Bloodline

It had been five years now since that Friday night at Doncaster when Sarah and I had carelessly ended up in bed professing undying love for each other.

We had both been there for the two-day Christmas National Hunt Meeting. I had been commentating at the course and Mitchell had had runners on both days. He and Sarah had stayed over in the same hotel as me, where we had all dined together in a large party of racing folk. Mitchell and the others had gone to bed straight after dinner as, in my experience, was the norm for racehorse trainers, while Sarah and I had shared first another bottle of red wine, then a nightcap liqueur or two, and finally a passionate sexual encounter in my bedroom.

Since then we had survived on snatched hours here and there, sometimes even a night or two together whenever Mitchell was away at the sales, and I had run up huge telephone bills calling her mobile.

We had been due to see each other at Newbury races this afternoon and then afterwards for a while at a carefully selected discreet motel near Hungerford, one more fleeting assignation in our on-going dangerous liaison.

Another of Clare’s pearls of wisdom came floating into my mind — Tell her it’s now or never and you’re fed up waiting. You’re wasting your life.

Was I?

I was thirty-one and Sarah was four years my senior. Mitchell, however, was now in his sixties, having been married twice before. How he had wooed and won the then twenty-one-year-old Sarah remained a mystery to me, but perhaps it was something to do with his immense wealth, most of which he had inherited as a baby from his grandfather, an eccentric oil magnate.

They didn’t have any children of their own — Sarah told me that Mitchell had had a vasectomy before they met — but there were three boys from his previous marriages and Sarah was being the dutiful stepmother. The youngest was about to finish school and Sarah told me that, then, she would leave Mitchell and come and live with me. But, in truth, it was the latest in a long list of prospective departure dates and maybe Clare had been right: Sarah never would leave Mitchell. She couldn’t afford to.

But did I care? Was I, in fact, not content with how things were? The old joke — I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure — seemed to have been written for me. As things stood, sex was fairly frequent and exciting, but I also quite enjoyed the freedom of living on my own.

However, there was also the worry of being found out. Mitchell Stacey was a hugely influential character in racing and I wasn’t at all sure my job would be safe if he discovered that I’d been seducing his wife behind his back. But would it be any better if we came clean and Sarah left him for me? Probably not. The best thing, I decided, was simply to carry on as before, and not to get caught.

Nicholas, my brother-in-law, came out of the drawing room looking for me. ‘This policeman needs to ask you some more questions.’

‘Sorry. I’m coming.’

Detective Sergeant Sharp remained for another two hours asking mundane questions and annoying us all. My brother James, the eldest of the Shillingford offspring, arrived in the middle with his scatty wife, Helen, so much of the ground had to be covered again.

Finally, the policeman seemed content with the answers he had, not that any of us were able to give him any reason why Clare should have thrown herself to her death from the balcony of a hotel room on the fifteenth floor.

‘Are you sure that’s a suicide note?’ I’d asked him as he’d shown it to James. ‘It doesn’t say anything about dying.’

He’d said nothing but his expression had shown that he thought I was clutching at straws. Maybe I was.

‘I’m afraid there will need to be a formal identification of the body,’ he said in the hallway.

To his credit, Nicholas volunteered immediately.

‘It would be better to be a blood relative’ said the detective, ‘rather than an in-law.’

‘Can’t you do it by DNA?’ I asked.

‘We can, sir, yes. But that takes time.’

And money, I thought.

‘The coroner will likely want to open an inquest first thing on Monday and he will want evidence of identification at that point.’

‘The policeman who came last night told me that you were a hundred per cent certain it was Clare. He said there were witnesses. Who were they?’

The detective somehow seemed reluctant to tell me.

‘Who were they?’ I pressed.

‘There had been a charity gala dinner in the ballroom of the Hilton Hotel. Most of the guests had left before Miss Shillingford fell.’ He paused. ‘But there were a few that had stayed on after the dinner for a drink in the bar. She narrowly missed landing on this group as they were waiting for a taxi.’

Oh, God, I thought.

‘The gala dinner,’ he went on, ‘had been in aid of the Injured Jockeys Fund.’