Bloodline

The desk had three drawers each side of a central knee hole, and the top two drawers on the left-hand side were full to overflowing with payment advice slips from Weatherbys, the company that administers racing’s finances. They detailed all of Clare’s rides, showing the riding fees paid to her bank account along with any prize money percentage she’d been entitled to, and she had clearly been stuffing them into the drawers for some time.

The bottom drawer on the left contained her bank statements and these were in better order. I picked up the top one, which was for the previous month.

I thought it unlikely that Clare had killed herself due to any money worries. According to the statement, just two and a half weeks before she died, her current account balance had been on the plus side of twenty thousand pounds.

I skimmed through the credits for the previous four months. Almost all were direct transfers from Weatherbys with only a couple of small amounts paid in by cheques. There were certainly no unexplained credits that matched the dates of the seven definites and four possibles, although any payment for her riding of Bangkok Flyer would not yet have appeared on a statement.

I filled another cardboard box with the bank statements and the payment advice slips and turned my attention to the drawers on the right.

The top one contained all her office supplies: a stapler, pens, notepads, stamps and paper clips. There were also several chequebook stubs, held together with a red rubber band, and two pairs of sunglasses, one with a broken arm.

In the second drawer there were various documents including Clare’s birth certificate, her passport, her jockey’s licence and a stack of investment portfolio valuations, all of which showed that Clare had been sensibly providing for her future after riding. A future that would now never materialize.

At the very back of the drawer, behind the investment valuations, I found a sealed white envelope.

I opened it.

The envelope contained two thousand pounds in cash, all of it in twenty-pound notes in packs of a thousand, each pack held together with an inch wide paper band.

I didn’t immediately assume that the cash was in any way sinister or irregular. Lots of people I knew kept a supply of cash in case of emergencies, although two thousand pounds was rather on the high side. However, the thing that did raise some doubts in my mind was that the bands around the cash had Barclays Bank printed on them, while I knew from her bank statements that Clare banked with HSBC. It was not easy to get that amount of cash from a bank where you didn’t have an account.

And my suspicions were raised a further fifty or so notches by what was written on the front of the envelope in capital letters: AS AGREED, A.

Had Clare been paid a couple of thousand pounds for not winning? And who was A?

I leaned back in her chair and wondered if she had fully understood what she had become involved in. It wasn’t just a game, it was a full-blown criminal fraud for gain, and discovery would have resulted in not just the loss of her career but also in the likely loss of her freedom.

I was suddenly very angry with her.

How could she have been so stupid?

And why had she told me it was all about power and control when, at the same time, she was accepting a couple of grand from someone? It didn’t make sense. All I could think was that she hadn’t thought the money important. After all, her bank balance and her investment portfolios were very healthy, and the cash had still been in a sealed envelope as if she hadn’t even bothered to count it.

I wondered if there were any fingerprints on the envelope, fingerprints that might help identify who had given it to Clare. Or maybe some DNA if someone had licked the envelope to stick it shut. The problem, however, was that I would have to go to the police with my suspicions in order for them to find out, and did I really want to do that? Yes, I did, if it was pertinent to Clare’s death, but not otherwise. The difficulty was knowing which was the case.

I placed the cash back in the envelope, being careful to hold it only by the edges, and then I put it into a cardboard box along with the other stuff.

That left only the bottom drawer on the right and that was full of press cuttings. I looked through the lot. All but two of them were about Clare herself, stretching back over four years. I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the other two was about me, a racing background piece done by a national daily a year or so previously. But it was the final cutting that was the most intriguing.

It was the two-page spread run in the Daily Gazette the previous May about race fixing, and it had been written by Toby Woodley.