Dick Francis - Silks

I could see that it was.

‘And he told you,’ I said, ‘to go to the police and say that you had been approached by a solicitor who had asked you to make sure you found Trent guilty?’ It was a question but, as all barristers know, one should never ask a question to which you don’t already know the answer.

He nodded and looked down into his lap.

‘It was dreadful, lying like that in the court,’ he said. ‘The appeal judges kept asking me if I was telling the truth or was I saying it because I had been told to do so by someone else. I was sure they knew I was lying. I felt so ashamed.’ He said the last part in little more than a whisper. ‘That’s why I’m here,’ he said more strongly. ‘When you came to my house I was afraid of you. I’ve been afraid of nearly everyone for the past year. I’ve hardly been out of the house since the trial. I’ve been looking at your business card for weeks and been trying to pluck up the courage to come here.’

‘I’m so glad you did,’ I said. He smiled a little. ‘And how is your wife?’

‘They took her into a nursing home yesterday, poor thing. The Parkinson’s is beginning to affect her mind and it’s becoming too much for me to manage on my own. She’s so confused. That’s another reason I’m here today,’ he said. ‘She’s safe now. The security at the nursing home is pretty good, mostly to stop the patients wandering off. Now I only have to worry about myself.’

‘And what would you like me to do about what you have told me?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’ he said, looking nervous again.

‘Do you want to go to the police?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said quite firmly. He paused. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you still frightened of this man?’ I asked.

‘Damn right I am,’ he said. ‘But you can’t live your life being too frightened to step out of your own house.’

Bridget Hughes was, I thought.

‘So what do we do?’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry. I think I should go now.’ He stood up.

‘Mr Barnett,’ I said to him. ‘I won’t tell anyone what you have told me, I promise. But if I try to stop this man and put him behind bars where he belongs, will you help me?’

‘How?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. I didn’t even know who the enemy was. ‘Would you recognize the man again?’

‘I certainly would,’ he said. ‘I’ll never forget him.’

‘Tell me what he looked like,’ I said.

Mr Barnett did his best but he often contradicted himself. He said he was big but then he also said he was shorter than me. He described him as muscular but also as fat. He was a little confused himself, I thought. In the end I had very little idea about the man who said he was Julian Trent’s father other than he was white, middle aged and fairly average in every way. Much the same as Josef Hughes had said and not very helpful. Short of getting a police artist or a photofit expert, it was the best he could do.

He departed back to his home in north London, again looking nervously from side to side. I was left to ponder whether I was any further on in finding out how, and why, Julian Trent had his fingers into the Scot Barlow murder.

Steve Mitchell’s trial was now less than a week away and we still had almost nothing to use in his defence except to claim that he definitely didn’t murder Scot Barlow, that someone else did – someone who was making it appear that our client was responsible. A classic frame-up, in fact, that no one else could see, not least because Steve Mitchell was not the most likable of characters and people didn’t seem to care enough whether he was convicted or not. But I cared. I cared for the sake of justice, and I also cared for the sake of my personal survival. But were the two compatible?

I could foresee that the trial was unlikely to fill the two weeks that had been allocated for it on the Oxford Crown Court calendar unless we came up with something a bit more substantial, and quickly.

After a sandwich lunch at my desk, I took a taxi to University College Hospital to see an orthopaedic surgeon, with my left leg resting straight across the back seat. Seven whole weeks had now passed since I had woken up in Cheltenham General Hospital with a pile-driver of a headache that had made my skull feel as if it were bursting. With a return to consciousness had also come the discovery that I had to remain flat on my back, my left leg in traction, with a myriad of tubes running from an impressive collection of clear plastic bags above my left shoulder to an intravenous needle contraption in my forearm.

‘You are lucky to be alive,’ a smiling nurse had cheerfully informed me. ‘You’ve been in a coma for three days.’

My head had hurt so much that I had rather wished that I had remained so for another three.

‘What happened?’ I had croaked at her from inside a clear plastic mask that had sat over my nose and mouth and which, I’d assumed, was to deliver oxygen to the patient.

‘You fell off your horse.’

I had suddenly remembered everything – everything, that is, up to the point of the fall.

‘I didn’t fall off,’ I had croaked back at her. ‘The horse fell.’ An important distinction for every jockey, although the nurse hadn’t seemed to appreciate the difference.

‘How is my horse?’ I had asked her.

She had looked at me in amazement. ‘I have no idea,’ she had said. ‘I’m only concerned with you.’

Over the next few hours my headache had finally succumbed to increasing doses of intravenous morphine and the roaring fire in my throat had been extinguished by countless sips of iced water via a green sponge on a stick.

Sometime after it was dark, a doctor had arrived to check on my now-conscious form and he had informed me of the full catalogue of injuries that I had sustained, first by hitting the ground at thirty miles and hour and then having more than half a ton of horse land on top of me.

My back was broken, he had said, with three vertebrae cracked right through but, fortunately for me, my spinal cord was intact, thanks probably to the back protector that I had been wearing under my silks. Four of my ribs had been cracked and one of those had punctured a lung that had subsequently partially collapsed. My head had made hard contact with something or other and my brain had been badly bruised, so much so that a neurosurgeon had been called to operate to reduce the pressure inside my skull by fitting a valve above my right ear that would drain away the excess fluid. My left knee had been broken, the doctor had explained, and he himself had operated to fix it as best he could, but only time would tell how successful he had been.

‘So will I live?’ I had asked him flippantly.

‘It was a bit touch and go for a while,’ he had replied seriously. ‘But I think you will. There was no real damage to your main internal organs other than a little bruising to the left kidney, and a small tear in your left lung that will heal itself. Yes, I think you’ll be fine in time, especially now you are conscious and there doesn’t appear to be any major damage to your brain either.’

‘And will I ride again?’ I’d asked him more seriously.

‘More difficult to say,’ he’d replied. ‘Again, time will tell. I suspect it will depend on how mad you are. I personally think that all you jump jockeys have a screw loose. The same ones come in here year after year to be patched up and plastered.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re completely bonkers.’

‘How about my horse?’ I had asked him.

‘I don’t know,’ he’d said. ‘But surely it wasn’t your own horse you were riding?’

‘Yes it was,’ I’d said. I had tried explaining about being an amateur jockey and the Foxhunter Chase but he hadn’t really been interested, and he had no idea whether Sandeman had been injured or not, or even if he was alive. It had only been when Paul and Laura Newington had come to see me later that evening that I had heard the full story of the disaster.