Tip Off

by John Francome

  When I’d finished, he nodded slowly. ‘I’m not surprised Jane’s reluctant to talk about it; coming to terms with your own son’s homosexuality must be awfully difficult, especially as he seems to have been involved with some fairly tacky characters.’ He pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘And there’s a nice irony in the fact that it was Harry Chapman who paid him to close his line, when Gerald Tintern had asked you to investigate it.’

  ‘Emma told me there wasn’t much love lost between them,’ I remarked.

  ‘You can say that again! I’ve known Gerald for forty years and I can tell you that his prime motive for building up the King George Hotel Group was to get his own back on Salmon’s for taking Atlantic Hotels from his father.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to have made a bad job of it,’ I said. ‘And you’re a shareholder, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m not complaining. But Gerald still hasn’t got the London flagship hotel he’s always wanted – a Ritz or a Dorchester – to give the King George Group the same status as Atlantic, and he won’t be happy until he has.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I said, making a connection. ‘The other day I bumped into a property agent who deals with him. I got the distinct impression that something big was due to happen, something that would make Gerald very happy, apparently.’

  ‘You must mean Daniel Dunne?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Very indiscreet of him.’

  ‘Why? What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s just that Gerald is close to securing a very large site in Buckingham Gate.’

  ‘Do many people know about it?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. I’m certainly not supposed to. Gerald’s a naturally secretive operator; it’s the sort of thing he likes doing best. He’s bought almost all the freeholds and leases that make up the block through a series of different property companies and Jersey investment trusts, and left them occupied by tenants who are still trading – at least for the time being. I should think he’s moving very cautiously now so the last few leaseholders won’t twig what’s going on and hold the whole deal to ransom.’

  Frank nodded knowingly.

  I sensed his disapproval. ‘Isn’t this an official King George Hotel deal, then?’

  ‘No. Or at least, not yet. Gerald certainly doesn’t know that I know about his activities. But whether he’s intending to put the site together on his own account then sell it on to the group, or planning to set up his own hotel there, I couldn’t say.’

  ‘How do you know about it then?’

  ‘He’s borrowed a lot of money to do the deal, using his King George shares as collateral, and it just so happens that Alec Denaro, the chairman of the bank who’s lent him most, is a very old friend of mine. In fact, although Gerald’s probably forgotten it, I introduced them.’

  I was surprised by the equanimity with which Frank seemed to accept the position. I thought of Lord Tintern, in the next room, doling out words of wisdom to everyone around him. ‘But doesn’t that concern you?’

  ‘Not unduly,’ Frank said. ‘What he’s doing isn’t illegal or strictly speaking even unethical. I’ve got nothing to complain of in Gerald’s performance so far; I backed him when he started in the fifties, and he’s done me very well. My original investment has appreciated several hundred times over.

  ‘Now,’ he said with a change of tone, ‘I’ve probably told you more than I should have and ought to get back and support my sister. Please be discreet but feel free to get in touch any time if you think I might be able to help somehow. I’d dearly like to see Toby’s death properly resolved, for Jane’s sake.’

  Later, I said goodbye to Jane and promised I’d come round again soon to see her. Emma was staying to the bitter end. I kissed her goodbye, resigned to another night on my own.

  Matt and I had arranged to meet up with Larry and get reports from Dougie in London. As we drove back to Reading, I thought of Frank and realised that the reason he’d looked so familiar was that there were mannerisms and physical features in him I’d already seen in Emma. I thought that perhaps her theory about her parentage had some basis in fact after all.

  Back in the office, Jason greeted us gloomily. He had already logged all the reports that had come in and there had been no sign of Lincoln all day, or indeed any other visitors to the scruffy little flat in West Kensington.

  Larry had been more successful at the races. His trip to Ascot had thrown up sightings of the photographer and the same suspicious character I’d spotted at Plumpton and Hereford.

  Obeying orders, Larry had done nothing about the photographer, but had tailed the other man back through the race-course after Connor’s nap had run. But once he had disappeared into an office at the back of the stand, Larry had lost him – at least, he didn’t reappear inside the next hour – and when finally Larry had knocked on the door, there had been no reply. He discovered afterwards that the office interconnected with several others and anyone entering could easily have left by a different exit.

  We arranged that the next day we would all be on duty, wherever that might be, to monitor this man and the photographer.

  On my way home, I found myself thinking back over everything Frank had told me about Gerald Tintern, and his almost obsessive ambition to own a major London hotel. I decided to take a detour by Buckingham Gate.

  The site Frank had described was directly opposite the southern entrance to the palace. It was a long Victorian terrace of shops and offices that didn’t look as if they had seen a paint brush in years. Most of the shops were closed and unoccupied; only three were still operating. One was a newsagent, one a launderette, and the other a bookmaker. Above the window, on a familiar dark blue sign, was the name ‘Salmon Racing’.

  I sat and stared at it for a few minutes before I drove on, turned into the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace, and headed straight for Hanover Square and Harry Chapman’s office.

  Chapter Eighteen

  In the morning I arrived at our office just before nine. Matt was already there with Sara. As it was a Saturday, neither Jason nor Monica was in and I had the impression Sara and Matt had been taking advantage of the empty office. I evidently didn’t hide my surprise well enough.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Matt asked brusquely.

  ‘I just didn’t expect to see Sara.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said with wide-eyed self-deprecation.

  ‘Listen to what she’s been telling me,’ Matt said.

  ‘Salmon’s have formally announced that Atlantic Hotels is for sale,’ she said. ‘I think it’s just a smoke-screen to show the licensing authorities they’re doing something to secure their position but everyone’s screaming at the Jockey Club for not pulling their fingers out, and telling them they should bring the police in. But the Jockey Club say they haven’t got a single scrap of evidence of any criminal activity. And listen to this – you know I told you the bookies were going to get one of Connor’s winners dope-tested over in the States?’

  I nodded keenly.

  ‘They managed to get hold of a urine sample from that horse Free Willy that Connor napped at Cheltenham last Friday – the one that dumped its rider,’ she said.

  ‘A sample of urine from a Free Willy? Sounds right,’ I laughed.

  ‘For God’s sake, Simon,’ Matt snapped. ‘Try to be serious for a few minutes.’

  ‘Matt,’ Sara protested, ‘don’t be such a miserable git. Anyway,’ she turned back to me, ‘they couriered the sample to the lab in Florida, and the result came back yesterday. Apparently the horse was clean as a whistle.’

  ‘I never really thought it wouldn’t be,’ I said.

  ‘But listen to this,’ she went on excitedly. ‘They also sent a sample from another runner – the second favourite, I think – and it was stuffed full of Demosedan!’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ I stared at her. ‘Wasn’t it masked?’

  ‘No, not as far as we know, but the animal was passed totally clean
in the post-race test at Newmarket.’

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ I gasped.

  ‘It’s true,’ Matt said. ‘Sara saw the American result for herself.’ Matt turned to me. ‘What does Demosedan do?’

  ‘It’s a serious sedative. Just half a cc in a muscle would slow a horse right down. And it only takes a couple of minutes to work.’ I put a hand to my forehead, trying to make sense of what had been happening. ‘So the winner hadn’t been doped, and another horse had. But they don’t always test the winners, so why did they choose Free Willy and this other horse?’

  ‘We’ve been over this already,’ Matt said tetchily. ‘We’ve established no common factor between all the naps, including Jockey Club stewards, local stewards and stipes, who do the choosing. It’s got to be the lab, yet we ran a check on everybody there after they sent us the personnel list, didn’t we?’

  Matt opened up the file he’d been building on the Jockey Club case and leafed through the stack of notes and print-outs that had accumulated in it. ‘We asked the Jockey Club to verify security clearance on all parties who might have been involved in monitoring and checking, yes,’ he confirmed, ‘and all staff at the Equine Forensic Lab were cleared.’

  ‘We’ll have to check them individually.’

  ‘Agreed, but we won’t get anywhere with that today. The place isn’t open on Saturdays.’

  I turned to Sara. ‘What are the chances that either the wrong sample was sent to the States, or that the American lab got it wrong?’

  ‘As far as I can tell, absolutely negligible. You’ve got to work on the basis that this horse and some of the other runners in the races where the naps won were well and truly doped. But you’ve been thinking along doping lines for some time, haven’t you?’

  ‘For want of any other logical explanation, yes. But we were always stuck with the problem of how they weren’t caught by the Forensic Lab. Maybe we should go and see them again.’

  ‘Our first priority’s to get our hands on this photographer and see if he’s noticed anything,’ Matt said.

  I nodded, and picked up the phone to dial Connor McDonagh’s line.

  Three minutes later, I put the phone down with a satisfied smile. ‘Good news. We’ve only got to go to Newbury – Tahiti Bride in the novice hurdle. We’d better get hold of Dougie and Jack. We’ll need a couple of fresh faces.’

  There was no sign of either target until Tahiti Bride’s race. Matt spotted the photographer first and, almost immediately afterwards, the man Larry had lost at Ascot, both down by the two-mile hurdle start.

  Whatever the photographer was doing, it looked to us from where we stood in the stands as if the other man was following him. Matt pointed him out to Dougie and Jack who made their way down to the side of the track so that they wouldn’t lose sight of him.

  There was a slight mist across the course, and soon after the start the runners disappeared from sight on the far side. When they came back into view, I could see Tahiti Bride’s colours leading the pack towards the second last flight. A minute later, she hurtled past the post to huge applause. Matt and I walked briskly from the Members’ stand to the unsaddling enclosure, when Dougie’s voice crackled over my radio.

  ‘The camera man’s heading for the car-park, and so’s the other.’

  Matt grabbed the radio. ‘Dougie – stop the second man! Any way you like, but just get him off the scent. And tell Jack to follow the photographer. We’re coming through to the car-park.’

  A moment later we had the photographer, his tail and Dougie in sight, but from the way he was moving, it looked as if the photographer already sensed that something was wrong. His pace had increased until he was almost running. He was heading straight towards us as we turned and ambled slowly in the same direction.

  We could hear his breathing, the irregular rhythm of an anxious man, as he gained on us. A few moments later he brushed right by Matt, who tripped him, so that he fell out of sight between two cars. He hit the ground hard and was grunting with pain.

  Matt swiftly leaned down and grabbed the camera, but the man threw out a hand and grasped the leather strap. For an instant he must have thought he had it but then the buckle gave way under the strain and Matt ran off into the crowd.

  I turned on my heel and walked briskly back to my car. I got in and drove for the exit where Matt was waiting. We’d seen no sign of the photographer by the time we passed through the gates and were heading back towards the A4. I hoped Dougie was still on to him.

  Matt chucked the photographic bag on the rear seat and pulled out his own radio.

  ‘Jack? How are you doing?’

  ‘Okay. I stopped yer man.’ Jack’s unruffled cockney voice echoed over the short waves. ‘’E wasn’t happy. Turns out ’e’s with Jockey Club security.’

  ‘Shit!’ Matt spat out the word with feeling. ‘Why didn’t we think of that! Jack, does he know who you are or who you’re working for?’

  ‘No way,’ Jack chuckled. ‘’E just knows some drunken geezer barged into ’im and sort of fell on top of ’im. There’s no sign of our camera man now.’

  ‘What about Dougie?’

  ‘Nor ’im.’

  We didn’t hear anything from either man during the half an hour it took us to get back to our office. When we arrived there, the first thing I did was to open up the back of the camera to take out the film.

  There wasn’t one.

  ‘He must have taken it out already,’ Matt said, ‘I’ll look in the bag.’

  He tipped the contents of the large canvas hold-all on to a table. Frustratingly, there was no film there either. We’d been assuming that this would give us some clue to what had been going on.

  I picked up the camera – a Leica with the massive 800mm lens I had seen through my binoculars. I opened the back again to inspect it more closely.

  Where the film should have been, there was a miniature compressed gas canister.

  I showed Matt. ‘What the hell do you suppose this is?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the motordrive.’ He turned back to the pile of objects that had come out of the bag. ‘There are four more of them here . . . and what are these?’ He had picked up and opened a small plain tin with a screw lid, like an old-fashioned lozenge tin. He tipped it over on the table and poured out a dozen metal pellets, about ten millimetres in diameter, each with a small pointed glass capsule on the front.

  I stared at them, then back at the camera in my hand. Slowly I turned it over to remove the cap over the long lens, and revealed not a glass lens, but a flat, matt black metal disc, in the centre of which was a circular aperture, about ten millimetres across.

  ‘Good God!’ I held it for Matt to see. ‘This isn’t a camera, it’s some kind of gun – for firing these little capsules.’ I nodded at the pellets.

  Matt took the weapon. After five minutes of fiddling about with it, replacing what turned out to be a spent cylinder with a fresh one, he looked through what was obviously a sighting aperture and fired a capsule somewhere into the bushes below the window of my office.

  ‘I guess the sights have been adjusted to perform at an optimum distance, maybe ten yards or so, which is as close as he could reasonably expect to get to the runners at the start. How big a target area would he have?’

  ‘I don’t know for certain,’ I admitted. ‘I’m not a vet, but generally if you are giving a horse a booster, it has to be in a vein. Otherwise something like dope can go into any muscle, though they tend to do it in the quarters.’

  Matt picked up another of the pellets. ‘These little capsules would be more or less invisible, I suppose. I presume they just break off and release whatever’s in them straight into the blood stream, and from there it would take just a few seconds to get to the heart.’

  I shrugged. This was uncharted territory for me. ‘Sounds right. I guess we and the Jockey Club man must have got on to the photographer at just about the same time.’

  Matt
nodded. ‘And Lincoln was there already – or was he part of it?’

  ‘There was no sign of him at Newbury today and Larry hasn’t called in with a sighting in London, has he?’

  When Matt had gone back to Henley to meet up with Sara, I rang Wetherdown. Frank Gurney answered.

  ‘It’s Simon here. How’s Jane?’

  ‘So-so. I’m taking her out to dinner later. I think she’d benefit from seeing a few other people around.’

  ‘I was going to come over to see her and pick up Emma.’

  ‘The lovely Emma has gone back to Ivydene.’

  I thought I could detect a hint of wistfulness in his voice. ‘I’ll go there, then,’ I said. ‘Give Jane my love.’

  ‘I will. And, Simon, we ought to talk again – sometime in the next few days?’

  ‘Whenever you like.’

  ‘Okay. I’m not going back to France for a while so if nothing else comes up in the meantime, let’s be in touch next week.’

  I put the phone down with a feeling that Frank was a man who didn’t waste people’s time. Anything he wanted to tell me would be enlightening.

  Before I drove into Ivydene, I phoned Emma to let her know I was coming.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘My father’s here, and he’s not in a good mood.’

  That much was obvious the moment I walked into the big black-and-white tiled hall of Lord Tintern’s house. He cornered me there before I’d even seen Emma.

  ‘I’d like a word with you,’ he said without a glimmer of his normal charm, and opened the door to his study.

  I could, I supposed, have refused to go, but I thought I might as well hear what he had to say now and get it over with.

  Inside the room he made no attempt to offer me a seat and came straight to the point. ‘Did you or did you not receive a fax from Portman Square at the beginning of the week?’

  ‘Confirming your instruction to cease our investigations?’

  He nodded curtly.