Declared Dead

by John Francome

  'Michael, are you in there?' I asked out loud, although it sounded more like a whisper. 'It's me, Victoria.'

  Again, silence. Courageously, or at least it felt that way, I threw the door open and stood back. Empty. I ran downstairs and grabbed the handle of the back door. It was locked. As I opened my mouth to scream, a gloved hand came over my face, and the ammonia bottle was jolted from my clammy grip by a powerful blow to my wrist. My mind went dark as my legs gave way under me and I fell to the floor.

  * * *

  'Victoria! Victoria! Wake up, please wake up!'

  It was Amy's voice. She was kneeling over me and although my eyes were closed, I could feel her breath on my face.

  'Say something, anything, please.' She put her hands on my shoulders and started to shake me.

  I opened my eyes and all around me was in darkness. I couldn't feel any pain, only a sense of bewilderment, loss and failure.

  'What happened?' I asked, putting out my hand to touch the profile above me.

  'Thank God you're all right.' She started sobbing. 'I'm so sorry.'

  'Amy, please calm down.' I struggled to my feet, pulling her up with me in the process. 'What's the time for God's sake?'

  'It's about eight o'clock.'

  'What? Do you mean I've been here for over two hours?'

  'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.'

  'Don't keep apologising, let's just get out of here and we can discuss everything in the car. Hold on, where's my handbag?' There was no electricity working in the kitchen and we both crawled round the floor feeling in vain with our hands for the handbag. 'It's no good,' I said after five minutes. 'It's gone and all the money with it. The bastard.'

  We walked quickly to the cars, which were both parked in front of the house. I was lucky he hadn't stolen my hire car because I'd left the keys in the ignition. 'Come on,' I said. 'Let's drive in convoy to Tipperary and park under the brightest light in the main street and talk.'

  I stopped near the police station, parked and went and sat in the passenger seat of Amy's car. The poor thing still looked as though she had seen a ghost.

  'I'm so glad you're all right,' she said, holding my hand. 'I thought for a ghastly moment you had been murdered.' She started to sob again.

  'That makes two of us,' I replied, trying to appear calm and rational. 'But here I am alive and well.'

  'What happened in there?'

  I told her everything right up to the moment when I must have passed out.

  'Did you get a look at him?'

  I shook my head. 'It was all over so quickly. He must have watched me go in the back door and waited for me in the kitchen. I feel such a fool.'

  'Don't blame yourself. He sounded so genuine on the phone, all that stuff he told me about wanting to help his old boss out. Victoria, are you sure you're all right? I mean you – he didn't do anything to you?'

  That thought hadn't occurred to me. 'I'm sure he didn't touch me.' It was then I remembered the wad of money from Willie O'Keefe which I had stuffed inside my bra. I asked Amy to excuse me for a second. She watched in astonishment as I slipped my hand down inside my jumper and started feeling about. It had gone.

  'The bastard!'

  'What's happened?'

  'Some money I was given for riding that winner. I put it in my bra for safe keeping. It's gone.' I shuddered at the thought of Corcoran searching me while I lay on the ground.

  'How about you?' I said, changing the subject. 'Didn't you find where I had hidden the directions?'

  'Oh yes, that was easy. I knew that's why you said you were going to the loo so loudly. I waited five minutes before leaving the tea rooms, only when I came out into the car park the car had two flat tyres.'

  'Sabotage?'

  'That's what I thought, but Corcoran doesn't know me and remember I did get there well ahead of you. I mean, there was no reason to connect us. The man I eventually persuaded to repair them said it was almost certainly the work of local schoolboys who've nothing better to do with their Saturdays.'

  I shook my head in disbelief at the mess we were in. Two thousand pounds of my mother's money down the drain and no further progress in locating Corcoran. Only a short time ago I was sympathetic to the Irishman for having suffered so long at Edward's hands, yet now I hated him. It was my turn to be penitent. 'I'm sorry, Amy, I should never have got you into this mess.'

  'Don't you be sorry, I'm just as much to blame. It'll teach us both to play detective. The real question is where do we go from here? Should we tell the Garda, do you think?'

  'What's there to tell? How two girls have come out here to pay an ex stable lad two thousand pounds as a down payment for confessing that he was being blackmailed. They'll laugh us out of Ireland. No, we're going on the first plane back to England and when I'm there I'm going to…' I paused.

  'You're going to what?'

  'Expose that sod Musgrave and make one of my late husband's blackmail victims admit to the police just what was going on.'

  'And which one do you have in mind?'

  'Sir Arthur Drewe.'

  'And how do you propose to drag him down to the police station?'

  'By the balls, if necessary.'

  Chapter 11

  We spent the night in a hotel near Shannon airport and took the first plane in the morning back to London. We were both feeling pretty despondent and Amy's well-intentioned attempts to make me look on the bright side fell embarrassingly flat. The simple truth was that Tom's trial was less than eight weeks away and we were no nearer producing any evidence that might help him. Amy, doing her best to reassure me, made great play of the fact that the case against him was purely circumstantial, and that from now on, our energies might be better directed elsewhere, like trying to find a witness who had seen Tom in the car park after he and Edward had left the pub. That was fine in principle, but the trouble was knowing where to begin, assuming such a witness even existed. No such person had as yet come forward voluntarily. Tom himself had no recollection of what he did or where he went that night. And indeed, as Amy admitted, all the attempts by his own solicitors, including hiring a fleet of private detectives, had proved fruitless. Most people are in bed late at night and those who aren't don't necessarily want to advertise their movements. We were at an impasse.

  I arrived back at the yard to find Ralph in a state of deep depression. A date had been fixed in six weeks' time for our hearing at the Jockey Club in London and even though he had done nothing wrong and his conscience was clear, the prospects of an acquittal were about twenty to one against. The disciplinary committee had wide powers, ranging from a fine, to suspension, to the withdrawall of a licence to train, and as far as Ralph was concerned, either of the last two would be extremely damaging. He was in the habit of running his horses on their merits and he certainly would not welcome any public adjudication to the contrary. No respectable owner wants to be associated with a crooked stable. I knew Ralph didn't blame me for what had happened at Worcester, yet equally I was under no illusion that he believed the incident wouldn't have been avoided if a male jockey had been riding instead of me. For my part, I really didn't see how in the circumstances anyone could have ridden any differently. Although I would think that, wouldn't I?

  * * *

  The next day we travelled up to Wolverhampton, where Ralph had two runners. The Midlands course is notorious for its penultimate fence, which claims innumerable victims, and I did well to finish on a novice chaser who seemed to think that the art of jumping was to go through the fence rather than over it. My second ride, in the long-distance hurdle, was a good deal more comfortable. Having ridden a patient waiting race, without any Eamon Brennan to box me in, I was able to come with a strong late run and win, going away by a couple of lengths.

  There is simply nothing like the taste of victory and even though there was only a small crowd, I felt the usual sense of elation as I was led back to the winners' enclosure. There are always a few punters who have backed you and come along to voice their
appreciation; at that moment I really welcomed it. Even Ralph had recaptured his usual bonhomie and the owners were full of praise and congratulations for the way I had ridden. They wanted me to join them for a celebratory bottle of champagne in the bar and Ralph encouraged me to come along as soon as I had weighed in and changed. Usually I would have jumped at the chance, as there is no greater fun than sharing moments of triumph, but on this occasion I wanted to go down by the rails and see if Musgrave was in action. I realised it was unlikely that he would venture out of London on a Monday to one of the smaller courses, yet you could never tell where greed might lead a man. If he was there, I wanted to go up and ask him why I hadn't heard from his solicitors since our last meeting at Kempton Park. Could he have something to hide, perhaps?

  I was disappointed. There was only a handful of bookmakers betting on the rails and none of them looked as though they had done much business. A couple near the top, representatives of the biggest firms, were busy on the telephone, receiving the latest betting information from their employers' shops around the country and finding out what horses, if any, they had to bet on course to keep the starting price down. I stood and watched for a few minutes as the betting got under way for the fifth and penultimate race.

  As I did so, it suddenly dawned on me that I was looking at a possible key to Musgrave's dishonesty. Every clerk keeps a written record of the bets his governor strikes and the sheets of paper they use have to be retained for inspection by the tax authorities. Musgrave, for all his dishonesty in not recording off-course bets, wouldn't dare take a similar chance with those made on course. If only I could obtain access to, and copy, his records, I would have conclusive evidence of each and every occasion when he had bet over the odds against a favourite winning, or had offered more extravagant prices than any other bookie. The difficulty was going to be finding out where Musgrave kept them. I was now going to have to add burglary to my qualifications.

  Being realistic, I recognised that it would be no use gaining entry to Musgrave's premises and photographing every document in sight. I first had to establish from James Thackeray if he had come across any races where Musgrave and Brennan had been up to no good together.

  I phoned Thackeray at work that evening and for once my luck was in. He announced gleefully that his researches were bearing fruit. He had already discovered six occasions over the last six months, excluding the races at Kempton and Worcester, where Musgrave had taken a different position from his fellow bookies and offered generous odds against fancied horses being ridden by Brennan. All six duly ran and were beaten. In addition, there was of course the Gold Cup when I was riding Cartwheel. On that occasion, Musgrave had taken bets from all and sundry and dropped at least a quarter of a million pounds as a result. Thackeray was no fool and he asked me on the phone whether I'd been aware that anything improper had been going on in the Cheltenham race. I hesitated before replying. On the one hand I wanted and needed James's help and that required my co-operating with him. On the other hand, to tell him that I knew Cartwheel was meant to lose implicated me in Musgrave's crookedness. I decided that it was time to come clean – well, almost clean – and tell him about Edward's involvement with Musgrave. I admitted that I had pulled two horses on Edward's orders earlier in the season and had done so only because I had had no option. It was James's turn now to hesitate. I could sense that he was torn between his instinct as a good journalist to expose the whole sordid story, and his loyalty to me as a friend and as the original source for his broader investigation.

  'This isn't easy, Victoria,' was his first comment.

  'I know that, James. It hasn't been that easy for me keeping it from you. I'm not asking forgiveness or pity for what I did; I know I've flagrantly broken the rules and cheated not just the owners of those two horses and dear old Ralph, but a whole lot of punters as well. That's why I couldn't go through with it on Cartwheel at Cheltenham. I was intending to stop riding for Ralph after that, as a kind of punishment to myself, but then Edward was murdered and I had no reason to cheat any more. That doesn't mean I killed him, by the way. I want to stay in racing and I don't want my son to grow up knowing that his mother was warned off the turf for being a cheat.'

  'But there's mitigation; everyone will understand.'

  'James, are you serious? Of course they won't. Nobody wants to believe that Edward was a grade A shit who forced his wife to pull horses. The police, and more importantly the Jockey Club, will think this is something I've dreamt up to excuse my own deplorable conduct. You aren't allowed to blame the dead because they can't answer back.'

  'Are you suggesting that I cover this up, leave your involvement out of any story I write?'

  'In a word, yes. You don't need to implicate me in order to expose Musgrave as a villain.'

  'And what if he spills the beans and says you were in it right up to your racing goggles?'

  'I'd deny it and call him a liar. That's where Edward's enforced silence works to my advantage, don't you see? Musgrave can't prove I threw away the Fontwell and Worcester races unless I confess, and I did win at Cheltenham, don't forget. That was hardly the ride of a bookie's stooge. "Inspired" I think you called it at the time. Please, James, if not for my sake, then for Freddie's?' I could feel he was wavering.

  'All right, provided you give me all the help I need to fix Musgrave.'

  'It's a deal and I've an idea just where to begin. His betting sheets.'

  'The field sheets? You mean the records of all the bets he's taken on course?'

  'Whatever. He's obliged to keep them by the tax authorities, isn't he? If we can obtain copies of the recorded entries for the races you suspect were crooked, we'll be able to nail him.'

  'It's a brilliant idea and about as feasible as photographing a flying pig. How do you suggest we get hold of these records? Give Musgrave a call and ask him for permission to come round and photocopy them?'

  'Not exactly. Assuming he keeps them at his office, what's wrong in us breaking in one night and taking photographs?'

  'Oh nothing at all. I mean, I used to blow safes in my spare time at university and…'

  'Don't be so cruel. It was only a suggestion.'

  'I'm sorry, I was just teasing. No, Victoria, I simply don't see how it's possible.'

  'I've got a better idea. Bookies have to keep records so that the tax men can come and check they've paid up the proper duty on off-course betting, right?'

  'Correct. Although they've abolished tax for on-course bets they still levy it for off-course. The Customs and Excise boys are in charge of it and can be quite difficult, so I'm told. One of their tricks is to place bets themselves in the shops and then make unannounced calls on the bookmakers concerned and see if the bets are accurately recorded.'

  'I wonder if they ever back any winners? That's it then! Why don't we pose as a couple of Excise officers and call in and do a random check at Musgrave's head office one afternoon? Once alone with the books, we could photograph the relevant pages and bob's your uncle. How about that for a touch of genius?'

  'It won't work. Even if he lets us in the office in the first place, Musgrave would insist on being present throughout.'

  'Not if we choose a busy race day when he's at the races betting. How about this Friday, the day before the National? I haven't got a ride and he's bound to be at Aintree for all three days of the meeting.'

  James was on the ropes this time. 'I wish you weren't so damned ingenious! It might just work. My problem is that I'm meant to be going up there to cover the meeting, too.'

  'Play hookey, watch a couple of the races on the box and phone in your copy as if you were there.'

  'Hold on a moment, you don't know my editor. The last chap who did that is selling racecards at Uttoxeter. I'll take the unusual step of telling him the truth.'

  'The whole truth? Is that wise just yet?'

  'Well, not the whole truth. I'll say I'm working on one of the greatest racing scandals of the year and am pledged to secrecy, and if I don't
do it, our rival will. There's nothing like the threat of competition. We all live for exclusives.'

  'Wonderful. We're agreed. You find out where Musgrave's head office is in London and on Friday we'll pay them a surprise visit.'

  'Victoria, this worries me, you know.'

  'Call yourself a punter?'

  * * *

  There was one other piece of information which I also hoped to glean from Friday's visit. According to Edward, Musgrave had never recorded the off-course bets he had struck with him. That had been done to avoid paying betting tax and was quite simply a fraud on the Revenue. The only proof of those bets I had in my possession was the written demand from Musgrave, along with the other incriminating documents I had found in the butt of Edward's gun.

  If, as I hoped, the records contained no mention of any bets struck by Edward, I could establish that Musgrave had been cheating and therefore had a motive for wanting Edward dead; that Edward had tried to make me pull Cartwheel in the Gold Cup in part settlement of his gambling debts and when I had failed to go along with the plan, Edward had paid with his life. I had so far kept the secret of Edward's gambling debts from James, and decided that I would give him the final piece of the jigsaw only if and when our visit had been successful.

  I couldn't wait for Friday to arrive, and apart from having a single ride at Plumpton on the Wednesday, kept a deliberately low profile. I knew that I still had to take some action about Sir Arthur Drewe and was torn between a showdown and finding a way to put indirect pressure on him. I no longer suspected him of murdering Edward – Musgrave and Corcoran were now far more likely candidates – but I did want him to admit to the police that he was being blackmailed. If the prosecution at the trial had to concede that the deceased had several major enemies, that could throw enough doubt in the jury's mind at least to secure an acquittal. At the moment all they would have was my word for it, backed up by apparently meaningless entries in a diary that I couldn't even produce. Amy had already warned me that there was every chance that if I tried to raise the question in court, the judge could well rule the evidence irrelevant and therefore inadmissible. Indeed, if the prosecution took the view I was a liability, they might not even call me as a witness!