I was still standing by the bed with the phone in my hand when Grant came back upstairs.
‘Who was that?’ he asked.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.
I was shaking too much.
Grant looked at me.
‘Darling, are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
I tried to reply that, as always, I was fine, but the words wouldn’t come out. I felt sick and I pushed past him into the bathroom where I threw up into the lavatory.
‘Good God, darling,’ Grant said. ‘What has happened?’
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. My mind was racing round in ever-decreasing circles and my heart was thumping away, nineteen to the dozen.
I was simply too frightened to repeat what I’d just heard.
‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ Grant said, worry etched deeply onto his face.
I shook my head.
‘Call the police,’ I said, managing at last to get three words out together.
Detective Sergeant Merryweather and Detective Constable Filippos sat on one side of our kitchen table while Grant and I sat on the other.
‘What exactly did the man say to you?’ asked the senior detective.
‘He said that next time he’d run over my kid not just his bicycle.’
Even three hours after I’d first heard them, repeating the words made my heart race.
‘Next time? A rather strange turn of phrase. Why do you think he said that?’
I glanced at Grant. He was still unaware of the STOP ASKING QUESTIONS piece of paper previously placed on my windscreen and I would have preferred it to have remained that way.
No chance.
‘Did it have anything to do with the message you received before?’ asked DC Filippos.
‘What message?’ Grant said immediately.
I sat silently, looking down at my hands.
‘What message?’ Grant repeated.
‘Your wife found a message placed on her windscreen,’ DC Filippos said.
‘What message?’ Grant said for a third time.
I said nothing but the detective wasn’t finished. ‘The message said to stop asking questions.’
Grant turned and looked at me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this?’
That was a good question and I didn’t have a satisfactory answer.
‘I didn’t want to worry you,’ I said.
Grant shook his head in frustration. ‘So what questions were you asking?’
‘Just questions,’ I said inadequately.
‘Questions about what?’ He was beginning to get angry and I could feel the stress growing in me too.
It all came out – it was bound to – everything, that was, except my flirtation with the Whisky Macs. I did at least manage to keep that quiet from both Grant and the police.
But all the rest came out, all the things I had tried so hard to keep from Grant. Not just the message on the windscreen but also the flat tyres, my approaches to the jockeys, the note in the envelope and, most worrying of all, my belief that I’d been pushed in front of the bus.
Grant was horrified.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said again.
‘I knew you wouldn’t like it.’
‘You’re dead right there,’ he said forcefully. ‘I don’t like it. Not one bit. In future, you must leave any investigating to the police.’
I glanced across the table at the two policemen. ‘But they don’t know what I do.’
‘And what is that?’ asked DS Merryweather.
Did I say? Was I sure? Did I have enough evidence?
‘I think someone is spot-fixing races and I believe it involves the jockeys Jason Conway and Mike Sheraton. And I’m sure it has something to do with Rahul, our unnamed man, who died in Cheltenham Hospital in November.’
‘What do you mean by spot-fixing?’ asked DS Merryweather.
‘Fixing which horse jumps the first fence in front.’
I could tell instantly that he thought I was crazy.
‘But why would that make any difference to the outcome?’
‘It doesn’t. That’s the point. But if you could gamble on which horse jumped the first fence first then it would be corrupt to fix it.’
‘But who would gamble on such a thing?’ the detective asked, the disbelief clearly audible in his voice.
‘Some people will gamble on anything,’ I said. ‘Especially, it seems, in India and Pakistan. If they gamble on when the first throw-in will occur in a game of football or when a no-ball is bowled in cricket, then why not on which horse is in front at the first fence?’
‘What evidence do you have?’
‘I’ve been watching videos of races in which Conway and Sheraton have been riding. I believe a pattern is emerging.’
‘What videos?’ Grant asked.
‘On my computer,’ I said. ‘There are racing websites that have videos of past races, and I was studying those all day yesterday.’
‘Is that why you had to send Oliver out to do the shopping?’ Grant was cross again, and with good reason. It was exactly why.
I nodded and hung my head in shame.
‘So, I ask you again,’ said the detective sergeant, ‘did this incident with Oliver’s bicycle have anything to do with the previous message?’
I nodded again.
‘The man on the phone said that I’d been told before not to ask questions and he wouldn’t tell me again. Next time he’d run over my kid, not just his bike.’
Grant was now really angry.
‘How could you have put our son in such danger?’ he demanded.
‘But I hadn’t asked any more questions,’ I said unhappily. ‘Not to the jockeys anyway.’
‘To who then?’ asked DS Merryweather.
I thought back to my encounter with the driver of the long black Mercedes with the dark windows.
‘The only question I’ve asked was of the driver of a certain Mercedes. I asked him who owned it.’
‘Which Mercedes?’
‘The one from which Jason Conway had been given the piece of paper with the name of a London railway station and a time.’
‘Liverpool Street at three-thirty?’ said DC Filippos.
‘Quite so,’ I said. ‘Liverpool Street at three-thirty. Not a train time but the name of a horse that ran in the Gold Cup at three-thirty last Friday.’
‘But why go to the trouble of passing a piece of paper with the horse’s name on it?’ said DS Merryweather. ‘Why not just email or call him?’
‘Because emails and telephone calls leave records of contact that can be traced,’ I said. ‘I expect Conway now wishes he’d destroyed the paper as soon as he had read it.’ I paused and looked at the three of them. ‘Liverpool Street may have finished third in the race. But it started fast and jumped the first fence in front, and Jason Conway rode it.’
The detectives stayed for another hour, making notes while I showed them some of the race videos. Not that they were convinced, even then, that anything untoward had been going on.
‘It stands to reason that someone has to jump the first fence in front,’ DS Merryweather said. ‘And it’s not as if the same jockey does it every time.’
‘That would be too suspicious,’ I pointed out. ‘But there are certain races when it looks very much by design rather than by chance.’
‘But don’t some horses just like to run at the front?’ the detective sergeant said dubiously after I’d been through everything I’d found. ‘There’s insufficient here to build a credible legal case. We know from experience how difficult it is to get a conviction for corruption in racing. About ten years ago, we thought we had irrefutable evidence of race-fixing by three jockeys, including a former champion, but an Old Bailey judge still threw it out after deciding the three had no case to answer – and we had a lot more on them than this.’ He waved his hand dismissively at my computer. ‘The same would certainly happen here. It’s all circumstantial and coincidental.’
‘There was nothing coincidental about running over Oliver’s bicycle,’ I said. ‘That was deliberate and intentional.’
‘But what is there to connect it to your allegation of spot-fixing in races? And how is it linked to the death of our nameless man from a cocaine overdose? Are you not guilty of simply piecing together several random situations into a single narrative because you want that so much to be the case?’
Was I?
I thought back once again to the reaction of the jockeys to the image of the unnamed man, to the certainty I’d felt about the Mercedes driver knowing who I was, to my collision with the bus and the telephone call of that morning.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not. I know I’m right.’
‘Could you prove it beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law?’
‘But I’m telling you the truth,’ I asserted with frustration.
‘As may be,’ said the detective, ‘but the truth is no guarantee of justice.’
‘Isn’t that rather cynical?’ I said. ‘Especially from a policeman. Surely justice is all about finding out the truth.’
He shook his head in disagreement. ‘Justice is determined by the facts, and those facts are decided solely by the jury based only on the evidence presented to them in court. Whether or not the events actually took place is irrelevant. In my experience, the truth doesn’t usually enter into it.’
If I couldn’t even convince the police, what chance did I have with a jury? And what danger would I be placing my family into in the meantime?
I could feel the stress rising in me once again.
Grant had been listening carefully to everything that had been said and he had clearly not been impressed.
‘Chris,’ he said, turning to me. ‘You have to let the police do their job and not get involved. The safety of our children is far more important than some suspected corruption in horseracing, or a dead man we don’t know.’
He was right. Of course he was right. But something inside me was telling me not to let it go.
I was like a drug addict who knew perfectly well that what he was taking was harmful to his health, even critically dangerous, but that didn’t stop him doing it. Addiction was a major characteristic of obsessive-compulsive disorder and I was well wedded to that concept.
Maybe Grant could see the determination in my eyes.
‘Darling,’ he pleaded, ‘you must stop. Promise me you will leave this all alone.’
I looked across at the policemen.
‘Don’t you even want to know the number plate of the Mercedes?’