Next the surgeon produced a consent form from his folder.
“How long will I be off?” Bill asked him as he signed.
“Bones generally take six to eight weeks to heal.”
“Six to eight weeks! No way. I need to be back sooner than that. I’ve got a ride in the King George on Boxing Day.”
“The plate might help. It will provide the support needed. When I plate a broken hip, I try to get the patient up and standing on it the following day.”
“So how long?” Bill asked again.
“A couple of weeks, maybe.”
“A couple of days, more like,” said Bill with a grin.
“See, you are crazy,” the surgeon said again, smiling back at him. “Completely crazy.”
—
I WENT HOME shortly after when they came to pick him up for surgery. I suppose I could have waited for the operation to be over, but it would probably have taken at least an hour and then he’d be woozy for a good few hours after that. Interviewing an injured jockey in an ambulance on the way to the hospital had been one thing but I’d be pushing my luck to be asking him more questions while he lay in the post-anesthesia recovery room.
I let myself into my apartment and sidled past the unopened cardboard boxes into my kitchen–cum–living room.
It was cold, the mercury having plummeted after the sun went down under clear skies. I flicked on the electric fire but kept my coat resolutely on with my hands deep in its pockets.
It was eight o’clock Saturday evening. Just three weeks before Christmas, when any sensible person was out at a party or having dinner with friends.
But not me.
I thought about Henrietta Shawcross.
I hadn’t had an opportunity to go back to the Smiths’ box to say good-bye to her—or to anyone else, for that matter. I hadn’t even been at the racetrack for the main event of the afternoon, the sixth race of the day, by which time I was well on my way to the hospital in the ambulance.
I opened my laptop computer and logged on to the Racing Post website to check the results.
Ebury Tiger had won the Tingle Creek Chase, and there were reports of emotional scenes at the trophy presentation when the winning jockey had dedicated the victory to the memory of his dear friend Dave Swinton, who, he said, should rightly have been standing there in his place.
Dave Swinton, alive or dead, was still everyone’s knight in shining armor. I would make myself no friends whatsoever if I tarnished that image with talk of him purposely losing races or committing other misdeeds. Like the small matter of trying to kill me.
I also searched the Internet for any mentions of a Henrietta Shawcross.
There were masses of them, and lots of photos too, many in the Bystander section, on the Tatler magazine website.
If the images were anything to go by, Miss Shawcross was a socialite of some renown, being photographed at many of the most sought-after events and parties. But there was little actual information about her life in the magazine, just her looking beautiful for the camera lens while cuddling up to a variety of actors, singers and other A-list headliners at glamorous gatherings.
Next, I carried out searches for Sir Richard Reynard, her uncle, and for Martin Reynard, her first cousin.
Both were in shipping. To be more precise, Sir Richard was the sixty-nine-year-old chairman of Reynard Shipping Limited, a company set up by his grandfather, and Martin was forty-two and also a director. And they were loaded. The Sunday Times “Top 1,000 UK Rich List” put the Reynard family at number 147, with a combined wealth in excess of half a billion pounds.
Reynard Shipping was almost a household name, and everyone must have seen the trucks carrying containers with REYNARD SHIPPING painted on the side in big white letters. No wonder Derrick had thought I should know who Sir Richard Reynard was.
He would certainly be able to afford to buy a potential Derby winner. In fact, he’d be able to buy a whole stableful of them.
I wondered if Henrietta Shawcross was included in the calculation of the family wealth. Probably.
I sighed. Either way, she was out of my league, that was for sure. That’s if she would even speak to me again after my dreadful faux pas at lunch.
I dug a little deeper on the Internet.
For some reason, I couldn’t find any recent accounts for Reynard Shipping Limited on the Companies House website. It appeared from their records that the company had ceased to exist some three years previously, although it was quite clearly still trading—their shipping containers were everywhere.
But there was some more detail about Henri.
According to some past newspaper articles, Henrietta Shawcross was an only child. Furthermore, she was an orphan, her parents having died together in a helicopter crash when she’d been just sixteen. Her mother’s not inconsiderable fortune, including a twenty-five percent stake in Reynard Shipping, had passed directly to her, to be held in trust by her uncle until her thirtieth birthday, which, I noted, was coming up in February.
No wonder Gay Smith had said that Henri didn’t need a sugar daddy.
I went to my freezer and selected a Chicken Madras from a stack of frozen dinners and popped it in the microwave.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’d be diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I knew I was pretty miserable. I didn’t take antidepressant drugs or anything, and I didn’t feel particularly suicidal—indeed, I had fought with all my strength to escape death in Dave Swinton’s sauna. There had been no question then of me giving up and lying down to die when it would have been very easy to have done so.
It was just that I considered my life at present as meaningless.
I woke up each morning and went to work in my office at BHA headquarters, or at a racetrack somewhere, or I visited some training stables or an equine swimming pool, or I attended one of myriad other racing venues, yet, wherever I had spent the day, I would return to the solitude and loneliness of my apartment.
I sat in an armchair to eat my dinner and wondered what Henri Shawcross was doing. I may not have been a regular gambler, but I’d bet an arm and a leg that she wasn’t eating a microwaved curry off her lap while watching Saturday-night drivel on the television.
I’d just finished my food when my landline telephone rang.
My heart leaped. Could it be her? Asking me out?
No, it couldn’t. I hadn’t given her my phone number.
“Hello?” I said, answering the call.
No one at the other end spoke even though I could hear some noises in the background.
“Hello?” I said again. “Is anyone there?”
After two or three seconds, the line went dead.
How odd, I thought. I dialed 1471 to get the last number that had called and wrote it down on the back of an envelope that contained my gas bill. It wasn’t a number I recognized. I tried calling back, but all I heard was a disembodied voice stating that the number did not receive incoming calls.
No sooner had I put the phone down than it rang again.
I picked it up. “Hello?” I said slowly.
“Jeff, is that you?” said a voice.
“Hello, sis,” I said. “Did you call me just now?”
“No,” Faye said, sounding concerned. “Should I have?”
“No. It’s all right. I had a call, but no one was there. That’s all.”
“Happens to me all the time,” said Faye. “I blame the phone companies. They seem to spend so much of their time trying to sell us cheaper and cheaper broadband that they neglect the phone service.”
But the phone service had been working fine—I had been able to hear the background noise. It was the fact that the caller said nothing that had been strange.
“Are you feeling any better than last Sunday?” I asked her.
“Much better, thank you,�
� she said. “Brandy for breakfast has helped a lot.” She laughed and I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.
“Are you doing anything tomorrow lunchtime?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
Nothing other than moping around my apartment feeling sorry for myself.
“Good,” Faye said. “Come to lunch. We have some guests and, to be honest, I could do with the help.”
“What time?”
“As early as you can. We’ve got twelve people coming.”
“Who are they?” I asked. I didn’t altogether trust Faye not to set me up to meet a dozen prospective girlfriends.
“For some reason, Q has decided that it is his turn to host the annual Christmas lunch for the QCs in his chambers, together with their wives. Someone does it every year. It would have been nice if he’d given me a bit more warning. It seems he asked them all ages ago but only sprung it on me last Tuesday.”
Suddenly being alone in my apartment with my TV and a microwaved dinner seemed quite attractive compared with spending the day with Quentin’s legal cronies. But I didn’t want to upset Faye.
“That would be lovely,” I lied. “Do you want me to bring anything?”
“Just yourself. We’re having a buffet and I’ve got everything I need. I could just do with some help setting it all out and with the drinks when everyone arrives. Q is so hopeless when it comes to anything practical.”
I wondered if I was being asked only because Faye understood how lonely I had become, especially on weekends, and rather than actually needing any real help she was simply trying to include me in something that involved other people, even if they were Quentin’s work colleagues.
“OK,” I said. “Is eleven o’clock early enough?”
“Eleven would be great. Thanks so much. I’ll see you in the morning.”
She hung up.
Was the highlight of my day to be acting as a servant to my brother-in-law and a bunch of his barrister friends? I suppose it might make a pleasant change from having someone try to kill me, as had happened the previous Sunday.
I wish.
14
Twice more my home phone rang and no one spoke on the other end. And twice more I dialed 1471 to get the number. Each time, it was different. My gas bill envelope now had all three numbers written on it and each of them, when called back, produced the No incoming calls message.
The second call was made as I was getting into bed on Saturday evening and the third woke me at seven o’clock on Sunday morning. I was convinced someone was there, listening, because the line didn’t sound completely dead, and at one point I was sure I could hear some traffic in the background.
The calls made me feel a little uneasy, as if someone was stalking me.
And it wouldn’t be the first time. Over the years, I had investigated a number of less than agreeable characters, some of whom had taken against me personally for exposing their own wrongdoing. I had been threatened, beaten up and, on one occasion, knocked down by a speeding car.
Most had been attempts to prevent me from carrying out an investigation, but a couple had been out of revenge for getting someone banned from racing.
I couldn’t think of anyone in particular that I had recently upset by getting them disqualified or excluded from the sport. There might be, however, somebody who’d ended up in prison as a result of their fraud and was now released and bent on settling an old score.
I would have to just get on with my life as usual and watch my back, as I always did, avoiding dark alleyways and dimly lit multistory parking lots.
—
MY PHONE RANG once again just after ten o’clock as I was putting on my overcoat to leave for Richmond and my waiting duties at Faye and Quentin’s house.
“Hello?” I said.
No reply.
“Who are you?” I asked.
No reply.
“What do you want?”
No reply.
The line went dead. I again dialed 1471 and this time the number was the same as for the previous call. Again, I tried to call it back, but, as before, there was nothing but the disembodied message No incoming calls.
Annoying, I thought.
If I’d had more time and it hadn’t been a Sunday, I might have contacted the phone company to have my number changed. But it was so irritating to have to go through the whole rigmarole of informing everyone of the change in number. Although, come to think of it, not many people knew my number in the first place.
I’d had the number transferred from the apartment I’d shared with Lydia. Nowadays, the only person who called me on that line was Faye. I tended to use my cell for all work calls, incoming and outgoing, and the only friends who had used the landline phone had departed from my life at the same time Lydia had.
Could it be Lydia? Pining after the sound of my voice?
I thought it most unlikely. The last I’d heard, she and her new man were blissfully happy together. But that had been from a friend of hers who had seemingly wanted to rub my nose in the fact that she had left me, so it might not have been very accurate.
I had a careful check outside as I locked my front door. There was no one hiding in the bushes waiting to attack me.
I was intending to take the train from Willesden Junction to Richmond, but I set off in a direction directly away from the railway station, doubling back along two side streets and retracing my path twice, just to check that there was nobody intent on following me.
There wasn’t.
I smiled at myself. I must be getting paranoid.
—
THE BUFFET LUNCH went off without a hitch and I even found I enjoyed it.
It was a revelation to me to discover that not all the Queen’s Counsel in Quentin Calderfield’s chambers were as stuffy, bigoted and boring as he. In fact, some of them turned out to be fun, and they were far more proficient at taking the mickey out of their host than I had ever dared to be.
“Come on, Quentin, give us a song, show us your yang side,” one of them said, laughing loudly. “All we ever see is your yin.”
From the look on his face, I’m not sure that Quentin had ever heard of yin and yang, which was somewhat of a surprise considering he always saw things distinctly as right or wrong, white or black, light or dark, just like Paul Maldini.
Needless to say, Quentin didn’t break into song.
“Do you think it’s going all right?” Faye asked when I went to the kitchen to fetch yet another bottle of red wine.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I never realized lawyers could drink so much and still speak so eloquently.”
“Practice,” she said. “All those liquid lunches they have, then back into court to argue for a man’s freedom, or his life. Most lawyers’ livers were given a welcome rest when the old Wig and Pen Club closed down. Q used to have lunch there almost every day. He was distraught when it shut.”
—
IT WAS totally dark by the time the last of their lunch guests departed.
Faye collapsed into a deep armchair in the living room. “I’m pooped,” she said.
“What a great lunch,” said Quentin, slumping down on the sofa and putting his feet up.
“Thank God. it’s not our turn every year,” Faye said with her eyes closed.
“Right, then,” I said. “I’ll leave you two and get back home.”
“You’re very welcome to stay,” said Faye. “We’re only going to veg out in front of the telly with some cheese and crackers. That’s if you’d like the company.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I should be getting back. I have things I must do before tomorrow morning.”
Did I have things to do? Not really. It was just my silly subconscious telling me that, for some reason, I would be better off on my own—like a leper.
“Suit yourself,” Faye
said, and she started to get up.
“Don’t move,” I said. “I can find my own way out. Thank you for a great lunch.”
“Thank you for your help.”
I leaned down and gave her a kiss. “Look after yourself, sis. Getting this tired is not good for you.”
“Tell me about it.”
I waved at Quentin, who was already half asleep. He briefly lifted a hand in response.
I let myself out into the cold night and walked to Richmond town center across the green. Only when I started down Brewers Lane did I remember about not walking down dark alleyways on my own.
I spun round. No one was following me. Why should there be?
I turned up my coat collar and dug my hands deep into the pockets against the icy northerly wind and made it safely to the station to catch the train to Willesden Junction. Once there, I decided against taking the shortcut home along the gloomy trackside path, rather keeping to the longer, well-lit streets. I did it not out of any worry that it would be me in particular that might be targeted but because there had been reports of several recent muggings on the path during the dark winter evenings and I had no real wish to be added to those statistics.
I checked the deep shadows around the bushes outside my front door for lurking rogues and villains and of course there were none, so I let myself in.
The rogues and villains were already inside.
There were two of them and they were not making a social call.
—
IT WAS their haste that saved me.
They were waiting for me just inside the front door. One of the men grabbed my arm as soon as I stepped through and slammed me up against the wall, sending my cell phone spinning out of my hand, while the other one tried to make mincemeat of my insides with a thin, sharp carving knife, stabbing repeatedly at my abdomen and chest.
If they had just waited until I’d removed my overcoat, I would have been far more vulnerable. As it was, the thick woolen folds and the twin rows of large bone buttons of my double-breasted, military-style greatcoat, together with my tweed jacket underneath, dampened or deflected the lethal thrusts to the extent that the blade seemed to barely make it through to my skin.
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