Dick Francis: Under Orders

Oven Cleaner had given his all. His heart, so strong in carrying him up the Cheltenham hill to victory, had failed him in his moment of triumph.

Willing hands managed to free the poor owner but she refused to leave for medical treatment on her broken ankle, cradling the horse’s head in her lap and crying the inconsolable tears of the bereaved.

I watched a vet examine the animal. He placed a stethoscope to the grey-haired chest and listened for a few seconds. He stood up, pursed his lips and shook his head. No paramedics, no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, no defibrillator pads, no cardiac massage, just a shake of the head.

A team of men hurried in with green canvas screens that they set up around the still steaming bulk. No screens, I thought, for the poor human victim who had died on the same spot not three hours before. But the screens were not really necessary. Whereas, earlier, the crowd had grown to watch the human drama, now they turned away, not wanting to witness the sad end of such a dear friend.

Deep gloom descended on the racecourse. It was not helped by an objection from the clerk of the scales because Oven Cleaner’s jockey had failed to weigh in.

‘How could I?’ he protested. ‘My bleeding saddle is still on the bleeding horse halfway to the bleeding glue factory.’

The ‘bleeding saddle’ in question had, in fact, been removed by the trainer when the horse had collapsed and had been placed out of sight under the cloth-covered table used for the presentations of the trophies. An uncommon amount of good sense broke out when it was agreed by the Stewards that the jockey, finally reunited with his saddle, could weigh in late.

I wondered what the rule would have been if the jockey had died instead of the horse. Could his lifeless corpse be carried to the scales? Dead weight. I smiled at the thought and received some stern looks for being so cheerful at a time of national mourning.

The fourth race on Gold Cup day is the Foxhunter Steeple Chase, often referred to as the amateur riders’ gold cup. The favourite won but returned to almost silent grandstands. The will to cheer had gone out of the crowd, which politely applauded the winner’s return.

‘Where’s that bloody jockey of mine?’ Bill Burton was asking anyone and everyone outside the weighing room.

‘Huw Walker?’ I asked as Bill hurried towards me.

‘Bloody unreliable bastard, that’s what he is. Gone bloody AWOL. Have you seen him, Sid?’ I shook my head. ‘He’s due to ride Leaded Light in the next but I can’t find him. I’ll have to declare another jockey.’ He went back inside to change his declaration.

Leaded Light was beaten into second place in a close finish that should have had the crowd on their feet shouting. Such was the mood that the jockey on the winner didn’t even look happy at having won. Many of the crowd had already departed and I, too, decided I’d had enough. I opted to wait for Charles at his car in the hope that he would also want to leave before the last race.

I was making my way past the rows of outside broadcast TV vans when a wide-eyed young woman came stumbling towards me. She was unable to speak but she pointed down the gap between two of the vans.

She had found Huw Walker.

He sat leaned up against the wheel of one of the vans looking at me with an expression of surprise. Except that his staring eyes were not seeing and never would again.

He was still wearing his riding clothes, breeches, lightweight riding boots and a thin white roll-neck top worn under a blue anorak to keep out the rain and the March chill. His anorak hung open so that I could clearly see the three closely grouped bullet wounds in the middle of his chest showing red against the white cotton. I knew what one bullet could do to a man’s guts as I had myself once carelessly been on the receiving end, but these three were closer to the heart and there seemed little doubt as to the cause of death.

Charles and I didn’t arrive back at Aynsford until after midnight.

As is so often the case, the police ran roughshod over everything with no care for people’s feelings and, it seemed, with little or no common sense.

They cancelled the last race of the day and closed the racecourse, refusing to let anyone leave, not even those in the central enclosure who didn’t have access to where Huw Walker had been found. Totally ill equipped to interview nearly sixty thousand people, they relented in the end and allowed the wet, angry and frustrated multitude to make their ways to the car parks and home but not before it was very dark and very cold.

In a way, I felt sorry for the policemen. They had no idea how to deal with a crowd of racegoers in shock and grief over a horse. Surely, they said, you are more concerned about the murder of a jockey than the death of an animal?

‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said one man standing near me. ‘All jockeys are bent, anyway. Got what he deserved, I reckon.’ Sadly, it was a common view. If it wins, it’s all the horse’s doing. If it loses, blame the pilot.

I didn’t get away quite so easily as I was a material witness and I reluctantly agreed to go to their hastily established incident room in one of the now vacated restaurants to give a statement. I pointed out that I hadn’t actually been the first to find poor Huw. However, the young woman who had was so shocked that she had been sedated by a doctor. She was asleep and unable to speak to the police. Lucky her.

Huw had been seen in the jockeys’ changing room before the Gold Cup but not after it. Bill Burton had been looking for him less than an hour later.

By the time they had set up their interview area and got round to asking me, it was clear they had received reports of the shouting match between trainer and jockey after Candlestick’s victory in the first. Bill Burton, it appeared, was already their prime suspect.

I pointed out to Detective Chief Inspector Carlisle of Gloucestershire CID that Huw had obviously been killed by an expert assassin who must have brought a gun with him to the races for the purpose and that Bill Burton couldn’t have magically produced a shooter out of thin air just because he had had a tiff with his jockey following the first race.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘maybe that’s what we are meant to think while, meantime, Burton had planned it all along.’

Yes, I had spoken to Huw Walker earlier in the day.

No, he didn’t say anything to me that could be of use to the police.

Yes, I had seen Huw Walker and Bill Burton together after the first race.

No, I didn’t know why anyone would want him dead.

Yes, I would contact them again if I thought of anything else which might be important.

I remembered the message on my London telephone and decided not to mention it. I wanted to listen to it first and the remote access system on my answer machine was broken.

The following morning, all the national dailies ran the ecstasy and agony of Oven Cleaner on their front pages. The Times ran the story over the first three pages with graphic photographs of his victory and the subsequent disaster.

Only on page seven was there a report of the discovery, late in the afternoon, of the body of jockey Huw Walker by Sid Halley, ex-champion jockey and now private detective. Even this item referred to the sad demise of the equine hero and, at first glance, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the two were connected. Somehow the impression was given that Walker’s death was a bizarre after-effect of the great horse’s passing, as if the jockey had killed himself in grief even though he had not himself ridden The Cleaner to victory. There was no mention of the three bullet wounds in Huw’s chest. As any one of the three would have been instantly fatal, the police, at least, were not treating his death as suicide.