“Why?” I asked. “What had you done?”
“But that’s what’s so bloody stupid,” he said. “I haven’t really done anything.”
“So what were they using to blackmail you?” I asked.
“It was an offshore bank account I had on the Isle of Man.”
“What about it?”
“I opened it in a different name because I thought at one stage I might move all my assets there.”
“For tax purposes?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Capital gains tax, to be precise. In the end, I didn’t go through with it, but I never closed the account. I’d put some money in it, and I suppose I should have paid tax on the interest it earned, but it was so small I didn’t think it mattered. Also, I didn’t tell my accountant or put any offshore account details on my tax return as I didn’t want the tax people to think I was trying to fiddle with my taxes.”
“Which you were,” Emily said.
“Yeah, well . . . but not using that account.”
“But you were fiddling with your taxes somewhere else?” I asked.
“Not actual fiddling,” he said, slightly affronted. “I avoid tax, not evade it. There’s an important difference. Avoidance is legal, evasion isn’t.” He smiled unconvincingly. “But I could really do without being audited by the Revenue. Let’s just say it might be awkward, you know, over certain of my interpretations of the tax laws.”
“Sailing close to the wind,” said Emily.
“Exactly,” Harry agreed. “Very close.”
“So what did the blackmail note say?”
He knew it by heart. “‘I know you are using an offshore bank account to evade paying tax. Just two hundred pounds will make the story go away. Get the cash together. Payment details will follow.’”
“Same blackmailer,” I said. “When did you get the note?”
“Nearly two years ago. At a time when it might have been very embarrassing to have had a Revenue investigation. So I paid.”
“Were you told to leave the money under your car in a racetrack parking lot?”
He nodded. “But he demanded more. About six months later I had to pay a thousand, next it was two thousand, then I got another note yesterday demanding a further twenty thousand. Now, I think that’s rather too much.” He sounded like someone who had just been overcharged for a meal or a hotel room.
“Have you by any chance got the note with you?” I asked.
He pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his coat pocket. “I didn’t want to leave it at home in case my wife found it.”
He handed it to me and I spread it out. It was a computer printout just like the others, but as on the latest one sent to Austin Reynolds the last zero of the twenty thousand had been added by hand.
I glanced at my watch. The next race was due to be off in fifteen minutes.
“I’ve got to go down and see the horses in the parade ring,” I said. “They’re juvenile three-year-old hurdlers and some of them I haven’t seen run before. I want to see them in the paddock to help me learn the colors. You two stay right here. I’ll be back before you know it.”
I skipped down the stairs and out toward the parade ring. Dodging through the crowd, I ran straight into Mitchell Stacey, almost knocking him over.
“Sorry,” I said automatically before I even realized who he was.
He stared at me with contempt. “Watch where you’re bloody going, can’t you?”
We stood facing each other for a moment.
Why, I thought, had Mitchell set up a spy camera in his bedroom to film Sarah and me? How had he known to do so?
What was it that Sarah had said to me in that last call? I should have paid the little shit. Paid who? Had Sarah also been a victim of blackmail?
Mitchell turned away toward the weighing room, and I went on to the parade ring to see the horses, but my brain was elsewhere. Instead of learning the colors of the jockeys’ silks, I called the Stacey home on my cell phone.
“Hello,” said Sarah’s familiar voice after two rings.
“Sarah, it’s me,” I said.
“I told you that it was much better for both of us if we didn’t talk again. And we had the police round here this morning asking questions about you.” She sounded angry. “I’m sorry, I must go.”
“No, please. Don’t hang up!” I shouted quickly. “Listen. Were you being blackmailed?”
There was a long pause on the other end, and at one point I wondered if she had indeed hung up but she hadn’t, I could hear her breathing.
“Did someone ask you for two hundred pounds to make the story of you and me go away?”
“Yes,” she said, “but I didn’t pay him. Maybe it would’ve been better if I had.”
I should have paid the little shit.
“But you do know who it was, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was that little shit of a journalist, Toby Woodley.”
19
I was not at all sure how I managed to commentate on the juvenile hurdlers.
My eyes had watched the horses being mounted in the parade ring, but none of the data received had reached my conscious brain. My mind had been racing with too much other information and too many unanswered questions.
Had Toby Woodley been murdered at Kempton Park races because of the blackmail?
I didn’t even properly learn the jockeys’ colors as the horses circled at the start, and, suddenly, the race was under way. I had to keep glancing down to my race program to see which horse was which as they jumped the two hurdles in the stretch for the first time.
Had it been one of Toby Woodley’s blackmail victims that had done us all a favor?
It was not proving to be my greatest-ever commentary. Concentrate, I told myself as the horses swept right-handedly away from the grandstands to start their second circuit. For God’s sake, concentrate!
But how could Toby Woodley have sent a blackmail note to Austin Reynolds on Thursday when he’d been murdered on Wednesday night?
The horses galloped down the back of the course, and on two occasions I called one of them by the wrong name, “Woodley,” when the horse was properly called “Woodmill.”
Could Toby Woodley have mailed the note on Wednesday evening after the last collection so that it hadn’t been date-stamped until Thursday?
The horses turned in to the finishing stretch for the second and final time, and by now even the crowd knew the colors better than I did. But thankfully I called the correct names of the leading pair as they jumped the last hurdle together side by side.
But Harry Jacobs had said that he’d received his latest note only yesterday. Could it really have taken three days to arrive?
The two horses fought out another close finish, flashing past the winning post with hardly a cigarette paper between them.
“Photograph, photograph,” called the judge once more.
Or had Toby Woodley had an accomplice who was now acting on his own?
—
HARRY JACOBS insisted on going back to the bar after the third race.
“I need another drink,” he said.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough, Harry?” I said. “Especially if you’re driving later.”
“I have a driver. I haven’t got a license.”
Probably lost it, I thought, from having too many boozy days at the races.
“OK,” I said. “But a couple of things first. Are you sure that note arrived at your home yesterday?”
“Absolutely certain,” Harry said. “It’s the sort of thing you remember.”
“Do you still have the envelope it came in?”
“No,” he said, “I threw it away. Why?”
“I wanted to see when it was mailed and whethe
r it was sent first or second class.”
“First class, I think,” he said. “But I couldn’t be certain. Sorry.” He stood up. “Now, where’s that drink?”
All three of us went down the stairs from the grandstand shed, but while Harry peeled off toward the bar to order more champagne, Emily and I went through the betting hall to the parade ring to see the horses for the next race, a tricky handicap hurdle with eighteen runners.
“Are all your days as thrilling as this?” Emily asked as I stood silently by the paddock rail making notes on my race program.
I looked sideways at her. “Do I detect a touch of sarcasm?”
“Me?” she said, smiling broadly.
“It’s not every day you come across blackmail,” I said.
“No,” she said, laughing, “only every other day.”
“Real blackmail, I mean, not that stuff you watch on the television.”
“At least that’s exciting.”
“How about if I told you that I knew who’d been sending the notes.”
“Who?” she said, her eyes opening wider in anticipation.
“I’ll tell you over dinner.”
“No,” she said, “tell me now.”
“Over dinner,” I said firmly. “I need to concentrate on the horses.”
“Well, in that case I’ll go and join Harry in the bar.”
“I thought you said you were driving,” I said.
“So?” She turned and walked away, looking back just once and waving before she disappeared into the bar.
I turned my attention back to the eighteen different silks in front of me and started to sort out which belonged to which horse.
—
WE STOPPED at six-thirty for an early dinner at the Three Horseshoes, a charming thatched pub in Madingley, near Cambridge.
“How lovely,” Emily said as we walked in, “a romantic dinner for two. I can’t remember when I last did this.”
“What about last night?” I said.
“I’d hardly call takeout from the local Chinese restaurant a romantic dinner.”
I smiled at her. “But if I remember correctly, it became quite romantic afterward.”
She laughed. “You just got lucky.”
We were shown to a quiet table by the window, overlooking the garden and the parking lot beyond it amongst the trees.
After the unwanted attentions of Harry Jacobs all afternoon, I was really looking forward to a couple of hours of uninterrupted time for just the two of us. I’d even left my phone in the car.
“Well?” said Emily eagerly after we’d ordered, “who’s the blackmailer?”
“A journalist called Toby Woodley.”
She seemed disappointed. “And who is he?”
“Who was he, you mean. He was murdered in the parking lot at Kempton Park racetrack last Wednesday evening. And I was there when he died.”
Emily’s interest was suddenly reawakened. “Did you kill him?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “But whoever did may have been a victim of his blackmail.”
“See,” she said. “I told you it was just like those mysteries on the television.”
“There’s a problem, though,” I said. “Toby Woodley was killed on Wednesday evening and Harry’s blackmail note didn’t arrive until Saturday. Harry thought it was sent first class, which means that in all likelihood it was mailed on Friday, or on Thursday at the earliest.”
“So,” said Emily, leaning forward, “who mailed it if this Woodley fellow was already dead?”
“Exactly,” I said. “And I think the same person may have inserted the extra zero at the end of the amount. It seems to me that the notes had already been printed and an extra zero was added as an afterthought. It was the same with the note shown me by Austin Reynolds.”
“But how do you know it was Toby Woodley who sent the first ones?”
This might be awkward, I thought.
“Well,” I said, “you know the man we parked next to?”
“The one whose wife you’ve been sleeping with?”
“Yes, that one.” It was definitely awkward. “She told me.”
“When?” she squealed.
“This afternoon. I called her when you were up in the booth with Harry.”
“My God! You are a sneaky bastard,” Emily said with a laugh. She leaned back in her chair. “I should drive home right now and leave you here.”
“I told you it was over between us.” I was trying to sound honorable and trustworthy. Even though I’d met Emily only forty-eight hours ago, I suddenly realized that I absolutely didn’t want to lose her.
“Anyway, what did she say?”
“She told me that she’d received a blackmail note demanding two hundred pounds to keep quiet about the affair. A note just like the others.”
“But how did she know who it was from?”
I thought back to my conversation with Sarah. “She was told to leave used twenty-pound notes in a brown envelope under her car in the parking lot at Newbury races, as the others had. But instead of money, she put strips of newspaper in the envelope, and then she hid and watched to see who collected it. It was this man Toby Woodley.”
“What did he do when she didn’t pay?” Emily asked.
“I think he was going to write about us in his newspaper. He said something last week about being good to me. It seems his editor wouldn’t let a story run because of Clare having just died. I now think the story must have been about me and Sarah Stacey. I think he then told her husband about us to get back at her for not paying.”
“Nice chap,” Emily said. “No wonder someone murdered him.”
A waitress arrived with our starters.
“Do you fancy some wine?” I asked.
“Of course I do,” Emily said, “but as you so prudently pointed out, I’m driving.”
“We could always leave the car and get a taxi.”
“And then how would I get to work in the morning?”
“Where is work?” I asked.
“Cambridge. I work in the university engineering department as a research assistant.”
It was now my turn to say “Wow!”
“I’m currently helping with a project to develop needleless injections. It’s really interesting.”
“So are you an engineer?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “I’m more of a medic. But I’m not a doctor. I only did a biomedical degree.”
It sounded pretty good to me.
“So I need my car in the morning to get to work.”
I suppose I would need a car too. I would have to sort that out, along with lots of other things. Thankfully, I had the day off.
“And I need to go home tonight,” Emily said. “I haven’t got my things for the morning.”
“Do you need to collect your white coat?” I asked flippantly.
She smiled and shook her head. “No. But I do need my university pass, and I can hardly go into the lab dressed like this, so I’m going home tonight to Royston.”
I wondered if I was being given the brush-off. I rather hoped not.
“You can come with me, if you like,” she said, “but I’m definitely sleeping in my own bed, with or without you.”
“With,” I said. “But I have to go back to Clare’s cottage first to collect my stuff.”
Emily smiled broadly. “That’s fine, then. We’ll make a detour.”
We ate our starters with just fizzy water as the accompaniment.
“So tell me,” Emily said, “who’s the second blackmailer, the one who mailed the note to Harry after this Woodley fellow was killed?”
“I wish I knew. But whoever it is, he’s rather more greedy. Toby Woodley never
asked anyone for very much, that’s why most of them paid him.”
“And do you think he asked all sorts of people for two hundred pounds?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I reckon that’s how he got some of his stories for the paper. If he had even the slightest suspicion about someone, he’d send them a blackmail demand for just two hundred pounds to make the story go away. If they paid, then he had the confirmation he needed that he was right and he would ask for more, if necessary backing up the demand with an article in the paper that proved he knew what had been going on, but of course without mentioning anyone by name.”
“But enough to frighten his victims into paying up.”
“Precisely,” I said.
“What’s it got to do with the death of your sister?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe nothing. But she definitely was being blackmailed and that may have had something to do with it.”
In truth, I felt nowhere nearer to finding out why Clare died.
“How was the journalist murdered?” Emily asked.
“He was stabbed in the back.”
“And you were there?”
“Yes, I was there immediately afterward. I didn’t actually see him being stabbed, but I was there when he died a few minutes later. The police thought I might have killed him because he’d written an article about Clare in that morning’s paper. But they couldn’t find any knife, so they let me go.”
And, I thought, they also couldn’t find his briefcase.
Had the notes for Austin Reynolds and Harry Jacobs been printed and ready to go in that stolen briefcase? Was the person who had mailed them not an accomplice of Toby Woodley but his killer?
—
EMILY AND I enjoyed the rest of our dinner free of further blackmail discussion, concentrating instead on learning more about each other.
“So where exactly do you live?” she asked me.
“I rent an apartment in Edenbridge, in Kent. But I’m intending to buy a house. I’ve even got the details on one in Oxfordshire I like the look of.”
That was something else I had to deal with tomorrow, I thought, along with renting a car. I also had to contact Detective Sergeant Sharp about the Hilton Hotel CCTV footage and follow up on the guest list for the Injured Jockeys Fund dinner. Between them, I hoped they might give me some clue to the identity of the mystery visitors to Clare’s room the night she died.
Dick Francis's Bloodline (9781101600931) Page 23
