Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

  Meanwhile, the target moved away, walking fast along the line of bookmakers, dodging other racegoers, some of whom were running towards the spot behind him where a woman had begun screaming loudly.

  I went on following the target while Nigel went to tend to the victim.

  So that was why he’d come. Not to meet or to talk but to kill.

  I followed him along to the end of the grandstand, where the food stalls were doing brisk business. He turned right and started up the slope towards the south exit. I hurried after him, the need for stealth now ended.

  He glanced back over his shoulder, noticed me pushing my way through the hamburger queue, and began to run.

  I ran after him, towards the entrance, where late arrivals were still streaming through the turnstiles.

  The official at the exit gate alongside the turnstiles wouldn’t let the target out. He kept asking for his ticket so it could be scanned for reentry.

  I was by now just a few feet away. The target looked up and saw me watching him.

  He panicked and reached into his coat pocket for the knife, its blade still showing red.

  “Get back,” he shouted, waving the knife in front of him. “Get back, all of you.”

  I stepped back a pace or two while others moved much farther away.

  “Give it up,” I said to him. “There’s no escape.”

  He looked around with wide eyes and grabbed hold of the gateman, who had been cornered next to his gate.

  “Open the gate,” the target ordered, ignoring the two large policemen in bright yellow jackets who had appeared on its far side, one of whom was talking urgently into his radio. “Open the bloody gate!” He was desperate.

  The gateman tried to comply, but in his haste and nervousness he couldn’t get the latch to open.

  “Give yourself up,” I shouted, but the target simply waved his knife more vigorously, slashing it towards me.

  I retreated a few more steps.

  More police arrived and a standoff ensued, with the target holding the unfortunate gateman in his left hand, with the knife in his right.

  “Open the gate or I’ll kill him.” The knife was close to the gateman’s neck.

  “Let him go and then we’ll open the gate,” shouted one of the policemen on the far side.

  “No,” yelled the target in escalating distress. “Open the gate first.”

  The impasse continued and was finally broken only when one of the newly arrived police officers stepped forward and shot him with a Taser stun gun.

  The target instantly dropped to the ground, his body writhing around uncontrollably from the multithousand-volt electric shocks delivered by the Taser. Two more policemen came forward, carefully removing the knife before bending the target’s arm behind his back and applying a pair of sturdy handcuffs to his wrists.

  Satisfied, they stood up, leaving the target lying facedown on the cold, wet tarmac.

  “Who is he?” one of them asked me.

  “Matthew Unwin,” I said. “He’s a banned ex–racehorse trainer.”

  “Banned?” he said. “Banned from what?”

  “All racetracks and racing stables.”

  “So what’s he doing here, then?” the policeman asked.

  Murdering a bookmaker.

  2

  You’re a pair of complete idiots.”

  Nigel and I were sitting on a bed in our hotel getting a roasting from our immediate boss, Paul Maldini, head of operations at the BHA Integrity Service.

  “You have Unwin under close surveillance and yet you allow him to just walk up and murder someone in broad daylight while you two stand by and watch!” Paul’s voice went up in both tone and volume, and he waved his arms around in the manner of his Italian ancestors.

  Nigel and I knew better than to interrupt.

  It would not have been helpful to point out that neither of us was actually standing still when Matthew Unwin had sliced right through the jugular vein of the hapless bookmaker, Jordan Furness. Or that it happened so fast that we couldn’t have stopped it even if we’d been standing right next to him. Or that it was only due to my continuing to follow Unwin after the event that he had been so rapidly detained by the police.

  Nigel and I both knew that Paul needed to “blow his top,” as he did occasionally when operations did not pan out as planned.

  “And whose stupid idea was it not to apprehend him at the racetrack entrance when he arrived?”

  Nigel and I looked at each other. As far as we could remember, it had been Paul himself who had ultimately given the go-ahead to allow Unwin access to the racetrack so that we could see who he was there to meet. But now was clearly not the time nor the place to point that out.

  And who was to say he wouldn’t then have used his knife on us?

  As Paul Maldini droned on above my head, I thought back to the previous day. I had spent much of the afternoon and evening with Detective Sergeant Galley of Gloucestershire Police, going over again and again every detail of Matthew Unwin’s brief appearance at the racetrack.

  In particular, he had wanted to know why Nigel and I had thought Unwin would be there.

  “One of our intelligence analysts received a tip-off from a CHIS.”

  “A CHIS?”

  “Covert human intelligence source.”

  “And who exactly was this CHIS?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.” I was sure he hadn’t believed me even though I’d been telling him the truth.

  However, I did know that the source was considered to be very reliable.

  All intelligence was graded as to the nature of the informant, from A to D, and the quality of the information, from 1 to 5. Something rated as A1 was pretty much considered as a fact, while anything below C3 was ignored completely as merely malicious rumor and gossip. B2 was fairly average, but, in this case, the analyst had given the info an A2 rating. Well worth acting on.

  “Mr. Hinkley, can you tell me why Mr. Unwin was banned from Cheltenham racetrack?” the DS had asked.

  “From all racetracks, not just Cheltenham. In January he was banned for eight years from all licensed racing premises.”

  “Why?”

  “He used to be a racehorse trainer and horses in his stable were found to have been given banned substances. They’d been doped.”

  “Eight years seems rather harsh.”

  “Not really. He could have been banned for up to twenty-five. Many in racing thought he’d got off rather lightly.”

  “It won’t make much difference now,” the policeman had said. “He’ll be in prison for far more than eight years anyway after today’s little performance. Have you any idea why he would attack Mr. Furness?”

  “None at all,” I’d said, “but I do know it was a deliberate choice. I watched as he searched with his eyes for the right man.”

  Paul Maldini moaned on for another half an hour about our incompetence, but I wasn’t really listening. I’d heard it before and knew that he’d calm down in a day or two. Most of the time he really was pretty good at his job, although, in my opinion, he needed to learn to control his rages.

  But at least he didn’t fire us.

  Instead, he sent Nigel and me back to the racetrack for the second day of the Festival.

  —

  ALL THE TALK was about the murder of the bookmaker, but it was more because of the delay it caused to racing and the postponement of the last race due to failing light rather than any altruistic concerns for the man himself.

  “I’m glad it wasn’t today,” I overheard one man say, laughing. “Their loss is our gain.” The postponed race had been rescheduled to be run before the official first race of day two.

  Sympathy for the murdered bookmaker was in short supply in spite of the violent manner of his passing.

  “He
probably deserved it,” said a tweed-suited woman in the Arkle Bar, who received nodding agreement from those around her.

  There was less talk but certainly more compassion for Matthew Unwin, the perpetrator of the crime.

  “Obviously, driven to it, poor man,” said one of the stallholders in the tented village.

  “Must have been desperate,” agreed his customer, pursing her lips and shaking her head.

  I drifted around the enclosures, listening and watching. I was dressed and appeared as myself, not least because, as a result of Paul Maldini’s diatribe, I hadn’t had enough time to “make up.”

  I had an official right of entry to everywhere on each of the fifty-eight currently operated British racetracks including, if I’d wanted, the jockeys’ changing rooms and the Royal Boxes. However, rather than putting on my BHA Access All Areas lanyard, which made me stand out as “an authority,” I usually arranged to wear a cardboard Owner badge that let me wander wherever I wanted in anonymity. On the rare occasions I had been asked which horse I owned I simply said that I was a member of a syndicate, an answer guaranteed to cause the inquisitor to instantly lose interest.

  I watched the rescheduled race from the stand reserved for owners and trainers, my ears tuned for any tidbits of gossip.

  “Did you hear about Peter and Marianne?” a lady said behind me to her companion. “A trial separation, they call it, but I know for a fact he’s screwing one of his stable girls. I hope Marianne takes him to the cleaners.”

  “I see Lorne Taylor is pregnant again,” said a male voice on my right. “That’ll be their sixth. How many kids do they want, for goodness’ sake?”

  “I heard from Trevor that Hot Target is to be gelded and sent to Lawrence Ford as a hurdler. Such a shame he’s been firing blanks.”

  I absorbed it all like a sponge. One never knew if, when, or what information might be useful.

  “Do you think we’ll win?” an excited lady owner asked the man on her far side, a middle-ability Lambourn-based trainer.

  “He has a fair chance,” the trainer replied without any great enthusiasm. “Depends on how well he jumps.”

  The horse in question jumped well enough but ran out of gas in the run up the hill to the line, finishing a creditable fifth out of twelve.

  “Maybe next time,” the trainer said in comfort to his clearly disappointed owner as they departed to unsaddle their charge.

  I wandered up to the lines of bookmakers in the betting ring.

  Someone had been busy with a high-pressure hose and there was no sign of the blood that had been spilled there only twenty-four hours before. The only thing different was that there was no Jordan Furness–emblazoned umbrella in the line. Not that a respectful space had been left empty. All the other bookmakers had simply moved along one place to fill in the gap.

  The detective sergeant had asked me over and over again if I had any inkling of why Matthew Unwin might have murdered Furness.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” I’d said. “Perhaps he owed money.”

  But murder was rather a drastic measure to get out of paying a debt.

  I thought back to the case that had resulted in Unwin being disqualified and excluded from racing. Several of the horses in his stables had tested positive for banned performance-enhancing drugs after an anonymous telephone tip-off to the BHA.

  Had that been a reason? Was it revenge?

  But surely a bookmaker wouldn’t have been the one to make the call?

  The ringing of my cell phone interrupted my thoughts.

  “Hello?”

  “Jeff? It’s Quentin.”

  Quentin was my brother-in-law, Faye’s husband.

  “Hi,” I said. “I am so sorry to hear the news about Faye.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s not looking too good, but she’s a fighter and determined to see this thing off.”

  “Good.”

  “I actually rang you about something else. I need your help.”

  “Yes, of course. How?”

  “I need something investigated and you’re an investigator.”

  “But I only investigate horseracing,” I said.

  “Look, I can’t tell you everything over the phone. Can you pop over and see me at home?”

  “I can’t. I’m at Cheltenham until Friday night.”

  “Saturday morning would be perfect.” Quentin could be very persistent.

  “All right,” I said. “It will be good to see Faye.”

  “Don’t mention any of this to Faye,” he said sharply. “She has enough troubles of her own at the moment. I don’t want her bothered by this.”

  “OK,” I said somewhat uneasily. “How about eleven o’clock?”

  “Make it nine,” he said decisively. “I have a conference call at ten-thirty.”

  Bang went my hoped-for lie-in. But how could I say no? I had decided that I would go see Faye over the weekend as it was.

  “OK,” I said again without enthusiasm. “I’ll be there at nine for our meeting, then I’ll spend some time after with Faye.”

  “Don’t tell Faye about your investigation,” he snapped again.

  “Look, Quentin,” I said, equally abruptly. “I haven’t even agreed to investigate anything for you yet and I’m not sure I will. But I will see you at nine o’clock on Saturday.”

  I hung up.

  Why, I thought, did my brother-in-law always manage to bring out the worst in me? Or maybe I brought out the worst in him. Either way, we had never really got on.

  He was some ten years older than my sister and he had been married twice previously when, one summer’s day, he swept Faye off her feet in a whirlwind romance just as she was beginning to resign herself to the fact that at thirty-two and with no boyfriend, she would never get married.

  Quentin Calderfield was an eminent barrister, known universally by his fellow advocates simply as QC, and Faye had been one of the junior clerks in his chambers. He was a man of immense self-confidence, used to getting his own way, and someone not to argue with unless you wanted to lose.

  Quentin had risen rapidly up the legal ranks to become Quentin’s counsel and was therefore now more accurately known as QC,QC. His father had been a distinguished judge and a justice of the UK Supreme Court, having previously sat as a senior Law Lord in the House of Lords. Quentin was expected, at least by himself, to take a similar path to the pinnacle of the legal profession, and not many doubted that he’d get there.

  I meandered up and down the lines of bookmakers, but my mind was preoccupied with Quentin and what he wanted investigating.

  He surely knows masses of investigators, I thought. The courts must be full of them. So why did he need me? No doubt, I’d find out on Saturday.

  —

  THE REST OF THE WEEK at Cheltenham was uneventful in comparison, and I crammed myself onto the London-bound train on Friday evening, having seen Electrode, a Duncan Johnson–trained horse, win the Gold Cup for the second time.

  Matthew Unwin had appeared at the town’s magistrates’ court on Thursday morning, charged with the murder of Jordan Furness, and had been remanded in custody.

  There had been some speculation at the racetrack as to Unwin’s mental state, but the police seemed to be treating it as an open-and-shut murder case. A detective had called me to say that I wouldn’t be needed at the magistrates’ hearing but, in the light of my signed statement, I would certainly be required as a witness for the prosecution at the trial unless, of course, Unwin pleaded guilty first.

  The train rolled into Paddington Station a little after eight o’clock and I caught the Bakerloo Line tube to Willesden Junction, before walking the last few hundred yards to my home in Spezia Road.

  “I’m back,” I shouted as I turned the key.

  “In the kitchen,” came the reply.

  Lydia Swiffi
n, my girlfriend of four years, was standing in front of the stove, wearing a striped apron, stirring the contents of a saucepan.

  “Good journey?” she asked, turning around for a peck.

  “Not really. Too many drunk punters singing out of tune.”

  “Not much chance of a snooze, then?”

  “None. How about you? Good day?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. I had two purchase offers accepted by vendors.” She smiled. “But that means nothing these days. I never count commissions until the contracts are exchanged and deposits paid.”

  “Well done anyway. I’ll go and unpack.”

  “Your supper will be ready in five minutes. I’m afraid I’ve had mine.”

  I took my bag along to our bedroom.

  In the run-up to our second Christmas as a couple we had jointly bought this ground-floor flat in a house that had once been a single-family home but now accommodated two, with an Italian couple and a baby upstairs.

  It had been a day of great joy when I had carried Lydia over the threshold and into our first home together, but, lately, I had begun to feel slightly trapped.

  Our relationship was still pretty sound, but I knew there was a great expectation from Lydia, and from both our families, that we would soon get married. I had even found a sheet of paper on which Lydia had been practicing her signature Lydia Hinkley.

  But the prospect of marriage rather frightened me. It was too long-term, too permanent. I was reminded of the joke about the three stages of sex. Initially, there is house sex, when you have sex all over the house. Then there is bedroom sex, when you have sex only in the bedroom. And finally there is hall sex, when the only sexual encounter you have with your partner is to pass in the hall and say, “Fuck you.”

  Lydia and I seemed to have moved on to stage two already. Gone were the spontaneous and uninhibited encounters on the kitchen table or the sitting-room floor. Even our outdoor bonking under the stars had waned with the moon into nothingness.

  Maybe that’s what happens as one moves into one’s thirties.

  I went back along the hall and sat down at that kitchen table.