Bloodline

But who would think that anyone would have wanted to kill John Lennon? People had loved him too.

‘What about the note?’ said scatty Helen. ‘It certainly looked like a suicide note to me.’

Over her head I watched as my father gave her a contemptuous stare. He had never been slow in expressing his disapproval of James’s choice of wife, and she was clearly not endearing herself to him right now.

‘But why would she kill herself?’ Angela wailed, putting into words once more what we were all asking inside our heads.

‘Maybe because living in this family is not always easy,’ Helen said somewhat tactlessly.

I thought my father was going to explode behind her.

‘Shut up, you silly woman,’ he bellowed from somewhere close to her ear.

Helen instantly burst into tears and was comforted by James, who tried to defend his wife.

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Helen is right. We are all so competitive.’

Yes, I suppose we were.

It was how we had been brought up. Top of the class, top of the class, you must strive to be top of the class. It had been drummed into us as children. School, university, first-class degree, job in the City. It had been like a mantra for our father.

He had been appalled and outraged when both Clare and I had announced that we had no wish to follow our older siblings to Oxford or Cambridge, or to any other university, but were determined to go straight into racing. Not that racing had been a departure for the Shillingford family.

Prior to his retirement to a villa in southern Spain, our uncle, my father’s younger brother, had been a multi-Classic-winning Newmarket trainer, and he had himself taken over the stable from our grandfather. Two of my cousins were also in the racing business, one as a trainer in the family yard and the other as the owner of a racehorse transport firm. Indeed, the Shillingfords were a much respected racing family and had been owners, trainers and, occasionally, jockeys in and around Newmarket since the days of Charles II and the founding of the Jockey Club.

It had been my father who had been the one to take a different route becoming the first Shillingford on record to get a university degree, let alone a first-class one from Merton College, Oxford.

But there was no doubt that the family as a whole, whether in the City of London or on a racecourse, had a huge competitive streak in its make up. Clare certainly had, and she’d said so at our dinner at Haxted Mill.

Only I amongst the Shillingford clan, it seemed, hadn’t been born with fire in his belly to be The Very Best of the Best. But even I could be pretty competitive if pushed, and I didn’t like it much when people said that I wasn’t the best commentator in racing, although I knew what they were saying was true.

‘Perhaps we drove her to it,’ James said gloomily.

‘What utter nonsense,’ my father stated, restarting his pacing. This time, however, he didn’t pace aimlessly back and forth but made a beeline for the drinks cabinet in the corner. ‘I need a drink,’ he said, sloshing a hefty slug of whisky into a tumbler and knocking it back in one gulp.

I looked at my watch. It was only a quarter to five, but it felt much later. I’d already been up for almost fourteen hours and I’d had far less than a full night’s sleep before that.

I too could have done with a drink, but I didn’t say so.

And I did tend to agree with my father on one point: I also couldn’t envisage how the family could have driven Clare to kill herself. Sure, we were all competitive but, if anything, Clare was more competitive than the rest of us put together. And she had thrived on it.

People who took their own lives, I’d always believed, were driven to it by failure and rejection, not by success and widespread affection. But I knew that wasn’t universally true. I could recall several high-profile suicides whose deaths had staggered the public, where an outward persona of joy, happiness and huge achievement had masked some inner self of depression and hopelessness.

The real truth was that one never knew what was going on in someone else’s head.

And the big question that wouldn’t leave mine was whether Clare’s death was related to me confronting her about her riding of Bangkok Flyer and her subsequent admission of race fixing.

Her note might seem to imply so, but her unconcerned, almost blasé, reaction at dinner hardly seemed to fit with her being so tormented by it that she had thrown herself from a balcony only two and a half hours later. However, I decided that now was neither the time nor the place to introduce this new factor into the discussion.