Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

‘Will your cousin Martin also be there?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s the host tonight. That’s why he’s over here.’

‘From the Cayman Islands?’ I’d asked.

‘From Singapore. He has a place in the Caymans, but he spends much of his time in Singapore running our operation out there, although he was here for most of the summer restructuring the UK business. He’s our new managing director, now that Uncle Richard is taking things a bit easier.’

‘Well, I hope you have a great evening,’ I’d said. ‘Much better than staying here.’

‘I doubt that. The Christmas party always turns into a nightmare. Everyone drinks too much and then they start telling me what they really think of us.’

‘Which is?’

‘That we don’t pay them enough, we have too many Asia-based staff, and that the company makes the family too much money.’

‘And does it?’

‘No. My great-grandfather took a job as a stevedore in the London Docks after returning from the battlefields of France in 1918. He started his own ship-loading business in 1920 and, since then, it’s been the Reynard family that has built the business up to what it is today, so why shouldn’t we enjoy the spoils?’

It sounded to me like something she was well used to justifying.

‘Everyone who works for us is well paid. We certainly have no trouble recruiting from our competitors. And, these days, our main hub is in Singapore, so we are bound to have lots of Asia-based staff, aren’t we?’

‘Are you much involved?’

‘I sit on the board as a non-exec director.’

‘But you work full-time elsewhere?’

‘Yes,’ she’d said.

I had been desperate to ask her why, but I’d said nothing. She would tell me if she wanted to. And she did.

‘I run a recruitment agency in Fulham,’ she had said finally.

‘You told me at Sandown that you worked for an agency, not that you ran it.’

‘I didn’t want to brag. I set it up from scratch about six years ago after a friend complained how difficult it was to get catering staff for her kids’ parties, and it’s sort of blossomed from there into quite an enterprise. I now have six full-time employees, including me, and literally hundreds of people on our books. Clients come to us with their requirements and we act as the middlemen, putting them together with our self-employed chefs, waiters and waitresses. We do all the contract work and arrange payment to the staff. And we charge the clients a fee for doing it all.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘It is,’ she’d said, beaming. ‘The agency makes a healthy profit and it’s all because of me rather than my family.’

I could see how important that was to her.

‘I’ve just started a section recruiting entertainers and magicians for events.’

I could do with a magician, I thought, to make Darryl Gareth Lawrence disappear.

Faye fussed around me like a mother hen, insisting that I sit on the sofa in their sitting room with my feet up.

‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked.

‘Nothing, thank you.’

I had talked Quentin into going home to Richmond via Harlesden to pick up some things from my flat.

‘Will it be safe?’ he’d asked.

‘What has Faye been telling you?’

But my safety was indeed a big concern.

Twice I’d made Quentin take a detour in the journey up Harrow Road towards Harlesden while I watched to see if anyone was tailing us.

Satisfied that there wasn’t, I’d still made him drive slowly past my flat three times until I was sure that no one was waiting in the bushes for my arrival.

Remembering what had happened last time, I’d been even more wary as I’d put the key into the lock, stepping back from, rather than through, the open front door as I’d done before.

There’d been nobody lurking inside, with or without a carving knife.

Quentin had parked the car on the road outside and come in with me to carry my stuff. It was also the first time he had been to my new flat and I don’t think he’d been particularly impressed as he stepped over the boxes in the hallway.

‘You’re even more untidy than Kenneth, and that’s saying something.’

Kenneth was his son by a previous marriage.

I’d gathered up my laptop computer and some more clothes, which I’d stuffed into a holdall.

I’d never realized how happy I would be to get into Quentin’s BMW and drive away from my home. Not that it had stopped me from insisting that he made two complete circuits of the Hanger Lane Gyratory to check we weren’t being followed.

‘You’re paranoid,’ Quentin had said.

‘You would be too, if you were me. There have been three failed attempts on my life in the last two weeks alone. I have no desire for there to be another one that succeeds.’

I wondered if he was now having second thoughts about having me to stay in his house.

On Monday morning, with my phone and laptop fully recharged, I sat at Faye’s dining-room table and started making calls and replying to the backlog of e-mails that had accumulated in my inbox.

I was back in business.

I e-mailed Paul Maldini, asking for an update of where things stood with respect to Bill McKenzie, and requesting that the investigation be handed back to me.

His response was less than encouraging. A date had been set in the middle of January for a disciplinary panel hearing into the running of Wisden Wonder at Sandown, and also into the betting pattern of Leslie Morris on the same race.

‘But who’s to say that the investigation will be complete by then?’ I said to Paul when I called him.

‘We can always postpone the panel if we need to.’

Maybe, I thought, but it seemed like the wrong way round to me. I was a firm believer in doing a full investigation first, preferably without the target knowing that his behaviour was being looked into.

‘Has anyone interviewed McKenzie or Morris?’

‘Not yet,’ Paul said. ‘But they will have both received the letter by now, requiring them to attend the disciplinary panel. They can be questioned at that time. They have also both been told to produce their phone records for the past six months.’

So Morris would, by now, know that we were on to him. That was a shame. It meant that there was little hope that we would ever learn the identity of the mysterious excluded person for whom he had allegedly been placing bets. Not unless he’d been foolish enough to use a phone to call Morris that was registered in his own name.

Increasingly, all dodgy betting conspirators, together with most other villains and terrorists, used pay-as-you-go mobile phones. Bought for cash with a false name and thrown away immediately after use. Tracing who had made a particular call was almost impossible.

I logged on remotely to the BHA database, which told me that Mr Leslie Morris was a sixty-six-year-old retired accountant, and that he was the registered owner of one moderate racehorse.

An accountant. Now, was that a coincidence?

I also used the database to look up where he lived.

The address on his owner registration was in Raynes Park near Wimbledon, just down the A3 from Sandown Park races, and only a handful of miles from where I was in Richmond.

I wondered if paying Mr Morris a visit might be helpful. He’d probably be on the defensive at the official panel, and would most likely have a lawyer with him to advise what he should say and, more importantly, what he should not say. At home, alone, he might be less guarded, especially if I caught him unawares.

‘Do you ever use a local taxi firm?’ I asked Faye.

‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked in reply.

‘I need to go and see someone,’ I said.

‘Not to do with your work?’

I nodded.