Bloodline

She didn’t answer and I tried to read her mind. Perhaps she was afraid of him, or had Clare been right and she simply couldn’t afford to leave?

‘When will he be back?’ I asked into the silence.

‘Not for hours. He’s got a runner in the last so he won’t be home until well after eight at the earliest.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy coming back with me for a while?’

In spite of everything, I was tempted.

‘How about Oscar?’ I asked. Oscar was the youngest of her stepchildren, the only one that still lived at home.

‘School play rehearsal. He won’t be home until at least ten. Please do come.’ She was almost pleading. ‘I need you. It’s been really dreadful knowing you’ve been in such pain and not being able to comfort you.’

I sighed. ‘I’ve got to go back to the RacingTV offices to finish what I’m doing. It’ll take another two or three hours at least.’

‘I’m only twenty minutes down the road. Come if you can.’

‘The offices close at six and the technician told me he wants to be gone by half past five, so I’ve got to be finished by then. I could come after that, for a little while, as long as you’re sure it’s safe.’

‘Safe as houses. I’ll watch Newton Abbot on the television just to make sure Mitch is still there for the last race.’

So would I.

Having been slightly irritated with me for arriving late, she now tried her best to hurry me away, so much so that I was back at the database studio reviewing more of Clare’s races well before two o’clock.

In all the races that Clare had ridden in, and not won, since the beginning of June, I found what I was pretty sure were seven examples of her purposely trying to lose, even though, in one of them, she didn’t really have much of a chance to win it anyway. And there were a further four races where I thought she’d not been doing her best to win when she might have done, although I couldn’t be sure that she was actively ‘stopping’ the horse.

I used the database system to make a copy of the eleven races in question onto a DVD, together with the information about all the horses that had run in each one.

There didn’t seem to be any common factors.

Of the seven definites, there was one pair that had the same trainer, but the five others were all different. Nine of the eleven had been trained in Newmarket, with one in Lambourn and the other at a stable near Stratford-upon-Avon. And all had different owners.

In addition to Bangkok Flyer, there was one other horse from the Austin Reynolds string, Tortola Beach, an exciting two-year-old prospect that Clare had ridden into third place at Doncaster in August when he had looked certain to win with just a furlong to go.

One of the others was from the Newmarket stable of Carla Topazio, a large domineering lady trainer of Italian descent who loved to sing operatic arias at every opportunity, mostly in the winners’ enclosure whenever her horses had won.

In another of the eleven, Clare had ridden a three-year-old filly called Jasmine Pearls, trained by our own cousin Brendan, which had finished a close fourth in the City Plate at Chester having led comfortably into the final furlong.

The only common thread I could see was that in none of the eleven suspect races had Clare been riding a horse trained by Geoff Grubb, her principal employer. Perhaps she had thought it would have been too great a risk. She had so much to lose if Geoff, for whatever reason, became unhappy with her riding — not just her stable-jockey job, but her home as well. Even though, at that final dinner, she had mocked me for not having bought my own house, she hadn’t done so either, choosing to live in Geoff’s rented Stable Cottage.

I sat staring at my list of definites and possibles, hoping that some other common denominator would leap out at me.

It didn’t.

Six of the eleven had started as the favourite, three at a price less than two-to-one, but two of the other five had been relative outsiders with odds greater than eight-to-one.

I looked up the trainers of the race winners, but they were mostly different as well. As were the jockeys, and the owners. Surely the eleven horses were not simply a random selection? Was there some shared characteristic that I wasn’t spotting? Maybe it was because I didn’t yet have all the necessary information to look at, and I needed to look at races earlier than June.

Perhaps Clare had been playing the ‘Race Fixing Game’ for much longer than just these last few months.

I glanced at my watch. It was ten past five and the technician was hovering and clearly itching for me to go. Any further searches would have to wait.

I quickly made another DVD with four of Clare’s big race victories on it, as well as her final race on Scusami. Sadly, I couldn’t find a VT of her first ever ride or even her first winner, but I still had more than enough to make the tribute piece for Channel 4.

I collected my two DVDs, thanked the technician, and left the studio.