Bloodline

‘Something about you being strangled last week.’ I could tell from his tone that he didn’t believe it.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That was why I crashed my car into Angela and Nicholas’s gatepost on Friday night.’

‘What nonsense,’ he said. ‘You were drunk. I heard one of those policemen say so. He said you must have been blind drunk to hit that post so hard.’

‘Dad, I was not drunk. Someone was trying to kill me.’

‘Hmph.’ He clearly still didn’t believe me.

‘And whoever it was tried to murder me again on Sunday night.’

‘But why would anyone want to murder you?’ He said it in a manner that I felt was rather belittling, as if I wasn’t worthy of being murdered.

But it was still a good question.

I’d been asking myself the same thing for almost thirty-six hours, since the disaster in the Three Horseshoes car park.

And I hadn’t yet come up with a credible answer.

‘I don’t know, Dad,’ I said. ‘But I intend finding out.’

‘And how are you going to do that?’ he asked, his voice again full of doubt that I could do anything. Our little moment of mutual understanding that had existed at Clare’s funeral had clearly evaporated.

I decided to ignore him. He had considered my whole life a disaster from the moment I’d told him, aged seventeen, that I wasn’t going to university. In his narrow opinion, not getting a degree was tantamount to failure, and the fact that I now earned at least twice what he ever had was completely immaterial.

Use your talents wisely. That’s why you have them.

I did have talents and I suddenly realized how I could use them to unravel this mystery. I just hoped it was wise to do so.

I drove my rented Honda to Brighton races, checking frequently that I was not being followed.

I arrived early, well before the racing was due to start, as there were people I needed to see.

‘No problem,’ said Derek, the RacingTV producer, when I asked him about my plans for the following evening at Kempton. ‘Night racing is always less frenetic than the afternoons because there’s only ever a single meeting, so we’ll have a full half an hour between races. Masses of time.’

‘Dead easy,’ said Jack Laver, the technician who ran the racecourse broadcast centre.

More of the easy, I thought, and less of the dead.

I always liked racing at Brighton. It is one of the more unusual of the British racecourses in so far as, like Epsom and Newmarket, it is not a complete loop but a long curving mile-and-a-half horseshoe-shaped track that runs along the undulating ridge of Race Hill, part of the South Downs range of chalk hills, two miles to the east of the city centre.

The view from the top of the grandstand on that particular October Tuesday was magnificent. The Indian summer of the past weeks had been swept away by a series of Atlantic weather fronts that had finally cleared through overnight, leaving cool, crisp conditions with spectacular visibility.

Away to my right, the bright sunlight reflected with a million flashes off the surface of the sea and, in the far distance, I could see a line of shipping making its way eastward towards the Straits of Dover.

To my left, I looked out across the roofs of the housing estate in the valley below towards where the stalls were being towed into position at the one-mile start, ready for the first race.

It was a truly beautiful day, the light azure sky contrasting with the lush dark green of the turf and the deep blues of the English Channel.

I sat on the chair in the commentary box and badly missed Clare. She used to ride frequently at Brighton, often staying the night before or after racing with our parents at Oxted. She had last been here for the racing festival in August and I could still remember her delight at riding three winners on the opening day while I’d been commentating.

I smiled at the memory.

There had been nothing strange or unusual about her riding on that occasion, just magnificent judgement and timing as she had swept up the hill to win the Brighton Mile Challenge Trophy, the big race of the day, by the shortest of short-heads.

Commentators were expected to be unbiased and objective, but there had been nothing impartial and balanced about my words that day as I had cheered with delight as she had pulled off the last-gasp victory.

Now it seemed such a long time ago, and I grieved for the loss of any more such joyous days.

I went down to the Press Room to find myself a bite to eat and a cup of coffee.

Jim Metcalf was there ahead of me and he’d already eaten all the ham and mustard sandwiches from the selection provided.

‘Did you see my piece today about you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘But I’ve heard about it from my father. He says it’s a load of rubbish.’

Jim tossed a copy of it to me across the room. ‘It’s only what was in that statement of yours.’

‘Yeah, but UK Today must be desperately short of news to have run that today when it happened last Friday,’ I said. ‘And, anyway, you’ve completely missed the real story.’