I wondered how he had found out where I lived. If he had obtained the information that I had given the coroner at the inquest, then why had it taken him so long to arrive at my door? I thought back to what I had done over the previous twenty-four hours. Perhaps his little birdie had been at Banbury police station yesterday, or somewhere else in the Thames Valley Police. That e-fit would have been sent right around the force, and perhaps someone recognized the face, someone not completely honest, someone who had then told Kipper, who had made it.
I would never know exactly how he had found me, and I hoped that this would be the last time I would see him, but, somehow, I had my doubts.
He would certainly find that the microcoder and the glass-grain RFID chips were missing from the rucksack as Mr. John Smith now had them. And I had also kept back the three house keys on their ring and the passports, the two photocopied equine ones, and both of those with my father’s picture in them.
However, if Paddy Murphy was to be believed-and there was absolutely no guarantee of that-then it would be the stash of money that the man would be more concerned about. If he knew where to look, Kipper would find the three blue-plastic-wrapped packages of banknotes back in their original hiding place underneath the rucksack lining. But, if he inspected them more closely, he might spot that the packages had been opened and then carefully resealed using clear sticky tape. And, if he then counted the cash, he might also discover that he was two thousand pounds short from each package.
It had seemed a good idea at the time. But now I wasn’t so sure.
What the hell was all that about?” Sophie demanded when I went down the stairs.
She and Alice were standing in the hall, looking up at me with concerned but expectant expressions on their faces.
“Just an impatient man who wanted something I had,” I said to them, trying to make light of the encounter.
“But he was horrible,” said Sophie. “Why did you give it to him?”
“But it was you who told me to,” I said, slightly exasperated.
“Whose rucksack was it anyway?” she asked.
“It belongs to a man called Alan Grady,” I said. “He gave it to me to keep safe.”
“Who’s Alan Grady?” she asked.
“Just a man from Australia that I met at Royal Ascot.”
“He’s not going to be very pleased with you for giving his rucksack away to someone else.”
She seemed to have completely forgotten the fear and panic that had gripped her when the man had been standing outside our front door.
“I don’t think he’ll mind too much,” I said without elaborating further. I smiled at the two of them. “Now, what’s for supper?”
“He won’t come back, will he?” Alice asked nervously as I ate my macaroni and cheese, the three of us sitting around the kitchen table.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s got what he came for.”
At least he got most of it, I thought. But would he come back for the rest? There was no doubt that he now knew exactly where I lived, and, even though I had been half expecting him to turn up, it was still rather a shock that he had.
After my supper, I went up into my little office to log on to the Internet while the girls took themselves off to bed.
HRF Holdings Ltd was indeed a parent company, and one of the businesses it owned I knew very well. Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd, to give it its full title, was one of the big-five High Street betting shop chains. Their shops were presently mostly confined to London and the southeast of England, but the business was expanding rapidly north and westwards.
I made a search of the Companies House WebCHeck service and downloaded the most recent annual report for Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd and for HRF Holdings Ltd. They were both private limited companies, and the report recorded the names of the directors and the company secretaries, as well as a list of the current shareholders, of each entity.
Just as there is no longer an individual called William Hill in charge of the William Hill bookmaking company, there was no sign in the report of anyone actually called Tony Bateman either as a director or as a shareholder at Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd. It must have been a name from the past, I thought, possibly the company founder or maybe an individual bookmaker who was, at some distant time, bought out by a bigger concern.
I did, however, recognize one name prominent amongst the list of both the directors and the shareholders of the company. Henry Richard Feldman was well known on British racetracks. Now in his late sixties, he had made his money in property development, specifically in the docklands of both London and Liverpool, although there were reports that a recent fall in house prices had hit him hard. For the past twenty years or so, he had been a prolific and successful racehorse owner, mostly jumpers. He was also the sole shareholder of HRF Holdings Ltd.
But why did he or, more precisely, why did Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd want to buy my business?
Ever since betting shops were made legal in Britain in 1961, the big firms had been expanding their domains by buying out the small independent bookies. But mostly it had been the individual town-center betting shops they had been after. However, more recently they had also been turning up in the betting rings on the tracks, using their influence to further control the on-course prices.
Now, it would seem, it was the turn of my business to be in their sights whether I liked it or not. Tony Bateman Ltd wasn’t so much after me and Luca, or even our customers; they were after our lucrative pitch positions at the racetracks. And, it appeared, they were prepared to resort to threats and intimidation to get them.
Sophie was fast asleep when, well after midnight, I finally went along the landing to bed. As always, coming home from the hospital had completely exhausted her.
I crept quietly into our bedroom and, last thing, with both shifty-eyed Kipper and the bullyboys from HRF Holdings still out there somewhere, I put Sophie’s dressing-table chair under the door handle.
Just to be on the safe side.
19
On Wednesday morning I made the arrangements for my father’s funeral. What I really wanted was to have a cremation because I believed it gave greater closure. However, the coroner’s office had other ideas.
“The police have withdrawn their objection to a burial,” said an official. “But they said nothing about a cremation. And I haven’t heard anything from the CPS.”
“The CPS?” I asked.
“Crown Prosecution Service,” he said.
I sighed. Why was everything so damn difficult?
“Will you please ask them all, then,” I said, “if they have any objection to a cremation.”
“Can’t you do that?” said the official.
“But you would have to be told by them, not me, which would involve another call anyway,” I said. “So why don’t you just telephone them in the first place?”
“OK, I suppose so,” he said, clearly reluctantly.
“Good,” I said briskly before he could think of another excuse. “I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.”
While I waited, I used the Internet to look up funeral directors close to Wexham Park Hospital. There were loads of them. I’d never realized that dying was so popular in that part of Berkshire.
I’d also never realized how expensive dying could be. A basic, no-frills funeral would cost about a thousand pounds, and that didn’t include the substantial price of a grave plot or the charge for the use of the crematorium. Add to that the cost of the necessary certificates, as well as a fee for someone to conduct the service, and it soon became a hefty sum indeed. To say nothing of the extras that could be incurred if I wanted an eco-friendly cardboard coffin or a choir. I began to wish I’d taken a bit more from the blue-plastic-wrapped packages to cover the expenses.