Bloodline

‘Don’t push your luck, Mr Shillingford,’ the superintendent said, but with a smile. ‘You’re lucky to be getting a lift home, and I could always change my mind. Ever heard of trains? Leave your car keys and your details with my sergeant and he’ll contact you when you can retrieve your car.’

I didn’t push my luck. I gave my car keys to his sergeant.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

I was driven in an unmarked police car by a driver who didn’t say a word to me all the way from Kempton to Edenbridge. He dropped me outside my front door, again in silence, and drove off.

I let myself in and then sat in my sitting-room- cum-kitchen-cum-dining-room-cum-office with a stiff whisky. I didn’t often drink spirits but I didn’t often have someone die with their head in my lap.

Who would have wanted to kill Toby Woodley?

Sure, there were lots of people, myself included, who might rejoice at his passing, but I couldn’t imagine that anyone would actually kill him over something he had written in the paper. As Jim Metcalf had said, everyone knew the Daily Gazette

was nothing more than a glorified rumour mill, and no one really believed any of it.

So why was Toby Woodley dead? And did his death have anything to do with his pieces in the paper about Clare? Or was it totally unrelated? Indeed, were the deaths of Toby Woodley and Clare Shillingford entirely isolated incidents for which the only common factor was me?

I sat for a while pondering such questions but without coming up with any useful answers.

I knocked back the rest of my whisky and went to bed.

What I needed most was someone to talk to, someone to bounce some ideas off. In the past that would have been either Clare or Sarah.

I lay in the darkness missing both of them hugely.

On Thursday morning I caught a train from Edenbridge to London and then another from London to Warwick.

I usually went everywhere by car and it made quite a change for me to sit and watch the world go by through the carriage window.

I bought a stack of newspapers at Edenbridge station and spent the journey reading everything I could find about the murder of Toby Woodley in the Kempton racecourse car park. There was precious little that I didn’t know already.

Only the Racing Post named me as one of the two men who had tried to save Toby’s life. I wondered how much flak I would receive from my colleagues for that.

The Daily Gazette, in contrast, named me as someone who was helping the police with their enquiries, which I suppose had been true at the time the paper had gone to press late the previous evening. The Gazette also speculated as to why one of its star reporters — their words — had been so cruelly cut down in the prime of his life. Was it something to do with the Daily Gazette’s on-going investigation into race fixing? Without actually saying so directly, the paper had used the obvious association of the Shillingford name to imply that it must have been me who had killed Toby Woodley to shut him up.

Perhaps I should contact my solicitor and sue them. But I knew of others who had sued the Daily Gazette

and, even though a few of them had won sizable damages, they always lost in the end. Newspapers in general were relentless and vindictive, and the Gazette led the way on both counts, hounding its detractors for ever with every slight misdemeanour, every speeding ticket, every marital indiscretion, even every faux pas being splashed across its front page in large bold type.

I took a taxi from Warwick station to the racecourse.

I was early.

I climbed up the stairs to the commentary box and sat silently looking out across the racecourse. There was a good hour and a half to go before the first race but I needed to think. In particular, I needed to think once again about why Clare might have killed herself, and also why anyone would murder Toby Woodley.

The phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Superintendent Cullen’s sergeant.

‘Mr Shillingford,’ he said, ‘did Mr Woodley have a black leather briefcase with him last night when you first saw him in the racecourse car park?’

‘I didn’t really notice,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘Mr Woodley was seen with it earlier in the racecourse press area, but now it’s missing.’

‘So was it a robbery that went too far?’ I asked.

‘Possibly,’ the sergeant replied. ‘We are trying to determine if the theft of the briefcase was the reason for the attack on Mr Woodley, or whether it was taken afterwards by a third party.’

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t remember seeing any briefcase.’

He thanked me anyway, and also told me that my car was now ready for collection and that the keys would be in the Kempton Park racecourse office, which was open late as they were racing there again that evening.

‘Thanks,’ I said, not really meaning it. Not having my car was a bore. I’d better look up the return train times from Warwick to London.

The sergeant hung up.

So the meeting at Kempton tonight was going ahead.