Felix Francis - Crisis

Declan remained silent but we all knew the answer anyway — it was because he believed he was just as guilty of incest as the others, whether he’d fathered the foetus or not. And he was right.

‘Hence, in that Doncaster hotel, you accused Ryan of being the father,’ I said. ‘And he broke your nose for your trouble. And you didn’t press assault charges because you were afraid that a court would demand to know what you’d been arguing about in the first place.’

Declan stood with his head bent down, his body language screaming that it was true, but Ryan was having none of that.

‘That’s a damned lie,’ he shouted.

‘So why did you hit him?’ I asked.

He stared at me. He had no answer.

‘But Ryan wasn’t the father,’ Oliver said quietly into the silence.

Ryan, the wonder boy who could do no wrong in Oliver’s eyes.

No, of course it wasn’t him.

We all looked at Chadwick senior but he said nothing more.

So the eyes slowly turned towards Tony.

‘Oh no,’ he said defensively, taking a pace backwards. ‘You’re not pinning this on me.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘The police have the profiles of Declan and Ryan. They’re on the UK national DNA database because they’ve both been subject to arrest. The profile from the lab doesn’t match either of them, so it has to be you.’

Now I really was bluffing, but he didn’t know that.

‘How about I take a DNA sample from you now for comparison?’ I said. ‘A hair from your head will do.’

I reached out towards him but he cowered away from me.

‘Come on, Tony,’ I said. ‘Give me a hair. Your DNA could exonerate you.’

‘It won’t,’ Oliver said drily.

We all resumed our staring at him.

He had kept that knowledge secret for almost sixteen years, refusing to reveal the truth while it slowly ate a hole through his brain like the hungry caterpillar. And now it was out.

Not that it was a surprise to me.

I’d reckoned for some time that it had to be Tony.

The one of Oliver’s three sons that he spent the whole time criticising.

I remembered back to the times Oliver had spoken to me about him.

For example, when we’d watched the race at Windsor on my first night in Newmarket: Tony has never reached his full potential due to his lack of concentration. Not like Ryan. Ryan would have won that easily. Declan would have too.

Or at Newmarket races last Friday when Tony had reported that Momentum had nothing left in the tank: Nonsense. You just didn’t ride him well enough.

Tony, the jockey that Oliver had wanted taken off Prince of Troy in the Derby: That steep run downhill into Tattenham Corner is the most testing stretch of racetrack on the planet. Needs someone with more bloody nous than Tony. Ryan, now, he was a master at it.

Tony, the son that Oliver had continuously belittled for sixteen years because he’d known all along that he had impregnated his own sister.

But Oliver hadn’t reported it to the authorities.

Oh no. Instead, he’d covered it up and kept his sons close to him, controlling them, but, in doing so, he’d sacrificed his daughter, consigning her to a life of drugs and depression, hospitals and hopelessness.

However, I wasn’t finished yet.

We knew now who had fathered the foetus, but who had killed its mother?

‘What were you doing on the Sunday before the fire?’ I asked Oliver. ‘Specifically between half past three and six o’clock on Sunday afternoon.’

‘I can’t remember,’ he replied immediately.

‘Come now, Oliver,’ I said to him. ‘You can do better than that. The police must have asked you the same thing.’

‘I was at home,’ he said.

‘Doing what?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said with irritation. ‘Sunday is my day of rest. Probably slumped in front of the TV.’

‘What were you watching?’

He was getting quite agitated. ‘What does it matter what I was watching?’

‘Because I contend that you were not watching anything. You were arguing with Zoe in your snug.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said.

‘That’s why you were so shocked when she turned out to be the body in the stable. You were afraid the police would find out she’d been here and accuse you of killing her.’

‘But I was with Maria,’ he stated authoritatively.

‘No you weren’t. Maria was upstairs in bed with a migraine, doped up to the eyeballs with a combination of hefty painkillers and white wine. She heard arguing from below and mistakenly thought it was you watching EastEnders on the television. But it wasn’t that, was it, Oliver? It was you and Zoe.’

‘But I dropped her at the station,’ Declan said. ‘You told me yourself that she caught the train.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She did, but not the four o’clock train, as you thought she would. She caught the next one. And, in the meantime, she walked up to Castleton House Stables to see your father, to demand to know which of her brothers had actually made her pregnant. And you told her, didn’t you, Oliver?’

‘But I didn’t kill her,’ Oliver said with a touch of panic in his voice.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Because Tony did.’

There was a shocked silence.

‘What rubbish,’ Tony said eventually. ‘What evidence have you got for such a wild accusation?’

None, I thought. At least, none that would stand up in court. But that wasn’t going to stop me.

‘Zoe came to see you on that Sunday afternoon, didn’t she?’ I said.

Tony said nothing.

‘Maybe she was looking for her mother, but Yvonne was staying with her sister in Ipswich, so it was you who answered the door.’

‘But she caught the train to Cambridge,’ Declan said.

‘Indeed, she did. But she didn’t get there, did she, Tony? The CCTV at Cambridge Station showed no sign of her and that’s because she got off at Dullingham, the only stop between Newmarket and Cambridge. From there she walked to Yvonne’s house. Isn’t that right, Tony?’

Tony was beginning to sweat.

‘What happened then, Tony?’ I asked. ‘Did she tell you that you were the father of her aborted child? Is that why you killed her? To keep it quiet?’

He sweated some more.

‘And then you took Zoe’s body to Castleton House Stables and set the place on fire to try to hide what you’d done.’

‘It’s not true,’ Tony shouted. ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’

He started to walk towards the door but Ryan stepped across in front of him.

‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘I want to hear what you have to say.’

But Tony said nothing.

‘Did you kill the horses?’ Oliver asked.

‘Of course not,’ Tony protested. ‘Why would I do that when I was due to ride Prince of Troy in the Derby?’

‘But you weren’t,’ I said.

I put my hand into my trouser pocket and pulled out the piece I had torn out of the newspaper at breakfast, the piece with its ‘DERBY WIDE OPEN...’ headline.

‘Have you seen today’s Racing Post ?’

I held it up so I could read, out loud, the last paragraph.

‘Champion jockey, Simon Varney, says he is still looking for a Derby ride after being previously engaged by Ryan Chadwick to ride Prince of Troy in the big race.’

‘Is that true, Ryan?’ Oliver asked. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

Ryan waved a dismissive hand as if to indicate that he’d been exercising his authority as the holder of the trainer’s licence, rather than referring every decision to his domineering father.

‘It is true, isn’t it, Ryan?’ I said. ‘Oliver kept going on to you about how Tony wasn’t up to riding the horse on the undulating track at Epsom, and you finally succumbed to the pressure to remove him. Janie Logan has confirmed it. You asked her to call Simon Varney on the Friday before the fire to confidentially offer him the ride on Prince of Troy in the Derby. And he accepted.’