a fully cremated body. To test for paternity, can you believe?’

‘Did it work?’

‘Yes it did. Seems they were able to extract enough material from the dental pulp of a tooth that hadn’t completely disintegrated.’

‘So you’re confident they will identify the person in the burning Mercedes?’

‘I’m certain of it. DNA has already been collected from Mr Swinton’s parents for comparison.’

‘So you are assuming, then, that it was Dave Swinton in the car?’

There was a significant pause from the other end of the line.

‘Are you suggesting that it wasn’t?’

‘I’m keeping an open mind on the matter,’ I said. ‘I feel that Dave Swinton was the most unlikely candidate for suicide I’ve ever come across. So I just wondered if it might have been someone else.’

‘That’s mere speculation.’

‘Maybe, but Dave Swinton had tried to kill me. Why did he do that? Was it to stop me telling anyone about him deliberately losing a race? But why would he bother if he’d already planned to kill himself?’

‘He could have been protecting his reputation for posterity.’

‘Don’t be stupid. His reputation would be in tatters anyway. Better to be known as a race-fixer than a murderer.’

‘He might have decided to kill himself only after he had left you to die in the sauna, by which time it was too late to go back.’

‘Now who’s speculating?’

‘But who else could it be?’ he asked.

‘Don’t you have any other missing persons on your files?’

‘Several. But none who have the slightest connection with David Swinton’s Mercedes. And, if it wasn’t him in the car, then where is he?’

It was a good question.