Crisis

by Felix Francis

  Over the following years, she had not only come to the attention of the police on several occasions, but also to many other agencies, not least the local social services in Ealing who had twice briefly taken her children into care.

  Arabella had disclosed to me that Zoe had had mental health problems, and she hadn’t been kidding.

  The research team had somehow discovered that Zoe had been forcefully admitted to psychiatric hospitals on at least three separate occasions, the most recent being for a two-month stretch earlier in the current year.

  Arabella had claimed that post-natal depression was the basis of Zoe’s problems but it appeared from the chronology in the report that her first hospital admission had been well before the birth of her eldest child, indeed it had been not long after she’d been found in Croydon.

  There was also something about the arson conviction, including two local newspaper reports from the time. Two years previously, Zoe and two other women had set fire to the garden shed of a man who had admitted beating up his wife. The shed in question had been large and had housed the man’s treasured model-train layout. The whole lot had been completely consumed in the fire.

  The three women had been neighbours of the victim and had seemingly extracted their own revenge after the man had been handed a community service order rather than the jail sentence they all felt he deserved.

  The three had pleaded guilty to criminal damage at Ealing Magistrates’ Court and had been bound over for a year to keep the peace, with each ordered to pay a hundred pounds in compensation for the loss of the shed. The man, meanwhile, had claimed in vain that thousands of pounds’ worth of model railway had also been destroyed, but the lady chairman of the bench had referred to it as simply ‘a few toys’.

  There was clearly little doubt about whose side she’d been on.

  But it was hardly the crime of the year, and surely not worthy of being the reason why the TV news was blaming Zoe for the fire at Castleton House Stables. If the Simpson White research wizards could get the information, then unquestionably the BBC should have been able to do so as well.

  However, there was one interesting additional detail at the bottom of the report that had not been available to the Ealing magistrates at the time the case had come before them: one of the other two women later revealed that it had been Zoe alone who had proposed setting fire to the shed, and that she had also snapped the door padlock shut first, wrongly believing the man to be still inside.

  Maybe it could have been the crime of the year after all.

  The last part of the Simpson White research report concerned Zoe’s husband, Peter Robertson.

  As Georgina’s original brief had indicated, Peter was an estate agent, but that told only a fraction of his story.

  Janie had said she thought Peter was older than Zoe, and he was – almost nine years older. He’d also been married twice before Zoe, and neither of those marriages had ended well. Now his third had gone the same way.

  The wizards had attached scanned copies of all three of his marriage certificates, together with the death certificate of his first wife and the High Court judge’s divorce certificate that had unshackled him from his second. There were also copies of the official registration of births for his and Zoe’s two children.

  They all made for interesting reading.

  Peter Robertson had married his first wife, Kirsty Wright, at Croydon Register Office when they had each been twenty-one. Both bride and groom had had ‘no fixed abode’ recorded for their addresses, and ‘unemployed’ was written in the spaces for their professions.

  Kirsty had survived a mere two months after her wedding day and it had clearly not been a happy marriage. The South London Coroner had recorded a verdict of suicide, deciding that Kirsty had killed herself by deliberately stepping off the platform at East Croydon Station, right into the path of the non-stopping Gatwick Express.

  Peter had wed for a second time at the same venue two years later, this time to a Lorna Harris. This marriage had lasted longer, three years to be precise, but it too had ended badly with Lorna divorcing him for what was stated in the petition as his ‘unreasonable behaviour’.

  Neither of these marriages appeared to have produced any children.

  He married Zoe Chadwick two years after his divorce, once again at Croydon Register Office, and this time, not only did Peter have a fixed abode but also ‘estate agent’ was recorded as his profession on the certificate.

  The birth of their first child, a daughter called Poppy, was registered at Croydon University Hospital just six weeks after the wedding, with a second daughter, Joanne, following twenty months later, by which time the Robertsons had apparently moved, Ealing Hospital now being recorded as the place of delivery.

  Finally, there was a note from the wizards saying that their contact at the Disclosure and Barring Service had confirmed to them that Peter had twice been convicted of the possession of Class A drugs, and they were still searching for further details.

  As a solicitor, I wondered just how legal that last enquiry had been. The registers of births, deaths and marriages were all in the public domain, as were the judgements of both the coroner and family courts, but an individual’s criminal record was subject to data-protection regulations, or at least it should have been.

  But that was why we called them wizards. They were able to use their special magic to find out things that we lesser mortals couldn’t.

  However, I decided I should keep that last piece of information very much to myself.

  I sat for a while reading and rereading all the material until I was sure I had the various relationships understood and committed to memory. Not that any of it gave me any insight as to why Zoe Robertson had ended up alone and dead in her father’s burned-out stables, seventy miles away from her home.

  I next spent some time thinking about Kate Logan and wondering if Janie had passed on my telephone number. Not that she would have needed my mobile number in order to contact me – she knew I was staying at the Bedford Lodge.

  Had it really only been the previous evening that I had met her?

  An awful lot seemed to have happened since then.

  My phone rang and I grabbed it but, sadly and unexpectedly, it was not Kate but DCI Eastwood on the line.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Foster, for your direction concerning Zoe Robertson.’

  ‘You’re very welcome,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Most helpful, but we would have discovered her identity anyway. It is routine to scan the national DNA database whenever we have an unidentified sample.’

  Then why are you calling me now, I thought.

  I found out quickly enough.

  ‘Perhaps you could further help us with our enquiries?’ he asked.

  ‘Anything,’ I said.

  ‘You said yesterday that you were with Mr Declan Chadwick when Mr Robertson called to tell him that Zoe was missing.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Peter Robertson actually spoke to Mrs Chadwick. I was with Declan when his wife relayed the message.’

  ‘Did either of them indicate that they had recently been in contact with Zoe Robertson or her husband?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I said slowly, thinking back to the way Declan had gone so pale at the news. ‘But . . .’ There was something else too. Something I’d considered slightly odd at the time. Now, what was it?

  ‘Yes?’ prompted the policeman.

  ‘I remember thinking it was slightly strange that Arabella announced that Zoe had gone missing again. As if she’d known Zoe had gone missing before.’

  ‘Mr Foster,’ replied the chief inspector, his tone full of irony. ‘Everyone in Newmarket knows that Zoe Chadwick had gone missing before. Police officers knocked on every door in the damn town during an intensive two-week search for her almost twelve years ago. What a complete waste of resources that was. I was a detective sergeant on the case at the time.’

  So that is what he hadn’t been telling me during our
meeting yesterday, and he sounded as if he was still angry about it.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but Arabella told me Zoe went missing regularly. And she also referred to Peter Robertson as Pete. One doesn’t do that unless you’ve been in fairly regular contact.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Foster. That is most helpful.’

  He was terminating the call.

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t go. Have you found out anything more about how the fire started? Was it Zoe who started it?’

  He hesitated, as if deciding whether to say anything or not.

  ‘After the results of the post-mortem, we now consider it unlikely that Mrs Robertson started the fire.’

  There was a distinct pause while the magnitude of what he had just said sank into my brain.

  ‘Because she was already dead,’ I said slowly.

  There was another pause. A much longer one.

  ‘There are clearly no flies on you, Mr Foster,’ the detective chief inspector said eventually. ‘I can see that I should have been more guarded. I’ll be drummed out of the force if I’m not careful.’ He cleared his throat as if emphasising the gravity of what was to follow. ‘That is highly confidential information, Mr Foster. You are not to pass it on to any member of the Chadwick family, or anyone else for that matter. That would be construed by me as obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I bet he was now wishing he’d said nothing at all. I had simply jumped to home plate from a throwaway comment way out in left field.

  ‘But how do you know?’ I asked him, not wanting to lose the opportunity.

  He hesitated again but clearly decided that, having already inadvertently given me the treasure, there was no problem in also handing over the map.

  ‘In spite of the intensity of the fire, the core of the body was largely intact, in particular the chest cavity, and, according to the pathologist, no smoke residue or fire damage was detectable in the lungs.’

  ‘So she hadn’t been breathing,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. Either she’d already been dead when the fire started or she died suddenly just as it did so, maybe from something like a heart attack. The pathologist is still investigating that remote possibility.’

  ‘So you believe she was murdered.’

  It was more of a statement than a question and precipitated another long pause from the detective.

  ‘We cannot say that for sure at present.’ Such was his unease at giving me any more information that he almost whispered the response. ‘As yet, we have no definitive cause of death. Maybe we never will, such is the extent of fire damage to the head, neck and the other extremities of the body. But murder is definitely one of the possibilities. Perhaps the most likely. Maybe she was strangled or hit over the head or something. Someone then may have set the stables on fire in an attempt to cover up what they’d done.’

  But who?

  And why?

  12

  About three in the afternoon, having dispensed with the car and driver, I walked from the Bedford Lodge Hotel along Bury Road past Oliver Chadwick’s house.

  It was almost as much as I could do not to pop into Janie’s office and ask if she’d yet given my number to Kate. But best not to be seen to be too eager, I thought, and kept on walking towards the town centre, for I was a man on a mission and I had a difficult decision to make.

  I had to decide on just one of the thirteen available.

  It was a big question.

  Which one?

  Which one?

  In which one of the thirteen betting shops in Newmarket would I make my bet?

  I felt it was time to further my education. I’d never been in a betting shop before. Indeed, I’d never placed a bet in my life other than buying the occasional lottery ticket, and surely that didn’t count.

  But that was all about to change.

  I’d done a bit of homework on the internet, looking up odds and bet types.

  I had naively believed that placing a bet was a straightforward exercise – you just choose the horse you think will be first in the race and hand over your stake money to the bookmaker, who will pay you out if the horse actually wins, or keep your stake for himself if it doesn’t.

  Simple.

  And, indeed, you can bet like that, but I found there are far more things to consider.

  For a start, not every bookmaker offers the same odds. You need to search for the best available price, just like in every other type of shopping. There is no sense in making a bet at odds of five-to-one at one shop when another down the road is offering six-to-one.

  And then not all bets are ‘win only’. In some races, you can back a horse to finish in the first three, or even in the first four. And there are other bets called forecasts, tricasts, exactas and perfectas, where multiple horses in the same race have to come in first and second, or first, second and third in any order, or in the right order.

  I discovered that you can also place a single stake on several horses in separate races, called an accumulator bet, and there are many combinations of accumulators with exotic names such as Trixie, Lucky 15, Goliath, Patent, Canadian and Yankee, to name just a few.

  There is even something called a ‘Heinz’, which consists of 57 separate bets on six horses, each running in a different race: 15 doubles, 20 trebles, 15 fourfold accumulators, 6 fivefold accumulators, and a single sixfold accumulator. Any two horses have to win to start paying out, with greater returns the more of them that triumph, and huge rewards if four, five or six of your selections come in.

  However, for all of the glamorous methods of wagering your money, I thought back to what ASW had said to me: There’s no such thing as a poor bookmaker.

  So punters beware.

  My first port of call was the BP filling station on Bury Road, where I withdrew some cash from their ATM. Then, empowered by the wedge of banknotes in my pocket, I went in search of the betting shops.

  The nearest one was Ladbrokes, opposite the Queen Victoria Jubilee Clock Tower at the top end of the High Street, its bright red and white frontage making it look more like a supermarket than a bookmakers, with special offers displayed on large posters in the window – two bets for the price of one.

  I strode purposefully over to the door but found myself looking round furtively before opening it, checking that no one who knew me was watching, as if I were a naughty boy entering a den of iniquity, a hangout of wickedness and immorality.

  I’m not sure what I expected to find – maybe a dark, smoke-filled room bustling with dubious individuals, all wearing hats and with their coat collars turned up, silently going about their business, handing over grubby handfuls of cash to a shirt-sleeved croupier behind a metal grill. Perhaps even with Paul Newman and Robert Redford on hand to relieve Robert Shaw of a briefcase full of twenty-dollar bills.

  How wrong I was.

  It was nothing at all like a scene from The Sting.

  Instead, it was a sparsely populated, brightly lit airy space, statutorily smoke-free, with a light-oak floor and a scattering of easy chairs and stools upholstered in corporate Ladbroke tomato-red fabric.

  On one side there was a glass-fronted booth for placing bets, and on the opposite wall, high up, a line of seven large television sets, some showing live horse and dog races, others displaying the odds of the runners. Under the TVs were pinned the various racecard pages from the Racing Post, with a wide shelf beneath for punters to lean on to write down their selections on the slips of paper provided, ready to hand in at the booth with their stake.

  In addition, in the quiet corners, there were two electronic fixed-odds betting machines offering casino games such as roulette and blackjack, as well as the regular one-armed bandit spinning wheels.

  It was an Aladdin’s cave, a whole new world, with new horizons to pursue.

  What had I been doing all my life?

  I was like a kid in a candy store.

  I walke
d across to the booth.

  ‘Do you have odds for the Derby?’ I asked the young woman behind the glass.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I’ll get them off the system. They’ve all changed now that Prince of Troy is confirmed as a non-runner.’

  He’s more than a non-runner, I thought, he’s a non-existent.

  She disappeared into the office behind and shortly reappeared with a printed sheet. She slid it across the counter under the glass.

  ‘They won’t all run,’ she said confidently. ‘Maximum of twenty in the Derby.’

  I looked down at the list of horses on the sheet. There were thirty-eight of them in all, the favourite at the top, the outsiders at the bottom.

  ‘Those are ante-post odds,’ said the young woman, pointing at the sheet. ‘You lose your stake if the horse doesn’t run.’

  ‘Or doesn’t win?’ I replied.

  ‘Yeah, that as well,’ she said with a laugh. ‘No refunds.’

  I scanned the list, looking for Orion’s Glory. He was nearly halfway down and quoted at a price of 33–1. Even I knew that was good, but maybe not quite good enough. I would shop around the other companies to see how they compared.

  ‘How often do the odds change?’ I asked.

  ‘The next scratch date is this coming Tuesday. The prices will shorten then for all of those left in. Then supplementary entries close on the Monday before the race. It would obviously change things dramatically if any horses are entered at that late stage. And the Dante tomorrow may cause a few fluctuations. Some of those are running in that.’ She nodded at the list in my hand.

  ‘But they won’t change in the next hour or so?’ I asked.

  ‘Not unless another favourite gets killed.’ She laughed.

  ‘Good for you, was it?’

  ‘Bloody marvellous. We’ve taken an absolute shedload on Prince of Troy to win the Derby, much of it since long before the Guineas when his price was really long. All the Chadwick lads came in here like clockwork, every week, to put more on him from their pay packets. They’ve been doing it for months. We’re their nearest shop. We stood to lose a bloody fortune if Prince of Troy won, which he probably would have.’