Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

Hence I’d come when he’d asked, giving up a precious Saturday-morning lie-in to catch an early train from Paddington to Hungerford and then a taxi to Dave’s house just outside Lambourn.

He had dropped a bit of a bombshell with his claim to have lost a race on purpose but, if he refused to elaborate, I’d have made a wasted journey.

I went into his kitchen and gratefully drank down two large glassfuls of water from the cold tap. And still I was thirsty. How Dave could drink nothing after a session in that sauna was beyond me.

I followed Dave’s directions to the guest bathroom and had a shower but still had to wait downstairs for more than twenty minutes before he reappeared dressed in a dark green polo shirt, blue jeans and trainers, his standard work attire.

Whereas most top jockeys still dressed in suits and ties to go to the races in order to impress the owners and trainers, Dave Swinton had long forgone such niceties. Nowadays, Royal Ascot and the Derby meeting apart, racing in general was a more casual affair, and the current champion jockey was the most casual of them all.

‘I’m going to Newbury now,’ he said, picking up a grip that was lying in the hallway. ‘I want to run the course before the first.’

I looked at my watch. It was coming up to ten o’clock.

‘I came by train and taxi,’ I said. ‘Can you give me a lift?’

‘Where to?’

‘Newbury racecourse will be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch the Hennessy and then take the train back to town.’

‘Why don’t you drive like everyone else?’ he said, clearly irritated.

‘I’ve no car,’ I said. ‘I don’t need one in London. I’ll come with you.’

He could hardly say no but I could tell that he wasn’t that happy. Whatever he had decided to tell me at seven o’clock that morning, he had clearly changed his mind since, and half an hour of us together in his car was not on his agenda, friends or not.

‘OK,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Are you ready?’

He drove the Jaguar at speed out of Lambourn up Hungerford Hill, the only sound being the roar of the car’s powerful engine, but if he thought I wasn’t going to say something, he was much mistaken.

‘Tell me about the race you didn’t win.’

‘Please, Jeff. I told you to forget it.’

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘Try.’

He drove on in silence past The Hare public house and on towards the M4 junction, overtaking a line of slower vehicles with ease.

‘Which race was it?’ I asked.

He ignored me. We turned eastwards, accelerating onto the motorway.

‘Come on, Dave, you asked me to come all this way because you had something to tell me that couldn’t be said on the phone. So here I am. Speak to me.’

He concentrated hard on the road ahead and said nothing as the Jaguar’s speedo climbed rapidly past a hundred miles per hour.

‘Are you in some sort of trouble?’ I asked, although he certainly would be if what he’d told me were true.

He eased up on the power and pulled over towards the left. For a nasty moment I thought he was going to stop on the hard shoulder and chuck me out, but he didn’t. He just drove sedately along in the inside lane at a mere eighty-five.

‘Jeff, can I speak to you off the record?’ he asked again.

‘You know I can’t agree to that. This is my job.’

‘It’s my bloody job that I’m more worried about.’

We took the slip road off the motorway at the Newbury turning and I sat and waited quietly while he negotiated the traffic lights on the roundabout.

‘Look, I’ll keep what you say confidential if I can,’ I said, encouraging him to go on. ‘But no promises.’

He must know that I was obliged to report any breach of the rules to the BHA Disciplinary Committee.

He sighed deeply. ‘I need your help.’

‘Ask away.’

‘I’m being blackmailed.’

‘Who by?’ I asked as calmly as I could.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Someone who knows more than they should about my financial affairs.’

‘And aren’t your financial affairs in order?’

‘Yeah, of course they are.’ He paused. ‘But, you know, working out the bloody tax is complicated. Maybe I take a few shortcuts.’

‘By not declaring certain things?’

‘Yeah, maybe. But why should I pay tax on gifts?’

It depended if the ‘gifts’ were actually payments for services rendered.

‘How much were these gifts that you didn’t declare?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Not compared to what I do declare.’

Dave Swinton was, by far, the highest-earning jockey in British racing. He was the public face of the sport with a mass of endorsements and sponsorship deals. His was the image that stared out of the Racing Needs You! posters of a recent widespread campaign to encourage the young to give it a try. His ever-present green polo shirts had the distinctive ‘Swoosh’ logo of a top sportswear manufacturer embroidered on the left breast above his name and there were advertising badges sewn onto each arm. He certainly earned far more from commercial endorsements than he did from his riding.

‘How much?’ I asked again.

‘About two hundred.’

I laughed. ‘But that’s not enough to worry about. Just include it in your next return. No one could blackmail you over that, surely?’

‘Two hundred thousand .’

‘Ah.’ The laughter died in my throat.

‘Yeah. But I declare more than a million.’ He paused as he overtook a line of traffic waiting at some lights, swerving across into the correct lane to turn left at the very last moment. ‘And then some bastard calls me and tells me to lose a race or else he’ll go to the tax authorities and spill the beans.’

‘And you’ve no idea who?’

‘None,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’d have killed him.’

‘I don’t think that would be particularly helpful.’

‘Maybe not, but it might make me feel better.’

He drove on in silence until we arrived at the racecourse.

‘Which race did you lose?’ I asked again as we turned into the car park.

‘I had twenty-eight rides and ten winners last week, so I lost eighteen races.’

‘Don’t mess with me, Dave,’ I said. ‘You know what I mean.’

He didn’t reply.

He pulled the Jaguar into a space in the jockeys’ parking area.

‘Do you want my advice?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ he said, leaning his head down onto the steering wheel.

I gave it to him anyway. ‘Go to the Revenue and tell them you made an error of omission on your tax return and you want to correct it. Pay the tax. That will be an end to it, and I’ll try to forget what you’ve told me.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then you’d be a fool. If someone has that information they will use it. They may not go to the authorities directly, but they will use it nevertheless. Perhaps they will try and sell it to a newspaper. You’d be right in the shit. Much better that you go to the taxman before they do.’

‘But I shouldn’t have to pay tax on gifts. It’s not like they were earnings.’

He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself rather than me.

‘Go and ask your accountant if you need to declare them.’

‘Bloody accountants,’ he said, sitting back in the seat. ‘You don’t want to tell them anything if you don’t want the taxman to know it. In spite of the fact that it’s me that pays their bill, my lot seem to work exclusively for the government, always telling me I can’t claim for all sorts of things I think are essential for my job.’

‘Get a new firm, then. And do it now.’

And maybe, I thought, it was one of his accountant team who knew about his tax-return omission who was trying to make a bit of extra cash on the side.