He sighed again.
‘I’m on it.’
Now it was my turn to be dumbstruck. There was no mention of that in his BHA file.
‘Four years ago, I was convicted of having sex with a child.’
I stood and stared at him, waiting silently for him to go on.
‘I was seventeen and the girl was fifteen. She became pregnant — that’s how they knew we’d done it. At first, they said they wouldn’t prosecute me, but I refused to promise not to see her again.’ He looked up to the heavens. ‘Bloody silly that was. Anyway, I was found guilty and sentenced to three months youth custody, suspended for two years. I was also put on the sex offender register for five years. I’m still on it.’
‘What happened to the girl?’ I asked.
‘I married her,’ he said. ‘You’ve just met her. Amy was pregnant with the twins. We are so much in love and everything was going brilliantly, until this happened.’
‘Why is someone able to blackmail you over it? The information must already be in the public domain.’
‘The man on the phone said that, unless I did as he wanted, he’d fix it for another girl of fourteen to make a complaint to the police that I’d been having sex with her.’ He swallowed. ‘I told him that was a lie. He said it didn’t matter. With my record, the social services would believe it and they’d take the twins away. The man told me I’d never get to hold my little girls again.’
He was in tears once again. Whether or not the threat was real, Willy Mitchell clearly believed it to be so.
‘Does Amy know about this?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘Well, of course she knows about the register and all that. She was in court when that happened. She told the judge we were madly in love and that we were getting married as soon as she turned sixteen, but he took no notice.’ The judge would have been bound by the law, I thought, and a suspended sentence had been quite lenient. ‘But she doesn’t know about the call from the man, or about the race at Newbury.’
‘Isn’t it time you told her?’ I said.
I dropped him at his mother-in-law’s house before going on to the railway station.
‘What will happen to me now?’ he’d asked me in the taxi.
‘Nothing for the moment,’ I’d said. ‘But call me straight away if the man contacts you again.’ I’d given him my business card.
He’d nodded. ‘OK.’
‘Tell me,’ I’d said, ‘how did you pass the criminal records check?’
The BHA would have done such a check as part of their ‘fit and proper person’ test before issuing him with his first licence to ride.
‘I got my jockey’s licence when I was sixteen. Before all this happened. One of the advantages of being only seventeen was that my name was never revealed in the press. Ever since, whenever I’ve applied for a renewal, I’ve answered no to the question on criminal proceedings.’
Which was also a breach of BHA regulations, but that was the least of his problems.
‘Luton?’
‘Yes,’ Henri said on the phone when she called on Sunday evening. ‘We have to check in at Luton Airport on Wednesday morning at eight thirty.’
‘I’ll take the train from London.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m coming with Uncle Richard. We’ll pick you up from the airport station at eight o’clock.’
‘I didn’t think flights across the Atlantic left from Luton.’
‘Ours does.’
I hadn’t seen her for six whole days. It felt like six months.
‘You do still want me to come, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Of course I do,’ she said earnestly. ‘Why on earth did you say that?’
‘It’s just that we have hardly spoken this last week, even on the phone.’
‘That all ends at lunchtime on Tuesday,’ she said. ‘That will be my last event for the year, thank goodness. After that, I’m all yours. I promise.’
It sounded delicious.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘What do I need to bring with me? Suit, dinner jacket?’
‘Good God, no,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Shorts and T-shirts mostly. It’s very casual. But bring some long trousers and a couple of decent shirts to go out to dinner.’
‘Do I need a jacket and tie?’ I asked.
‘You shouldn’t.’
‘I’ll pack them anyway,’ I said.
Smart clothes were a bit like nuclear weapons — better to have them and not need them, than to need them and not have them.
‘Don’t bring too much,’ she said. ‘There’s a weight limit on luggage. We can only take one suitcase each.’
Flying from Luton Airport and a luggage limit of only one suitcase.
I had visions of us being cramped together on a knees-to-the-chest charter flight for ten hours. But, as long as I was with Henri, I wouldn’t mind a bit.
As I put down my mobile, it rang again. This time it was Detective Inspector Galvin.
‘I thought you would like to know that Gary Banks was remanded in custody by the magistrates,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘He was charged with both the manslaughter of Darryl Lawrence and the attempted murder of you. He is due back in court next week but that will be a formality. You can rest assured that he will now stay behind bars until his trial.’
‘When will that be?’ I asked.
‘Sometime next year,’ he said. ‘The date won’t even be set for months yet.’
That was a relief.
‘Did he say anything?’ I asked.
‘He blames it all on Lawrence. Claims he didn’t know that Lawrence had a knife with him. He says he thought they were there just to rough you up a bit.’
‘He definitely knew about the knife when they came to the hospital to try and finish the job.’
‘He says it wasn’t him with Lawrence on that occasion.’
‘But he was wearing the red baseball boots.’
‘Indeed,’ said the inspector with a slight laugh. ‘I’m afraid our friend Mr Banks is not very bright. He just talked himself into more and more trouble.’
‘I assume that you asked him why they were after me.’
‘He said he doesn’t know. Lawrence was the brains behind it, if you can call them brains. Lawrence just told Banks what to do.’
‘How about the phone calls to my landline?’
‘Lawrence made those, apparently. Just as you thought, they were trying to find out where you were. It seems that they’d been waiting for you to appear outside Sandown racecourse on that Saturday afternoon. Banks told us they were planning to “do” you on your way back to Esher railway station. But you never turned up.’
I’d departed from the racecourse in an ambulance, on its way to Kingston Hospital with Bill McKenzie, and his broken collarbone.
‘What did Banks say when you mentioned Leslie Morris?’ I asked.
‘He swore blind that he’s never heard of anyone called Leslie Morris,’ said DI Galvin. ‘But, then, he would, wouldn’t he?’
Perhaps he had been telling the truth.
The timing didn’t fit.
Bill McKenzie hadn’t known that I was interested in him until he was leaving the parade ring on Lost Moon for the race in which he’d be injured. Even if he’d wanted to, he hadn’t had a chance to contact Leslie Morris before he’d gone to surgery. I knew because I’d been with him all the time.
Morris would have been unaware that I was at Sandown that Saturday. So, if he hadn’t told Lawrence and Banks to wait for me outside the racecourse, who had?
And how would they have known what I looked like?
Even if Morris had spotted me following him on the previous afternoon, which I knew he hadn’t, then Lawrence and Banks would have been looking for a man with long dark hair, a brown beanie hat and a goatee.