I sat there with my mouth open.
“I don’t want money,” I said, exasperated. “I want family.”
“Nevertheless,” Lachie went on. “This whole business is going to be a legal can of worms. Alan Grady left a will, and, as we all know, where there’s a will, there’s a disgruntled relative.” He laughed again.
“But if there’s a will, then what’s the problem?” I said. “Surely he would have left everything to his daughters anyway.”
“The will is in the name of Alan Charles Grady,” Lachie said,
“and, according to the registry here, he’s not dead. You, meanwhile, claim that the man who owned this house was your father, a Peter James Talbot, now deceased, but it doesn’t say that on the property deeds.”
Now it was me who laughed. Absolutely nothing about my father was as it appeared.
“Can’t we just go and have a quick peep inside?” I said. “No one would ever know.”
“I’m afraid we can’t,” he said. “Those keys might work in the door locks, but they won’t be any good for the padlocks the court has had applied as well.”
“Oh,” I said, peering closely at the house, but it was too dark behind all the lacy ironwork to see the front door properly.
The earlier excitement of my arrival in Australia had evaporated completely. I felt dejected and lost. “So what’s next?” I asked miserably.
“Well, let’s look on the bright side,” he said. “The Grady girls have agreed to meet you, and I have set up the meeting for tomorrow. It’s Australia Day, and we are going to the races.”
“Horse racing?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’ve arranged for us to meet them at Hanging Rock races tomorrow afternoon.”
“Are they married?” I asked, eager for knowledge. “Do they have children?”
“Not married,” Lachie said. “Can’t say about children, but I don’t think so.”
“Didn’t some schoolgirls once go missing at Hanging Rock?” Sophie said. “During a picnic.”
“That was in a film,” said Lachie. “But it wasn’t a true story.”
“What are their names?” I asked.
“What, the girls in the film?” Lachie said.
“No, silly, the Grady daughters.”
“Patricia and Shannon. Patricia’s the elder. She’s twenty-nine. Shannon is two years younger.”
I was absolutely astounded. My much-maligned but innocent father had apparently named his first Australian daughter after his murdered English wife.
Lachie picked up Sophie and me from our hotel at eleven o’clock the following morning and drove us the hour and a half northwest of the city to Hanging Rock races.
“It’s been a dry summer,” said Lachie as he drove past mile after mile of scorched brown farmland. “There’s a serious bushfire risk at the moment. I’m quite surprised they’re even racing at Hanging Rock. They ran out of water last year and had to transfer the races to another course at Kyneton.”
“Why exactly are we meeting my sisters up here?” I asked.
“They live up this way.” It seemed like a good reason.
“How many meetings do they have a year?” I asked him.
“At Hanging Rock?”
I nodded
“They race only two days. New Year’s Day and Australia Day. It’s country racing. Quite small. It’s not like Flemington.” Flemington was where the Melbourne Cup was held each November.
Hanging Rock racetrack was indeed no Flemington nor Royal Ascot either. But it was lively and bustling with people on their Australia Day out. Most of the buildings were temporary hospitality tents, and, like Bangor-on-Dee, there was no grandstand other than a natural bank from which to watch the racing.
The racetrack was within the Hanging Rock Recreation Reserve and was dominated, as its name might suggest, by the hanging and other rocks of a five-hundred-foot-high volcanic outcrop behind the enclosures. Unlike Leicester racetrack, this one did have trees in the middle. Lots of them. Eucalyptus gum trees that would at times obscure the horses on the far side from the crowd.
And from the stewards, I thought.
Overall, it was a delightful setting, with great elm trees providing shade for the punters as they gathered around the bookmakers like the proverbial bees around the honeypot. Gambling was gambling, the same on both sides of the globe.
Lachie had obviously spun some yarn to the Hanging Rock Racing Club because we were met at the entrance by a small delegation.
“Welcome to Hanging Rock races,” said Anthony, the club chairman, shaking my hand. “Always a pleasure to welcome a fellow racing enthusiast from England.”
“Thank you,” I said, shaking his hand back and feeling like a bit of a fraud.
And they had laid on lunch for the three of us in one of the tents.
“What on earth did you tell them?” I said to Lachie in a quiet moment.
“I told them that you ran one of the biggest bookmaking firms in the UK and were looking to possibly expand over here.” He smiled broadly. “It got us a free lunch, didn’t it?”
“But how about my sisters?” I said.
“They’ll be along later,” he said. “I couldn’t get them the free lunch as well, now could I?”
The lunch itself was excellent and would have easily rivaled anything served at Royal Ascot. There was even a country-and-western band, appropriately called, in this land of poisonous snakes, the “Original Snakeskins,” who wandered amongst the tents making music and entertaining the happy crowd.
We were at a table laid for ten that included the club dignitaries as well as the chairman, who was seated on the far side of Sophie. I, meanwhile, had been placed next to an official from the Australian Racing Board, who, I discovered during the meal, was the head of their security service.
“I wouldn’t have thought there was enough skulduggery going on at Hanging Rock to warrant the presence of the head honcho,” I said, smiling at him.
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “But I have a holiday home just down the road in Woodend. So this is my local course. And I’m not working today. I’m here simply to enjoy myself.” He took a swig of his beer.
“Busman’s holiday?” I said.
“Exactly.”
We ate in silence for a while.
“Do you have any undercover staff in the security service?” I asked him quietly while the others at the table were deep in conversation. “Any secret investigators?”
“A few,” he said, draining his beer glass and purposely not giving me any details.
“How about an Englishman?” I asked. “Someone called John Smith?”
It was his turn to smile at me. “Now, Mr. Talbot, there are lots of Englishmen called John Smith.”
“This particular one was principally interested in something he called a ‘microcoder.’”
The smile disappeared from his face but only for an instant.
“Anyone for another beer?” he said suddenly, standing up from the table, holding his empty glass.
“Lovely idea,” I said, also standing up.
We walked together down to the bar at the end of the tent, leaving the others at the table.
“What do you know about a microcoder?” he asked me intently. The busman’s holiday was over. This was now a workday after all.
“That it is used to write fake RFID identification chips.”
“Oh God,” he said, clearly disturbed. “Do you know where it is?”
“Not anymore,” I said. “I did have it in England, but I gave it to this Mr. John Smith.”
I could tell that the head of Australian racing security wasn’t at all pleased to hear that. Not one little bit. “For God’s sake, why did you give it to him?”