Hands down, p.16
Hands Down, page 16
‘With the double-word score, that’s ten points,’ I said, feeling quite pleased with myself, but my joy was premature – much too premature.
I had carelessly left the A sticking up near the corner of the board.
‘BAIZE,’ Charles said triumphantly, putting down his last four tiles around the A. ‘That’s the Z on a double-letter score, and the whole thing on a triple-word score. So that’s two times ten for the Z, plus three for the B and one each for the vowels. Twenty-six, times three for the triple, that’s seventy-eight points in total.’
I sat there totally stunned.
‘But you don’t double the Z score first and then triple it,’ I complained.
‘Yes, you do.’
We resorted to reading the rules that were stuck to the underside of the box lid and, guess what, he was right.
‘Seventy-eight,’ he said again, writing it down on the score sheet. He added up. ‘That now puts me nineteen points in front, so I win.’
He smiled broadly and clapped his hands.
‘All right, all right. Enough,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to rub it in.’
I felt I’d been beaten on the line by a short head, having led all the way from the starting gate. Worse, it was a Devon Loch moment.
‘Want another game?’ Charles asked.
‘No.’
‘You’re just a bad loser,’ he said with a laugh.
‘Indeed I am,’ I agreed. ‘And, because of that, I have no intention of losing to Anton Valance.’
Nor of losing my wife and daughter.
20
I spent most of the night awake, much of it sitting on a chair in front of the Aga in the kitchen, with Charles’s loaded shotgun across my knees, while Rosie slept soundly at my feet.
Nobody came.
Charles appeared at seven o’clock, coming into the kitchen wearing his pyjamas and a dressing gown. He yawned loudly, setting me off too.
‘Sleep well?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I lay awake for hours on end listening.’
‘So did I. I just dozed occasionally.’
‘Have you been outside?’ he asked.
‘I went right round at first light but there’s nothing untoward.’
‘We should be grateful.’
Grateful was not the word I would have used. Relieved, maybe, but not grateful. I couldn’t go on living like this. And I certainly couldn’t bring my family back home into these circumstances, that’s if Marina ever decided to return. Either way, I needed to get on and sort out Mr Valance and his two cronies, pronto.
* * *
Charles went home after a breakfast of toast and marmalade, but with no butter – I really needed to go to my local supermarket.
‘Shall I leave you the shotgun and cartridges?’ he asked as he was packing his other stuff into his car.
‘We would both be breaking the law if you did,’ I replied. Maybe we had done so already, as the weapon in question had been in my charge all night anyway, but at least he’d been in the same building.
‘So, is that a yes or a no?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But only if you are happy about it.’
‘I’m not happy about it one bit. But I’d be a lot less happy if your house got burned down with you in it.’
Charles was nothing if not pragmatic.
‘I promise not to fire it unless it’s necessary.’
‘I should hope not.’
‘And, even if I do,’ I said, ‘I’ll not actually shoot at anyone. It’ll just be a deterrent.’
‘But deterrents don’t work if you’re not prepared to use them. Do you remember the Falklands War back in 1982? Who would have thought that Argentina could have been so stupid as to attack Britain, a nuclear power – but they did. But, even then, we didn’t use our modern and very expensive nuclear arsenal – of course we didn’t – and the Argies knew all along that we wouldn’t, so it had no deterrent effect whatsoever.
‘However, a single and almost obsolete Vulcan bomber, flying the 8,000-mile round trip from Ascension to the Falkland Islands and back, just to drop a few ineffectual Second World War bombs across the runway at Port Stanley, had far more impact as a deterrent. The Argentine junta believed, quite rightly, that we could, and would, do the same to Buenos Aires, so they kept most of their air force at home to protect their capital city. And that may well have been the difference between us winning and losing that war.’
‘So are you telling me, in a roundabout manner, to use your gun to shoot someone?’
‘Yes, I am, if you have no alternative. If they know for certain that you won’t shoot at them, it’s not worth having the gun in the first place. Indeed, it could be more of a liability than a help, especially if it is captured and then used against you. That’s what happened to the British Army at Rorke’s Drift.’
‘Rorke’s Drift?’
‘During the Anglo-Zulu War in southern Africa. Almost a third of our deaths at Rorke’s Drift were due to the Zulus firing our own rifles back at us – rifles that had been either captured from us earlier, or actually ripped from the hands of the defenders themselves as the battle unfolded.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ I asked him with incredulity.
‘Every officer cadet, in whichever service, has to study prior battles during their basic training to make sure that mistakes made in the past are not repeated in the future. What happened at Rorke’s Drift is ultimately why, during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, all British infantry weapons were attached to our soldiers with webbing belts so they couldn’t simply be pulled away by the enemy and then used against us.’
I was certainly impressed by Charles’s encyclopaedic military knowledge – but I still had no intention of shooting anyone with his shotgun, not unless I absolutely had to.
* * *
I spent an hour stocking up on food at Tesco before collecting Chico from Banbury railway station at noon.
It had been almost three years since I had seen him and he had spread a little around his waist, plus he had a few more grey flecks among the tight, dark curls on his head, but otherwise he looked just as I’d first seen him all those years ago at Hunt Radnor.
He lobbed his holdall onto the back seat and climbed into the Discovery next to me. I set off back to Nutwell.
‘So how was your night with the Swedish beauty?’
‘Don’t ask.’
‘Not as expected then?’
‘Have you ever seen The Crying Game?’
I looked across at him ‘No!’
‘Oh, yes. Ingrid, my gorgeous Swedish beauty. Turns out she used to be a bleedin’ Ivan.’
‘When did you find out?’ I asked, trying very hard not to laugh. ‘Don’t tell me it was only when she took her clothes off.’
‘You mean his clothes off. Seems she’s still legally a bleedin’ man. He certainly had everythin’ intact down below, just like in the film, even if he does have tits as well. It’s all very confusin’, I can tell you.’
‘My God. What did you do?’
‘What do you think I did? I made my excuses and left. Sad, though. She – he – was really nice about it. We talked for a bit before I went. Poor kid is really troubled. By the end, I felt really sorry for her – him.’
‘Will you see her again?’
‘I said I might, especially if she had the operation. Seems she’d been thinkin’ about havin’ it for a quite a while now.’
‘What a varied life you lead.’
‘You can talk. You’re walkin’ around with some dead geezer’s hand sewn onto your arm. That’s bleedin’ gruesome for a start.’
Chico clearly had an intuitive way with words.
‘How is it, anyway?’ he asked.
I took my right hand off the steering wheel and drove along holding the wheel only with my new left one. ‘It’s totally part of me now. I don’t even think about it as being different.’
‘So it’s better than that fancy electric job you had before?’
‘Much better. I can feel things with this.’
‘Like that bird of yours? Bet she loves it, you now having two hands to stroke her lovely body.’
If only, I thought.
‘Chico, behave yourself. She’s not here at the moment, anyway.’
‘Yeah, you said. Over in Holland with her sick dad. Pity.’
We drove on in silence for a while.
‘Tell me,’ Chico said eventually, ‘who are the bad guys you need me to protect you from?’
‘A couple of heavies in balaclavas.’
‘Not more Northern Irish terrorists, I hope?’
Chico had also been there when we’d had our troubles from the Irishman in the past.
‘No. These two are from Yorkshire, but they’re still pretty terrifying.’
As I drove home, I brought him up to speed with the details of my encounters with the two men, first in the car park at Catterick races on Tuesday afternoon, and then again outside my house on Thursday night.
‘Not petrol again,’ he said. ‘Don’t people ever learn? You should never ever start fires with petrol. It’s far too bleedin’ dangerous. It explodes.’
‘I’ll be sure to tell that to my Yorkshire friends next time they come calling.’
‘Did they come back again last night?’
‘Nope.’ I laughed. ‘Nothing exciting happened here either.’
Chico ignored my little joke.
‘But I sat up all night with Charles’s shotgun on my knees just in case.’
‘The admiral?’ Chico said. ‘How’s he doin’?’
‘He’s fine. I’m sure you’ll see him sometime while you’re here.’
We arrived at my house in Nutwell and Rosie was as excited to see the new arrival as he was her.
‘Amazin’ how they remember,’ Chico said, tickling Rosie’s chin and stroking her head, as her tail wagged enthusiastically further back.
‘It’s your smell,’ I said. ‘Dogs never forget a smell.’
‘Right then,’ Chico said, standing up, welcome over. ‘Fill me in with all the gen.’
We sat at the kitchen table drinking cups of coffee as I told him the whole story, right from when Gary Bremner had called me eight days previously.
The only thing I missed out was the real reason Marina had taken Saskia to Holland, that was before she found out how ill her father really was.
‘And you don’t want to just go to the racing authorities and tell them the whole lot?’ he asked when I finished.
‘Not yet,’ I agreed. ‘This man Anton Valance is no fool, far from it. He will have ensured that, if the authorities investigated, he would come out of it squeaky clean, while all his victims would carry the can.’
‘He doesn’t seem very clever to me,’ Chico said. ‘Otherwise he’d never have sent a couple of heavies to beat up Sid Halley. Bleedin’ stupid, that was. Everyone knows that’s the best way to get your arse kicked.’
‘That may have once been true, but time passes and people forget. And it doesn’t change the fact that Valance will have covered his tracks. You mark my words, if we go to the authorities now, nothing will stick to him and he’ll simply be free to entrap new jockeys and trainers to do his dirty work. We need to get something on him that will stand up, if not in a court of law, at least at a BHA enquiry.’
‘And how are we goin’ to do that?’
‘I don’t know yet, but I’m working on it.’
Indeed, throughout my long night on guard in the kitchen, I had thought of little else.
‘But if what you say is true,’ Chico said, ‘and he or his heavies murdered this Bremner bloke, won’t the police find him out?’
‘The police don’t believe it was murder. They think Gary killed himself. Seems they found a suicide note, but it was not written on paper, it was typed into his phone.’
‘So anyone could have done it.’
‘Exactly.’
‘How stupid can you get? But the police have always been far more interested in closin’ cases than actually findin’ out what really happened. Like those murders in Barking a few years back. Happened right close to where I live. What was his name? Stephen somethin’. Killed four young blokes with drugs. Left their bodies almost in the same place, but still the cops thought the lads had accidently overdosed themselves. They even said one of them did it on purpose, because they also found a suicide note next to his body, but that one had definitely been written by the killer. I ask you. Didn’t they check the bleedin’ handwriting? Port. That was it. His name was Stephen Port. Saw a TV programme about it recently. Right weird bastard, he is. And barking mad if you ask me.’ He laughed at his play on words.
‘So what do we do about this Valance man and his pair of goons? Do we wait here for them to come back or go lookin’?’
‘Neither at the moment. Instead we go in search of more of his victims. I’ve already spoken to the trainer Simon Paulson and to the jockey Marcus Capes, but I’m also keen to have words with Jimmy Shilstone.’
‘And who’s he when he’s at home?’
‘He’s the jockey that definitely stopped the two Paulson horses at Catterick last week, and Paulson told me that the two of them together had done it eight times in total.’
‘So where do we find this Shilstone fella?’ Chico asked.
‘He’s got rides at Ayr in Scotland today but he’s booked for two more at Market Rasen tomorrow. One of them for Simon Paulson.’
‘And where the hell is Market Rasen?’
‘North Lincolnshire. About two and a half hours’ drive away from here.’
‘But, if we go all that way, will he even speak to you?’
‘I doubt it. Not willingly at least. We’ve already had one conversation, at Catterick – that’s if you could call it a conversation. I did most of the talking. He just told me quite forcibly to go forth and multiply, and kept on walking.’
‘Charmin’. So what will you do?’
‘I’d really like to speak to him away from a racecourse. Maybe find out where he lives.’
‘So do we follow him home from the races?’
‘No chance. We’d be bound to lose him.’
‘What then?’
* * *
Two hours later, while Chico snoozed in an armchair, I watched the racing from Ayr on the television. I also called Simon Paulson.
‘Are you fucking crazy? I can’t tell you that!’
‘Why not?’
I had simply asked him if the horse he had declared to run in the fourth race at Market Rasen the following day, Oscar Mike, the one to be ridden by Jimmy Shilstone, would be running on its merits, or was it to be stopped from winning.
‘Because… because—’
‘There you are,’ I said, interrupting him. ‘There’s no reason not to tell me. So will Oscar Mike win?’
‘Let’s just say it’s unlikely.’
‘No, Simon, let’s not just say that. Have you been told by Anton Valance to ensure it doesn’t win, or not?’
He said nothing.
‘Silence won’t do, Simon. So tell me, is it being stopped?’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
‘When were you told?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, after the full declarations were announced.’
‘How?’
‘How what?’
‘How were you told?’
‘Valance called me.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He told me that Oscar Mike wasn’t to win.’
‘Did he say why?’ I asked.
‘No, of course not.’
‘So what did he say? What were his exact words?’
‘He just said two words – Oscar Mike – and then he hung up.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘No. That’s all he ever says. Just the name of the horse.’
He would, wouldn’t he? Nothing obviously incriminating to record there.
‘But I know what he means, all right.’
‘And what’s the phone number?’ I asked.
‘No idea. All it shows on my phone is “No caller ID”. No one else calls me like that. That’s how I know it’s going to be him. Oh, God. What a mess.’
It certainly was.
‘But Valance must surely call you all the time to book Jimmy to ride your horses.’
‘He does, but he uses a different phone for that.’
‘So what’s that number?’
There was a pause while he found it on his phone, then he read it out to me and I wrote it down. It started 07, so was a mobile, hence no clue to where he lived, but it was a start in finding him – a good start.
‘So does he also call Jimmy Shilstone with this mysterious “No caller ID” phone?’ I asked.
‘I assume so. Jimmy knows, all right. I certainly don’t have to tell him.’
‘Where does Jimmy live?’ I asked, slipping the question into the conversation in an innocent way.
‘Malton. Why?’
‘I thought I might go and see him.’
‘He won’t like that.’
‘I dare say,’ I said. ‘But do you have his address?’
‘I’m not so sure I should be giving you that.’
‘So would you rather I called my friends in the BHA Integrity Department to get it? Of course, I’ll probably have to tell them why I want it, and also why you won’t give it to me.’
Simon wasn’t to know that I’d already tried the same tactic once before, to try and get Anton Valance’s address, but without any success thanks to the damn data-protection regulations.
There was a long pause from the other end of the line. ‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘I wouldn’t want to get Jimmy into any trouble.’
‘Trust me, Simon. He’s already in trouble – really deep trouble,’ I said. ‘And you are too. Can’t you see that I’m trying to help you both get out of this without you losing your licences?’
If only, I thought.
21
Chico and I left for Malton at five-thirty on Sunday morning, well before it was light, having cajoled Charles into looking after Rosie, albeit against his better judgement.
‘Can’t you take her with you?’ Charles had implored as he’d met me bleary-eyed at his front door, still wearing his pyjamas.
