Dick Francis's Gamble

1

I was standing right next to Herb Kovak when he was murdered. Executed would have been a better word. Shot three times from close range, twice in the heart and once in the face, he was almost certainly dead before he hit the ground, and definitely before the gunman had turned away and disappeared into the Grand National race-day crowd.

The shooting had happened so fast that neither Herb nor I, nor anyone else for that matter, would have had a chance to prevent it. In fact, I hadn’t realized what was actually going on until it was over, and Herb was already dead at my feet. I wondered if Herb himself had had the time to comprehend that his life was in danger before the bullets tore into his body to end it.

Probably not, and I found that strangely comforting.

I had liked Herb.

But someone else clearly hadn’t.

The murder of Herb Kovak changed everyone’s day, not just his.

The police took over the situation with their usual insensitive efficiency, canceling one of the world’s major sporting events with just half an hour’s notice and requiring the more than sixty thousand frustrated spectators to wait patiently in line for several hours to give their names and addresses.

“But you must have seen his face!”

I was sitting at a table opposite an exasperated police detective inspector in one of the restaurants that had been cleared of its usual clientele and set up as an emergency-incident room.

“I’ve already told you,” I said. “I wasn’t looking at the man’s face.”

I thought back once again to those few fatal seconds and all I could remember clearly was the gun.

“So it was a man?” the inspector asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“Was he black or white?”

“The gun was black,” I said. “With a silencer.”

It didn’t sound very helpful. Even I could tell that.

“Mr… er.” The detective consulted the notebook on the table. “Foxton. Is there nothing else you can tell us about the murderer?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “It all happened so quickly.”

He changed his line of questioning. “So how well did you know Mr. Kovak?”

“Well enough,” I said. “We work together. Have done for the past five years or so. I’d say we are work friends.” I paused. “At least we were.”

It was difficult to believe that he was dead.

“What line of work?”

“Financial services,” I said. “We’re independent financial advisers.”

I could almost see the detective’s eyes glaze over with boredom.

“It may not be as exciting as riding in the Grand National,” I said, “but it’s not that bad.”

He looked up at my face. “And have you ridden in the Grand National?” His voice was full of sarcasm, and he was smiling.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” I said. “Twice.”

The smile faded. “Oh,” he said.

Oh, indeed, I thought. “And I won it the second time.”

It was unlike me to talk much about what I now felt was a previous life, and bragging about it was even more uncharacteristic. I silently rebuked myself for my indulgence, but I was getting a little irritated by the policeman’s attitude not only towards me but also towards my dead colleague.

He looked down again at his notes.

“Foxton,” he said reading. He looked up. “Not Foxy Foxton?”

“Yes,” I said, although I had long been trying to give up the Foxy nickname, preferring my real name of Nicholas, which I felt was more suited to a serious life in the City.

“Well, well,” said the policeman. “I won a few quid on you.”

I smiled. He’d probably lost a few quid too, but I wasn’t going to say so.

“Not riding today, then?”

“No,” I said. “Not for a long time.”

Had it really been eight years, I thought, since I had last ridden in a race? In some ways it felt like only yesterday, but in others it was a lifetime away.

The policeman wrote another line in his notebook.

“So now you’re a financial adviser?”

“Yes.”

“Bit of a comedown, wouldn’t you say?”

I thought about replying that I believed it was better than being a policeman but decided, in the end, that silence was probably the best policy. Anyway, I tended to agree with him. My whole life had been a bit of a comedown since those heady days of hurling myself over Aintree fences with half a ton of horseflesh between my legs.

“Who do you advise?” he asked.

“Anyone who will pay me,” I said, rather flippantly.

“And Mr. Kovak?”

“Him too,” I said. “We both work for a firm of independent financial advisers in the City.”

“Here in Liverpool?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “The City of London.”

“Which firm?”

“Lyall and Black,” I said. “Our offices are in Lombard Street.”

He wrote it down.

“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want Mr. Kovak dead?”

It was the question I had been asking myself over and over again for the past two hours.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Everyone liked Herb. He was always smiling and happy. He was the life and soul of any party.”

“How long did you say you have known him?” asked the detective.

“Five years. We joined the firm at the same time.”

“I understand he was an American citizen.”

“Yes,” I said. “He came from Louisville, in Kentucky. He used to go back to the States a couple of times a year.”

Everything was written down in the inspector’s notebook.

“Was he married?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“None that I knew of,” I said.

“Were you and he in a gay relationship?” the policeman asked in a deadpan tone of voice, his eyes still on his notes.

“No,” I said, equally deadpan.

“I’ll find out, you know,” he said, looking up.

“There’s nothing to find out,” I said. “I may have worked with Mr. Kovak, but I live with my girlfriend.”

“Where?”

“Finchley,” I said. “North London.”

I gave him my full address, and he wrote it down.

“Was Mr. Kovak involved in a gay relationship with anyone else?”

“What makes you think he was gay?” I asked.

“No wife. No girlfriend. What else should I think?”

“I have no reason to believe Herb was gay. In fact, I know he wasn’t.”

“How do you know?” The policeman leaned towards me purposefully.

I thought back to those rare occasions when Herb and I had spent any time together, sometimes in hotels where we would be staying overnight at financial conferences. He had never made any sort of pass at me, and he had occasionally chatted up the local girls and then boasted about his conquests over breakfast. It was true that I’d never actually seen him in a sexual situation with a woman, but I hadn’t seen him with a man either.

“I just know,” I said weakly.

“Hmm,” said the inspector, clearly not believing me and making another note in his book.

But did I really know? And did it matter?

“What difference would it make anyway?” I asked.

“Lots of murders have a sexual motive,” said the detective. “Until we know differently, we have to explore every avenue.”

I t was nearly dark before I was finally allowed to leave the racetrack, and it had also started raining. The courtesy shuttle service to the distant park-and-ride parking lot had long since ceased running, and I was cold, wet and thoroughly fed up by the time I reached my Mercedes. But I sat for some while in the car before setting off, once more going over and over in my mind the events of the day.

I had picked Herb up from his flat at Seymour Way in Hendon soon after eight in the morning and we had set off to Liverpool in great good humor. It was to be Herb’s first trip to the Grand National, and he was uncharacteristically excited by the prospect.

He had grown up in the shadow of the iconic twin spires of Churchill Downs racetrack, the venue of the Kentucky Derby and spiritual home of all American Thoroughbred racing, but he had always claimed that gambling on the horses had ruined his childhood.

I had asked him to come to the races with me quite a few times before but he had always declined, claiming that the memories were still too painful. However, there had been no sign of that today as we had motored north on the motorway chatting amicably about our work, our lives, and our hopes and fears for the future.

Little did we know then how short Herb’s future was going to be.

He and I had always got on fairly well over the past five years but mostly on a strictly colleague-to-colleague level. Today had been the first day of a promising deeper friendship. It had also been the last.

I sat alone in my car and grieved for my newfound, but so quickly lost, friend. But still I had no idea why anyone would want him dead.

My journey back to Finchley seemed to be never-ending. There was an accident on the M6 north of Birmingham with a five-mile backup. It said so on the radio, sandwiched between endless news bulletins about the murder of Herb and the cancellation of the Grand National. Not that they mentioned Herb by name, of course. He was just referred to as “a man.” I assumed the police would withhold his identity until his next of kin had been informed. But who, I wondered, were his next of kin? And how would the authorities find them? Thankfully, I thought, that wasn’t my problem.

I came upon the back of the traffic congestion just south of Stoke, the mass of red brake lights ahead of me shining brightly in the darkness.

I have to admit that I am usually an impatient driver. I suppose it is a case of “once a racer, always a racer.” It makes little difference to me if my steed has four legs or four wheels, if I see a gap I’d tend to take it. It’s the way I’d ridden during my all-too-short four years as a jockey and it had served me well.

But, that evening, I didn’t have the energy to get irritated by the queues of near-stationary cars. Instead I sat quietly in the outside lane as we crawled past an upturned motor home that had spread its load of human and domestic clutter across half the carriageway. One shouldn’t look at others’ misfortune, but, of course, we all did, and thanked our lucky stars it wasn’t us lying there on the cold tarmac receiving medical assistance.

I stopped at one of the motorway service areas and called home.

Claudia, my girlfriend, answered at the second ring.

“Hello, it’s me,” I said. “I’m on my way home, but I’ll be a couple of hours more at least.”

“Good day?” she asked.

“Have you seen the news?”

“No. Why?”

I knew she wouldn’t have. Claudia was an artist and she had planned to spend the day painting in what she called her studio but what was actually the guest bedroom of the house we shared. Once she closed the door, turned up the music on her iPod headphones and set to work on a canvas, it would take an earthquake or a nuclear strike to penetrate her bubble. I had been quite surprised that she had answered the phone.

“The National was canceled,” I said.

“Canceled?”

“Well, there’s talk of them holding the race on Monday, but it was canceled for today.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Someone was murdered.”

“How inconvenient of them.” There was laughter in her voice.

“It was Herb,” I said.

“What was Herb?” she asked. The laughter had gone.

“It was Herb who was murdered.”

“Oh my God!” she screamed. “How?”

“Watch the news.”

“But Nick,” she said, concerned. “I mean-are you OK?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

Next I tried to call my boss-Herb’s boss-to warn him of the coming disruption to business, as I was sure there would be, but there was no answer. I decided against leaving a message. Somehow voice mail didn’t seem the right medium for bad news.

I set off southwards again and spent the remainder of the journey as I had the first part, thinking about Herb and wondering why anyone should want to kill him. But there were so many questions and so few answers.

How did the murderer know Herb would be at Aintree today?

Had we been followed from London and stalked around the racetrack?

Had Herb really been the target or had it been a case of mistaken identity?

And why would anyone commit murder with sixty thousand potential witnesses in close attendance when surely it would be safer to lure their victim alone into some dark, quiet alley?

I’d said as much to the detective inspector, but he hadn’t thought it particularly unusual. “Sometimes it is easier for an assailant to get away if there is a big crowd to hide in,” he’d said. “Also it can pander to their ego to do it in a public place with witnesses.”

“But it must make it more likely that he would be recognized, or at least allow you to get a good description.”

“You’d be surprised,” he’d said. “More witnesses often mean more confusion. They all see things differently, and we end up with a description of a black white man with straight curly hair, four arms and two heads. And everyone tends to look at the bleeding victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. We often get a great description of the corpse but nothing about the murderer.”

“But how about CCTV?” I’d asked him.

“It appears that the particular spot behind the grandstands where Mr. Kovak was shot is not in view of any of the racetrack security cameras and was also not visible from any of the cameras brought in by the television people to cover the event.”

The assassin had known what he was doing in that respect. It had clearly been a professional hit.

But why?

Every line of thought came back to the same question. Why would anyone want to kill Herb Kovak? I knew that some of our clients could get pretty cross when an investment that had been recommended to them went down in value rather than up, but to the point of murder? Surely not.

People like Herb and me didn’t live in a world of contract killers and hit men. We simply existed in an environment of figures and computers, profits and returns, interest rates and bond yields, not of guns and bullets and violent death.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that, professional as the hit may have been, the killer must have shot the wrong man.

I was hungry and weary by the time I pulled the Mercedes into the parking area in front of my house in Lichfield Grove, Finchley. It was ten minutes to midnight and just sixteen hours since I had left here this morning. It felt longer-about a week longer.

Claudia had waited up, and she came out to the car.

“I watched the television news,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

Neither could I. It all seemed so unreal.

“I was standing right next to him,” I said. “One moment he was alive and laughing about which horse we should bet on and the next second he was dead.”

“Awful.” She stroked my arm. “Do they know who did it?”

“Not that they told me,” I said. “What did it say on the news?”

“Not much, really,” Claudia said. “Just a couple of so-called experts disagreeing with each other about whether it was as a result of terrorism or organized crime.”

“It was an assassination,” I said firmly. “Plain and simple.”

“But who on earth would want to assassinate Herb Kovak?” Claudia said. “I only met him twice, but he seemed such a gentle soul.”

“I agree,” I said, “and the more I think about it, the more certain I become that it must have been a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps that’s also why the police haven’t yet revealed who was shot. They don’t want to let the killer know he hit the wrong man.”

I walked around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. It had been a warm and sunny spring day when we had arrived at Aintree, and we had decided to leave our overcoats in the car. I looked down at them both lying there, Herb’s dark blue one on top of my own brown.

“Oh God,” I said out loud, suddenly becoming quite emotional again. “What shall I do with that?”

“Leave it there,” said Claudia, slamming the trunk shut. She took me by the arm. “Come on, Nick. Time to put you to bed.”

“I’d rather have a stiff drink or two.”

“OK,” she said with a smile. “A couple of stiff drinks first, then bed.”

I didn’t feel much better in the morning, but that might have had something to do with the few more than a couple of stiff drinks I’d consumed before finally going to bed around two o’clock.

I had never been much of a drinker, not least as a need to keep my riding weight down when I’d been a jockey. I had left school with three top grades at A level and, much to the dismay of my parents and teachers, I had forgone the offered place at the LSE, the London School of Economics, for a life in the saddle. So, aged eighteen, when many young men going up to university were learning how to use their newfound freedom to pour large amounts of alcohol down their throats, I’d been pounding the streets of Lambourn in a sweatsuit or sitting alone in a sauna trying to shed an extra pound or two.

However, the previous evening, the shock of the day’s events had begun to show. So I had dug out the half bottle of single malt whisky left over from Christmas and polished it off before climbing the stairs to bed. But, of course, the spirit didn’t take away the demons in my head, and I had spent much of the night troubled and awake, unable to remove the mental image of Herb growing cold on a marble slab in some Liverpool mortuary.

The weather on Sunday morning was as miserable as I was, with a string of heavy April showers blowing in on a bracing northerly breeze.

At about ten, during a break in the rain, I went out for a Sunday paper, nipping up to the newsagent’s shop on Regent’s Park Road.

“A very good morning to you, Mr. Foxton,” said the shop owner from behind the counter.

“Morning, Mr. Patel,” I said in reply. “But I’m not sure what’s good about it.”

Mr. Patel smiled at me and said nothing. We may have lived in the same place but we did so with different cultures.

All the front pages on the shelves had the same story: DEATH AT THE RACES read one headline, MURDER AT THE NATIONAL read another, GUN HORROR AT AINTREE ran a third.

I glanced quickly at them all. None gave the name of the victim, and, to me, there appeared to be far greater coverage about the aggravation and inconvenience suffered by the crowd rather than any commiseration or condolence towards poor Herb. I suppose some conjecture was to be expected as the reporters had so little real factual information from which to make a story, but I was surprised at their apparent lack of any sympathy for the target of the assassin.

One paper even went so far as to suggest that the murder was likely to have been drug related, and then went on to imply that everyone else was probably better off with the victim dead.

I bought a copy of the Sunday Times for no better reason than its headline-POLICE HUNT RACE-DAY ASSASSIN-was the least sensational, and the story beneath it didn’t immediately assume that Herb had probably deserved to be killed.

“Thank you, sir,” said Mr. Patel, giving me my change.

I tucked the heavy newspaper under my arm and retraced my tracks home.

Lichfield Grove was a fairly typical London suburban street of mostly 1930s-built duplexes with bay windows and small front gardens.

I had lived here now for the past eight years yet I hardly knew my neighbors other than to wave at occasionally if we happened, by coincidence, to arrive or leave our homes at the same time. In fact, I knew Mr. Patel, the newsagent, better than those I lived right next to. I was aware that the couple on one side were called Jane and Phil (or was it John?), but I had no idea of their surname or what either of them did for a living.

As I walked back from the newsagent’s, I thought how strange it was that members of the human race could live here so cheek by jowl with their fellow beings without any meaningful reaction between them. But at least it made a change from the rural village life I had experienced before, where everyone took pains to know everyone else’s business and where nothing could be kept a secret for long.

I wondered whether I should make more of an effort to be more community minded. I suppose it would depend on how long I intended to stay.

Many of my racing friends had thought that Finchley was a strange choice, but I had needed a clean break from my former life. A clean break-that was a joke. It had been a clean break that had forced me to stop race riding just as I was beginning to make my mark in the sport. The clean break in question was to my second cervical vertebra, the axis, on which the atlas vertebra above it rotated to turn the head. In short, I had broken my neck.

I suppose I should be thankful that the break hadn’t killed or paralyzed me, either of which could have been a highly likely outcome. The fact that I was now walking down Lichfield Grove at all was due to the prompt and gentle care of the paramedics on duty at Cheltenham racetrack that fateful day. They had taken great pains to immobilize my neck and spine before I was lifted from the turf.

It had been a silly fall, and I had to admit to a degree of carelessness on my part.

The last race on Wednesday of the Cheltenham Steeplechasing Festival was what was known as the Bumper-a National Hunt Flat race. No jumps, no hurdles, just two miles of undulating rich green grass between start and finish. It is not the greatest spectacle the Festival has to offer, and many of the large crowd had already made their way to the parking lots, or the bar.

But the Bumper is very competitive, and the jockeys take it very seriously. Not often do the jump boys and girls get to emulate Willie Shoemaker or Frankie Dettori. Judging the pace with no jumps to break up the rhythm is an art, and knowing where and when to make your final challenge to the finish can make all the difference to the outcome.

That particular Wednesday, just over eight years ago, I had been riding a horse that the Racing Post had rather kindly called an outsider. The horse had just one speed-moderate-and absolutely no turn of foot to take it past others up the final climb to victory. My only chance was to go off fairly fast from the start and to try to run the “finish” out of the others.

The plan worked quite well, up to a point.

At about halfway, my mount and I were some fifteen lengths in front of the nearest challenger and still going reasonably well as we swung left-handed and down the hill. But the sound of the pursuers was getting ever louder in my ears, and six or seven of them swept past us like Ferraris overtaking a steamroller as we turned into the straight.

The race was lost, and it was no great surprise to me, or to the few still watching from the grandstands.

Perhaps the horse beneath sensed a subtle change in me-a change from expectation and excitement to resignation and disappointment. Or perhaps the horse was no longer concentrating on the task in hand in the same way that his jockey’s mind was wandering to the following day’s races and his rides to come.

Whatever the real cause, one moment he was galloping along serenely, albeit one-paced, and the next he had stumbled and gone down as if shot.

I had seen the television coverage. I’d had no chance.

The fall had catapulted me over the horse’s neck and headfirst into the ground. I had woken up two days later in the neurosurgery and spinal-injuries department of Frenchay Hospital in Bristol with a humdinger of a headache and a metal contraption called a halo brace surrounding and literally screwed into my skull.

Three uncomfortable months later, with the metal halo finally removed, I set about regaining my fitness and place in the saddle only for my hopes to be dashed by the horse-racing authority’s medical board, who decided that I was permanently unfit to return to racing. “Too risky,” they had said. “Another fall on your head could prove fatal.” I had argued that I was prepared to accept the risk and pointed out that a fall on the head could prove fatal even if you hadn’t previously broken your neck.

I had tried at length to explain to them that all jockeys risked their lives every time they climbed aboard half a ton of horse and galloped at thirty miles per hour over five-foot fences. Jockeys were well used to taking risks and accepted the consequences without blaming the authorities. But it was all to no avail. “Sorry,” they said. “Our decision is final.”

So that had been that.

From being the new kid on the block, the youngest winning jockey of the Grand National since Bruce Hobbs in 1938 and widely tipped to be the next champion, I was suddenly a twentyone-year-old ex-jockey with nothing to fall back on.

“You will need an education for when your riding days are over,” my father had once said in a last futile attempt to make me take up my place at university instead of going racing when I was eighteen.

“Then I’ll get my education when I need it,” I’d replied.

And so I had, applying again and being accepted once more by the LSE to read for a combined degree in government and economics.

And hence I had come to live in Finchley, putting down a deposit on the house from the earnings of my last successful season in the saddle.

Finchley Central Underground Station, around the corner from Lichfield Grove, was just ten stops up the Northern Line from the LSE.

But it hadn’t been an easy change.

I had become used to the adrenaline-fueled excitement of riding horses at speed over obstacles when winning was the thing. Winning, winning, winning-nothing else mattered. Everything I did was with winning in mind. I loved it. I lived it. It was like a drug, and I was addicted.

When it was snatched away from me, I suffered badly from withdrawal symptoms. An alcoholic with the d.t.’s had nothing on me.

In those first few months I tried hard to put on a brave face, busying myself with buying the house and getting ready for my studies, cursing my luck and telling everyone that I was fine; but inside I was sick, shaking and near suicidal.

Another shower was about to fall out of the darkening sky as I hurried the last few yards along the road to my house with the newspaper.

In keeping with many of my neighbors, I had arranged early on to concrete over my small overgrown front lawn, converting it into an off-road parking space that was now occupied by my aging Mercedes SLK sports car. I had excitedly bought the car brand-new with my percentage from the Grand National win. That had been ten years and more than a hundred and eighty thousand miles ago, and, in truth, I was well past needing a change.

I opened the trunk and looked down at the two coats lying there. The previous evening the sight of Herb’s blue cashmere had almost been too much for me to bear, but now it appeared as just an overcoat without a home.

I picked them both up, slammed the trunk shut and hurried inside as the first large drops of rain began to wet my hair.

I hung my coat on one of the hooks behind the front door and wondered what I should do with Herb’s. He wouldn’t be needing it now but I supposed it belonged to his family and would go back to them eventually.

In the meantime, I hung it up next to mine in my hallway.

I am not quite sure why I went through the pockets. Maybe I thought that he might have left his flat key there as he had been wearing the coat when he had locked his door the previous morning.

There was no key but there was a piece of paper deep in the left-hand pocket. It had been roughly folded over and screwed up. I flattened it out on the wall.

I stood there in disbelief reading the stark message written on the paper in black ballpoint capital letters:

YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE WHAT YOU WERE

TOLD. YOU MAY SAY YOU REGRET IT, BUT

YOU WONT BE REGRETTING IT FOR LONG.

Did that mean Herb had been the real target? Had the assassin actually shot the right man? And if so, why?