Even Money

10

Ididn’t get to Newbury for the evening racing. Instead, I went straight home to Kenilworth.

I was angry.

In fact, I was absolutely livid.

How could my father have come to Ascot, just one week previously, and been so normal and so natural, even so agreeable, when he held the knowledge that he had murdered my mother together with her unborn child?

It was despicable, and I hated him for it.

Why had he come back from Australia and turned my life upside down?

Had he come because of the glass-grain RFIDs and the money? Surely it hadn’t been just to see me?

I lay awake for ages, tossing and turning, trying to sort it all out, but all I came up with were more and more questions, and no answers.

Whose money was it in his rucksack?

Was the money connected to the RFIDs and the black-box programmer?

Was he killed because he hadn’t handed over the money or was it the black box and the glass grains that were so important?

And what exactly were they for?

Every punter has a story of how they think a crooked trainer or owner has run the wrong horse in a race. How a “ringer” has been brought in to win when the expected horse would have had no chance. Unexpected winners have always made some people suspicious that foul play has been afoot, and, in the distant past, before racing was a well-organized industry, rumors of ringers abounded, and there must have been some truth to them.

But running a ringer has always been more difficult than most people believe, especially from a large, well-established training stable, and not only because horse identification has become more sophisticated with the introduction of the RFID chips. Sure, a horse will be scanned by an official vet the first time it runs and randomly thereafter, and this, together with the detailed horse passport, makes it difficult to substitute one horse for another. But the real reason is that too many people would have to be “in the know.”

There is an old Spanish proverb that runs: A secret between two is God’s secret, between three it is all men’s.

To run a horse as a ringer requires the inside knowledge of a good deal more than three men. The horse’s groom, the horsevan driver, the traveling head lad and the jockey just for a start, in addition to the trainer and the owner.

It would be impossible to keep it a secret from any of them because they would simply recognize that the horse was not the right one. People who work every day with horses see them as individuals with different features and characteristics rather than just as horses. It has often been said that every great trainer needs to know his horses’ characters better than he knows those of his own family. Lester Piggott was said to be able to recognize any horse he had ridden even when it was walking away from him in a rainstorm.

Just as everyone would realize pretty quickly, if not immediately, that a celebrity look-alike was not the real thing, so too would racing folk easily spot a ringer, unless it was far removed from its normal environment. And it was too much to expect that a secret conspiracy of even a handful of people would hold for very long.

So what real good were the rewritable identification RFIDs?

I finally went to sleep, still trying to work out the conundrum.

I was not sure what the noise was that woke me, but one moment I’d been fast asleep, the next I was fully conscious in the dark and knowing that something wasn’t quite right.

I listened intently, lying perfectly still on my back and keeping my breathing very quiet and shallow.

As usual in the summer, I had left open one of my bedroom windows for ventilation. But I could hear nothing out of the ordinary from outside the house. Nothing except for the breeze, which rustled the leaves of the beech tree by the road, and the occasional hum of a distant car on Abbey Hill.

I had begun to think I must have been wrong when I plainly heard the sound again. It was muffled slightly by the closed bedroom door, but I knew immediately what it was. Someone was downstairs, and he was opening the kitchen cabinets. The cabinet doors were held shut by little magnetic catches. The sound I had heard was the noise made when one of the catches was opened.

I lay there wondering what I should do.

Detective Sergeant Murray had warned me that witnesses to murder were an endangered species, and now I began to wish I had taken his warning a bit more seriously.

Was the person downstairs intent on doing me harm or was he happy to go on exploring while leaving me to sleep?

The problem was that I didn’t really imagine my intruder was searching through my kitchen cabinets for something with which to make himself a cup of tea or coffee. He would be after my father’s rucksack and its hidden contents, and they were not downstairs in the kitchen but deep in the recesses of my wardrobe, up here with me in my bedroom. It would only be a matter of time before he would have to come upstairs, and then he surely would know that I must be awake.

I thought about making lots of noise, stamping my way down the stairs and demanding to know who was in my house, in the hope that he might be frightened away. But then I remembered the two stab wounds that had killed my father. Was my visitor the shifty-eyed man from the Ascot parking lot, and did he have his twelve-centimeter-long blade with him ready to turn my guts into mincemeat as well?

Ever so quietly, I stretched out my hand towards the telephone that sat on my bedside table, intending to call the police. I decided it was better to be still alive, even if it did mean I would have the difficult task of explaining why there was thirty thousand pounds’ worth of someone else’s cash in my wardrobe. Much better, I thought, than drowning in my own blood.

But there was no dial tone when I lifted the receiver. My guest downstairs must have seen to that.

And, as always, I had left my mobile in the car.

What, I wondered, was plan C?

There was nothing to be gained from simply lying there in bed and waiting for him to come up and plunge his knife into my body. I was sure he wouldn’t just go away when he failed to find what he had come for downstairs. Clearly, he would rather have found the booty and departed silently, leaving me blissfully asleep, or else he would have come up and dealt with me first. But I was under no illusion that he would give up before he had searched everywhere, whether or not I was wide awake or fast asleep, or very dead.

It wasn’t that dying particularly frightened me. But I didn’t really want to go yet, not when Sophie was making such good progress. And not now that I knew I had sisters to meet in Australia. And particularly not before I had discovered what this was all about. I had always felt rather sorry for soldiers who died in wars, not only because they were dead but because they would never know who won or if their sacrifice had been worth it.

Maybe I just wanted to die in my own time, not at someone else’s wish and whim.

I looked around in the dim luminosity that filtered through the curtains from the ambient streetlight glow outside. Sadly, my bedroom wasn’t very well equipped with any form of handy weapon.

I gently levered myself out of bed and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts. I might not be able to prevent myself being killed, but I was determined that I would not be found in a state of total undress.

Perhaps I should just throw the money and the other things down the stairs and let my visitor take them away. Anything to stop him coming up to get them himself, with murder in mind.

I silently crossed the room to the wardrobe, but before I had a chance to open it I heard the third tread of the staircase creak. I had been meaning to fix that step for years but couldn’t be bothered to lift all the carpet. I had become so obsessed with the creak that I missed it out, always taking two steps together at that point. The wear of the carpet there-or, rather, the lack of it-was even becoming noticeable against the others.

My visitor hadn’t known about it, and in the darkness he wouldn’t have spotted the underused carpet. But I knew that the step always creaked as weight was applied and also creaked again as weight was removed.

I stood absolutely stock-still beside my wardrobe, listening. I was holding my breath, and I could begin to hear the blood rushing in my ears. There had definitely been only one creak. The intruder had stopped on the stairs in midclimb and was, no doubt, listening for any movement from me as hard as I was from him.

I had to breathe.

I decided to snort through my nose like a pig. I snored loudly, and then exhaled in a long rasping wheeze. I snored once more, and, quite clearly, I heard the third step creak again as my nocturnal visitor removed his weight from it. I assumed he was still on the way up, not going back down. I snored a third time, then grunted as if turning over in bed.

The wardrobe was behind my bedroom door.

I flattened myself against the wall and stared at the door handle, which was a brass lever with a small scroll on the end. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that I was sure it must be audible out on the landing.

The handle began to depress, and my heart almost went into palpitations. Slowly the door opened towards me.

Attack had to be the best form of defense.

When the door was about halfway open, I threw myself against it with all the force I could muster, attempting to slam it shut again. But the door didn’t fully close because my visitor’s right arm was preventing it. I could clearly see his gloved hand and his wrist protruding into my bedroom. There was a gratifying groan from its owner each time I pushed against the door, repeatedly throwing my weight against the wood.

“You’ve broken my bloody arm!” he shouted.

Good, I thought. Pity I hadn’t torn it off completely.

“What do you want?” I shouted back through the door, still refusing to ease up the pressure to release his arm.

“Sod off,” he shouted back. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”

Not if I had any say in the matter, he wasn’t.

I put my right foot down on the floor to stop the door from opening, leaned back and then threw my whole weight against it once more.

This time, he didn’t just groan, he screamed.

So I repeated it. He screamed again.

“What do you want?” I shouted again.

“I want to break your fucking neck,” he said back to me through the door, sounding very close indeed.

I pressed again, the door squeezing against his damaged arm.

“And what exactly are you looking for?” I said.

“The microcoder,” he said

“What’s that?”

“It’s a microcoder,” he repeated unhelpfully.

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“A flat black box with buttons on it,” he said. “Give me the microcoder and I’ll go away.”

“I don’t think you’re in a position to make demands,” I said, pushing hard on the door. “What does this microcoder do?”

Instead of answering, he threw his weight against his side of the door to try to open it, but my foot was still preventing that. However, the wood bent sufficiently enough for him to extract his arm. The door slammed shut.

My advantage, it seemed, was over, but I still couldn’t hear him going down the stairs.

“What does the microcoder do?” I repeated, shouting through the door.

“Never you mind,” he said, still sounding very close. “Just give it back.”

“I haven’t got it,” I said.

“I think you have.”

“Is it yours?” I asked.

“Your father stole it,” he said. “And I want it back.”

“Was that why you murdered him?” I asked.

“I didn’t murder anyone,” he said. “But I could murder you, you bastard. I’m in agony here.”

“Serves you right,” I said. “You shouldn’t come snooping round other people’s houses uninvited.”

“It doesn’t give you the right to break my arm,” he whined.

“I think you’ll find it does,” I said. “Now, get out of my house and stay out.”

“Not without the microcoder,” he said.

“I told you, I haven’t got it.”

“Yes, you bloody have,” he said with a degree of certainty. “You must have it. Where else would it be?”

We didn’t seem to be making any progress.

I hooked my left foot around Sophie’s dressing-table chair and pulled it towards me. I then placed the back of the chair tight under the door handle. I should have done that at first, I thought. There was absolutely no way I was going to open my bedroom door while he remained in my house, so there was equally no chance I was going to hand over what he had called the microcoder.

Stalemate ensued for the next fifteen minutes or so.

I was wondering what he was up to when he suddenly banged on the door, making me jump.

“Are you still awake in there?” he asked.

“What do you think?” I replied.

“Yeah, well, sorry and all that,” he said quite casually. “I’ll be off now, then.” He said it as if he’d just been around for a drink or something and it was time to go home.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Never you mind,” he said again. “But I didn’t kill your father.”

I heard him go down the stairs, and the third step, my new friend, creaked twice as he descended. Then I heard the front door being opened. Then it was slammed shut.

I went across to my bedroom window and looked down. The man had indeed left my house, and I watched the top of his head as he walked across the car-parking area and onto the road. He appeared to be cradling his right arm in his left, and, at one point, he turned briefly to look up at me, as if intentionally showing me his face. I recognized him immediately. It wasn’t the man with the close-set eyes who had stabbed my father in the Ascot parking lot-it was the elusive fourth stranger from his inquest.

I stood looking out my bedroom window for some time in case he came back. I neither saw nor heard any car drive away, and I was still very wary as I finally removed the chair from under the door handle and peeped out onto the landing.

I didn’t yet know how he’d made it into my house in the first place. I didn’t really relish going downstairs only to find him there once more, having simply gone around the block and back in through one of the rear windows that faced the garden.

The house was quiet, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

I stood at the top of the stairs straining to hear any sound from below, maybe a breath or a shuffle of feet. But there was nothing.

I crept silently down, avoiding step three, listening carefully and ready to run back up to my bedroom bolt-hole at the slightest noise. There was no one there. He really had gone away, and he’d not come back again. I turned on all the lights and went around the house to close the stable door now that the horse had bolted.

In truth, I’d made it far too easy for him. As well as the fanlight in my bedroom being open, so had the one in the living room, and he had simply put his arm through it, opened the big window beneath and climbed in. He’d left some muddy footprints on the fawn carpet under the window. No doubt, I should now call the police, and they could take photos of the prints and try to match them to a specific shoe size and manufacturer.

Instead, I used my handheld vacuum cleaner to clear up the mess.

The phone handset in the kitchen was off the hook. I picked it up and listened. Nothing. I replaced it on the cradle, then lifted it again and pressed REDIAL. The LED readout just showed 0. A female computer-generated voice stated that “The number you have called has not been recognized, please check and try again,” and that phrase was repeated about six times, and then it shut off completely, leaving the line dead.

Apart from the mud on the living-room floor, my nocturnal visitor, the fourth stranger, had been meticulously tidy in his search. The kitchen cabinets were all open but hardly disturbed, as were the sideboard cupboards in the dining room. He had been trying to be quiet.

However, far from answering any of the questions surrounding my father, my intruder had simply created new ones, and, in particular, was he working together with Shifty-eyes or did they represent different interests?

After all, he had only asked for the microcoder. There had been no mention of the considerable cache of money that had been hidden with it.

But if the fourth stranger knew where I lived, as he clearly did, then surely so could anyone else. I had, perhaps carelessly, freely given out my home address at the inquest, where the fourth stranger would have heard it. It now also would be in the official record. It wasn’t much of a leap to realize that the information could be obtained by any member of the public who really wanted it. Perhaps I should be on the lookout for another unwelcome nighttime guest, one with shifty eyes, in search of bundles of blue-plastic-wrapped cash.