Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

‘So how long?’ Bill asked again.

‘A couple of weeks, maybe.’

‘A couple of days more like,’ said Bill with a grin.

‘See, you are crazy,’ the surgeon said again, smiling back at him. ‘Completely crazy.’

I went home shortly after, when they came to collect him for theatre. I suppose I could have waited for the operation to be over but it would probably have taken at least an hour and then he’d be woozy for a good few hours after that. Interviewing an injured jockey in an ambulance on the way to hospital had been one thing, but I’d be pushing my luck to be asking him more questions while he lay in the post-anaesthesia recovery room.

I let myself into my flat and sidled past the unopened cardboard boxes into my kitchen-cum-sitting room.

It was cold, the mercury having plummeted after the sun went down under clear skies. I flicked on the electric fire but kept my coat firmly in place on my back with my hands deep in its pockets.

It was eight o’clock on Saturday evening. Just three weeks before Christmas, when any sensible person was out at a party, or having dinner with friends.

But not me.

I thought about Henrietta Shawcross.

I hadn’t had an opportunity to go back to the Smiths’ box to say goodbye to her, or to anyone else for that matter. I hadn’t even been at the racecourse for the main event of the afternoon, the sixth race of the day, by which time I was well on my way to the hospital in the ambulance.

I opened my laptop computer and logged on to the Racing Post website to check the result.

Ebury Tiger had won the Tingle Creek Chase and there were reports of emotional scenes at the trophy presentation when the winning jockey had dedicated the victory to the memory of his dear friend, Dave Swinton, who, he said, should rightly have been standing there in his place.

Dave Swinton, alive or dead, was still everyone’s knight in shining armour. I would make myself no friends whatsoever if I tarnished that image with talk of him purposely losing races or committing other misdeeds, like the small matter of trying to kill me.

I also searched the internet for any mentions of a Henrietta Shawcross.

There were masses of them, and lots of photos too, many in the Bystander section on the Tatler magazine website.

If the images were anything to go by, Miss Shawcross was a socialite of some renown, being photographed at many of the most sought-after events and parties. But there was little actual information about her life in the magazine, just her looking beautiful for the camera lens while cuddling up to a variety of actors, singers and other A-list headliners at glamorous gatherings.

Next, I carried out searches for Sir Richard Reynard, her uncle, and for Martin Reynard, her first cousin.

Both were in shipping. To be more precise, Sir Richard was the sixty-nine-year-old chairman of Reynard Shipping Limited, a company set up by his grandfather, and Martin was forty-two and also a director. And they were loaded. The Sunday Times UK Rich List put the Reynard family at number 147 with a combined wealth in excess of half a billion pounds.

Reynard Shipping was almost a household name and everyone must have seen the trucks carrying containers with REYNARD SHIPPING painted on the side in big white letters. No wonder Derrick had thought I should know who Sir Richard Reynard was.

He would certainly be able to afford to buy a potential Derby winner. In fact, he’d be able to buy a whole stableful of them.

I wondered if Henrietta Shawcross was included in the calculation of the family wealth. Probably.

I sighed. Either way, she was out of my league, that was for sure. That’s if she would even speak to me again after my dreadful faux pas at lunch.

I dug a little deeper on the internet.

For some reason I couldn’t find any recent accounts for Reynard Shipping Limited on the Companies House website. It appeared from their records that the company had ceased to exist some three years previously although it was quite clearly still trading — their shipping containers were everywhere.

But there was some more detail about Henri.

According to some past newspaper articles, Henrietta Shawcross was an only child. Furthermore, she was an orphan, her parents having died together in a helicopter crash when she’d been a teenager. Her mother’s not inconsiderable fortune, including a twenty-five per cent stake in Reynard Shipping, had passed directly to her, to be held in trust by her uncle until her thirtieth birthday, which, I noted, was coming up in February.

No wonder Gay Smith had said that Henri didn’t need a sugar daddy.

I went to my freezer and selected a Chicken Madras from a stack of frozen ready meals, and popped it in the microwave.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I’d be diagnosed as clinically depressed, but I knew I was pretty miserable. I didn’t take antidepressant drugs or anything, and I didn’t feel particularly suicidal — indeed, I had fought with all my strength to escape death in Dave Swinton’s sauna. There had been no question then of me giving up and lying down to die, when it would have been very easy to have done so.

It was just that I considered my life at present as meaningless.

I woke up each morning and went to work in my office at BHA headquarters, or at a racecourse somewhere, or I visited some training stables or an equine swimming pool, or one of a myriad of other racing venues, yet, wherever I had spent the day, I would return to the solitude and loneliness of my flat.

I sat in an armchair to eat my dinner and wondered what Henri Shawcross was doing. I may not have been a regular gambler but I’d bet an arm and a leg that she wasn’t eating a microwaved curry off her lap while watching Saturday-night drivel on the television.

I’d just finished my food when my landline telephone rang.

My heart leaped. Could it be her? Asking me out?

No, it couldn’t. I hadn’t given her my phone number.

‘Hello?’ I said, answering the call.

No one at the other end spoke, even though I could hear some noises in the background.

‘Hello?’ I said again. ‘Is anyone there?’

After two or three seconds, the line went dead.

How odd, I thought. I dialled 1471 to get the last number that had called and wrote it down on the back of an envelope that contained my gas bill. It wasn’t a number I recognized. I tried calling back but all I heard was a disembodied voice stating that the number did not receive incoming calls.

No sooner had I put the phone down than it rang again.

I picked it up. ‘Hello?’ I said slowly.

‘Jeff, is that you?’ said a voice.

‘Hello, Sis,’ I said. ‘Did you call me just now?’

‘No,’ Faye said, sounding concerned. ‘Should I have done?’

‘No. It’s all right. I had a call but no one was there. That’s all.’

‘Happens to me all the time,’ said Faye. ‘I blame the phone companies. They seem to spend so much of their time trying to sell us cheaper and cheaper broadband that they neglect the phone service.’

But the phone service had been working fine — I had been able to hear the background noise. It was the fact that the caller said nothing that had been strange.

‘Are you feeling any better than last Sunday?’ I asked her.

‘Much better, thank you,’ she said. ‘Brandy for breakfast has helped a lot.’ She laughed and I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.

‘Are you doing anything tomorrow lunchtime?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

Nothing other than moping around my flat feeling sorry for myself.

‘Good,’ Faye said. ‘Come to lunch. We have some guests and, to be honest, I could do with the help.’