Triple Crown

A mile and a half

Belmont Park, New York

Three weeks after the Preakness

Five weeks after the Kentucky Derby

First run at Belmont Park 1905,

previously run at Jerome Park and Morris Park

racecourses in New York, since 1867

26

The Triple Crown jamboree moved on from Baltimore to New York but, with three whole weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, there was a slight pause for everyone to draw breath.

Fire Point arrived back at Belmont Park on the day after his great success at Pimlico, returning to his stall like some victorious Roman general through a guard of honour provided by the racetrack grooms, not only those from George Raworth’s barn but seemingly from every other barn on the backside as well.

The signwriter had already added and the Preakness Stakes to the ‘Home of Fire Point. Winner of the Kentucky Derby’ board screwed to the outside wall.

The local TV news channels were there in force to cover the homecoming, something that would do no harm at all for the marketing of the final leg. A Triple Crown contender was guaranteed to add tens of thou- sands of extra spectators to the gate come race day.

For my part, I did not look forward to settling back into regular Belmont Park life after the excitement of the week at Pimlico. True, it was a huge improvement to be sleeping again in a room with only the regularly drunk and flatulent Rafael, rather than with both Diego and Keith trying to out-snore one another, but, somehow, the fun had gone out of this particular assignment.

I was beginning to find the daily drudgery of a groom rather monotonous. Perhaps my enthusiasm would return as the Belmont approached, but that still seemed like a long way off.

I suppose happiness in any job has a lot to do with one’s expectation.

For Rafael, working as a groom in a top horseracing barn in New York City, where he was occasionally given overall responsibility, was the pinnacle of his ambition. He had escaped from the dismal poverty, appalling criminality and deadly danger of a Mexican slum to share a room with what he thought was only one Irishman instead of his whole extended family. He was quite obviously a happy individual, even when he was inebriated, smiling and singing his way through each day without a care in the world or an ounce of desire to do any better.

Diego, in contrast, was an angry young man.

No doubt he had originally travelled to the United States from Puerto Rico to seek his fortune, arriving in New York with an expectation that the streets would be paved with gold, only to have his hopes dashed by the reality. In his eyes, ending up as a mere groom at Belmont Park was living his life as a failure. Consequently, there was not an ounce of happiness to be found anywhere in his body.

And, sadly, after a few quieter days at Pimlico on his own, he was again supported by his Puerto Rican compatriots and thus somewhat bolder. Ever since the truck had arrived through the gates, he had been mouthing at me what I presumed were Spanish obscenities, or threats. On the plus side, however, we had also returned to the jurisdiction of the New York courts, which meant that his trip to Rikers Island was very much back on the cards.

I spoke to Tony Andretti on my second night back, after consuming yet another dose of Bert Squab’s extra-hot chilli con carne from the track kitchen.

‘Crackshot has got equine viral arteritis,’ Tony said. ‘It was confirmed today.’

I was not in the least bit surprised. Indeed, I would have been astounded if it had been anything else.

‘Bryson, Crackshot’s trainer, is creating merry hell and the Maryland Jockey Club are running round in ever-decreasing circles trying to determine where the infection came from. Norman Gibson has even initiated a FACSA investigation. What do you want me to tell him?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

I could tell from a snort down the line that Tony didn’t like keeping information from his section chief.

‘And there’s more,’ Tony said at length. ‘The professor has also established that there was EVA virus in the semen sample, loads of it. I really think it’s time to arrest George Raworth.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘And for the same reason as before. Nothing concerning the semen sample would be admissible as evidence in court because it was removed from a locked place without a search warrant.’

‘Let’s get a warrant now, then,’ Tony said. ‘If we can find that cryo-flask, there will surely be some trace left in it we could analyse.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think the flask is even here. It’s probably still in Raworth’s Jeep. I haven’t seen that since the day after the Preakness and the flask definitely wasn’t in the truck with the other stuff when we returned from Pimlico.’

‘But we surely have enough to get the New York Racing Association to ban him.’ Tony was getting quite angry.

‘You think so, do you?’ I said rather sarcastically. ‘Do you remember that NFL quarterback who was banned for allegedly deflating footballs?’

‘Of course. Deflategate,’ Tony said. ‘Big news. Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. FACSA was peripherally involved with the investigation.’

‘Yeah, that’s the one. The NFL thought they had a watertight case but, even so, the ban was overturned by a US federal judge due to a lack of convincing evidence that Brady himself knew anything about it.

‘Everyone appeals to law these days, and Raworth would be no exception because there’s so much at stake. Never mind the individual race purses and the kudos of being a Triple Crown winner, there’s also the small matter of the ten-million-dollar Triple Crown bonus, half of which goes to the winning trainer. Trust me, Raworth would fight to the death through the courts and, without that sample being admissible as evidence, you would surely lose, and look foolish.’

‘So what can we do?’ Tony said in exasperation.

‘Nothing. Not yet. We watch and wait and hope he makes a mistake.’

There was silence from the far end, as if Tony was digesting that rather unpleasant pill.

‘In the meantime can you check on something for me,’ I said. ‘Debenture was selected for a random drug test after the Maryland Sprint Handicap at Pimlico on Saturday. Raworth seemed quite concerned about it. Can you find out the result of the test from the Maryland Racing Commission and keep it from being publicised?’

‘Why?’ Tony asked. ‘Surely, if the test is positive, we can use that to ban Raworth.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But if it’s a positive for, say, steroids or clenbuterol then, even with his record, the Maryland Commission will ban him for only a month or two at best, and only then after lengthy appeals. I want to nail him for something far more serious than a bit of doping and, in the meantime, I don’t want him put on the defensive.’

‘OK,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll have a quiet word with their commissioner, but if the test is positive he’ll want to do something about it.’

‘Convince him otherwise,’ I said. ‘After all, the horse didn’t win anything. It came seventh out of eight.’

‘OK,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll do my best. Anything else?’

‘How about the Texas ranch?’ I said. ‘Did you find out anything?’

‘I haven’t yet but I’ve asked the chief of our Colorado Springs office to do some digging for me. Don’t worry. I explained that it was to be confidential to him alone. He normally deals with corruption in the pro rodeo circuit and they use Quarter Horses so it’s his area of expertise.’

‘Pro rodeo circuit?’ I said. ‘Is there such a thing?’

‘There certainly is. It’s big business. There are hundreds of events each year and even a national final each December to decide the World Champion All-Around Cowboy. There’s millions of dollars at stake and it is broadcast live on CBS.’

I marvelled at the way Americans claim to be the champions of the world at something that no one else does — like the winners of the Super Bowl who are officially crowned as the World Champions even though no other country is allowed to enter a team in the competition, not even Canada.

‘So when do you expect to hear back from your man?’ I asked.

‘He said it might take a few days. He’s been at a rodeo in Las Vegas and he won’t return to his office until Wednesday morning.’

‘Didn’t you tell him it was urgent?’ I implored.

‘The guy has worked for us all weekend,’ Tony said in his defence. ‘So he’s entitled to a couple of days off playing the slots and tables. He is still the best man for the job, so be patient.’

I had never been very good at being patient.

Playing the slots and tables, indeed.

If I was busting my gut here seven days a week, why wasn’t everyone else?

Charlie Hern took morning exercise on Wednesday, standing on the platform by the training track with a stopwatch in his hand, while the horses were galloped in turn by Victor Gomez.

‘Where’s Mr Raworth?’ I asked Victor as he came back to the barn to change horses.

‘He gone visit family,’ Victor said.

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘El Paso,’ Victor replied. ‘He back Friday maybe, or Saturday maybe. Depends traffic.’

‘Has he driven all the way to El Paso?’

Victor nodded.

It was 2,000 miles by road from Baltimore to western Texas.

‘Perhaps he no like airplanes,’ Victor said, before disappearing back to the track on Paddleboat.

Perhaps he no like airplanes.

Oh yeah? Who was Victor kidding?

Raworth was a man who regularly spent a third of each year in Florida, another third in California, and the rest of the time in New York, with training barns in each place. He would be as accustomed to getting on and off aircraft as most people were buses.

Was this the mistake we were hoping for?

I took a chance by going back to the bunkhouse to call Tony immediately. All the grooms were at work so the place was deserted.

‘Raworth is in El Paso,’ I said. ‘He went there by road from Pimlico.’

‘That’s a hell of a drive,’ Tony said. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘That he’s driven all the way to El Paso to refill the cryogenic flask with EVA-infected Quarter Horse semen from the family ranch? No commercial airline would allow him to fly with liquid nitrogen in his baggage.’

‘No way,’ Tony said in agreement.

‘We can’t be sure about them having EVA at the ranch until your man in Colorado gets back to us.’

‘I’ll get him home from his gambling today,’ Tony said decisively. ‘Did you say Raworth has a Jeep Cherokee?’

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘A white one.’

‘Registered in which state?’

I tried to conjure up a mental image of the vehicle registration plate.

‘New York, I think. The Empire State.’

‘I’ll get the licence plate from New York Department of Motor Vehicles and then Homeland Security can track him across the country using their automatic licence plate recognition cameras.’

‘How many of those do they have?’

‘Lots, with hundreds more going up every month on every Interstate and in most cities across the country. Don’t tell anyone though. The majority of Americans complain bitterly about their lack of privacy as it is but, if they really knew how much their government spied on them, they’d throw a fit. The cameras track people all over the country and match them to various databases such as known criminal, wanted person, gang member, missing person, immigration violator, even tax avoiders and those on the sex offender registry, not to mention terrorist suspects. The Los Angeles Police even want to use the camera data to send letters to the owners of all vehicles that enter areas of high prostitution to warn them to stay away.’

They ought to threaten to send letters to their wives, I thought.

‘Could they also find out if Raworth has driven to El Paso before?’

‘Probably. It depends on how long ago. They don’t keep the data indefinitely.’

‘It won’t be very long,’ I said. ‘There was still liquid nitrogen in the flask at Pimlico, so it had to be only a few weeks ago at most.’

‘I’ll get it checked right away,’ Tony said. ‘Call me later.’

We hung up and I walked slowly back to the barn, thinking.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ Keith shouted at me, making me jump. ‘Paddleboat has been back in his stall for ages.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to the jacks.’

‘Well don’t,’ Keith said. ‘The horses’ comfort comes before yours.’

I hurried off down the shedrow to deal with Paddleboat.

‘Raworth’s Jeep left the hotel parking lot at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore Harbor at five after eight, Eastern Daylight Time, last Sunday morning, overnighted at the Garden Tree Motel east of Memphis, Tennessee, and joined I-10 from I-20 fifty miles short of the family ranch at 8.52 p.m., Mountain Time, on Monday evening. That was the last camera he passed. Raworth was the only person on board throughout. He stopped for gas five times. I have the names of the gas stations if you want them, and their closed-circuit footage showing him there along with copies of his credit card receipts for both the gas and the motel.’

I was impressed.

‘How did you get this so fast?’ I asked, worried he might have used his own FACSA agents.

‘I was at detective school with the current Director of Homeland Security. I asked him for a favour and he ran it this afternoon as a training exercise for his staff. They are good — very good. Even I think so. And, you were dead right. They also picked up that Raworth’s Jeep had recently taken that journey before. He started out from his home in New York April twenty-fifth and arrived El Paso the twenty-seventh. On that occasion he left for Louisville April twenty-ninth, then drove back to New York May tenth, three days after the Kentucky Derby.’

‘It all fits,’ I said.

‘So now can we arrest him?’

‘Only if he has the cryogenic flask with him when he turns up back here at Belmont and we’re absolutely sure it is full of frozen sperm containing the EVA virus. Then you can hang him out to dry, but I really want to get your mole as well into the bargain.

‘And how are you going to do that?’ Tony said excitedly.

‘I’m working on it.’

27

George Raworth arrived back at Belmont Park shortly after nine o’clock on Saturday evening.

I knew he was coming.

I had spoken to Tony after my supper on Friday and he’d told me that the Jeep was again on the move.

‘It is amazing how it can be tracked in real time,’ Tony said. ‘If Raworth were a terrorist they could call in a drone strike to take him out.’

He’d been watching too many movies, I thought. A drone strike directed at a vehicle on home soil might have raised a few awkward questions in the US Congress.

Tony gave me two other important pieces of information as well.

The first was that Debenture had indeed failed the drug test after the Maryland Sprint Handicap.

‘He had excess cobalt in his system,’ Tony said.

‘Cobalt?’

‘Just so. Not a huge amount, mind. The test found seventy-two parts per billion of cobalt while the permitted threshold level in Maryland is only fifty.’

I’d heard of the use of excess cobalt before, in particular in Australia where a trainer had been disqualified from racing for fifteen years for giving it to his horses, and I’d done some research on the subject in London.

Cobalt is a trace element needed by bacteria in the human digestive tract to produce the vitamin B12, which in turn is essential for the production of the hormone erythropoietin that stimulates bone marrow to produce red blood cells.

Erythropoietin is known as EPO for short; it was regular injections of a synthetic form of EPO that allowed the cyclist Lance Armstrong to win seven consecutive Tours de France. Attempts to cover up positive tests had been instrumental in triggering Armstrong’s dramatic fall from grace, an almost overnight transformation from sporting hero and cancer survivor into demonised cheat.

The injecting of cobalt is assumed to increase the amount of vitamin B12 produced, and hence the quantity of natural EPO in the blood. That, in turn, should increase the number of red blood cells created, and hence the amount of oxygen that could be delivered to the muscles, thus improving stamina and performance.

However, the jury was still out on whether it actually made any difference at all in horses.

Raworth had obviously been experimenting with a horse that he had not expected to win, and so he had not anticipated that it would be tested. The random selection had been his bad luck. And our good.

‘Has the Maryland Racing Commissioner agreed to sit tight on the findings?’

‘Reluctantly, for the time being,’ Tony said, ‘and only because the level is low. Some tests in the past have shown concentrations of many hundred parts per billion, even thousands.’

‘What’s the penalty for excess cobalt in Maryland?’

‘For a first offence, especially one this low, it is fifteen days’ suspension and a five-hundred-dollar fine, plus loss of purse money for the race.’

‘The horse finished second to last,’ I said, ‘so he didn’t win any purse money. And fifteen days hardly seems enough of a deterrent. That’s just a holiday, and five hundred dollars is mere peanuts in this sport. I want to get Raworth for far more than that.’

‘But the fifteen-day suspension might mean that he couldn’t act as the trainer of Fire Point for the Belmont Stakes.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ I said. ‘He would surely appeal and any suspension would be deferred until after it was heard.’

However, remarkable as all that was, it was Tony’s second piece of information that I found the more interesting.

His man in Colorado Springs had turned up a two-year-old insurance claim for a stallion infected during an outbreak of equine viral arteritis in American Quarter Horses at the Raworth family ranch, the Crazy R.

‘Why is it called the Crazy R?’ I asked. ‘Strange name for a farm.’

‘That’s their brand,’ Tony replied. ‘Crazy R means an upside-down R. They brand an inverted capital R into the hides of their cattle with a red-hot branding iron.’

‘Not these days, surely,’ I said.

‘Of course. It mattered more when stock ran free but, even now, it is still the best way of determining ownership — if an animal has your brand on it, then it’s yours, no more questions asked. It continues to be the most important tool we have in the fight against cattle rustling.’

‘I thought cattle rustling disappeared with the demise of the Wild West,’ I said with a slight laugh.

‘The West is still wild, let me tell you,’ Tony replied, ‘and cattle rustling is very much alive and well.’

‘But branding the skin with a red-hot iron sounds so cruel,’ I said. ‘There must be better modern methods of proving ownership. How about microchips?’

‘They’re slowly making inroads and hot branding will probably disappear eventually, but it remains a legal requirement in many states.’

‘Do people still brand their horses as well?’

‘Less so these days,’ Tony said. ‘There’s a new technique called freeze branding that’s becoming more common for horses. Instead of using a red-hot iron, an extremely cold one is held against the horse’s side. It is far less painful because instead of burning a vivid scar into the skin, the intense cold destroys the pigmentation cells, making the hairs grow totally white. That’s what provides the unique mark.’ He laughed. ‘Not much good though, I suppose, if you have a white horse to begin with.’

‘How cold does the branding iron have to be?’ I asked.

‘About minus three hundred degrees.’

‘How do they get it that cold?’

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

‘With liquid nitrogen,’ Tony said.

Raworth’s white Jeep Cherokee pulled up alongside his barn just as it was getting dark, at the same time as I was making my way back from the recreation hall to the bunkhouse.

I stepped quickly behind one of the huge grey steel manure skips and peeped around the edge.

Charlie Hern came out of the barn to greet George and the two men shook hands. I was too far away to hear what they were saying but their body language was relaxed and friendly.

George went round the Jeep and opened the rear passenger door. He then stood back and looked all around him. I ducked behind the skip but there was no real chance he would see me in the rapidly deepening darkness.

I carefully placed only one eye around the side in time to see George and Charlie lift the white CryoBank flask out of the vehicle and carry it swiftly into the barn. From the way in which they were moving I could tell that it was heavy.

It had to be full again with liquid nitrogen.

But did it also contain more EVA-tainted frozen semen?

I reckoned so, but I would still have to check.

Never mind the coldness of his liquid gas, maybe it was time to turn up the heat on Mr George S. Raworth.

‘What you doing?’ said an accusing voice behind me.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

‘Nothing,’ I said, turning round to find Rafael standing there. But it was pretty obvious what I’d been doing, even to Rafael.

‘You pick lock,’ he said.

It wasn’t a question. It was a statement and I could hardly deny it.

I had sneaked into the barn after George and Charlie had both driven away in the Jeep. Keith was in the office busily watching a film on the TV and I’d thought that all the grooms were either in the recreation hall or already in their beds.

I’d been wrong.

Rafael found me crouching down next to the feed-store lock listening for the pins to be moved into the correct position by my rake pick. He had arrived just as the door opened, his footsteps making absolutely no sound on the loose dirt floor of the shedrow.

He looked from me to the open door and then back to me again.

‘You bad man, Paddy,’ Rafael said. ‘I go tell Mr Keith. You get fired.’

He turned and started to walk away.

‘Rafael,’ I said clearly to his back. ‘If you tell Mr Keith, then I’ll also tell him that you are drunk most nights. Then we will both get fired.’

He stopped and slowly turned round to face me.

‘Why you do this?’ he said, pointing at the open feed-store door.

Think, I said to myself. Think — and fast.

‘I was only practising picking the lock,’ I said. ‘It’s my hobby.’ I pulled the door shut so it locked again. ‘Here, you have a try.’ I held out the two metal lock picks.

He hesitated.

‘You,’ he said, pointing at me.

So I opened the lock again, showing him exactly how I did it.

He was amazed when the cylinder turned once more and the feed-store door opened.

‘You thief?’ he asked seriously.

‘No. Of course not,’ I said, laughing. ‘I just like opening locks.’

I pulled the door shut again and grinned at him. He smiled back but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

‘Come on,’ I said, putting my hand on his shoulder and forcing him away. ‘It’s high time we were in bed.’

I steered him out of the barn and towards the bunkhouse.

Damn it, I thought. I’d have to have another go tomorrow.

‘Paddy,’ Keith said, ‘Paddleboat is running in the second race this afternoon, off at one-fifty. Make him look nice. The boss wants him claimed.’

It was half past four on Sunday morning and I had again reluctantly dragged myself from my bed in the darkness. How I longed for a Sunday-morning lie-in — even to only six o’clock would be bliss.

‘That’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Late decision,’ Keith replied. ‘He was always entered but we had expected him to be scratched. But Mr Raworth has decided that he should run after all.’

Interesting, I thought.

Today was eight days after the Preakness. I had travelled down to Pimlico on the horse-transport truck a week last Monday — thirteen days ago.

To my sure knowledge, at that time, Paddleboat had still been getting a large dose of clenbuterol in his daily feed and had been expected to continue doing so for the rest of that week, although, to be fair, he had not been given any since my return to Belmont Park a week ago.

But that meant there had been a maximum of thirteen days since his last dose and possibly as few as seven.

The New York Racing Association rules stated that no horse could run within fourteen days of receiving clenbuterol.

Was this another mistake?

A combination of the drug and some hard work on the training track had certainly made a noticeable difference to Paddleboat. He had bulked up considerably since I’d first arrived at Belmont.

Not that it necessarily made the horse any faster. George Raworth clearly didn’t think so, not if he still wanted him claimed and out of the barn.

I did my four, mucking out the stalls and preparing Paddleboat for some light morning exercise, just a gentle pipe-opener before that afternoon’s race.

After the horse returned from the track, I washed him down and made up his bed, then I set to work making him look as beautiful as possible. If I could help in getting the old boy claimed then he might have a happier existence with a new trainer, without the continual threat of a one-way trip to the knacker’s yard hanging over him, deferred only by the application of large doses of clenbuterol and other drugs.

I polished Paddleboat’s coat, plaited his mane and combed out his tail. Then I picked out his feet, blackened his hooves, and finally brushed a checkerboard pattern onto each side of his rump using a template.

He looked like a million dollars, even if the claiming fee for the race was only twelve and a half thousand.

If Paddleboat didn’t get claimed today, he probably never would.

Rafael came to see me as I was finishing off and he was clearly impressed by my handiwork.

‘You done really good job, Paddy,’ he said.

But he hadn’t come to compliment me on my grooming.

‘No more play with locks,’ he said sternly.

‘OK, Rafael,’ I said equally seriously. ‘I promise. No more playing with locks.’

‘You give me lock picks, now,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘and then I say nothing to boss.’

I thought that Rafael was getting rather above his station, but he had been put in charge of the barn when Charlie Hern was at the Preakness, and he clearly believed he had authority over me.

I had no choice.

I put my hand into my pocket and handed over the two small pieces of metal. Rafael took them, nodded, and then turned and walked away.

Damn it and double damn it.

What the hell did I do now? New lock-picks were hardly things you could buy at the local convenience store.

28

Paddleboat finished fifth of the eight runners, which was an improvement by one position over his previous run.

And he was claimed.

I removed his race bridle and handed him over to a groom from his new barn. I had surprisingly grown quite attached to the horses in my care and, when I went back to the now empty Stall 1, it was with a heavy heart. But, I supposed, it was for the best. At least the horse hadn’t been injured or killed.

Pull yourself together, I told myself; it was only a horse, and a not very good horse at that.

I walked down the shedrow to the office to find Keith leaning back in the chair with his feet up on the desk watching a rerun of Friends on the TV.

‘Paddleboat was fifth,’ I said. ‘And he was claimed.’

He took his feet off the desk and sat forward, clapping his hands together. ‘Wow! Who by?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘I just handed him over to his new groom.’

‘That’s great news.’

‘Why is it?’ I asked. ‘Surely there is one less set of training fees coming in?’

Keith shook his head. ‘Paddleboat was owned by Mr Raworth. He claimed him in January at Aqueduct on behalf of an owner who then never paid up. We’ve been trying to get rid of him ever since. I wonder which mug claimed him.’

I turned to leave but Keith called me back.

‘Hold the fort a minute will you, Paddy, while I go to the john? Saves me locking up.’

‘Sure,’ I replied.

He dashed off out the door and down the shedrow to the WCs in the centre of the barn.

The stable drug register was lying closed on the desk.

I opened it and skimmed through the recent entries, in particular looking for the drugs given to Paddleboat and Debenture.

According to the records, Paddleboat had stopped receiving clenbuterol in his feed on the Thursday before I had left for Pimlico, seventeen days ago.

I knew that to be untrue, but how could I prove it?

And, from what I could see, there was no record of Debenture ever having being given any cobalt salts. But then there wouldn’t be, would there? Cobalt was a banned substance.

Keith returned to the office but I had already closed the register and made sure it was back exactly as I’d found it.

‘Thanks, Paddy,’ Keith said, settling down again in front of the TV.

‘No problem.’

I went off in search of a quiet corner to call Tony on the non-smart phones.

‘I think it is time to start setting our trap,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘Who do you communicate with on your private email?’

Tony clearly thought it was an odd question.

‘Friends and family, you know, and other private stuff.’

‘Do you ever send emails to anyone involved with FACSA using your private account?’

There was a pause while he thought.

‘I’m in touch with my predecessor as Deputy Director. I worked under him for thirteen years and we’re still friends. I occasionally email him about FACSA matters, especially if I need some advice.’

‘He’ll do very nicely,’ I said. ‘I assume you trust him?’

‘Without hesitation.’

‘Will he keep things confidential from everyone, including the others at FACSA?’

‘I am sure he will if I ask him to.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Call him, but not from your office or your home phones, and certainly not with your own cell. Use the one you’re speaking on now. Explain that you believe your emails have been compromised and you are trying to set a trap for whoever has done it. Give him as much detail as you think is necessary but make it clear to him that he should never call you, or send you anything unless you have called him first.’

‘Do you really think my phones are bugged?’

‘Probably not,’ I said, ‘but it is better to assume they are than to get caught out later. After you’ve spoken to him, send him an email saying that you are now convinced there is someone in the FACSA setup who is leaking confidential information to potential racing targets. That should get our mole’s attention.’

‘Is that enough?’ Tony asked.

‘To start with, yes. It will put our mole on alert but not to the extent that he, or she, thinks we know who it is.’

‘Which we don’t,’ Tony pointed out.

‘I’m well aware of that,’ I said, slightly irritated. ‘But, in time, we might try to make him, or her, believe that we do, in order to flush them out into the open.’

‘Do you want my friend to reply to the email? I would, if I were him.’

‘Yes, tell him to send a reply asking why you believe there’s a problem. But don’t answer until tomorrow.’

‘Why not?’ Tony said.

‘Because I’m still working on what and how much we should divulge. If we do too much too quickly, our mole will smell a rat.’

‘Can moles smell rats?’ Tony asked with a laugh.

I laughed too. It eased the tension.

‘There’s something else I would like you to do,’ I said. ‘Tell Norman Gibson officially that the Maryland Racing Commissioner has informed you in confidence that a horse failed a dope test for excess cobalt at Pimlico on Preakness Day. Say that the information is not being made public yet because you have decided that FACSA should conduct a review into the misuse of cobalt in American racing and you do not want to send everyone into hiding. When that gets around your office there will be even more for our mole to think about. He’ll be desperate to find out which horse failed the test.’

‘So I don’t say which horse?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d be worried about our mole immediately alerting George Raworth. He might then remove the liquid nitrogen flask and we would end up with nothing.’

‘Have you found out whether there’s any semen in it?’ Tony asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘And I’m unlikely now to get a chance.’

I explained to him that I had lost my lock picks, without actually giving him the details of how. That would have been too embarrassing.

‘I could easily get a search warrant,’ Tony said. ‘We can’t risk that Raworth will infect any more horses with EVA.’

He was right. Of course, he was right.

‘But if we move too soon then we might lose the chance of catching your mole, and that’s the reason why I’m here in the first place. Today is Sunday. The Belmont Stakes horses won’t be gathering here until the end of this week at the earliest. If I don’t have the mole by the coming Friday, then you can get your warrant.’

I could tell that Tony didn’t like having to wait, but he liked having a mole in his organisation even less.

My only problem was working out how I was going to find the FACSA mole in just five days.

On Monday afternoon I had Tony write another email to his friend listing the reasons why he was certain that FACSA had a mole.

I asked him to explain how some trainers had been clearly pre-warned about upcoming raids, and also how he had brought forward the raid on Hayden Ryder’s barn at Churchill Downs by three days, only to discover that the trainer had arranged for the horses to be moved out on that very morning due to a tip-off.

‘Also tell him all about the journalist Jason Connor, including his trip to Laurel and how he died on the way home,’ I said. ‘Say that you don’t believe the medical examiner’s report and you are convinced the mole in the organisation is somehow responsible for Connor’s death.’

To be honest, by doing this, I thought we were moving things along a bit too fast, but my timescale was limited.

‘I need the mole to know that we are chasing his tail.’

‘But surely it would be better if he didn’t,’ Tony replied. ‘Then we could catch him unawares.’

‘Yes, ideally,’ I said, ‘but how would we? We need him to come out into the open and, this way, he knows we know, but he doesn’t know that we know he knows we know.’

‘Eh? What was that? Can you run it past me again?’

‘By reading your emails, the mole will know that we are aware we have a mole in the first place. But, I’m hopeful that he, or she, doesn’t also know that we are aware that your private emails have been compromised, so that he is unaware that we are giving him the information that we know about him on purpose.’

‘What if he does know?’

‘Then we will probably never discover who it is. That’s why we need to be very careful about what you should write to your friend. We absolutely must not let on to the mole that we know he’s reading it. Otherwise we’ll never catch him out.’

Life in Raworth’s barn went on as normal during Monday’s evening stables, except that Diego had decided that his self-imposed truce of the last few days should come to an end.

I couldn’t understand why. He had clearly so scared Maria that she hadn’t said a word to me in over a week and she had even ignored the other young grooms, choosing to eat her meals either alone or with Diego and avoiding the recreation hall altogether by returning to her room immediately after.

But that didn’t seem to deter Diego in his vendetta.

Twice he tried to knock feed out of my hands in the shedrow and, when I went to sidestep him, he kicked out at me, causing me to stumble into the dirt.

‘What’s your problem?’ I shouted at him from my knees, but he didn’t reply. He only stared down at me with his cold black eyes.

Things only got worse when I went for my supper. I had hung back in the hope that he would go to eat with the others, and I would come along later and avoid him.

But my plan didn’t quite work out that way.

Diego was waiting for me outside the track kitchen, together with his three Puerto Rican lieutenants, and he had a knife in his right hand. I could see it glinting in the late-afternoon sunshine.

I’d been stabbed before, badly, and it had so nearly been the end of me. On that occasion there had been two of them, and now there were four. But these didn’t have the element of surprise that the others had had.

This time I saw my would-be attackers early so I turned and ran for my life, shouting as I did so.

‘Help! Help!’ I screamed at the top of my voice, dispensing for once with the Irish accent.

I could hear their footsteps chasing me as I sprinted down the roadway but people were coming out of the barns to see why someone was disturbing their horses.

The footsteps behind fell away to silence and I chanced a glimpse over my shoulder. My pursuers had disappeared. Too many witnesses, no doubt.

I eased my pace slightly but I didn’t stop. I decided I would forgo my supper tonight and, in future, I would make certain that I was surrounded by Raworth’s other grooms at all times.

I kept going right down to Belmont Park’s huge grandstand, to where the last few of the Memorial Day holiday race crowd were still making their way back to their cars or to the train station.

Safety in numbers was my goal and I milled around among those waiting outside the clubhouse entrance for the valet-parking boys to bring their vehicles to them, all the while keeping my eyes open for a quartet of unwelcome Hispanics.

So intent was I at watching the roadway that I walked straight into the diminutive jockey Jimmy Robinson, almost knocking him over and causing him to drop the bag he’d been carrying.

‘Can’t you watch where you’re going?’ he said angrily, bending down to pick it up.

I’d last seen him five weeks ago in the lay-by north of Oxford, when he’d been mistakenly arrested for drug dealing, but had actually only been buying diuretics and laxatives.

Nigel Green in London had warned me he was coming to ride in New York. I should have been more careful.

I quickly turned so he wouldn’t see into my eyes. I had grown a beard since he had last seen me and I was also wearing my ever-present LA Dodgers baseball cap. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognise me.

‘Some people,’ I heard him say loudly behind me as I walked briskly away. ‘Not even an apology.’

I ignored him and kept going, against the human traffic, through the doors and into the grandstand.

It was high time I got out of here and went back to England.

29

Tuesday morning dawned with a dark and menacing sky. The humidity was up in the 90 per cents and the temperature wasn’t far off the same in degrees.

‘We have storm,’ Rafael said as we walked to the barn from the bunkhouse.

I was sure he was right. One could almost feel the electricity in the air.

‘No horse exercise early,’ Rafael said. ‘They go later.’

He was almost right about that too.

‘It’s dark here today,’ Keith said, referring, not to the weather, but to the fact that there was no racing at Belmont Park on Tuesdays. ‘So the horses can go out later. The track is closed anyway until at least nine, when this storm is forecast to be through.’

The chance of anyone being struck by lightning was always slight but why take the risk? That was obviously the opinion of the Belmont track authorities; or, more likely, they didn’t want to get sued.

Some years ago, a 22-year-old Australian jockey had been hit when out riding morning exercise on a racecourse near Perth. He’d died instantly, along with the gelding he’d been on. The fact that the horse had been wearing metal shoes hadn’t helped.

There was a dazzling flash of lightning followed almost instantaneously by a deafening clap of thunder, and the heavens opened, huge drops of rain initially making dents in the dirt outside before everything was overwhelmed by the huge volume of water falling from above.

For the next three hours, the Raworth grooms, plus Maria, walked the horses in turn round and round the shedrow in order to give them at least some exercise. We did our best to keep the animals calm but the repeated flashes of electricity and accompanying crashes of thunder put them all on edge, and us too.

By eight o’clock we were hanging around outside the office waiting for the elements to improve. Rafael went up the ladder to the bedding store and tossed down half a dozen bales of straw for us all to sit on.

Diego sat facing me, watching my every move.

He had made no comment about his attempted attack. Indeed, he made no comment to me about anything, not that communication of any sort was easy due to the incessant hammering of the torrential downpour on the barn’s metal roof.

The previous evening, I had remained in the grandstand for almost three hours, until the very last possible moment before it was closed up for the night. I had taken the opportunity to have a good nose around all the hidden nooks and crannies, especially in the four separate kitchens, where I had conducted a fruitless search for some leftover food.

Still hungry, I had eventually made my way back to the bunkhouse using a roundabout route to avoid Diego and his henchmen.

He was a distraction I could have well done without.

The weather forecasters had been rather optimistic. Nine o’clock came and went with the electrical fireworks still in full swing above us.

Keith came out of the office at ten.

‘All track work is cancelled for the day,’ he shouted over the din of the thunderclaps and the endless rain. ‘Even if this blows over soon, the track will be too wet.’

No one moved. None of us fancied going out into the biblical-style deluge, even for a late breakfast at the track kitchen.

My non-smart phone rang, its piercing shrill ringtone cutting right through the other noise.

Everyone’s eyes swivelled my way. Everyone, that is, except Diego, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me for the past hour anyway.

I took the phone out of my pocket and looked for a number on the screen. There was none, just the single word ‘withheld’.

No one knew this number, I thought. No one other than Tony and I’d given him the strictest of instructions never to call me.

‘Hello,’ I said, answering.

‘Jeff, it’s me,’ Tony said. ‘I have to speak to you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said loudly, ‘you must have the wrong number.’

I hung up and put the phone back in my pocket. Perhaps I should have had it switched to silent but then the alarm wouldn’t sound to wake me in the mornings.

It had to have been really important for Tony to have called but there was no way I could speak to him with all the others listening. And I wasn’t going to get up and go somewhere else to make a call back. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, we all went on sitting on the bales in the shedrow, waiting for the rain to pass.

But I sat there fearful that the atmospheric high jinks above my head wasn’t going to be the only storm I had to deal with today.

It was not until well after midday that I was able to get any privacy. The rain had pretty much stopped by then and, when all the others went to lunch, I walked round the barn to the bunkhouse to call Tony.

I went right through the building to make sure everyone else was out, then I shut my bedroom door and placed the back of the wooden chair under the doorknob so I couldn’t be disturbed. Even so I kept my voice to a minimum.

‘We have a problem,’ Tony said.

Houston? I thought, with a smile.

But our problem was, in fact, nothing to laugh about.

‘Someone called the Maryland Racing Commissioner’s office at eight o’clock this morning saying he was from FACSA, wanting to know the name of the horse that had failed the post-race cobalt test at Pimlico.’

‘Who?’

‘They don’t know,’ Tony said. ‘The commissioner hadn’t yet arrived at his office, so the man spoke to his PA.’

‘What was he told?’ I asked with trepidation.

There was a slight pause as if Tony was preparing me for bad news. My heart dropped.

‘He was told it was Debenture,’ he said miserably.

‘How could such a thing happen?’ I said angrily, hissing the words down the line. ‘Surely they should have checked who was asking. It could have been a journalist for all they knew.’

‘Apparently the man used my name and he was very persuasive, telling the PA that he had spoken to the commissioner last week, who had told him the name of the horse but had since mislaid the piece of paper on which he’d written it down. The PA knew the information was highly confidential. She had even been instructed by the commissioner not to tell anyone else in their own organisation, not even his deputy. It was partly because of the confidentiality that she assumed it had to be me calling as no one else knew anything about it.’

‘What time did you call Norman Gibson to tell him about the test result?’

There was another pause. More bad news?

‘I didn’t call him,’ Tony said. ‘I sent him an email.’

My heart sank again.

‘From your private account or from the FACSA one?’

‘The FACSA account, obviously,’ he said, somewhat affronted. ‘All FACSA emails are encrypted. They’re meant to be totally secure between sender and recipient. The mole shouldn’t be able to read them.’

Not unless he had access to your work computer and your password, I thought wryly. Or if the mole was Norman Gibson himself.

‘When did you send it?’

‘Late yesterday afternoon,’ he said, ‘after we spoke.’

‘So how did you find out that someone had called the commissioner?’

‘When he arrived for work at nine this morning, he called me only to make sure I had been given the right name. I knew nothing about it, of course.’

It had been a huge risk for the mole, but it had narrowed our search.

‘At least we now know that our mole is a man,’ I said. ‘That reduces the field somewhat.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Tony asked.

‘How quickly could you arrange a search of Raworth’s barn if you had to?’

‘It would probably take us at FACSA at least twenty-four hours to put everything in place but, if it was really urgent, I could call in the FBI or, better still, the local Nassau County Police Department. They could be on site almost immediately. Getting a warrant would mean finding a judge but they usually have one of those on standby. I might even make some calls now and get a warrant issued in case we need it.’

‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Do that. But, for now, we do nothing. We sit tight, while I watch and listen. If things start to happen, I’ll call you straight away.’

‘Just like in England,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That day back in England,’ Tony said, ‘when we set that trap by the road. You didn’t call in the police until well after I would have done. As I remember saying then, you have nerves of steel.’

‘Do you want to find your mole or not?’ I asked.

‘I’ll make those calls.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But don’t send any emails.’

Tony didn’t laugh.

I made it to the track kitchen for lunch just as the clock in the dining hall moved on to two minutes past two.

Bert Squab was already closing up.

I hadn’t eaten anything since my lunch the previous day, having missed supper due to Diego and his chums, and then breakfast because of the rain.

My stomach was beginning to think my throat had been cut.

‘I’m shut,’ Bert announced, spreading his considerable bulk as wide as possible and folding him arms in front of him, so that they rested on his protruding belly. ‘You’re too late.’

I could see several steaming dishes of food behind him.

‘Come on, Bert,’ I said imploringly, holding out one of the plastic meal tokens. ‘Give me a break. It’s only two minutes past.’

‘Two o’clock is the cut-off time for the groom meal scheme,’ Bert said adamantly as the clock clicked over to three minutes past. ‘You can still buy some lunch if you want it — for cash.’

He smiled at me.

Bastard, I thought.

Capitalism was alive and well, and living at Belmont Park.

For many people, and Bert was clearly among them, making a bit of extra money on the side was more important than making friends, even if the first actively hindered the second.

I’d done my utmost to be sociable towards him in the past but, far from being a friend, Bert Squab was now my sworn enemy.

Could I last until supper with no food?

I’d have to. I was damned if I was going to give anything extra to this obstinate oaf for food that was already there and paid for. And I knew for sure that any cash I handed over would go straight into his own pocket.

‘I’ll have to have words with my guv’nor,’ I said, turning away and walking towards the exit.

I hadn’t really said it as a threat, but I had quite expected Bert to soften and apologise, and then call me back to eat, but he didn’t.

It was only food, I told myself. Some people in the world regularly go without food for days on end. I could surely manage it for another four hours.

I went back to Raworth’s barn and hung around there, keeping my eyes and ears open for any unusual activity.

The storm of the morning had completely cleared away and the sun was now shining brightly in a near cloudless sky. I sat down on an upturned bucket at the end of the barn and watched as the puddles outside slowly evaporated away and the thick mud turned back into dry earth.

What should I do?

Tony had said that I had nerves of steel but it didn’t feel like it at the moment.

What was the worst thing that could happen?

Even if Raworth were to get away scot-free for infecting his rivals and the FACSA mole remained undiscovered, it wouldn’t be the end of the world as I knew it.

Sending in the Nassau County Police with a search warrant might secure the first objective but would, pretty much, rule out the second, at least for now, and that’s the one I wanted the more of the two.

So much more.

That was the reason I had been living like this for these three long weeks, busting my arse by day, sleeping in a lookalike prison cell with a flatulent Mexican by night, and sharing a bathroom, not only with the other eight human occupants of the building but also, it seemed, with half the cockroach population of North America.

I surprised myself by how badly I wanted to catch this mole.

In fact, I decided that I’d stop at nothing to get him.

I stood up and walked a little distance from the barn to call Tony.

‘Send an email to your predecessor friend telling him that you may have a lead on one of Adam Mitchell’s former grooms who, you understand, knows how Mitchell was tipped off about the raid last October and is prepared to talk about it. Make a joke of the fact that you have found out partly by accident because it appears that the groom in question now looks after a horse that tested positive for cobalt at Pimlico on Preakness Day. But don’t tell him the name of the horse is Debenture. We don’t want to make it too obvious.’

‘Don’t you look after Debenture?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It could be dangerous.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I can’t see any other way of getting our mole to show himself, and certainly not by this coming Friday. He may not buy it, of course. It is rather like waving a scarlet cape at a bull. Maybe he will charge, or maybe he won’t. But surely it is worth a try.’

And as the matador, would I get gored by his horns, or could I deliver la estocada, the final coup de grâce?

‘I thought male moles were called boars, not bulls,’ Tony said.

I ignored him.

30

I stayed close to Raworth’s barn right through until evening stables, waiting and watching, but nothing happened.

The horses spent the time in their stalls, alternately snoozing in the afternoon heat or munching from their haynets.

I wondered what dried grass tasted of, and how hungry a man would have to be to try it. I had certainly seen news items on the television where starving people had tried to sustain themselves by eating boiled leaves.

Thankfully, I wasn’t yet at that stage, although a dull ache of hunger had settled into the pit of my stomach and I was really looking forward to my supper.

At about three-thirty I stood up and stretched my legs, walking round the shedrow to stay in the shade. I could hear canned laughter from the office where Keith was again watching a comedy show on the TV.

I didn’t really want to have to chat to him so I avoided going past the open office door and retraced my steps down to the other end of the barn.

I tried the feed-store door.

It was locked. Of course it was locked.

The feed store was always kept locked except when Charlie Hern or Keith were actually issuing the horse nuts from the feed bins.

And the drug store within would also surely be locked, quite likely with frozen EVA-contaminated semen in the cryogenic flask hidden away in its bottom corner.

How I could have done with my lock picks to check.

Evening stables started at four o’clock under the close eye of Charlie Hern. With the departure from the barn of Paddleboat, I had been allocated another of the equine residents, a four-year-old gelding called Highlighter who was housed in Stall 15, close to the office and well away from my other three and, somewhat inconveniently, sandwiched between two horses cared for by Diego.

I had done my best all day to avoid him, but now I found myself right on his doorstep, even sharing a water tap at that end of the barn.

I left Highlighter right to the end in the hope that Diego would have given up waiting and gone to supper.

No such luck.

He came into Stall 15 after I had done the mucking out and just as I had finished brushing Highlighter’s coat to a nice shine. But he wasn’t intent, this time, on physical violence. Maybe that was because I was bigger than him, and he wasn’t accompanied by his back-up team. So, instead, he simply threw a full bucket of muddy water all over Highlighter’s back.

So juvenile, I thought.

Charlie Hern was already on his tour of inspection around the other side of the barn, and he certainly wouldn’t have been pleased to find one of the horses caked in mud. I didn’t have long enough to take Highlighter outside to the wash point, so I did my best to scrape the mud off his coat and out of his mane, brushing each vigorously with a stiff dandy brush. But, in spite of my efforts, the horse was still not looking very good by the time Charlie arrived.

‘Come on, Paddy,’ Charlie said, clearly irritated. ‘Get a move on. You know better than to present a horse to me in this state.’

‘Sorry, Mr Hern,’ I said meekly. ‘I’ll make sure he’s right before I go.’

‘Damn right you will,’ Charlie responded.

He felt down over the animal’s legs and tut-tutted under his breath, but not so quietly that I wouldn’t hear. Then he moved on to the next stall as I went back to my brushing.

‘Damn you, Diego, damn you,’ I repeated over and over in time with my brush strokes as I repaired his damage.

Consequently, I was the last in line as Charlie issued the correct quantity of concentrated feed for each horse.

‘Have you cleaned up Highlighter?’ he asked as he poured the feed into bowl 15.

‘Almost, sir,’ I said. ‘I just need to finish him off.’

‘Be sure you do,’ Charlie said sternly. ‘And check he eats up his supper.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, taking the bowl of feed and making my way back towards Stall 15.

I could do with eating up my supper as well.

I was still brushing out Highlighter’s mane and tail when I heard George Raworth arrive. He came into the barn shouting loudly for Charlie Hern, who was still down in the feed store.

They went into the office.

‘Keith,’ I heard George say, ‘go and make sure all the staff have gone to supper and then go yourself, will you? I need to talk to Charlie alone.’ I could hear him clearly through the wooden partitions between the office and the stall I was in.

‘OK, boss,’ Keith replied. ‘I think they’ve left already.’

‘Have a look anyway,’ George said.

I slipped out of the stall but, instead of leaving, I quickly climbed the ladder up to the bedding store and hid myself, lying down silently between the straw bales stacked above the office with my ear to the floor.

I glimpsed the top of Keith’s head as he made a complete circuit of the barn beneath me, without once looking up.

‘All clear,’ I heard Keith say as he went back to the office.

‘Right,’ George said. ‘You get going too.’

‘OK, boss,’ Keith said. ‘How long do you want?’

‘Give us a good half an hour,’ George said. ‘Come back after your meal.’

I heard the office door close and there was a pause, presumably for Keith to walk away.

‘Check, will you?’ I heard George ask.

I heard the office door open, then it closed again.

‘He’s gone,’ Charlie said. ‘Now what’s this about?’

‘I’ve had a call on my home phone from someone demanding money,’ George said, hissing it hardly louder than a whisper. But I could still hear him clearly.

‘What for?’ Charlie asked.

‘He told me I had a horse fail a dope test at Pimlico and ten thousand dollars in cash would make it all go away.’

‘Which horse?’ Charlie said.

‘He didn’t say but it has to be that damn nag Debenture for cobalt. Nothing else has had anything. Why did we ever think it was a good idea? The damn animal is useless and we should have recognised that.’

‘It should have been clear of his system before that race,’ Charlie said. ‘I was told he’d pee it all out in only a day or two.’

‘Well he obviously didn’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Charlie said. ‘I looked up the Maryland sanctions for cobalt before I even suggested it. They’re pathetic — a slap on the wrist and a five-hundred-buck fine, nowhere near ten grand. Just ride it out.’

‘So what do we do about tomorrow?’ George said.

‘In what way?’

‘Debenture is due to run in the last race. We’d better scratch him.’

‘No,’ Charlie said quickly. ‘That’s ideal. It’s been over a week since he ran at Pimlico. The cobalt will have surely gone from his system by now. Let’s insist they do another test on him. He’ll be clear. That would help our case.’

‘It is not really the damn cobalt I’m worried about, it’s the other stuff.’ George was sounding agitated.

‘Relax,’ Charlie said. ‘No one can possibly know about that.’

How wrong he was.

‘But what if NYRA do a search?’

‘They won’t. The positive was not even on their watch and no one would do a search for a single positive for cobalt. Others have been done for far more than that, and they’ve laughed it off. It wasn’t as if we used much of the stuff anyway.’

Well done, Charlie, I thought. Keep talking George out of moving the flask.

‘Look,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll get rid of what’s left of the cobalt, just in case. But relax. All will be fine.

No it won’t, I reflected.

My hungry stomach rumbled loudly.

I held my breath. Had they heard? It had seemed very loud to me. I went on lying as still as I could, silently berating my noisy stomach, without actually telling it that it was now unlikely to get any supper as well.

‘What time was the call?’ Charlie asked beneath me, seemingly unruffled. Even if he had heard a noise, he would likely have thought it was one of the horses.

‘About four o’clock.’

‘What did you say?’ Charlie asked.

‘I told him that I had no idea what he was talking about.’

‘And?’ Charlie prompted. ‘What did he say to that?’

‘He told me to think hard and he’d call me again in the morning.’

‘And did he tell you how you were meant to pay him?’

‘He said to get the cash together and take it with me to the track tomorrow. He’d find me there.’

‘What, here at Belmont?’ Charlie said.

‘Yes. Here. During racing.’

‘I reckon it’s some smart-assed lab technician after a fast buck,’ Charlie said. ‘He’s probably acquired a bit of information and is trying to make some easy dough on the back of it. He almost certainly couldn’t make the Maryland charge go away, anyway. What are you going to do then? Complain that your ten-grand bribe to some mystery man didn’t work? You’d get laughed at. Ignore him.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ George said. ‘But do you think we should dispose of the other stuff, just in case?’

‘No. We might need it. There’s a piece in today’s Racing Form that says Amphibious has recovered from his fall in the Santa Anita Derby and will run in the Belmont Stakes. It seems his trainer has been mouthing off that Fire Point is not good enough to be a Triple Crown winner and he intends to make sure he isn’t. We’ve come this far, George, and I don’t intend to give it all up now.’

‘OK. But maybe we should move it.’

‘Where to?’ Charlie said. ‘Do you really want your wife and kids asking what’s in the funny tank in the garage? And I can’t keep it. Not with Sophie sniffing round everything. Like I told you before, it is safer locked away here.’

George Raworth might have been the trainer, the big boss, while Charlie Hern was only his assistant but, in this venture, Charlie was definitely in charge. Everything about their conversation indicated so.

‘If he calls you again in the morning, which I doubt, you tell him to take a hike, we’re not paying.’

‘What if he’s not a lab technician but someone important? It might be worth ten grand to us not to have him create any trouble. After all, look at the prize we’re after.’

I assumed he meant the five-million-dollar bonus to the trainer of a Triple Crown winner.

‘But who’s to say he won’t then come back for more,’ Charlie said.

‘We might need to take that chance.’

‘OK, string him along a bit,’ Charlie said. ‘But don’t pay him anything unless you talk to me first. Got it?’

‘Yes,’ George replied. ‘I’d better get back home in case he calls again. I don’t want the kids answering, especially as George Junior now sounds exactly like me on the telephone.’

I heard the office door open and, presently, I could hear as the Jeep Cherokee was started and driven away.

Annoyingly, Charlie Hern appeared to stay exactly where he was.

Hence, so did I, hardly daring to breathe in case I was heard in the evening stillness of the barn. But I was well used to lying completely still. I’d had to do it in wet ditches before now, so a bed of soft straw was relative luxury.

After an anxious five minutes or so, Charlie stood up, scraping the legs of the chair on the floor. I chanced a look down as he came out of the office and watched his bald pate as he went along the shedrow to the far end of the barn jangling his keys. Off to the drug store, I thought, to remove the rest of the cobalt.

I gave him enough time to reach it, then I moved swiftly to the ladder and went down, leaving the barn quickly in the opposite direction from the track kitchen. The last thing I wanted to do was to meet Keith coming back from his supper.

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes to seven.

I’d missed my fourth meal in a row and now I was really hungry.

I took a roundabout route down towards the grandstand and then along to the main gate of the racecourse, crossing over the Hempstead Turnpike at the traffic lights to the Belmont Deli & Grill to spend some of my pitiful wages.

Never had a cheese-and-ham sandwich tasted so good. I even splashed out on a cold beer to help it down. Fabulous.

Next I called Tony.

‘The fish took the bait,’ I said.

‘Huh?’ he replied.

‘Someone called George Raworth this afternoon demanding money to keep Debenture’s positive test for cobalt quiet.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘I am not. I overheard him not half an hour ago telling his assistant trainer. The man apparently demanded ten thousand dollars to make the test results disappear.’

‘But who could do that?’ Tony asked. ‘Only someone in the Maryland Racing Commission could make that happen.’

I thought back to what Charlie Hern had said earlier. ‘Perhaps it’s someone who couldn’t actually make the test results disappear but is simply using the information to turn a quick profit by selling a promise he can’t keep.’

‘Then it could be anyone,’ Tony said. ‘How about someone in the testing laboratories?’

He was grasping at straws, even now not wanting to accept that one of his team had been so blatant in asking for such a bribe.

‘I doubt that,’ I said. ‘If it is anything like in England, samples are coded only with numbers so the lab staff don’t know the names of the horses that provide them. The only people who knew were you and me, the Maryland Commissioner and his PA, plus your mole. And you can guess who my money’s on.’

Tony took a second or two to digest that fact.

‘What else did you hear?’ he asked.

‘That the man would collect the cash from Raworth tomorrow afternoon during racing here at Belmont. Who from the FACSA racing section is due to be in New York tomorrow?’

‘I’ll check the roster right away. The weeks between the Preakness and the Belmont are fairly quiet, racing-wise, hence it’s a popular time for staff to take vacations, especially for those without kids who want to get away before the schools finish for the summer and all the prices are hiked.’

‘How about if you call all of them on their cell phones, even if they’re on vacation, and get your contact at Homeland Security to use his technology to find out where they are when they answer? You probably don’t even need to call them. Some new smart phones are trackable even when they’re off.’

‘I’ll try.’ He didn’t sound too hopeful. ‘He stuck his neck out for me when he tracked the Jeep from El Paso. I’m loath to ask him for something again in case he says no. It is our problem not theirs.’

‘I thought we were all on the same side,’ I said, slightly exasperated.

‘We are, but it is not always that easy. Each agency has to answer separately to congressional committees and many of their members have political agendas. If we’re too cosy with one another, they don’t like it. They then think we have too much of the power that they want for themselves.’

‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘Surely it’s for the greater good.’

‘Maybe, but I’m also not sure I want Homeland Security asking awkward questions, which they would surely do. Tracking Raworth’s Jeep was one thing, but helping us to monitor our own agents is quite another.’

Ah, I thought. Here was the real reason. Tony didn’t want to have to admit to other government agencies that he had a bad apple in his organisation.

‘Then we will have to catch your mole on our own,’ I said.

31

‘Paddy,’ Keith said. ‘Debenture runs in the last today.’

It was five o’clock on Wednesday morning and he came into the stall when I was with the horse in question. ‘Mr Raworth confirmed to me last night that he’ll definitely run. Make sure he’s looking his best, the boss is quite keen that he should be claimed.’

‘OK,’ I said.

It wasn’t a surprise. Not after what I’d heard between trainer and assistant the previous afternoon, but it did present a considerable difficulty. How was I going to keep an eye on George Raworth all afternoon if I also had to look after Debenture?

Tony had decided that, whatever happened, this would be my last day as a groom.

I had called him again before I went to bed to discover the whereabouts and roster of his agents, and he had given me the news.

Whether we managed to catch the FACSA mole today or not, the local Nassau County Police would execute a search warrant at Raworth’s barn at seven o’clock on Wednesday evening, looking for the flask of frozen semen.

Tony had actually wanted to move in first thing this morning but I had managed to talk him into giving me until after the afternoon’s racing. I had wanted longer but he was adamant that the raid had to be today.

That was because he had learned that Amphibious, the colt from Santa Anita, would be arriving at New York by air from California early on Thursday and he wasn’t prepared to take the risk that he could purposely be infected with EVA.

I couldn’t really blame him. It would be indefensible to allow another horse, a hugely valuable potential stallion, to have a future stud career ruined when we already knew the mechanics of how it was done, and by whom.

Try explaining that to a congressional committee, or to the jury in the civil lawsuit.

‘I’m not feeling too good,’ I said to Keith.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘My stomach’s bad,’ I said, holding a hand to my abdomen and pulling a face. ‘It must be something I ate.’

‘Soldier on for the time being,’ Keith said, not displaying any sympathy whatsoever. ‘We’ll see if you’re better later.’

So I soldiered on, mucking out my four horses and getting them ready for morning exercise.

Twice I rushed off to the lavatory, both times when I knew Keith would see me, and did my absolute best to make myself appear sick.

I remembered reading the book Day of the Jackal, where the assassin chews on cordite to make his skin go grey and clammy, in order to fake illness. I had no cordite to hand but, after finishing my morning duties at nine, I ran on the spot very fast for five minutes, out of sight in one of the stalls, in order to make my face flush red and to produce some sweat.

Then I went to see Keith in the office.

‘I’m really not good,’ I said, again clutching my abdomen.

‘I can see that,’ he replied, standing up from his chair.

‘Feel my forehead,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got a fever.’

From Keith’s reaction, you might think I’d asked him to put his hand into the open mouth of a starving lion. He shrank back against the far wall of the office, putting his arms up in front of his face.

‘But you might be infectious,’ he said nervously. ‘Stop by the track medical facility and get yourself checked out.’

‘What about Debenture?’ I said. ‘He runs later.’

‘I’ll tell Diego to deal with him.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll go see the medics right now.’

I walked out of the office and went back to the bunkhouse. I needed a few things from my locker.

By midday I was positioned close to the grandstand entrance nearest to the barns, waiting for George Raworth to arrive.

I had used the time since leaving Keith to perform a transformation in my appearance.

First I collected my disguise kit from my room.

My plastic wash bag may have been cheap but it contained some seriously expensive hair dye, hidden in one of the two shampoo bottles. I also selected a disposable razor, a can of shaving cream, some cotton balls, a comb and my dark sunglasses, along with my one collared shirt and the only pair of trousers I had with me that were not made of denim.

I stuffed the lot into a Walmart plastic grocery bag and walked down to the grandstand just as the turnstiles were opened for the early arrivals.

With my groom’s ID pass firmly in my pocket, I paid the clubhouse entrance fee and made a beeline for the nearest disabled toilet, locking myself in.

For most of the next half-hour I worked on my hair and beard.

By the time I emerged, my fair locks had turned jet black and my wispy yellow beard had been converted into a matching black goatee. The cotton balls had been lodged tight between my teeth and gums to change the shape of my face and the faded T-shirt and scruffy jeans had gone into the waste bin, replaced by more respectable wear. I even tried, mostly in vain, to bring some semblance of shine back to my faux leather black loafers.

To top it all, I added the dark glasses and looked at myself in the mirror.

Not perfect, I thought. My sister would have still known me but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. I hoped it would be enough.

Now I stood near the entrance, apparently studying the day’s racing programme but actually keeping my eyes fixed on the turnstiles.

The current structure was built half a century ago but, at almost a quarter of a mile long and nearly a hundred yards deep, it was still the world’s largest single grandstand for Thoroughbred racing with well over a million square feet of floor space, twelve bars, five restaurants, eighteen escalators, nine lifts, and enough capacity for up to a hundred thousand people. There was even a five-bed hospital tucked away in one corner.

The place would be full to bursting in ten days’ time for the Triple Crown showdown in the Belmont Stakes but, on the Wednesday after Memorial Day, a crowd of only a few thousand souls was expected. Consequently, two-thirds of the stand was closed off completely and even the rest felt cavernous and empty.

The first race of the afternoon was due off at twenty past one and, when the starting gates opened, I was still in the spacious grandstand lobby waiting for George Raworth.

Not that I hadn’t seen a familiar face. I had.

Frank Bannister, he who had looked after me when I’d first arrived at FACSA, came swanning through the turnstiles at half past twelve, using his metal special-agent badge to gain entry.

Tony had told me the previous evening that Frank might be here.

‘He has been detailed to be in New York by Norman Gibson,’ Tony had told me, ‘to make arrangements for other members of the racing section who will be attending the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival next week. There may be others too. It is largely up to them where they go when not actually scheduled.’

That hadn’t been particularly helpful.

When I’d first seen Frank arrive, I had lifted the race programme up to my face and peeped over the top. He went from the turnstiles to an information desk where he spoke to a woman, who made a brief phone call. After a few seconds, a man appeared from the office behind the desk and shook Frank’s hand. The two of them then disappeared into the office.

Nothing suspicious in that, I thought.

I went on waiting for George Raworth to arrive.

After about ten minutes, Frank emerged from the office and wandered off into the depths of the grandstand, in the opposite direction to where I was standing.

Much as I would have loved to follow him and find out what he was up to, my primary target still had to be George Raworth.

Only if he approached George would I be sure that Frank Bannister was our mole.

Not having heard the morning phone call, I wasn’t totally sure if a rendezvous was actually in the offing. Maybe George had told the man to take a hike, as Charlie Hern had suggested, and he wouldn’t appear at the track until it was time to saddle Debenture for the last race.

I went on waiting.

George arrived at five past two, but he wasn’t alone.

I watched through the glass doors as he strode confidently across the open forecourt towards the clubhouse entrance, appearing for all the world as the self-assured trainer of a horse that had won the first two legs of the Triple Crown. However, fifteen yards behind him, and keeping slightly to one side, was a nervous-looking Charlie Hern.

That complicated the situation somewhat, I thought. So there would be two of us following George. I would have to be extra careful not to trip over his other tail.

But at least it meant that the handover of cash was probably ‘on’.

George walked by without giving me a second glance and I stood waiting until his shadow was also well past me before joining the snake.

I tried to imagine myself as the mole.

If I were in his position, I would not simply walk up to George Raworth and demand the cash. First and foremost, I would want to ensure that I wasn’t walking into a trap. I would be wary that George might have called in the police so I would check things out, gauge the lie of the land, and bide my time.

In fact, if I were the mole, I would follow George around for quite a while before making any contact, keeping my eyes peeled for others doing the same thing. So there might be four of us playing ‘follow the leader’, with George taking us on a merry dance for much of the afternoon.

The secret to being a successful tail was not to get so close to your target that you were spotted, but also not to be so far away that either you couldn’t see what the target was doing or, worse still, you lost him altogether.

Clearly the best place was to be behind not only your target but also any others who were following him — to be at the back of the line, keeping an eye on all of them at once. It was easier said than done, especially if you didn’t know what the other tails looked like, assuming they existed at all.

In this case, I did know what Charlie Hern looked like and, if the other tail turned out to be Frank Bannister, I also knew him. My advantage might lie in the fact that I was counting on neither of them recognising me.

And also I was good at my job. I’d been trained in the British Army Intelligence Corps by an instructor who had previously been a surveillance specialist with the elite UK police Special Branch. ‘I know it sounds simple,’ he had said, ‘but the trick is always to be natural. If the target stops and turns round to check, don’t you stop as well. That would not be natural and will instantly give you away. Keep walking, go past him and, if necessary, double-back behind later.’

Of course, when the Special Branch tailed a suspect, it was always done by a team. Here I was on my own so I couldn’t afford to be seen at all, even if the target didn’t realise I was on his tail. Being seen twice would surely give me away, even if he didn’t identify me specifically as his former groom.

George walked briskly along the wide concourse and then back out into the open air towards the paddock, with Charlie never more than twenty paces behind him.

Charlie was being a fool, I thought. He was tailing George far too openly. Even if the mole didn’t know what Charlie looked like, he couldn’t fail to spot that he was following George, and hence know that George must also be aware of Charlie. My only hope was that the mole surely couldn’t mistakenly believe that Charlie was the police, he simply wasn’t good enough.

I stood on the concrete steps surrounding the paddock and leaned on the white metal railings. To anyone watching, I appeared to be studying the horses parading for the third race, occasionally consulting the race programme booklet in my hand. But, behind my dark sunglasses, I only had eyes for the people, in particular for anyone who was paying George undue attention as he stood on the grass close to a bronze statue of the great Secretariat.

Not that it was an easy task. As the trainer approaching a possible Triple Crown triumph, George Raworth was something of a racing celebrity and there were lots who wanted either to speak with him or get close enough to take a selfie with him in the background.

I scanned the faces of the other racegoers.

There was no sign of Frank Bannister, or anyone else I recognised.

The horses were led through the walkway under the grandstand to the track for the race and the meagre crowd followed, but George didn’t budge an inch, almost as if he was making himself as conspicuous as possible. Charlie Hern didn’t move either, continuing to lean on the white railings some distance to my right, all the while watching his boss.

I decided that, with everyone else moving through to watch the race, I would be too exposed if I stayed on the paddock steps, so I went back inside and continued to keep a lookout through one of the huge arched windows that ran down the rear of the grandstand.

George remained where he was for the next two hours, moving only slightly to his left to stand in the shade of the ancient Japanese white pine that dominated the Belmont Park paddock. He puffed out his chest and stood tall with his feet apart, facing the public enclosures.

His body language was broadcasting a very clear message. ‘Here I am,’ it said. ‘You will have to come to me.’

As far as I could tell, nobody suspicious did, not that keeping close to him was easy for me. Both George and Charlie endlessly scrutinised the faces of all those around them, watching for some indication of understanding at what was going on.

Twice I became aware that Charlie was looking in my direction. I was standing again by the metal rail, seemingly watching the horses for the fourth race. I didn’t look back at him. Instead I lowered my head as if studying my programme.

There was no shout of awareness, no movement from him whatsoever.

Charlie may have seen me but he hadn’t recognised me as one of the Raworth stable staff.

Without fail, for every waking moment since the day of my first arrival here, I had worn the blue LA Dodgers baseball cap with the peak curved down at the sides. It was the cap more than anything that had come to define me. Charlie had never seen me without it, not even at our first interview, and the fact that I was now bareheaded was thus an advantage in remaining unknown to him in the crowd. The variation in hair colour, the change in face shape and the dark glasses also helped.

Nevertheless, I decided that I shouldn’t push my luck, so I again retreated inside the grandstand away from his gaze.

But watching George through the ground-floor windows was far from ideal. It was just about all right when there was no one else standing on the paddock steps, such as during the actual running of the races, but when the people returned they tended to obscure my view. That’s why I had gone back outside in the first place.

So, after the next race, I moved my position again, working my way round to a hot-dog stand on the right-hand side of the paddock so that I was almost behind Charlie but still able to keep George in clear vision, albeit now with a profile view.

The afternoon wore on, becoming more and more overcast, and still there was no sign of anything close to being a handover of ten thousand dollars.

The horses for races five, six and seven appeared as if by magic through the horse tunnel from the barns, were saddled, mounted and then departed through the grandstand to the track, but George remained steadfastly in the centre of the paddock throughout, only occasionally glancing at the large TV screen to his left as the races unfolded.

He would have to move soon, I thought, in order to get Debenture ready to run in the ninth, and last, race of the day.

Frank Bannister appeared and I suddenly became very interested in his movements. But he wandered over to the left of the paddock area and never once went close to George Raworth. Indeed, he seemed more intent on watching the horses than keeping his eye on any of the people.

Or, maybe, that was what he wanted everyone to think.

So intent was I on watching Frank that I nearly missed it.

But not quite.

Something within my subconscious brain flashed a warning — a subliminal message sent from my eye to the cerebral cortex of my brain.

Gun!

It was hidden under a newspaper, which had slipped away only for a moment as the gun was thrust into George’s belly. It had only been visible for the shortest of split seconds, but that had been long enough for my mind to register the shape — a Glock 22C with silencer, loaded, no doubt, with fifteen.40-calibre expanding bullets in the magazine.

All my concentration switched immediately back to George in time to glimpse a splash of white as an envelope was passed out of his hand and into another.

The whole exchange had taken merely a second or two.

No one else appeared to have seen it, certainly not Charlie Hern, who didn’t move a muscle, continuing to lean nonchalantly on the white metal rail as he had for the preceding two and a half hours, yawning expansively into the bargain.

George himself, however, seemed totally shocked, standing there with his mouth hanging open in surprise, as his assailant turned and vanished into the crowd.

I, too, had been caught slightly unawares because the holder of the gun, the collector of the cash, had not been Frank Bannister as I’d been half expecting, nor any other man for that matter.

It had been a woman.

32

The woman with the gun was now my target and I set off in pursuit as she moved swiftly up the concrete steps towards the grandstand, both the gun and the envelope having been stuffed into the bag she was holding.

I hadn’t seen her face, not even in profile, as she had a mass of long greying curls that hung down across both cheeks.

Wig, I thought, as I struggled to keep up.

The movement of her body was keen and athletic, not that of someone old enough to have grey hair.

My plan had been simply to watch and identify the mole, and then to report back to Tony Andretti. But now I was chasing her shadow, hoping to catch a glimpse of her eyes to make a positive identification.

She went through the doors into the grandstand and turned right towards the exit. I barged past the other spectators who were on their way from the paddock to watch the race.

‘Sorry,’ I shouted to one elderly man as I almost knocked him over, but I didn’t stop to help. Instead I rushed forward, trying to keep the grey curls in sight.

The woman didn’t make directly for the exit but veered off to the left in the main lobby and disappeared into the Ladies’. I didn’t know whether she was aware that I had been following her. Quite possibly. It had certainly not been up to my usual high standard of covert tailing, more akin to a bull rampaging through a china shop. I didn’t really care, but now I had a dilemma. Did I follow her into the Ladies’?

She was armed and might be waiting for me to appear. I had absolutely no intention of walking into a hail of.40 bullets, expanding or otherwise, but I was worried she might be escaping through a window.

The men’s room was immediately alongside and I quickly went in there. Logic dictated that, if there were windows in the Ladies’, there would also be some in the Gents’.

There were just solid walls and electric light, and not a pane of glass to be seen.

I went back out into the lobby and waited, finding a concrete pillar to lean against so that it wasn’t too obvious that I was waiting for someone to emerge from the toilets.

There were loudspeakers in the lobby and I listened to the racecourse commentator as he described the horses making their way to the starting gate for the eighth race. Soon this deserted lobby would be filling with those leaving before the last race, making an early dash for the exits in order to miss the traffic jams. Watching the Ladies’-room door might then prove more difficult and I didn’t want to lose our best lead yet to the mole.

I needed backup.

Tony had asked me earlier if I’d wanted some and I had foolishly said no, fearful that a cast of hovering hawks might have frightened away the prey.

I pulled the non-smart phone from my pocket and began to dial Tony’s number.

‘Turn it off,’ said a man’s voice close into my right ear. At the same time something hard was pressed into the small of my back.

I turned off the phone and the man reached forward over my shoulder to take it out of my hand.

‘Move,’ he ordered, pushing harder into my back.

I moved, walking forwards.

‘Go left,’ he said. ‘Towards the elevator.’

He nudged me in the back again so I went to my left, towards the elevator.

I wondered how this could be happening.

Maybe there wasn’t a crowd of nearly a hundred thousand as there would be in ten days’ time, but this was no dark alley in some run-down city centre. It was a busy racecourse in broad daylight with security personnel within view.

Should I shout out to them?

‘Don’t even think about calling for help,’ the man said as if he was reading my mind. ‘You’ll never live to receive it.’

I kept quiet and walked.

We arrived at the elevator. It had a For Stewards’ Use Only notice stuck to the doors.

‘ “Up” button,’ the man said.

I pushed it and I could hear the mechanism start whirring somewhere overhead.

‘What’s going on?’ It was a female voice. ‘Who’s he?’

‘He followed you,’ the man replied. ‘He was waiting for you outside the restrooms.’

Now I was in deeper trouble. I didn’t like the odds. Two against one was bad enough but they also had guns while I had nothing more than my bare hands.

I dared not turn round but didn’t actually need to. I could see them both reflected in the brushed-metal doors of the elevator. It was not a clear image but it was good enough.

Bob Wade and Steffi Dean.

The FACSA lovers.

Not one mole but two.

The elevator doors opened and a prod from behind implied I was to enter.

‘Keep your face to the wall,’ the man instructed.

If he thought it would stop me identifying them, then he was wrong. But maybe he didn’t know that. Perhaps it was safer for me if he thought I didn’t know them, so I went right in, almost pressing my nose up against the back wall.

It could also be that they hadn’t recognised me. If so, I’d like it to stay that way.

The two of them followed me into the lift and the doors closed behind them. We started to go up.

‘Did you get the cash?’ Bob asked.

‘Yes,’ Steffi replied. ‘Did you deal with the groom?’

‘All done.’

‘So what shall we do with this one?’

It was a question that I was quite interested to know the answer to as well.

‘What do you suggest?’ Bob said.

‘Waste him,’ Steffi replied.

That was not the answer I’d been hoping for.

‘Not here,’ Bob said.

The lift continued on its effortless way to the top of the grandstand.

I knew exactly where it was going.

I’d been up here before on Monday night when I’d been searching for food and avoiding the attentions of Diego and his chums. This was the lift used by the race stewards to make their way up to their exclusive viewing eyrie, which was attached precariously to the very front edge of the grandstand roof.

The lift stopped and the doors opened.

‘Back out,’ Bob said.

I did as I was told.

Where were the damn stewards when you needed them?

They were watching the last race, of course, looking for wrongdoing on the track when it was all taking place behind them.

What were my chances?

There was a little good news and plenty of bad news.

The good was what Tony had said about the accuracy of law-enforcement officers with their guns. He’d told me that the New York City Police hit barely a quarter of their human targets at distances up to six feet. However, the bad news was that he had also said that his special agents were trained to shoot multiple rounds to make up for that. And, at present, the distance between Bob’s gun and my back was a lot less than six feet, more like six inches. He was hardly likely to miss from there.

How could I make the distance greater?

Running away might help, but not if he shot me before I had taken enough steps.

‘Turn round,’ Bob said, holding my shoulder so that I turned with both he and Steffi always behind me. That was a good sign, I thought. They were still trying to make sure I didn’t see their faces.

‘Walk.’

We were in a corridor that ran the full width of the grandstand from the lift at the back to the stewards’ room at the very front. It had been built into the depth of the roof.

‘Where are we going?’ Steffi asked, a slight nervous timbre in her voice giving away her anxiety.

‘There’s a door into the roof space down here,’ Bob said. ‘We’ll put him in there.’

Dead or alive?

I could hear the commentator trying to engender some excitement as the last race of the day drew to a close and I wondered how Debenture was doing. The stewards would soon be coming along this corridor on their way down to ground level.

I walked a little slower but Bob wasn’t having it.

He prodded me in the back with his gun. ‘Faster.’

I speeded up fractionally. If the stewards did come the other way, he could hardly shoot them all.

Sadly, we arrived at a door on the left before there was any sign of departing officials.

‘Open it,’ Bob said from behind me.

I did as he instructed.

Through the door was a world that the racegoer usually never sees — the void between the upper and lower skins of the grandstand’s vast cantilevered roof.

I was expecting to find only the inside of the roof but there was far more than that. Apart from the vast labyrinth of steel girders that supported the huge structure, there was a maze of pipework providing drainage together with miles of wiring and a gigantic electrical switching box, similar to mine at home but about twenty times bigger.

Stretching away into the distance was a wooden walkway with metal-pipe handrails down either side. The walkway appeared to extend the full length of the grandstand and above it at about twenty-foot intervals were hung a series of naked light bulbs to provide illumination.

I started to move along the walkway and the two of them followed, closing the door to the corridor behind them.

‘Stop,’ Bob instructed. I stopped.

‘Waste him,’ Steffi said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ Bob said. ‘Let’s find out who he is first.’

‘Why?’ Steffi said. ‘Just waste him.’

I heard an automatic being cocked behind me.

Was this the end of the road? Was it time to play the only remaining trump in my hand?

‘Tony Andretti and Norman Gibson know all about you two,’ I said. ‘You’re finished. You kill me and you’ll both be executed for killing a federal officer.’ It was the first time I’d spoken and I had dropped the Irish accent.

There was a silence that seemed to go on for ever.

Had I misjudged? Was I about to get a bullet in the back of my skull?

‘He’s bluffing,’ Bob said calmly into the stillness.

‘I’m not bluffing,’ I said quickly. ‘Your names are Bob Wade and Steffi Dean and the cops are already on their way.’

Bob grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me round to face him. He tore off the dark glasses I was still wearing and stared at me.

‘You?’ he said, clearly seeing straight through my disguise. ‘But you went back home to England.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been chasing your tails and now I’ve caught you.’

‘You seem to be forgetting something,’ Bob said, smiling and waving his silenced Glock 22C in my face.

‘Are you really going to kill a federal agent?’ I asked.

‘You’re not a federal agent,’ Steffi said.

‘As good as. I was invited here by your Deputy Director as a temporary member of FACSA. I am sure the jury will consider me as a federal agent when they choose to give you the death penalty.’ I hoped it was so, even though I doubted it. ‘Do they still electrocute murderers in New York?’

All the while I had been talking, I’d been moving myself further away from them, fraction by fraction, simply by rocking from foot to foot, shuffling an inch or so backwards each time.

‘The death penalty is abolished in New York State.’ Steffi sneered at me as she said it.

‘Not for federal crimes,’ I said. ‘Sizzle, sizzle.’

‘Shut up,’ Bob shouted in my face. Another inch away. ‘I tell you, he’s bluffing about the cops.’

‘And about the ten grand in Steffi’s purse?’ I said. ‘George Raworth has been most helpful.’

He wasn’t to know otherwise.

Another couple of inches away.

I looked at Steffi’s thick black hair, tied back in a ponytail. ‘They’ll shave all that lovely hair off your head,’ I said to her. ‘To make a better contact. The current will fry your brain inside your skull.’

I was quite certain that ‘Old Sparky’ had, in fact, long been consigned to history, replaced by the banality of a lethal injection. Equally as effective, no doubt, but far less dramatic. Nevertheless, Steffi was clearly rattled.

‘Shut him up,’ she demanded. ‘Or I’ll do it.’

She reached into her bag, presumably for her gun.

Bob Wade began as if to say something and he took his eyes off me as he, too, looked down towards Steffi’s bag. I didn’t need a second invitation.

I reached to my left and grabbed the handle on the front of the electrical switching box and rotated it a quarter-turn from ON to OFF.

With a loud clunk, all the lights went out.

I turned and ran down the walkway into the darkness as if my life depended on it, which it probably did, at the same time bending down to reduce my target size.

I didn’t hear any guns being fired behind me over the sound of my own footsteps, no doubt on account of the silencers, but I certainly heard the bullets as they whizzed past me before ricocheting off the steel roof girders.

I didn’t stop but bolted onward at full pelt, guiding myself by running my hands along the handrails on each side and praying that no one had left anything on the walkway that I would trip over.

I was still running at top speed when the lights came on again, just in time for me to see the walkway ahead take a sharp zigzag to the left round a large vertical pipe.

As I negotiated the turns, I glanced behind me.

I had run a good forty yards in the dark and neither Bob Wade nor Steffi Dean had followed. They were standing where I’d left them next to the switching box, and they were looking in my direction.

I hoped and half expected that they would give up and leave but they clearly had other ideas as they both started down the walkway towards me. Steffi fired at me, not that I heard the retort of the pistol, but the bullet zipped past somewhere close to my left arm and I heard that all right.

It was all the incentive I needed to keep going along the walkway deeper into the roof space.

I looked to both sides for some sort of weapon but the only thing movable I could find was a five-tread wooden stepladder, no doubt left behind by some idle workman who hadn’t returned it to its rightful storage place.

It was far too cumbersome to use as a club but I picked it up nevertheless and went on swiftly down the walkway using the ladder to break each light bulb above my head as I passed by. If they were going to find me, they would have to do so in the dark.

33

The walkway must go somewhere, I thought, as I continued to run down it. There surely had to be more than one way out of this roof.

I hurried on further, ever conscious that, as long as I stayed on the walkway, I was extremely vulnerable.

But dare I leave it? Was the skin of the roof below strong enough to take a man’s weight? It was a long way down to the viewing seats far below if I got it wrong.

My instinct was to stay as far away from the two special agents as I could. Distance between gun and target was my friend. All handguns have short barrels and are pretty inaccurate at anything over twenty-five yards, but these two were marksmen, Steffi had said so on my first day at the FACSA offices.

As if to confirm the fact, a bullet crashed into the ladder over my head, sending splinters into my hair. Too close. Much too close.

At last I came to the end of the walkway and that was all it was, a dead end. No door. Nothing. No way out. The walkway was only there to service the pipework and electrical fittings in the roof, not as an access to anywhere else.

I now had no choice other than to leave it but, before climbing over the handrail, I spent a second or two taking a mental image of the pattern of steel girders that held up the roof. Then I used the ladder to smash the last remaining light bulb, plunging the whole end of the roof space into near darkness.

I climbed away from the walkway using the girders like a climbing frame.

In a modern structure the steel beams would have had a circular cross section and be welded together like those visible in new airport terminals, but this roof had been constructed in the 1960s and was all made from H-beams held together with nuts and bolts, like a gigantic Meccano set.

But that was an advantage as it provided me with plenty of hand and foot holds as I quickly moved away from the walkway towards the back of the grandstand until I was up against the far edge of the roof.

The problem with the lack of light was that, even though Bob and Steffi were unable to see me, I couldn’t see them either.

So what was my plan?

Staying alive was uppermost, but I couldn’t stay here forever, waiting for them to find and shoot me. I had to get out.

I could hear the two of them talking but could snatch only the odd word.

I thought I heard something about a flashlight. That was not good news.

However, even with the broken bulbs, it was not totally black.

The lights were still on near the exit door, where I had run under them before finding the ladder. As far as I could tell, that was the only way out and my foes had clearly grasped that fact as well. In the pools of light beneath the remaining bulbs, I could see Steffi striding back along the walkway towards the exit door to cut off any escape bid.

Being as silent as possible, I started again climbing through the steelwork, also making my way back towards the door but keeping in the deep shadow close to the far edge, well away from the walkway. It was a dangerous strategy but I could see no alternative.

Where was Bob?

I looked back over my shoulder and strained my eyes looking for him in the gloom. I could just make out his shape on the walkway and he seemed to be standing on the stepladder that I had used to break the light bulbs.

A light came on above him. He had obviously moved an unbroken bulb from further along. I watched as he went back along the walkway, set up the stepladder and reached above his head to unscrew another, which went out. It came on again down the line.

At this rate, he would soon have enough light to see me, especially if he followed me into the girder maze. One advantage, however, was that with every bulb he moved, it got progressively dimmer near the door.

It began to rain. I could hear it beating on the upper skin of the roof.

It was quite clear that Bob Wade and Steffi Dean had no intention of giving up. They were determined to get me. Maybe I would have been too if I’d been in their shoes. Contrary to what I had told them, no one else knew. Silence me and they might very well get away completely undetected.

It was such a prospect that made me all the more resolute to get out of here alive. Of course I didn’t want them to kill me but I was absolutely damned if I would allow them to get away with it and to carry on undermining the work of their anti-corruption agency.

But how could I?

I edged closer to the door, making sure that I kept some of the larger girders between Steffi and me. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the dimness and there was enough light for me to plot a route in my head for the quickest way to the exit.

‘I still can’t see him,’ Bob called out from the far end. ‘He must be down here somewhere.’

His voice was partly drowned out by the noise of the rain and Steffi moved three or four steps down towards him before replying.

‘Maybe he’s hiding under the walkway,’ she shouted back.

I had thought of that and now I was glad I’d rejected it.

‘I wish we had a damn flashlight,’ Bob said, almost to himself.

‘I can’t hear you,’ Steffi shouted.

She moved forward another five paces.

I had to move. Not only was it likely to be my only chance to get to the door but, if she took another stride or two, she would be able to see me clearly.

I eased myself around the girder I was clinging to, trying to keep the metal between us.

The rain got harder, and louder.

Steffi walked forward another few paces.

‘Do you need any help?’ she shouted.

There was no audible reply.

She went further down the walkway.

‘Do you need any help?’ she shouted again.

She was now some thirty or forty yards from the door. Indeed, I was already behind her. It had to be now or never.

Once I started there would be no going back. My rapid movement would give me away, even in this light.

I swallowed hard and tried to generate some moisture into my mouth. This was it, and I was scared, bloody terrified in fact, but I was not petrified by fear. Indeed, it was the fear that drove me on.

I almost ran across the roof grid, giving a good impression of a monkey as I swung from girder to girder in a straight line for the exit.

I was almost back at the walkway before Steffi realised. Only five yards to go.

I leaped over the handrail and fairly sprinted for the door, yanking it open.

Something punched me hard in the right arm, almost knocking me off my feet. I’d been shot.

But I could still run — out through the door, along the corridor and back towards the lift.

I could hear Steffi shouting behind me.

My arm hurt like hell and I was dripping blood from my fingers, but I found I was laughing. I was out of that damn roof and I was still alive.

I pushed the lift button but the doors didn’t open. The bloody thing was down the bottom and I didn’t have the time to wait for it.

I’d be dead before it arrived.

I dived through a door marked ‘Emergency Exit Only’.

This was an emergency.

I bounded down the stairs, but they didn’t go all the way to ground level, rather they exited through double doors into one of the restaurants in the closed-off section of the grandstand. It was deserted.

The restaurant exit was at the far end of the room and I could already hear footsteps on the stairs behind me. So I went through the door into the kitchen only to be confronted with a mass of stainless steel — half a dozen rows of chef workstations with long preparation worktops interspaced with gas hobs and ovens below and extraction hoods and open storage shelves above. Even the ceiling was lined with stainless steel.

But there were no chefs. No kitchen staff at all. And no obvious route to an exit.

Damn it.

I was leaving a trail of blood droplets, a dead giveaway to my whereabouts, so I grabbed an apron that was lying on a work surface and wrapped it round my hand. Maybe it wouldn’t stop the bleeding, but it should prevent the blood from dripping onto the floor, at least for a while.

I had a quick look at my upper arm. The bullet had missed the bone, slicing through the flesh about three inches above my elbow. It was very painful but, thankfully, I was still able to use it.

I looked around for a knife. This was a kitchen, right? There had to be knives, but all I could find was a small vegetable knife with a blade about three inches in length. I’d have much preferred a nice heavy meat cleaver, but three inches was better than nothing. At least it was sharp.

I saw the door begin to move so I ducked down beneath one of the worktops, many of which had stainless-steel cupboards beneath.

‘He’s in here,’ Steffi said. ‘There’s a blood trail.’

‘How could you have missed him?’ Bob said, breathing heavily.

‘I didn’t miss him,’ Steffi said, clearly pained. ‘Do you think he bled spontaneously? Of course I hit him.’

‘But you didn’t stop him though, did you? You let him get out.’ Bob was clearly in no mood to be kind to his lover. ‘I told you to guard the goddamn door. If you’d done what you were told, we wouldn’t be in this mess.’

My eyes were down at floor level and I could see their feet under the cupboards, over by the door. I watched as Bob’s moved. He started walking slowly down the first line of workstations. I crawled the other way.

For some reason, it reminded me of the children hiding from the Velociraptors in the Jurassic Park movie.

Who would be the T. rex that would come to my aid? No one. The racing was all over for the day, and everyone had gone home.

If Bob and Steffi had worked together as a team they would have caught me easily. But, they didn’t.

‘You stay by the door,’ Bob said sternly to Steffi. ‘And don’t move this time.’

‘All right.’ She sounded cross. ‘But there must be another way out of here. The door to the restaurant can’t be the only one. How do the staff get in and out?’

That was a good question, I thought. Could I find it?

There followed a game of cat and mouse, where I was definitely the mouse, scampering around on all fours.

Bob moved up and down the lines of chef workstations, slowly advancing across the room. I did the same on my hands and knees, always keeping at least one line ahead of him. But I was running out of space — and of time.

Whenever I crawled round one end or the other of the workstations, I looked for the exit. Get it wrong and I’d be finished. There would be no prizes for trying to escape into a dead end.

I took a big gamble and doubled back. Instead of crawling down the last line, I turned the other way and went back where Bob had just been. It was another dangerous strategy as it put me between the lovers, hence there was definitely now one of them between me and any exit. But the alternative was no more attractive — guessing where to go and ending up with a bullet in the head if I were wrong.

‘Where the hell is he?’ Bob said, sounding so close that it was as if he was standing on top of me.

‘He must have gone out another exit. He certainly didn’t come past here.’ There was something of a sarcastic edge to Steffi’s voice, as if she was still somewhat miffed by Bob’s earlier comments.

‘You wait here,’ Bob instructed. ‘I’ll go check.’

I heard Bob walk away, his shoes making a slight squeak on the scrubbed tile floor with each step. He soon returned.

‘The only other exit door is locked from the inside,’ he said. ‘He must still be in here.’

Bugger, I thought. This isn’t going well.

Where could I hide?

Nowhere.

Most of the worktops had cupboards beneath, which were all shut with sliding doors, and there was no way I could open one without Bob or Steffi hearing. But, at a few places, there was just a single shelf about six inches from the floor that stretched right through from one side of the worktop to the other. Most of them were covered in pots and pans, and there was no chance of moving those silently either.

However, on my crawling travels I remember spotting one empty shelf. It was where I had seen Bob not just from the ankles down but everything below his knees.

‘I knew this was a bad idea,’ Bob said.

‘But we need that extra money if you’re going to divorce Angie and marry me,’ Steffi said. ‘She’ll take you for everything she can.’

Good old Angie, I thought. I wished she’d take him right now.

‘I need to talk to you about that,’ Bob said.

‘About what?’ Steffi demanded.

‘Not now. We’ll talk later. Let’s find him first.’

‘Not changing your mind are you?’ Steffi was getting quite agitated.

‘No, of course not,’ Bob replied, but his tone suggested the completely opposite answer. He very clearly had changed his mind. ‘Come on. Let’s find him.’

‘What if he’s managed to escape?’ Steffi said, panic audibly rising in her voice. ‘Then we’re done for. You heard what he said about the death penalty.’

‘Shut up,’ Bob replied sharply. ‘He can’t have. He must be here. In one of these cupboards.’

I heard him slide open one of the cupboard doors.

‘But what if he has escaped?’ Steffi’s voice had risen so that it was little more than a squeak. She was now in full panic-attack mode.

‘Shut up, woman,’ Bob said angrily. ‘And help me find him.’

Perhaps he thought it was better for her to be occupied than standing by the door dissolving into jelly. But it was more bad news for me. With two of them looking, they were bound to find me now.

‘I think we should go,’ Steffi said suddenly. She hadn’t moved. I could still see her feet over by the door.

‘What do you mean, go?’

‘Go. Leave. Get out of here before the cops arrive.’ All her earlier bravado about wasting me seemed to have evaporated. My talk of electrocution and Bob’s change of heart over a divorce had clearly unnerved her.

Bob was far more relaxed. ‘If the cops were coming they’d have been here by now. He was lying about that, and about everything else.’

‘I still think we should leave, now,’ Steffi said determinedly.

Go on, Steffi, convince him.

‘No way,’ Bob said. ‘We finish this.’ I heard him slide open another cupboard door.

‘But I don’t want to get arrested for murder,’ Steffi said.

‘You won’t,’ Bob said. ‘He was lying, I tell you. We find him and kill him. And then we get out of here.’

All the while they had been talking, I had been crawling until I found the empty shelf.

Silently, I eased myself onto it so I was lying with my back to the metal, with my knees drawn up. Maybe Steffi would pass the end of the workstation and not see me. I would then be behind her again, and closer to the door into the restaurant.

My plan almost worked.

As I had hoped, she walked right past the end without spotting me.

Now all I had to do was roll off the shelf in the direction she had come from. Then I’d be behind her. Easy.

But it was at that point when things started to go badly wrong.

In Jurassic Park, it was a falling soup ladle that gave away the children’s position to the Velociraptors. In my case it was a large metal saucepan lid.

It had been standing vertically on its edge on the far side of the large saucepan to which it belonged. I only touched the pan fractionally with my foot as I manoeuvred myself back onto the floor but it was enough to upset the equilibrium.

I watched in horror as the lid rolled gently off the shelf away from me and clattered to the floor, going round and round like a coin dropped onto a granite top, only ten times louder.

‘Get him,’ shouted Bob.

I stood up and ran.

A bullet zinged off the extractor hood next to my ear causing me to duck involuntarily. I reached the end of the line to find Steffi, but she was facing away from me and towards where the noise of the lid had come from.

I grabbed her from behind, holding her tight to me with my left arm and placing the vegetable knife up against her windpipe with my right hand.

‘Drop it,’ I shouted into her ear.

She wriggled and squirmed so I cut her neck. Only a little cut but enough to draw blood. She gasped and went very still, dropping her gun with a clatter to the floor. I used my foot to slide it backwards but I had no chance of bending down to get it because Bob was standing right in front of us, about ten feet away.

‘Drop your gun,’ I shouted at him, ‘or I’ll slit her throat.’

He did nothing of the sort. Instead he took two steps closer and pointed the barrel straight at me, lining up his right eye with the sights.

Steffi was shorter than me by a couple of inches so I ducked my head down behind hers so as not to give him a clear target to shoot at.

‘I said drop your gun,’ I repeated. ‘I will cut her if you don’t.’

A strange look came over his face, almost one of indifference to the plight of his mistress. Was he thinking only of his own skin, or had he decided there was another way out of his matrimonial predicament?

He took another step forward and shot Steffi from no more than three feet away in the chest.

The force of the impact threw us both backwards off our feet, Steffi landing heavily on top of me.

My first instinct was that I had also been shot but my mind and body were still operating normally.

For some reason I remembered what Bob himself had said to me on that very first day in the FACSA offices in Arlington. Expanding bullets are less likely to pass right through suspects and into innocent bystanders behind them.

How right he was.

But I feared that my relief was likely to be short-lived. I would be next.

I realised that I had landed on Steffi’s gun. It was sticking into my back. I grabbed it and dived behind the next line of workstations. Now things were a little more even.

But why had he shot Steffi? It didn’t make any sense.

And there was little doubt in my mind that she was dead. She hadn’t been wearing her FACSA bulletproof vest and her chest had been ripped apart by the expanding bullet.

She lay there on the tile floor in front of me, a pool of bright-red blood spreading out beneath her, with non-seeing eyes still wide open as if in surprise.

I crouched behind the workstation, gun at the ready, watching for the moment that Bob appeared.

He didn’t.

Where was he?

I lowered my head down to the floor and looked under the cupboards. All I could see was his ankles and feet. He was standing just the other side of the worktop.

He was a professional marksman, regularly practised, and I had only fired a gun once since I’d left the army, many years before. However, one never forgets how to aim and pull a trigger.

I reached under the cupboard with my arms fully extended, holding the Glock 22C as still as I could. The end of the silencer was only twenty-four inches or so from Bob’s feet. Surely I couldn’t miss from here.

I closed my left eye, looked along the sights with my right, and squeezed the trigger as smoothly as I could manage.

The gun leaped in my hand with the recoil as the round went off. It all seemed a bit surreal without an accompanying deafening bang, the only sound being the mechanic clanging as the gun’s mechanism automatically ejected the empty cartridge and reloaded. However, the scream from Bob was amply loud enough to make up for it.

I hadn’t missed. The bullet appeared to have caught him square on the right ankle bone and its subsequent expansion had almost torn his foot clean off.

I didn’t go to his aid. He still had his gun and I was in no doubt that he’d use it.

Instead, I ran for the door to the restaurant before he too worked out he could also shoot me at floor level.

Logic told me that Bob couldn’t have run after me with only one functioning foot but, nevertheless, I sprinted across the deserted restaurant, through the empty cavernous betting hall beyond, and down the stairway towards the grandstand exits.

Indeed, I didn’t stop running until I reached a lone uniformed guard at the security desk in the main lobby.

‘Call the cops,’ I shouted at him. ‘There’s been a murder.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘And the cops are already here investigating it.’

I stared at him. He knows? How does he know?

‘So where are they then?’

‘With the body,’ the guard said somewhat matter-of-factly.

‘Whose body?’

It was his turn to stare at me, as if I was the idiot.

‘The groom who was murdered. Over in the barns.’

Did you deal with the groom? Steffi had asked.

All done, Bob had replied.

‘No,’ I said to the security guard, finally understanding. ‘There’s been another murder. Here in the grandstand. In one of the kitchens. Call the cops again.’

34

Everything considered, it turned out to be quite a busy night for the Nassau County Police Department. Almost their total on-duty manpower ended up at Belmont Park for one reason or another.

There was considerable confusion and I seemed to be the cause of most of it.

Initially, in spite of my protestations that I was all right, I was dispatched by ambulance to the emergency room of a local hospital to have my arm dealt with. The bleeding had decreased to a mere ooze, but there was still a nasty gash that required treatment.

It was while a doctor was cleaning and stitching the wound under local anaesthetic that more police turned up at the hospital to arrest me for the murder of one federal special agent, namely Stephanie Dean, and for the grievous bodily harm of another, viz Robert Wade.

Try as I might to explain to them that it had been Robert Wade who had killed Stephanie and that I had been the one they had shot at first, I was eventually handcuffed and frogmarched out of the hospital and into a waiting squad car.

At the police station, I was photographed and fingerprinted, plus I had a swab taken of my saliva for DNA. However, it was the discovery in my pocket of a groom’s ID card in the name of Patrick Sean Murphy that caused the greatest excitement, and not only because the photograph on it didn’t resemble me as I now was.

It transpired that the said Patrick Sean Murphy, an Irishman, was being sought as the prime suspect in the murder of the dead groom.

My repeated pleas to the lead detective that I was, in fact, one Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley, an Englishman, on loan from the British Horseracing Authority to the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency, fell on deaf ears.

‘Call the Deputy Director of the agency,’ I told him. ‘He’ll vouch for me.’

But the detective didn’t believe me and the discovery of an United States Permanent Resident Card in my wallet, also in the name of Patrick Sean Murphy and with my matching thumbprint, was all the proof he needed that I was lying.

He kept asking me the same questions over and over again, and I gave him the same answers on each occasion.

‘Why did you kill a federal law-enforcement officer?’

He clearly took a very dim view of that.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Why did you shoot at another?’

The police had already done a powder-residue test on my hands. I was sure it had registered positive. And my prints would be on Steffi’s gun.

‘Because he was trying to kill me.’

‘And why would that be? Was it because you had already killed his colleague?’

I told him the whole story from the beginning at least four times but it was quite clear he didn’t believe me. It sounded too improbable, even to my ears.

‘Go and look in the roof space,’ I said. ‘You’ll find the broken bulbs and a bullet hole in the stepladder. And who do you think shot me?’

I showed him the stitches in my arm, which were now hurting again as the local anaesthetic wore off.

The detective changed tactics.

‘Why did you kill the groom?’

‘I didn’t. I don’t even know which groom has been killed.’

The detective consulted his papers.

‘Mr Ríos, a US citizen from Puerto Rico. Diego Manuel Ríos.’

I stared at him.

‘His cousin, Miss Maria Quintero, says that you and Mr Ríos had an ongoing feud and she claims you killed him.’

She was right. I had killed him.

I had asked Tony to email his Deputy Director predecessor stating that he had a lead on how trainers were being tipped off: the groom who looked after Debenture was prepared to talk. That would normally have been me but, due to my feigned illness, Keith had detailed Diego to look after the horse instead.

And because of that, Bob Wade had killed Diego and not me.

‘Where was he found?’ I asked.

‘Where you left him — in a barn, with a pitchfork stuck deep in his chest.’

Bob Wade must have acquired that idea from Hayden Ryder, who had tried to do the same to him at Churchill Downs. But Diego hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest or a special agent badge as protection.

‘I’ve already told you, I didn’t see Diego Ríos at any time this afternoon. I was over at the racetrack, not at the barns.’

‘Can you prove that? Do you have any witnesses?’

No, of course I didn’t. I had spent the afternoon trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

‘So why did you kill him?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘The murder weapon has your fingerprints all over it.’

Hell, I thought. That wasn’t good.

‘All the grooms have used all the pitchforks at one time or another. They will have all our fingerprints on them.’

‘What was the feud between you and Mr Ríos all about?’

I was not going there. It would sound far too incriminating if I told him it was over advances I had made towards his cousin. It was not a feud anyway. A true feud needed animosity in both directions. Diego’s had all been one-way.

I decided it was time I asked for a lawyer. Probably well past time.

‘I want a lawyer,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘It is my right,’ I said.

‘Only guilty men ask for lawyers,’ he responded, and I’m sure he believed it. In his eyes, suspects were all guilty until proved not to be and, even then, he’d probably still have had his doubts.

‘I’d also like to make a phone call,’ I said, ignoring his remark. ‘I think I have a right to that as well.’

He obviously didn’t like it but he shrugged his shoulders in acceptance. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘One call.’

I made it to Tony Andretti.

‘Where are you?’ he asked angrily. ‘There’s been a disaster at the track.’

‘What sort of disaster?’

‘I’ve lost two of my best agents,’ he said gloomily. ‘One is dead and the other is currently in surgery to save his foot.’

‘They were your moles,’ I said to him. ‘Not one mole, but two. Both of them. Bob Wade and Steffi Dean.’

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

‘Tony?’ I said eventually. ‘You still there?’

‘Yes,’ he replied slowly. ‘I’m still here.’ He sounded shocked. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

He was not happy. ‘I wanted you only to find our moles, not kill them.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Steffi Dean was shot dead by Bob Wade from a range of about three feet. She didn’t stand a chance.’

‘Bob Wade says an unknown assailant did it, a man with a black goatee.’

No wonder the cops had come looking for me at the hospital. They would have readily believed a federal special agent. Who wouldn’t?

‘Check the ballistics. The bullet that killed Steffi came from Bob’s gun.’

But I wondered if there would be enough of the expanded bullet remaining to test for barrel marks and scratches.

‘Can you get me out of here?’ I asked. ‘The Nassau County cops have arrested me for murder.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

He didn’t sound too hopeful or, indeed, particularly eager.

What had he expected? Perhaps he’d thought that I would silently expose his mole, only then for the villain to be discreetly retired from the service, rather than to face the full force of the law. Something nice and quiet that would keep the reputation of his agency intact. Maybe even to accept the death of Jason Connor as the accident that the Maryland Medical Examiner believed it was.

What he clearly hadn’t intended was having to wash FACSA’s dirty laundry in public. For the Nassau County detectives to be investigating the violent death of a special agent under the intense scrutiny of the intimidating New York City media, hungry for another fatal-shooting story, especially one tinged with more than a whiff of official corruption.

‘Can you at least find me a decent lawyer?’ I asked.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he repeated, without giving me much confidence that it would happen.

The thought crossed my mind that maybe Tony Andretti would be perfectly happy leaving me to my own devices, at least for a while. The media scrutiny would then continue to be directed solely at me as the suspect in custody, rather than at him, asking difficult questions like, ‘Why had I been released without charge?’ and, if so, then, ‘Who really had shot Steffi Dean?’

Part of me even worried that he might be quite happy to sacrifice me permanently, for the good of the agency. Steffi was dead and Bob could be declared medically unfit to continue. The cancer would have been excised from the body and no one need be any the wiser that it had ever existed.

The only problem would be what to do with me.

After his magic trick in getting me a Green Card from the State Department within twenty-four hours, I’d put nothing past the resourceful Deputy Director of FACSA.

I spent a restless night in a hot and airless police holding cell, in which the bright overhead lamp never went out and the toilet in the corner flushed itself automatically every fifteen minutes.

My arm throbbed and the stitches itched, but I couldn’t complain about the breakfast.

A segmented metal tray arrived at six o’clock loaded with copious quantities of crisp bacon, scrambled eggs and fried potatoes but, thankfully, with not a single grit anywhere in sight. I ate the bacon with my fingers and the rest with a white plastic spoon — the officer who delivered it having explained that knives and forks, even plastic ones, were considered too sharp to issue to violent offenders.

I was pleasantly surprised, and hugely relieved, to find that Tony had sent a lawyer.

His name was Marty Mandalay and he arrived as I was finishing my breakfast. He was young and brash, with a snazzy three-piece suit and slicked-back black hair, held in place by copious quantities of wax. I wasn’t sure I would have bought a second-hand car from him but his business card stated that he was a graduate of Harvard Law School and I assumed that, in spite of my earlier concerns, Tony wouldn’t have sent me a dud.

‘Don’t say anything at the interview,’ Marty instructed seriously in my cell. ‘Nothing at all. I will answer all the questions for you. Got that?’

‘OK,’ I said, nodding.

‘Not a word,’ Marty reiterated. ‘No matter what I say. Zilch! Keep those lips of yours tightly zipped. And don’t ask to speak to me privately. Trust me. Just sit on your hands and keep schtum. I know what I’m doing.’

‘I’ve got the message,’ I assured him.

‘Good.’

This time, the interview was conducted by the same detective as before but with someone from the State Prosecutor’s office sitting alongside him.

‘Now, Mr Murphy,’ said the detective, ‘let’s start again from the beginning, shall we? Why did you kill the groom Diego Ríos?’

I would have thought a simple ‘No comment’ would have been adequate but Marty clearly had other ideas.

‘My client, Mr Murphy, exercises his right under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution not to answer that question on the grounds he might incriminate himself.’

Marty had told me to keep my lips tightly zipped but, instead, my jaw hung open in surprise. For a start, I wasn’t Mr Murphy, I was Mr Hinkley. And surely one ‘took the Fifth’ only in court, not in a police interview. If I knew that, then my Harvard-trained attorney undoubtedly should have known it as well.

I wanted to say something — to complain that my lawyer was an idiot — but he had also said to trust him, he knew what he was doing.

I closed my mouth again and kept it that way.

The detective, meanwhile, wore a semi-satisfied expression as if he felt he was getting somewhere.

‘Why did you kill Federal Special Agent Stephanie Dean?’

‘My client exercises his right under the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution not to answer that question on the grounds he might incriminate himself.’ Marty said it again without any trace of emotion in his voice.

And so the interview progressed.

Question from the detective, same answer from Marty.

Neither of them seemed to tire of the game as question after question was answered in identical fashion. I remained seated throughout on Marty’s right, stock-still and stony-faced, while all the time squirming inside at the guilty picture the answers were painting in everyone’s mind, mine included.

Finally, after about two hours, the detective stood up and went outside with the prosecutor.

‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ I said to Marty.

He didn’t answer. He just put a finger to his lips, pointed at the mirror to my right and raised his eyebrows.

Yes. Stupid of me. I understood, all right.

One-way glass and, no doubt, a microphone picking up everything we said.

We sat in silence for a good ten minutes, until the prosecutor returned.

‘Patrick Sean Murphy,’ he said formally, ‘I am indicting you for the first-degree murders of Diego Manuel Ríos and Stephanie Mary Dean and for the malicious wounding of Robert Earl Wade.’

He went on to outline the date and time of the alleged crimes, and then he read me some further rights, but I wasn’t really listening.

First-degree murder.

There had to be some mistake.

35

It wasn’t Diego who made the trip to Rikers Island in chains.

It was me, as Patrick Sean Murphy.

I spent a second night in custody, this time in what was appropriately named the ‘County Lockup’, a metal cage made of inch-thick steel bars solidly embedded into the concrete floor and the ceiling.

I had complained to Marty Mandalay, my so-called lawyer, that, in my opinion, his bizarre replies to the detective’s questions had done nothing but make it more likely I would be indicted for first-degree murder.

‘I thought lawyers were meant to help their clients,’ I’d said to him sarcastically.

‘Trust me,’ he had replied. And then he’d winked at me, leaving me totally confused. I now wondered if, far from trying to get me released, he had actually been doing his best to get me charged.

The time seemed to drag on for ever, not helped again by having the bright overhead light blazing away all night. There was an electric fan situated behind a grille in one corner of the cage but either it didn’t work or the staff refused to turn it on when I asked them to.

Probably the latter.

I was not the flavour of the month with the lockup staff. ‘Cop killer,’ I heard one of them say to a colleague, so I would clearly receive no acts of kindness from this lot.

When I’d first arrived from the police station, I had been issued with a faded orange boiler suit with ‘County Lockup’ stencilled on the back in large black letters. Then I had been made to strip naked in the centre of a room full of correctional staff, before being thoroughly examined by them to ensure that I had no drugs, mobile telephones or other contraband hidden in any of my bodily orifices.

If the process had been designed to totally humiliate the prisoner, then it had succeeded admirably.

How could this be happening to me? I kept asking myself. I had done nothing wrong. Yet everyone else seemed to think I had, apparently including Tony Andretti. Perhaps I should have used my one permitted telephone call to ring Paul Maldini in London rather than Tony. But the Nassau County cops probably wouldn’t have let me make an international call anyway.

Was Paul Maldini even aware, I wondered, that one of his senior integrity officers was currently locked up in a New York jail? Somehow I doubted it.

At around nine in the morning I was told I would be going to an arraignment hearing at the county courthouse.

I had to stand with my hands behind my back through a gap in the cage door while manacles were applied to my wrists. Then leg irons were placed around each ankle with only a short length of chain between them so I had to hobble.

‘Is this all really necessary?’ I asked the uniformed officer as he none-too-gently locked everything in place.

‘You’re a Category A prisoner,’ he answered, whatever that meant.

I suddenly realised that he was more frightened of me than I was of him. I jangled the manacles and made him jump backwards in alarm. It was a minor victory in an otherwise dire situation.

I was loaded into a prison van for the short journey from the lockup to the courthouse and then escorted by two burly correctional staff to a holding cell in the basement. Here, after about an hour, Marty Mandalay came to see me.

‘Just answer yes to your name when asked,’ he said.

‘Which name?’ I asked. ‘Patrick Murphy or Jeff Hinkley?’

‘Patrick Murphy,’ he said.

‘But…’

‘No buts. Do as I ask and you’ll be out by tonight. Or maybe tomorrow night.’

‘Tonight,’ I said firmly. ‘I can’t stand another night of this.’

‘I’ll try,’ he said, but I could tell he wasn’t very optimistic. ‘The judge will ask if you want to plead. Say nothing. I will do the talking.’

‘How about bail?’ I asked.

‘You won’t get it,’ Marty said. ‘Killing a federal law-enforcement officer is a capital offence. Add to that you’re a foreigner, so there’s absolutely no chance of bail and I won’t even ask for it. It will prevent the judge having to deny. Better not to have asked than have it denied.’

I had to trust his judgement. What else could I do?

An arraignment hearing was similar to an appearance at a magistrates’ court in England. It was the start of the legal process.

The accused was presented before a judge to confirm his or her name and address, and also to ensure that the charges, or indictments, were understood.

‘Are you Patrick Sean Murphy, residing on the backside at Belmont Park racetrack?’ asked the judge.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

I wondered if that constituted perjury.

He then read out the indictments: two counts of murder in the first degree with premeditation and malice aforethought, plus one count of malicious wounding. It didn’t sound at all good.

‘Do you understand the indictments?’ the judge asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied.

‘Do you wish to enter a plea?’

Marty Mandalay stood up next to me.

‘Not at this time, Your Honour.’

The judge paused for a moment, looking at Marty, as if he was waiting for him to apply for a bail hearing.

He didn’t.

‘Remanded to New York City Correctional Department. Next appearance two weeks from today. Take him away.’ The judge banged his gavel to indicate that proceedings were at an end.

The whole hearing had taken less than five minutes but it hadn’t passed unnoticed by the media, who were squeezed tightly into the courtroom press area. It seemed that I was quite a celebrity.

But I was not the only newsworthy felon making his first court appearance on that Friday.

As I was being led away, the defendants in the next case were being brought in. George Raworth and Charlie Hern didn’t take any particular notice of me but I did of them. They also wore matching orange boiler suits but were neither manacled nor chained. They were obviously not Category A prisoners.

The sight of them cheered me up no end.

The planned Nassau County Police raid of Raworth’s barn had obviously gone ahead as planned, in spite of the murders, and here was the proof that the two had been indicted, although what for I didn’t know. What would be the charge for cheating one’s way to a Triple Crown? Fraud, maybe.

No doubt I would find out eventually from Tony Andretti. Assuming that he would get me out of jail as Marty had promised.

Rikers Island was as foreboding a place as I had ever set foot in.

The atmosphere was hugely intimidating but that, I realised, was the intention.

Somehow British jails at least gave the impression that rehabilitation of offenders was the highest priority. Here, it appeared, it was the punishment and dehumanisation of the inmates.

I was subjected to yet another strip search and my lockup orange boilersuit was exchanged for one of a similar hue with CONVICT in large letters on the back, in spite of the fact that I hadn’t yet been convicted of anything.

But it was the assault on one’s senses that was the most extreme.

Everyone seemed to be shouting at once — either the prison officers barking orders, or the unseen unfortunates incarcerated behind the cell doors yelling for attention. And the smell of stale sweat and rancid body odour hung like a fog over everything. It was as much as I could do not to retch.

I was processed once more — name, address, photo, fingerprints — and then I was finally placed in a stifling cell in the solitary block.

The cell had two doors, one inside the other. The outer door was solid with only a small glass window while the inner one was made of vertical bars with a single horizontal slot across in the middle.

I was pushed forward into the cell and the inner door was closed and locked. I then had to put my hands out through the slot in this door to have the manacles removed. The outer door was then slammed shut with a loud clang.

I almost cried in despair.

My court appearance had been at eleven but the transport to Rikers had not departed the courthouse until the end of the day’s proceedings. Six others had made the journey with me in the prison van but, sadly, none of the six were George Raworth or Charlie Hern.

They must have secured bail, I thought. Lucky them.

I had no watch and there was no clock in the cell. Time dragged.

I’d been in a cell before but not one like this. If I stood up facing the door and put my arms out to each side, I could easily touch both walls at the same time. At the foot of the narrow bed was a stainless-steel toilet bowl, with no seat, and a small stainless-steel sink, complete with a single cold tap that only worked if you held it down.

I’d had my fill of stainless steel for one lifetime.

Opposite the cell door was a small window made of solid glass bricks. It let in the natural light but it was impossible to see through.

Time dragged some more and, presently, a tray of food was offered through the slit in the inner door. I took the tray and, to my surprise, the food wasn’t too bad, although it was only lukewarm and rather lacking in taste.

How I longed for a bowl of Bert Squab’s extra-hot chilli con carne at the track kitchen.

It took me all of two minutes to eat the meal and then I sat on the bed and tried not to think about anything much in particular. It was too depressing.

My job at the BHA suddenly seemed rather attractive, but anything would be better than this. What would Faye say if she knew where I was? She would certainly have given the prison guards what for about my treatment.

The square of light in the window slowly faded away to darkness.

It must be nearly nine o’clock, I thought. Another day gone.

I lay down on the bed and stared at the concrete ceiling. Amazingly, in spite of the constant bright electric light, I drifted off to sleep.

I was woken by the outer cell door being opened by two prison officers.

‘On your feet, Murphy,’ said one of them loudly. ‘Hands.’

I put my hands behind my back and out through the slot in the inner door. The manacles were reapplied to my wrists.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked.

‘You’re being transferred,’ he replied without any further explanation.

The two officers escorted me from the solitary wing back into the main part of the prison. Oh God, I thought, I’m going to have to share a cell. All those horrific stories of life in American jails came into my mind and a touch of panic came along with them.

But we didn’t go to any of the other cell blocks. Instead, we headed to the reception area where I had arrived earlier. A clock on the wall showed it was three in the morning.

‘Patrick Sean Murphy?’ asked another uniformed officer, consulting a clipboard.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Transfer to Sing Sing Prison.’

‘Now?’ I said. ‘But it’s the middle of the night.’

‘So?’

Clearly transfers between prisons at such an hour were not unusual.

Leg irons were reapplied and I hobbled my way out to the prison van, a blue truck with ‘New York State Department of Corrections’ painted along each side. I was locked into one of its internal cells and I could hear as the engine was started and we set off.

I didn’t get to Sing Sing.

Almost immediately we were clear of the Rikers Island prison gates, the cell door was opened.

‘Come on,’ said Tony, jangling a bunch of keys at me, ‘let’s get you out of those irons.’

I almost cried again, this time from relief.

‘You took your bloody time,’ I said.

36

How an hour can change a man’s life.

At three o’clock in the morning I had been in leg irons and manacles in one of the most intimidating places on earth yet, by four, I was stretched out in a luxurious leather armchair aboard a US government private jet, en route from LaGuardia Airport in New York to Andrews Base outside Washington, DC.

I had also swapped the prison-issue orange boilersuit for a check shirt, chinos and slip-on leather brogues that Tony had thoughtfully brought with him from my stash of clothes in his guest-room closet.

Tony clearly wasn’t eager to talk about the happenings in the grandstand on Wednesday evening. Twice he ignored my inquiry about ballistic tests on the bullet that had killed Steffi Dean. It was as if he was somehow embarrassed by it all.

So I asked him about the other events of the evening instead. ‘How was Diego Ríos found?’

‘The horse he was with never turned up at the paddock from the receiving barn.’

‘Debenture,’ I said.

‘Yes. That’s it. It seems George Raworth sent someone to find out where he was and they found Diego Ríos with a pitchfork through his heart, and the horse still in the stall. Needless to say, the race went ahead without Debenture.’

And I had wondered in the roof how the old horse was doing.

‘I’m surprised it went ahead at all.’

‘The others were at the gate before Ríos was found.’

‘Tell me about the raid on Raworth’s barn,’ I said.

‘It all went like clockwork,’ he replied, smiling broadly. ‘The Nassau County Police turned up with their search warrant and went straight to the barn drug store, as you had suggested. They bagged up everything including the cryo-flask. Raworth and his assistant…’

‘Charlie Hern?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘They were both arrested on suspicion of fraud, and of animal cruelty.’

‘Animal cruelty?’ I said. ‘That was imaginative.’

Tony laughed. ‘It was the best we could think of at the time.’

‘Unbelievably, I saw them at the Nassau County Courthouse yesterday morning. I was leaving my arraignment hearing as they were coming in for theirs. I presume they both got bail as neither went to Rikers with me.’

‘Indeed they did,’ Tony said. ‘A hundred-thousand-dollar bond each, plus a condition that they may not go within five hundred feet of any racetrack or any horse barn. NYRA have moved quickly to revoke his trainer’s licence so he can’t act as a trainer for the Belmont Stakes. His horses have already been transferred to other stables.’

‘Including Fire Point?’ I asked.

‘Especially Fire Point. He’s gone to another trainer at Belmont Park. Someone called Sidney Austin.’

I nodded. I’d heard of him.

I wondered about Raworth’s staff. He had three barns across the country but it was those at Belmont I was concerned about, in particular Keith, Victor, Rafael, Maria and Chuck, the yard boy. They would have lost not only their jobs, but their homes and keep as well.

I could only hope that, like the horses, they would soon be taken on by other trainers. I feared most for old Chuck and his trusty broom. I had been told by Keith that Raworth had acquired Chuck along with the barn when he’d first arrived at Belmont, but maybe his time would now be up.

There was nothing I could do for them but that didn’t stop me worrying.

Maybe Bert Squab would give them a meal or two for free.

But probably not.

We landed at Andrews just before five, as the sky was lightening in the east. Harriet was there to drive us back to their place. Tony sat up front while I was in the back.

‘What about Bob Wade?’ I asked. ‘How’s his foot?’

‘He lost it,’ Tony said.

Was I sorry? No, not really.

At least I’d left him alive, which is more than he would have done for me.

‘Is he under arrest?’ I asked.

There was a pause from the front seat.

‘He’s not, is he?’ I said.

‘Not at this time,’ Tony said in his official ‘Deputy Director’ tone.

‘Why not?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer.

It was much more convenient for FACSA if everyone believed that both Steffi Dean and Diego Ríos had been murdered by the Irish groom, Patrick Sean Murphy. Public confidence would not be compromised, as would certainly be the case if it became known that one of the Agency’s own had been responsible. A high-profile trial, and all the media attention it would generate, would not be very welcome.

‘We may not have secured a conviction,’ Tony said.

‘Surely there’s enough evidence.’

‘The ballistics are inconclusive and it would largely be your word against Bob’s. Could we take the chance? It is sometimes pretty difficult to get a jury to convict even when the evidence is overwhelming.’

Ask O.J. Simpson’s prosecutor, I thought.

‘So what happens to Bob now?’ I asked.

‘He’s been retired from the service,’ Tony replied. ‘Supposedly because he’s medically unfit, but he knows the true reason. He has effectively been dismissed, losing his benefits and his pension.’

By benefits he meant government-funded medical insurance for life.

‘Did you question him about warning people of upcoming raids?’

‘We certainly did.’

‘And how about Jason Connor? Couldn’t you at least arrest him for that?’

There was a short silence.

‘We decided that such an arrest would not be in the best interests of the Agency.’

‘Who is we?’ I asked.

‘The Director and I.’

‘Why?’

‘Other than the collection of cash from George Raworth at Belmont Park on the day Steffi Dean was killed, we had no real evidence of racketeering and absolutely nothing concerning the death of Jason Connor. So we cut a deal.’

‘What deal?’

‘That Bob would leave the agency and face no criminal charges but, in return, he would tell us everything that had been going on.’

Tony paused and I waited patiently for him to continue.

‘Over the years Bob had set up quite an operation with nearly a hundred trainers and breeders. Anyone that he came into contact with during his normal agency work.’ Tony laughed. ‘He effectively sold them insurance. They paid him monthly premiums on the understanding that he would warn them if there was a planned FACSA raid, or even if any out-of-competition drug testing was due to take place at their stables.’

‘How much was this monthly premium?’ I asked.

‘Not a lot. It depended on the trainer, but it was always less than a hundred dollars, sometimes only fifty. Not enough for anyone to worry about.’

But even fifty dollars a month was six hundred a year. Times that by a hundred trainers and the sum would soon add up.

‘Was Hayden Ryder one of the trainers who paid?’

‘Yes,’ Tony said.

So that was why Ryder had been angry enough to go for Bob with a pitchfork. It had been his bad luck that Trudi Harding had seen it and shot him.

‘What did Bob say about Jason Connor?’ I asked.

‘He refused to speak about him. He knew he was on firm ground as the Maryland Medical Examiner had already declared that Connor’s death was an accident.’

‘But you still don’t believe it?’

‘No,’ Tony said. ‘There was something rather cocky about Bob Dean’s demeanour when I was questioning him about it, as if he knew we knew but there was nothing we could do about it.’

And there wasn’t.

‘Where did the money go?’ I asked. ‘That sort of cash doesn’t appear anywhere on Bob’s bank statements.’

I knew because I’d checked.

‘His elderly mother has dementia,’ Tony said, ‘and Bob has power of attorney over her affairs. It all went directly into her bank account.’

‘But then where?’

‘The mother is in a nursing home. The money paid for her care. Bob claims that was why he set the scheme up in the first place but he was making more than was required. He withdrew the balance in cash.’

‘So why were he and Steffi trying to get ten grand out of George Raworth?’

‘Raworth was not one of his regular clients and Bob claims it was Steffi’s idea to get some quick extra. It seems she wasn’t happy that most of the other money went to the mother.’

I bet she wasn’t. Steffi had been the greedy one. It had been their undoing.

‘Did Bob give you the names of all the trainers and breeders who were paying him?’

‘That was part of the deal.’

‘What are you going to do to them?’ I asked.

‘There’s not much we can do. It’s hardly illegal to help pay for an old lady’s nursing care. According to Bob, that’s what they were told — a contribution, he called it.’

‘You could always send in the drug testers unannounced.’

Tony laughed. ‘We already have plans to do just that.’

I looked out of the car window as we sped westward along the DC Beltway towards Fairfax. Washington was waking up and the roads were already busy.

‘I heard Bob and Steffi talking when I was hiding from them,’ I said. ‘Steffi was expecting Bob to leave his wife and marry her. I was amazed when he shot her.’

‘We interviewed Mrs Wade yesterday. She told us that those plans had been put on hold. Bob had promised her to give their marriage another chance, for the sake of their daughters. Not that it will survive now. She was apoplectic with rage when we told her that Bob had spent two nights in a New York hotel with Steffi Dean earlier in the week. He’d told his wife he was on an official agency assignment, when he’d actually taken three days of his annual vacation.’

‘Did she know about his other little sideline?’

‘She said not. She thought the nursing home was paid for by Medicare. She is absolutely furious with Bob about that too.’

So Bob Wade had lost his job, his benefits, his pension, his marriage and his right foot, but not his liberty.

Was it enough?

It seemed it would have to be.

I flew back overnight to London on a British Airways super-jumbo.

‘Mr Hinkley, you’ve been upgraded to first class,’ said the man behind the check-in desk.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and wondered if Tony had anything to do with it. I expected so. For someone who could arrange a Green Card in twenty-four hours and spirit an inmate out of Rikers Island, fixing an upgrade would have been child’s play.

I relaxed into my first-class seat with a glass of chilled champagne and thought about my future.

Would I stay with the BHA?

I wasn’t sure.

Paul Maldini had been keen to have me back — stay for as long as you need, provided you come back eventually.

I’d been away for over five weeks — five weeks of excitement and danger. Would I be able to settle back into my old routine?

I put off the decision by taking a week’s leave, spending much of it with my sister. The renewed chemo had made Faye feel ill again and her skin looked pale and almost transparent when I first went to see her. But her spirits were high.

‘It is good news,’ she said, forcing a wan smile. ‘My doctor thinks we caught it just in time.’

Good, I thought. But both of us knew it would be back, and that we wouldn’t always manage to catch it just in time.

The following week I went back to work at BHA headquarters in High Holborn.

‘Had a good holiday?’ asked one of the admin staff.

‘Great, thanks,’ I said.

I went along the corridor to my office and sat down at my desk.

There were hundreds of unopened emails in my inbox. I sighed and set to work replying to some of the most urgent.

At noon, the phone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said, answering.

‘Hi, Jeff,’ said a familiar voice. ‘How are things?’

‘Great, Tony, thanks.’

‘Did you see the Belmont on Saturday?’

‘Sure did,’ I replied. ‘It was on late here.’

I had watched the race live on television. Fire Point, now trained by Sidney Austin and ridden by Jimmy Robertson, had won the Belmont Stakes by five lengths from Amphibious, going away.

‘Makes you think, eh?’ Tony said.

‘It sure does.’

The irony was not lost on either of us that maybe, just maybe, Fire Point had been good enough all along to win the Triple Crown without the need for George Raworth and Charlie Hern to nobble the opposition. Perhaps they would then have deserved the kudos and won the five-million-dollar trainer bonus fair and square. As it was, they were facing financial ruin due to the expected lawsuits from the owners of the five EVA-infected horses, plus a long stretch on Rikers Island for fraud and animal cruelty.

‘Any other news?’ I asked.

‘Angie Wade has officially filed for divorce.’

She who would take Bob for everything she could.

‘Anything else?’

‘Yes. One other thing. I thought you might be interested in the following piece that appeared in today’s New York Times.’

He read it out to me:

But you should never believe anything you read in the newspapers.

‘So Patrick Sean Murphy is officially no more,’ I said. ‘Is the case now closed?’

‘Indeed it is,’ Tony replied. ‘How are you settling back into life as Jefferson Roosevelt Hinkley?’

‘I’m working on it.’