Felix Francis: Dick Francis's Gamble

“Lots of murders have a sexual motive,” said the detective. “Until we know differently, we have to explore every avenue.”

It was nearly dark before I was finally allowed to leave the racetrack, and it had also started raining. The courtesy shuttle service to the distant park-and-ride parking lot had long since ceased running, and I was cold, wet and thoroughly fed up by the time I reached my Mercedes. But I sat for some while in the car before setting off, once more going over and over in my mind the events of the day.

I had picked Herb up from his flat at Seymour Way in Hendon soon after eight in the morning and we had set off to Liverpool in great good humor. It was to be Herb’s first trip to the Grand National, and he was uncharacteristically excited by the prospect.

He had grown up in the shadow of the iconic twin spires of Churchill Downs racetrack, the venue of the Kentucky Derby and spiritual home of all American Thoroughbred racing, but he had always claimed that gambling on the horses had ruined his childhood.

I had asked him to come to the races with me quite a few times before but he had always declined, claiming that the memories were still too painful. However, there had been no sign of that today as we had motored north on the motorway chatting amicably about our work, our lives, and our hopes and fears for the future.

Little did we know then how short Herb’s future was going to be.

He and I had always got on fairly well over the past five years but mostly on a strictly colleague-to-colleague level. Today had been the first day of a promising deeper friendship. It had also been the last.

I sat alone in my car and grieved for my newfound, but so quickly lost, friend. But still I had no idea why anyone would want him dead.

My journey back to Finchley seemed to be never-ending. There was an accident on the M6 north of Birmingham with a five-mile backup. It said so on the radio, sandwiched between endless news bulletins about the murder of Herb and the cancellation of the Grand National. Not that they mentioned Herb by name, of course. He was just referred to as “a man.” I assumed the police would withhold his identity until his next of kin had been informed. But who, I wondered, were his next of kin? And how would the authorities find them? Thankfully, I thought, that wasn’t my problem.

I came upon the back of the traffic congestion just south of Stoke, the mass of red brake lights ahead of me shining brightly in the darkness.

I have to admit that I am usually an impatient driver. I suppose it is a case of “once a racer, always a racer.” It makes little difference to me if my steed has four legs or four wheels, if I see a gap I’d tend to take it. It’s the way I’d ridden during my all-too-short four years as a jockey and it had served me well.

But, that evening, I didn’t have the energy to get irritated by the queues of near-stationary cars. Instead I sat quietly in the outside lane as we crawled past an upturned motor home that had spread its load of human and domestic clutter across half the carriageway. One shouldn’t look at others’ misfortune, but, of course, we all did, and thanked our lucky stars it wasn’t us lying there on the cold tarmac receiving medical assistance.

I stopped at one of the motorway service areas and called home.

Claudia, my girlfriend, answered at the second ring.

“Hello, it’s me,” I said. “I’m on my way home, but I’ll be a couple of hours more at least.”

“Good day?” she asked.

“Have you seen the news?”

“No. Why?”

I knew she wouldn’t have. Claudia was an artist and she had planned to spend the day painting in what she called her studio but what was actually the guest bedroom of the house we shared. Once she closed the door, turned up the music on her iPod headphones and set to work on a canvas, it would take an earthquake or a nuclear strike to penetrate her bubble. I had been quite surprised that she had answered the phone.

“The National was canceled,” I said.

“Canceled?”

“Well, there’s talk of them holding the race on Monday, but it was canceled for today.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Someone was murdered.”

“How inconvenient of them.” There was laughter in her voice.

“It was Herb,” I said.

“What was Herb?” she asked. The laughter had gone.

“It was Herb who was murdered.”

“Oh my God!” she screamed. “How?”

“Watch the news.”

“But Nick,” she said, concerned. “I mean-are you OK?”

“I’m fine. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

Next I tried to call my boss-Herb’s boss-to warn him of the coming disruption to business, as I was sure there would be, but there was no answer. I decided against leaving a message. Somehow voice mail didn’t seem the right medium for bad news.

I set off southwards again and spent the remainder of the journey as I had the first part, thinking about Herb and wondering why anyone should want to kill him. But there were so many questions and so few answers.

How did the murderer know Herb would be at Aintree today?

Had we been followed from London and stalked around the racetrack?

Had Herb really been the target or had it been a case of mistaken identity?

And why would anyone commit murder with sixty thousand potential witnesses in close attendance when surely it would be safer to lure their victim alone into some dark, quiet alley?

I’d said as much to the detective inspector, but he hadn’t thought it particularly unusual. “Sometimes it is easier for an assailant to get away if there is a big crowd to hide in,” he’d said. “Also it can pander to their ego to do it in a public place with witnesses.”

“But it must make it more likely that he would be recognized, or at least allow you to get a good description.”

“You’d be surprised,” he’d said. “More witnesses often mean more confusion. They all see things differently, and we end up with a description of a black white man with straight curly hair, four arms and two heads. And everyone tends to look at the bleeding victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. We often get a great description of the corpse but nothing about the murderer.”

“But how about CCTV?” I’d asked him.

“It appears that the particular spot behind the grandstands where Mr. Kovak was shot is not in view of any of the racetrack security cameras and was also not visible from any of the cameras brought in by the television people to cover the event.”

The assassin had known what he was doing in that respect. It had clearly been a professional hit.

But why?

Every line of thought came back to the same question. Why would anyone want to kill Herb Kovak? I knew that some of our clients could get pretty cross when an investment that had been recommended to them went down in value rather than up, but to the point of murder? Surely not.

People like Herb and me didn’t live in a world of contract killers and hit men. We simply existed in an environment of figures and computers, profits and returns, interest rates and bond yields, not of guns and bullets and violent death.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that, professional as the hit may have been, the killer must have shot the wrong man.

Iwas hungry and weary by the time I pulled the Mercedes into the parking area in front of my house in Lichfield Grove, Finchley. It was ten minutes to midnight and just sixteen hours since I had left here this morning. It felt longer-about a week longer.

Claudia had waited up, and she came out to the car.

“I watched the television news,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”