Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

DS Jagger wrote in his notebook. ‘Mr Hinkley, you will have to make another formal statement and, this time, with all the relevant information included. Do I make myself clear?’

He was still cross with me.

‘Perfectly clear,’ I said.

‘I will arrange for one of my constables to come and take it. Will you be in here long?’

‘I’m told until Saturday,’ I said. ‘But I’m forming an escape committee.’

‘I’ll send my constable tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And be sure to tell him everything you can think of, whether you believe it’s relevant or not.’

‘Tell him to bring lots of paper,’ I said. ‘I’ll give him my life story.’

‘Be serious, Mr Hinkley.’

‘I am. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned during my time at the BHA it’s that there is no such thing as an isolated incident. Thoroughbred racing may be one of the largest industries in this country, but those involved — breeders, owners, trainers and jockeys — are like a close-knit family. Everybody knows everybody else and they’re all connected by blood, by marriage or by financial dependency.’

I wondered if I should tell him about Bill McKenzie and his ride on Wisden Wonder. And maybe about Leslie Morris and his large cash bets. Were they also relevant? Bill McKenzie had told me that he wasn’t being blackmailed but I wasn’t sure I believed him. He had definitely lost that race at Sandown on purpose, just as Dave Swinton had at Haydock. Were the two connected?

That’s what I should have been investigating this week, not lying in some hospital bed twiddling my thumbs.

Next to arrive was Paul Maldini, although it did take him a while to get in as one of the nurses had called hospital security when she found him loitering outside my room.

‘It must be your shady Italian ancestry,’ I said with a laugh as he was finally permitted to enter.

‘Bloody ridiculous,’ he said.

‘Not at all. I asked them to vet all my visitors. There is someone out there with a long thin carving knife, and I have no wish to meet him again, thank you very much.’

‘It’s very inconvenient, you being in here,’ he said, clearly irritated. Paul Maldini was not one for pleasantries like How are you feeling? or I’m glad you’re alive , he was only thinking of the work I was missing.

‘I’m not lying here out of choice, I can assure you, and it’s better than the alternative.’

‘What alternative?’

‘The morgue,’ I said. ‘It seems it was a close-run thing.’

I filled him in on most of the details without making the whole thing too melodramatic.

He was silent for a moment, perhaps thinking, as I was, that my present predicament was not quite so inconvenient after all. At least I would be coming back to the office eventually.

‘Do you have any idea who did it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘But it might be the same person who shut me in the sauna last week.’

‘What sauna?’ he asked.

Oops! I’d forgotten that I hadn’t actually told Paul about the sauna incident. In fact, I hadn’t told him anything about my exchanges with Dave Swinton.

This could be awkward. Not least because I’d already told the police.

‘Someone locked me in a sauna,’ I said.

‘How odd,’ he said. ‘Where?’

I hesitated.

I’d have to tell him and face the music. ‘At Dave Swinton’s house.’

‘What were you doing at Dave Swinton’s house?’

I took as deep a breath as my stitches would allow. ‘I think I’d better explain everything from the beginning.’

I told him about Dave calling me early on Hennessy Saturday demanding to speak with me, and of my subsequent trip to Lambourn and Newbury.

Paul’s eyes widened when I recounted what Dave had said about purposely losing a race, and his eyebrows almost disappeared into his hairline when I explained about the blackmail. By the time I disclosed the details of my return visit on Sunday morning, including being shut into and then escaping from the sweltering sauna, he was almost apoplectic.

‘Why the bloody hell didn’t you tell me all this before?’

‘When it was reported on the news that Dave had killed himself, it suddenly didn’t seem important. Why would I want to tarnish the glittering reputation of our hero with nasty rumours about race fixing and tax evasion when I had no real evidence that either was true?’

‘But he himself had admitted it,’ Paul said angrily. ‘We should have suspended him from riding immediately and convened a disciplinary panel.’

‘There you go,’ I said. ‘If I’d told you straight away, it would have been headlines in the Sunday papers.’

‘But...’

‘But nothing,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘Just be thankful that it didn’t happen, otherwise the BHA would have been blamed for pushing Dave Swinton to kill himself.’

That shut him up.

‘And also,’ I said, ‘instead of reflecting on his stellar racing career, as they rightly did, the obituaries would have been all about his possible connection to fraud and deception. Is that what you would have wanted?’

From the look on his face, perhaps it was.

Paul always considered that anyone who broke the Rules of Racing was personally insulting him in some way. And he didn’t take kindly to insults. But maybe it was because Paul had individually invested so much in Dave Swinton as the poster-boy of the Racing Needs You! campaign, and he felt betrayed.

‘So why are you telling me all this now ?’ he said in a tone that reminded me of a hurt schoolboy.

‘Because Dave Swinton didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.’

Paul stared at me. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible to drive a car at the same time as you are tied up in the boot.’

Paul went on staring.

‘The police found plastic cable ties in the boot of the Mercedes with Dave’s blood on them.’ I went on to tell him everything that DS Jagger had told me. ‘And, if Dave himself was already trussed up in his car like a chicken, the person who shoved me into the sauna to die is most likely the same person who killed him . And it may be the same person who tried again this Sunday with a carving knife.’

‘But why would anyone want you dead?’ Paul asked.

It was the question I had been asking myself, over and over.

‘Maybe I know something that someone doesn’t want me to tell anyone else about.’

‘What?’ Paul said.

‘If I knew that, then I’d shout it loudly to everybody so that there’d be no need to kill me to prevent it.’

‘I don’t suppose it has anything to do with McKenzie falling off Wisden Wonder at Sandown,’ Paul said. ‘With you indisposed in here, I’ve asked Nigel to have a look into that. And I’ve arranged for a letter to be sent to McKenzie summoning him to a disciplinary panel in January to explain his riding of the horse.’

I would have much preferred it if Paul had left that for me to deal with later.

I was an advocate of doing the investigating first, preferably furtively and in secret, and then calling the miscreants to account based on my findings.

Paul, meanwhile, tended to believe that the early summons to a disciplinary panel would put the fear of God into the accused and could produce dividends in the form of a confession. He seemed not to appreciate the fact that accomplices, or even the brains behind the scam, might go to ground and never be implicated.

In this particular case, Bill McKenzie was already well aware that I was suspicious of his riding of Wisden Wonder and so I reckoned that no further damage would have been done by Paul’s intervention.

We discussed a few of the other outstanding cases that were sitting on my desk, some of which were waiting for me to produce a report, but we kept coming back to Dave Swinton.