Hands down, p.6
Hands Down, page 6
Marina had just given me the green light to carry on investigating the Middleham fire and the other things, so that was good. But I worried that the major switch in her position was simply because she had no intention of ever coming back to me and so it didn’t matter to her one jot what I did.
I squeezed the toothpaste from the tube onto my brush, marvelling at the fact that I could now do it easily after so many years of spreading the red-and-white-striped stuff one-handedly all over the bathroom sink. But had this simple dexterity come at a price I couldn’t afford?
I looked down and studied my new hand.
Whatever magic the surgeons had weaved in making it move and feel, it still looked somewhat alien to me too. For a start, it had someone else’s fingerprints, and also their DNA. Even though I was told by the doctors that the human body regenerates itself all the time, the new cells take their pattern from the old ones they replace, so the DNA doesn’t change.
If my left hand were to be cut by a knife and bleed, the blood spilled would have the Sid Halley genetic structure, while the skin cells that might be deposited on the blade would have that of the original donor.
I smiled at the thought of some poor police forensic officer in the future trying to work out why two sets of DNA had been found at a stabbing crime scene when it was known for sure that only one person was injured. A bit like those locked-room lateral-thinking conundrums.
But having a part of me with someone else’s DNA was a bit of a challenge, not least because my immune system tended to view this alien intruder as an enemy, rather than as a friend, and would happily destroy it.
Rejection is what it is called and, even though my conscious brain had warmly welcomed my transplanted hand’s arrival, my unconscious physiology never gave up the struggle to rid me of it.
To prevent this, I took a daily cocktail of drugs specifically designed to suppress my natural immune system. While they allowed my new hand to be tolerated by the rest of my body, it had the unfortunate side effect that it made me more vulnerable to infections. A common cold could render me sick and in bed for a week, while flu was to be avoided at all costs.
The trick was to balance the giving of just enough of the drugs to prevent rejection of the transplant, while leaving enough residual protection to ward off infectious diseases.
Covid-19 has been particularly dangerous for donor-organ recipients. In the first year of the recent pandemic, some 40 per cent of unvaccinated transplant patients who developed Covid-19 died from the disease, against a mortality rate of less than 2 per cent of infected people in the population as a whole.
Hence, in the first lockdown, Marina, Sassy and I had shielded, keeping ourselves away from absolutely everyone. Since then, I had been jabbed with all sorts of vaccines, and with regular boosters, to try and stave off infections of any kind and, so far, the balance had been pretty good. But I had to remember to take my medication religiously every night. Even leaving it for one day could result in rejection problems, as I knew only too well.
Early on, just after my transplant, I’d been forced to miss taking my daily pills. We had been on our way back home from a holiday in Australia when our flight was delayed for 24 hours at Singapore by an engine fault.
All the passengers were put up in a hotel but I’d only kept a single dose with me and the delay meant the journey would now take two nights. By the time we arrived in London, when I was finally able to retrieve my medication from our checked baggage, my hand had gone bright red and the skin had begun to itch mercilessly.
Thankfully, the damage had not been permanent and my hand had soon recovered, but the experience taught me an important lesson: make sure I had plenty of back-up doses close to hand. Even Marina had taken to keeping some of my pills in her handbag, just in case.
Clinical rejection of my hand had only been one of my problems after the operation. When I’d first woken after fifteen hours of anaesthesia my mind had been like cotton wool and waves of nausea had swept over me. But I could still remember my surgeon, Harry Bryant, also known as Harry the Hands, standing next to the bed asking me to try and move the fingers on my left hand.
Was he crazy? my muddled brain had thought at the time. I don’t have a left hand.
Except, of course, I now did, and there it was, right next to my head in a sort of sling, pointing upwards, with my new fingers sticking out above the bandages. I remembered looking at those alien sausage-like appendices, stained yellow by an iodine solution, and wondering if I’d done the right thing.
‘Can you move them?’ Harry the Hands had asked.
For many years, I’d controlled my prosthesis by sending impulses to the muscles in my arm. The electrical signals had been picked up by sensors on the skin and, over time, I had learned to use those nerve messages to rotate the wrist and open and close the fake fingers. But the stimuli I sent to activate the electric motors weren’t the ones I had previously used to control my real fingers, those I’d been born with.
So used was I to this indirect control of my mechanical digits, that I now sent the same message to my arm. Needless to say, the new flesh fingers did not budge one iota.
But Harry had been well ahead of me.
‘Open and close the fingers on your right hand.’
I had done that. I hadn’t even had to think much about it. My brain had just sent the signals and the fingers moved. Easy-peasy.
‘Now do the same to both hands simultaneously.’
Both of us had stared at the new fingertips and there had been just the faintest of twitches, nothing substantial but more than enough to satisfy Harry, who smiled broadly.
‘Well done. We must have connected something right, anyway. That will do for now. You need to rest.’
He had then departed but, for several hours after, I had marvelled at the slight movement my new fingers could make whenever I wanted them to. And I still marvelled at it three years later.
Those three years had involved months of physiotherapy stimulating not only the reconnecting of the motor nerves but also the sensory ones, to the point where I could now feel the vast majority of the skin surface, and I could pick up, maybe not a needle, but certainly a coin.
However, the rejection issue remained and I would need to continue taking take my immunosuppressant medications for the rest of my life. So I now swallowed the six tablets I took every night to keep my hand intact and made ready for another night alone in my bed.
My main worry at the moment was that I faced a totally different kind of rejection, one that fancy medicines couldn’t prevent.
* * *
First thing on Monday morning, I went back to my search for Anton Valance.
I could find no trace of anyone of that name involved in British horse racing.
In desperation, I called Toby Jing, a contact I knew vaguely in the integrity section of the BHA, the British Horseracing Authority, but he wasn’t particularly happy to speak to me.
‘I’ve told you before, Sid,’ he said. ‘I have a duty of confidentiality, so I shouldn’t be speaking to you at all and certainly not on my work phone.’
‘Come on, Toby,’ I implored. ‘I only want to know if you’ve ever heard of someone called Anton Valance.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, not particularly sounding it. ‘You must know that there are now very strict regulations concerning the protection of personal data. The damn General Data Protection Regulations now rule my life. So I can’t tell you.’
‘Even if it means that the integrity of racing is put at risk?’
‘How is it at risk?’ he asked with concern.
‘I don’t know yet. That’s why I need to find Anton Valance.’
He sighed loudly down the line. ‘Sid, I’m afraid I can’t help you. Why don’t you try the TBG, the Thoroughbred Business Guide? They list almost everyone involved in racing.’
‘I’ve tried that. He’s not in there.’
There was a slight pause.
‘Then I’m sorry. My hands are totally tied by GDPR. I would be breaking the law if I said anything to you about any individual without their specific, freely given, plainly worded and unambiguous consent.’
It sounded to me like he’d used that excuse many times previously.
‘All right, but just do me one thing,’ I asked quickly, before he had a chance to disconnect.
‘What’s that?’ There was a degree of suspicion in his tone, and with good reason.
‘There is no need for you to say anything. Then you can’t be breaking the law. I’m simply going to ask you a question. If the answer is no, then hang up immediately. Here goes. Is Anton Valance a BHA-registered jockeys’ agent?’
There was no sound from the other end.
‘Are you still there?’ I asked.
‘Certainly am,’ came the reply.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Here’s another.’
‘What’s this? Twenty questions?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And if the answer to any of them is no, you hang up and I lose my turn. So here’s question number two.’ I worked it out carefully in my head. ‘Would you say Mr Valance was untrustworthy?’ I emphasized the ‘un’.
Still no sound.
‘Okay,’ I said again. ‘Question three: Has Valance ever been the subject of a BHA investigation?’
I could hear breathing down the line but nothing else.
‘So was there an enquiry held of which there is an official record?’
He hung up.
So what had I learned?
Anton Valance was a registered jockeys’ agent in spite of not being listed in the TBG, he was considered untrustworthy by the BHA Integrity Department, had been investigated, but had not been found to have broken the Rules of Racing, at least not sufficiently for there to have been an official enquiry. But I still didn’t know how to find him.
I tried Gary Bremner’s phone.
This person’s phone is currently unavailable. Please try again later.
Where did I go from here?
I tried the Racing Administration website but I needed to enter a password to gain access and, as I was not a BHA-registered person, I didn’t have one. Damned GDPR. They made life so much more difficult for us private investigators.
I wondered who I could ask to use their password, even though they would know it was against the racing regulations.
Once upon a time, even after I’d retired from riding, my standing in racing as a four-time former champion jockey had been quite high and most honest people would help me out, as they realized the good I was doing in rooting out the dishonest ones. But it had been a long time now since I was a regular on a racecourse and many of my former contacts had either retired or died.
And it didn’t help that, three years previously, I’d been questioned on suspicion of child abuse.
The accusation had been without foundation, and was designed to undermine an investigation I was involved with at the time. I had quickly been released without charge but most people forgot that part, only remembering the widespread reporting of the original arrest after my name had been maliciously leaked to the press by the police.
One of my best racecourse sources of both real information and juicy gossip had been a man called Paddy O’Fitch. He’d been a walking encyclopaedia of racing knowledge, but he had finally drunk himself into an early grave the previous year.
And I could hardly ask Simon Paulson. He’d made it perfectly clear that he didn’t want me to contact him again – ever!
Even the nature of racing’s hierarchy has changed in recent times.
When I’d first started my investigating, racing had been administered under the direct control of the Jockey Club, a private institution dating back to 1750, which, at the time, had been responsible for all rule and disciplinary matters.
New members of this prestigious organisation, many of them with titles, were elected only by the already existing members, but all of them were steeped in racing, either as owners, trainers or amateur riders, although current and former professional jockeys were, and still are, specifically excluded from the club bearing their name.
In the early twenty-first century, the self-electing and largely aristocratic nature of the Jockey Club was considered inappropriate for the body charged with regulating a modern major industry, and so the governance of racing was passed to an independent institution, the British Horseracing Authority.
However, one of the consequences of this change has been that the new chiefs were often career sports administrators who may have come to racing with little or no prior knowledge of our particular sport.
For me, whereas I had once been able to have a quiet word of warning concerning racing’s integrity with a senior member of the Jockey Club, many of whom had owned horses I had ridden, I was seen now as just another face in the crowd, and every communication with the powers that be had to be officially logged.
I thought back to what Sid Halley in his investigating heyday would have done.
Whereas subterfuge and evasion might have paid dividends eventually, a full-frontal attack had usually produced results more quickly.
Hence, I resolved to go back to Middleham the following day, to make myself known in full sight, and to ask some difficult questions of anyone and everyone I could find, and at full volume.
8
The six o’clock television news on Monday evening was dominated by a new development from Middleham, one I found even more disturbing than the news of the fire.
Gary Bremner’s body had been found, not burned to a crisp as everyone else had thought, but hanging from a tree in the undergrowth at the bottom of his garden. The bulletin showed the Deputy Chief Constable of North Yorkshire Police being interviewed standing in front of a blue tent erected behind him.
‘It would appear,’ he said, ‘that Mr Bremner did not die in the fire at his stables, as has been widely reported over the last two days. At this time, we are treating the death of Mr Bremner as unexplained.’
The news reporter was then shown on camera stating that the authorities seemed to be treating it as a case of suicide. One of his police informants, he explained, had told him that they had found a note near the body. The reporter speculated that the loss of Gary’s training yard, and of his best horse, might have affected his state of mind.
I, meanwhile, believed nothing of the sort.
To me, even at a distance of two hundred miles, it had all the hallmarks of a murder made to look like a suicide. But the note was a problem. I hoped that the North Yorkshire Police would give it to a forensic handwriting specialist to compare it against other things Gary had written.
While I was digesting the unwelcome fact that my primary source in Middleham had just been permanently eliminated, my phone rang. Marina’s number showed on my caller ID, so I answered it, wondering what I should say to her, but it wasn’t actually her on the line.
‘Hello, Daddy,’ said a nine-year-old voice.
My heart leaped.
‘Hello, Sassy, my darling. Are you having a good time?’
‘Not really. Opa isn’t very well and so I have to be quiet all the time.’
‘I know, but are you being chief nurse?’
‘I’m trying to, but everyone seems so sad. Mummy’s been crying a lot.’
‘Darling, it isn’t easy for Mummy with her daddy being so unwell. So just be a good girl and look after her for me.’
‘Okay,’ she said reluctantly. ‘But can I come home soon? I’m missing Rosie and it’s Annabel’s birthday next week. I just have to go to her party. And she’s getting her own phone as a birthday present.’
Sassy’s sarcastic tone was asking the usual question – why couldn’t she have a phone? It was a subject that had been discussed very regularly in our household.
‘Everyone else has got one,’ she would often whine, even though it wasn’t true. Marina and I had decided that, at nine, she was still too young, but we were swimming against the tide as more and more of her classmates now had them, and Saskia felt she was being left behind.
‘Pleeeeease, Daddy, can I have a phone?’
‘No, darling. Not yet. Annabel is older than you. She’ll be ten next week. So you will have to wait a little longer.’
And Marina and I had secretly decided that twelve would be the best age, although I sometimes felt that we had almost no chance of putting off the inevitable until then.
‘It’s not fair,’ Sassy moaned.
Life’s not fair, I thought. Lose a hand, gain a new one and then lose your wife. Not fair at all.
‘Can I speak to Mummy, please?’
Marina came on the line.
‘How are things?’ I asked.
‘Not great. I think it’s just a matter of waiting for the inevitable.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘How about you?’
‘I’m okay. A bit lonely. I miss you and Sassy.’
There was a long pause from the other end, and then a sigh. ‘I’m missing you too.’
That was encouraging.
‘Have you found out anything more about the Middleham fire?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘There have been some happenings that you simply won’t believe.’
I told her about Gary Bremner being found dead and the police believing he had committed suicide. She was shocked.
‘And do you think he killed himself?’
‘Not for one second. When I saw him on Sunday he was determined to catch the bastards responsible for killing his horses. There’s no way he would have just given up.’
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘What do you suggest?’ I asked.
‘Do you have a client?’
We both knew what she meant. She was asking if anyone was paying me. When I’d done investigating for a living, having a paying client was essential to fill the coffers.
‘Only Gary Bremner, and now he’s hardly in any position to pay.’
‘How about the BHA?’
‘No chance. I’m beginning to think I’ve become persona non grata in those quarters.’
