Felix Francis: Crisis

‘I’ve come for my assessment,’ I said once more, with no hope or expectation.

‘Good,’ said the voice. ‘Come on up.’ And a click from within opened the door.

And so I had stepped into the world of Simpson White.

No one ever asked me how I found them. Only the fact that I had was important, not the means I’d employed. Three hours later, I had an offer of a job, although at the time I’d little or no idea what the job actually involved.

‘We are definitely not a law firm,’ ASW told me seriously, ‘and we’re not a PR company either. But we do deal in public relations, and we do need lawyers.’ Indeed, he spent more time telling me what they were not rather than what they were , as if he wasn’t entirely sure himself. But I liked him and he clearly liked me too. ‘So, do you want the job?’

‘How much does it pay?’ I asked.

He seemed slightly irritated that I should ask about anything as sordid as money.

‘How old are you?’ he asked, rather than answering my question.

‘Thirty,’ I replied.

‘Married?’

‘No,’ I said, wondering if that was a suitable question for a job interview.

‘Engaged?’

‘No.’

‘Any relationship at all?’

‘Not at present,’ I said, although that was surely none of his business.

‘Then why are you worried about how much I would pay?’

It was my turn to be slightly irritated.

‘I have to live.’

‘You’ll do that all right,’ ASW replied with a laugh, ‘and you’ll also never feel so tired, so excited or so important, all at the same time.’

‘So what would I actually do in the job?’ I asked.

‘Anything and everything,’ he replied somewhat unhelpfully. ‘We are basically an advisory service and we give legal and other advice to everyone from presidents and prime ministers to CEOs of major international companies. Anyone, in fact, who is in need of our help and is prepared to pay our fees.’

He drew breath and I sat quietly looking at him, waiting for him to go on.

‘We are specialists in crisis management. Crises will always occur, either man-made or from natural disasters, and the perception of how the crisis is managed is almost as important as the relief effort itself. Our job is simply to ensure that, when things are bad, they are not made worse by insensitive or downright stupid words and actions by those who are meant to be making things better.’

‘Like Deepwater Horizon,’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

Deepwater Horizon was a BP oil-drilling rig that exploded in April 2010 causing an environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. BP bosses initially claimed it was only a small problem and that it was not their fault. For BP, the public relations disaster was almost as destructive as the physical one.

‘We sit on shoulders whispering advice into ears and hope it’s listened to — although, thankfully, we weren’t involved in that one.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Okay what?’ ASW replied.

‘Okay, I’ll take the job.’

So here I was seven years later, leaving through that same grey, grimy front door on my way to King’s Cross and then on to Newmarket.

Horse racing! God help me.

I didn’t need to receive the brief to know what I was going to.

‘PRINCE OF TROY DEAD IN STABLE FIRE’, read all the headline banners at the newspaper stands in King’s Cross.

Even I had heard of Prince of Troy. He was the current wonder racehorse, described by most as the best since Frankel. Some even said he was better.

I picked up the early edition of the Evening Standard and scanned the front page with its large ‘PRINCE OF TROY DEAD’ headline. According to the report, the horse had been a sure thing for the Derby in just over two weeks’ time, having swept aside all other contenders with consummate ease in his eight previous races, including in the Two Thousand Guineas, the first Classic of the season, just nine days ago.

But now he was gone, apparently roasted alive while standing in his stall. And, it seemed, he had not perished alone. The paper stated that six other top colts had died alongside him in the huge blaze that had rapidly engulfed a whole stable block overnight, fanned by a strong northerly wind coming straight off the Fens.

‘An immeasurable loss to racing,’ the paper went on, ‘and a personal tragedy for the trainer of the seven horses, Ryan Chadwick, and the whole of the Chadwick family.’

I tucked the newspaper under my arm, bought myself a take-away coffee from Starbucks, and found a seat at a table on the next fast train to Cambridge.

Wireless internet on trains was still pretty variable so Simpson White supplied all operatives with a ‘dongle’ that effectively turned a laptop computer into a large mobile telephone.

I downloaded my emails, including the one from Georgina with the brief.

Ryan Chadwick was not our client, as I had expected, nor indeed any of the Chadwick family. It was my old friend His Highness Sheikh Ahmed Karim bin Mohamed Al Hamadi, known universally as just Sheikh Karim, and he had been the owner of Prince of Troy.

Ahmed Karim had been a vibrant, carefree Arab crown prince of twenty-two when his father, the ruling emir, had been assassinated by his generals for thwarting their attempts to go to war once again with a neighbouring state. The new young leader had purged the army of his father’s murderers, made lasting peace in the region, and had dragged his oil-rich nation out of the Middle Ages and into the twenty-first century. Just thirty years on, it was now one of the leading financial and tourist centres of the Middle East.

But he hadn’t done so without the occasional crisis and challenge to his leadership. His rule was fair but firm, with firm being the appropriate word, and there had been a few scandals when overzealous officials in his administration had overstepped their authority, especially in dealing with tourists from more liberal European cultures. Hence, he and I had worked twice together before.

The brief outlined how Sheikh Karim had steadily built up a string of top-rated racehorses and it was his intention to eventually rival other Arab royal owners. He had sent his first two-year-old to the trainer Oliver Chadwick only nine years previously and now had some twenty Thoroughbreds in training in several countries.

His UK operation was still largely based at the Chadwicks’ Castleton House Stables on Bury Road in Newmarket and he had been anticipating his first ever Derby success with Prince of Troy.

The brief made it clear that I was to act as Sheikh Karim’s representative and to liaise with Oliver Chadwick directly. He’d been told to expect me.

Oliver, it seemed, was Ryan’s father and the current head of the Chadwick racing dynasty. Georgina had also added some basic background information on the Chadwicks, including a link to an article in the Racing Post written five years previously when Oliver had retired and Ryan had taken over as the trainer.

Oliver Chadwick was himself the son of one Vincent Chadwick, who had bought Castleton House on Bury Road soon after the Second World War. He had built the first stable yard and started training racehorses in 1950.

Oliver’s elder brother, James, had initially taken over the training licence when their father was killed in a car crash in the early 1970s, but it had passed to Oliver when James emigrated to South Africa only four years later.

Over the next thirty years, it was Oliver who built the reputation of the business until it was considered that Castleton House Stables was one of the finest racehorse training establishments in the country, with a list of owners that included not just Sheikh Karim but also the great and the good of British racing.