Bloodline

So am I, I thought, yawning in sympathy but, unlike him, I hadn’t done a stroke of work all day. In my case it was probably something to do with not having had any proper sleep for the past three nights.

Derek twisted round in his chair to face me. ‘What do you think about tomorrow?’

I was scheduled to present from Folkestone. ‘I’ll be fine if you want me.’

‘I actually think we should stick with Iain for the rest of this week,’ he said. ‘It might be construed as somewhat insensitive on your part to return too soon. But how would you feel about doing a full tribute piece about Clare for broadcast on Saturday from Newmarket?’

‘Channel 4 have already asked me,’ I said. ‘I’m filming it on Thursday and it’ll be shown on the Morning Line on Saturday, and also during the afternoon. I think I’d better check with them before I do another.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Derek. ‘I’ll ask Iain to do ours.’

Iain, it seemed to me, was being asked to do far too much.

‘You could always ask Channel 4 if you can use the same piece.’ Cooperation between the broadcasters was rare but not completely unknown.

‘Maybe. But using Iain will give us a slightly different slant.’ He paused. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound how it did.’

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘That’s sensible.’

And it was. I’d have done the same thing in his position.

‘Do you think it’ll be OK for me to use the RacingTV database in Oxford for my tribute piece?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure it will,’ said Derek. ‘You know we’ve had that new indexing system installed.’

‘That’s exactly why I want to use it.’

‘It’s really fabulous. Just put in Clare’s name under “jockey” and then click on “winner” and it will list all the races that she’s won, together with the other runners, the prize money, the distances, the prices, everything. Then you just have to click on any entry in the list to play the VT straight back. It’s absolutely brilliant.’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘But you don’t have to go all the way to Oxford, you know. You can access everything just as easily from the scanner. Not now, of course, because the link will be down, but tomorrow from Folkestone. The link will be up by about ten and there’ll be about three hours clear before racing.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But I still think I’ll go to Oxford. Then I’ve got all day.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Derek said rather dismissively. He obviously thought that I could surely find the videos I needed of Clare winning races in a three-hour period, and he was well aware that my home in Edenbridge was a lot closer to Folkestone than it was to Oxford.

That was all true, but I didn’t really want Derek looking over my shoulder all the time I was accessing the video database because I was actually far more interested in searching for races that Clare had purposely lost.

6

It was a bit like the proverbial searching for a needle in a haystack.

During the past four months, the height of the flat-racing season, Clare had ridden almost every day, often four or five times in an afternoon and, sometimes, at an evening meeting as well.

According to the database, since the beginning of June, there had been four hundred and twenty-nine races run in which Clare had been one of the jockeys, and she’d been on the winner in thirty-seven of them, including her last ever ride at Lingfield the previous Friday on Scusami.

What was it that Clare had said when I asked her how often she had stopped a horse from winning? Three or four times, maybe five. And what had she written in her note? I don’t know what has been happening to me these last few months.

I assumed, therefore, that the three or four races, or maybe five, would have been in the last few months. I had better start at the beginning of the four hundred and twenty-nine and just go through them all, ignoring only the ones she had actually won. That left three hundred and ninety-two races to watch. I settled myself into the studio chair for a lengthy session.

But first I watched again her ride on Bangkok Flyer last Friday to remind me of exactly what I was looking for. The more I saw it, the more obvious it seemed. I was sure that I’d have no trouble spotting it again in a different race. All I really needed was to watch the final furlong.

I also looked to see who trained Bangkok Flyer. I knew most things about the horses that I watched regularly, including their owners and trainers, but Bangkok Flyer was a two-year-old maiden and Friday had been the first time I’d seen him run.

According to the database, he was trained in a Newmarket stable by Austin Reynolds, for a long time the nearly man of British flat racing. Austin was now in his mid to late fifties and he had never quite fulfilled his potential in the sport.