Felix Francis - Crisis

Now, that was one reputation it was difficult to lose.

And I certainly wasn’t going to reveal what I knew about any blackmail money because I doubted that the wizards had been acting within the law when they’d obtained copies of Peter’s bank statements from the finance company.

No, the DCI would have to wait for some reaction to my thunderflashes in order to confirm my suspicions before I’d mention anything to him.

The answer to my easy request from the research team was waiting for me in my email inbox when I got back to the hotel. They reported that they were still working on the difficult one.

I called up the driver and his Mercedes, and then went into the hotel dining room to have a quick breakfast while I waited for them to arrive. I even found myself glancing through the hotel’s copy of the Racing Post .

I wanted to check where the racing was today and whether Ryan or Declan had any runners, or Tony any rides.

Ayr, Nottingham and Chepstow were the meetings for racing on the flat, with two additional steeplechase fixtures at Hexham and Huntingdon.

I skimmed through the races looking for the name Chadwick and found it only once. Trainer D. Chadwick had a runner in the three o’clock race at Nottingham. If he were true to form, Declan would have sent Joe, his travelling head lad, with the horse. So all the Chadwicks were likely to be at home.

I was just closing the paper when a headline on the opposite page caught my eye: ‘DERBY WIDE OPEN AFTER LOSS OF PRINCE OF TROY’.

With my forty-pound wager in mind, I read the article beneath from start to finish but Orion’s Glory wasn’t mentioned once as being among the favourites.

Ah well, I thought, perhaps I could sneak the forty pounds through with my expenses — a necessary outlay in order to get acquainted with the system.

Or maybe not.

However, it was the last paragraph of the article that was the real interest.

Ensuring that none of the waiters were watching, I tore the piece out of the paper, folded it up and put it in my trouser pocket.

‘Dullingham, please,’ I said to the driver as he held the door open for me.

‘The village or the station?’ he replied.

‘Aren’t they at the same place?’ I asked.

‘Oh no,’ he said with a smile. ‘That catches lots of people out. The station is almost a mile outside the village. I know it well. My in-laws live there.’

‘Well, I want Eagle Lane, number three.’

‘Right you are,’ he said, and off we went.

Number 3, Eagle Lane, was a small, neat, modern detached house that looked somewhat out of place, sitting as it did alongside a chocolate-box-pretty thatched cottage.

I rang the doorbell, hoping I’d been given the right address.

I had.

Yvonne Chadwick opened the front door in her bedroom slippers, and she instantly recognised me.

‘What do you want?’ she asked gruffly.

‘Is Tony in?’ I asked.

‘No. He’s riding out in town.’

I’d hoped he was. That’s why I’d chosen this time.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because it’s you I’ve come to see. I want to ask you some questions about Zoe.’

‘I’m not interested,’ she said, and she started to close the door again.

‘Don’t you want to know why your daughter died?’ I said quickly.

‘She died a long time ago.’

The door was almost shut and, short of putting my foot in it, I was almost out of options.

‘Why did Zoe have an abortion?’ I shouted through the last few inches.

The door stopped closing, and then opened a fraction.

‘Who told you?’ she demanded through the gap.

‘Then it’s true,’ I said. ‘You made your thirteen-year-old daughter have an abortion and yet you never reported the matter to the police. Why was that, Yvonne?’

She opened the door wide and looked nervously past me both sides to check that no one else was listening.

‘You’d better come in.’

I followed her down the hallway into the kitchen. Why was it always the kitchen?

‘I didn’t make Zoe have an abortion,’ Yvonne said. ‘She arranged it on her own.’

‘I find that difficult to believe.’

‘Well, it’s true. She skipped off school and went on her own to a clinic in Cambridge. And, it appears, they were under no obligation to tell either her parents or the police.’

‘But she was only a child herself.’

‘It doesn’t matter. The stupid law says that doctors don’t have to tell if a thirteen-year-old doesn’t want them to. And Zoe didn’t. Some guff or other to do with medical confidentiality.’

‘So how did you find out?’

‘She told me, but not till about a year later. We were having a huge row about something else and she just blurted it out. Of course, I didn’t believe her, but she had some paperwork hidden in her room. She showed me. As you can imagine, I was horrified.’

‘But who paid for it?’ I asked.

‘The taxpayer,’ Yvonne said. ‘Seems it was done on the NHS.’

‘Did you ask her who the father was?’

‘Of course I did, over and over again, but she wouldn’t say. She was furious with herself for revealing anything to me in the first place. She claimed that she never meant to tell anyone, ever. I expect the father was some bloody boy from school taking advantage of her.’

I looked at Yvonne closely and wondered if she really believed that, or she was just saying it for my benefit.

‘Why did you say that she died a long time ago?’ I asked.

‘Might as well have done. I grieved for her when she first went missing. Prepared myself over those dreadful weeks for her to be found raped, strangled and dumped naked in a hedge. Then, when they found her alive in London, she refused to see or even speak to me. So I just went on thinking of her as being dead. It was easier somehow.’

‘But you’ve seen her since?’

‘Only once. She came here about five years ago with that damn husband of hers. They brought their children with them too. But I think she only did it to make me feel bad. To goad me. That and to accuse me of having had her sectioned. I told her it wasn’t true but I don’t think she believed me. They didn’t even come in. They just drove off again.’

‘But you knew where to go last week,’ I said. ‘I saw you at their home.’

‘Tony got the address for me. From Oliver. So I went. I don’t know why. It wasn’t a good idea. I had to sleep on the sofa. He didn’t want me there and the children didn’t even know who I was.’

There were tears in her eyes.

‘But why did you tell Catherine Logan that the Chadwick men had killed Zoe from a very young age?’

‘Did I really say that?’ She said it in a most unconvincing manner.

‘You know you did.’

‘Just that it wasn’t easy for Zoe growing up with three highly competitive older brothers, plus a domineering father. Particularly as she didn’t like horses.’

There’s nothing wrong with that , I thought.

I waited for Yvonne to go on.

‘Ryan was eleven when Zoe was born, Declan was nine, and I think they were jealous of their baby sister.’

‘Jealous?’

‘She was the apple of my eye. I’d always wanted a daughter. Perhaps I spoilt her too much. And I wasn’t the older two’s real mother, something they’ve never let me forget. They always called me Yvonne, not Mum. They still do. It’s as if they somehow blame me for their own mother’s death, which is nonsense, of course. She died of cancer before I even met Oliver.’

‘So they transferred their resentment of you onto Zoe?’

‘Yes,’ she said with realisation, as if it was perhaps the first time she’d appreciated it in that way. ‘That is exactly what happened.’