Felix Francis - Crisis

I paused.

‘Ryan never told you, did he, Tony? He was probably worried about your reaction. And by the Monday it didn’t matter anymore — no one was going to ride Prince of Troy ever again. But you knew anyway, didn’t you, Tony? Because you and Simon Varney were riding together on the Saturday afternoon, sharing the same jockeys’ changing room at Ascot. I checked on the internet.’

I paused again.

‘Did Simon Varney ask you for advice on how to ride the horse? Or did he just gloat?’

Tony said nothing.

‘So you decided to get rid of Zoe’s body, and to take your revenge on your brother and father at the same time, by setting fire to Prince of Troy’s stable.’

Now who was the fucking idiot , I thought.

‘You bastard,’ Ryan said with feeling. ‘How could you have come into the house on the morning after the fire expressing your sorrow when, all along, it had been you that had started it?’

Tony just hung his head in shame.

‘Why did you kill Zoe?’ I asked.

He lifted his head a fraction and looked at me.

‘I didn’t mean to. She wouldn’t shut up. Kept going on and on at me about having to pay more or she’d go to the newspapers and destroy my career. I grabbed her by the throat to stop her and, before I knew it, she was dead.’

He started crying. Maybe for his career that would be destroyed now anyway, along with his life.

‘But why the horses?’ Oliver asked, the pain of their loss clearly greater in his voice than his grief for a dead daughter.

‘I panicked,’ Tony said. ‘I didn’t mean for them all to die.’

‘Just Prince of Troy?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘The fire took hold so fast.’

All that shredded paper bedding , I thought.

The five of us stood there like a silent tableau at the end of a play.

I reached carefully into my breast pocket for my phone.

‘Are you still there?’ I asked.

‘I certainly am,’ said DCI Eastwood.

‘Did you hear?’

‘Every word,’ he said. ‘Recorded it too. My sergeant’s already on his way.’

Eleven days later I took Kate to the Derby.

With uncharacteristic generosity, ASW had laid on a car and driver for us in spite of the fact that I wasn’t actually working.

The news of my success at solving the mystery of the dead horses, to say nothing of the dead human, had spread fast through the company and I was now regularly referred to by Georgina as her very own Hercule Poirot.

Tony had been taken away from Declan’s yard in handcuffs by DS Venables, and he was now languishing in Norwich Prison on remand.

Even after Tony’s revelations and removal, the remaining Chadwick men had continued to argue among themselves, pointing the blame at each other as well as at Tony.

‘You should never have spoken to Simon Varney without discussing it with me first,’ Oliver had yelled at Ryan, as if that was what had been the tipping point in making Tony set the place on fire.

But Ryan had clearly had enough of being subservient to his father.

‘Don’t you tell me what I should or shouldn’t do,’ he had shouted back. ‘You do nothing but interfere all the time. Why don’t you and your bloody floozy piss off and live somewhere else? Let me get on with training the horses how I want to.’

Oliver had been visibly hurt by Ryan’s attack but, if he’d thought he would receive any solace from his second son, he was much mistaken.

Somewhat irrationally, Declan blamed him fair and square for Arabella’s death, maintaining that she would have still been alive if only he had told the authorities years ago that Tony was the father of the aborted foetus.

‘I never want to see either of you again in my life,’ Declan had declared, before walking out of the stable in tears.

The shameful secret that Oliver had exploited to hold his family together under his close personal control had ended up being the very reason they were torn apart.

Gone were the days when the Derby festival went on for a whole week, with hundreds of thousands of Londoners descending on the Surrey racecourse to drink, gamble and party; when even the sittings of Parliament were suspended so that members could attend the race.

But, on this particular day, the June sunshine had encouraged another huge crowd to make its way to Epsom Downs by car, train and bus, many intent on enjoying the alcohol-fuelled carnival atmosphere in the centre of the course, where the bars and funfair had been open from early morning, and would remain so until well after dark.

Kate and I, however, were in the posh seats as guests of Sheikh Karim. Hence, we were dressed to the nines, me in a morning suit, complete with fancy waistcoat and top hat, and Kate in what she reliably informed me was called an asymmetric summer dress, a stunning off-one-shoulder creation in light-blue chiffon silk with a pink floral print. To top it off, she wore a blue feathery fascinator and pink high-heeled shoes, and carried a matching pink clutch bag.

‘You look absolutely stunning,’ I said to her as we had our tickets scanned at the racecourse entrance.

‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ she said. ‘Is it hired?’

‘Bloody cheek,’ I replied with a laugh. ‘Of course it’s hired. Moss Bros’ best.’

Kate had stayed the previous night with me at my flat in Neasden, having caught the train from Cambridge on Friday evening after her day’s work at Tattersalls. And I had gone to King’s Cross Station to meet her, not wanting to be apart from her for a second longer than was necessary.

I had spent the last week in a far more mundane manner than I had the previous fortnight at Newmarket.

Monday had been idled away at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on the Marylebone Road, when I should have been in the office completing my report.

I’d represented a pair of idiotic eighteen-year-old professional footballers who’d been caught sniffing cocaine in the gents’ toilet of a West End nightclub late on Saturday night. They had then compounded their difficulty by initially giving the police false names and addresses.

Simpson White had been engaged by their club to keep the incident as low-key as possible, the two boys being members of the youth squad rather than the first team, and it was after the end of the football season.

By using a spurious pretext that one of my clients was unwell, I had managed to persuade the clerk to move their hearing to the end of the day in the hope that any journalists lurking would have given up waiting and gone home.

The case itself had taken precisely four minutes as the pair pleaded guilty to possession of a Class A drug, were each fined a hundred pounds, and warned by the magistrate as to their future conduct.

At first, the two had laughed and joked outside the court about how they had got off so lightly, but that was only until the representative of the club had informed them that their lucrative playing contracts were being cancelled.

I’d initially felt sorry for them, but one’s actions always have consequences, and maybe the sooner one learns that, the better. The Chadwicks were a good example of how unacceptable behaviour going unpunished for so long had made them feel invincible. And the fallout had been much heavier as a result.

The rest of my time had been taken up with dealing with a national hamburger chain, the directors of which had failed simply to put their hands up and apologise when a member of their staff had refused access to a disabled customer. Instead, they had tried to make the excuse that the man had been excluded not because he was in a wheelchair, but because he’d been rude. However, as seemed always the case these days, mobile-phone footage had soon appeared on social media showing that it had actually been the staff member who’d been rude, and the subsequent PR disaster was threatening to bring down the whole business.