Bloodline

The article beneath reiterated the allegation that Clare had stopped Brain of Brixham in the race at Wolverhampton and even gave further details of the amount of money that had supposedly been won by those laying the horse on the internet betting exchanges.

It must have been a quiet day for other news, I thought, and Toby Woodley’s imagination had obviously been running in overdrive to fill the gap.

But there was also an underlying tone to the piece that vaguely implied that Clare’s ride on Brain of Brixham might not have been an isolated incident but rather only one in a pattern.

Watch this space, it said at the end,

for further revelations tomorrow, and not only about Clare Shillingford, but also about her brother, Mark.

I stared at it. What revelations about me was Toby Woodley going to make up now? He’s told me I’d regret saying at Stratford that he’d been treated at Clare’s funeral not like dirt but like shit. Now the little bastard would make me pay. At least, unlike Clare, I would be able to take him to court if he lied.

And this wasn’t the first time that the Daily Gazette had made accusations about race fixing either. It had done so the previous May, but not on its front page. On that occasion the whole thing had quickly died away to nothing as the paper had been unable to produce any firm evidence and had declined to name any individuals, probably for fear of being sued.

Even the Racing Post, which should have known better, had a report following up on the Gazette

’s story, demanding answers and challenging Toby Woodley to reveal the identity of members of the betting syndicate ‘for the good of racing’. The Post’s tenor may have been more ‘put up, or shut up’, but it wouldn’t help to reduce the speculation. At least Jim Metcalf in UK Today had refused to join the chorus.

Other than reading the newspapers, I spent most of Wednesday morning studying the brochures for the eight houses I had looked at on the internet. The various estate agents had been most efficient in sending the details and each brochure had arrived with a covering letter telling me, each in a slightly different way, that now was the ideal time to buy a house.

I was sure that every estate agent always thought it was an ideal time to buy a house. They were hardly likely to say it wasn’t, now were they?

I was particularly interested by a house in a North Oxfordshire village. I’d often thought that Edenbridge in Kent was far from being the ideal place to live for someone with my job. Lingfield Park was certainly handy, and Brighton, Plumpton and Folkestone were pretty close as well. It was also not bad for Fontwell, Goodwood and the London courses, but I spent much of my time at the tracks in the Midlands and the North and they were all a long way off. It was no wonder that the odometer on my old Ford had been round the clock twice.

Oxfordshire, I thought, was a good central location, one where I could get to and from almost all the English racecourses in a single day, although there were none in the county itself.

I sat and looked at the glossy pictures and wondered if I was doing the right thing. In particular, was it sensible to move away from my parents when they were at a stage in their lives when they would soon be needing more help?

That fact alone, I decided, was one very good reason why I should move. As things stood, I could see that it was going to fall to me alone to look after them, as had indeed become the case in recent months. At least if I lived in Oxfordshire rather than just five miles down the road, my elder siblings might start believing that they also had some responsibility for their parents, especially as they would all then be living closer to them than I.

Perhaps I should call the estate agent and make an appointment to go and see the house. Maybe I’d do it tomorrow.

Midweek racing under the lights at Kempton Park on the all-weather Polytrack has become standard fare for punters although, during the winter months, the crowd, if that is the right term for the sparse gathering of the faithful, wisely spend most of their time inside the glass-fronted bars and restaurants.

However, in late September the weather gods had been kind and England was enjoying an Indian summer with hot days and warm balmy evenings. So much so that I left my overcoat in my car, which I parked in the racecourse car park.

I generally liked commentating on racing under lights.

I had first been night racing at Happy Valley racecourse in Hong Kong as a nineteen-year-old. It had probably been the strange environment as much as anything, but I’d found the whole experience so exciting and part of that excitement remained every time I saw the jockeys’ silks shining vividly in the glow of bright artificial light.