Dick Francis - Silks

He looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘The call was taken by the telephone on the desk of a civilian worker in the front office of the police station.’

‘Was that not unusual?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘And was the number of that telephone widely available to the public?’ I asked him.

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ he said.

‘Do you not think it is strange that the call was taken on a telephone where the number was not widely known, a telephone where no log was taken of incoming calls, and a telephone on which no recording equipment was attached so that the caller and his number would be unknown?’

‘Mr Mason,’ the judge interjected. ‘That’s three questions in one.’

‘I’m sorry, My Lord,’ I said. ‘Inspector McNeile, would you agree with me that, until the police arrived at Mr Barlow’s house to discover his body, it is likely that the only person or persons who knew that Mr Barlow was dead would be those responsible for his murder?’

‘I suppose so, yes,’ he said.

‘Inspector, how many years in total have you been a detective?’ I asked him.

‘Fifteen,’ he said.

‘And how often in those fifteen years,’ I said to him, ‘have you been telephoned anonymously, on an unrecorded line, to report an intruder in a property so that the police would turn up there and discover a murder victim surrounded by a mass of incriminating evidence?’

‘That’s enough, Mr Mason,’ said the judge.

‘My Lord,’ I said respectfully, and sat down. It had been a minor victory only, in a day of unremitting bad news.

‘Court adjourned until ten o’clock tomorrow morning,’ said the judge.

‘All rise.’

Eleanor didn’t come to Oxford on Monday night. In one way I was relieved, in another, disappointed. When I arrived back at the hotel from court I lay down on the bed, my head aching slightly from all the concentration. This slight headache soon developed into a full-on head-banger.

It was the first such headache I had suffered for some time and I had begun to forget the ferocity of the pain behind my eyes. During the first three weeks immediately after the fall at Cheltenham, I had suffered these on most days and I knew that relaxing horizontally on a bed for a couple of hours was the best and only remedy. A couple of paracetamol tablets took the edge off it, but I had carelessly left my stronger codeine pills at home. They were somewhere in the shambles that had once been my bathroom.

At some point I drifted off to sleep because I was awakened by the phone ringing beside the bed.

‘Yes?’ I said into it, struggling to sit up because of the shell.

‘Mr Mason?’ a female voice said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘This is Nikki Payne here,’ she said. ‘I’ve been to the Home Office and the South African embassy as you asked and neither of them had any record of a Jacques Rensburg. But they did of someone called Jacques van Rensburg. In fact there are three of them who live in England. Apparently van Rensburg is quite a common name in South Africa.’

It would be.

‘Two of the South African Jacques van Rensburgs living here are at university, here on student visas. One is at Durham and the other is a post-graduate at Cambridge and both have been here for the past two years.’

I suppose it was possible that the Jacques we wanted had given up working with horses for a life of academia, but somehow I doubted it.

‘What about the third one?’ I asked.

‘His visa has expired, but it seems he’s still here although his right to work has expired too. But, apparently, that’s not unusual. That’s all I have for the moment.’

‘Well done,’ I said to her.

‘I’m not done yet,’ she said. ‘Anice chap at the embassy is searching for the third Jacques back in South Africa just in case he went home without telling the Home Office. There aren’t any proper records kept when people leave the UK, only when they arrive.’

It was true, I thought. No one from the immigration department checks your passport on the way out, only on the way in. The airlines only check their passengers’ passports to ensure they have the same names as on their boarding passes.

‘But you did show them the photo?’ I asked her.

‘Of course I did,’ she said. ‘My friend at the embassy is trying to get me a copy of this Jacques van Rensburg’s passport snap sent from the South African Department of Home Affairs in Pretoria so I can see if it is actually him.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Call me tomorrow if you get anywhere.’

She hung up and I rested my head back onto the pillow. My headache was only slightly better, so I lay there for a while longer, reclosed my eyes and drifted back off to sleep.

The phone on the bedside cabinet rang once more, waking me again. Damn it, I thought, can’t a man have any peace?

‘Hello,’ I said, irritated.

‘Just make sure you lose the case,’ said a whispering voice.

I was suddenly wide awake.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded loudly down the line.

‘Never mind who,’ said the whisperer. ‘Just do it.’

The line went dead.

Detective Inspector McNeile was back in the witness box on Tuesday morning for further cross-examination.

‘I remind you that you are still under oath,’ the judge said to him.

‘Yes, My Lord,’ he replied.

I levered myself to my feet, pulling on the lectern on the bench in front of me.

‘Inspector McNeile,’ I said. ‘Yesterday afternoon you told us how the police came to find out about the murder of Mr Barlow from a phone call to a non-recorded, non-emergency number, is that right?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. There was no harm, I thought, in reminding the jury.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. ‘Now I believe that the police also discovered that Mr Barlow had received a text message on his mobile telephone on the day of his death. Is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ he said again.

‘And did this text message say, and I quote.’ I picked up a sheet of paper myself and read from it. ‘“I’m going to come round and sort you out properly you sneaking little bastard”?’ I paused for effect. ‘And then the message was signed off with Mr Mitchell’s name?’

‘I haven’t got access to the actual text,’ he said, turning to the judge as if for assistance.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But does that sound about right to you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I believe it said something like that.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, putting down the paper. ‘And were the police able to establish that this text message had indeed been sent to Mr Barlow by Mr Mitchell?’

‘No,’ he said softly.

‘Sorry, Inspector,’ I said. ‘Could you please speak up, so the jury can hear you?’

‘No,’ he repeated more strongly.

‘And were the police able to establish who was, in fact, responsible for sending that text message to Mr Barlow?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We were not.’

‘Am I correct in saying that you discovered that the message had been sent anonymously by a free text messaging service available to anyone with access to any computer and the internet anywhere in the world?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That is correct.’

‘And is it correct that you were unable to establish which computer had been used to send the message?’

‘That is correct,’ he replied.

‘So, in addition to an anonymous, unrecorded telephone call to the police directing them to a murder scene to discover incriminating evidence against the defendant.’ I glanced at the judge who was looking back at me intently. ‘There was also an anonymous text message sent to Mr Barlow’s telephone that was made to appear as if it had come from the defendant?’