John Francome - Declared Dead

'Do you mean that otherwise you won't be able to tell for certain if it's Edward's body or not?'

He looked at me as if surprised by my question, and I felt myself going red in response. He took up the initiative. 'Do you have any reason to think that it might not be?'

'None at all. I just don't understand why he would want to kill himself and in such a horrible way.'

'You think it must be suicide then?'

'What else? You're surely not suggesting he's been murdered?' I said, in disbelief.

'At this stage, Mrs Pryde, I'm keeping an open mind. I'm just sorry to be the bearer of such bad news. Now, if you don't mind, I think I'd better be going.'

We went downstairs where the constable was reading through his notes.

'Right then,' the Inspector continued, 'I'll leave Garnier here to wait for the fingerprint boys. We'll need some of yours as well, of course, and Freddie's and your daily's, Mrs Parsons. Would you mind giving Gamier her address? Is there anything in particular your husband has recently had his hands on?' I instinctively thought of my neck.

There're his binoculars in the hall. Will they do?'

'Perfect. We should get some very good dabs off them.' He turned to leave. 'I'll need to take a more detailed statement from you later. Let me say again how sorry I am that this has happened. I would prefer it if you didn't talk to the press and you might find it sensible to lie low for the next couple of weeks. You can give Garnier the address where you're going to be staying.'

I didn't feel any need to reply. He reached the front door then looked round as if to survey the room. 'Oh yes, one final thing, Garnier. Make sure the fingerprint boys take the marks on that bronze and then bring it back to the station for forensic to have a look at. I'll be in touch, Mrs Pryde.'

An hour and a half later, two fingerprint experts had grunted and crawled over the cottage. Edward's binoculars were greeted with whoops of satisfaction as they yielded apparently perfect specimens of the fingers of both his hands. My prints were taken and then they left to visit Mrs Parsons. I warned her by telephone that they were on their way to see her. Her involvement at this stage made any call to the press unnecessary. By midnight the whole of Lambourn would know that something serious was up in the Pryde household. I had already telephoned Ralph Elgar and told him the barest details of what was happening. He was shocked, and reassured me that Freddie was quite all right with him until I could get back. He insisted that we continued staying there until everything was cleared up. After the fingerprint men and Garnier had left, I telephoned Amy Frost in London. I was relieved when she answered the phone, as I thought she might be away for the weekend. I recounted everything that had happened.

'Where are you now?' she asked.

'At the cottage. Why?'

'I'm coming down, if you don't mind waiting there for an hour or so for me.'

I looked round the room. It suddenly seemed extremely eerie. 'I think I'll be okay, but hurry up all the same.'

By the time Amy arrived, I had drunk a quarter of a bottle of whisky, and heard footsteps in every part of the house, except the downstairs lavatory. She was dressed in a leather cat suit. Amy wasn't classically good looking, but she made the most of herself and I think men were attracted to her because of her bubbly personality. She was almost three inches taller than I was and quite well built with dark hair and hazel eyes, her face liberally covered with freckles.

'Amy, I'm sorry, did I interrupt something?' I asked, grinning at her.

'Well, I was just warming up with some champagne when you called!'

'I'm sorry.'

'Don't apologise. I was beginning to have second thoughts anyway. Those barristers do know how to bang on about themselves! If I have to hear once more about what he told the judge…'

'At the rate I'm going, I'll be appearing in front of one myself, soon. What am I to do if those are Edward's remains in the boot of the car?'

'Co-operate and tell them everything you know.'

'Everything? Even about the fight and Freddie and the blackmailing?'

'All of it. They probably won't believe the blackmail bit and even if they do, there's no way they're going to drag old man Pryde into this.'

'Do you think they'll want to see me again?'

'They're bound to, and next time it won't be in the cosy warmth of your sitting room. Who saw you today, by the way?'

'An Inspector Wilkinson and a young constable. Wilkinson was a bit too smooth for my liking, but he's plainly on the ball.'

'I'll have him checked out. This is the kind of case that a policeman can make his name on. Identify the body, quick arrest, speedy trial and unanimous conviction. Result: instant promotion and gratitude of nation.'

'They've got to identify the body first. From what I could gather, they've only the charred bones to work on. And, oh yes, the Inspector mentioned a pool of dried blood near the car, too.'

'I don't know about the bones, but the blood will be enough to provide a positive identification provided they have something else to match it with.'

'Positive identification? I thought that all you could tell from blood was the individual's group, which could be the same as millions of other people's.'

'Haven't you heard of DNA?'

'Well, vaguely.'

'It's this new process that is revolutionising everything from the detection of rape to the determination of paternity. It works like this, or at least I think it does. Every one of us has our own individual blueprint. Once you have a piece of an individual's skin or some semen or blood for example, you can detect from that the chromosomal ingredients unique to that person, his or her blueprint, as it were. They can then be matched up to another sample of blood or semen or skin or hair root, it doesn't even matter which, and hey presto, you have positive identification.'

'So if I told you that there was still some of Edward's blood on that bronze they took away…'

'It would be a major breakthrough for them. If that pool of blood they found is human, they will now be able to tell you for certain whether it's Edward's or not. In other words, they'll have both halves of the jigsaw.'

I frowned.

'Do you think it might not be Edward's then?'

'No, not really. I'm just worried that if it is, suspicion's going to fall on someone I know.'

'May I ask who, and perhaps even more importantly, why?'

She looked extremely concerned when I gave her the answers.

I returned to spend the night at Ralph Elgar's. Freddie was fast asleep, still blissfully unaware of the tragedy unfolding around him. Not surprisingly, I couldn't sleep. I looked back on my life with Edward and tried to pinpoint a time when things had started to go wrong. There was no doubt that some of the blame for the failure of our marriage lay on my shoulders. I had become consumed by my ambition to make it as a jockey and expected him to understand that ambition too, as well as giving it his whole-hearted support. It never occurred to me that he might have different goals for himself; indeed he never gave any indication of having any goals. I suppose on reflection that we married because at the time we enjoyed going to bed together and liked having fun. Unfortunately, marriage requires a commitment of a different nature. And now Edward was dead.

I wondered what was going to happen, just how much was going to come out. I thought about what Inspector Wilkinson had said about lying low for a couple of weeks and rejected the idea. There would no doubt be a lot of gossip on the racecourse and no shortage of pointing fingers. On the other hand, if I gave up riding, even for a short while, it would seriously damage my prospects. After all, someone still had to pay the bills and the mortgage and buy Freddie's clothes. I compromised by deciding not to ride for a week and to do my best to shelter Freddie from the turbulence that lay directly ahead. If Edward was dead, I wouldn't be able to go back to riding six days a week as I had been. I would have to spend a lot more time at home with my son.