Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Front Runner

And now the sliver of light was definitely bigger.

It took me nearly an hour to make a hole large enough for me to get a finger through.

I put my eye up to the hole and looked out but there wasn’t much to see, just the far wall of the garage and a space where the Mercedes had been when I’d arrived. But it lifted my spirits no end that I could at last see beyond the walls of the sauna.

I went back to my hammering at the edges with the pointed rock and it wasn’t that long before the hole had grown sufficiently for me to get my hand outside.

I then used one end of a floor slat as a sort of crowbar and gradually split the planking further, both above and below the hole, until there was space enough for me to stick my head out.

By this time the sauna walls had no chance against me. I attacked the hole like a man possessed, kicking away the planking and, before long, I was out, standing in the garage.

I walked round to the sauna door.

A garden fork had been jammed between the sauna door and the garage wall with such force that the tines of the fork had dug grooves in the brickwork.

I picked up my coat from the handlebars of the bicycle and removed my phone from the pocket.

The missed call had indeed been from Faye.

I held the phone in my hand and wondered what to do.

Should I call the police?

There was no doubt in my own mind that Dave Swinton had tried to kill me, but I was worried that no one else would believe it.

I went over everything again in my head. Was there any way it could have been a mistake or an accident?

I glanced over at the garden fork, still in position holding the sauna door firmly closed. The placing of that had been no accident, no mistake. And the person who put it there had to have been aware that the sauna was switched on.

No one could have driven away from that garage and not have expected the man left in the sauna to die. The fact that I hadn’t died had simply been down to dogged determination on my part, and good luck.

I dialled 999 on my phone.

‘Emergency, which service?’

‘Police,’ I said. ‘I wish to report an attempted murder.’

They did believe me — just — in the end.

Initially, two young uniformed policemen arrived in a patrol car. They listened intently as I described what had happened and their eyes widened slightly when I showed them the garden fork. They widened even more when they saw the hole I had made in the wall of the sauna to escape. But it was when they discovered that I was accusing one of the country’s most well-known and best-loved sporting celebrities of attempted murder that reinforcements were summoned in the shape of a plain-clothes officer, who introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Jagger from the Thames Valley Police Major Crime Unit.

‘So, Mr Hinkley,’ said DS Jagger, ‘why do you think Mr Swinton wanted to kill you?’

Why did part of me still feel a need to keep confidential what Dave had told me yesterday? I surely was under no obligation to do so. I must be absolved from any promise I had made to him to try to forget what he had said. After all, he had tried to kill me.

‘I knew that he had purposely lost a horse race and I think he tried to kill me to stop me saying something to the authorities.’

The detective clearly thought it was a poor motive for murder.

‘Are you really telling me that Mr Swinton would risk a murder charge over something so trivial?’

I tried to point out to the policeman that purposely losing races was not trivial for a professional jockey, but he wouldn’t believe it. And part of me agreed with him. Why would Dave risk a lifelong prison sentence when he knew I didn’t have any real evidence that he’d stopped a horse anyway? Especially as I didn’t even know which horse or race was in question.

Had he expected to come home from Towcester that evening to find me dead, remove the garden fork, and then try to make out that it had been due to dreadful misfortune — he had left me in the sauna alone and I had obviously spent too long in the heat and had been overcome?

‘Why don’t you ask him that question?’ I said.

‘Oh, we will,’ said the detective sergeant. ‘Just as soon as we find him.’

‘He’ll be at Towcester races,’ I said, trying to be helpful. ‘He has five rides there this afternoon.’ I looked at my watch. ‘The first race will be in about ten minutes.’

‘Mr Swinton has so far not arrived at Towcester as had been expected. A request has been made to my Northamptonshire colleagues to detain him if, and when, he arrives.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Jockeys had to be at the course at least forty-five minutes before a race they were due to ride in. That put paid to my theory that Dave would continue to act as if nothing had happened and claim my death was just a terrible accident.

I had to go over my account one more time from the beginning while it was written down by a young detective constable. I was then asked to read and sign the statement.

‘What now?’ I asked.

‘You are free to go, Mr Hinkley,’ DS Jagger said.

‘Just like that?’

‘It is my understanding that you have declined any medical assistance. What else do you need?’

‘A lift to a railway station would be good.’

He reluctantly agreed and I was despatched with the young detective constable in an unmarked police car.

‘Hungerford do you?’ he asked.

‘That would be fine.’

He drove in silence out of Lambourn.

‘Is there much crime in these parts?’ I asked.

‘I’m based at Reading,’ he said. ‘There’s lots of serious crime in Reading.’ He sounded as if he was pleased. ‘Rapes, murders... all sorts.’

‘Is Detective Sergeant Jagger from there too?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘We call him Mick,’ the constable said with a laugh. ‘But not to his face, of course. He’s my guv’nor.’

‘Is he any good?’

He chanced a quick look at me.

‘Why?’

‘I want to know if I can rely on him to catch Dave Swinton,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time.’

‘Do you really believe he shut you in that sauna on purpose to kill you?’ He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do. Why otherwise would I call you lot?’

‘But it seems like a strange way to try and kill someone. Not very reliable.’

‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘If you had been in there with the temperature at a hundred and ten centigrade, you wouldn’t have thought so. I was bloody lucky to get out alive.’

‘Maybe. And I have to admit that bursting through the wall like that was impressive.’ He laughed. ‘Just like the Incredible Hulk.’ He laughed again.

This policeman had actually seen the garden fork in position and the hole I’d had to make in the side of the sauna to escape and he was still sceptical of the danger I’d been in. What chance would I have of convincing others?

I called Faye from the train while trying to ignore the strange looks I was receiving from my fellow passengers. Had they never seen a man with a large hole burnt in his trousers before?

‘Hi, little bro,’ she answered. ‘How are things?’

‘Much the same,’ I said, deciding not to tell her that someone had just tried to kill me. She would only worry. ‘How are you doing?’

‘I’m still alive.’

It was the way she always answered that question.

Faye had cancer. To be precise she had gallbladder cancer, even though she no longer had a gallbladder. That had been removed two years previously.

In those two years she’d had one setback when a scan had shown a small spot on her liver. More surgery and another course of chemotherapy had seemingly done the trick but, as Faye always said, at her age you never truly survived cancer, you just held it at bay for a while, in an ever-decreasing spiral-dive into your grave. The slower the descent, the better, but one could never fully arrest the fall.