Bloodline

I had told DCI Perry about Mitchell Stacey, but did I really believe he could be responsible? He had certainly shown an ugly side to his nature in the car parks both at Newmarket and at Stratford, but he was a bull-in-a-china-shop sort who would surely confront me man to man rather than sneaking up and trying to strangle me to death anonymously.

But what other suspects did I have?

None.

And what could anyone else gain by killing me?

Surely Iain Ferguson didn’t imagine that his career would advance more quickly if I was, quite literally, taken out of the picture?

I must have drifted off to sleep eventually because the next thing I knew I was wide awake and listening hard for the noise that had awakened me.

There had been a metallic clank. Or had I dreamed it?

I lay in the dark, listening. There it was again, and it was outside.

I quietly stood up from the sofa and went over to the window, my heart again pounding hard inside my chest.

I pulled back the heavy curtains to find that it was daylight and people were already up and about. Racing folk start work early and the metallic clanks had been the sound of Geoffrey Grubb’s stable staff fetching metal buckets of water for the horses.

I laughed at myself. I must be getting paranoid.

I looked at my watch. It was half past six, I’d been asleep for only about two hours. But it was high time I got myself moving if I wasn’t going to be late.

I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of instant coffee, which went some way to waking me up properly. Then I made two more cups and took them up to the guest bedroom.

Angela and Emily were both still fast asleep, and it took me about a minute of gentle prodding to wake one of them.

‘Go away,’ Angela said, putting her head under the pillow.

‘I need to go in ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Shall I take your car? I could be back by ten past nine.’

‘Do what you like,’ she murmured.

I collected some clothes and my electric razor from my suitcase and went into the bathroom to shower, shave and dress. A feeling of lumps in my throat that had persisted all the previous night had finally begun to ease and my voice seemed a little more normal. And the little red spots in my eyes and on my face had almost faded away to nothing.

I emerged from the bathroom to find Emily standing there wrapped in a sheet, hopping from foot to foot.

‘We’re both coming with you,’ she said. ‘Though God knows why. Angela’s said something about dropping you off and then going home.’

‘But I need to go right now.’

‘So do I. I’m bursting.’ She grinned, pushed past me and closed the bathroom door.

I laughed. I decided I could get to like Emily, maybe to like her a lot. Just as long as someone didn’t succeed in killing me first.

‘What do you mean, someone tried to murder you? That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard for someone being late.’

‘It’s not an excuse,’ I said. ‘It’s true.’

I could tell that Lisa, the Morning Line producer, didn’t believe a word I’d said and she was clearly not happy. I’d only been five minutes late but there was another crisis going on with the programme’s main guest, who was going to be much later.

‘Someone really did try to strangle me last night,’ I said, ‘and I wonder if it has anything to do with the murder of Toby Woodley at Kempton on Wednesday.’

That shut her up, but only briefly.

‘And does it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘So where’s the story in that?’ she asked flatly. ‘You could at least have arrived with a smoking gun, or a knife with Toby Woodley’s blood on it.’

‘How about a bruised neck?’ I asked. ‘And a croaky voice?’

‘Not visual enough. But the voice may be a problem. We’ll have to say you’ve got a cold.’

‘Why not tell the truth?’

‘Too complicated,’ she said. ‘Now, have you done your homework on the two-year-olds?’

The big race at Newmarket that afternoon was the Millions Trophy, the richest contest for two-year-old horses in Europe.

‘Of course I have,’ I replied, knowing full well that I hadn’t really done enough. But I knew all the horses well from having seen them run previously.

‘Good, because you might have to talk about them for much longer than planned if that bloody Austin Reynolds doesn’t turn up.’

‘Austin Reynolds?’ I said, surprised. ‘I thought the guest was Paul James.’

‘Paul had a fall last night at Wolverhampton and has cried off. Austin agreed to step in but now he’s called to say his car won’t start and he’ll be late.’

‘But he only lives in the town,’ I said. ‘Can’t someone go and fetch him?’

‘Seems he’s coming up from London.’ She didn’t sound pleased.

Austin Reynolds, the nearly man of British racing, was the trainer of Tortola Beach, one of the runners in that afternoon’s big race.

Tortola Beach had been one of the definites that I’d found in the RacingTV database. Clare had purposely ridden it to lose in a race at Doncaster the previous August.

And Austin Reynolds also trained Bangkok Flyer.

‘Thirty minutes to air time, everybody,’ shouted Matthew, the floor manager.