‘There you go,’ I said. ‘If I’d told you straight away, it would have been headlines in the Sunday papers.’
‘But...’
‘But nothing,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘Just be thankful that it didn’t happen, otherwise the BHA would have been blamed for pushing Dave Swinton to kill himself.’
That shut him up.
‘And also,’ I said, ‘instead of reflecting on his stellar racing career, as they rightly did, the obituaries would have been all about his possible connection to fraud and deception. Is that what you would have wanted?’
From the look on his face, perhaps it was.
Paul always considered that anyone who broke the Rules of Racing was personally insulting him in some way. And he didn’t take kindly to insults. But maybe it was because Paul had individually invested so much in Dave Swinton as the poster-boy of the Racing Needs You! campaign, and he felt betrayed.
‘So why are you telling me all this now?’ he said in a tone that reminded me of a hurt schoolboy.
‘Because Dave Swinton didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.’
18
Paul stared at me. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible to drive a car at the same time as you are tied up in the boot.’
Paul went on staring.
‘The police found plastic cable ties in the boot of the Mercedes with Dave’s blood on them.’ I went on to tell him everything that DS Jagger had told me. ‘And, if Dave himself was already trussed up in his car like a chicken, the person who shoved me into the sauna to die is most likely the same person who killed him. And it may be the same person who tried again this Sunday with a carving knife.’
‘But why would anyone want you dead?’ Paul asked.
It was the question I had been asking myself, over and over.
‘Maybe I know something that someone doesn’t want me to tell anyone else about.’
‘What?’ Paul said.
‘If I knew that, then I’d shout it loudly to everybody so that there’d be no need to kill me to prevent it.’
‘I don’t suppose it has anything to do with McKenzie falling off Wisden Wonder at Sandown,’ Paul said. ‘With you indisposed in here, I’ve asked Nigel to have a look into that. And I’ve arranged for a letter to be sent to McKenzie summoning him to a disciplinary panel in January to explain his riding of the horse.’
I would have much preferred it if Paul had left that for me to deal with later.
I was an advocate of doing the investigating first, preferably furtively and in secret, and then calling the miscreants to account based on my findings.
Paul, meanwhile, tended to believe that the early summons to a disciplinary panel would put the fear of God into the accused and could produce dividends in the form of a confession. He seemed not to appreciate the fact that accomplices, or even the brains behind the scam, might go to ground and never be implicated.
In this particular case, Bill McKenzie was already well aware that I was suspicious of his riding of Wisden Wonder and so I reckoned that no further damage would have been done by Paul’s intervention.
We discussed a few of the other outstanding cases that were sitting on my desk, some of which were waiting for me to produce a report, but we kept coming back to Dave Swinton.
‘Do you know which race he purposely didn’t win?’ Paul asked.
‘I think so,’ I said, and I told him about Garrick Party’s run at Haydock. ‘The horse is a well-known front runner with no great finishing speed but, on this occasion, Dave held him up for a late run that the horse, predictably, was unable to produce. He finished third out of eight.’
‘At what price?’
‘He started as favourite at thirteen-to-eight.’
‘Did the stewards on the day have him in?’
‘Yes. They questioned both Dave and the trainer, Jason Butcher, but they accepted the excuse that the horse had been held up due to the heavy going. But I don’t buy it. The horse had previously won twice in the mud, both times from the front.’
‘Difficult to prove,’ Paul said.
‘Impossible.’
My last visitor of the day arrived at six o’clock, as I was lying on the bed having a snooze. Paul’s visit, in particular, had tired me out, probably because it had been me who had done most of the talking.
I woke to find myself staring at the beautiful face of Henrietta Shawcross.
My first thought was that I must be dreaming, but I wasn’t.
‘You are a very difficult man to find, Mr Hinkley,’ she said. ‘And I should know — I’ve been looking for you ever since you disappeared without trace on Saturday afternoon.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘I should think so too.’ She pulled a cross face that did nothing to diminish her beauty. ‘Fancy leaving me without even saying goodbye.’
‘Sorry,’ I said again.
‘And so you should be. I’m not used to men suddenly vanishing without at least asking for my number.’
‘And do you give it to them?’ I asked.
‘No. Not as a general rule. But I might have given it to you. If you had bothered to ask.’
‘Sorry,’ I said once more.
She removed her coat, placing it over the back of one of the chairs, then she sat down on the other one and looked around her. ‘What are you doing in here, anyway? What’s wrong with you?’
What should I say?
‘I was attacked,’ I said.
‘By whom?’
‘I wish I knew. A couple of heavies with a carving knife.’
She suddenly looked concerned. ‘Were you stabbed?’
‘Thirteen times,’ I replied, rather indulgently.
She was shocked and it put her off her stride, but only for a moment.
‘Then why aren’t you dead?’ she asked.
‘Luck,’ I said. ‘That and a thick coat. Fortunately I managed to throw them off me and run for help.’
‘See, you are a superhero after all.’ She smiled.
‘How did you find me?’ I asked, but what I really wanted to ask was Why did you find me?
‘The usual method,’ she said jokily. ‘I tried the internet, you know, on Google, but that failed. Then I tried those people-finding websites but none of them came up trumps. So I resorted to plan C.’
‘Which was?’
‘I called one of Uncle Richard’s racing contacts to find out who, exactly, you worked for. And then I slept with the chairman of the BHA before blackmailing him into telling me your whereabouts.’
‘That seems a tad excessive,’ I said.
‘It worked, though.’ She grinned.
‘Do you ever tell the truth?’ I asked.
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘So why did you bother?’
‘What?’
‘To find me,’ I said.
She cocked her head sideways. ‘Maybe I just wanted to.’
‘Does Uncle Richard know?’ I asked.
‘Uncle Richard doesn’t own me,’ she said icily. ‘I do what I want.’
I wondered just how true that was. According to what I’d discovered on my computer, Sir Richard Reynard was the sole administrator of her trust fund and the holder of the purse strings — at least until her thirtieth birthday the following February.
‘I’m flattered,’ I said.
‘Don’t be,’ she said, standing up and walking over to the window. ‘I just wondered what you looked like in a hospital gown.’ She smiled at me. ‘Disappointing, to tell you the truth. Dirty pale blue is obviously not your colour.’
She, meanwhile, was wearing black trousers, calf-length boots and a white roll-neck sweater that touched her in all the right places.