As yet, he had no big-race wins under his belt but he should still be making a pretty good living from his riding, especially if one added in a share of prize money, plus regular schooling fees.
If I was right about the fix, Leslie Morris had pocketed about seven thousand pounds from Bill McKenzie falling off Wisden Wonder.
I wondered how much would be the jockey’s share.
Half, at best, or maybe a third? Probably even less.
Would he jeopardize his whole career for a couple of thousand pounds?
Did I really think he was that stupid?
My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon in blue theatre scrubs and a dishcloth hat, and he was carrying a green folder.
‘Mr McKenzie,’ he said, studying the folder, ‘I see that you’re a jockey.’
He’d hardly had to read that in the paperwork, I thought. The patient was still wearing his britches and the cut-off racing silks were draped over the end of the couch.
‘Is this injury as a result of a racing fall?’
‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘At Sandown.’
The surgeon made a note in the folder.
‘Have you broken your collarbone before?’
‘Not on this side,’ he said, pointing to his left shoulder. ‘But I’ve done the other one three times.’
‘You’re crazy,’ said the surgeon. ‘Why don’t you do something safer for a living?’
‘Because I’m no good at anything else,’ Bill said, and then he looked straight at me. ‘Racing is my life.’
I raised my eyebrows in response. He knew exactly what I was thinking — he was thinking it too.
The surgeon took a thick marker pen from his pocket and drew two big black arrows on Bill’s left shoulder, one on his front and the other on his back.
He smiled. ‘We don’t want to open you up on the wrong side, now do we?’
Next the surgeon produced a consent form from his folder.
‘How long will I be off?’ Bill asked him as he signed.
‘Bones generally take six to eight weeks to heal.’
‘Six to eight weeks! No way. I need to be back sooner than that. I’ve got a ride in the King George on Boxing Day.’
‘The plate might help. It will provide the support needed. When I plate a broken hip, I try to get the patient up standing on it the following day.’
‘So how long?’ Bill asked again.
‘A couple of weeks, maybe.’
‘A couple of days more like,’ said Bill with a grin.
‘See, you are crazy,’ the surgeon said again, smiling back at him. ‘Completely crazy.’
I went home shortly after, when they came to collect him for theatre. I suppose I could have waited for the operation to be over but it would probably have taken at least an hour and then he’d be woozy for a good few hours after that. Interviewing an injured jockey in an ambulance on the way to hospital had been one thing, but I’d be pushing my luck to be asking him more questions while he lay in the post-anaesthesia recovery room.
I let myself into my flat and sidled past the unopened cardboard boxes into my kitchen-cum-sitting room.
It was cold, the mercury having plummeted after the sun went down under clear skies. I flicked on the electric fire but kept my coat firmly in place on my back with my hands deep in its pockets.
It was eight o’clock on Saturday evening. Just three weeks before Christmas, when any sensible person was out at a party, or having dinner with friends.
But not me.
I thought about Henrietta Shawcross.
I hadn’t had an opportunity to go back to the Smiths’ box to say goodbye to her, or to anyone else for that matter. I hadn’t even been at the racecourse for the main event of the afternoon, the sixth race of the day, by which time I was well on my way to the hospital in the ambulance.
I opened my laptop computer and logged on to the Racing Post website to check the result.
Ebury Tiger had won the Tingle Creek Chase and there were reports of emotional scenes at the trophy presentation when the winning jockey had dedicated the victory to the memory of his dear friend, Dave Swinton, who, he said, should rightly have been standing there in his place.
Dave Swinton, alive or dead, was still everyone’s knight in shining armour. I would make myself no friends whatsoever if I tarnished that image with talk of him purposely losing races or committing other misdeeds, like the small matter of trying to kill me.
I also searched the internet for any mentions of a Henrietta Shawcross.
There were masses of them, and lots of photos too, many in the Bystander section on the Tatler magazine website.
If the images were anything to go by, Miss Shawcross was a socialite of some renown, being photographed at many of the most sought-after events and parties. But there was little actual information about her life in the magazine, just her looking beautiful for the camera lens while cuddling up to a variety of actors, singers and other A-list headliners at glamorous gatherings.
Next, I carried out searches for Sir Richard Reynard, her uncle, and for Martin Reynard, her first cousin.
Both were in shipping. To be more precise, Sir Richard was the sixty-nine-year-old chairman of Reynard Shipping Limited, a company set up by his grandfather, and Martin was forty-two and also a director. And they were loaded. The Sunday Times UK Rich List put the Reynard family at number 147 with a combined wealth in excess of half a billion pounds.
Reynard Shipping was almost a household name and everyone must have seen the trucks carrying containers with REYNARD SHIPPING painted on the side in big white letters. No wonder Derrick had thought I should know who Sir Richard Reynard was.
He would certainly be able to afford to buy a potential Derby winner. In fact, he’d be able to buy a whole stableful of them.
I wondered if Henrietta Shawcross was included in the calculation of the family wealth. Probably.
I sighed. Either way, she was out of my league, that was for sure. That’s if she would even speak to me again after my dreadful faux pas at lunch.
I dug a little deeper on the internet.
For some reason I couldn’t find any recent accounts for Reynard Shipping Limited on the Companies House website. It appeared from their records that the company had ceased to exist some three years previously although it was quite clearly still trading — their shipping containers were everywhere.
But there was some more detail about Henri.
According to some past newspaper articles, Henrietta Shawcross was an only child. Furthermore, she was an orphan, her parents having died together in a helicopter crash when she’d been a teenager. Her mother’s not inconsiderable fortune, including a twenty-five per cent stake in Reynard Shipping, had passed directly to her, to be held in trust by her uncle until her thirtieth birthday, which, I noted, was coming up in February.
No wonder Gay Smith had said that Henri didn’t need a sugar daddy.
I went to my freezer and selected a Chicken Madras from a stack of frozen ready meals, and popped it in the microwave.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’d be diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I knew I was pretty miserable. I didn’t take antidepressant drugs or anything, and I didn’t feel particularly suicidal — indeed, I had fought with all my strength to escape death in Dave Swinton’s sauna. There had been no question then of me giving up and lying down to die, when it would have been very easy to have done so.
It was just that I considered my life at present as meaningless.