Dick Francis - Under Orders

I made my way down to the exit. What a difference a day makes. I didn’t notice anyone at the hospital reception desk who was desperately looking for the Intensive Care Unit as I had been just over twenty-fours hours ago. But then I wouldn’t. A crisis doesn’t make you grow a second head or anything; the turmoil is on the inside. Invisible.

When I had been riding, Saturday morning had always been a ‘work day’ in Andrew Woodward’s yard and I assumed that nothing would have changed. On a ‘work day’ the horses would do ‘work’. A large string of them would be out on the exercise grounds early, galloping hard to increase their stamina and speed. Preparing a horse for racing was all about developing stamina and speed. High protein oats, minerals and oils are transformed into strong, firm muscle through regular and demanding training gallops.

First lot in the Woodward stable had always gone out at half past seven sharp. Horses need to be made ready with saddles and bridles, with protective bandages on their lower legs, and with their coats and tails brushed. There was much to do for the trainer and his assistants prior to the ‘mount up’ order being given; at ten past seven they would be busy and preoccupied with the horses and the stable staff.

Which is why, on Saturday morning at ten past seven precisely, I let myself in through the front door of Juliet Burns’s tiny cottage.

Lambourn is set in a hollow of the Berkshire Downs, appropriately close to the Bronze Age White Horse figure carved into a chalk hill at Uffington. Locally, and for good reason, the area is known as The Valley of the Racehorse. At about two thousand, there are almost as many racehorses living in the village as there are people. And the majority of the human residents earn their living either directly or indirectly from their equine neighbours.

I wasn’t sure what made a village into a town but, if any village deserved it, it was Lambourn. Not many villages I knew had at least a dozen shops, several restaurants, two fish-and-chip bars, four pubs, a leisure centre and a fully equipped hospital, even if it was only for the horses. But still no town hall.

There was only one betting shop. In spite of a roaring trade, it apparently wasn’t very profitable. There were too many winners.

I had lived here myself for five years during my racing career and my face was almost as well known in this community as Saddam Hussein’s was in Baghdad. If I were ever to take up burglary as a career, the one place I would not choose to start would be Lambourn.

Thankfully Juliet had not heeded my advice to increase the security of her cottage. Her front door Yale key was under the stone in the window box, just as before. I turned the lock, put the key back under the stone, and stepped into the cottage.

I stood very still in the hallway listening for the slightest sound. The house was silent, and from outside there were no shouts from nosy neighbours who might have witnessed my arrival. I closed the door.

I padded silently up the stairs. It would be just my luck if she was still here, ill in bed. I risked a peep into her bedroom. The bed was empty and unmade. I put my right hand down on the sheet; it was cold.

I hadn’t put on gloves as I wasn’t worried about fingerprints. I didn’t intend stealing anything and I’d been in this house only last week anyway. My right-hand dabs must have already been everywhere.

I reckoned I had at least twenty minutes before Juliet could possibly come home. I thought that she would probably be going out to the gallops with the horses, either seated on one of them or in Andrew Woodward’s old Land Rover. That would give me well over an hour to look around, but I didn’t want to take the chance that she might pop back after the string had left the yard. I gave myself twenty minutes to be out of the place. Better safe than arrested.

I went across to her wardrobe and opened the door.

Altogether, I counted a dozen outfits hanging there, many of them in the designer-named plastic covers so thoughtfully provided to keep the dust off. There were short floral cocktail dresses and long slinky evening gowns, skirts with matching jackets and brightly coloured trouser suits, and they didn’t look like fakes or copies to me.

It was an impressive list with four Giorgio Armanis, two each from Versace and Gucci, and a scattering of others, all of them from well-known designers that even I had heard of. There were rows of shoes from Jimmy Choo and a shelf of handbags from Fendi. It was a veritable treasure trove. I did a simple mental calculation using some information about prices that I had obtained from Jenny.

I knew that good assistant trainers were hard to find these days and that they could command quite high salaries, especially compared to only a few years ago, but I again wondered how Juliet Burns had obtained the means to have nearly thirty thousand pounds’ worth of clothes and accessories in her wardrobe.

I remembered the morning I had brought her back here, the morning when Bill had died. She had been very keen for me to leave her jacket on the bed and not to hang it up. But at that time, I hadn’t realised what I’d been looking at.

I took my camera out of my pocket and took some shots through the open wardrobe door. I didn’t want to disturb things more than I needed to. If, as I imagined, these dresses were Juliet’s pride and joy then she would know exactly in which order they were hung up, and the exact position of every shoe and handbag. I didn’t want her to know I’d been here. Not yet, anyway.

I closed the wardrobe door carefully and looked round the rest of the bedroom. There wasn’t much that I hadn’t seen on my previous visit. I looked in the drawers in her dressing table but there was nothing unusual. I discovered no hidden cache of jewels, no boxes of bearer bonds.

There were bedside cabinets on either side of the double bed. In one I found a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a rolled up pair of men’s socks. In the other there were some condoms hidden in a Jimmy Choo shoe-box, together with a couple of raunchy paperbacks. I smiled. So much for the tom-boy exterior.

I went into the bathroom. Two toothbrushes stood in a beaker on a glass shelf but otherwise there was nothing of interest. I looked in her bathroom cabinet but there were only the usual things: tampons, painkillers and sticky plasters. I took care to put everything back as I had found it.

I made a last check of the bedroom and noticed Juliet’s hairbrush on her dressing table. Amongst its mass of black bristles were some hairs that had conveniently been pulled out with the follicles still attached. I took a photograph of it.

I had a plastic bag in my pocket that I had brought with me, just in case. I very carefully removed at least a dozen of the hairs and placed them in the bag. I put the brush back in the same position I had found it and went downstairs.

I glanced at my watch. I had already used up ten minutes, half my time.

I searched the kitchen but there was nothing of interest there. The small fridge in the corner contained some skimmed milk, a pack of bacon, a bunch of black grapes that looked past their best, and a row of six eggs in the door. No champagne, no caviar, and no incriminating hypodermic syringes full of dope.

The waste bin under the sink was empty and I didn’t dare go outside to rummage through the dustbin. There were too many eyes that might have been watching. Such a shame. I had discovered all sorts of secrets in people’s dustbins.

I went through to the small sitting room. A laptop computer sat on the floor next to the sofa. Computers can be funny things. They have a habit of remembering everything done to them so I was particularly wary of leaving any tell-tale signs that might indicate to Juliet that I had been there.