On the third page there was a brief account of an inquest at South Devon Coroner’s Court that had been opened and adjourned into the sudden and violent death of one Patricia Jane Talbot, aged eighteen, of New Malden in Surrey.
According to the paper, the post-mortem report stated that the major cause of death had been asphyxiation due to constriction of the neck, and that the hyoid bone had been fractured, which was consistent with manual strangulation.
The piece concluded by stating that the deceased had been found to be pregnant at the time of her death, with a female fetus estimated at between eighteen and twenty weeks’ gestation.
Indeed, he had murdered her baby.
He had murdered my sister.
10
Ididn’t get to Newbury for the evening racing. Instead, I went straight home to Kenilworth.
I was angry.
In fact, I was absolutely livid.
How could my father have come to Ascot, just one week previously, and been so normal and so natural, even so agreeable, when he held the knowledge that he had murdered my mother together with her unborn child?
It was despicable, and I hated him for it.
Why had he come back from Australia and turned my life upside down?
Had he come because of the glass-grain RFIDs and the money? Surely it hadn’t been just to see me?
I lay awake for ages, tossing and turning, trying to sort it all out, but all I came up with were more and more questions, and no answers.
Whose money was it in his rucksack?
Was the money connected to the RFIDs and the black-box programmer?
Was he killed because he hadn’t handed over the money or was it the black box and the glass grains that were so important?
And what exactly were they for?
Every punter has a story of how they think a crooked trainer or owner has run the wrong horse in a race. How a “ringer” has been brought in to win when the expected horse would have had no chance. Unexpected winners have always made some people suspicious that foul play has been afoot, and, in the distant past, before racing was a well-organized industry, rumors of ringers abounded, and there must have been some truth to them.
But running a ringer has always been more difficult than most people believe, especially from a large, well-established training stable, and not only because horse identification has become more sophisticated with the introduction of the RFID chips. Sure, a horse will be scanned by an official vet the first time it runs and randomly thereafter, and this, together with the detailed horse passport, makes it difficult to substitute one horse for another. But the real reason is that too many people would have to be “in the know.”
There is an old Spanish proverb that runs: A secret between two is God’s secret, between three it is all men’s.
To run a horse as a ringer requires the inside knowledge of a good deal more than three men. The horse’s groom, the horsevan driver, the traveling head lad and the jockey just for a start, in addition to the trainer and the owner.
It would be impossible to keep it a secret from any of them because they would simply recognize that the horse was not the right one. People who work every day with horses see them as individuals with different features and characteristics rather than just as horses. It has often been said that every great trainer needs to know his horses’ characters better than he knows those of his own family. Lester Piggott was said to be able to recognize any horse he had ridden even when it was walking away from him in a rainstorm.
Just as everyone would realize pretty quickly, if not immediately, that a celebrity look-alike was not the real thing, so too would racing folk easily spot a ringer, unless it was far removed from its normal environment. And it was too much to expect that a secret conspiracy of even a handful of people would hold for very long.
So what real good were the rewritable identification RFIDs?
I finally went to sleep, still trying to work out the conundrum.
I was not sure what the noise was that woke me, but one moment I’d been fast asleep, the next I was fully conscious in the dark and knowing that something wasn’t quite right.
I listened intently, lying perfectly still on my back and keeping my breathing very quiet and shallow.
As usual in the summer, I had left open one of my bedroom windows for ventilation. But I could hear nothing out of the ordinary from outside the house. Nothing except for the breeze, which rustled the leaves of the beech tree by the road, and the occasional hum of a distant car on Abbey Hill.
I had begun to think I must have been wrong when I plainly heard the sound again. It was muffled slightly by the closed bedroom door, but I knew immediately what it was. Someone was downstairs, and he was opening the kitchen cabinets. The cabinet doors were held shut by little magnetic catches. The sound I had heard was the noise made when one of the catches was opened.
I lay there wondering what I should do.
Detective Sergeant Murray had warned me that witnesses to murder were an endangered species, and now I began to wish I had taken his warning a bit more seriously.
Was the person downstairs intent on doing me harm or was he happy to go on exploring while leaving me to sleep?
The problem was that I didn’t really imagine my intruder was searching through my kitchen cabinets for something with which to make himself a cup of tea or coffee. He would be after my father’s rucksack and its hidden contents, and they were not downstairs in the kitchen but deep in the recesses of my wardrobe, up here with me in my bedroom. It would only be a matter of time before he would have to come upstairs, and then he surely would know that I must be awake.
I thought about making lots of noise, stamping my way down the stairs and demanding to know who was in my house, in the hope that he might be frightened away. But then I remembered the two stab wounds that had killed my father. Was my visitor the shifty-eyed man from the Ascot parking lot, and did he have his twelve-centimeter-long blade with him ready to turn my guts into mincemeat as well?
Ever so quietly, I stretched out my hand towards the telephone that sat on my bedside table, intending to call the police. I decided it was better to be still alive, even if it did mean I would have the difficult task of explaining why there was thirty thousand pounds’ worth of someone else’s cash in my wardrobe. Much better, I thought, than drowning in my own blood.
But there was no dial tone when I lifted the receiver. My guest downstairs must have seen to that.
And, as always, I had left my mobile in the car.
What, I wondered, was plan C?
There was nothing to be gained from simply lying there in bed and waiting for him to come up and plunge his knife into my body. I was sure he wouldn’t just go away when he failed to find what he had come for downstairs. Clearly, he would rather have found the booty and departed silently, leaving me blissfully asleep, or else he would have come up and dealt with me first. But I was under no illusion that he would give up before he had searched everywhere, whether or not I was wide awake or fast asleep, or very dead.
It wasn’t that dying particularly frightened me. But I didn’t really want to go yet, not when Sophie was making such good progress. And not now that I knew I had sisters to meet in Australia. And particularly not before I had discovered what this was all about. I had always felt rather sorry for soldiers who died in wars, not only because they were dead but because they would never know who won or if their sacrifice had been worth it.
Maybe I just wanted to die in my own time, not at someone else’s wish and whim.