Dick Francis's Damage

by Felix Francis

  “How would we do that?”

  “Put an announcement in The Times that says that Van Gogh accepts Leonardo’s offer of marriage with a proposed dowry of twenty thousand pounds.”

  “Would twenty thousand be enough?” asked Ian Tulloch. “It’s not much compared to five million.”

  “Twenty thousand pounds is still a lot of money,” I said. At least it was for me. Twenty thousand pounds, all of it tax-free, was more than many people earned in a year, but for the likes of Ian Tulloch it might just be petty cash.

  “The man might go to the newspapers,” said Charles Payne, another of the independent directors.

  “He won’t,” I said decisively, but I looked around at skeptical faces in front of me. “Not if he’s in this for the money. As I said before, he’ll have spent months planning every single detail—it’s not easy, or cheap, to dope every horse at Cheltenham—and he’ll want a decent return for his trouble. There’s no way he would give up his trump card so easily.” They still didn’t look convinced. “He probably wants half a million. If he asks you for five million and you end up paying him half a million, then you’ll probably all believe you have a bargain, but he, in fact, will have gained everything that he’d hoped for in the first place. I’d maybe offer him less than twenty grand, perhaps only ten.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Bill Ripley in a tone that implied he didn’t really believe me.

  “I’ve completed several tours of Afghanistan as an army intelligence specialist. Much of my time was spent dealing with kidnapping in Helmand Province—mostly among the Afghan people. A child of one of the few remaining middle-class Afghans would be snatched either by the Taliban or, more often, by the corrupt police. The ransom demanded would always be for millions of dollars, a sum way beyond the means of even the richest parents. Offers and threats would pass back and forth until an amount was agreed upon that was acceptable to both sides. Sometimes it was only a few hundred dollars or maybe a few thousand. I was involved in many of those negotiations, sometimes face-to-face with the kidnappers. They were a source of essential intelligence, especially in learning who were our real friends, rather than those who would happily shoot us in the back as soon as we turned round.”

  “Why did you leave the army?” It was Bill Ripley again.

  “I didn’t want to get killed,” I said. “I did three six-month tours inside four years and I didn’t fancy going back—too many of the bad guys knew me by then.”

  In truth, I’d been fortunate to get out alive from one particularly hairy situation in an Afghan house when hostage negotiations had rapidly gone tits up and guns had been drawn by both sides, most of them pointing at me. On top of that, a good mate of mine hadn’t been so lucky in a similar circumstance and he’d come home in a box.

  No one now questioned my assessment of the current situation.

  “Tell us what to do,” said Roger Vincent.

  “Personally, I’d probably call in the police. But if you won’t do that and I accept that position, then lets place a notice in the paper and wait for a response. Meanwhile, I’ll try to find out how he did it and stop it happening again at Ascot.”

  “What do you need from us?”

  “I assume from his demeanor that Crispin Larson is aware of the situation.”

  “He’s aware of the test results,” said Roger Vincent, “but not the letter.”

  “I’ll need his help to find out how the doping was done. And he should be made aware of the letter. He has one of the best analytical minds I know. We could all do with his help.”

  Roger Vincent looked around the table and received a series of nods.

  “That’s agreed,” he said. “But no one else.”

  “What shall we tell the staff?” Howard Lever asked no one in particular.

  “Tell them that you were concerned about a leak of confidential material to a newspaper,” I said, “and you are now happy that the source of the leak has been identified and the individual concerned has been disciplined.”

  “Which individual?”

  “Me, of course,” I said. “All the staff in this building will know by now I’ve been summoned to the boardroom. Most will probably have walked past to have a look.” I waved at the glass wall, through which we could see people in the office. “We simply let it be known that I’ve lost my job for passing unauthorized information to the press. That way, I can work without anyone else knowing what I’m doing. As long as I have remote access to the BHA data files, I can work from home. I will need to keep my credentials, of course, to get into the racetracks and so on. Crispin Larson can be my contact here at headquarters. He’ll need to know that I am actually still employed and working totally undercover.”

  “Isn’t that all a bit melodramatic?” Howard Lever asked.

  That’s rich, I thought, coming from him.

  “How would you ever be able to come back to work for the BHA?” Bill Ripley asked.

  “You’re a member of the Jockey Club,” I said to him. “They’ve never made public any reasons for their decisions for more than two hundred years. I’m sure the BHA can take a page out of their book just for once.”

  And anyway, I thought, an undercover man not openly acknowledged by the BHA might be very useful.

  I’d often stretched the boundaries of legality in my surveillance work, but now I felt a greater freedom, released from the necessity to write reports for my fellow investigators to pore over and tut-tut my actions.

  Just as long as the BHA didn’t completely hang me out to dry if I got caught on the wrong side.

  9

  Nigel Green was furious on my behalf.

  “They can’t just sack you,” he screamed. “It’s outrageous.”

  “They didn’t sack me,” I said rather more quietly as I filled an old shoebox with the personal items from my desk. “I was invited to resign.”

  “That’s tantamount to the same thing. It’s a disgrace, and I don’t care who hears me say it.” He was almost shouting in defiance.

  “Nigel,” I said, “let it go. I’m quite happy to move on, and this way I get a decent reference. If we make too much of a fuss, I may lose that. That was the deal. So, thank you for your concern, but please drop it.”

  I hated lying to him.

  Nigel had become my closest friend at the BHA, not that any of my colleagues were really that close. I tended to keep my own company.

  Soon after I’d started the job, Nigel and his wife had asked Lydia and me to join them for supper and, shortly thereafter, we had returned their hospitality, but that had been nearly three years ago now and neither of us had seemed that keen to do it again.

  I suppose it was something to do with our line of work. We may not be as bad as Crispin Larson, but we were all believers in security and the need-to-know principle. It tended to make us rather reserved on a social level.

  “What will you do?” Nigel asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Something will turn up. I negotiated three months’ pay in lieu of notice, so I have time to look.”

  “It’s a damn shame,” he said. “The job has been more interesting with you round. I’m really sorry to see you go.”

  “You never know,” I said, “I might come back, when I’ve served my time in exile and they’ve forgotten and forgiven.”

  “I hope so.”

  It seemed mean, somehow, putting him through his sorrow, but it wasn’t as if I’d died. And he’d soon forget me when I passed through the front door.

  —

  THE FIRST TASK was to find out how the horses had been doped and it was the three negative test results that were the key. Why were they negative when all the others had been positive? If I could find out what was different about those three, then I was sure I’d find the method.

  Crispin Larson had been apprised of the situation b
y Howard Lever and he was keen as mustard to assist, meeting me for a drink about an hour after I’d left the building.

  “Clandestine operations are my forte,” he claimed. “God, if only I was able to turn my body clock back a few years, I’d be out there with you, dear boy. It would be just like old times.”

  We were speaking together at a table in the back room at El Vino, the famous wine bar in Fleet Street, once the haunt of journalists and newspaper editors but now frequented mostly by those from the legal profession, although the place was almost empty at two-thirty in the afternoon.

  Most important, it was not a regular drinking hole for staff from the BHA, who usually walked no farther than the Red Lion pub situated right next door to the offices.

  “What exactly did you do in the old times?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer. In fact, he said nothing. I wondered if he was internally berating himself for having said too much already.

  “I need some information,” I said. “For a start, I need the names of all the horses that were tested and especially the three that were not found to be positive.”

  “I have it all here, dear boy,” he said, pulling one of his red folders from his briefcase. He handed it over.

  “Thanks,” I said. I flicked through the folder, glancing at page after page of positive results for something called methylphenidate.

  “What is methylphenidate anyway?”

  “It’s a central nervous system stimulant, similar in chemical makeup to amphetamine. Methylphenidate hydrochloride is marketed as the drug called Ritalin. Rather conversely, even though it’s a stimulant, it is often prescribed for the treatment of hyperactivity in children.”

  “But does it make horses run faster?”

  “It certainly could with the right dosage. The positive tests at Cheltenham were all of fairly low concentrations and probably wouldn’t have affected the results, but they were well over the NET.”

  “The NET?”

  “The no-effect threshold,” Crispin said. “It’s the level below which the drug has no significant pharmacological action. It is effectively the level above which the BHA would take action and disqualify the horse. For some drugs, like anabolic steroids, the NET is zero.”

  “But we’re not disqualifying the horses this time?”

  “How can we? It would mean we would disqualify all the winners at the Festival. British racing would be ridiculed and would be laughed at all round the world.”

  He was right.

  And who was to say that the man had doped only the forty-six that had tested positive? In total, four hundred and sixty-two horses had run in twenty-seven races during the four days of the Festival. Only the race winners, beaten favorites and a few other randomly selected horses would have been drug-tested. That added up to just forty-nine. How many of the other four hundred and thirteen had also been dosed with methylphenidate?

  If we disqualified the winners, could we be sure that those that finished second, and would hence be promoted to victors, weren’t also high on the same stuff? We knew that both the winner and the second horse in the Gold Cup had tested positive, so did we award that race to the well-beaten, and untested, third?

  I had some sympathy with the BHA Board and their insistence on secrecy. There would be a god-awful row if this ever became public, with lawsuits galore and everyone trying to get their grubby hands on the gold.

  “Is that all?” said Crispin. “I’d better get back.”

  He started to stand up, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him.

  “Crispin,” I said. “There’s something else I need to ask.”

  He sat down again. “Fire away, dear boy.”

  “I want to know why you sent me to have a quiet look at Graham Perry’s setup rather than sending in the drug-testing team straightaway.”

  He was slightly taken unawares.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because of something I read concerning Matthew Unwin. He claimed in his disciplinary hearing that someone had doped his horses without his knowledge because he’d refused to pay them. Was it anything like that with Graham Perry?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, dear boy.”

  Crispin was ever so slightly flustered, a state he usually created in others.

  “Come on, Crispin,” I said, “tell me. You must have had good reasons.”

  He looked at me as if weighing the pros and cons.

  “It was a hunch,” he said quietly, then laughed. “And I am the first to scoff at people with hunches.”

  “So what was this hunch?” I asked.

  Crispin looked at me again for some long seconds as if calculating in his ultra-fast brain whether he should disclose such information under his need-to-know criteria. The calculations came down in my favor.

  “I have been concerned for some weeks, don’t you know. It started with the Unwin case. His claims were summarily dismissed at the inquiry as a pathetic attempt to pass the blame from himself to some mysterious, unnamed individual. But”—he paused as if still debating with his inner self if it was all right to go on—“some of the intel I have received since his case in January may appear to back up his position.”

  He paused again, looking around him as if for eavesdroppers in the same manner that Quentin had done in the Richmond café.

  I waited patiently for him to continue.

  “Two other trainers have come forward claiming to have been similarly approached by someone demanding money not to dope their horses.”

  I didn’t ask him which trainers. Crispin would tell me if I needed to know.

  “So your hunch in the Perry case was that whoever had made the anonymous call to RaceStraight was doing so because Perry wouldn’t pay, just as may have happened with Unwin?”

  “Yes. I wanted you to find out quietly, dear boy. I could have simply sent in the hit squad, but any positive tests would have inevitably ended in Perry losing his license, perhaps unfairly, because far too many people would have been aware of the tests for the results to be kept under wraps. I’d rather hoped you might have discreetly discovered if something was afoot that might indicate a third-party involvement.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all that beforehand?” I said with a degree of irritation. “I would have approached the situation differently. I’d have tried to spot if someone else was watching the setup rather than concentrating on Perry himself.”

  Crispin sat in silence. If I wanted an apology, I’d be disappointed.

  “Did you send the swabs and hairs for analysis?” I asked, slightly changing the subject.

  “Yes indeed. Thank you. They went this morning by courier. I’ve requested a rush job. Results should be back by the end of the week. I also arranged for all three of Perry’s runners to be tested at Bangor. Again, initial results later this week.”

  “So,” I said, leaning forward, “do we think that there are two people trying to extort money from racing or has a small-scale operation targeting individual trainers graduated to demanding cash from the racing authorities as a whole?”

  “A good question, dear boy,” Crispin said without giving an answer. He would have made a perfect politician. “What will you do first?”

  “Go to Cheltenham to determine how he did it,” I said. “And then try and stop him from doing it again at Ascot. We ought to organize added security there this weekend.”

  “I hope I’ve dealt with that,” Crispin said. “I arranged to let it slip accidentally on purpose to the Ascot management that the BHA might be conducting an inspection of racetrack security, with particular reference to the security of the horses. I expect the whole place to be swarming with extra guards.”

  “How did you let it slip?” I asked.

  “I instructed my PA to give Ascot a call and ask for extra parking spaces as we had a racetrack security inspection tea
m coming. They took the bait and called her back for clarification. She then told them she’d made a big mistake in asking for the parking spaces in the first place. It was all meant to be a secret and to please forget she’d ever called, otherwise she could be in serious trouble with her boss.”

  He chuckled to himself and clearly thought the whole thing was a great joke.

  I wasn’t at all sure that I agreed with him.

  —

  “I’M HOME,” I shouted as I walked through the front door at half past four.

  I had expected Lydia to be there, as she worked from home on Mondays, but there was no sign of her. I was not particularly surprised, or worried, as she was probably at a viewing. She worked for a local realtor in Willesden Green and the property market in northwest London was amazingly buoyant, considering the extortionate prices being asked for even the smallest of flats.

  I often wondered if we should put ours up for sale, as we could make a huge profit over what we had paid for it only three years ago, but, of course, we would then have had to pay just as high a price for somewhere else to live. Property values weren’t like real money except for first-time buyers, who really struggled to find their initial deposits.

  I took the box of my possessions along to the study/nursery and stood there emptying it. After three years at the BHA, I realized I had gathered remarkably little in the way of desk clutter. No family pictures in smart frames or fancy paperweights, just a few pens, a stapler, a pair of nail clippers, a stack of hotel notepads and a red-and-white mug with Keep Calm and Carry on Racing printed on its side that Lydia had given me at Christmas.

  I wondered if the stapler and some of the pens technically still belonged to the BHA, but, since I did too, no one was likely to come looking for them.

  It felt rather strange that I no longer had a desk at BHA headquarters. I hoped this was a good idea. I had no one else to blame but myself if it wasn’t.

  I went back to the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea in the Keep Calm mug and looked out the window, thinking while I drank and watching as the shadows lengthened in the late-afternoon sun.