Field of 13

Dead on Red

Although first published here, Dead on Red is set in the past (in 1986 and 1987, to be exact) partly because the regulations regarding the carriage of hand-guns from mainland Europe to England were tightened as part of the 1988 firearms act.

Emil Jacques Guirlande, Frenchman, feared flying to the point of phobia. Even advertising posters featuring aeroplanes, and especially the roar of stationary jet engines at airports, raised his heartbeat to discomfort and brought a fine mist of chill sweat to his hairline. Consequently he travelled from his Paris home by wheels and waves on his world-wide entrepreneurial missions, the more leisurely journeys in fact suiting his cautious nature better. He liked to approach his work thoughtfully, every contingency envisaged. Panicky reactions to unforeseen hitches were, in his orderly consideration, the stupidity of amateurs.

Emil Jacques Guirlande was a murderer by trade, a killer uncaptured and unsuspected, a quiet-mannered man who avoided attention, but who had by the age of thirty-seven successfully assassinated sixteen targets comprising seven businessmen, eight wives and one child.

He was, of course, expensive. Also reliable, inventive and heartless.

Orphaned at seven, unadopted, brought up in institutions, he had never been warmly loved for himself, nor had ever felt deep friendly affection for any living thing (except a dog). Military service in the army had taught him to shoot, and a natural competency with firearms, combined with a developing appetite for power, had led him afterwards to take employment as a part-time instructor in a civilian gun club, where talk of death reverberated in the air like cordite.

‘Opportunities’ were presented to Emil Jacques through the post by an unidentified go-between he had never met, but only after careful research would he accept a proposition. Emil considered himself high class. The American phrase ‘hit man’ was, to his fastidious mind, vulgar. Emil accepted a proposition only when he was sure his customer could pay, would pay, and wouldn’t collapse with maudlin regrets afterwards. Emil also insisted on the construction of unbreakable alibis for every customer likely to be an overwhelming suspect, and although this sounded easy it had sometimes been the overall stop or go factor.

And so it was on a particular Tuesday in December 1986. The essential alibi looking perfect, Emil committed himself to the task and carefully packed his bags for a short trip to England.

Emil’s English, functional rather than ornate, had sustained him so far through three English killings in four years. Tourist phrase-book’s gems — (‘Mon auto ne marche pas’; ‘my car’s broken down’) — had both kept him free from the damaging curiosity of others and also allowed him to abort his mission prudently if he felt unsafe before the act. He had, indeed, already twice retreated at a late stage from the present job in hand: once from bad weather, once from dissatisfaction with the sickness alibi proposed.

‘Pas bon,’ he said to himself. ‘No good.’

His client, who had paid a semi-fortune in advance, grew increasingly impatient at the delays.

On the Tuesday in December 1986, however, Emil Jacques, as satisfied with the alibi as he could be, having packed his bag and announced an absence from the gun club, set off in his inconspicuous white car to drive to Calais to cross the wintry waters of the English Channel.

As usual, he openly took with him the tools of his trade: handguns, ear defenders, multiple certificates proving his accreditation as a licensed instructor in a top-class Parisian club. He carried the lot in a locked metal sponge-lined suitcase, in the manner of photographers, and as it was still years before the banning of hand-guns in England, his prepared tale of entering competitions passed without question. Had he run into trouble on entry, he would have smiled resignedly and gone home.

Emil Jacques Guirlande, murderer, ran into no trouble on this Tuesday in December 1986. Unchallenged at Dover, he drove contentedly through the hibernating fields of southern England, peacefully reviewing his wicked plan.

On British racecourses that year the steeplechasing scene had been sizzlingly dominated by the improbable trainer — jockey allegiance of a long-haired descendant of true gypsies with the aristocratic nephew of an historic house.

Gypsy Joe (more accurately, John Smith) felt and displayed the almost magical affinity with animals that ran like a gene river in his people’s blood. To please Gypsy Joe, thoroughbreds dug into their own ancient tribal memory and understood that leading the herd was the aim of life. The leader of the herd won the race.

Gypsy Joe gave his horses judiciously the feed and exercise that best powered their hearts, and whispered mysterious encouragements into their ears while he saddled them for races. He was successful enough by ordinary standards and grudgingly admired by most of his peers, but for Joe it was never enough. He searched always — and perhaps unrealistically — for a rider whose psyche would match what he knew to be true of his horses. He searched for youth, courage, talent, and an uncorrupted soul.

Every year he watched and analysed the race-riders new on the scene while he busied himself with his regular runners, and not for five years did he see what he wanted. When he did see it, he wasted no time in publicly securing it for his own.

So Gypsy Joe rocked the jump-racing fraternity in the late spring of 1986 by offering a riding contract to a light-hearted amateur who had ridden in races for precisely one season and had won nothing of note. All the amateur had to do in order to accept the unusual proposal was to take out a professional licence at once.

Red Millbrook (he had red hair) had listened to the telephoned offer from Gypsy Joe in the same general bewilderment that soon raised eyebrows from the Jockey Club mandarins to critical clusters of stable-lads in local pubs.

Firstly, few retainer contracts of any sort were offered to jockeys in steeplechasing. Secondly, Gypsy Joe already regularly employed two long-time professionals (without contracts) whose results were widely considered satisfactory, as Gypsy Joe lay fifth on the trainers’ races-won table. Thirdly, Red Millbrook, not long out of school, could be classed as an ignorant novice.

With the assurance of youth, the ‘ignorant novice’ applied for a licence at once.

Red Millbrook, thus newly professional, met Gypsy Joe face to face for the first time when he walked with curiosity into the parade ring before the April Gold Cup at Sandown Park. Gypsy Joe, at forty and full of bullish confidence, knew he was inviting sneers for letting this almost untried lordling loose on a testing track in a big-news event on a horse he’d never even sat on. Adverse comments in various racing papers had already lambasted Joe for passing over both of his two useful, faithful — and fuming — stable jockeys and ‘throwing away the chance of a Golden Cup for the sake of a publicity stunt’. Gypsy Joe trusted his instincts and was not deterred.

Young Red Millbrook, meeting Gypsy Joe in the parade ring, thought him a big untidy long-haired shambles of a man and rather regretted the impulsive promise he’d signed, which was to ride always where and when bidden by the trainer.

The two ill-assorted future allies tentatively shook hands with television thousands watching, and Red Millbrook thought the tingle that ran through him was due only to the excitement of the occasion. Gypsy Joe, however, smiled to himself with satisfaction, and was perhaps the only onlooker not surprised when his runner clung on for the Gold by half a length.

It wasn’t that Red Millbrook had ever in his short life ridden badly: he had in fact spent all his adolescent spare hours on horseback, although those spare hours had been purposefully limited by parentally imposed education. His titled father and mother could summon pride in an amateur jockey for a son, but shied away wincing at the word professional. Like a tart, his mother groaned.

Red Millbrook thought his new professional status a step up, not down. Anxious to put on a reasonable show at Sandown, he took a fierce determination to the starting gate, and over the first fence awoke to an unexpected mental alliance with the horse. He had never felt anything like it. His whole body responded. He and the horse rose as one over each of the string of jumps constructed and spaced to sort out the fleetest. He as one with the horse swept round the final bend and stretched forward up the last testing hill. He shared the will and the determination of his animal partner. When he won, he felt, not amazement, but that he had come into his natural kingdom.

In the winner’s unsaddling enclosure Gypsy Joe and Red Millbrook smiled faintly at each other as if they had joined a private brotherhood. Gypsy Joe knew he’d found his man. Red Millbrook embraced his future.

Up on the stands the two passed-over stable jockeys watched the race and the win with increasing rage. One of them would normally have been on the horse, and he — Davey Rockman — felt his fury thoroughly justified.

Gypsy Joe was a rough customer to work for (Davey Rockman considered), but his horses ran often, were well schooled, and had kept him — Davey — in luxury and girlfriends for the past five years. Davey Rockman’s appetite for women, once the scandal of the racecourse, had long been accepted as the norm; and conversely ‘The Rock’s’ dark good looks were known powerfully to attract anything female. Davey Rockman’s anger at the loss of the money he would have earned by winning the big prestigious race was minor compared with the insult to his sexual pride.

It didn’t once occur to him that had he, and not the usurper Red Millbrook, been riding the horse, it might not have won.

Nigel Tape, the stable’s regular second-string jockey, burned with loyal resentment on ‘The Rock’s’ behalf. Nigel Tape, destined never himself to shine as a star, habitually basked in his position of side-kick to ‘The Rock’, always echoing the same frustrations, the same triumphs, the same unrealistic gripes. He felt all of Davey Rockman’s legitimate indignation at having been replaced, and magnified the umbrage to vindictive proportions. Davey ‘The Rock’ felt flattered by Nigel Tape’s almost fanatical devotion and didn’t see its dangers.

On the Monday after the April Gold Cup, Gypsy Joe surveyed the glowering faces of his two long-term jockeys as they drove into his stable-yard for the morning exercise and training session.

He said to them flatly, in businesslike tones, ‘As you’ve probably realised, Red Millbrook will be my first retained jockey from now on. You, Davey, have the option of staying on here as schooling jockey, which you’re good at, and riding the occasional race, or of course if you prefer it you can try for chief stable jockey with a different trainer.’

Davey Rockman listened in bitter silence. His status as Gypsy Joe’s first jockey had been comfortably high in the jump-racing world. The demotion the trainer was handing out not only meant a severe permanent drop in face and in income, but also the virtual end of his attractiveness to skirts. He habitually used the power of his position to dominate women. He liked to slap them about a bit and make them beg for passion. He felt superior. He strode about often in his jockey boots, counting them a symbol of virility.

Finding a job with comparable standing was hardly an option: there weren’t enough good stable-jockey jobs to go round. Davey Rockman looked straight at Gypsy Joe’s uncaring determination to downgrade him and felt the first surge of murderous hate.

Nigel Tape asked aggressively, ‘What about me, then?’

‘You can go on as before,’ the trainer told him.

‘Picking up crumbs? It’s not fair.’

‘Life is never fair,’ Gypsy Joe said. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

Gypsy Joe’s ancient instincts proved spectacularly right. Red Millbrook and Gypsy Joe’s horses galvanised each other on track after track while the main part of the jump-racing programme waned towards summer. The cheers for one win barely died away before they rose for another. The owners of the horses were ecstatic: new owners offered horses every day. By the time the next ten-month-long season warmed up in August, the trainer had rented a lot of extra stabling and the jockey was whistling to himself in happy fulfilment as he drove his car from success to success. Through September and October and November it seemed he could do no wrong. He led the jockeys’ list.

His parents became reconciled to his ‘tart’ness and boasted about him instead, but his two elder sisters, unmarried, grew jealous of his fame. He still lived in the family house in London which his sophisticated mother much preferred to clomping round weekend fields and battling mildew in a damp old cottage. Red settled for her London comfort while planning to buy a house of his own with his winnings, though not one necessarily on Gypsy Joe’s doorstep. The lives of jockey and trainer remained as separate as before their partnership had fused at Sandown, but the vibrations between them remained unchanged. They smiled always the same understanding smile, but they never drank together.

Red Millbrook — friendly, uncomplicated, generous-hearted — mixed little with the other jockeys, who tended to be in awe of his dazzling skill, and he cheerfully ignored the ill-will he saw blazing in Davey Rockman’s eyes, and the identical copycat resentment in Nigel Tape’s. Owing to the multiplication of the horses in the stable, Davey Rockman, Red Millbrook blithely reflected, still rode a fair amount of races, even if not on the winning cream of the string, and even if not with the same stunned and genuflecting coverage in the press. It wasn’t his fault, he assured himself, that Gypsy Joe had singled him out and given him such a great and satisfying opportunity.

He was unaware that it was the disastrous collapse of his vigorous sex life that most infuriated The Rock; and The Rock on his part failed to realise that it was his bitter constant grumbling that put women off. For the first time in his life girls flocked round Red Millbrook, who thought their approaches amusing: and his amusement further inflamed his seething dispossessed rival.

In December, when Davey Rockman broke some small bones in his foot in a racing fall, Red Millbrook sent him a message of sympathy. The Rock thought it an insult and didn’t reply.

Red Millbrook kept his car in the London street outside his parents’ house and drove from there each day to wherever he was due to race. Normally he set off northwards on a road which took him through tall black railings into the grassy expanse of Hyde Park. There were paths there and clumps of evergreen bushes, and benches for the rest of tired walkers. Also there were several sets of traffic lights, both to aid pedestrians crossing and to allow traffic to turn right in a complicated pattern. Almost always one of the sets of lights would be red against Red Millbrook. Patiently he would wait for the green while his radio filled the car with music.

On one Friday morning in December, while he waited, humming, at the stop light, a man approached his stationary car and tapped on the passenger side window. He was dressed as a tourist and carried a large street map, to which he hopefully pointed.

Red Millbrook pressed a button and obligingly opened the electrically-controlled window. The tourist advanced the map politely into the car.

‘Excuse me,’ said the tourist, ‘which way to Buckingham Palace, please?’

He had a foreign accent, Red Millbrook thought fleetingly. French, perhaps. The jockey leaned towards the window and bent his head over the map.

‘You go—’ he said.

Emil Jacques Guirlande shot him.

Truth to tell, Emil Jacques enjoyed killing.

He took pride in being able to bring death so quickly and cleanly that his prey hadn’t even a suspicion of the need for fear. Emil Jacques considered he would have failed his own high standards if ever he’d seen eyes widen with desperate fright or heard just the beginning of a piteous plea. Some assassins might take pleasure in their victims’ terror: Emil Jacques, for a murderer, was kind.

Red Millbrook had looked exclusively at the map held half open in Emil Jacques’ left hand. He hadn’t had time to see the Browning 9mm pistol with its efficient long silencer slide smoothly out from within the map’s lower folds. Emil’s right hand had a speed and sweetness of touch with a gun that no magician could have bettered.

The fire-hot bullet instantly destroyed Red Millbrook’s brain. He felt nothing, knew nothing, made no sound. The faint ‘phut’ of the Browning lost its identity in the beat of the radio’s music.

Without hesitation Emil Jacques withdrew his map, the pistol again hidden in its folds. He made a gesture of thanks in case of onlookers and walked casually away.

He went unhurriedly along a path and round a clump of bushes, and he had gone quite a long way when he heard car horns blaring behind him. The red lights, he knew, had turned to green, but one car was unmoving, obstructing the traffic. By the time irate drivers had discovered the blood and skull splinters and had screamed with hysterics, Emil Jacques was leaving the park to rejoin his car; and by the time the Metropolitan Police were hurriedly setting up an incident room to investigate the crime, Emil Jacques, driving carefully, was halfway to Dover on his way back to France.

Not bad, he thought. Not bad in the end, though it had been difficult to set up.

In late October, when he’d been offered the job, he had made his usual unarmed reconnaissance, had learned the pattern of life of his target and had noted the opportunity presented by the multiple traffic lights at the one particular entrance to Hyde Park. With a stopwatch, he’d driven over and over his target’s normal daily route until he knew to the second the maximum and minimum times a car might have to stand and wait for red to turn green. Red Millbrook left home at varying times but almost always took the Park way to avoid traffic. Once in every four days or fewer, he was stopped by the lights. Every time the lights stopped him, he sat defenceless before them in his car. Killing him there was wholly possible, Emil Jacques decided, if he were quick.

He practised at home with map and gun through his own car window until he could bring off the attack routine within seconds. He then accepted the offered proposition and in November, when he had received his agreed up-front payment, he crossed from Dieppe to Newhaven (for a change) and drove through customs with his hand-gun suitcase declared and cleared.

Almost at once things went wrong. Red Millbrook left London and went to Scotland for a two-day race meeting at Ayr, afterwards dawdling southwards, staying with friends and owners while he rode them winners all over the north. Emil Jacques fretted helplessly in London and felt vulnerable, and when Red Millbrook did finally return to his parents’ house, the weather turned brutal with gales and hailstorms and long bursts of rain; the sort of weather no tourist would walk about in, asking directions with a map.

Finally Emil Jacques read a racing newspaper carefully, and with the help of his English-French dictionary, realised that the promised ill-health alibi of his customer was no longer secure. Uneasily aware also that the small hotel’s receptionist was beginning to want to flirt with the quiet guest with the French accent, Emil Jacques aborted his mission entirely and cautiously went home.

It was three weeks later, when the weather was cold but sunny on a Friday morning in December, that Red Millbrook stopped at the traffic lights and died.

The outrage that shook the racing world surprised Emil Jacques in France. He hadn’t realised how intensely the British people revered their sporting heroes, and he was unexpectedly shaken to hear that he (the assassin) would be lynched (at least) if found. A fund was being set up, contributed to in a flood of sentiment at every racecourse gate, offering a tempting price on the killer’s head.

Emil Jacques Guirlande sat at his customary inconspicuous corner table in the café near his apartment and painstakingly, word by word, translated the eulogies paid to the dead young prodigy in the English racing press. Emil Jacques pursed his lips and suppressed regret.

The patron, a bulky man with a bulging apron and heavy moustache, paused at Emil Jacques’ side and added his own opinion. ‘Only a devil,’ he said, pointing at Red Millbrook’s attractive picture, ‘would kill such a splendid fellow.’ He sighed at the villainy of the world, adding, ‘and there’s a letter for you, Monsieur.’ He gave Emil Jacques a conspiratorial leer and a nudge in the ribs and produced an envelope from beside the till. The patron believed the letters he occasionally passed to his most constant customer were notes of assignation made secretly by sex-starved ladies looking for fun.

Emil Jacques always accepted the letters with a wink, never disillusioning his host: and in this way, at the end of a three-cutoff go-between chain he received messages and sent them. The envelope that evening duly delivered the remainder of the agreed price for the Millbrook job: no wise man or woman ever risked withholding what they owed to a killer.

It could have been expected that the sharp Metropolitan Police Force superintendent in charge of finding Red Millbrook’s murderer would never attain soul-mate heights with Gypsy Joe Smith. Gypsy Joe was a man of instinct with a great accountant. Instinct won the races, the accountant made his client rich. Gypsy Joe operated on a deep level of intuition. The policeman and the accountant worked on fact and logical deduction.

The superintendent thought all racing people to be halfway crooks and Gypsy Joe held the same belief about the police. The superintendent took a sceptical view of Gypsy Joe’s intense and genuine grief. Gypsy Joe wondered how such a thick-brained super had reached that rank.

They engaged like bulls in Gypsy Joe’s stable office, fiercely attended also by a local high-ranking detective who seemed chiefly concerned about ‘patch’.

‘Who cares whose patch he died on,’ Gypsy Joe bellowed. ‘Put your stupid heads together and find out who did it.’

Separately and finally the two high-rankers did put their not-so-stupid heads together, but without any sudden blaze of enlightenment. They extensively interviewed the two women who’d stopped at the lights behind Red Millbrook’s car, and who’d tooted at him when the lights went green, and had gone to yell at him, and had found his slumped bloody body and would never sleep dreamlessly again.

They had seen no one, they said. They had been talking. There weren’t many people in Hyde Park. It was winter.

Emil Jacques had left no clues in Red Millbrook’s car: no fingerprints, no fibres, no hairs. The bullet, hopefully dug out of the chassis, matched nothing on anyone’s record, nor ever would. Careful Emil Jacques never killed anyone with a gun he’d used for the purpose before. For all of everyone’s efforts, the case remained unsolved.

The Metropolitan Police superintendent changed his mind about Gypsy Joe and unwillingly began to respect him. This was the man, he realised, standing with him in his windy stable yard, who was least likely in the world to have harmed the dead jockey, and that being so, he could ask his help. He didn’t believe in second sight or fortune telling, but really one never knew... And Gypsy Joe had plucked Red Millbrook out of the air: had seen his undeveloped genius and given it springing life. Supposing... well, just supposing the gypsy’s insight could do what good detection methods couldn’t.

The superintendent shook his head to free himself from such fancies and said pragmatically, ‘I’ve asked around, you know. It seems most of the jockeys were screwed up with envy of Red Millbrook and the bookmakers hoped he’d break his neck, but that’s different from actually killing.’ He paused. ‘I’m told the person who hated him most was his second fiddle, David Rock-man, your former number one.’

‘He couldn’t have done it,’ Gypsy Joe asserted gloomily. ‘His alibi’s perfect.’

‘He couldn’t have done it,’ the superintendent nodded, ‘because at the relevant time he was hobbling round the hospital here on crutches, getting physiotherapy for his broken foot.’

‘And his glued-on trusty, Nigel Tape, couldn’t have done it either, because he was here under my very eyes, riding my horses on the exercise gallops when Red...’ Gypsy Joe stopped short, his throat constricting. The waste and destruction of the soaring talent he’d set free on his horses brought Gypsy Joe daily nearer to tears than he would have thought possible. He knew he would never find another Red Millbrook: a match like that to his horses happened only once in a trainer’s lifetime.

When the superintendent had gone, Gypsy Joe’s hatred for Red Millbrook’s killer continued to burn like a slow relentless furnace in his dark gypsy soul. He would know, he thought. One day, in the unexplained way that things became clear to him, he would know who’d killed Red Millbrook, and he would know what to do.

His horses, meanwhile, had to run in their intended races. The owners telephoned demanding it. Life had to go on. Davey Rockman’s fractured foot mended like magic and Gypsy Joe, with misgivings he didn’t wholly understand, allowed his former number one to retake his earlier place.

The horses missed Red Millbrook. They won races, but not joyously in droves. The glory days were over. Some racegoers cheered; some wept. Gypsy Joe despaired.

It was at the memorial service for Red Millbrook’s life that The Rock made his revealing mistake. In the church, oblivious to Gypsy Joe standing grimly and unsuspected behind him, Davey Rockman turned his head to Nigel Tape and smirked.

Gypsy Joe saw first the evil in the curve of the sneering lips, and felt pierced only with simple disgust. But by evening and through the night the deeper knowledge that he sought arrived.

In the morning he telephoned the Metropolitan Police superintendent.

‘A paid murderer?’ the super repeated doubtfully. ‘Contract killers are very rare, you know. It’s unlikely that this is one.’ He thought to himself that most murders were domestic — family affairs — impulsive, and he knew most were solved. Often drugs were the dynamics of unexplained deaths, but not this time, he didn’t think. There was no smell of it. And no suggestion of political assassination, which was normally flamboyant and led to arrest, either on the scene itself, or soon after.

‘Which leaves you where?’ asked Gypsy Joe.

‘Looking at the currents inside the Millbrook family. We think the young man knew his killer. We think whoever shot him tapped on the window and the young man, recognising the person, lowered the window to talk. The sisters are no sweet cookies...’

‘I don’t believe it.’ Gypsy Joe was positive. ‘The Millbrook family didn’t kill him. I saw violent destructive hatred in Davey Rock man’s eyes at yesterday’s memorial service. You are underestimating the violence of hate. Nearly everyone does. I saw him gloat over Red’s death. I’m certain he had him killed. I’ll go after him and stir things up.’

The superintendent, doubting and believing in turns, not sure after all that gypsy insight could be relied on, told his informant weakly, ‘Take care, then, there’s a murderer about.’

Gypsy Joe took the warning seriously but walked his big frame and his outsize personality into the path of everyone he thought might show him a line to crime. No one exactly gave him directions to an assassin but at length, when his quest had become the talk of every racecourse, someone with a snigger told him to look under his own nose. Nigel Tape, he eventually discovered, had a brother who’d once done time for receiving stolen cars. Hardly helpful, he thought. A pussy-cat when he was looking for a lion.

With nothing therefore but implacable suspicion to fuel him, Gypsy Joe began asking Davey ‘The Rock’ questions. Endless needling questions, on and on and day by day.

‘How did you find a killer? Who did you ask?’

‘How did you pay him? Did you send him a cheque?’

‘He’ll blackmail you, won’t he? He’ll want more and more.’

On and on.

He shredded Davey Rockman’s nerves, but kept on offering him rides in races The questions tormented The Rock, but he needed the fees. His hands began shaking. Gypsy Joe, everywhere, accused in his ear, ‘Murderer.’

‘I didn’t do it,’ The Rock yelled, frantic.

Gypsy Joe, regardless, repeated ‘Murderer’ again and again, and allowed his jockey no peace.

Davey Rockman and Nigel Tape went to Warwick races together, Nigel Tape driving his own leased car and hoping The Rock would pay his share of the petrol. Gone were the days, it seemed, when The Rock grandiosely paid all of their joint expenses as a matter of course. The Rock, Nigel Tape morosely considered, wasn’t any longer the hero he’d worshipped all these years.

The Rock’s saturnine good looks had rapidly lost their taut appeal since the smooth tanned skin on his jaw and cheekbones had loosened and greyed. The bravado of the riding boots no longer strode with self-confident near-arrogance from weighing-room to parade ring. The maestro no longer masterfully slapped his calf with his riding whip. Onlookers used to the swagger of pre-Red Millbrook days hardly recognised the dimmed round-shouldered slinker as the wolf of the tracks, the sexual predator that had set alarmed mothers scurrying protectively after their chicks.

The Rock, under Gypsy Joe’s pitiless barrage, had more than halfway crumbled.

‘He’s sure I did it,’ The Rock moaned. ‘He never leaves me alone five minutes. He wants to know who killed his precious boy and I can scream and scream that I don’t know and he just goes on asking.’

Nigel Tape glanced sideways at the wreck of his friend. He — and every pair of eyes on the racecourse — could clearly see the atrophy of The Rock’s vivid character, let alone his riding skill. Horses in his hands were going soft.

‘You can’t tell him who killed Red Millbrook because you don’t know.’ Nigel Tape’s voice was edging from reasonableness to exasperation. He’d said the same thing a dozen times.

‘I tell him over and over I don’t know,’ The Rock complained. ‘He thinks I just walked up to someone who has a gun and said, “Shoot Red Millbrook for me.” He’s so simple he’s pathetic’

Gypsy Joe, neither simple nor pathetic, watched his jockey’s spineless performances that afternoon and was obliged to apologise to his owners.

For all his persistent inquisition of The Rock, Gypsy Joe hadn’t learned who’d killed Red Millbrook. He began to believe that the jockey truly didn’t know whose hand had actually held the gun. He didn’t change his certainty of The Rock’s basic guilt.

At the end of an unproductive three hours of also-rans, the trainer told his jockey that good owners were harder to replace than good riders (Red Millbrook excepted). He’d given Davey Rockman every chance, he said, but the owners were bitterly complaining and enough was enough, so goodbye. The Rock, speechless, burned behind his eyes with incandescent malice and saw no fault in himself.

‘What about me?’ demanded Nigel Tape. ‘Do I get The Rock’s job? First jockey to the stable?’

‘No, you don’t. You haven’t the drive. If you want to, you can carry on as before.’

‘It isn’t fair,’ Nigel Tape said.

On their drive home from the races, The Rock violently swore to revenge himself for the public disgrace of losing his job.

‘Get that gunman for me,’ The Rock said. ‘Tell him I need him again.’

Nigel Tape drove erratically in troubled silence. Fair haired, with sun-bleached eyebrows, the pale shadow of Davey The Rock painfully felt his long allegiance weakening. He had quite liked Red Millbrook, he belatedly realised, and Gypsy Joe hadn’t been bad to work for, all these years. A steady job, better than most...

‘Do it,’ The Rock insisted. ‘Tell your brother to fix it again.’

‘It’ll cost you,’ Nigel Tape said weakly.

‘Get on with it,’ he was told.

Nigel Tape’s ex-jail-bird car-thief brother knew a man who knew a man who was in touch with a man who knew someone in the elimination business. In early February 1987, the patron of Emil Jacques’ local cafe produced from beside his till a pale pink envelope that smelled sweetly of carnations.

The patron smiled widely, nudging Emil Jacques in the ribs. Emil Jacques smelled the scent and with many a wink stowed the billet-doux away to read in private.

Emil Jacques later stood at the window of his splendid lofty apartment and thoughtfully watched the small boats busy below on the Seine. The pink envelope had contained only a postcard-sized black and white photograph of Gypsy Joe, with his name, address, age and occupation written in pencil on the back. Underneath, in small letters, he read, ‘David Rockman, jockey’.

Owing to his careful and successful slaughter of British steeple-chasing’s brightest boy, Emil Jacques had begun to take a passing interest in the sport. He bought occasionally from news-stands British racing newspapers and persevered with them to the extent that he needed a French-English dictionary less and less. His English, in racing terms, became increasingly idiomatic.

He was tempted by the prospect of killing Gypsy Joe.

Normally he refused two terminations within the same small social or business circle, reckoning the duplication doubled his risk. Also two killings instigated so soon by the same client sent fierce warning shivers down his spine. David Rockman, jockey, however, had paid him promptly for Red Millbrook’s death and presumably knew that at least a similar sum would be expected again.

Emil Jacques cared nothing about his clients’ motives or inner psychological forces which could be roughly categorised, he thought, as greed, lust or hate. He cared only that he did his job cleanly, got safely clear and banked the proceeds later in his secretive way. He cared nothing personally for Red Millbrook or Gypsy Joe Smith. Emil Jacques Guirlande was always a true mercenary, a cold soldier for hire.

He decided that it would be safe enough to reconnoitre at least the Gypsy Joe prospect. Consequently, with small bag packed (no guns) he crossed the Channel with his car, uncomfortably sea-sick for once because of a sudden maritime winter storm. Early February snow fell and lay obstinately over southern England, bringing horse racing to a halt, the weather again conspiring to prolong Emil Jacques’ target’s life.

Emil Jacques could make only sporadic checks on Gypsy Joe’s daily existence without drawing comment on himself, but he learned the trainer’s morning routine of travelling up by Land Rover to the white-dusted Downs and watching the long string of horses cantering past for exercise up an all-weather sand track. He listened to the stable-lads’ chat in the local pubs in the evenings and absorbed their graphic language, along with the general flow of stable life.

He learned that Gypsy Joe’s devotion to his horses included a late-night visit to each of them, to see that all were comfortable and at peace, and on silent shoes one evening he approached the stable-yard and stopped at an undiscovered distance, watching.

Gypsy Joe came out of his house alone at ten o’clock and made his rounds, finally leaving his much loved horses safe until morning. At ten the following evening he made his rounds again, and at ten the next evening, again.

It was there, in the tranquil yard, Emil Jacques decided, that one night soon a quiet death would spit out of the dark.

During the night of Emil Jacques’ decision, a thaw turned England brown and green, and next day Gypsy Joe took his runners to Sandown Park races.

The two months since Red Millbrook’s murder had in no way lessened Gypsy Joe’s furious grief, and he couldn’t help remembering that it was here on this testing track that the red-haired boy’s dormant genius had first fully awakened. While he watched his February runners do moderately well with a jockey-replacement, Gypsy Joe mourned the past and vowed to continue his pursuit of Davey The Rock. However long it took him, he would reduce the guilty villain to breakdown and confession.

Davey Rockman, that afternoon, had been engaged (by a minor trainer) to ride only one race. He finished second to last with his mind not on the job. He spent his time glaring at Gypsy Joe in unabated hate, hopping up and down for an answer to the demand he’d passed to Nigel Tape’s brother.

Emil Jacques Guirlande, correctly positive that neither man would know him, went with inner amusement to Sandown Park races and stood close to both.

Gypsy Joe, his quarry, gave a cursory glance at the neat youngish undistinguished racegoer reading his racecard six feet away and felt none of the supernatural shudder of foreboding that his ancestry would have expected. Gypsy Joe looked at Red Millbrook’s murderer and didn’t know him.

An hour later, on the stands before the fifth race, Emil Jacques rubbed sleeves with Davey The Rock and listened to him complaining acidly to Nigel Tape about merciless trainers, the slow post and the spitefulness of ungrateful whores.

Emil Jacques, disliking him, decided to increase his fee sharply.

When the proposal reached Davey The Rock three days later he screeched with fury; the swollen payment demanded up-front would swallow the rest of his savings. But Gypsy Joe’s campaign of accusation was driving him to drink and madness, and he would do anything — anything — he thought, to get rid of the remorseless whispers in his ears. ‘Murderer. Murderer. Admit you let loose a murderer.’

Davey Rockman sent every advance cent asked for, leaving nothing in reserve. He was foolishly risking that the murderer would not come looking for the rest after the deed was done.

A week later, at the beginning of March, the patron of the café passed two letters — nudge nudge — to his lucky customer with the busy sex life. The customer winked and smiled and began to think of moving to a different mail box.

Emil Jacques took his letters home. One, a thick sort of package, contained the whole of Davey The Rock’s hard-earned savings. The other proposed the almost immediate assassination of a politician in Brussels, death to occur within ten days, before a crucial vote.

Emil Jacques stood by his high window and looked down on the Seine. Caution warned him that Brussels was too soon. His anonymity, he reckoned, depended in part on the infrequency of his operations.

He had survived Red Millbrook’s murder easily, but the hunt would be redoubled after Gypsy Joe’s. The enlarged fee might make that death worthwhile, but a further murder in Brussels, his third in little over three months, that quick murder might give him an identity in police consciousness. The last thing he wanted, he thought grimly, was to be ‘Wanted’.

All the same, the Brussels proposal included the offer of a magnificent fee for a prompt performance, and he was, he considered, the BEST.

The following day therefore he banked Davey Rockman’s savings, put in a morning’s teaching with new guns at the gun club and in the afternoon and evening drove across Belgium to Brussels. He would reconnoitre the Brussels job, he decided, and would give his yes or no before crossing to England to terminate Gypsy Joe. He would be careful, he thought, and go one step at a time.

He spent three too-slow days in Brussels stalking his politician round the bazaars of the European parliament, finding to his growing dismay that his quarry was seldom alone and even in the gents was thoroughly guarded. What was worse, there was a fond wife and a pack of bright children with little sharp eyes. Children were a hazard for sensible murderers to steer wide of.

Emil Jacques, impatient and under pressure, unusually sent an acceptance by post of the Brussels proposition without clearly planning his ambush in advance, confident he would think of a good one in plenty of time. Meanwhile, as he waited for the Brussels up-front money to arrive, he would finish off Gypsy Joe: he would spend the weekend in England, earning the Rockman fee. He set off on this plan but almost at once things again began to go wrong. Even before he’d even left the city, his car broke down. (‘Mon auto ne marche pas.’) Emil cursed.

It was Friday morning. He was told his car would be repaired by Monday lunchtime. Emil Jacques blasphemed.

He went into a travel agent’s office to study his options and found himself at the desk of a smiling motherly middle-aged madame who took a liking to her youngish customer and made endless helpful suggestions.

Monsieur wanted to spend the weekend in England? Well, of course, he must fly.

Sabena, Belgium’s airline, had frequent flights every day to Heathrow.

Madame gestured to a poster on the wall advertising a fantail of huge aeroplanes, all taking off.

Emil Jacques Guirlande shuddered and began to sweat.

Monsieur could rent a car at Heathrow. She, Madame, would arrange it.

Emil Jacques took a heroic grip on his neurosis and said he would go by sea, by car ferry, as he had intended. Madame said the delay obviously meant that he would miss the boat he’d planned to take, but he could go later by a different route and she, Madame, could arrange a rental car to meet him at Dover.

Emil Jacques agreed.

Beaming with pleasure Madame busied herself on the telephone while her customer wiped his forehead.

She told him kindly that soon he would be able to travel to England by tunnel. The excavation would be starting this year, 1987. Wasn’t that splendid? In one instant Emil Jacques progressed from fear of flying to Tunnel claustrophobia.

Madame gave him tickets and reservations and a boarding pass for his preference for water.

She said, ‘I’m afraid the crossing takes four and a half hours, but I’ve booked a rental car to be ready for you at Dover. So sorry about your troubles with your own.’

Emil Jacques, still smothering his trembles, paid her with feeble smiles and prudent cash and, following her directions, travelled by train to the Channel coast. He carried with him his metal suitcase and an overnight grip, and he reassured himself over and over again that if this unsettling departure from his normal approach to slaughter looked at all risky he would return to see to Gypsy Joe at a later, calmer date.

He boarded the ferry, along with about four hundred and fifty other passengers, many of whom had come across from England on a day-trip to shop and were going home laden with bags labelled ‘Duty Free’. Emil Jacques found a seat in the bar and ordered mineral water, and tightly gripped his metal suitcase between his feet.

The ferry moved off from its berth on Friday 6 March 1987 at five past six in the evening. At six twenty-four the ship cleared the harbour’s outer mole and accelerated towards the open sea.

Four minutes later, she sank.

The bow doors were open because they had not been closed after the cars and other vehicles had been loaded for the passage to Dover. No one had checked the doors were shut.

The ferry filled and capsized fast in thirty seconds.

The hull, showing above the water, had been painted a brilliant red.

Red as traffic lights.

Redder than Red Millbrook’s hair.

RED.

In England at six twenty-five on 6 March Davey The Rock, in self-pitying tears, borrowed enough from Nigel Tape to get drunk. Broke, out of work, starved of sex and frightened to disintegration of a half-paid murderer, The Rock blamed everyone else.

When the Herald capsized, Emil Jacques’ gun-laden metal suitcase slid away inexorably from between his feet. He stretched to catch it, and fell from a height, and the last thing the murderer who feared flying saw was the wall of water that drowned him.

At ten o’clock that evening, while the cold North Sea still swirled in eddies through the settling wreck, Gypsy Joe left his house and made his quiet normal rounds of his stableful of dozing horses; as he would safely do the next night, and the next night, and the next.

The stars were bright.

Not knowing why, Gypsy Joe felt at peace.