Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931)

by Francis, Felix

  I was left alone briefly to change, but the detective and his sidekick soon returned, accompanied this time by another man who was clearly their boss—the superintendent.

  “Mr. Shillingford,” he said. “Detective Superintendent Cullen.” He held out his hand toward me and I shook it. “I’m sorry you have been asked to stay here for so long. I hope my boys have been looking after you?” He smiled.

  No knife, I thought.

  “They have been charming,” I said, smiling back. Two could play at this game. “And thank you for the tracksuit and shoes.” We both smiled again.

  Another chair was brought in, and we all sat down, although the cubicle was hardly big enough for the four of us.

  “Can you think of any reason why Mr. Woodley would be murdered?” the superintendent asked.

  “Other than because of today’s front page of the Daily Gazette?” I said. There was little point in not mentioning it, and I thought it would be better if I did so first.

  “Exactly. Other than that.”

  “Lots of them,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I can think of lots of reasons why someone might want to murder Toby Woodley. He was a horrible little man who preyed on other people’s weaknesses.” I paused briefly. “I’d have happily stuck a knife into his back.”

  “And did you?” he asked seriously.

  “No,” I said. “Someone else seems to have done it for me.”

  “Is that an admission of a conspiracy?”

  “No, of course not,” I said. “But if you’re expecting me to grieve over Toby Woodley, you’ll be disappointed. I hated the little creep.”

  “I understand,” he said slowly, “that you have been telling people here this evening that he was nothing more than an insect that needed stamping on. Is that right?”

  “Quite right,” I said. “Because he’s been trashing my late sister’s reputation with his lies and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Someone may have.”

  “Well, it was not me.”

  “What were the revelations about you that Mr. Woodley was going to write about?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” I said. “I was rude to him at Stratford races yesterday, and I expect he was planning to make up some nonsense about me out of revenge.”

  “How were you rude to him?”

  “I basically told him he was a little shit,” I said. “Because he was.”

  Superintendent Cullen looked down at his notebook, then up at me.

  “Are you happy he’s dead?”

  I sat there and looked at each of the three policemen in turn.

  “I tried to save his life, didn’t I? I put my mouth over his—over the mouth of someone I hated and despised—and I breathed into him.” I instinctively wiped my mouth with the sleeve of the tracksuit. “Of course I’m not happy he’s dead. But, equally, I’m not especially sad about it either.”

  —

  THEY FINALLY let me go at about half past midnight after I had agreed to and signed a full account of the incident as I remembered it. But they kept my clothes, my shoes, and, much to my annoyance, my car.

  “I need my car,” I said.

  “None of the cars close to the white van can be moved,” the superintendent said to me. “We need to search the area again properly in the daylight, and I’m not prepared to compromise any forensic evidence present by moving anything.”

  “But how am I going to get home?” I asked. “Especially at this time of night?”

  “I’ll get a car to take you.”

  “Thank you. How about my clothes?” I asked. “And my shoes?”

  I was rather fond of those shoes.

  “You’ll get them back in due course.”

  I didn’t like to ask how long “in due course” might be. Years, probably, particularly if they provided evidence that was pertinent to a prosecution.

  “I’ll need my car tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’ve got to get to Warwick races.”

  “Don’t push your luck, Mr. Shillingford,” the superintendent said, but with a smile. “You’re lucky to be getting a ride home. I could always change my mind. Ever heard of trains? Leave your car keys and your phone number with my sergeant and he’ll contact you when you can retrieve your car.”

  I didn’t push my luck. I gave my car keys to the sergeant.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  I was driven in an unmarked police car by a driver who didn’t say a word to me all the way from Kempton to Edenbridge. He dropped me outside my front door, still silent, and drove off.

  I let myself in and then sat in my sitting room–cum–kitchen–cum–dining room–cum–office with a stiff whisky. I didn’t often drink spirits, but I didn’t often have someone die with his head in my lap.

  Who would have wanted to kill Toby Woodley?

  Sure, there were lots of people, myself included, who might rejoice at his passing, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually kill him over something he had written in the paper. As Jim Metcalf had said, everyone knew the Daily Gazette was nothing more than a glorified rumor mill and no one really believed any of it.

  So why was Toby Woodley dead? And did his death have anything to do with his pieces in the paper about Clare? Or was it totally unrelated? Indeed, were the deaths of Toby Woodley and Clare Shillingford entirely isolated incidents for which the only common factor was me?

  I sat for a while pondering such questions but without coming up with any useful answers.

  I knocked back the rest of my whisky and went to bed.

  What I needed most was someone to talk to, someone to bounce some ideas off. In the past that would have been either Clare or Sarah.

  I lay in the darkness, missing both of them hugely.

  —

  ON THURSDAY MORNING I caught a train from Edenbridge to London, and then another from London to Warwick.

  I usually went everywhere by car, and it was quite a change for me to just sit and watch the world go by the window.

  I bought a stack of newspapers at Edenbridge station and mostly spent the journey reading everything I could find about the murder of Toby Woodley in the Kempton parking lot. There was precious little that I didn’t know already.

  Only the Racing Post named me as one of the two men who had tried to save Toby’s life. I wondered how much flak I would get from my colleagues for that.

  The Daily Gazette, in contrast, named me as someone who was helping the police with their inquiries, which I suppose had been true at the time the paper had gone to press late the previous evening. The paper also speculated as to why one of its “star reporters”—their words—had been so cruelly cut down in the prime of life. Was it something to do with the Daily Gazette’s ongoing investigation into race fixing? Without actually saying so directly, they used the obvious association of the Shillingford names to imply that it must have been me who had killed Toby Woodley to shut him up.

  Perhaps I should contact my solicitor and sue them. But I knew of others who had sued the Daily Gazette, and even though a few of them had won sizable damages, they always lost in the end. Newspapers in general were relentless and vindictive, and the Gazette led the way on both counts, hounding its detractors forever, with every misdemeanor, however slight, every speeding ticket, every marital indiscretion, every faux pas, splashed across its front page in big bold type.

  I took a taxi from Warwick station to the racetrack.

  I was early.

  I climbed up the stairs to the commentary booth and sat silently looking out across the track. There was a good hour and a half to go before the first race, but I needed to think. In particular, I needed to think once again about why Clare might have killed herself. And also why anyone would murder Toby
Woodley.

  The phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Superintendent Cullen’s sergeant.

  “Mr. Shillingford,” he said, “did Mr. Woodley have a black leather briefcase with him last night when you first saw him in the racetrack’s parking lot?”

  “I didn’t really notice,” I said. “Why?”

  “Mr. Woodley was seen with it earlier in the track’s press area, but now it’s missing.”

  “So was it a robbery that went too far?” I asked.

  “Possibly,” the sergeant replied. “We are trying to determine if the theft of the briefcase was the reason for the attack on Mr. Woodley or whether it was taken afterward by a third party.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t remember seeing any briefcase.”

  He thanked me anyway and then told me that my car was now ready to pick up and that the keys would be at the Kempton Park office, which was open late as they were racing that evening.

  “Thanks,” I said, not really meaning it. The sergeant hung up.

  Not having my car was a bore. I’d better look up the return train times from Warwick to London.

  So the meeting at Kempton tonight was going ahead. Just as it had been with Clare’s, Toby Woodley’s demise had been but a minor blip in the ever-moving symphony of life that plays on regardless. Are we each so insignificant, I thought, that our death would mean nothing more to most people than a slight inconvenience collecting a car?

  Clare’s death certainly meant more to me than that.

  I still couldn’t believe she had gone forever.

  I yet again listed in my head the only reasons I could muster to explain why she would have killed herself and yet again came up with precious few.

  She must have been depressed. Surely people who kill themselves must be depressed. But depressed about what?

  I kept coming back to the question of the elusive boyfriend. She had definitely been seeing someone—more than that, she’d been sleeping with him. I thought back to our conversation at that last dinner: What a lover! she had said, and she’d grinned like the cat who’d got the cream. But she’d refused point-blank to say who it was, and I felt she’d become quite aggressive about it when I’d pressed her.

  So who was Clare’s great lover and was he one of the two men that Carlos, the bellman, had seen go to her room?

  But why hadn’t he come forward to grieve with the family?

  He might be married, I thought. Or perhaps the affair had finished sometime between dinner and eleven-thirty that night. Was that the reason she had jumped?

  Or had it been to do with her riding?

  Had someone else spotted what I had seen in the race at Lingfield? Maybe somebody had threatened to tell the racing authorities. I thought back again to something else Clare had said that night: I can’t imagine a time when I couldn’t ride anymore. I wouldn’t want to go on living.

  And how about Toby Woodley?

  Were his death and Clare’s connected? Had someone killed him to shut him up? Had there been more truth to his articles than I’d given him credit for? Was there indeed a betting syndicate that had made a fortune laying Brain of Brixham in April?

  I didn’t think there could be. For a start, the Internet exchanges would have told the British Horseracing Authority if there had been any unusual betting patterns on that race, particularly as Clare had been suspended for riding carelessly in it.

  Perhaps Toby Woodley hadn’t got the details completely right, but nevertheless someone had thought he’d been close enough.

  Overall, I was frustrated by my lack of information. I hoped that the Hilton Hotel’s CCTV film or the guest list from the Injured Jockeys Fund gala might give me some clues.

  Provided I could get hold of them.

  —

  I COLLECTED MY CAR from Kempton at eight o’clock that evening, having cadged a ride from Warwick with a south-coast trainer who didn’t mind a brief detour off the London orbital freeway.

  “It’s the least I could do,” he said. “I was very fond of Clare.”

  He dropped me at the gates of the Kempton parking lot, and I walked through to the racetrack office. The only signs of the previous day’s murder were the white tent still covering the spot where Toby had died and a very large number of police officers, standing around, holding clipboards.

  “Excuse me, sir,” called one of them as I emerged from the office with my car keys. “Were you here yesterday evening?”

  “Yes, I was,” I said. “I’m collecting my car, which was kept here. I was interviewed last night by Superintendent Cullen.”

  He still wrote down my name and address on his clipboard. “Is there anything else you’ve remembered since you were interviewed that might be useful to us?”

  “No,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He let me go, and I walked toward my car, which someone had moved over to the fence near the exit.

  I felt slightly uneasy.

  Less than twenty-four hours ago someone had been murdered in this parking lot. Stabbed in the back. While now there was easily enough light to see the cars, there were plenty of dark shadows in which someone could be hiding. The hairs on the back of my neck stood upright, and I spun around to check.

  There was nobody there.

  I laughed at myself. Of course there was nobody there.

  Even a psychopath would surely think twice about murdering someone here with this many police about.

  But I did walk right around my old Ford before I opened it, and I also checked the backseat to make sure no one was lurking there with intent.

  They weren’t. Not this time.

  12

  On Friday morning I packed a suitcase and drove myself to Newmarket.

  My original plan had been to come there after racing at Warwick the previous day and stay for a couple of nights with Clare. But that plan had changed even before Clare’s death. About a month ago we had both sort of decided during a phone call that two nights was one night too many given the current belligerent atmosphere between us.

  But Clare had then laughed and promised to hide all the kitchen knives during my stay. At least, I thought, we hadn’t gone too far down an irreversible path that we were unable to see the funny side and laugh at ourselves. But then the disastrous event in Park Lane had overtaken us.

  Oh, how I longed again for her still to be alive. It was like an ache that wouldn’t go away. Painkillers had absolutely no effect. I’d tried.

  I parked next to Clare’s cottage and collected the key from Geoff Grubb’s stable yard office. There must have been another key in Clare’s handbag, and I presumed the police had that. I would have to ask Detective Sergeant Sharp for it on Monday. Would they also have her car? I would ask the detective about that as well.

  The rent’s paid for the rest of the month, Geoff had said to me at Windsor races when I’d seen him just two days after Clare had died. Well, today was the last day of the month, so I had better get on doing something about clearing out her stuff.

  I let myself in and stood in her sitting room. It was only eight days since I’d last been there, but so much seemed to have happened since. Somehow, though, I felt it was a little easier being there this time.

  I took my things up the narrow staircase to the spare bedroom, hanging my dinner jacket in the wardrobe.

  Clare and I had planned to go to Tatiana’s eighteenth birthday party together, and I had a slight emotional wobble as I recalled Clare’s surprise at being asked.

  “I hardly know the girl,” she had said. “You’re her godparent, not me.”

  “But you can’t really blame her. If you had a celebrity aunt, you’d also invite her to your party.”

  “Celebrity, my arse,” she replied with a laugh. “You’re the celebrity. That’s what being on TV does for you.
”

  But Clare had indeed been quite a celebrity, as the abundant column inches of obituary that had appeared in The Times and the Daily Telegraph had proved. All the more reason why I should endeavor to defend her reputation from the slurs in the Daily Gazette. And, I thought, all the more reason for ensuring that I told no one of her irregular riding practices on Bangkok Flyer and the like.

  I sighed. I didn’t feel like going to an eighteenth birthday party. I could have done without all that noise for a start, not to mention a late night before I was due to appear on The Morning Line for Channel 4. But I had agreed ages ago to make the birthday speech, so I had to be there. And I wanted to support Nicholas, my brother-in-law, who was still worrying himself sick over whether or not he should have postponed the whole thing.

  He and Angela had asked me if I would like to be Tatiana’s godfather when I’d been only fourteen. I’d been really flattered, but, to be honest, I probably hadn’t been the most conscientious of godfathers. I had no idea about her faith, but I’d always sent Christmas and birthday presents, which is what I reckoned were my main duties.

  Nicholas and Angela lived near Royston, about twenty miles southwest of Newmarket, and the party was in a tent in their garden. According to the invitation, it started at eight o’clock, so I decided that I should leave at about seven forty-five in order to arrive suitably early but without appearing to be too prompt. I reckoned that if I was there pretty much at the beginning, I could get away well before the end.

  I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve, midday. So I had nearly seven hours for sorting and packing before I needed to get ready. But where did I start? I wasn’t even sure how much of the furniture had belonged to Clare and how much had been rented with the cottage.

  I decided to deal with her clothes first. I went out to my car to collect some large blue bags and some cardboard boxes that I had brought with me just for that purpose.

  I started with the overly full drawers of frilly black lace underwear, which filled up one of the blue bags to overflowing. It made me sad that Clare had invested so much in something that almost no one saw. But I suppose it must have given her pleasure.