Front Runner

by Felix Francis

  “You don’t know my Julie. She can be very jealous.”

  More the fool her, I thought. But, then, I wouldn’t have wanted Henri chatting up some other man at the wedding in Kent.

  I wondered what she was doing right now.

  “I was determined not to go through with it,” Bill said, bringing me back from my daydreaming.

  “With what?” I asked.

  “Stopping Wisden Wonder from winning. I’d done it once with Pool Table and I told the man that that was enough. But he says that I should think very carefully before I subjected my wife to such distressing news.” Bill laughed forlornly. “I told him it wasn’t bloody me who would be subjecting her to the distressing news. He just replied that I should have thought about that before I fucked another woman.”

  I could appreciate his dilemma.

  “I did consider trying to win the race anyway and to hell with him. If I’d won, perhaps it would screw the man good and proper. And if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter. Because at least I hadn’t stopped the horse on purpose.”

  “So why didn’t you try and win?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want to risk it. The man would have sent the pictures to Julie.” He put his head in his hands again. “I even tried to get you to stop him.”

  “What?” I said, surprised.

  He looked up. “I tried to get the BHA to stop him by phoning that anonymous tip-off line. I was hoping you might arrest Morris or something. Then I’d be off the hook, so to speak. But I saw him standing by the paddock exit at Sandown as I was going out on Wisden Wonder, all bold as brass in his bloody hat. He didn’t say anything, he just glared at me. It gave me the bloody willies, I can tell you. So I made damn sure I couldn’t win. I fell off.”

  “Why did you tell the tip-off line that he was placing bets for an excluded person?”

  “I was hardly going to say that he was betting on a fixed race, was I, not when I was the bloody fixer? Don’t be crazy. I tried to think of something that the BHA would have to act on. Something that would prevent him from being allowed into the racetrack. Something that wouldn’t implicate me.”

  But it had implicated him.

  It had been Bill’s telephone call that had alerted me to what was actually going on.

  The irony wasn’t lost on him.

  “I suppose that was a bloody stupid idea.”

  25

  The following morning, having checked in the Racing Post that he wasn’t riding at either of the day’s two race meetings, I went to the village of East Hagbourne hoping to find Willy Mitchell at home.

  My taxi drew up outside Mitchell’s place at noon. Willy was strapping his twin girls into their seats in a battered old Ford that stood in front of a modest-looking house.

  “Can you please wait?” I said to the taxi driver. “I may be a while.”

  “Be as long as you like,” he said, reclining his seat. “The meter’s still running.”

  Willy Mitchell wasn’t pleased to see me.

  “We’re just going out for Sunday lunch,” he said.

  “I won’t keep you long.”

  His very young-looking wife came out of the front door carrying two plastic bags. She was little more than a girl herself.

  “Look after the twins for a minute, will you, love?” Willy said to her. “This is about work. I won’t be long.” He looked at me. “You’d better come inside.”

  Mrs. Mitchell looked quizzically in her husband’s direction, but he said nothing more to her. He just led me through the front door and on into their kitchen, where we stood on either side of a small table.

  “Now what?” he said.

  “I’m on your side, Willy.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “It’s true, even if you don’t believe me.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Who is blackmailing you?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything. As before at Ascot, he just stared at me.

  I waited.

  “Who says I’m being blackmailed?” he asked eventually.

  “You do,” I replied. “It’s what your body language is shouting at me.”

  He went back to saying nothing. I waited some more.

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said.

  “Then go away and leave me in peace.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said. “Either talk to me now or you’ll end up at a disciplinary panel at the BHA and you will lose your license to ride.”

  “If I talk to you, I’ll lose my license anyway.”

  “Not if I can help it,” I said. “Willy, I know that you are being forced to do something you don’t want to. You are not alone. There are other jockeys in the same position as you. I don’t want any of you punished. I just want the blackmailer.”

  “Come on, Willy,” called a female voice from down the hall. “Hurry up or we’ll be late.”

  “All right, Amy, love,” Willy shouted back. “I’ll be there in a minute.” We heard her go back outside. He looked at me. “We’re going to her mother’s place. She likes us there on time.”

  “I’m sure she’ll wait,” I said. “Now, who is blackmailing you?”

  He sighed. A big, heavy sigh that had all the weight of the world. He slumped down onto one of the kitchen chairs.

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking down at the table. “I really don’t know.”

  “What hold does he have over you?” I asked.

  He lifted his eyes to my face. There was fear in them. “I can’t tell you that.”

  I thought about Bill McKenzie and the sex photos.

  “Have you been sleeping with another woman?” I asked.

  “No,” he said emphatically, standing up and bunching his fists. “How dare you!”

  “OK, OK,” I said. “Calm down.”

  So it wasn’t tax and it wasn’t adultery.

  “Willy, we have to go.” His wife came down the hall into the kitchen and she was quite cross.

  “Where does your mother live?” I asked her.

  “Didcot,” she said flatly.

  “Then, Mrs. Mitchell, why don’t you go on alone with the children. I’ll bring Willy there shortly in my taxi. I have to go to Didcot anyway to catch the train back to London.”

  She didn’t like it. She looked at her husband.

  “Good idea, love,” Willy said, clearly not giving her the support she was hoping for. “You go on. You know how much your mom is looking forward to seeing the girls. I’ll be there soon enough. In plenty of time for lunch.”

  She opened her mouth as if to say something but closed it again, turned on her heel and marched out. She slammed the front door behind her.

  Willy went to go after her. I moved to block his way.

  “Tell me what you know,” I said to him, “and I’ll do my best to get you out of this mess with your career intact.”

  He stared through me as if I wasn’t there.

  “How did the blackmailer contact you?” I said. “Was it by phone?”

  His eyes refocused on my face and he nodded. “A man called me here one night out of the blue.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He asked me if I loved my twin girls,” he said. “I ask you. What sort of question is that? Of course I love them. I absolutely adore them and I’ll do anything for them.”

  He paused. What father wouldn’t?

  “And?” I said, encouraging him to go on.

  “The man said I had to do what he asked or he would make sure that I’d lose them. He’d have them put in foster care.”

  His voice broke, and there were tears in his eyes. He was really nothing more than a boy.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “No one can arrange to have other people’s children put in foster care just like that.”

&
nbsp; There was a long silence.

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Tell me, then,” I said.

  There was another long silence. He audibly sighed.

  “Do you know what the registry of sex offenders is?” he asked.

  “I’ve heard of it,” I said.

  He sighed again.

  “I’m on it.”

  Now it was my turn to be dumbstruck. There was no mention of that in his BHA file.

  “Four years ago, I was convicted of having sex with a child.”

  I stood and stared at him, waiting silently for him to go on.

  “I was seventeen and the girl was fifteen. She became pregnant—that’s how they knew we’d done it. At first, they said they wouldn’t prosecute me, but I refused to promise not to see her again.” He looked up to the heavens. “Bloody silly, that was. Anyway, I was found guilty and sentenced to three months’ juvenile detention, which was suspended. I was also put on the sex offenders list for five years. I’m still on it.”

  “What happened to the girl?” I asked.

  “I married her,” he said. “You’ve just met her. Amy was pregnant with the twins. We were so much in love and everything was going brilliantly until this happened.”

  “Why is someone able to blackmail you over it? The information must already be in the public domain.”

  “The man on the phone said that unless I did as he wanted, he’d fix it for another girl of fourteen to make a complaint to the police that I’d been having sex with her.” He swallowed. “I told him that was a lie. He said it didn’t matter. With my record, social services would believe it and they’d take the twins away. The man told me I’d never get to hold my little girls again.”

  He was in tears once again. Whether or not the threat was real, Willy Mitchell clearly believed it..

  “Does Amy know about this?” I asked.

  “No,” he said quickly. “Well, of course she knows about the registry and all that. She was in court when that happened. She told the judge we were madly in love and that we were getting married as soon as she turned sixteen, but he took no notice.” The judge would have been bound by the law, I thought, and a suspended sentence had been quite lenient. “But she doesn’t know about the call from the man or about the race at Newbury.”

  “Isn’t it time you told her?” I said.

  —

  I DROPPED HIM at his mother-in-law’s house before going on to the railway station.

  “What will happen to me now?” he’d asked me in the taxi.

  “Nothing for the moment,” I’d said. “But call me straightaway if the man contacts you again.” I gave him my business card.

  He’d nodded. “OK.”

  “Tell me,” I’d said, “how did you pass the criminal records check?”

  The BHA would have done such a check as part of their fit and proper person test before issuing him with his first license to ride.

  “I got my jockey’s license when I was sixteen. Before all this happened. One of the advantages of being only seventeen was that my name was never revealed in the press. Ever since, whenever I’ve applied for a renewal, I’ve answered no to the question on criminal proceedings.”

  Which was also a breach of BHA regulations, but that was the least of his problems.

  —

  “LUTON?”

  “Yes,” Henri said on the phone when she called on Sunday evening. “We have to check in at Luton Airport on Wednesday morning at eight-thirty.”

  “I’ll take the train from London.”

  “OK,” she said. “I’m coming with Uncle Richard. We’ll pick you up from the airport railway station at eight o’clock.”

  “I didn’t think flights across the Atlantic left from Luton.”

  “Ours does.”

  I hadn’t seen her for six whole days. It felt like six months.

  “You do still want me to come, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Of course I do,” she said earnestly. “Why on earth did you say that?”

  “It’s just that we have hardly spoken this last week, even on the phone.”

  “That all ends at lunchtime on Tuesday,” she said. “That will be my last event for the year, thank goodness. After that, I’m all yours. I promise.”

  It sounded delicious.

  “OK,” I said. “What do I need to bring with me? Suit, tuxedo?”

  “Good God, no,” she said with a laugh. “Shorts and T-shirts, mostly. It’s very casual. But bring some long pants and a couple of decent shirts to go out to dinner.”

  “Do I need a jacket and tie?” I asked.

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “I’ll pack them anyway,” I said.

  Smart clothes were a bit like nuclear weapons—better to have them and not need them than to need them and not have them.

  “Don’t bring too much,” she said. “There’s a weight limit on luggage. We can only take one suitcase each.”

  Flying from Luton Airport and a luggage limit of only one suitcase.

  I had visions of us being cramped together on a knees-to-the-chest charter flight for ten hours. But as long as I was with Henri, I wouldn’t mind a bit.

  As I put down my cell, it rang again. This time it was Detective Inspector Galvin.

  “I thought you would like to know that Gary Banks was remanded in custody by the magistrates,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “He was charged with both the manslaughter of Darryl Lawrence and the attempted murder of you. He is due back in court next week, but that will be a formality. You can rest assured that he will now stay behind bars until his trial.”

  “When will that be?” I asked.

  “Sometime next year,” he said. “The date won’t even be set for months yet.”

  That was a relief.

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

  “He blames it all on Lawrence. Claims he didn’t know that Lawrence had a knife with him. He says he thought they were there just to rough you up a bit.”

  “He definitely knew about the knife when they came to the hospital to try and finish the job.”

  “He says it wasn’t him with Lawrence on that occasion.”

  “But he was wearing the red sneakers.”

  “Indeed,” said the inspector with a slight laugh. “I’m afraid our friend Mr. Banks is not very bright. He just talked himself into more and more trouble.”

  “I assume that you asked him why they were after me.”

  “He said he doesn’t know. Lawrence was the brains behind it, if you can call it brains. Lawrence just told Banks what to do.”

  “How about the phone calls to my landline?”

  “Lawrence made those, apparently. Just as you thought, they were trying to find out where you were. It seems that they’d been waiting for you to appear outside Sandown racetrack on that Saturday afternoon. Banks told us they were planning to do you on your way back to Esher railway station. But you never turned up.”

  I’d departed from the racetrack in an ambulance on its way to Kingston Hospital with Bill McKenzie and his broken collarbone.

  “What did Banks say when you mentioned Leslie Morris?” I asked.

  “He swore up and down that he’s never heard of anyone called Leslie Morris,” said D.I. Galvin. “But, then, he would, wouldn’t he?”

  Perhaps he had been telling the truth.

  The timing didn’t fit.

  Bill McKenzie hadn’t known that I was interested in him until he was leaving the parade ring on Lost Moon for the race in which he’d be injured. Even if he’d wanted to, he hadn’t had a chance to contact Leslie Morris before he’d gone to surgery. I knew because I’d been with him all the time.

  Morris would have been unaware that I was at Sandown that Sat
urday. So if he hadn’t told Lawrence and Banks to wait for me outside the racetrack, who had?

  And how would they have known what I looked like?

  Even if Morris had spotted me following him on the previous afternoon, which I knew he hadn’t, then Lawrence and Banks would have been looking for a man with long dark hair, a brown beanie, glasses and a goatee.

  If so, it would appear to be a very poorly thought through plan for murder.

  The chances of knifing the wrong man to death as a result of misidentification seemed enormous.

  No, they had to have known exactly what I looked like.

  “Did you ask Banks how they would recognize me outside the racetrack?” I asked the inspector.

  “Indeed I did,” he said. “It seems that they followed you to the racetrack from Esher railway station earlier in the day.”

  I silently berated myself for not having spotted a tail. I was the one who usually did the following and I knew all the tricks. I should have noticed.

  “But how did they know what I looked like then?”

  “According to Banks, you were pointed out to them.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck began to stand up. It was my turn for an adrenaline rush. Fight or flight. The body’s natural response to fear. I had been pointed out to a pair of killers without me having the slightest notion of why and it frightened me badly.

  “Who pointed me out?” I asked, forcing my voice box to relax.

  “Banks says he doesn’t know. Just a man.”

  “Didn’t he give you a description?”

  “He claims he never met the man. He only saw him from afar. Lawrence spoke to him inside the station while he, Banks, had been told to wait outside.”

  “He must be able to give you something,” I said. “Was the man young or old? Tall or short? Fat or thin?”

  “He says he doesn’t know, but I’m not sure I believe him. He claims that only Lawrence knew who the man was.”

  And Lawrence was conveniently dead.

  26

  On Monday morning, I caught another train from Paddington, this time to Reading, where I took a taxi to the police station for a booked appointment with Detective Sergeant Jagger.