by Dick Francis
Books by Dick Francis
THE SPORT OF QUEENS (autobiography)
DEAD CERT
NERVE
FOR KICKS
ODDS AGAINST
FLYING FINISH
BLOOD SPORT
FORFEIT
ENQUIRY
RAT RACE
BONECRACK
SMOKESCREEN
SLAY-RIDE
KNOCK DOWN
HIGH STAKES
IN THE FRAME
RISK
TRIAL RUN
WHIP HAND
REFLEX
TWICE SHY
BANKER
THE DANGER
PROOF
BREAK IN
LESTER: The Official Biography
BOLT
HOT MONEY
THE EDGE
STRAIGHT
LONGSHOT
COMEBACK
DRIVING FORCE
The Edge
THE DICK FRANCIS LIBRARY
Michael Joseph
London
MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD
Published by the Penguin Group
27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Viking Penguin Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in Great Britain 1988
Second impression January 1989
Third impression May 1993
Fourth impression June 2001
Copyright © Dick Francis 1988
All rights reserved.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmittedin any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-192967-5
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The villains in this story are imaginary.
The good guys may recognise their own virtues!
My thanks to
SHANNON WRAY
formerly of Penguin Books, Canada, who started the train rolling
SHEILA BOWSLAUGH
and Sam Blyth of Blyth & Co, travel entrepreneurs
BILL COO
Manager of Travel Communications, VIA Rail,
and the staff of Union Station, Toronto
HOWARD SHRIER and TED BISAILLION
actor/writers
and
Col. Charles (Bud) Baker, Chairman of the Ontario Jockey Club,
Krystina Schmidt, caterer; American Railtours Inc.,
operators of private rail cars,
and John Jennings, who travelled the trains with horses.
CHAPTER ONE
I was following Derry Welfram at a prudent fifty paces when he stumbled, fell face down on the wet tarmac and lay still. I stopped, watching, as nearer hands stretched to help him up, and saw the doubt, the apprehension, the shock flower in the opening mouths of the faces around him. The word that formed in consequence in my own brain was violent, of four letters and unexpressed.
Derry Welfram lay face down, unmoving, while the fourteen runners for the three-thirty race at York stalked closely past him, the damp jockeys looking down and back with muted curiosity, minds on the business ahead, bodies shivering in the cold near-drizzle of early October. The man was drunk. One could read their minds. Mid-afternoon falling-down drunks were hardly unknown on racecourses. It was a miserable, uncomfortable afternoon. Good luck to him, the drunk.
I retreated a few unobtrusive steps and went on watching. Some of the group who had been nearest to Welfram when he fell were edging away, looking at the departing horses, wanting to leave, to see the race. A few shuffled from foot to foot, caught between a wish to desert and shame at doing so, and one, more civic-minded, scuttled off for help.
I drifted over to the open door of the paddock bar, from where several customers looked out on the scene. Inside, the place was full of dryish people watching life on closed-circuit television, life at second hand.
One of the group in the doorway said to me, ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ I shrugged. ‘Drunk, I dare say.’
I stood there quietly, part of the scenery, not pushing through into the bar but standing just outside the door under the eaves of the overhanging roof, trying not to let the occasional drips from above fall down my neck.
The civic-minded man came back at a run, followed by a heavy man in a St John’s Ambulance uniform. People had by now half-turned Welfram and loosened his tie, but seemed to step back gladly at the approach of officialdom. The St John’s man rolled Welfram fully onto his back and spoke decisively into a walkie-talkie. Then he bent Welfram’s head backwards and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
I couldn’t think of any circumstance which would have persuaded me to put my mouth on Welfram’s. Perhaps it was easier between absolute strangers. Not even to save his life, I thought, though I’d have preferred him alive.
Another man arrived in a hurry, a thin rain-coated man I knew by sight to be the racecourse doctor. He tapped the ambulance man on the shoulder, telling him to discontinue, and himself laid first his fingers against Welfram’s neck, then his stethoscope against the chest inside the opened shirt. After a long listening pause, perhaps as much as half a minute, he straightened and spoke to the ambulance man, meanwhile stuffing the stethoscope into his raincoat pocket. Then he departed, again at a hurry, because the race was about to begin and the racecourse doctor, during each running, had to be out on the course to succour the jockeys.
The ambulance man held a further conversation with his walkie-talkie but tried no more to blow air into unresponsive lungs, and presently some colleagues of his arrived with a stretcher and covering blanket, and loaded up and carried away, decently hidden, the silver hair, the bulging navy blue suit and the stilled heart of a heartless man.
The group that had stood near him broke up with relief, two or three of them heading straight for the bar.
The man who had earlier asked me, asked the newcomers the same question. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘He’s dead,’ one of them said briefly and unnecessarily. ‘God, I need a drink.’ He pushed his way into the bar, with the doorway spectators, me among them, following him inside to listen. ‘He just fell down and died.’ He shook his head, ‘Strewth, it makes you think.’ He tried to catch the barman’s eye. ‘You could hear his breath rattling … then it just stopped … he was dead before the St John’s man got there.… Barman, a double gin … make it a treble …’
‘Was there any blood?’ I asked.
‘Blood?’ He half looked i
n my direction, ‘Course not. You don’t get blood with heart attacks.… Barman, a gin and tonic … not much tonic … get a shunt on, will you?’
‘Who was he?’ someone said.
‘Search me. Just some poor mug.’
On the television the race began, and everyone, including myself, swivelled round to watch, though I couldn’t have said afterwards what had won. With Derry Welfram dead my immediate job was going to be much more difficult, if not temporarily impossible. The three-thirty in those terms was irrelevant.
I left the bar in the general break-up after the race and wandered inconclusively about for a bit, looking for other things that were not as they should be and, as on many days, not seeing any. I particularly looked for anyone who might be looking for Derry Welfram, hanging around for that purpose outside the ambulance room door, but no one arrived to enquire. An announcement came over the loud-speakers presently asking for anyone who had accompanied a Mr D. Welfram to the races to report to the clerk of the course’s office, so I hung about outside there for a while also, but no one accepted the invitation.
Welfram the corpse left the racecourse in an ambulance en route to the morgue and after a while I drove away from York in my unremarkable Audi, and punctually at five o’clock telephoned on my car phone to John Millington, my immediate boss, as required.
‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’ he demanded. ‘He can’t be.’
‘His heart stopped,’ I said.
‘Did someone kill him?’
Neither of us would have been surprised if someone had, but I said, ‘No, there wasn’t any sign of it. I’d been following him for ages. I didn’t see anyone bump into him, or anything like that. And there was apparently no blood. Nothing suspicious. He just died.’
‘Shit.’ His angry tone made it sound as if it were probably my fault. John Millington, retired policeman (Chief Inspector), currently Deputy Head of the Jockey Club Security Service, had never seemed to come to terms with my covert and indeterminate appointment to his department, even though in the three years I’d been working for him we’d seen a good few villains run off the racecourse.
‘The boy’s a blasted amateur,’ he’d protested when I was presented to him as a fact, not a suggestion. ‘The whole thing’s ridiculous.’
He no longer said it was ridiculous but we had never become close friends.
‘Did anyone make waves? Come asking for him?’ he demanded.
‘No, no one.’
‘Are you sure?’ He cast doubt as always on my ability.
‘Yes, positive.’ I told him of my vigils outside the various doors.
‘Who did he meet, then? Before he snuffed it?’
‘I don’t think he met anybody, unless it was very early in the day, before I spotted him. He wasn’t searching for anyone, anyway. He made a couple of bets on the Tote, drank a couple of beers, looked at the horses and watched the races. He wasn’t busy today.’
Millington let loose the four-letter word I’d stifled. ‘And we’re back where we started,’ he said furiously.
‘Mm,’ I agreed.
‘Call me Monday morning,’ Millington said, and I said, ‘Right,’ and put the phone down. Tonight was Saturday. Sunday was my regular day off, and Monday too, except in times of trouble. I could see my Monday vanishing fast.
Millington, in common with the whole Security Service and the Stewards of the Jockey Club, was still smarting from the collapse in court of their one great chance of seeing behind bars arguably the worst operator still lurking in the undergrowth of racing. Julius Apollo Filmer had been accused of conspiring to murder a stable lad who had been unwise enough to say loudly and drunkenly in a Newmarket pub that he knew things about Mr effing-blinding Filmer that would get the said arsehole chucked out of racing quicker than Shergar won the Derby.
The pathetic stable lad turned up in a ditch two days later with his neck broken, and the police (Millington assisting) put together a watertight-looking conspiracy case, establishing Julius Filmer as paymaster and planner of the crime. Then, on the day of his trial, odd things happened to the four prosecution witnesses. One had a nervous breakdown and was admitted in hysteria to a mental hospital, one disappeared altogether and was later seen in Spain, and two became mysteriously unclear about facts that had been razor-sharp in their memories earlier. The defence brought to the witness box a nice young man who swore on oath that Mr Filmer had been nowhere near the Newmarket hotel where the conspiracy was alleged to have been hatched but had instead been discussing business with him all night in a motel (bill produced) three hundred miles away. The jury was not allowed to know that the beautifully-mannered, well-dressed, blow-dried, quietly-spoken youth was already serving time for confidence tricks and had arrived at court in a Black Maria.
Almost everyone else in the court – lawyers, police, the judge himself – knew that the nice young man had been out on bail on the night in question, and that even though the actual murderer was still unknown, Filmer had beyond doubt arranged the stable lad’s killing.
Julius Apollo Filmer smirked with satisfaction at the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict and clasped his lawyer in a bear-hug. Justice had been mocked. The stable lad’s parents wept bitter tears over his grave and the Jockey Club ground its collective teeth. Millington swore to get Filmer somehow, anyhow, in the future, and had made it into a personal vendetta, the pursuit of this one villain filling his mind to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
He had spent a great deal of time in the Newmarket pubs going over the ground the regular police had already covered, trying to find out exactly what Paul Shacklebury, the dead stable lad, had known to the detriment of Filmer. No one knew – or no one was saying. And who could blame anyone for not risking a quick trip to the ditch.
Millington had had more luck with the hysterical witness, now back home but still suffering fits of the shivers. She, the witness, was a chambermaid in the hotel where Filmer had plotted. She had heard, and had originally been prepared to swear she had heard Filmer say to an unidentified man, ‘If he’s dead, he’s worth five grand to you and five to the hatchet, so go and fix it.’
She had been hanging fresh towels in the bathroom when the two men came in from the corridor, talking. Filmer had been abrupt with her and bundled her out and she hadn’t looked at the other man. She remembered the words clearly but hadn’t of course seen their significance until later. It was because of the word ‘hatchet’ that she remembered particularly.
A month after the trial Millington got from her a half-admission that she’d been threatened not to give evidence. Who had threatened her? A man she didn’t know. But she would deny it. She would deny everything, she would have another collapse. The man had threatened to harm her sixteen-year-old daughter. Harm … he’d spelled out all the dreadful programme lying ahead.
Millington, who could lay on the syrup if it pleased him, had persuaded her with many a honeyed promise (that he wouldn’t necessarily keep) to come for several days to the races, and there, from the safety of various strategically placed security offices, he’d invited her to look out of the window. She would be in shadow, seated, comfortable, invisible, and he would point out a few people to her. She was nervous and came in a wig and dark glasses. Millington got her to remove the glasses. She sat in an upright armchair and twisted her head to look over her shoulder at me, where I stood quietly behind her.
‘Never mind about him,’ Millington said. ‘He’s part of the scenery.’
All the world went past those windows on racing afternoons, which was why, of course, the windows were where they were. Over three long sessions during a single week on three different racecourses Millington pointed out to her almost every known associate and friend of Filmer’s, but she shook her head to them all. At the fourth attempt, the following week, Filmer himself strolled past, and I thought we’d have a repeat of the hysterics: but though our chambermaid wobbled and wept and begged for repeated assurances he would never know she had seen him, she stayed
at her post. And she astonished us, shortly after, by pointing towards a group of passing people we’d never before linked with Filmer.
‘That’s him,’ she said, gasping. ‘Oh my God … that’s him.… I’d know him anywhere.’
‘Which one?’ Millington said urgently.
‘In the navy … with the grey sort of hair. Oh my God … don’t let him know …’ Her voice rose with panic.
I could hear the beginnings of Millington’s reassurances as I fairly sprinted out of the office and through to the open air, slowing there at once to the much slower speed of the crowd making its way from paddock to stands for the next race. The navy suit with the silvery hair above it was in no hurry, going along with the press. I followed him discreetly for the rest of the afternoon, and only once did he touch base with Filmer, and then as if accidentally, as between strangers.
The exchange looked as if navy-suit asked Filmer the time. Filmer looked at his watch and spoke. Navy-suit nodded and walked on. Navy-suit was Filmer’s man, all right, but was never to be seen to be that in public: just like me and Millington.
I followed navy-suit from the racecourse in the going-home traffic and telephoned from my car to Millington.
‘He’s driving a Jaguar,’ I said, ‘licence number A576 FDD. He spoke to Filmer. He’s our man.’
‘Right.’
‘How’s the lady?’ I asked.
‘Who? Oh, her. I had to send Harrison all the way back to Newmarket with her. She was half off her rocker again. Have you still got our man in sight?’
‘Yep.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
Harrison was one of Millington’s regular troops, an ex-policeman, heavy, avuncular, near to pensioned retirement. I’d never spoken to him, but I knew him well by sight, as I knew all the others. It had taken me quite a while to get used to belonging to a body of men who didn’t know I was there; rather as if I were a ghost.
I was never noticeable. I was twenty-nine, six foot tall, brown haired, brown eyed, twelve stone in weight with, as they say, no distinguishing features. I was always part of the moving race crowd, looking at my race-card, wandering about, looking at horses, watching races, having a bet or two. It was easy because there were always a great many other people around doing exactly the same thing. I was a grazing sheep in a flock. I changed my clothes and general appearance from day to day and never made acquaintances, and it was lonely quite often, but also fascinating.
