Slowly, over the months, I had recounted to her the complete story of those three weeks in late June and early July. I told her the full details of my father’s murder, about finding his rucksack and its hidden contents. I told her about Mr. John Smith and the microcoder, about finding him in our house and breaking his wrist. I even told her about Luca and Larry’s little games with the phones and Internet at Ascot, and how I had extracted revenge for the attack on me at Kempton by the big-firm bullyboys.
Once or twice, she told me off for not having contacted the police straightaway, and she was justifiably really quite cross that I had placed myself and her in such danger from a known murderer.
I had tried to explain to her that I didn’t like the policeman in charge of the case, but she, quite rightly, had said that personalities shouldn’t have made any difference. But of course they did. Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn’s poor opinion of bookmakers in general, and of me in particular, had clouded his judgment in the same way that my antipathy towards him had clouded mine. Even when it was all over, he had still been reluctant to admit that I’d had nothing to do with my father’s murder.
I had been to see him the day following the car crash, at the Thames Valley Police headquarters near Oxford. He’d told me that the driver of the silver hatchback, known to me as Kipper but now properly identified as a Mr. Mervyn Williams, had indeed survived, but he was still in a critical condition and had been transferred to the special head-injury unit at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. Apparently, according to the police who had attended the scene, he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt at the time of the accident.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I’d said flatly. “The man was trying to shunt me off the road at the time, and I was just lucky that the truck hit him and not me.” I had decided against telling the chief inspector about me making an emergency stop in order to precipitate the crash in the first place.
“But why?” he had asked me.
“Because I think he’s the man who murdered my father. I presumed that he was trying to do the same to me, to eliminate me as a witness.”
“What makes you think it’s the man who murdered your father?” he’d asked.
“I think I recognized him at one point, when he tried to pass me.”
“How very interesting,” the chief inspector had said, and he’d lifted the telephone on his desk.
Mervyn Williams, I discovered at a second meeting with the chief inspector just a week later, was a qualified veterinary surgeon, originally from Chepstow in South Wales, but he had been living in Newbury for the past ten years as some sort of veterinary investigator for the RSPCA. A police search of his house had uncovered a black-and-red rucksack still with an airline baggage tag attached with GRADY printed on it. Results were eagerly awaited for a DNA test of blood spots discovered on the sleeve of a charcoal-gray hoodie from Mr. Williams’s wardrobe and consistent with my description of the Ascot attacker’s clothes. And a further search of the mangled remains of his silver hatchback had also uncovered a kitchen knife of the correct proportions to have inflicted the fatal wounds to my father’s abdomen.
I chose not to ask the chief inspector if they had also found the remote control to my kitchen television, although I could really have done with it back.
“So what happens now?” I’d asked instead.
“That depends on if, and how well, Mr. Williams recovers,” the chief inspector had said. “He’s been formally arrested on suspicion of murder, but the doctors are saying he has massive brain damage, so he’ll probably never be fit to plead even if he survives.”
“What does that mean?” I’d asked.
“If he’s unfit to plead, there would be no criminal trial as such. But there would be what is called a ‘trial of the facts,’ when the evidence is placed before a jury and they would effectively decide if he had done it or not. But, of course, there would be no actual declaration of guilt or innocence and no sentence.”
“So what would then happen to Mervyn Williams?”
“If he’s unfit to plead, he’d technically be a free man, but if he recovers enough so that he becomes fit he could still be tried for murder. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that he was the man responsible, and the DNA should prove it. Your e-fit was remarkably accurate considering you saw him for only a second or two in the Ascot parking lot, and with his hood up too.”
I hadn’t enlightened him that the fleeting glimpse in the Ascot parking lot hadn’t been, in fact, the only occasion I’d seen the man.
The chief inspector had shown me a photograph of Mr. Mervyn Williams that the police had taken from his home. I looked once more at the man I had known only as shifty-eyed Kipper, with his eyes set rather too close together for the shape of his face, the man I’d last seen laughing at me as he’d tried to overtake me on the road to Leek Wooton.
“So is that it?” I’d said.
“For the moment,” the chief inspector had replied cautiously. “But I still have a niggling feeling you haven’t told me the whole truth.”
He was, I supposed, quite a good detective, really.
Thanks to the nearly six-hundred-thousand-pound generosity of Mr. Henry Richard Feldman, Sophie and I traveled upstairs, in Club Class, from London to Sydney on a British Airways jumbo jet, sipping vintage champagne for most of the way.
It had taken a little while for Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd to pay out on the juvenile delinquents’ bets, but they had been persuaded by HRF Holdings Ltd, their parent company, to see sense in the end.
Only two of the thirty had failed to make the bet, instead pocketing the two-hundred-pound stake. They were now ruing their mistake to the tune of four thousand eight hundred smackers, as well as the well-earned derision of the other twenty-eight.
Duggie and Luca had given some of their own winnings to refit the electronics club with new equipment, and I’d spent a couple of thousand of mine on some more comfortable dining chairs for the mental hospital grand salon.
Just in case.
The source of all our riches, the horse Oriental Suite, now running as Cricket Hero, had raced twice more since Bangor-on-Dee, winning easily on both occasions, but at starting prices far shorter than our hundred-to-one bonanza of July. His trainer, Miles Carpenter, also known to me as Mr. Paddy Murphy, had stated in a television interview that he hoped the horse would win at the Cheltenham Steeplechase Festival the following March.
However, according to reports in the Racing Post in early December, Cricket Hero had suffered a massive heart attack at home on the gallops and had dropped stone dead. “Just one of those things,” the paper had said. “Sadly, it happens all too often in racing.”
I, meanwhile, wondered if it had actually been that particular horse which had died, if table-tennis balls had been involved and whether or not he’d been insured for a small fortune.
Sophie and I landed in Sydney at six in the morning on a glorious January, Southern Hemisphere summer day just as the sun began to peep over the horizon to the east. I had a wonderful view of the city as we approached from the north, with the still-dark Sydney Harbour Bridge spanning a ribbon of early light reflected from the water beneath.