Bloodline

‘Bleedin’ marvellous,’ Gareth exclaimed, staring closely at the monitor. ‘Crackin’ good picture too, considerin’ it only uses a normal internet wireless link.’

The wide-angle lens on the camera meant we could see all the way down the far side of Austin Reynolds’s car, and right down to ground level, with a particularly good shot of the offside rear wheel, behind which I could already see the corner of a brown envelope sticking out.

‘Can you run that back?’ I asked Gareth.

‘Sure,’ he said, and the image jerked slightly as he put the recording into reverse on the screen. Even played backwards, it was clear for us both to see Austin Reynolds as he’d got out of his car, opened the back door, removed his coat from the back seat, closed the door, put on the coat, and then leaned down to place a brown padded envelope behind the rear wheel, before walking off towards the entrance to the enclosures.

‘What’s in the envelope?’ Gareth asked, his inquisitiveness getting the better of him for a moment.

‘Just some stones,’ I said.

‘Diamonds?’ Gareth was suddenly quite interested.

‘No such luck,’ I said, laughing. ‘Just a few pieces of ordinary gravel to stop it blowing away.’

Gareth didn’t ask me why Austin was placing a worthless envelope behind his rear offside wheel, which I was then going to such trouble to watch — ask no bleedin’ questions, and he’d be told no bleedin’ lies.

‘How about the other camera?’ I asked.

‘No problem,’ he said, looking at another image on his monitor. ‘I’ll just go and make a small adjustment.’

He disappeared outside and I watched on the monitor as the picture moved slightly to the left and Austin’s car came clearly into view with the racecourse entrance beyond. This second camera was attached to the side of one of the receiving-dome frameworks on the roof of the signals-relay vehicle that was parked alongside the scanner.

Gareth returned and seemed satisfied with his handiwork.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘That should do it. Good job we’ve got no girls tonight or we’d be needin’ that camera.’

‘Girls’ in this instance did not refer necessarily to womankind. It was the nickname for any presenters, male or female, who sat in a glass-fronted box overlooking the parade ring to describe the horses before a race. Someone had once stated that they had chatted away to each other like a pair of schoolgirls, and the nickname had stuck.

The use of such paddock boxes used to be routine but they are now mostly seen at only the big meetings, when one of the small cameras would be employed to briefly show the ‘girls’, mostly men and usually sitting side by side wearing headphones.

No girls tonight.

Oh, God! Don’t remind me.

The blackmailer took the envelope at seven thirty-five, just as the seven runners for the fourth race were being mounted in the parade ring, and at the precise moment when Austin Reynolds was giving his jockey a leg-up into the saddle.

By that time it was dark and, just like the CCTV camera at the Hilton Hotel, Gareth’s two small cameras had automatically switched to infrared operation, both of them assisted by an infrared lamp positioned on the signals-relay vehicle that bathed the area in a radiation invisible to humans but clear as daylight to the cameras.

I nearly fell off my stool in the commentary box, from where I hadn’t moved since well before the first race. It was a good job that it didn’t happen actually during a race commentary, I thought, or I would have completely lost the plot.

Jack Laver had also worked his magic and had installed not one but three monitors in the commentary box, and the extra two showed the images from Gareth’s hidden cameras.

And there was the blackmailer, bold as brass, walking over to Austin’s car, bending down, removing the envelope, and stuffing it down his coat without stopping to open it to count his money — not that he’d find any money.

And just for good measure, as he had bent down, he had looked straight into the camera hidden in the Honda from a distance of just a couple of feet. The image may have been monochrome green, and he might have had zombie-like eyes, but his features were clear and distinct.

Almost before anyone would have had a chance to react, our man was up and gone, visible now only via the second camera, walking briskly back towards the racecourse entrance, once more to mingle with, and become anonymous amongst, the other racegoers and the attendant policemen.

The man’s head bobbed up and down slightly with each step, and I had seen that easy, large-stride, lolloping motion before in the video room at Charing Cross police station.

The man who collected Austin Reynolds’s envelope, with its filling of gravel, was the same man who had exited the Hilton Hotel just minutes after Clare had fallen to her death.

But this time, I’d seen his face. And, in spite of the greenness and the zombie eyes, I was certain I knew him.

I knew him very well indeed.