Isank deeper into depression as the Royal Ascot crowd enthusiastically cheered home another short-priced winning favorite. To be fair, it wasn’t clinical depression-I knew all about that-but it was pretty demoralizing, just the same.

I asked myself yet again what I was doing here. I had never really enjoyed coming to Ascot, especially for these five days in June. It was usually much too hot to be wearing morning dress, or else it rained, and I would get soaked. I preferred the informality of my usual haunts, the smaller steeplechase tracks of the Midlands. But my grandfather, who had started the family business, had always used the fact that we stood at the Royal Meeting as one of our major marketing tools. He claimed that it gave us some form of respectability, something he had always craved.

We were bookmakers. Pariahs of the racing world. Disliked by all, and positively hated by many, including large numbers of those whose very livelihoods depended on gambling. I had discovered over the years that my clients were never my friends. Whereas City investors might develop a close relationship with their stockbrokers, punters never wanted to be seen socializing with their bookies. Most of my regulars didn’t even know my name, nor did they want to. I suppose that was fair. I didn’t know most of their names either. We were simply participants in transactions where each of us was trying to bankrupt the other. I suppose it was a situation not really likely to engender mutual respect.

“Score on seven,” said a tall, top-hatted young man thrusting a banknote towards me. I glanced up at our board to check the odds we were offering on horse number seven.

“Twenty pounds on number seven at eleven-to-two,” I said, taking his note and adding it to the wad of others in my left hand.

A small printer in front of me whirred and disgorged a ticket that I handed to the man. He snatched it from me and moved quickly away into the throng as if he didn’t want to be seen fraternizing with the enemy. His place in front of me was taken by a short, portly gentleman whose multicolored vest was fighting a losing battle against his expansive stomach. He was one of my regular Royal Ascot customers. I knew him only as A.J., but I had no idea what the A.J. stood for.

“Hundred on Silverstone to win,” he wheezed at me, holding out some folded twenty-pound notes in his chubby fingers.

“Hundred on two at even money,” I said, taking his cash and checking the amount. Another betting slip appeared out of the small printer as if by magic, and I passed it over. “Good luck, A.J.,” I said to him, not really meaning it.

“Huh?” he said, somewhat surprised by my comment.

“Good luck,” I repeated.

“Thanks,” he wheezed, and departed.

In the good old days, when bookmaking was an art rather than a science, every transaction was written down in “the book” by an assistant. Nowadays, as in most things, it was on a computer that everything was recorded. The same computer that printed the betting slips.

It kept a running tally of all the bets that we had taken, and also constantly updated our profit or liability for every possible outcome of the race. Gone were the days when it was down to the gut reaction of the bookmaker to decide when and by how much to change the prices we displayed on our fancy electronic board. Now the computer decided. Bookmaking was no longer by instinct, it was by fractions.

When I had started working for my grandfather I had been his “runner.” It had been my job to take cash from his hand and use it to back a horse with other bookmakers, a horse on which he had taken some large bets, in order to spread his risk. If the horse was beaten, he didn’t make so much, but, conversely, if it won, he didn’t lose so much either. Now even that was done by computer, betting and laying horses on the Internet exchanges, even during the actual running of the race. Somehow, the romance and the fun had disappeared.

Just as mobile phones have caused the demise of the tic-tac men, computer gambling was now killing off any bookmakers with personality who were prepared to back their hunches. And I wasn’t at all sure if it was good for the punters, or for racing.

“Twenty pounds, horse two,” said another man taking the plunge.

“Twenty on two at evens,” I repeated, not so much for the man in front of me, more for Luca Mandini, my assistant, to enter the bet on his computer.

Luca was my magician, my Internet whiz kid with a razor-sharp mathematical brain who stood right behind me. His fingers tapped his keyboard, and the betting slip duly appeared from the printer.

Without Luca, I was sure I would have given up by now, forced out by the relentless bullyboy tactics of the big bookmaking firms who did all they could to squeeze the profit out of the small independents. It was the same in the grocery trade, where the big supermarkets used their muscle to force the small shops to close. They didn’t necessarily do it on purpose; they just did it in their never-ending drive for bottom-line figures to satisfy the expectations of some faceless group of shareholders. I was the sole shareholder in my business, and I felt the pain.

I lived in daily fear that Luca would be enticed away from me by some other outfit, maybe one of those big firms who, it seemed, would stop at nothing to put the likes of me out of business in their greedy quest to capture a larger share of the betting market.

I took the slip from the printer and handed it to the man standing patiently in front of me.

“Are you Teddy Talbot?” he asked.

“Who wants to know?” I asked him back while looking beyond for my next customer.

“I know your grandfather,” said the man, ignoring my question.

My grandfather’s name had indeed been Teddy Talbot, and it was his name that was still prominently displayed above our prices board next to me. The slogan actually read TRUST TEDDY TALBOT, as if the extra word might somehow encourage punters to bet with us rather than the next man.

“My grandfather’s dead,” I said, still looking beyond him and hoping that he would move away. He was disrupting my business.

“Oh,” he said. “When did he die?”

I looked down at him from my lofty position on a foot-high metal platform. He was gray haired, in his late fifties or early sixties, and wearing a cream linen suit over a light blue shirt that was open at the neck. I envied the coolness of his attire. “Look,” I said, “I’m busy. If you want to talk, come back later-after the last. Now, please move aside.”

“Oh,” he said again. “Sorry.”

He moved away, but only a short distance, from where he stood and watched me. I found it quite disconcerting.

“Weighed in,” announced someone over the public-address system.

A lady in a straw hat came up and held out a slip to me. I took it from her. TRUST TEDDY TALBOT was printed across the top, as it was on all our betting slips. It was a winning ticket from the previous race, the first of rather too many. Nowadays, the potential win amount had to be printed on the slip, so I scanned the details and paid her out for her win, tearing the slip in half and placing the bits into a hopper to my left. The transaction was wordless-no communication was necessary.

A line of winning-ticket holders was forming in front of me.

Betsy, Luca’s girlfriend, came and stood on my left. She paid out the winners while I took some of their winnings back as new bets on the next race. Luca scanned his screen and adjusted the prices on our board according to the bets I took and also the bets and lays he made on the Internet gambling exchanges via his computer behind me. It was like a balancing act, comparing potential gains against potential losses, always trying to keep both possibilities within acceptable ranges.

It was my surname on our board, and I was the handler of the punters’ cash, but, in truth, it was Luca with his computer who was the real bookmaker, betting online and setting our board prices to always try to keep our predicted return greater than one hundred percent, as indicated on his screen. Anything over a hundred percent was called the “overround” and represented profit, less than a hundred indicated loss. Our aim was to keep the overround at about nine percent, but all the mathematics relied on us taking bets in the correct proportions for our odds, something we tried to ensure by continually adjusting our prices. However, the punters didn’t always cooperate with our plans, so Luca tried his best to compensate by betting and laying on the Internet.

The computer was both our best friend and our worst enemy. We liked to think that it was our slave, doing the jobs we gave it more efficiently than we could have done them ourselves. But, in reality, the computer was the master, and we were its slaves. The analysis and figures on its screen controlled our decisions without question. Technology, rather than insight, was now the idol we worshipped.

And so our day progressed. I became hotter and hotter, both over and under the collar, as the sun broke through the veil of cloud, while heavily backed, short-priced winners continued to make it a great day for the punters while pushing down our percentage return into the red.

I didn’t need to wear my stifling morning suit, as our pitch wasn’t actually in the Royal Enclosure. But we were close to the enclosure rail, in a prime position, and many of my clients wore the coveted name badges of those admitted to the inner sanctum. Besides, my grandfather had always worn formal dress at this meeting, and, since my eighteenth birthday, he had insisted that I did so too. At least he hadn’t decreed that we should have top hats as well.

I had never in fact applied to be admitted to the Royal Enclosure because there were no bookmaker pitches on that side of the fence. I did sometimes wonder if being a bookmaker would somehow disqualify one from admittance, like being a divorcée had once done.

Another favorite won the fifth race to huge cheers from the packed grandstand. I sighed audibly.

“It’s not so bad,” said Luca in my ear. “I had most of that covered.”

“Good,” I said over my shoulder.

The string of short-priced winners had forced us to try to limit our losses by adjusting down the offered prices on our board. Unlike in a shop, punters went in search of the highest prices as that represented a better return for their bets, provided, of course, they won. So lower prices meant that we didn’t do as much business. Even our regular clients tended to go elsewhere, chasing the fractionally better odds offered by others-there was absolutely no loyalty amongst punters.

The man in the linen suit still stood about five yards away and watched.

“Hold the fort,” I said to Betsy. “I need a pee.”

“Will do,” she said.

I walked across to the man.

“What exactly do you want?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” he said defensively. “I was just watching.”

“Why?” I demanded again.

“No reason,” he said.

“Then why don’t you go and watch someone else instead?” I said forcefully.

“I’m not doing any harm,” he almost wailed.

“Maybe not, but I don’t like it,” I said. “So go away. Now.”

I walked past him and into the grandstand in search of the Gents’.

When I returned, he’d gone.

“Thanks,” I said to Betsy as I again stood up on the platform.

“Come on,” I shouted at the small crowd in front of me. “Who wants a wager?” I glanced up at the board. “Eleven-to-four the field.”

There were a few takers but business was slow. As every race seemed to be a losing one from our point of view, it was probably just as well. At this rate, the more business we did, the more we lost.

However, there was some respite when the last race of the day was won by a twenty-to-one outsider, the favorite having been boxed in against the rails until it was too late.

“That saved our bacon,” said Luca with a broad grin.

“Saved your job, you mean,” I said, smiling back at him.

“In your dreams,” he replied.

In my nightmares, more like.

“So what’s the total?” I asked him.

In the good old days, it was easy to tell how we had done simply by the size of the wad of banknotes in my pocket, but these days we also had to consider our credit card balance with the Internet exchanges.

“Down fifteen hundred and sixty-two,” he said with certainty, consulting his machine.

“Could be worse,” I said, but I couldn’t actually remember a previous first-day Tuesday at Royal Ascot when we had lost money.

“Sure could,” he said. “If the favorite had won the last, we would have been off another grand more at least.”

I raised my eyebrows at him, and he grinned. “I didn’t manage to take as much of the favorite as I wanted on the exchanges. Damn Internet link went down.”

“Just us or everyone?” I asked seriously.

“Dunno,” he said, intrigued. “I’ll find out.”

Luca and I started to pack up our equipment as Betsy paid out the occasional winning ticket. Most of the racegoers were streaming for the exits to try to beat the traffic jams, and, no doubt, there would be more winning tickets from the last race handed in the following day.

We kept a record on our computer of all the bets taken, both winning and losing, and it never ceased to amaze me how many of the winning tickets were never cashed. Presumably some were lost, and perhaps some inebriated punters didn’t realize they were winners, but almost every day there were two or three winning bets that were never claimed. “Sleepers,” they were called, and they were like a cash bonus for us. But it was one we could never completely rely on. Our tickets didn’t have an expiry date on them, and, only the day before, I’d had to cash a sleeper from the Royal Ascot Meeting of the previous year. Maybe it had been hiding for twelve months in the deep recesses of someone’s morning-coat pocket, or tucked into the hatband of a topper, waiting quietly to be discovered and paid out.

The crowd had mostly dispersed to the parking lots by the time Luca, Betsy and I had packed up the majority of our gear and loaded it onto our little wheeled trolley that ingeniously doubled up as a base for our computer during the racing. The betting ring was deserted save for the other bookmakers, who, like us, were packing up amongst the detritus of a day’s gambling: discarded newspapers, torn-up betting slips, crumpled coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches.

“Do you fancy a beer?” Luca asked as I pulled one of the elastic straps over our equipment.

“I’d love one,” I said, looking up at him. “But I can’t. I have to go and see Sophie.”

He nodded at me knowingly. “Some other time, then. Betsy and I are going to go and have one, if that’s all right with you. We’re taking the train into town later to go to the party in the park.”

“Right,” I said. “You go on. I’ll pack up the rest of the stuff.”

“Can you manage?” he asked.

He knew I could. I did it all the time. But this little exchange was his way of not taking it completely for granted.

I smiled at him. “No problem,” I said, waving a dismissing hand at them. “Go on. I’ll see you both in the morning. Usual time.”

“OK,” said Luca. “Thanks.”

Luca and Betsy went off together, leaving me standing alone next to the tarpaulin-covered equipment trolley. I watched them go, Betsy hand in hand with her young man. At one point they stopped and embraced before disappearing out of my sight into the grandstand. Just another happy couple on their way, I assumed, to the bandstand bar, where there was usually an impromptu drinking party after each day’s racing.

I sighed.

I supposed I must have been that happy once. But it had been a long time ago. What, I wondered, had happened to all the happy times? Had they deserted me for ever?

I wiped my brow with the sleeve of my jacket and thought about how I would absolutely adore a nice cooling beer. I wanted to change my mind and go to find the other two, but I knew that it would end up being more trouble than it was worth. It always was.

I sighed again and stacked the last few of our equipment boxes onto the trolley, then fixed the rest of the elastic cords across the green tarpaulin. I took hold of the handle and released the brakes from the wheels. As I had told Luca, I could just about manage it alone, although it was always easier with two, especially up the concrete slope towards the tunnel through the grandstand. I tugged hard on the handle.

“Do you want a hand with that?” a voice shouted from behind me.

I stopped pulling and turned around. It was the man in the cream linen suit. He was about fifteen yards away, leaning up against the metal fence between the betting ring and the Royal Enclosure. I hadn’t noticed him as we’d packed up, and I wondered how long he’d been there watching me.

“Who’s offering?” I called back to him.

“I knew your grandfather,” he said again while walking over to me.

“You said,” I replied.

But lots of people knew my grandfather, and nearly all of them hadn’t liked him. He had been a typically belligerent bookie who had treated both his customers and his fellow bookmakers with almost the same degree of contempt that they clearly held for him. He had been what many might have called a “character” on the racetrack, standing out in all weathers at an age when most men would be content to put their feet up in retirement. Yes, indeed, lots of people had known my grandfather, but he’d had precious few friends, if any.

“When did he die?” asked the man, taking hold of one side of the handle.

We pulled the trolley together in silence up the slope to the grandstand and stopped on the flat of the concourse. I turned and looked at my helper. His gray hair was accentuated by the deeply tanned skin of his face. I reckoned it wasn’t an English-summer tan.

“Seven years ago,” I said.

“What did he die from?” he asked. I could detect a slight accent in his voice, but I couldn’t quite place it.

“Nothing, really,” I said. “Just old age.”And bloody-mindedness, I thought. It was as if he had decided that he’d had his allocated stretch in this world and it was time to go to the next. He had returned from Cheltenham races and had seemingly switched off inside on the Friday, and then he had expired on the Sunday evening. The post-mortem pathologist couldn’t say why he had died. All his bits had apparently been working quite well and his brain had been sharp. I was sure he had simply willed himself to death.

“But he wasn’t very old,” said the man.

“Seventy-eight,” I said. “And two days.”

“That’s not old,” said the man, “not these days.”

“It was old enough for him,” I said.

The man looked at me quizzically.

“My grandfather decided that his time was up, so he lay down and died.”

“You’re kidding?” he said.

“Nope,” I said. “Absolutely serious.”

“Silly old bugger,” he said, almost under his breath.

“Exactly how well did you know my grandfather?” I asked him.

“I’m his son,” he said.

I stared at him with an open mouth.

“So you must be my uncle,” I said.

“No,” he said, staring back. “I’m your father.”

But you can’t be my father” I said, nonplussed.

Are you telling us that you didn’t know your father existed?” the detective chief inspector asked.

“Well,” I said slowly, “yes and no.”

“Which?” he demanded. “Yes, obviously I knew that he existed thirty-seven years ago, but, no, I didn’t know until today that he still existed.” It was confusing. After all, he didn’t now exist, not as a living being anyway.

I was again with Detective Sergeant Murray and DC Walton, but we had transferred as a group from Wexham Park Hospital to Windsor Police Station, swapping the grieving families’ room for a stark police interview room with no windows. The chairs at each place, I noticed, could have come from the same manufacturer’s batch.

We had been joined by Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, who did not extend the nicety of expressing sympathy for my dead father. I decided I didn’t like him very much, and he clearly had no good feelings towards me either.

“A bookmaker, eh?” he’d said by way of introduction, curling his lip. He, like many, clearly believed that all bookmakers were villains unless proved otherwise, and even then there’d be some doubt remaining.

“Are you absolutely certain that this man was your father?” He stabbed his finger at the driver’s license that sat on the table in front of me, its black-and-white photograph clearly being that of the man I had left lying dead under a sheet at the hospital.

“No,” I said, looking up at the detective chief inspector, “I can’t say I am absolutely certain. But I still think he was. It was not so much what he looked like or what he said but his mannerisms and demeanor that convinced me. He picked at his fingers in the same way I watched my grandfather do a million times, and there was something about his lolloping walk that is somehow reminiscent of my own.”

“Then why is this license in the name of someone called Alan Grady?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Is it genuine?”

“We’re checking,” he said.

“Well, I still believe the man in that photograph is my father.” The detective chief inspector clearly didn’t share my confidence. “The DNA will tell us for sure one way or another,” he said. I had been asked for, and had given, a sample of my DNA at the hospital. “And you say he’s lived in Australia for the past thirty years or so?”

“That’s what he told me, yes,” I replied.

“And you believed him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” I said. “Why would he lie to me?”

“Mr. Talbot,” he said, “in my experience, people lie all the time.” He leaned forward and looked at me closely. “And I think you might be lying to me right now.”

“Think away,” I said. “But I’m not.”

“We’ll see,” said the detective chief inspector, standing up abruptly and walking out of the room.

“Chief Inspector Llewellyn has left the room,” said the detective sergeant for the benefit of the audio-recording machine that sat on the table to my left.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“Mr. Talbot,” said the detective sergeant, “you can leave anytime you like. You are not under arrest.”

Maybe not, I thought, but I had been questioned “under caution.”

“Then I would like to go home,” I said. “I have to be back at Ascot racetrack at ten-thirty in the morning.”

“Interview terminated,” said the detective sergeant, glancing up at the clock on the wall, “at twenty-two forty-five.” He pushed the STOP button on the front of the recording machine.

“Have you spoken to any of the other people who were there in the parking lot?” I asked him as we walked along the corridor.

“We continue to make inquiries,” he answered unhelpfully.

“Please can I have a photocopy of that driver’s license?” I asked him.

“What for?” he said.

“The photograph. The only one I have of my father was taken before I was born. I would like to have another.”

“Er,” said the detective sergeant, looking around at Detective Constable Walton, “I’m not sure that I can.”

“Please,” I said in my most charming manner.

Constable Walton shrugged his shoulders.

“OK,” said the sergeant. “But don’t tell the chief inspector.”

I wouldn’t, I assured him. I wouldn’t have told the chief inspector if his fly had been undone.

Sergeant Murray disappeared for a moment and returned with a blown-up copy of the license, which I gratefully folded and placed in my trouser pocket alongside the envelope of cash.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said wistfully. “Lost my dad too, about three months ago.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied. “Cancer.”

He walked me to the door of the police station, where we shook hands warmly, the comradeship of those with recently deceased fathers.

“Now, how do I get home?” I said, turning my morning-coat collar up against the chill of an English June night.

“Where’s your car?” he asked.

“In the parking lot at Ascot, I expect. That’s where I left it.” With, I hoped, all our equipment still safely in the trunk. The uniformed boys had helped me load everything in there before insisting that they drive me to the hospital. “You might have a concussion from that kick,” one of them had said. “Better safe than sorry.”

So here I was in Windsor town center at eleven o’clock at night with no transport, and I knew there was no chance of getting a hotel room anywhere near Ascot during the Royal Meeting.

“Where’s home?” asked the sergeant.

“Kenilworth,” I said, “in Warwickshire.”

“Outside our patch,” said Sergeant Murray.

“Does that mean you won’t send me home in a police car?” I asked him.

“Er”-he seemed to be undecided-“I suppose it does. You’ll have to get a taxi.”

“Do you have any idea how much a taxi to Kenilworth would cost?” I asked in exasperation. “Especially at this time of night.”

“I could arrange a lift to Ascot to get your car,” he said.

“It’ll probably be locked in the parking lot,” I said. “Or towed away.”

“Sorry, sir,” he said rather formally. “Nothing else I can do.”

“Don’t you have a spare cell I could use?” I asked.

“We can’t go offering cells as hotel rooms, now can we?” he said sarcastically.

“Why not?” I said. “If I was drunk and disorderly, you’d put me in a cell to sleep it off.”

“But you’re not,” he said.

“I could be,” I said, grinning at him. “It’d be cheaper than taking a taxi to Kenilworth.” And back again tomorrow, I thought. Much cheaper, even allowing for a fine, and more comfortable than sleeping in my car.

“I’ll see,” he said. “Wait here.”

He disappeared into the police station for a few minutes.

“OK,” he said. “On compassionate grounds only. I’ve had to say that you are distraught over the death of your father and in no state to be allowed to go home. And, for God’s sake, don’t tell Chief Inspector Llewellyn. He thinks you’re up to your neck in something dodgy.”

“Well, he’ll know where to find me, then.”

Sophie was still cross when I went to see her, but at least she was speaking to me, albeit with thinly disguised anger.

It was after eight by the time I made it to the hospital near Hemel Hempstead.

“I thought you weren’t coming again,” she said with a degree of accusation.

“I said I would come,” I said, smiling at her and trying to lighten the atmosphere. “And here I am, my darling.”

“What have you done to your eye?” she demanded.

“Silly, really,” I said. “I caught it on the corner of the kitchen cupboard, you know, the one by the fridge.” We had both done it before, often, though neither of us had actually cut ourselves in the process.

“Were you drunk?” she asked.

“No,” I said, “I was not. I was making tea. To be precise, I was getting the milk out.”

I leaned down to give her a kiss, and she made a point of smelling my breath. Finding no trace of the demon drink, she relaxed somewhat and even smiled at me.

“You should be more careful,” she said.

“I’ll try,” I replied, smiling back at her.

“Have you had a good day?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Particularly good. All six favorites lost, and we recouped the entire amount of yesterday’s losses and then some.” I decided against mentioning anything about my visit from a detective chief inspector of police or the discovery that my father had murdered my mother.

“Good,” she said, sounding genuinely pleased.

We sat together in armchairs in front of the television in what might have been a normal domestic situation if not for the multiadjustable hospital bed in the corner of the room and the white-smock-uniformed male nurse who brought us in a tray of coffee, together with Sophie’s medication.

“Good evening, Mr. Talbot,” the nurse said to me. “Glad you could make it tonight.” He smiled. “Your wife was so disappointed yesterday, as were we all.”

He gave the impression that I was being officially told off, which I probably was. Sophie’s treatment relied heavily on having a steady routine with no surprises.

“Good evening, Jason,” I said to the nurse, smiling back and resisting the temptation to make excuses. Now was neither the time nor the place.

“My, what have you done to yourself?” he said, looking at my face.

“Head-butted our kitchen cabinet,” I said.

Jason raised his eyebrows in a questioning Oh yes, pull the other one fashion.

“We do it all the time,” said Sophie, coming to my aid. “We ought to get that cupboard moved.”

Jason relaxed and seemed satisfied that my black eye was accidental.

“The guest suite is available if you want to stay,” he said with a smile, his admonishment for yesterday’s absence clearly over.

“Thank you,” I said, “but I can’t. I need to go home and change.” I also decided against explaining that I had worn exactly the same clothes for two days running and why. “But I can stay for a while longer.”

Sophie and I watched the television news together before I departed into the night and the road to Kenilworth, and home.

Our house was a 1950s-built, three-bedroom semidetached in what was still called Station Road, although the railway station to which it referred had closed down in the 1960s. The previous owners had transformed the postage-stamp-sized front garden into an off-road parking space, and I gratefully pulled my Volvo into it at ten minutes to midnight.

As usual, the house was cold and lonely. Even on a midsummer’s day it rarely could be described as warm or cozy. It was as if, somehow, the very bricks and mortar were aware of the daily sadness and despair experienced by the occupants within.

Sophie and I had moved here from a rented one-bedroom over-shop flat soon after our wedding. Her parents hadn’t approved of the union. They were God-fearing Methodists who believed that bookmakers were agents of the Devil. So it felt as if we were both orphans, but we didn’t care. We were in love and we only needed each other.

The house in Station Road was the first home we had owned and we knew it would be a struggle. The mortgage company loan had been to their utmost limit, and, at first, Sophie had worked in the evenings behind the bar at the local pub in order to help meet the repayments. I had toiled six days a week on the Midlands racetracks, and, quite quickly, we were able to pay down the mortgage to a more manageable level where we could spend more time together at home.

I had always wanted children, and I soon made mental plans to turn the smallest bedroom into a nursery. Perhaps it was the pain of having endured a largely abandoned and unhappy childhood that had made me so keen to nurture the next generation. Not that my grandparents hadn’t been loving and caring. They had. But they had also been somewhat distant and secretive. Now I knew why.

“How could God have taken Mummy and Daddy to heaven?” I had constantly asked my grandmother, who, of course, had no answer to give me. Now I discovered that it had been my father, not God, who had been responsible for my mother’s death, and he, far from going to heaven, had gone to Australia. The car crash story had been as convenient as it was untrue.

In spite of her longing for a child, Sophie’s illness had soon put our family plans on hold.

All had seemed fine until, one night, I woke to find her side of our bed empty. It was half past three in the morning, and I could hear her somewhere downstairs, singing loudly, so I went to investigate.

She was in the kitchen and had clearly been there for quite a while. Every shelf and cupboard had been emptied, their contents stacked both on the kitchen table and on the floor, and she had been cleaning.

She had seen me come into the room but had carried on singing even louder than before. She simply couldn’t stop. And so it had gone on all night and into the following day. I couldn’t reason with her. Eventually, in desperation and fear, I had called the doctor.

This manic state had lasted for nearly a week, with her spending much of the time in bed asleep and heavily sedated. When awake, she had hardly stopped talking or singing, and she was greatly irritated when interrupted.

And then, almost as quickly, she had dived into a deep depression, refusing to eat and blaming herself for all the ills of the world. It was irrational and obsessive behavior, but she believed it absolutely. Sedatives were exchanged for antidepressants, and for a while we didn’t seem to know whether she was going up or down.

Mental illness can be very frightening, and I was utterly terrified. Physical disease usually manifests itself with visible symptoms-a rash, a fever or a swelling. And there is nearly always some pain or discomfort to which the patient can point and describe.

However, a sickness of the mind, and its function, has no such easy-to-understand physical indicators. Sufferers appear just as they did before the disorder hit, and often, as in Sophie’s case, have no comprehension that they are ill. To them, their behavior appears quite normal and logical. It is everyone else who’s mad for even suggesting they need psychiatric help in the first place.

The plans for a family that I had initially placed on hold had, by now, been well and truly switched off. The little bedroom, which had long ago become my office and storeroom, would, it seemed, never contain a cot and teddy bears, at least not while Sophie and I owned the house.

It was not just that Sophie was too often ill to look after a child, it was also the risk that a pregnancy would cause an upset to her hormones that could tip her over entirely into a void from which she would never recover. Postnatal depression can severely debilitate even the sanest of mothers, so what might it do to Sophie? And even though a professor of psychiatry had told us it wasn’t likely, there was some evidence to suggest that manic depression could be a hereditary condition. I was wary of creating a manic-depressive child. For ten years I had witnessed the destruction from within of a bubbly, lively and fun-loving young woman. I didn’t relish the thought of the same thing happening to my children.

I supposed I still loved Sophie, although after five months of medically enforced separation I was sometimes unsure. It was true that, during those months, there had occasionally been some good moments, but they had been rare, and mostly we existed in limbo, our lives on pause, waiting for someone to push the PLAY button if things improved.

We had definitely been dealt a bum hand in life. Sophie’s parents, typically and loudly, had blamed me for their daughter’s illness, while I silently blamed them back for rejecting her over her choice of husband. The doctors wouldn’t say for sure if that had been a factor in her illness, but it certainly hadn’t helped.

Alice, Sophie’s younger sister, constantly said I was a saint to stick by her all these years. But what else could I do? It wasn’t her fault she was ill. What sort of husband would desert his wife in her time of need? “In sickness and in health,” we had vowed, “until death us do part.” Perhaps, I thought, death would indeed be the only way out of this nightmare.

I shook myself out of these morbid thoughts, let myself into the house and went straight to bed.

There was an unusual feeling of bonhomie amongst the bookies in the ring as we waited to see who had been taken to the cleaners. Except, that is, for the on-course teams from the big outfits, who had been as much in the dark as the rest of us and who would, no doubt, carry the blame for something over which they had had no control.

Rumors abounded, most of which were false, but by the end of the day there was pretty strong evidence that all the big boys had been hit to some extent. That was, if they ever paid out. Bookmakers in general, and the betting shop chains in particular, didn’t like losing and were quick to refuse to honor bets. They seemed to believe that fixing the starting prices was their right and privilege, and theirs alone.

From our own point of view, it hadn’t made a whole lot of difference. I had taken two large bets of a thousand pounds each, with quite a few smaller ones following as punters chased the big money. Three-quarters of that had been laid by Luca with other bookies as their prices had tumbled, and he had laid a little more on the Internet during the actual running of the race. Both the horses that had been heavily backed with us had lost, of course, whilst we had taken only a very few last-minute wagers on the favorite on which we’d had to pay out, including that fifty pounds to win from A.J. Most of the bets with us on Brent Crude had been taken earlier in the day when his price had been even money, not fifteen-to-eight. Unlike the betting shops, we always paid out at the price offered at the time of the bet and not on the starting price. A satisfactory result all around, I thought. And a bloody nose to the bullies to boot. Now, that was a real bonus.

There were five other items hidden in the space, in addition to the money.

One was a South African passport in the name of Willem Van Buren.

Another was a small polythene bag containing what appeared at first to be ten grains of rice, but, on closer examination, were clearly man-made. They looked like frosted glass.

Two others were photocopied booklets about six by eight inches with DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION printed along the top of the front cover.

And the fifth was a flat black object about six inches long and two inches wide with some buttons on it. At first I thought it was a television remote control, but it didn’t appear to have VOLUME and CHANNEL buttons, just 0 to 9 plus an ENTER button. I pushed them all. Nothing happened. I turned it over. There was a battery compartment on the back that, I discovered, was empty, so I took the device through to the kitchen and scavenged the battery from the kitchen clock.

I pushed the buttons again and, this time, was rewarded by a small red light that appeared in the top right-hand corner for a moment before going out. Nothing else happened. I pointed the thing at the television and pushed again. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened other than the flash of the little red light.

I didn’t know much about electronics in general, or TV remotes in particular, but I did know that they had to be programmed correctly.

I would show the thing to Luca, I thought. He was not only my whiz kid at using the computer, he also understood what went on under its cover-Luca had even worked as an electronics maintenance man briefly before he transferred to the racetrack. My own technical ability ran simply to giving something a sharp clout with my hand if it failed to perform as expected.

I put the battery back in the kitchen clock, which I reset to the right time of twenty to one. I had to be back on the road by nine o’clock in the morning.

I suddenly felt very hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d had a bowl of cereal and a slice of toast for breakfast sixteen hours earlier. I hadn’t had the time.

I looked in the fridge. There wasn’t much there. I usually went to the supermarket once a week on a Sunday to get the essentials like milk, bread and those ready-cooked meals I could simply stuff in the microwave. But this last weekend I had somehow forgotten to go. I shook the plastic milk bottle. There was only enough left for a small bowl of cereal and maybe a cup of coffee in the morning. The loaf of bread was down to the last few slices, and they looked to have passed their best with green mold spots appearing around the edges.

I found a tin of baked beans in a cupboard and made myself beans on toast, carefully removing a few moldy bits from the bread before placing it in the toaster.

I spread the bounty from the rucksack’s secret compartment out on the kitchen table in front of me and looked at it as I ate.

I picked up the two booklets with the heading DOCUMENT OF DESCRIPTION. I hadn’t seen one close-up before, but I knew what they were. “Horse passports,” I believed they were called, and every racehorse had to have one in order to race. They were a detailed record of a horse’s marking and hair whorls. A horse presented at a racetrack for a race had to match the one described in its passport to ensure that another horse wasn’t running in its place. In the olden days, unscrupulous trainers might have presented a “ringer” that would run as if it were another horse. The ringer was usually much better than the horse that should have been running and hence it would start at much more favorable odds than if its true identity had been known. Many such deceptions had raked in the cash before the introduction of detailed horse passports had put a stop to it.

But the two in front of me were photocopies, not the originals, and could never have been passed off as the real thing. I scanned through them but could see nothing out of the ordinary.

Next I picked up the human passport, that of Willem Van Buren from South Africa, and looked at the photograph. It wasn’t the same man I had seen in Sussex Gardens, I was sure of that, because the face that looked out at me from the image on the passport was that of my father. Van Buren must have been the name he had used to check into the Royal Sovereign Hotel.

Did I have yet more sisters, or perhaps some brothers, in Cape Town or Johannesburg?

I was also intrigued by the little bag of rice-type grains. I took one of them out of the bag and rolled it between my thumb and index finger. It was, in fact, slightly larger than a grain of rice, being about a centimeter long and about a third of that in diameter. I held it up to the light, but I couldn’t see through as it was opaque. I shook it by my ear, but it made no noise.

Why, I wondered, would anyone bother to hide a few chips of frosted glass? There had to be more to them than the eye, or the ear, could tell.

I took my tomato-sauce-covered knife and recklessly crushed the grain against the table. It actually broke surprisingly easily. I could now see that the grain was not made of solid glass but was a cylinder with what appeared to be a minute electronic circuit housed inside.

I looked carefully at the nine still left in the bag. There were definitely no external connections, no terminals to connect to. Again, I would ask Luca. If anyone knew what they were, he would. I scooped the broken bits back into the bag and placed it on the table.

And then, of course, there was the money.

What should I do with it all?

Well, I told myself, I should go and give it to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn. But how could I? He certainly wouldn’t take it very kindly that I hadn’t told him about my father’s luggage earlier. He might accuse me again of being somehow involved in his murder.

I began to wish I had told him straightaway about the seedy hotel in Sussex Gardens. It would have made things much easier, and also I wouldn’t have suffered the fright of my life. I still came out in a cold sweat just thinking about what would have happened if the man had recognized me.

What should I do?

I decided to sleep on it, and went to bed.

It emits a radio signal,” said Luca in the car on the way to Ascot on Saturday morning. He was holding the black remote-type thing with the buttons. “You were bloody lucky this wasn’t stolen,” he added.

“Why would it be stolen?” I asked him.

“Because the teenagers at the electronics club are a bunch of hooligans,” he said.“Most of them are only there because the courts make them go. To keep them off the streets on Friday nights. Supposed to be part of their rehabilitation. I ask you… Most of them wouldn’t be rehabilitated by a stretch in the army.”

“But what about this?” I said, pointing at the device.

“One of the little horrors had it in his bag,” he said. “God knows what he thought he would do with it. Just liked the look of it so he lifted it. They are like bloody magpies. If it shines, they’ll steal it.”

“You said it emits a radio signal,” I said. “What sort of signal?”

“Fairly low frequency,” he said. “But quite powerful. One of the staff at the club was able to set up an oscilloscope to see it.”

“What’s an oscilloscope?” I asked.

“Like one of those things in a hospital that shows the heart rate of patients,” he said. “It displays a trace on a screen.”

“But what’s the thing for?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, but I think it might be for writing information onto the RFIDs.”

“The glass grains?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The end slides off.” He showed me. “And you can fit one of the grains into this hollow.” He pointed at it as I drove. “When you push the ENTER button, it sends out a signal. I think that must program the RFID with the numbers you punch into it before pushing the ENTER button.”

“Is that really possible?” I said. “There aren’t any connectors.”

“It’s easy,” he said. “Writing to RFIDs occurs all the time. When someone puts their Oyster card near one of those round yellow pads on the tube gates, the card is first scanned to determine the available credit, then the system automatically deducts the fare and rewrites the card with a new balance. Same thing on all the buses. It’s done by radio waves. It doesn’t need connectors.”

I was slightly disappointed. I had somehow hoped that the device was going to be more exciting than something that was fitted to every bus in London. But why, then, I wondered, did my father think it was necessary to hide it in his rucksack?

I yawned. Sleep had not come easily to me after my visit to my grandmother. I had lain awake for hours thinking about what she had said to me, and also how that secret must have burned ferociously in her for so long. What did you do when you found out that your son was a murderer? More to the point for me, what did you do when you found out that your father was one?

I thought back to when I had sat by my father’s body in the hospital after he had died. Was it really just four days previously? It felt like half a lifetime.

I had mourned for what might have been, for the lost years of opportunity. Somehow, even in spite of the knowledge I had gained since, I felt some form of affinity with the man who now lay silently in some mortuary’s cold storage. But what had he done? Had he really deprived me not only of himself but also of my mother, and a brother or sister as well?

I had tried to telephone Detective Sergeant Murray at Windsor Police Station, but I was told he was either elsewhere or off duty. I had left a message for him to call me, but, so far, there had been nothing.

“It’s the Wokingham today,” said Luca, rubbing his hands and bringing me back from my daydreaming.

“Sure is,” I said.

The Wokingham Stakes was the fourth race of the day on Royal Ascot Saturday, and it was one of the most lucrative races of the whole meeting for us bookmakers. It was also a popular race with the trainers, with the number of runners limited only by how many starting stalls could be accommodated across the width of the racetrack.

But it was not only a cash cow for the bookies, it was fun as well. While it was true that most bets tended to be smaller than for some of the group races, there were plenty of them, and it seemed like a happy race, with no one placing white-knuckle wagers that they couldn’t afford to lose.

Betsy went to sleep in the back and Luca looked through the Racing Post as I drove.

“Thirty runners again today,” he said. “They reckon here that Burton Bank will start favorite at about six- or seven-to-one.”

“Who trains him?” I asked.

“George Wiley,” Luca replied.

“Wiley trains in Cumbria, doesn’t he?” I said. “That’s quite a way to come. He must think he’s a good prospect. How about the others?”

Luca studied the paper. “About ten with a realistic chance, I’d say, but the Wokingham is always a bit of a lottery.” He smiled.

“How about the Golden Jubilee?” I asked. The Golden Jubilee Stakes was the big race of the day. Like the Wokingham, it was also run over a straight six furlongs and was for three-year-olds and upwards.

“Eighteen runners this year,” he said. “Pulpit Reader will probably be favorite, but, again, it’s anyone’s race. Always the same in the sprints.”

We discussed the afternoon’s races and runners for a while longer. I thought we would need the unpredictability of the Wokingham and the Golden Jubilee Stakes after the first two races of the day. The Chesham Stakes and the Hardwicke Stakes were both renowned for producing short-priced winners favoring the punter.

The previous day’s rain had swept away eastwards into the North Sea and the sun had returned, bringing out the Saturday crowd, which was streaming into the racetrack by the time we had negotiated the traffic jams and parked the car. It looked like being another busy day at the office.

Phones as well?” I asked.

Luca was busy pushing buttons on his mobile.

He nodded. “Same as before.”

The effect was startling. Suddenly there were men running everywhere with walkie-talkies in their hands and curly wires visible over their collars and leading, I presumed, to earpieces in their ears. They scanned the bookmakers’ boards, on the lookout for sudden changes to the odds.

“Twenty pounds to win on Burton Bank,” repeated the young man in front of me, slightly irritated at the delay.

“Sorry,” I said to him. “Twenty to win number two at sevens,” I repeated, turning to Luca. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, then pressed the keys, and out popped the ticket from the printer. I held it out to the young man, who snatched it away.

“A tenner each way number four,” said the next punter, a large man in a blue-striped shirt and red tie.

I glanced up at our prices board.

“Ten pounds each way number four at fifteen-to-one,” I said, and the ticket duly appeared.

Ten pounds each way wasn’t going to be enough to significantly change the odds, I thought, not even on a relative outsider.

There was not much going on, although I could see some of the men with the earpieces moving down the line of bookies making bets and keeping a close eye on the prices.

But no one tried to make any odds-changing bets with me, and our board hardly altered in the five minutes or so before the race. But that didn’t stop the chaps with the earpieces running up and down in front of me, shouting at one another both directly and through their walkie-talkies.

“What do you mean it’s busy?” one of them shouted into his two-way radio.

I couldn’t hear the reply, as obviously it played straight into his ear via the earpiece.

“Well, get her out now,” he shouted. He turned to one of the others. “There’s a damn woman in the pay phone making a call.”

It was almost funny.

Larry Porter clearly thought it was, and he stood full square, laughing loudly.

“It’s back,” said Luca just as the starting stalls opened and the cavalry charge began.

“What a surprise,” I said.

I watched the race unfold on one of the big-screen TVs. As was usually the case in the Wokingham, the thirty runners divided into two packs, running close to the rails on either side of the course, in the traditional commentator’s nightmare.

The handicapper didn’t quite get his dream of a multiple dead heat, but still there was a pretty close blanket finish, with those running on the stand rail having a slight advantage.

“First, number four,” announced the public-address system. “Second, number eleven. Third, number twenty-six. The fourth horse was number two.”

So Burton Bank, horse number two, had finished fourth. He had once again been made clear favorite, with a starting price of five-to-one, so some of those bets made by the earpieces must have been to try to shorten his price. On Thursday, in the Gold Cup, Brent Crude, the favorite, had drifted badly when the Internet went down, so, I thought, the big boys’ first instinct today must have been to back the favorite and drive down the price. It hadn’t done them much good.

The winner had been returned at a starting price of fifteen-to-one. But there was nothing suspicious about that. The starting price of the winner of the Wokingham Stakes had regularly been at twenty-to-one or higher.

“What was all that about?” I said to Luca.

“Dunno,” he said. “Nothing much seemed to happen.”

“No,” I said. “But it was fun while it lasted.”

“Where did all those blokes come from?” he said. “They must have been hiding in the stands somewhere.”

“It was a bit of overkill, if you ask me,” I said.

“They must have lost a packet last time.”

“I’ll bet they didn’t do so well this time either,” I said with a grin. “And they don’t like it.” I laughed.

“Serves them bloody right,” Luca said, laughing back at me.

It really did serve them right, I thought. The big boys had no sympathy for independent bookies as they tried to squeeze the lifeblood out of us, so they couldn’t expect much compassion in return when they got rolled over. In fact, the truth was, we absolutely loved it.

“Weighed in,” announced the public address.

The first in line to be paid out was the gorgeous young woman in black and white.

“Well done,” I said cheerfully, giving her fifty pounds for her ten-pound place bet on number eleven.

“Thank you,” she replied, blushing slightly again. “My first win of the day.”

“Would you like to use it to make another bet?” I asked, pointing at the cash in her hand.

“Oh no,” she said in mock shock. “My boyfriend says I should always keep my winnings.”

“Very wise,” I said through gritted teeth.

Damn boyfriend!

Early on Tuesday morning I drove to South Devon and parked near a long line of multicolored beach huts behind Preston Sands, in Paignton. I had left Kenilworth at four-thirty to avoid any rush-hour traffic and had made it to what was described by the travel agents as the “English Riviera” in a little over three hours.

Ironically, I had driven right past Newton Abbot racetrack, where they were racing later that day. But I wasn’t here for my work. Luca and Betsy had taken the equipment and would be standing at Newbury for the evening meeting. I hoped to be able to join them later.

I locked my old Volvo and went for a walk along the seafront.

It was still relatively early, and Paignton was just coming to life, with the deck-chair-rental man putting out his blue-and-white-striped stockpile in rows on the grass for the holidaymakers to come and sit on. There were a few morning dog walkers about, one or two joggers and a man with a metal detector digging on the sand.

It was a beautiful June summer day, and, even at eight in the morning, the sun was already quite high in the sky to the east, its rays reflecting off the sea as millions of dancing sparkles. The temperature was rising, and I was regretting not having worn a pair of shorts and flip-flops rather than my dark trousers and black leather shoes.

I thought back to the inquest the day before.

“South Devon,” Detective Sergeant Murray had said to me quietly as we had stood in the lobby of the courthouse.

“What?” I’d said.

“South Devon,” he repeated. “That’s where your mother was murdered. In Paignton, South Devon. Her body was found on the beach under Paignton Pier.”

“Oh,” I’d said inadequately.

“On the fourth of August, ’seventy-three.”

“Right, thank you,” I’d replied.

“And don’t tell the chief inspector I told you,” he’d said, keeping an eye on the door to the Gents’, through which his boss had disappeared.

“No,” I’d said. “Of course I won’t.”

He’d turned to move away from me.

“Did she have a child with her that was murdered as well?” I’d asked him. “A baby?”

“Not according to the file I read,” he’d replied quickly before hurrying away from me as the Gents’ door had opened.

My grandmother had probably been confused, I thought.

I took off my shoes and socks, rolled up the legs of my trousers and walked on Paignton beach.

I wasn’t really sure why I had come nearly two hundred miles in search of something that had happened nearly thirty-six years before. What did I think I would find? I wondered.

The previous evening I had used my computer to Google “Paignton Murder” and had been surprised to find over twenty-two thousand hits on the Web. Paignton must be a dangerous place, I’d thought, until I discovered that almost every reference was for Murder Mystery weekends or dinners at the local hotels. But there were, amongst all of those, reports of real murders by the seaside, though I could find nothing about the murder of a Patricia Jane Talbot in August 1973. The Internet simply did not stretch back far enough.

So here I was, walking along the beach, as if simply being here would give me some insight into what had gone on in this place all that time ago and why.

The tide was out, revealing a wide expanse of red sand crisscrossed with multiple ridged patterns and grooves produced by the outgoing water. I strode purposefully southwards towards Paignton Pier, past the imposing gray seawall of the Redcliffe Hotel, carrying my shoes and digging my bare toes into the sand. At one point, I stopped and looked behind me at the line of footprints I had created in the soft surface.

I couldn’t remember when I had last left footprints on a seashore. My grandparents had taken me very occasionally to the sea when I had been small, but we had never sat or walked on the beach. During the war, my grandfather had been posted to North Africa and had spent two years fighting his way back and forth across the Egyptian desert. As a result, he had developed an aversion to any form of sand.

“Bloody stuff gets everywhere,” he used to say, so under no circumstances did we ever go near it. Once or twice, he had been cajoled by my grandmother into sitting on the pebbles at Brighton while I had played in the water on day trips from our home in Surrey, but we had never holidayed at the seaside. In fact, thinking back, we had rarely holidayed anywhere. To my grandfather, going to the races every day was holiday enough, in spite of it being his job.

Paignton Pier, like every other pier at seaside resorts around the country, had been built in the latter part of the nineteenth century to allow pleasure steamers to dock when the tide was out and the harbor was dry. Steamers that would disgorge their passengers to indulge in the new health fashion of the time, of bathing year-round in salt water. It was testament to the ability of the Victorian engineers that the majority of the piers still existed long past the time when most folk had decided that immersing themselves in the freezing sea did their health more harm than good.

But the seaside piers had survived because they had been adapted as centers of entertainment. Paignton Pier was no exception, and I could see that amusement arcades had been built over much of its length.

I stood on the beach in the shadow of the pier and speculated again about what had been done right here to my mother. I also wondered where I had been at the time and whether I had been with my parents here in Paignton that fateful day. Had I been here before, in this very spot beneath the pier, as a fifteen-month-old toddler? Indeed, was I here when she’d died?

There was nothing much to see. I hadn’t expected there to be. Perhaps I was foolish to have come, and the image of where my mother had met her grisly end would haunt me forever. But something in me had needed to visit this place.

I pulled my wallet out of my trouser pocket and extracted the creased picture of my parents taken at Blackpool. All my life I had looked at that picture and longed to be able to be with my father. It was his image that had dominated my existence rather than that of my mother. The grandparents who had raised me had been my father’s family, not my mother’s, and somehow my paternal loss had always been the greater for me.

Now I studied her image as if I hadn’t really looked at it closely before. I stood there and cried for her loss and for the violent fate that had befallen my teenage mother in this place.

“You all right, boy?” said a voice behind me.

I turned around.A man with white hair and tanned skin, wearing a faded blue sweatshirt and baggy fawn shorts, was leaning on one of the pier supports.

“Fine,” I croaked, wiping tears from my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt.

“We could see you from my place,” said the man, pointing at a cream-painted refreshments hut standing close to the pier. “We’re setting up. Do you fancy a cuppa?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Come on, then,” he said. “On the house.”

“Thank you,” I said again, and we walked together over to his hut.

“He’s all right, Mum,” the man shouted as we approached. He turned to me. “My missus thought you looked like you were going to do yourself in,” he said. “You know, wade out to sea and never come back.”

“Nothing like that,” I said, giving him a smile. “I assure you.”

He handed me a large white cup of milky tea and took another for himself from the cheerful-looking little lady behind the counter.

“Sugar?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said, taking a welcome sip of the steaming brown liquid. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“We need it to last, though,” he said. “July and August are our really busy times. That’s when the families come. Mostly just a bunch of old-age pensioners, OAPs, in June. Lots of pots of tea and the occasional ice cream, but very few burgers. We need the sun to shine all summer if we’re going to survive.”

“Are you open all year round?” I asked.

“No chance,” he said. “May to September, if we’re lucky. I’m usually a builder’s laborer in the winter. If there’s any work, that is. Not looking good this year with the economy going down the bloody tubes. At least most folk aren’t going abroad for their holidays, eh? Not with the pound so low. Too expensive.”

We stood together for a moment silently drinking our tea.

“I must get on,” said the man. “Can’t stand here all day. I also run the pedalos and the windsurfers, and they won’t get themselves out, now will they?”

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

He looked at my dark trousers and my white shirt.

“They’ll clean,” I said to him.

He looked up at my face and smiled. “Let’s get on, then.”

“Ned Talbot,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Hugh Hanson,” he said, shaking it.

“Right, then, Hugh,” I said. “Where are these pedalos?”

Ididn’t get to Newbury for the evening racing. Instead, I went straight home to Kenilworth.

I was angry.

In fact, I was absolutely livid.

How could my father have come to Ascot, just one week previously, and been so normal and so natural, even so agreeable, when he held the knowledge that he had murdered my mother together with her unborn child?

It was despicable, and I hated him for it.

Why had he come back from Australia and turned my life upside down?

Had he come because of the glass-grain RFIDs and the money? Surely it hadn’t been just to see me?

I lay awake for ages, tossing and turning, trying to sort it all out, but all I came up with were more and more questions, and no answers.

Whose money was it in his rucksack?

Was the money connected to the RFIDs and the black-box programmer?

Was he killed because he hadn’t handed over the money or was it the black box and the glass grains that were so important?

And what exactly were they for?

Every punter has a story of how they think a crooked trainer or owner has run the wrong horse in a race. How a “ringer” has been brought in to win when the expected horse would have had no chance. Unexpected winners have always made some people suspicious that foul play has been afoot, and, in the distant past, before racing was a well-organized industry, rumors of ringers abounded, and there must have been some truth to them.

But running a ringer has always been more difficult than most people believe, especially from a large, well-established training stable, and not only because horse identification has become more sophisticated with the introduction of the RFID chips. Sure, a horse will be scanned by an official vet the first time it runs and randomly thereafter, and this, together with the detailed horse passport, makes it difficult to substitute one horse for another. But the real reason is that too many people would have to be “in the know.”

There is an old Spanish proverb that runs: A secret between two is God’s secret, between three it is all men’s.

To run a horse as a ringer requires the inside knowledge of a good deal more than three men. The horse’s groom, the horsevan driver, the traveling head lad and the jockey just for a start, in addition to the trainer and the owner.

It would be impossible to keep it a secret from any of them because they would simply recognize that the horse was not the right one. People who work every day with horses see them as individuals with different features and characteristics rather than just as horses. It has often been said that every great trainer needs to know his horses’ characters better than he knows those of his own family. Lester Piggott was said to be able to recognize any horse he had ridden even when it was walking away from him in a rainstorm.

Just as everyone would realize pretty quickly, if not immediately, that a celebrity look-alike was not the real thing, so too would racing folk easily spot a ringer, unless it was far removed from its normal environment. And it was too much to expect that a secret conspiracy of even a handful of people would hold for very long.

So what real good were the rewritable identification RFIDs?

I finally went to sleep, still trying to work out the conundrum.

On Wednesday I went to Stratford Races. Whoever thought that jump racing in June was a good idea hadn’t envisaged racing at Stratford after a prolonged drought, when the river Avon was so low that the racetrack watering system hadn’t been able to keep up with the evaporation from the sunbaked earth. The ground for weeks had been as hard as concrete, and very few trainers were willing to run their steeplechasers in such conditions.

The overnight declared runners for Stratford had been so few that it was hardly worth the journey, even though Stratford was the second-nearest course to my home, Warwick being a few miles closer.

Add the fact that Mother Nature had decided that, on this day, the six-week drought would break with numerous thunderstorms moving north from France, and one could understand why the midweek race-day crowd was not really worthy of the name.

Only four bookmakers had bothered to turn up to try to wring a few pounds out of the miserable, rain-soaked gathering. Even Norman Joyner, who almost always came to Stratford, hadn’t bothered. And most of the public who had come had the good sense to stay dry in the tote-betting hall under the grandstand, leaving us four bookies to huddle under our large umbrellas with the raindrops bouncing back off the tarmac. Royal Ascot in the sunshine, it was not.

The first race was a two-mile novice hurdle. According to the morning papers, there were five declared runners, but one of them had been withdrawn. The reason given by the horse’s trainer was that the rain had affected the going, but that was a joke. The ground was so dry, it would have needed rain akin to the Noachian Deluge to make any noticeable difference.

The four remaining runners appeared on the course and went down to the two-mile start while a few hardy punters made a dash across the ring towards us to place bets, before hurrying back to the shelter of the grandstand.

“It’s not much fun today,” said Luca in my ear.

“It was your idea,” I said, turning to him. “I’d have been happy staying in bed on a day like this.”

After my disturbed night, staying in bed had sounded like an excellent plan, but Luca had called me twice during the morning to see if I was coming to Stratford that afternoon.

“You don’t have to come,” he’d said in the second call. “Betsy and I can cope on our own, if you want. We had a good night at Newbury without you.”

I had begun to feel I was being eased out of my own business, and that made me even more determined to be here. But now, as another rivulet of rainwater cascaded off the umbrella and down my neck, I wasn’t at all sure that it had been the right decision.

“We must be mad,” shouted Larry Porter, again our neighboring bookie.

“Bonkers,” I agreed.

I thought it was funny how we use certain words. Here were Larry and I, in full control of our mental capacities, using terms like “mad” and “bonkers” to describe each other, while the likes of Sophie, and worse, institutionalized in mental health facilities, were never any longer referred to in such terms even in private. And the terms “lunatic asylum” and “loony bin” were now as archaic and taboo as “spastic” and “cripple.”

The betting business was so slow that Betsy had complained about the rain and taken herself off to the drier conditions of the bar, and I was beginning to wish I could join her.

“Whose stupid idea was it to come to Stratford?” I said to Luca.

“Would you have preferred Carlisle?” he said.

Kenilworth to Carlisle was more than two hundred miles, while the distance from my house to Stratford-upon-Avon racetrack was less than twenty.

“No,” I said.

“Well, shut up, then,” said Luca with a grin. “You’ve got a waterproof skin, so what are you worrying about? As least it’s not cold.”

“It’s hardly hot,” I replied.

“No pleasing some people,” he said to the world in general.

“Why don’t you just go home and leave Betsy and me to make you a living.”

“But Betsy’s gone off in a strop,” I said.

“She’s only in a strop because she wants to do your job and she can’t because you’re doing it,” he said.

He said it with a smile, but he meant it nevertheless.

It seemed I really was being eased out of my own business. But I suppose it was better than losing Luca and Betsy to a new outfit.

“You mean it, don’t you?” I said seriously.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “We need to be more ambitious, more proactive, more ruthless.”

I wasn’t sure whether the “we” included me or not.

“In what way do you want to be more ruthless?” I asked him.

“All that stuff at Ascot last week has shown me that the big boys are not invincible,” he said. “Someone gave them a bloody nose, and good luck to them. Bookmaking should be all about what happens here.” He spread his arms wide. “Well, not exactly here today, but you know what I mean. Bookmaking is about standing at a pitch on the course, not being stuck in some anonymous betting shop watching a computer screen.”

I was amazed. I thought it was the computer gambling that made Luca tick.

“But you love the Internet,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “But only as a tool for what happens here. The on-course bookies need to set the prices, and they should not be driven by the exchanges. By rights, it should be the other way round. We should be prepared to alter our prices for our advantage, not for those of anyone else.”

“You sound like you’re at war,” I said with a laugh.

“We are,” he said seriously. “And if we don’t fight, we’ll go under.”

I remembered back to the time when I had been assisting my grandfather for a couple of years or so. I’d had the same sort of discussion with him then. Bookmaking was an evolving science, and new blood, like Luca, needed to be ever pushing the boundaries. As he had said, without it, we’d go under.

As is so often the case with small fields, the four horses in the race finished in extended line astern, the favorite winning it at a canter by at least ten lengths. There was hardly a cheer from the measly crowd, and the winner returned to an almost deserted unsaddling enclosure.

As Luca had said, it wasn’t much fun.

A man in a suit came striding across from beneath the grandstand just as the rain began to fall in a torrent. He was holding an umbrella, but it didn’t appear to be keeping him very dry. Too much water was bouncing back from the ground. His feet must have been soaked by the time he stopped in front of me.

“What the bloody hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” I asked him in all innocence.

“With the bloody prices?” he said loudly.

“What about the prices?” I asked him.

“How come that winner was returned at two-to-one when everyone knows it should have been odds-on?”

“Nothing to do with me,” I said, spreading my hands out wide.

“Don’t get bloody clever with us,” the man said with menace, pointing his finger at me.

“And who is us, exactly?” I demanded, trying to disregard the implied threat.

He ignored me and went over to remonstrate with Larry Porter, who told him to go away and procreate, or words to that effect.

The man was far from pleased. “I’m warning you two,” he said, pointing at both Larry and me. “We won’t stand for that.”

Larry shouted at him again to go away, using some pretty colorful language that made even me wince.

“What was all that about?” I said to Luca.

“Just trying to rustle up a bit more business,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

“I thought we might tempt a few more punters over here if we offered a better price on the favorite,” he said, grinning at me. “That’s all.”

I stood there looking at him.

“You silly bugger. We don’t play games with these guys,” I said seriously. “Their bite is far worse than their bark.”

“Don’t be so boring,” he said.

“I mean it. They are powerful people, and they stamp on irritations.”

Was this what he meant by “being at war”?

The starting price was not set by a single bookmaker’s prices. It was a sort of average, but was actually the mode of the offered prices rather than a true average. A mode is that value that occurs most frequently in a sample.

At Ascot the previous week the number of bookmakers was very high, so a representative sample of, say, twelve bookmakers’ prices was used. The twelve were chosen not quite randomly, as they always included those bookies at the highest-traffic end of the betting ring. If, in the sample of twelve, five of the bookmakers had the price of a certain horse as the race started at, say, three-to-one, then its starting price would be three-to-one, even if four of them had the price at seven-to-two and the other three at four-to-one. Three-to-one was the mode because it was the price that occurred most frequently.

If there were two modes because, say in the above example, five bookies had the price at three-to-one, and five of them had it at seven-to-two, then the starting price was always taken as the higher of the two odds. So in that case it would have been seven-to-two.

At Stratford on this particular wet Wednesday in June, there were only four ring bookmakers, so the sample included all of them, but it was still only four. Only two of them needed to offer higher prices than was “true” for the starting price to be recorded as “too high.”

So Luca could not have affected the price on his own.

“Was it Larry’s idea or yours?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” he said, all innocent.

“It needed two of you,” I said.

“You were there too,” he said with a degree of accusation in his voice.

It was true. I was there, and it was my name on the board, or it was my surname at least. So I would carry the can, if a can indeed had to be carried. But I now realized how much I had subconsciously delegated to Luca and his computer.

“So was it Larry’s idea?” I asked, knowing full well that Luca had brains far in excess of Larry Porter and that it really was bound to have been Luca’s idea. But I wanted him to give me the option of not disposing with his services, to give him the chance to lie to me so that I could try to fool myself that maybe he wouldn’t try it again the next time I wasn’t there.

Was that why he had been so keen for me to stay at home and leave things to him and Betsy? Was that really why Betsy was in such a strop and had decided to absent herself from the scene of the crime?

I could almost hear the cogs whirling in his brain. He knew exactly what I had asked him and why. It wasn’t that I truly wanted to know whose idea and plan it had been. What I was really asking him was whether he wanted to keep his job.

If he started out in business on his own, he would have to purchase a number at a pitch auction in the future, which would require considerable outlay to obtain a decent spot in the ring. And he would most likely end up with a high number and hence a lowly choice of position. Those bookies with the best pitches took the most money, and, in a recession, it was no time to move further down the pack.

From my own point of view, I had come to rely very heavily on Luca. His expertise with our computer and Internet gambling had been instrumental in keeping the name of Teddy Talbot in the higher echelons of bookmaking circles. We had been remarkably profitable over the last few years, and I was not naïve enough to think that it came solely down to me. It was all to do with the teamwork that Luca and I had perfected. Finding a new bookmaker’s assistant wouldn’t be easy, perhaps impossible to find one as good as Luca.

The trouble was, he knew it.

But, that said, I couldn’t keep him on if I didn’t trust him not to bring my business down, either in standing or in monetary terms. If my grandfather had taught me one thing, it was that reputation was important. Most bookmakers are not held in great respect by the majority on the racetrack. Punters tend to think they are being forever robbed blind by the bookies. But I considered that I had always acted fairly and honorably towards the betting public, and also towards my fellow bookmakers, something that had not gone unnoticed by my regular customers. I wasn’t about to see all that change, and Luca had to make his mind up if he could play by my rules. I might be sure that I needed him, but he, in turn, was now deciding if he needed me.

“How about offering me a proper partnership?” he said with a smile.

I took that as a positive sign.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t take too long,” he said seriously, the smile having vanished.

Was he threatening me, I wondered, or simply warning me that he’d had offers from elsewhere?

Being a bookmaker’s assistant was, for some, a self-employed business in itself. In our case, Luca was my full-time employee, but he could do equally well, and maybe better, offering his expert services freelance on a daily basis to the highest bidder. Over the past seven years, since my grandfather had died and I had taken on Luca, I had often engaged a professional bookmaker’s assistant for various days here and there, either when one of us was ill or away on holiday or, in my case, tending to the needs of my sick wife. I tried to use the same man each time, but there were half a dozen or so who were all highly capable and in regular demand.

Maybe Luca was considering joining their ranks, or perhaps he’d had an offer from another bookmaker to become a partner.

I looked over at Larry Porter.

Surely not him, I thought. I had always considered that I was a better businessman than Larry, but maybe he thought the same about me.

“Hi, Larry,” I called across the deserted, rain-swept six feet between us. “What price will you give me on the favorite in the next?”

“Piss off,” he shouted back, “you self-righteous git.”

Charming, I thought. It might have been funny if it wasn’t for the fact that he and Luca had put us all in jeopardy by so blatantly changing the prices.

Larry clearly wasn’t enjoying his afternoon at the races. And he wasn’t the only one.

The day progressed with, if anything, a deterioration in the weather. The individual thunderstorms had coalesced into a single expanse of dark, menacing cloud stretching right across the sky, and the rain fell continuously straight downwards in the still air while the humidity rose to an oppressive hundred percent.

No doubt the gardeners of middle England were delighted by the downpour, but the punters at Stratford plainly were not. We took just two bets on the big race of the day, if that was an appropriate way of describing it.

The three-mile steeplechase on rock-hard going had attracted a paltry field of just three, in pursuit of a prize put up by a well-known Midlands building company. It was not the lovely summer’s day that the firm’s directors would have hoped for to entertain their clients when they had handed over their sponsorship check to the racetrack. Two small groups of their guests stood around under company-logo-printed umbrellas, watching the horses in the parade ring and trying unsuccessfully to look happy. Then they scuttled off back to their private box in the grandstand to dry off and to sip another glass of bubbly.

In the betting ring there was noticeably more activity than for the first couple of races, though that was due not to an increase in the number of punters braving the conditions but to the fact that several “suits” from the big outfits had turned up. They stood around getting wet, scrutinizing the prices on our boards more closely than a stamp collector studying a Penny Black.

Nothing untoward occurred, of course, but I caught a brief glimpse of Luca and Larry Porter having a secret smile at each other. Just how long, I thought, would it be before they couldn’t resist trying it again?

The race itself could hardly be described as exciting. The short-priced favorite, the only decent horse of the three, jumped off in front at the start and led the other two around and around the course by an ever-increasing margin, winning by a distance, almost at the trot. One of the remaining two slipped over at the last fence to leave the other to finish second, but so far behind the winner that the stands had emptied long before.

To add insult to injury, the stewards decided to abandon the rest of the day’s racing, citing the hazardous nature of the course. It seemed that the heavy rain, coming down as it had on the rock-hard ground, was causing the top surface of the grass to skid off the underlying dry, compacted soil, making the going treacherous.

Personally, I thought the stewards had done everyone a favor, and we gratefully packed up our stuff and made our way to the parking lots.

“Are you still OK for Leicester tomorrow evening without me?” I asked Luca.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Looking forward to it.” He smiled at me. I stopped pulling the trolley. “OK, OK,” he said. “I know. No funny business. I promise.”

“Let’s talk at the weekend,” I said.

“Fine,” he replied. “I want to talk things through with Betsy anyway.”

Betsy had appeared from the bar and had helped us to pack away the last few things. I was never quite sure what was going on in her head, and that day she had been more obtuse than ever. She had said hardly a word to me since a brief “Hello” when she and Luca arrived.

We loaded the equipment in the trunk of his car while Betsy simply sat inside it in the passenger seat. She didn’t say good-bye to me.

“Have a good day tomorrow,” said Luca. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope it all goes well.”

Sophie was due to have an assessment with a consultant psychiatrist from a different hospital. It was the final hurdle for her pass in order to be able to come home. Just as there needed to be agreement between two psychiatrists for her to be sectioned in the first place, there was also a need for such agreement for her to be “released back into the community,” as they put it.

The stress of an assessment was, paradoxically, bad for her condition, so I always tried to be on hand to provide her with reassurance and comfort between the sessions.

I wasn’t at all sure whether it was a good idea to leave Luca and Betsy to go to Leicester together without me, and without the services of one of the freelance bookmaker’s assistants. It was an evening meeting with the first race at twenty to seven. I supposed I might have been able to get there after spending the day at the hospital. Hemel Hempstead to Leicester was just a quick trip up the M1 highway.

“Betsy and I will be fine,” Luca said, clearly reading the dilemma in my face. “I promised, didn’t I?”

I must have still looked doubtful.

“Look,” he said. “We will be doing the best for the business in every respect. No point in fouling it all up if you’re thinking of offering me a partnership, is there?” He smiled at me.

“OK,” I said. “But…”

“Do you trust me or not?” he said, interrupting me.

“Yes, of course,” I said, hoping it was true.

“Then leave it,” he said seriously. “I’ll do tomorrow evening with Betsy, on our own. Like you said, we’ll talk at the weekend.”

He then climbed into the car next to Betsy and drove away, with me standing there watching them and wondering if life could ever be the same again.

Well?” I said. “Talk to me.” I drove along the Stratford-to-Warwick road.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” he said.

“How do you know I didn’t?” I glanced across at him.

“I stayed to watch. No one came.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t call them.”

“I watched you through the window,” he said. “You vacuumed up the mess I left, and no one does that if he’s called the police.”

I felt uneasy at the thought of him being outside my home, watching me. “How long did you wait?” I asked him.

“Not long,” he said. “My arm hurt too much.”

“Serves you right.”

“You broke my wrist.”

“Good.”

We sat in silence for a while.

“Who the hell are you anyway?” I asked him.

“Just call me John,” he said.

“John who?”

“Just John.”

“And what do you want?” I asked him again.

“The microcoder,” he said. “Like I told you last night.”

“What makes you think that I’ve got it?”

“Where else would it be?”

“It could be anywhere,” I said.

“You have it,” he said with finality.

“Even if I did have it-and I don’t-what right do you think you have breaking into my house to look for it?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “And I didn’t break in. You left a window open. You were just asking to be burgled.”

“So that’s what you are, is it?” I said. “A burglar.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said.

I looked across at him. “I’m not the one with a broken wrist.”

“OK,” he said, “I agree. That wasn’t so clever.”

Again I drove in silence.

“Where to, then?” I asked.

“To wherever the microcoder is.”

“I told you, I don’t have it.”

“And I told you, I don’t believe you.” He turned in his seat and looked at me. “For a start, if you didn’t know what I was talking about, then you would surely have telephoned the police last night. And second, we know it was you that retrieved your father’s rucksack from the hotel in Paddington.”

“What rucksack?” I said, trying to keep my voice as level and calm as possible and wondering, once more, if this John fellow and Shifty-eyes were working together. He had said “we.” Was I, after all, on my way to meet again the man with the twelve-centimeter knife?

“Oh, come on,” he said. “We’d been looking for his luggage too, you know. And I’d been looking for your father as well, for weeks. Ever since he stole the microcoder.”

“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just turned back and looked out at the road.

“Why did you murder my father?” I said slowly.

“I didn’t,” he said, still looking ahead.

“But you had it done,” I said.

“No.” He turned again to face me. “That was not me.”

“Then who was it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And you expect me to believe you?” I said. “Perhaps we should go to the police station and you can then explain to them exactly who you are and why you were in my house last night.”

“I’ll deny it,” he said. “You vacuumed up the evidence, remember?”

I pulled the Volvo into a rest area and stopped the engine. I turned to him.

“And what is it you really want?” I asked.

“The microcoder,” he said flatly. “That’s all.”

“And what exactly is this bloody microcoder anyway?” I said.

“An electronic device.”

“Yes, but what does it do?” I asked.

He sat silently for a moment or two clearly debating with himself as to how much he should tell me.

“It writes coded information onto animal-identification tags,” he said.

“RFIDs,” I said absentmindedly.

“So you do know what it is,” he said, slapping his knee. “So where the hell is it?”

Now it was my turn to sit silently debating with myself how much I was going to tell this Just call me John mysterious stranger.

“Are you some sort of secret agent?” I asked.

He laughed. “What makes you think that?”

“You seem pretty secretive,” I said. “And you talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’ as if you were part of an organization.”

He again stared for a moment through the windshield.

“Indirectly,” he said. “I work for the Australian Racing Board.”

“Do they know you break into people’s houses?”

“They would deny any knowledge of my existence.”

“You don’t sound Australian.”

“I’m not,” he said. “English to the core. Can’t stand the Aussies. Too bloody good at cricket, if you ask me.”

“So this so-called microcoder is to do with Australian racing?”

“It’s to do with all racing, everywhere.”

“But is there much racing in Australia?” I asked. “I’ve heard of the Melbourne Cup, of course, but not much else.”

“There’s a lot more racing in Australia than that,” he said. “There are six times as many racetracks in Australia than here in Great Britain, and twice as many horses in training. It’s big business.”

“Do they have licensed bookmakers?” I asked.

“Yes, plenty of them,” he said. “But all off-track betting is through the TAB, their equivalent of the tote.”

“Well, you live and learn.”

“And you must have heard of Phar Lap?” he said. “Most famous racehorse that ever lived.”

“The name rings a bell.”

“Well, he was an Australian horse,” John said. “Back in the thirties. He won fourteen group races in a row one year, including the Melbourne Cup.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah, but he was poisoned with arsenic during a visit to the United States. Some said the horse was killed on the orders of the Chicago mob to prevent him winning again and costing them a packet in illegal bets.”

“Why are bookies always cast as the villains?” I asked.

“That’s because you are,” he said, smiling at me. “Now, where’s my microcoder?”

“So it’s yours, is it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“How can I be so sure? And why is it so important?”

“It just is,” he said. “And I know you have it.”

“How?”

“I had a description of the man who collected your father’s luggage from the hotel in Paddington, though I didn’t know it was you, not until I saw you at the inquest.”

“Lots of people look like me,” I said.

“Stop playing games with me, Mr. Talbot,” he said seriously. “The lady at the Royal Sovereign Hotel described you absolutely perfectly, including your black eye, though why she didn’t question your name being Dick Van Dyke I’ll never know.”

I couldn’t help smiling, and he noticed.

“What on earth made you come up with that?” he said.

Perhaps he was unaware that my father had used the name Willem Van Buren when he’d checked in. The hotel lady had said he was called Van-something, and Dick Van Dyke had been all I could come up with at the time.

“If you know so much, how come you took so long to find him-so long, in fact, that I found his luggage before you did?”

“Because he wasn’t using his real name,” he said.

“And what is his real name?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he said. “You formally identified him at the inquest two days ago. So it’s now officially recorded by the coroner as Peter James Talbot. But is that right? Who, then, is Alan Charles Grady?”

And who, I also thought, was Willem Van Buren, of South Africa?

“Tell me what you know about my father,” I said to John.

“Why should I?” he said.

“Do you want your microcoder back or not?” I asked.

“You probably won’t like it.”

I was sure of that, if what I knew already was any indication.

“Well, for a start, I knew him only as Alan Grady. The first time I heard the name Talbot was after he was dead. I had been keeping a tight eye on Mr. Grady for some time. He was followed from Melbourne, but I lost him at Heathrow. I now think that he never came through immigration but took another international flight straight out. But I don’t know where to.”

I thought about the e-ticket receipt I had found tucked into the Alan Grady passport in my father’s rucksack. There had been no other flights listed there, other than his return to Australia.

“Was he using the name Grady?” I asked.

“I don’t know that either,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have access to airline passenger lists.”

“An unofficial tail, then?” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said. “As I told you, officially I don’t exist.”

I wished.

“For how long, exactly, have you been keeping a close eye on my father?” I asked him.

“For years,” he said. “Must be twenty at least. As far as I know, he’s always been known to the racing authorities. He used to run an illegal backstreet bookmaking business in Melbourne.”

“But I thought you said that bookmaking was legal in Australia?”

“Only on-course bookmakers are legal,” he said. “Needless to say, our friend Mr. Grady was not one of those.”

“But I am, remember,” I said to him.

“Oh yes, so you are.” He looked like he had stepped in something nasty.

“You’re showing your prejudices. We’re not all bad, you know.”

“Aren’t you?” he said, laughing. “Well, Alan Grady had been hovering around the edges of racing in Australia for as long as I’ve been working there. He mostly was very good at keeping one step ahead of the security service, doing just enough to keep himself out of court.”

I was surprisingly quite pleased that he was good at something. “Only ‘mostly’?” I asked.

“He did get convicted a couple of times,” he said. “Small stuff, really. He did one short stretch inside for obtaining money with menaces. Unpaid gambling debts. Then he got himself turned over by another illegal outfit and ended up bankrupt.”

At least that bit of my father’s story had been true, I thought.

“How come a man can go to prison and also be bankrupted and still no one realizes that he’s not using his real name?”

“But Alan Grady was his real name,” he said. “Passport, driver’s license, bank accounts, even a genuine birth certificate, all in the name of Grady. He was Alan Grady. As I said, I didn’t hear the name Talbot until the day after he died and that was only by chance from someone I had lunch with at Ascot last Wednesday. He told me about the murder in the parking lot.”

“But how did he get a genuine birth certificate in a false name?” I asked.

“There must have once been a real Alan Grady,” he said.“Perhaps your father stole his identity. Perhaps the real Alan Grady died.”

Or he was murdered, I thought. Should I tell him, I wondered, about the Willem Van Buren passport? On balance, I thought not. Not yet.

“So tell me about this microcoder,” I said.

“Seems you know already.”

“I know it can be used to write numbers onto RFIDs,” I said. “But so what? Why was it worth chasing my father halfway round the world to get it back?”

“Fraud,” he said.

“Yeah, I assumed that, but what sort of fraud?”

“Making one horse appear to be another,” he said.

“But so what?” I said again. “Everyone knows that running a ringer in a race needs a conspiracy. Too many people would surely recognize the animal, and someone will spill the beans.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “But you could easily sell a foal or a yearling as another, with no risk then of anyone recognizing it as the wrong horse. Especially if you sell it to England from Australia or vice versa.”

“But surely horses are DNA tested for their parentage,” I said.

“They are,” he agreed. “But they are only retested if they eventually go to stud. And the DNA testing takes a long time. Not like using a handheld scanner on the ID chip, which is instant.”

“But even if you switch a bad horse for a good one and then sell it,” I said, “what would you do with the good one you’ve kept? You can’t sell the same horse twice.”

“No, but you could put it into training under its new identity. It would still be a good horse and could make a packet on the track. And if it’s so much better than people think it should be, it would win at long odds, at least to start with. Just make sure you don’t breed it. Geld it, even, to be safe.”

“And the bad one you sold would just be seen as another expensive failure?” I said. “And there are lots of those about.”

“Exactly,” he said.

Everyone in racing knew about Snaafi Dancer. Bought as a yearling in 1983 for a world’s record price of over ten million dollars, he ran too slow to ever make it to the racetrack, and then turned out to be infertile. And he was just one of a whole string of flops that had been sold for millions and then earned not a cent of it back.

“I grant you, it’s a long-term strategy,” he said. “But one that’s quite likely to be profitable. Obviously, you wouldn’t do it with a really megavaluable yearling, as there would be masses of checks made, but loads of horses go to the sales each year. And even the Horses-in-Training Sales now attract huge prices, and for geldings too.”

“But I thought those ID chips were meant to be secure and unchangeable,” I said.

“So did we,” he said. “But it seems we were wrong. The chip that’s inserted in a horse’s neck contains a number that is unique for that horse, and it is supposed to be read-only and permanent. But someone has discovered that a very intense localized magnetic field can wipe the number from the chip, just the same way those security tags stuck on CDs in shops are wiped over a magnetic pad to clear them.”

“And, don’t tell me,” I said, “the microcoder can write a new number in?”

“Well, not quite,” he said. “The magnetic field has to be so strong that the chip’s electronics are completely destroyed. But the microcoder can write a different number into a new chip, which is then inserted in the horse’s neck and, hey, presto, you instantly have a different horse.”

“But how about the horse’s passport with all its whorls and such?” I said.

“That would be OK if people bothered,” he said. “But too many people believe the technology without question. Like in tennis. All those arguments about whether the ball was in or out have disappeared thanks to the computerized Hawk-Eye system. The players believe it absolutely, as does everyone else. If Hawk-Eye says it was out, then it was out. Same with this. If the ID chip says that the animal is horse A, then it’s horse A, even if it’s got all the whorls for horse B. The authorities try to get people to check both, but they still tend to believe the ID chips. After all, it’s the same authorities that insist on them being inserted, and then they tell people they’re foolproof. Only now they find they’re not.”

“Does everywhere use the same ones?” I said.

“Pretty much,” he said. “Except the United States. They don’t use chips at all, at least not yet, because they tattoo the inside of the horse’s lip. But if a horse comes from the States to race in Australia or Europe, it has to be chipped first.”

“By whom?” I said.

“A vet authorized by the racing board.”

“Seems to me that the system needs changing,” I said.

“We need that microcoder back,” he said in reply.

“What’s to stop someone making another one?” I said.

“Nothing, I suppose,” he said. “But our boffins say it’s not that easy.”

“How about the man who made the first one? He could surely make another.”

“Ah,” he said. “Therein lies a tale.”

“What tale?” I asked.

“A trigger-happy Victoria State policeman shot him as he was trying to resist arrest.”

“Dead?” I asked.

“As good as,” he said. “Got a bullet in his brain. Totally gaga.”

What a waste, I thought. Smarter than the boffins, and now what? A vegetable.

“Someone else will work it out,” I said.“Probably some fourteen-year-old in his school science lab.” Or Luca, I thought.

“It would have to be someone with both the knowledge and the intent,” he said.

“If there are any with the knowledge, then there will be some with the intent. Trust me, I’m a bookmaker.”

He laughed. “You’re probably right. But we have to try and do what we can to stay ahead of them.”

“How about the tattoos the Americans use?”

“They’re tricky to do, and they become difficult to read as the horse gets older,” he said. “And they’re not fraudproof either. It has been known for some unscrupulous souls to try to vary the original tattoo.”

We had been sitting in the rest area for quite a while, and, as we talked, I had been trying to think what to do. Why had he said nothing about the money? Did he, in fact, know that the money had also been in the rucksack? Was I going to give him the microcoder and the cash? Did I have any choice in the matter? If John here had a direct line to the Victoria State Police, then he probably did to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn as well. But why then had he entered my house uninvited through a window in the middle of the night?

“Never mind the horses,” I said. “Do you have any personal ID?”

“What, here?”

“Yes,” I said. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“I told you,” he replied slightly uncomfortably. “The Australian Racing Board would deny all knowledge of my existence.”

“And why is that, exactly?” I said.

“The very nature of my job means I have to work undercover. If I was a normal employee, then my cover would be blown. There are bound to be some people within the organization who would pass on the information to the very people I am trying to investigate.”

“But John who?” I said.

“Smith,” he said with a straight face.

John Smith. Oh yeah, I thought, pull the other one. But John was probably not his real name either.

“So where exactly is my microcoder?” he said.

“I gave it to a friend.”

“You did what?” he exclaimed. “Who?”

“A friend who’s an electronics specialist,” I said. “To try and see what it does.”

He went pale. “Well, get it back now,” he almost shouted.

“I can’t,” I said. “My friend has gone away on holiday for a week. To Greece.”

I didn’t know why I was so reluctant to simply hand it over. I suppose I thought that this John would then just disappear, in which case I would never learn anything more about my father. Maybe it was also because I didn’t really trust him. Not enough to hand over my trump card to him, not just yet anyway.

“Where does this friend live?” John asked.

“Why? Are you thinking of breaking into another house?” There was more than a hint of sarcasm in my tone.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “If I think it’s necessary,” he said.

“It’s somewhere in High Wycombe,” I said. “I don’t know exactly where. There are lots of houses in High Wycombe. Are you going to break into them all?”

“Oh, ha-ha,” he said. “When does this friend get back from holiday?”

“Sunday, I think,” I said.

“And what’s his name?” he demanded.

“Her, actually,” I said. “And what makes you think I would tell you her name anyway? You must be joking. You’d go and break into her house.”

“Mr. Talbot,” he said seriously, “I don’t think you really understand the trouble you might be in. I assure you, I’m not the only person looking for that microcoder. And some of them might not be so…” He stopped, as if thinking.

“Honest?” I said. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Patient,” he said. “There are some very nasty people out there.”

Be very careful of everyone, my father had said. I certainly intended being very careful of Shifty-eyes and his twelve-centimeter knife. And, as far as I was concerned, that included being very careful of Mr. John Smith here as well.

“You call breaking into people’s houses being patient?” I said.

He sat there in silence for a second or two staring ahead.

“Where can I drop you?” I said. “I have things to do.”

“Here will do fine. A colleague of mine has been following us since we left the racetrack.” He twisted around in the seat.

I looked in the rearview mirror. There was a dark blue Ford in the rest area behind us, but it was some ways off. I couldn’t see the driver due to the reflection of the sky from the windshield.

“Give me a call when your friend comes back from holiday,” he said, turning back and handing me a business card. I looked at it and rotated it in my hands. A mobile phone number was printed across the center of one side. There was no name, no company and no address, just the telephone number. “Call me,” he said. “For your own good.”

He opened the passenger door and eased himself out of my car.

“Go now,” he ordered, closing the door.

He stood there as if waiting for me to depart. I, meanwhile, felt decidedly annoyed to think that someone had been following me. In fact, I was downright angry about it.

I started the engine, but, instead of engaging forward gear, I put the Volvo into reverse and accelerated backwards down the rest area towards the Ford.

I’m sure I would have rammed him if he hadn’t suddenly pulled out into the road and shot away, narrowly avoiding a collision with both a truck and a car towing a caravan. I snatched the Volvo into forward gear and pulled out to give chase, but I had no chance. Both the truck and the caravan were between me and the Ford, and I could see it in the distance speeding away. The twelve-year-old engine under my car’s hood was reliable but well past its prime and, even with its gas-guzzling 2.3 liters plus turbocharger, it was unable to generate enough horses for me to pass the slower vehicles.

Damn it, I thought. That wasn’t very clever. My first-ever undercover, secret-agent, James Bond-style car chase, and I’d got stuck behind a caravan. M would not have been amused.

I turned the car around at the next junction and went back to the rest area.

Naturally, there was no sign of either a dark blue Ford or a certain Mr. John Smith, or whatever his real name was.

Sophie’s assessment took all morning and went on into the afternoon. It mostly consisted of a case conference amongst the medical staff, discussing whether they all considered Sophie well enough to go home. It needed unanimity on their behalf. Any dissent was likely to prove decisive. A consulting psychiatrist from another hospital chaired the conference.

In addition, there was an informal presentation by Sophie, where she was invited to explain to the psychiatrists why she thought she was ready to leave their care. Then they, in turn, were free to ask her questions in order to try to determine her state of mind.

This was not the first time Sophie had been forced to go through this type of assessment. Six times before, she had endured sitting quietly while others discussed her mental health and then passed judgment on her fitness, or otherwise, to be released from the hospital. Only on four of those six occasions had she been successful, and it was far from guaranteed this time.

“And what about you, Mr. Talbot?” asked the visiting psychiatrist in the session after lunch. “Are you able to be at home to support your wife through the first few days?”

“Of course,” I said. “I am always there to give my support.”

“Do you work from home?” he asked, looking up at me from his notes.

“No,” I said. “But I intend being there when Sophie leaves the hospital.”

“And what line of business are you in?” he asked.

I paused for a moment. I had once had a bookmaker colleague who always claimed he was an accountant, only adding that he was a “turf accountant” if challenged.

“I’m a bookmaker,” I said.

“In a shop?” he said without a pause.

“No,” I said. “I’m an on-course bookie, mostly at the Midlands’ meetings.”

“Horses or dogs?” he asked.

“Horses,” I said. “Although I have stood at dog racing in the past, there’s little profit in it these days.”

He raised his eyebrows. “And why is that?”

“Not enough tracks,” I said. “There used to be masses of them, but they keep closing for redevelopment. Too few tracks mean too few dogs. It all becomes far too predictable. And the public’s appetite for dog racing has also changed. Nowadays, they all sit in restaurants and bet from their dinner tables using the tote.”

“You make it sound as if you don’t like the tote,” he said with a smile.

“I don’t,” I said. “The tote can never lose its shirt. It always takes its cut before paying out the winning tickets. They can’t get it wrong because they don’t have to set the prices, while I have to use my knowledge and experience to keep myself in business.”

“I see,” he said slowly, clearly losing interest.

“But I will be at home whenever Sophie needs me,” I said.

I decided not to mention unwelcome nighttime visitors or men with twelve-centimeter knives.

“Thank you, Mr. Talbot,” said the psychiatrist. “I’m sure you will.”

His tone implied that he didn’t really believe it. He looked down and wrote more notes.

“Excuse me,” I said. He looked up. “I assure you that Sophie’s well-being is far more important to me than my work. I desperately want her home. And I will do everything within my power to ensure she remains safe and unharmed. I love my wife.”

I had sat all day holding Sophie’s hand, listening to these emotionally distant professionals discussing her most personal secrets in matter-of-fact detail, and now I quite surprised myself with the passion of my plea. But I did want Sophie home.

I realized that I wanted it very much indeed.

“Yes, Mr. Talbot,” said the psychiatrist, “I believe you do.” He smiled at Sophie, who went on holding my hand very tightly.

He went back to writing a few more notes before looking up. “Mrs. Talbot, Mr. Talbot, thank you both for your time. As you know, we shall have further discussion among us before we make our final decision. Today is Thursday. We should have an answer for you by tomorrow or Saturday.” He looked around at the other medical staff as if inquiring whether any of them had anything more to say. They didn’t.

“Thank you, then,” he said, rising to his feet, indicating that our time was up.

“Thank you,” said Sophie.

We stood up in turn and made our way out of the conference room.

“I thought that went quite well,” I said to her quietly.

“Did you?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, being upbeat. “Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t like that psychiatrist much.”

“He seemed OK to me,” I said. “I’m sure it will be all right.”

We walked together, side by side, along the corridor towards her room.

“Do you really love me?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”

She didn’t stop walking. But she did start smiling.

The rest of the telephone was less useful than I had hoped.

Unlike most people, my father had not used his mobile as his phone book. There were no entries at all on either the phone memory or on the SIM card. No handy names of contacts who might or might not have made a microcoder, and who now lay in a Melbourne hospital with a bullet in his brain.

No convenient names for my sisters with their telephone numbers.

The only useful thing was a list in the calls register of the last ten numbers he had called and five that he had received. One of them in each of the lists was the +353 number of Paddy Murphy.

I made a written note of them all, just in case the phone decided to die completely, but I wasn’t even sure if they were UK, Irish or Australian numbers, or anywhere else for that matter.

I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to ten in the morning in Kenilworth. It would be the same in Dublin. But I wondered what time that made it in Melbourne, Australia.

I used my father’s phone to call Paddy Murphy.

“Hello,” said a very Irish-sounding voice with the emphasis on the long final “o.”

“Is that Paddy Murphy?” I asked.

“Who wants to know?” said the voice rather cautiously. Was Paddy Murphy not his real name either?

“This is Alan Grady’s son,” I said.

There was a long pause from the other end.

“Are you still there?” I asked eventually. He was. I could hear his breathing.

“And who might Alan Grady be?” he said.

“Don’t play games with me, Mr. Murphy. Call me back on this number if you want to talk.”

I hung up.

He called back immediately, the phone ringing before I had time to put it down.

“Yes?” I said.

“And what line of business might you be in?” he asked.

“Selling,” I said.

“Selling what, exactly?” he replied.

“Depends on what you want to buy,” I said.

“Now, are you playing games with me this time, Mr. Grady?” he said.

“Maybe.”

“Are you the Garda?” he asked suddenly.

“Garda?”

“The Garda,” he repeated. “The police?”

“Why do you ask?” I said, realizing finally what he meant. “Have you been up to no good?” But the line was dead. Paddy Murphy, or whoever, had already hung up.

Damn, I thought. That hadn’t gone at all well. He was possibly my only real lead to discover what was going on, and now he had done a runner. Perhaps he believed I’d been trying to trace the call. I wish I had. My father had flown into Dublin, but Mr. Paddy Murphy, if that was his real name, could be anywhere in the more than thirty thousand square miles of the Republic of Ireland.

I sat for ten minutes, waiting and hoping for him to call. He didn’t.

So I tried him again, but he didn’t answer. How, I wondered, did one find out where a certain telephone number was situated? If it was a mobile, I might have no chance, but a landline would have an area code. I decided to ask Luca. If anyone knew, he would.

Imade it to the hospital in time for the last fifteen minutes of the news.

Sophie seemed so pleased to see me and jumped up and threw her arms around my neck when I arrived.

“Oh, I’m so glad,” she cooed. “I thought you must be not coming, as it’s so late.”

“There was a pop concert after racing,” I said. “Masses of people, so it took a long while to pack up and get out.” But it had helped make the traffic lighter, I thought.

I sat down next to her, and she held my hand as we watched the last few items and then the weather. Neither of us wanted to say anything about the results of the assessment. We were both afraid of pre-guessing the result only to then be disappointed. But, from my perspective, Sophie was now as well as I had ever known her over the last ten years.

I realized that for the first time in a long while, I was completely relaxed around her.

Even when she had been home in the past, I had been ultracareful not to do or say anything that might upset her. I had become the true expert at walking on eggshells.

But things seemed different this time. She seemed stronger emotionally. It was almost as if she had been helping me through the ordeal of the previous day’s assessment rather than the other way around. Perhaps it was time to discuss the possible outcome. Time to grasp the nettles of life, and never mind the stings.

“Still no news, then?” I said.

“No,” she replied. “It’s very frustrating. All the staff here can’t understand it. They all think it’s a foregone conclusion that I should go home.”

“So do I,” I said. “Darling, you seem so much better now than for a very long time.”

She smiled at me with genuine happiness, and my heart went flip-flop once more.

“I know,” she said. “I feel absolutely wonderful, and these new drugs are great. Far fewer side effects than before. And I don’t feel so bloated by them.”

Could I really hope that life’s previous bumpy up-and-down roller coaster was now going to run smooth and flat? It was far too soon to believe that, but at least the starting signs were good.

“Have a nice day at Uttoxeter tomorrow,” she said as I stood up to leave.

“I will,” I replied, giving her a kiss.

I debated in my mind whether to worry her about Luca. I really wanted her opinion, and I suppose she had a right to know if I was about to become a fifty percent partner rather than a sole proprietor of the business.

“Luca Mandini wants a full partnership,” I said.

“Does he indeed?” she said. “He’s still very young.”

“He’s twenty-seven,” I said. “That’s not so young. And he’s good. Very good.”

“Do you think you’ll lose him if he doesn’t get it?” she asked.

“Probably. He’ll either start up on his own or go to someone who’ll give him what he wants.”

“But can you afford it?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. “I would save on his salary, and it wouldn’t be a whole lot different moneywise. I already give him a sizable share of the profits. But it would mean I’d lose some of my independence. We’ve been doing very well lately with him running the computer. I don’t really know enough of that side of things. If Luca left, I suppose I could always employ another assistant who does, but…”

“But not as good?” she said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“Seems a no-brainer to me, then. Give him what he wants.”

“You really think so?”

“Sure,” she said. “Can you afford not to? Luca won’t be able to simply walk away if he’s a partner, will he? But make sure you tie him down with a contract so it costs him to leave.”

Tie him down with a contract so he can neither leave the business nor destroy it with dodgy dealings, I thought. I had decided against telling Sophie about Internet outages, mobile phones that wouldn’t work and fixing the starting prices. I also failed to mention fists and steel toe caps in the Kempton parking lot. There were still limits to what was prudent.

But I was glad I’d asked her about Luca. Crystal clear business thinking had always been her forte-when she was well, that is-and her current advice seemed as sound as her present mental state.

“Thank you,” I said to her. “I’ll do just that.”

We kissed good night, a joyous, loving kiss.

On this occasion, she was not even fed up at me for leaving her behind. I think we both knew she would be coming home with me on Monday, and a couple more days or so wouldn’t matter.

Dundalk, the Internet told me. Paddy Murphy’s telephone was in Dundalk. I further discovered that Dundalk was some fifty miles north of Dublin on the northeast coast of the Irish Republic, close to the mouth of the Castletown River and not far from the border with Northern Ireland.

My computer also told me that Dundalk was the biggest town in Ireland that was not actually a city, with a population of about thirty thousand. Within the surrounding area, the 42 area code, there were nearly half a million people. I could hardly turn up in Dundalk asking for someone called Paddy Murphy, now could I? If I did, it would probably be me they would be throwing in the loony bin.

I was sitting in my office after another undisturbed night in Station Road.

I remained highly concerned about Shifty-eyes. I was under no illusions that he would have given up in his search for the money. Consequently, I had once again slept with the chair from Sophie’s dressing table wedged under the bedroom door handle. I had also left the cash in the cupboard beneath the stairs just in case he turned up with his twelve-centimeter knife. Perhaps he could then have been cajoled into taking the money without also using my body for target practice.

I looked again at my father’s telephone. I had tried Paddy Murphy’s number a few more times late the previous evening after I had returned from the hospital. I pushed the button once more and heard the familiar ringing tone.

“If you were the Garda, you’d be here by now,” Paddy said, answering. “So I’ll assume you’re not.”

“No,” I said, “I’m not.”

“So who are you?” His Irish accent was stronger than ever.

“I told you,” I said. “I’m Alan Grady’s son.”

“He doesn’t have a son,” he replied.

“Oh yes he does,” I said.

“You don’t sound Australian.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I was born before he went to Australia.”

There was a long pause at the other end.

“Are you still there?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “What do you want with me?”

“How well did you know my father?”

“What do you mean ‘did’?” he asked.

“My father was murdered at Ascot races. In the parking lot. He was stabbed.”

There was nothing but silence from the other end.

“When?” he asked finally.

“A week ago last Tuesday.”

There was another long pause.

“Have they caught who did it?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Any suspects?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“Don’t they have any leads at all?” he asked persistently. I thought he might be a little scared. Perhaps he had good reason.

“The murderer was a man in his mid to late thirties. Thin build, with shifty-looking eyes,” I said.

“How do you mean ‘shifty’?” he said slowly.

“Slightly too close together for his face,” I said.“Do you recognize the description?”

He hesitated too long. “Could be anyone,” he said.

“But you know who,” I said. It was a statement, not a question.

“No,” he said. But I didn’t believe him.

“Is this man likely to come after you?” I asked.

“Why should he?” he said with a slightly nervous rattle to his voice.

“I don’t know. But you do.”

“No,” he said again rapidly.

“Denying it won’t stop it happening,” I said. “Who is it?”

“Do you think I’m bloody mad or something?” he said. “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you, now would I?”

“Why not?” I asked him.

“Do you think I’m bloody mad or something?” he said once again. “Because he’d kill me too.”

“He might do that anyway,” I said.

It added to his discomfort.

“Blessed Mary, Mother of Christ,” he said.

“Praying won’t help you,” I said. “But telling me or the police might. And why would this man want you dead anyway?”

He didn’t reply.

“Have you stolen money from him?” I asked.

Still nothing.

“Or is it something to do with the microcoder?” I said.

“The what?” he said.

“The microcoder,” I repeated. “A black box with buttons on it.”

“Oh, you mean the chip writer,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Who does it belong to?”

“That depends,” he said. “I thought it was Alan’s.”

“Wasn’t it?” I said.

“I think now that he may have stolen it,” he said.

“From the man with the shifty eyes?” I asked.

“No,” he said with certainty. “Not from him.”

“I thought you didn’t know who he was?” I said.

“I don’t,” he said, but without conviction. “But the chip writer definitely came from Australia. I know that.”

“And Shifty-eyes doesn’t?” I said.

“You’ll be a bloody sneaky little bastard,” he said. “To be sure.”

That may be, I thought, but I still hadn’t gathered much information from this Mr. Paddy Murphy.

“Why did my father come to see you two weeks ago?” I asked him.

“Who says that he did?” he said.

“I do,” I replied. “But why? And what’s your real name?”

“Inquisitive, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” I replied.“And if I don’t get some answers from you pretty soon, I might just go and give your phone number to the policeman investigating my father’s murder. Then you can sit and wait for your Garda to turn up on your doorstep.”

“You wouldn’t be doing that, now would you?” he said.

“Try me.”

Another pause.

“What do you need to know?” he asked.

“What my father was doing in Ireland, for a start,” I said.

Pause.

“He was delivering something,” he said at last.

“What?” I demanded. “And to whom?”

“To me,” he said.

“What was it he was delivering?”

“Just something I’d bought from him,” he said.

“What was it?” I asked him again.

There was another pause. This was taking an age, I thought.

“Something for a horse,” he said.

“An electronic identification tag?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said slowly without elaborating.

“And a horse passport?”

“Yes,” he said slowly again.

“A forged horse passport and ID tag?” I asked.

Another pause.

“Come on,” I said loudly with frustration, “tell me.”

“But why should I?” he said.

“Because with Shifty-eyes on the lookout, I may be the only friend you have, Mr. Paddy Murphy, or whatever your real name is.”

“But why would he be after me?” he said.

“You tell me. You’re the one who knows who he is.”

“I can’t,” he wailed.

“Yes, you can,” I said. “And you must. Suppose he kills you too. You would want to know that he was then caught, wouldn’t you?”

“But I don’t know his real name,” he said.

There were so many people using false names, it was becoming ridiculous. Even I had effectively told Paddy Murphy that my name was Grady.

“Well, what do you know?” I asked him.

It was like getting blood from a stone.

“I know he kills horses,” he said.

“What!” I exclaimed. “How?”

“In all sorts of ways. I know he killed one by putting table-tennis balls up its nostrils so it began to suffocate. Horses can’t breathe through their mouths like we can, and it caused this particular horse to drop down dead from a heart attack.”

I shuddered at the thought.

“But he always kills them in a way which looks like it was an accident. For the insurance money.”

I did some quick thinking.

“So you switch a bad horse for a good one,” I said, “kill the bad one and claim the insurance money on the good one?”

“Exactly,” he said.

It was a much safer bet than selling the bad one and taking the chance that someone does a DNA check on his new purchase.

“What happens to the good horse?” I asked.

Now that he had started to tell me, it came easier. He was almost bragging at the cleverness of the scheme.

“It goes into training under the name of the nag, the bad one,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we can also make a killing backing it when it first runs in poor company, and wins easily at long odds.”

It was clever, I thought. But risky too. Making a horse’s death appear accidental wasn’t easy, and surely the insurance company would be suspicious.

“How about the insurers?” I said. “Don’t they check?”

“To be sure, they do,” he said. “They even have a special investigator who researches all horse deaths on which someone has made a claim in order to determine that they are genuine accidents.”

“So how come you can get away with it?” I asked.

“The insurer’s special investigator has his eyes set rather too close together.”

Mr. John Smith, or whoever, was waiting for me next to my car in the Uttoxeter racetrack parking lot at the end of the day.

“Haven’t you got anything better to do than hang round in racetrack parking lots?” I asked him sarcastically.

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said, ignoring me.

“How very observant of you,” I replied.

“Don’t you be funny with me,” he said. “Your friend is back from holiday tomorrow, and I want the microcoder.”

“I don’t know what time she lands,” I said. “I’ll call you when I’ve heard from her.”

“Make sure you do,” he said threateningly.

“You should be nice to me,” I said, “or you won’t get it back at all.”

“Watch it,” he said with real menace.

“Are you threatening me?” I asked.

“You’d better believe it,” he said.

“Well, I must warn you, I don’t respond well to threats.”

“Take my advice, Mr. Talbot,” he said, “respond to this one.”

Gone was the patient good humor of last Wednesday afternoon. Mr. John Smith, I imagined, was under pressure to get results.

He suddenly turned and walked away across the parking lot. I tried to see where he went, but I lost sight of him amongst the departing crowd, and I couldn’t tell if it was the dark blue Ford from the rest area that he climbed into.

“What was all that about?” asked Luca, who had been silently watching the exchange. Betsy had been standing next to him throughout, and her eyes were now wide with surprise and inquisition.

“Nothing,” I said, and started to load the equipment into the car.

“It didn’t look like nothing to us,” Luca said.

I looked him in the eye, and then shot a quick glance at Betsy, hoping Luca would get the message that I didn’t want to discuss the matter within her hearing.

“Just who was that man?” said Betsy. “He didn’t seem very nice.”

“It was nothing,” I said again. “He wants something I have, and we have been negotiating about the price. That’s all.”

Luca looked at me with disbelief showing all over his face, but he too glanced briefly at Betsy, telling me that he did indeed understand not to discuss the matter further with her there. Betsy, meanwhile, had not got the same message.

“What?” she said.

“What ‘what’?” I asked.

“What have you got that he wants?” she persisted.

“Nothing much,” I said. “A type of television remote. Forget it.”

She looked like she was about to ask me another question when Luca interrupted her thought process. “Where do you want to go for dinner tonight, Betsy?” he said.

“What?” she said angrily, turning towards him.

“Where shall we go for dinner tonight?” he repeated.

“We’re going to my mother’s,” she said sharply.

“Oh yes,” said Luca. “I forgot.”

He winked at me as we climbed into the car. Luca was nobody’s fool, he forgot nothing.

Within ten minutes I could see in the rearview mirror that Betsy was again listening to her iPod and dozing with her head against the window.

“Betsy, please, could you pass me a tissue?” I asked fairly quietly.

She didn’t move.

Luca began to turn around.

“Leave her,” I said to him.

“So was this TV remote thing that the man wanted that RFID writer you showed me?” Luca asked me quietly.

“Yes,” I said. “He calls himself John Smith, but I very much doubt that’s his real name. He also says he’s working for the Australian Racing Board.”

“Why don’t you just give it to him, then?” Luca said.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “For some reason I don’t altogether trust him, so I made up a story about giving it to a friend who had then gone on holiday.”

“Nice one,” said Luca sarcastically. “Where to?”

“Greece, I think,” I said. “I can’t really remember. I told him she was back on Sunday, that’s tomorrow.”

“She?” he said, almost laughing. “So where did the RFID writer come from in the first place?”

“I was given it,” I said.

“Who by?” he asked.

“A man from Australia.”

“Not John Smith?” he said.

“No. Another man from Australia.”

“Hence the Australian Racing Board’s interest in it?”

“Exactly.”

“So who was this other man from Australia?” Luca asked persistently. I began to wish we had never started this.

“Just a man,” I said evasively.

“So a mystery man from Australia just gave you a device for writing RFIDs and now the Australian Racing Board wants it back?”

It sounded implausible even to me.

“Yes,” I said.

“But is it theirs?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you ask the mystery man who gave it to you?”

“I can’t,” I said. “He’s gone away.”

“Back to Australia?”

“Not exactly,” I replied. Farther than that, I thought.

“So are you going to give it to the man in the parking lot, this John Smith?” Luca asked.

“I might,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

“Well, it’s not yours, is it? So why not give it to him? And I tend to think that next time he comes asking, you might just get another dose of fists and steel toe caps if you refuse. He seemed quite determined.”

“Yes, you’re probably right,” I said. “But there’s still something about him I don’t like. And I feel that giving up the microcoder is like giving up my trump card.”

“ ‘Microcoder’?” Luca said.

“That’s what the man calls it. But I know my father called it a ‘chip writer.’”

“Your father?” Luca said surprised. “I thought your father was dead.”

“He is,” I said without further elaboration. I’d forgotten that I hadn’t told Luca that the man murdered at Ascot had been my father. As far as Luca was concerned, my father had always been dead, and he knew I had been raised from babyhood by my grandparents.

“So how come your father knew about this microcoder thing?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” I said, trying to close the discussion.

“It’s a long journey,” he said.

“Yeah, well, not long enough.”

“So what’s next?” said Luca.

“Days off tomorrow and Monday, then Towcester on Tuesday evening,” I said.

“No,” he said, irritated.“I meant what’s next with this microcoder thing?”

“How difficult would it be to make another one exactly the same?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “As far as I remember, it’s just a radio transmitter that concentrates the radio signal at a point where you would put the RFID. It didn’t appear that sophisticated.”

“Could you make another one?” I asked.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said slowly.

“I don’t want you to,” I added quickly. “I just wondered if you could.”

“Yeah, I reckon I might,” he said. “Or if I couldn’t, one of the little hooligans from the electronics club would probably be able to do it in no time. They are like bloody magic when it comes to electronics. One of them even made a device that fooled the authorities into thinking he was at home wearing his court-ordered ankle tag when he was really out all night breaking into people’s cars. He said it gave him the best alibi anyone could ever want. Even the coppers were impressed.”

“How did they find out?” I asked.

“Oh, these lads may be damn clever when it comes to electronics,” he said. “But they can be pretty dense otherwise. The bloody idiot broke into an unmarked police car that was parked right outside the police station, and everything he did was recorded on an in-car video camera.”

I laughed.“Almost as bad as that bank robber recently who wrote his demand note on the back of a check from his own checkbook. It had his name printed on it.”

“It’s a good thing villains are stupid or we’d all be victims,” Luca said with a laugh.

“But they are not all stupid,” I said, becoming serious. “Remember, we never hear about the clever ones because they don’t get caught.”

“Good point,” he said.

Talking about not getting caught reminded me of the stash of banknotes still hidden in the cupboard under my stairs. Who did they belong to? Were they meant to be payment for Shifty-eyes for killing horses? Or maybe they were his cut for approving the insurance claims after the horses were dead. Either way, I was pretty sure they weren’t actually mine, even if I did have a sort of claim to inherit them after my father’s death, for they had been in his luggage.

“So do you want a copy of this microcoder?” Luca said, bringing me back from my daydreams.

“No, not really,” I said. “I just wondered why it was so important to get this particular one back if any half-witted juvenile delinquent could simply make another.”

“But they would have to have something to copy,” he said. “And they would have to know the right frequency to set it at.”

“Is that difficult?” I asked.

“Not if you have the original,” he said.“But much more difficult, maybe impossible, without it.”

“So if our Mr. John Smith-or whatever his name is-is so keen to get his hands on the original, is it because he doesn’t have access to another one?” I said. “But you would have thought that the Australian Racing Board had access to whatever resources they needed. I think that’s why I don’t trust him. It doesn’t ring quite true.”

“So does that mean you won’t give it to him?” Luca asked.

“No,” I said slowly. “But I might just ensure it doesn’t work properly before I hand it over.”

“That might be dangerous,” said Luca, grinning.

“You think so?” I asked.

“Yeah, but why not? Live dangerously.”

Or not at all, I thought.

The creak of someone walking over the third step brought me instantly from deep sleep to sharp awareness. It was already light. I lay there in bed, holding my breath and trying hard to listen for any movement on the stairs. I turned my head and looked at the door. Sophie still slept soundly beside me.

How could I have put her in such danger? I thought. What a fool I was.

The door handle slowly depressed and the door began to open. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest. What was I to do?

“I made you some tea,” said Alice, coming into the room, carrying a tray with two mugs of steaming liquid.

“Oh, Alice,” I said with such relief in my voice that I almost cried. “Thank you.”

“It’s a beautiful morning,” she said in a whisper, looking at Sophie.

“Yes,” I replied in the same manner. “I’ll leave her to sleep.”

Alice put the tray down on my bedside table and, with a wave, she departed. I heard step three creak twice, as usual, as she went down.

What was I doing? I thought.

Was it time to go to the police and hold my hands up for my failings and ask for their help and protection?

It was all well and good for me to perform the James Bond, secret-agent act when it was only my life and my future on the line. But what would Sophie do without me, especially now that she was home and getting better? Maybe her recovery wouldn’t last forever, but surely I had an obligation to her in the meantime.

Shifty-eyes was still out there somewhere, and he surely would still be searching for his money. I was actually quite surprised that he hadn’t already found me. Mr. John Smith had seemingly had no problem in turning up in my home in the dead of night. Perhaps it was not as easy as I thought to get records from a Coroner’s Court. Or perhaps Shifty-eyes would have had to give his name to get them, and I suspected he might have been reluctant to do that. Maybe he still didn’t know that I existed, but I thought it unlikely.

Thinking about the Coroner’s Court reminded me that today was when I should call their office to see if an order had been signed to allow for my father’s funeral to take place. I wondered if my sisters knew yet that their father was dead, or whether they even cared.

The first race at Towcester’s late-June evening meetingstarted at six p.m. I have always liked to be set up at least an hour before the first in order to capture the early punters, and also to give time for us to sort out any problems we might have with our equipment, in particular flat batteries and poor wireless Internet signal. Consequently, I drove in through the racetrack-entrance archway a little before five and parked in the shade of a large oak tree in the center of the parking lot.

I have always enjoyed going to Towcester Races, and not only because most of their meetings have no admission charge for the public and hence none for the bookies. I also loved the parkland course set on the rolling countryside of the Easton Neston estate, and their recent investments in new facilities that made it an attractive venue for both bookies and punters alike.

As the racetrack was approximately midway between our homes in Kenilworth and High Wycombe, Luca and I had agreed to meet there, traveling in our separate cars, so I unloaded everything myself and pulled it on our trolley into the racetrack enclosure.

The betting ring at Towcester was unusual insofar that it was in the space between the grandstands rather than in front of them, as on many courses. This was due to the stands having been built very close to the track, which I suppose was sensible as it gave a much better view of the racing for the spectators.

Luca was already waiting for me as I pulled the trolley to our pitch.

“Where’s Betsy?” I asked.

“She’s not coming,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think she will be coming again, ever.”

“Oh?”

“She packed up yesterday and moved out of my flat,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not meaning it.

“I’m not,” he replied.“Not really.” He paused.“I suppose I’ll miss her.” He paused again. “I’ll definitely miss her in bed. Wow, she was so good.” He smiled at me.

“Too much information, Luca,” I said, laughing. “Far too much information.”

We set up the stuff in silence for a while.

“I suppose we’ll need a new junior assistant now,” Luca said.

“Yes,” I said. “Any ideas?”

“There’s a lad at the electronics club who might be good.”

“I don’t want any juvenile delinquents.”

“He’s a good lad at heart,” said Luca. “He just fell in with the wrong crowd.”

“Talking about the electronics club,” I said, “did you tell the police about that microcoder thing?”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

“I should think so too. I nearly got arrested yesterday.”

“God! I’m sorry. I didn’t even know Jim was a copper until after he’d asked.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

“This chap, Jim, who also helps at the club, he called me up yesterday morning and asked about that black-box device thing you gave me to look at. Jim had helped me to investigate it. He was the bloke who fixed it up to the oscilloscope. So he just casually, like, asks me where I got it from, and I told him that you gave it to me. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong to say so, but Jim then says his boss will be most interested. So I ask him who his boss is, and he says some chief inspector or something.”

“You could have bloody warned me,” I said, fighting with the catch that held our board up.

“Sorry,” he said. “Jim called right in the middle of my own domestic crisis. Betsy had just accused me, point-blank, of sleeping with her sister, Millie.”

I stopped what I was doing and looked at him in surprise. Perhaps I might forgive him for not remembering to tell me about PC Jim.

“And have you?” I asked, intrigued.

“That’s none of your business,” he said, laughing. “But, no, not exactly.”

“And what the hell does that mean?” I said.

“I kissed her. Only once, mind. At her birthday party. You know, we went there from Ascot. But Betsy caught us.”

“Oh come on,” I said. “Everyone kisses the birthday girl at her own party.”

“Not with tongues,” he said. “And not out in the garden, behind a bush.”

“Ah,” I replied. That explained a lot. Betsy had been cool towards Luca ever since that party, and now I knew why.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked him.

“Nothing,” he said. “Leave things to settle for a while, I think. Then I’ll see how the land lies.”

“She may not have you back,” I said.

“Back? Are you crazy? I just thought I’d better let things calm down before I asked Millie out.” He grinned at me, and I wasn’t sure whether he meant it or if he was just trying to shock his new business partner. Knowing Luca, it was probably both.

It was a lovely summer’s evening at the races with a large crowd, many of them eager to have a flutter on the horses, and most of them in summer-casual dress of shorts and T-shirts. It was a far cry from the morning-dress formality of Royal Ascot, and much more fun. The bars were soon doing brisk business, helped by the unusually warm weather, and before long there was a party atmosphere all around the betting ring.

Luca and I worked continuously, taking bets and paying out winners without a break, one of the disadvantages of not having a junior assistant. But busy as it was, it was still one of those times when being a bookmaker was a real joy.

No one really becomes a bookie unless they have a bit of the showman in them. I just loved standing on my platform shouting out the odds and bantering with the crowd.

“Come on, mate,” shouted one heavyweight punter at me, “call that fair to have Ellie’s Mobile at only three-to-one?” He looked up at the name at the top of our board. “How can we ‘Trust Teddy Talbot’ when you only offer it at that price?”

“If you’ll ride it, you can have it at tens,” I shouted back at him.

All his mates roared with laughter.

“He couldn’t ride a bike,” one of them shouted.

“Not without bending it,” shouted another.

“Give me twenty on the nose,” said the heavyweight, thrusting a note in my direction.

“Twenty pounds to win, number two, and make it at four-to-one,” I said to Luca over my shoulder. “Special favor.”

“Cheers,” said the man, surprised. “You’re a real gent.”

I didn’t know about that, but, if I couldn’t repay a bit of initiative and color, then I was in the wrong business.

Ellie’s Mobile, the favorite, romped home to win by four lengths at a starting price of three-to-one, cheered with great gusto by the ten-strong band of well-oiled mates, who had stayed near our pitch to watch the race.

“Well done,” I said to the big chap, who was beaming from ear to ear.

“My God!” he said loudly to whoever would listen.“I’ve actually got one over on a bookie.”

“That makes a change,” chipped in one of the others.

They all guffawed, and ordered more beer.

“Weighed in,” sounded the public-address system.

I paid the big man his eighty pounds in winnings plus his twenty-pound stake.

“Cheers,” he said again, stuffing the cash into a pocket. “I’ll trust Teddy Talbot any day of the week.”

Giving him a better price had cost me twenty pounds. But the man and his nine friends more than repaid that amount in losing stakes in the remaining races. And they did so with smiles on their faces.

In fact, the whole evening was fun, with plenty of punters and a good mix of favorites and outsiders winning the races. Our overround, the measure of our overall profit, hovered around nine percent throughout, and both Luca and I were tired but happy as we packed up the equipment onto our little trolley after the last race.

“Where are you parked?” I asked him.

“In the center,” he said. “And you?”

“Up there.” I pointed. “Where are we the rest of the week?”

“Worcester tomorrow afternoon, Thursday evening and Friday afternoon at Warwick, then Leicester on Saturday,” Luca said. He always remembered what we had arranged better than I. We sat down about once every six weeks or so to plan the time ahead, and it was getting near to when we would have to do it again.

“Better put everything in my car, then,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’ll give you a hand.”

We dragged the trolley up the hill to the parking lot near the main entrance where I had left my car. All around us were happy racegoers also making their way to their vehicles in the late-evening sunshine. One of the reasons why evening racing was so popular was that, even in southern England, the sun didn’t set until well after nine o’clock for two whole months during midsummer.

“How about your young delinquent friend?” I asked as we pulled on the trolley handle. “Can he come with you sometime this week so I can meet him?”

“I’ll find out,” Luca said. “And he’s not a delinquent. He’s a nice boy, or I wouldn’t even suggest it.”

“OK, OK,” I said, smiling. “Ask him if he’d like to come and watch us one day this week. What’s his name?”

“Douglas,” he said. “Douglas Masters.”

His name didn’t sound like that of a juvenile delinquent, but who was I to know? Kipper didn’t exactly sound like a killer’s name either, but it was.

“Calls himself Duggie. Can I tell him there’s a job?”

“Sure,” I said. “But tell him it’s like an interview. No promises.”

On Wednesday morning I made the arrangements for my father’s funeral. What I really wanted was to have a cremation because I believed it gave greater closure. However, the coroner’s office had other ideas.

“The police have withdrawn their objection to a burial,” said an official. “But they said nothing about a cremation. And I haven’t heard anything from the CPS.”

“The CPS?” I asked.

“Crown Prosecution Service,” he said.

I sighed. Why was everything so damn difficult?

“Will you please ask them all, then,” I said, “if they have any objection to a cremation.”

“Can’t you do that?” said the official.

“But you would have to be told by them, not me, which would involve another call anyway,” I said. “So why don’t you just telephone them in the first place?”

“OK, I suppose so,” he said, clearly reluctantly.

“Good,” I said briskly before he could think of another excuse. “I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes.”

While I waited, I used the Internet to look up funeral directors close to Wexham Park Hospital. There were loads of them. I’d never realized that dying was so popular in that part of Berkshire.

I’d also never realized how expensive dying could be. A basic, no-frills funeral would cost about a thousand pounds, and that didn’t include the substantial price of a grave plot or the charge for the use of the crematorium. Add to that the cost of the necessary certificates, as well as a fee for someone to conduct the service, and it soon became a hefty sum indeed. To say nothing of the extras that could be incurred if I wanted an eco-friendly cardboard coffin or a choir. I began to wish I’d taken a bit more from the blue-plastic-wrapped packages to cover the expenses.

What, I wondered, would have happened if I hadn’t been here?

I called back the official at the coroner’s office.

“The police are happy, after all, that a cremation of Mr. Talbot’s remains can take place,” he said. “And the CPS doesn’t seem to be bothered at the moment because no one has been arrested yet for the crime.”

“Great,” I replied. I had discovered that the cost of a cremation was much less than that for a grave plot. “Tell me,” I went on, “who organizes and pays for a funeral of someone who turns up from abroad and dies in England without any family or friends?”

“The local Environmental Health Department would have to see to it,” he said.

“And they pay?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But they then try and recover the money from the family or from the deceased’s estate. But that won’t happen here because you are the next of kin and you’re here, so you can pay for it.” He made it sound so easy.

“How about if I couldn’t afford to?” I asked.

“You could apply to the Social Fund for help,” he said. “But you’d have to be receiving some sort of state benefit to qualify.”

Somehow it didn’t seem quite fair that my father had turned up out of the blue when I had thought he’d been dead for thirty-seven years only for me to be saddled with his funeral expenses, especially when his death was due to someone else sticking him in the guts with a carving knife. But I could tell that it was going to be no good arguing about it. There wouldn’t be a huge amount of sympathy for someone who had murdered his wife even if he himself had been the victim of a violent end. I would just have to shut up and pay up.

I called the first funeral director on the Internet list.

“We could fit you in this coming Friday,” the man said. “We’ve had a cancellation at Slough Crem. It’s a bit short notice, though.”

I amusingly wondered how a funeral director could have a cancellation for a cremation. Perhaps the deceased had miraculously returned to life.

“What time on Friday?” I asked.

“Three o’clock,” he said.

Friday was just two days away, but I didn’t think that really mattered. It wasn’t as if there would be anyone else coming. I wondered if I should try to contact his family in Australia to ask if any of them would want to attend. But I didn’t even know who to contact, and no one from there had been in touch with me during the past two weeks, either directly or through the Coroner’s Court, and they had my address.

“Three on Friday will be fine,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “Where is your father’s body?”

Good question, I thought. “I presume he’s still at Wexham Park Hospital,” I said. “But I’m not sure. The coroner’s office will know.”

I started to give him their number.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got it,” he said. “We’ll fix everything.”

For a fee, no doubt, I thought rather ungraciously.

“Do I need to book someone to take the service?” I asked.

“We can also fix that if you like, but you don’t have to have anyone religious if you don’t want to,” he said. “Anyone can take the service. You can officiate yourself, if you want to.”

“No,” I said. “I think he would have wanted a vicar or something.”

I couldn’t imagine why I thought that. Perhaps it was me who would rather have a clergyman. I wasn’t a very religious person, but I did think it would be slightly odd if I officiated at the service and, at the same time, was the only mourner present. Better to have an expert, so to speak.

“Any special request for music or hymns?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Whatever the vicar thinks is fit will be fine by me.” I didn’t exactly say that just a couple of quick words and straight into the fiery furnace would be ideal, but I made it clear that all I wanted was a simple funeral. The minimum that was acceptable would do well, I told him. It wasn’t as if I’d had a lifelong affection for my father.

“Do you want any flowers placed on the coffin?” he asked.

“I think not,” I said. Historically, cut flowers were placed on and around coffins to provide a sweet scent to cover any other unwelcome aromas that might emanate from the decomposing corpse within. I assumed my father’s body had been stored in appropriate refrigeration since his death, so flowers should be unnecessary.

“As it’s such short notice,” the man said, “could we have full payment up front by credit card?”

“Is that normal?” I asked.

“Quite normal,” he assured me. “Especially as the deceased was not resident in this country, with no estate to be probated by the courts.”

As it was the custom in Britain to cremate the coffin with the body, I could see that it would be rather difficult for the funeral director to take it back due to lack of payment once the event had occurred.

I gave him my credit card number and my address.

“Thank you, Mr. Talbot,” he said. “Of course, we will send you an itemized account after the day.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The business of life and death went on.

I thought that it must be difficult to be a good salesman in the undertaking trade. There had to be a line where selling a higher-class, and hence more expensive, coffin to a bereaved family became exploitation rather than acceptable good corporate practice. Especially if the coffin was almost immediately to be incinerated to ashes in a crematorium at a temperature in excess of eight hundred and fifty degrees centigrade.

“Is there anything else I need to do?” I asked.

“The death will need to be registered with the registrar,” he said. “But if it’s still subject to an inquest, that will have to wait until after the inquest is over. In the meantime, the coroner will issue a temporary death certificate, and you will have to sign Form A.”

“Form A?” I asked.

“Application for a cremation. It has to be signed by the executor or the next of kin. But you can do that just before the service. Everything else we need we’ll get from the coroner.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll see you on Friday afternoon.”

I sat in my office for a while wondering who I should tell. I expect the police would want to know, but was I required to inform them? And should I tell my grandmother that her son’s funeral was on Friday? Perhaps not, I thought. It would be far less distressing for her if I didn’t.

And how about Sophie?

We had never really discussed my parents as I’d never had any memories of either of them. She still thought they had both died in a car accident when I was a baby. Should I now explain to her that Alan Charles Grady, the man who had owned the black-and-red rucksack, the man who had been murdered in the Ascot racetrack parking lot, had actually been Peter James Talbot, my father? Not dead for the past thirty-seven years, as Sophie had thought, but dead for just fifteen days? And did I tell her that my mother had also not died in a car crash but had been strangled on the beach under the pier at Paignton? And did I further tell her that it had been my father who was responsible?

I decided that I would, in time, tell Sophie all about the events of the past two weeks, but not just yet. She had enough to deal with at the moment, having just come home from the hospital. I certainly didn’t want to upset the balance of her life, not while she was still adapting to her drug regime.

I decided I would go to my father’s funeral alone.

At three o’clock on Friday afternoon I sat alone in the chapel of Slough Crematorium as my father’s bare coffin was carried past me by four men from the funeral home and placed on the curtain-skirted catafalque at the front.

A clergyman in a white surplice over a black cassock came in and stood behind the lectern.

“Are you the son?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Are we waiting for anyone else?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you wish to say anything at any point?” he asked me.

“No,” I said again.

“Right, then. We’ll get started.”

The door at the back of the chapel opened with a squeak. I turned around. Detective Sergeant Murray came in and sat down two pews behind me. I nodded to him, and he responded in the same manner. I turned back to the minister, who then began.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

The clergyman droned on, rushing through the funeral rite as laid down in the Book of Common Prayer.

I didn’t really listen to the words.

Instead, I sat and stared at the simple wooden coffin and tried hard to remember what the man inside it looked like. I had seen him alive only briefly, for hardly more than an hour, yet his reappearance had dominated my life for the past two and a half weeks in a way it hadn’t done for the previous thirty-seven years.

It was difficult to describe my full feelings, but anger was uppermost amongst them. Anger that he had now gone forever and anger that he had been here at all.

Undeniably, he was my father. The DNA had proved that. But it didn’t feel like he had anything to do with me. But he, and his actions, had certainly been integral to the direction of my life, who I was and what I would become.

I wished I’d had longer to talk with him on the day he’d died, and the chance to talk to him again, even if it was to rant and rave at his conduct or to gather answers to so many unanswered questions: why did he kill my mother? why did he run away? why didn’t he take me with him? how could he have deserted me for so long? and, in particular, why did he come back?

I thought about his daughters, my sisters, so far away in Australia, who probably didn’t even know their father was dead. Should I say a prayer on their behalf?

The minister was nearing the end.

“In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Peter, and we commit his body to the elements, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him, and keep him, and give him eternal peace. Amen.”

As he was saying the last few words, the minister pushed a button on the lectern, and I watched intently as my father’s coffin slowly disappeared from sight behind long red curtains that closed silently around it.

The whole funeral had taken precisely nine minutes. The cremation would take a little longer. And then that would be that. My father’s earthly body would exist no more.

If only his influence could be so easily and quickly eliminated.

“Lovely service,” I said to the minister on my way out. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, shaking my hand.

Everyone always says it’s been a lovely service at a funeral, I thought, even if it hadn’t. It was neither the time nor the place to criticize, however bad things had been. In this case, the service had been functional. And that was enough.

“Thank you for coming,” I said to Detective Sergeant Murray as we stood together outside afterwards.

“Chief Inspector Llewellyn apologizes for not being here himself,” he said.

“I hadn’t expected him to come,” I said. I hadn’t, in fact, expected anyone to be here, and especially not the detective chief inspector, and not least because I hadn’t told a soul about the arrangements.

“The coroner’s office let us know,” he said. I nodded. “The police always try to go to murder victims’ funerals if we can.”

“Just in case the killer turns up?” I asked.

“It has been known,” he said, smiling.

“No chance today,” I said. “Not without being noticed anyway.”

“No,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Not much of a crowd to hide among at this one.”

“How are things on the detective front?” I said. “Any suspects yet?”

“Only you,” he said, but he said it with another smile. “My chief really doesn’t like you, does he?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The feeling’s mutual.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“Has my e-fit been of any use?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it has,” he said. “It’s been shown to some of the other witnesses, and they now generally tend to agree with you. So yours has now taken on the mantle as being the most accurate.”

I was pretty sure that shifty-eyed Kipper wouldn’t have been best pleased by that.

“But I haven’t seen it reproduced in any of the newspapers,” I said. “Or on the television.”

“It’s been in the Bracknell and Ascot Times, and in the Windsor and Eton Express,” he said. “But no one has yet come forward to say they recognize him.”

“Perhaps it would have been better to have put it in the Melbourne papers,” I said. “Or at least in the Racing Post.”

“Now, that’s a thought,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go and recommend it to the chief inspector.”

And, with that, the detective sergeant made his apologies and departed.

That just left me and the funeral director, who had been hovering to one side.

“Was everything in order, Mr. Talbot?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “It was fine.”

“Good,” he said. “And what would you like done with the ashes?”

“What are the choices?” I asked.

“You can have them, if you want,” he said. “They will be ready for collection tomorrow. Or we can collect them for you and hold them at our office, if you like. We’ll be coming here anyway. Funerals take place on Saturdays.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked.

“They can be scattered here, in the Garden of Remembrance, if you would prefer,” he said. “That way, you wouldn’t need to provide for a container.”

“Container?” I asked.

“If you wanted to take the ashes away, you would have to provide or pay for a container. Perhaps a box or an urn.”

“Oh,” I said. “No. Just have them scattered here, then. I don’t want them.”

“Right,” he said. “That will be all, then. I’ll send you an itemized receipt in due course.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That will be fine.”

He nodded to me, it was almost a bow, and then he walked quickly across to his car and drove away. I wondered if funeral directors laughed more at home than other people to make up for the solemnness of their work or whether they are so conditioned to having a sad disposition that they have difficulty letting their hair down.

I was left standing alone in the crematorium parking lot with that strange feeling of having mislaid something but wasn’t quite sure what, like when you leave a shopping bag on the counter and get halfway home before realizing it.

Perhaps it was a childhood that I’d mislaid, with loving parents, family holidays and happy Christmases. But was it my childhood that I’d lost or those of my nonexistent children? I stood next to my car and wept.

A few early arrivals for the next funeral spilled out of their cars and made their somber way over towards the chapel. None of them bothered me. Weeping in a crematorium parking lot was not only acceptable, it was expected.

I went straight from the nursing home to Leicester racetrack, but, afterwards, I couldn’t recall a single moment of the journey. My mind had been too preoccupied trying to come to terms with what I’d been told.

As I had so hoped, I was, after all, not the son of a murderer. But I was the grandson of one. I had stood alongside my grandfather on racetracks for all those years as his assistant, unaware of the dreadful secret he and my grandmother had concealed. Far from being the ones who had stepped in and cared for me in my time of need, they had been the very architects of my misery.

Automatically, as if on autopilot, I parked the Volvo and began to unload the equipment. I pulled out our odds board with TRUST TEDDY TALBOT emblazoned across the top. I stopped unloading and looked at it. I would have laughed if I didn’t feel so much like crying. Trust Teddy Talbot to ruin your life.

On Monday morning, I picked up Luca and Duggie early from the Hilton Hotel parking lot at Junction 15 on the M40 motorway, and the three of us set off for the Bangor-on-Dee races with happy hearts but with mischief in mind.

The bruises on my abdomen, inflicted by fists and steel toe caps at the Kempton Park races, had finally begun to fade, but the fire of revenge still burned bright in my belly. I had told Larry Porter that I would get even with the bastard who had ordered the beatings, and today was going to be my day.

“Did you check with Larry?” I said to Luca. “Has he got the stuff?”

“Relax,” Luca said to me. “Don’t worry. Larry will be there in good time.”

“Did you speak to any of your friends?” I asked Duggie. “To remind them?”

“All OK,” he replied. “As Luca said, relax, everything is fine.”

I hoped he was right.

We arrived at the racetrack early, and I parked in one of the free parking lots. I went to pay the fee at the bookmakers’ badge entrance while Luca and Duggie unloaded the equipment and pulled it through to the betting ring.

“Where’s the bloody grandstand?” said Duggie, looking around.

I laughed. “There isn’t one.”

“You’re putting me on,” he said.

“No,” I said. “There really aren’t any grandstands at Bangor.”

“How do the punters see the racing, then?” he asked.

“It’s a natural grandstand,” I said. “The people stand on the hill to watch the racing.” The ground fell away down towards the track, giving ample room for a good view of the horses.

“I’ve seen it all now,” he said.

“No, you haven’t,” I said. “In southern Spain, they race along a beach, with the crowd wearing swimming trunks and sitting under sun umbrellas. It’s proper racing with starting stalls, betting, the lot. It even gets TV coverage.”

“And in St. Moritz, in Switzerland,” Luca said, “every year they race on a frozen lake. I’ve seen it. It’s amazing. But there are no swimming trunks, though, more like fur coats: it’s midwinter.”

“They race on snow in Russia too,” I said. “And back in the eighteen hundreds, they used to have racing right along the frozen Moscow River-actually on the ice.”

“Then why do they cancel racing here whenever it snows?” Duggie asked.

“Good question,” I said. “Obviously, the wrong kind of snow.”

We giggled. But it was nervous laughter.

We set up our pitch, and Luca commented favorably on the new name on our board. I had spent the previous evening painting over the TRUST TEDDY TALBOT slogan and had replaced it with, it had to be said, some pretty poorly painted white letters saying simply TALBOT AND MANDINI.

“I’ll have to change the wording on our tickets as well,” Luca said. “I’ll do it now.”

He set to work while I went to the Gents’. The nerves were clearly beginning to get to me.

“There’s a public pay phone on the wall round there,” I said when I came back. I pointed down the side of the building between the seafood bar and the Gents’.

“I’ll have to be making a call to my granny, then, at the appropriate time,” said Luca, smiling.

“No way,” I said. “I’ll need you here, on the pitch.”

“What’s the problem?” Duggie said.

“I don’t want anyone being able to use the public pay phone when the mobiles stop working,” I said.

“That’s easy,” said Duggie. “I’ll go and fix it.” And off he went before I had a chance to stop him.

He was back in a couple of minutes.

“All done,” he said. “No one’s going to use that phone today.”

Luca and I looked at each other.

“What did you do?” I asked Duggie.

“What do you think?” he said. “I broke it. Then I went into the office and complained that the phone wouldn’t work. They’ve put an OUT OF ORDER sign on it now.”

I laughed. “Well done.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But they offered me the use of the secretary’s phone instead if it were urgent like.”

“Ah,” I said. I didn’t want anyone using the secretary’s phone either.

“It’s simple,” said Duggie. “I got the secretary’s phone number, so I get a mate to call it at the right time and then not hang up. It will tie up the line so no one can call in or out on it. In fact, I’ll get a few of my mates to all call just in case they have more than one line on that number. That’ll tie them all up.”

“But won’t your mates’ numbers show up on caller ID?” I said. “I don’t want them traced.”

“So I’ll get my mates to withhold their numbers, or they can call from the pay phones in Wycombe,” he said. “It’s dead easy.”

“OK,” I said. “Fix it.”

Larry Porter arrived and began to set up his pitch alongside ours.

“Have you got the equipment?” I asked him.

“Yes. All set,” Larry said. “Bill’s coming separately, later.”

Bill, I assumed, was the man I had seen at Ascot in the white shirt and fawn chinos who had placed the “two monkeys” bet with me when the Internet and phones had gone down just before the Gold Cup.

The maiden hurdle was the fifth race of the afternoon, and I became more and more nervous as the clock ticked around to four-thirty, race time. Monday-afternoon racing anywhere was always quiet, and today was no exception. But the lack of activity in the betting ring did nothing to help settle the butterflies in my stomach.

In all, the bookmaker turnout was reasonable. I counted sixteen of us in the main betting ring, and there were a few others over near the course, all of us chasing the meager pickings from the sparse Monday crowd. But other than Larry and Norman, I didn’t recognize any of the other bookies, as we were at the northern extent of our usual patch and wouldn’t normally be standing at Bangor.

At long last, it was nearing the maiden hurdle race time. The horses were in the saddling boxes and the punters were beginning to make their selections. There were nineteen runners, with Pool House the fairly short-priced favorite at six-to-four. The horse had raced three times previously and finished second on the last two occasions. And today it was being ridden by the many-times-champion jockey who had made the journey from Lambourn especially to ride this one horse, so he, for one, expected it to win. And all the newspapers agreed with him.

With the horses in the parade ring, and with precisely six minutes to go before the scheduled start time, I nodded imperceptibly to Larry, who pushed his out-of-sight switch to turn on the phone jammer. At the same time, I nudged Luca, who activated his virus on the racetrack’s Internet server, effectively putting it out of action and isolating the track from the outside world.

I thought of the thirty juvenile delinquents and hoped that they were all poised to place their bets.

A man in a white shirt and fawn chinos suddenly appeared in front of me. Bill, I assumed.

“Grand on number four,” he said, thrusting a wad of banknotes towards me.

Number four was the second favorite.

“Grand on number four at three-to-one,” I said loudly over my shoulder.

“Offer at eleven-to-four,” Luca said equally loudly.

“OK,” said the man. I gave him the TALBOT AND MANDINI-printed ticket, and the price changed on our board.

“Give me a monkey on four at threes,” Luca bellowed at Larry Porter.

“You can have it at five-to-two,” Larry shouted back.

“OK,” said Luca, who then turned the other way towards Norman Joyner. “Give me a monkey on number four,” he shouted even louder.

“Fine,” shouted Norman back. “At nine-to-four.”

Within less than a minute, the price of horse number four was tumbling all over the betting ring and, as a result, the price of Pool House, the favorite, was tending to drift longer.

The panic from the boys from the big outfits wasn’t as dramatic as it had been at Ascot, but it was fairly impressive nonetheless. They rushed around trying desperately to get their phones to work but without success. I saw one of them rush off to use the pay phone, but he was soon back with a frustrated look on his face.

But they had all clearly been well briefed after the incident at Ascot. They clearly knew that the price of the hot favorite had, on that occasion, lengthened during the time when the Internet and phones were down. They would also know that when the favorite then won, they all got hit badly because all the bets in the High Street betting shops were paid out on the starting price, and that had been artificially made too high.

Consequently, the big-firm boys, those with the cash in their pockets, now took it upon themselves, in the absence of orders from their head offices, to back the favorite heavily, to bring its price down again to six-to-four.

There was almost panic to get their money on with the ring bookies before the start. I took a number of big bets, and, reluctantly, we brought the price of Pool House down from seven-to-four, first to thirteen-to-eight, then to six-to-four and finally to eleven-to-eight, before the off. The horse had actually started at shorter odds than it would have if we had done nothing.

The race began, and Larry switched off his phone-jamming device while Luca cured the Internet server of his virus.

“That didn’t bloody work, did it?” said Larry angrily. “Now, if the favorite goes on and wins, I stand to lose a packet.”

But the favorite didn’t win.

A complete rank outsider called Cricket Hero beat it by two lengths and was returned at the surprisingly long starting price of a hundred-to-one and without a single cheer from the watching crowd. We hadn’t taken a single bet on the horse, so, from the paying-out point of view, it was a very satisfactory result and went some way to make up for our lack of business in the previous races.

“Hold the fort a minute,” I said to Luca.

I went over to watch Cricket Hero being led into the winner’s unsaddling enclosure. There was a distinct lack of enthusiastic applause from those who had turned up to see the horses come in, but there would have been very few amongst them, if any, who would have backed it. The horse’s connections, however, were absolutely delighted and beaming from ear to ear as their horse circled around and around, steaming gently from under its blanket. I looked in the race card to see what they had down as the name of the trainer. Miles Carpenter, it said, from Ireland.

I leaned on the rail close by to the person I assumed was Mr. Carpenter. He was smiling like the cat that got the cream.

“Well done, Mr. Carpenter,” I called to him.

He turned and took a stride towards me. “Thanks,” he said in a thick Irish accent.

“Nice horse,” I said, nodding at the bay, but the truth was it didn’t look that good. Compared to the other horses, whose well-groomed rumps had shone in the summer sunshine, the winner’s coat had been allowed to grow rather long and, in places, was matted and dull. His tail was a jumble of knots and his hooves were not nicely blackened like most racehorses’ when they run. In fact, the horse looked like an old nag. That’s partly why his price had been so high. No one wants to bet on a horse that doesn’t look good in the parade ring. Generally speaking, horses that don’t look very well don’t run very well either.

But appearances can be deceptive.

“Yes,” he replied with a big smile, coming a step closer. “I think he’s going to be a champion.”

I spoke directly to him, quietly but quite clearly. “Oriental Suite, I assume.”

The smile instantly disappeared from his face.

“And you,” I went on, “must be Paddy Murphy.”

“And who the fuck are you?” he said explosively, coming right up to me and thrusting his face into mine.

“Just a friend,” I said, backing away and smiling.

“What do you want?” he snarled.

“Nothing,” I said. I turned away, leaving him dumbstruck behind me.

He had already given me what I wanted. Confirmation that Oriental Suite was indeed now called Cricket Hero. Not that I had really needed it.

I assumed that the real Cricket Hero was dead. Switched with Oriental Suite using the Australian fake RFIDs and then killed for a large insurance payout.

To be honest, Cricket Hero’s death had not been a great loss to racing. I had looked him up on the Racing Post website. He had run a total of eight times, always in bad company, and had finished last or second to last on every occasion. His official rating had been so low as to be almost off the bottom of the scale. But that would all change now.

The horse now running as Cricket Hero was actually Oriental Suite, and one thing was absolutely certain. Oriental Suite should never have started any race at odds of a hundred-to-one, let alone a low-quality maiden hurdle at Bangor-on-Dee on a quiet Monday afternoon in July.

I thought about the two photocopied horse passports I had found in the secret compartment of my father’s rucksack. One of them had been in the name of Oriental Suite. But the other had belonged to a horse called Cricket Hero, and I had been struck by the similarities in the markings and hair whorls of the two horses as recorded on the diagrams.

And I had been looking out for the name Cricket Hero to appear in race entries ever since.

Luca, Duggie and I could hardly contain ourselves as we packed up the equipment after the last race. Larry had been so frightened by the prospect of his heavy losses that he gave the electronic phone jammer back to Luca and swore to me that he would never try anything like that again. I bit my lip hard so that I wouldn’t smile.

We loaded the stuff in my Volvo, and I drove back south towards Warwickshire, Luca next to me as usual, Duggie behind him.

“The look on Larry’s face when that race started was priceless,” said Luca, laughing. “He was in a complete panic.”

“Norman didn’t look too happy either,” I said, joining in the hilarity.

“I heard one of those suits saying that he knew something was up as he couldn’t get a line on the secretary’s phone,” said Duggie.

“Thanks to you,” I said, looking at him in the rearview mirror. “Well done.” He beamed.

I drove in silence for a while. We were all enjoying wallowing in the success of it all.

“What are you going to do with all that money?” Duggie asked eventually.

“Well,” I said, “I thought of donating it to charity. Perhaps the Injured Jockeys Fund.”

“Good idea,” said Luca very seriously. “It’s a very good cause.”

I went on driving.

“But then I thought it would be more fun if we had it,” I said.

We all burst into laughter.

“Much better idea,” said Duggie, banging the back of the front seats in his excitement.

We discussed the money for the next twenty minutes.

Provided Tony Bateman paid it all out, and assuming that all the thirty bets had actually been placed and at the hundred-to-one starting price, then the total winnings would be six hundred thousand pounds. A quarter of that would go to the thirty delinquents at a rate of five thousand pounds each. Luca, Duggie and I decided that we would split half the total, three hundred thousand, jointly amongst us, with the other quarter going anonymously and jointly to two charities, the Injured Jockeys Fund and Racing Welfare, just to ease our consciences.

“Can we do this every week?” asked Duggie. “Biggest paycheck I’ve ever had, I can tell you.”

“Better than that,” I said. “Gambling winnings are tax free in the UK.”

We all laughed again.

I had decided that splitting the money equally amongst the three of us was the only way. Duggie’s help with the delinquents had been crucial, and his little intervention with the bullyboys at Leicester had made me grateful that he was on my side, not theirs. I wanted to keep it that way.

We were still all in high spirits when I finally turned into the Hilton Hotel parking lot at Junction 15 on the M40, where Luca had left his car.

“Do they let you park here for free?” I asked him.

“I didn’t ask,” he said.

“But how do you get out?” There was a barrier down at the parking lot exit.

“Duggie and I will go in for a celebration drink,” he said. “I’ll get a token from the barman.”

“Don’t get breathalyzed,” I said.

“I won’t,” he said in farewell. He and Duggie gave me a wave as I turned the car out of the hotel parking lot and drove away. I thought it was fortunate you couldn’t lose your license for having euphoria-induced adrenaline in your bloodstream. I would be well over the limit.

My telephone rang as I negotiated the turn out onto the main road.

The phone was in its hands-free car cradle, and the number of the caller was shown across the green rectangular display at the top. It was Sophie’s mobile number.

I pushed the button.“Hello, my darling,” I said cheerfully into the microphone that was situated next to the sun visor.“I’ve just dropped Luca and Duggie at the Hilton and I’ll be home in about ten minutes.”

But it wasn’t Sophie’s voice that came back at me out of the speaker.

“Hello, Mr. Talbot,” said a man’s voice. A chill ran right down my spine, and I nearly drove straight into an oncoming truck. “You still have something of mine,” he said. “So now I have something of yours.”

I became cold and clammy all over.

“Let me speak to my wife,” I said.

There was a slight pause, then Sophie came on the line. “Ned, Ned,” she screamed. She sounded very frightened, and there was a quiver in her voice. “Help me.”

“It’s all right, Sophie,” I said, trying to calm her. “Everything will be all right.”

But she wasn’t there anymore, and the man came back on the line. “Do as I say, Mr. Talbot, and she won’t get hurt.” The tone of his voice was really quite normal, but there was real menace in his meaning.

Not only did I fear for Sophie’s safety, I feared more for her state of mind.

“What do you want?” I asked him.

“I want the rest of the items that were in that rucksack,” he said. “I want the chips, the chip writer and the rest of the money.”

That confirmed to me that the man was shifty-eyed Kipper. I had feared that I’d not seen the last of him, or of his twelve-centimeter knife, and my fears had clearly been well founded.

“I haven’t got the items,” I said.

“Go and get them, then,” he said, just as if he was telling off a miscreant schoolboy who had forgotten his books.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Never you mind,” he said. “And don’t hang up. Keep on the line. If you hang up, I will hurt your wife. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Now, where are my things?”

What was I to say? Telling him that I had given the RFID chips and the microcoder/chip writer to Mr. John Smith was unlikely to help get Sophie released unharmed. As for the money, it was still spread amongst the juvenile delinquents. True, I had the take from the afternoon’s racing at Bangor-on-Dee in my pocket, but it certainly didn’t run to six thousand pounds after such a slow day. Perhaps, at best, there might be half of that.

“They’re at my house,” I said.

“Where in your house? I couldn’t find them.”

I didn’t like the sound of that.

I thought quickly.

“In the cupboard under the stairs,” I said. “In an old paint tin.”

There was a pause.

“Go and get them,” he said.“Now. But don’t hang up the phone. Where are you now?”

“On the Warwick bypass,” I said.

“Go to your house, but keep talking to me. If you hang up, I will kill your wife.”

It was the first time he had used the word “kill,” and a fresh wave of fear swept over me. God knows how Sophie was feeling if she’d heard it.

“All right, all right, I won’t hang up,” I said quickly. “Now, let me talk to my wife again.”

There was another pause.

“Ned,” she cried down the phone. “What the hell’s going on?”

“Sophie,” I said. “It will be all right, my love. I promise. I’ll get the things he wants and he will let you go. Stay calm.”

“I will stay calm, Mr. Talbot,” shifty-eyed Kipper said, obviously taking the phone back. “Just get my things, and we can all stay calm. But do not hang up the phone.”

“What happens if I lose the mobile signal?” I said.

“You had just better hope you don’t,” he replied.

I realized why he didn’t want me to hang up. As long as I was on the line with him, I couldn’t call the police.

“OK,” I said. “I’m turning off the A46 into Kenilworth.”

There was no reply.

“Where shall I bring them?” I asked.

“Just get them first,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you what to do.”

I made the few turns in Kenilworth and drew up outside my house alongside Alice’s car, which stood alone in the parking area. Where, I wondered, was Alice?

I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes to eight, and I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since a single slice of toast for breakfast, some twelve hours ago. But hunger was something I could easily endure.

“I’ve arrived at my house,” I said into the microphone.

“Good,” he said. “Go in and fetch the stuff. Take your mobile phone with you, and don’t hang up.”

“It might hang up automatically when I take it out of the hands-free system.”

“You had better hope it doesn’t,” he replied. “If you hang up the phone, I’ll kill your wife.”

“But it hangs up on its own when I take it out,” I pleaded. “It’s done it before.”

“Take it out now,” he said.

I lifted the phone out of its cradle, and, of course, it immediately hung up. Oh God, I thought, now what do I do? Do I call back or what?

Before I had a chance to decide, the phone rang in my hand.

“Hello, yes,” I shouted into it. “I’m here.”

Please let it be him, I prayed, and not my bloody voice mail.

“Good,” said Kipper. My heart rate went down by at least half. I would never have thought that I would be relieved to hear his voice.

“OK,” I said. “I’m getting out of the car and going in.”

The front door was open about two inches, and I began to fear that he might actually be inside the house waiting for me.

“Are you in my house?” I asked him.

There was no reply.

“I need to know if you are in my house,” I said again.

Once more, there was no reply.

“Stop playing games with me,” I spoke firmly into the phone. “I am not going through my front door until you tell me where you are.”

“Do as you are told,” he replied. “I’m in charge here, not you. Now, go into your house and get my things.”

“No, I will not,” I said, my heart rate climbing again. “I will not go through my front door only for you to plunge your knife into me the same way you did to my father at Ascot.”

There was a long pause from his end.

“Are you still there?” I asked eventually.

“I’m here,” he said. “How come your name is Talbot and not Grady?”

I suddenly realized he hadn’t known that the man he knew as Alan Grady, the man he had murdered in the Ascot parking lot, had been my father.

“My father’s name was really Talbot, not Grady,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “Now, that might account for why I have been unable to find out about him.”

He obviously hadn’t traced me through the inquest records because he hadn’t known which records to look at. But he must have known that my father was dead, I thought. The stabbing had been an expert job.

“Are you in my house?” I repeated into the phone.

“If I was in your house, I would have gone to the paint tin and taken what is mine by now.”

Did I believe him? But did I have any choice but to go in anyway?

I pushed the front door open wide with my foot until it turned on its hinges as far as it would go, almost flat against the wall. There was not enough space for him to be hiding behind it.

“Have you got them yet?” he asked, making me jump.

“No,” I replied.

I stepped into the hall. I could hear nothing. I walked quickly down the hall past the cupboard under the stairs and into the kitchen. Everything from the kitchen cabinets was strewn across the floor. I stepped carefully through the mess to the house telephone, but there would be no using it to call the police. The wire had been cut right through. I went into the living room and found the same things had been done to both the phone and the cupboards in there. I had no doubt that the third extension, the one in the bedroom upstairs, would have suffered the same fate, but I still started up the stairs to check. Step three creaked as I stepped on it

I thought I could hear a slight banging.

I stopped to listen.

The faint knocking sound came again, but I wasn’t sure of exactly where from.

“Have you got the stuff?” Kipper said to me through the phone.

“No,” I said. “I’m having a pee.”

“Hurry up.”

I put the phone down to my side and listened once more.

I could definitely hear someone knocking. It was below me.

I rushed back down the stairs and opened the cupboard underneath.

Alice lay there on her side, curled around the vacuum cleaner and with her arms tied behind her back. She was banging her tied-up feet on the floor. A tea-towel gag had been wrapped around her face, so I pulled it down, and she immediately spat out a dirty dishcloth that was in her mouth.

“Ugh,” she said, and was promptly sick on the floor.

“You bastard,” I said into the phone.

Kipper laughed. “Ah, you’ve found my little surprise.” He sounded pleased with himself.

I went back into the kitchen, fetched a pair of scissors and cut through the plastic garden ties that had secured Alice’s wrists and ankles. She sat on the hall floor rubbing where the plastic had dug into her flesh. I put a finger up to my mouth in the universal “be quiet” gesture and pointed at the phone.

“Phone the bloody police,” she shouted, ignoring me.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” said shifty-eyed Kipper through the phone. “Not if you want to see your wife again.”

“Alice, I can’t,” I said.

“Why the bloody hell not?” she demanded.

“He’s got Sophie,” I said. “And he’s on the other end of this phone.”

“Tell him he’s a fucking piece of shit,” she said with passion, continuing to rub her wrists. I was quite taken aback by her vulgarity. Alice had always been so prim and proper, at least within my hearing.

Kipper had obviously heard what she had said because he laughed again. “Tell her she should be happy to be alive.”

I didn’t bother.

“Now, get my things,” he said, “and go back to your car.”

What was I to do? I had to make him think that I still had them or he would hurt or kill Sophie. And I needed to set up a swap, I thought. That would be a good start, but, so far, I hadn’t actually worked out how to.

But first, I needed something to swap for Sophie. I took a canvas shopping bag off the hook on the back of the kitchen door and started putting things into it. First, the wad of banknotes, the takings from Bangor races, came out of my trouser pocket and into the bag. Next, I took a clear plastic sandwich bag and put ten grains of rice in it from Sophie’s rice jar. Finally, the instruction booklet for the kitchen television, together with the TV remote control, went into the shopping bag as well.

Alice stood in the kitchen doorway, watching me with wide eyes. “What are you doing?” she said. “Call the police.”

I again put my finger to my mouth, and this time she understood. I also held up the cut phone wire, and she nodded.

“OK, I’ve got it all,” I said into the phone.

“Go and get into the car and drive back onto the A46 towards the M40.”

“OK,” I said.

I put my hand over the microphone and spoke to Alice. “I’ve got to go and give this to the man.” I held up the shopping bag. “I’ll come back here with Sophie. Are you OK?”

She nodded again slightly, but I noticed tears on her face. She was clearly very shocked. It’s not every day you get tied up and left in a cupboard under the stairs with a dirty dishcloth rammed into your mouth. Thank goodness.

I stroked her shoulders in reassurance and then went back out to my Volvo with the shopping bag.

“OK,” I said into the phone. “I’m back in the car. I’m going to put the phone back in the hands-free cradle, but it may hang up again.”

“Leave it, then,” he said. “Keep it in your hand.”

I reversed out onto Station Road and retraced my path to the A46.

“OK,” I said, holding the phone to my ear. “I’m now on the A46 going towards the M40.”

I didn’t get stopped for illegal use of a handheld mobile phone. There’s never a policeman about when you want one.

“Leave the A46 and take the A425 towards Warwick,” he said. “Take the third turn on the right, Budbrooke Road. Follow it round to the right. Go to the very end of the road.”

“OK,” I said to him. I still wasn’t sure what I would do when I got there.

I took the A425 and then slowly turned into Budbrooke Road. It was an industrial estate sandwiched between a canal and a railway line. Large, characterless modern blocks built of seamed metal stood on either side of the road. No doubt during the working day this area was busy with people and traffic, but at eight-fifteen on a Monday evening it was completely deserted.

I drove slowly down to the very end of the road and stopped between two of the big soulless buildings. I turned the car around so I was looking back up the road, but my Volvo was the only car about, and I began to wonder if I was in the right place.

“Are you here?” I asked.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Where?”

“Shut up and wait.”

I wondered if he was waiting to see if I’d been followed. I sat there for what seemed like ages, but it was probably only a couple of minutes. I looked all around. If he was watching me, I couldn’t tell where from.

“OK,” he said finally through the phone. “Open the car door, put the things out on the ground and drive away.”

“What about my wife?” I asked.

“When I am satisfied that I have everything, I will let her go.”

“No way,” I said. “If you want your things, you will have to let her go now.”

“Do as you are told,” he said again.

“No,” I said. “If you want this stuff, then you will have to come here now and swap it for my wife.”

“An exchange?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “An exchange.”

He laughed. “Mr. Talbot, this is not a spy movie. Leave the things on the ground and go.”

“No, I will not,” I said again firmly. “I want my wife back now.”

He didn’t answer, and I began to fear that he had gone. But then a small silver hatchback moved slowly down the road and stopped, facing me, about thirty yards away.

The driver’s door opened, and Kipper stood up next to the car. He lifted the phone to his ear.

“Where’s my stuff?” he said.

I opened the door to the Volvo and stood next to it. I too lifted a phone to my ear.

“Where’s my wife?” I said.

He reached down into the car and pulled her up from the backseat. She stood up next to him. I could see that her hands were behind her back, presumably tied, and there was what looked like a pillowcase over her head.

“Take that off her head,” I said into the phone.

He pulled the pillowcase away, and Sophie blinked in the bright summer-evening sunshine. He held her in front of him with his right arm over her shoulder. And he had his twelve-centimeter-long knife resting against her neck.

“Where’s my stuff?” he asked again through the telephone.

I could feel my heart pumping in my chest. I put my hand into the Volvo, picked up the canvas shopping bag and held it up.

“Show me,” he said.

I pulled the wad of banknotes out of the bag. I held it up above my head and waved it at him. Most of the notes were tenners and twenties, but he wouldn’t be able to see from his distance that they weren’t all fifties or even Australian hundred-dollar bills.

“Show me the chip writer,” he said.

With a dry mouth, I put the money back in the bag and carefully picked up the television remote control. I held it up with the back of it facing towards him. From where he was standing, I hoped that it would appear to be a black box of approximately the right size and shape. I held my breath for a few seconds, and then, equally carefully, I put the remote back in the bag.

“And the chips?” he asked.

I held up the sandwich bag with the grains of rice in it. I could hardly tell them apart from the real RFID chips, and I was the one holding them. He would have had no chance of doing so from thirty yards away. I put them back in the shopping bag as well.

“And here are the horse passports,” I said, holding up and waving the TV instruction booklet around so that he couldn’t see it too clearly. “Now, release my wife.”

“Go over there and put the bag on the ground.” He pointed towards the building to my right, his left.

I put the TV instruction booklet back in the bag and walked about fifteen or twenty steps over to where he had pointed. I put the bag down on the ground and stood next to it. I was still twenty yards or so from where he stood holding Sophie, the knife at her neck glinting in the sunlight.

“Now, go back to your car,” he said through the phone, even though I could hear him plainly without it.

“Let my wife walk away from you,” I said to him. “When she starts walking, I will walk away from the bag.”

“Mr. Talbot, you really have been watching too many spy films,” he said with a laugh.

It may have amused him to think that we were taking part in a spy movie, but I didn’t feel at all like laughing. Not with my humble TV remote control acting the part of an electronic microcoder/chip writer and a bag of simple rice grains appearing as some programmable RFIDs. And certainly not when my wife’s life might depend on them remembering their lines.

“Let my wife go,” I said firmly to him, “and then these are yours.” I pointed down at the bag.

The recovery of the items must have become an obsession with him. He looked over longingly at the shopping bag. He removed the knife from Sophie’s throat and gently pushed her away from him towards my car. I let her go a few strides, just enough to be out of his reach, and then I started moving slowly backwards towards the Volvo, watching Kipper intently for any sudden movements.

He walked around the front of his car and started towards the bag.

Sophie was now about halfway to my car, but she wasn’t going anywhere near fast enough to my liking. Her face showed relief at being away from Kipper’s grasp, but she clearly didn’t fully realize the ongoing danger of the situation.

It would have been nice to have had the time to allow Sophie to climb gently into the passenger seat, but Kipper was almost at the bag, and a single glance would enlighten him instantly that my kitchen television remote control was not the microcoder/chip writer he was expecting.

“Sophie, run,” I shouted at her urgently. At the same time, I sprinted for the Volvo and opened the rear door. Sophie ran towards me. I took a couple of strides forward, grabbed her and literally threw her across the backseat. I slammed the back door and was in the car almost before Kipper realized he’d been fooled. I tossed my phone over onto the passenger seat as I slammed the driver’s door shut and locked it

The first part of the scheme had gone exactly to plan. Now all I had to do was get Sophie and me safely away. I started the engine, threw the car into gear and shot past Kipper’s silver hatchback with my back wheels spinning on the loose surface.

I could see him shouting something at me, but I couldn’t hear what it was, and I didn’t care. He ran over to his car, and, all too soon, the silver hatchback appeared large in my rearview mirror as I waited at the junction with Birmingham Road for a gap in the traffic. He came right up behind me at speed and rammed the Volvo forwards, right out into the path of a speeding white van.

I closed my eyes and waited for the crash, but somehow the van driver managed to avoid the collision by swerving around me with a squeal of his tires and a blast of his horn. It didn’t seem to me that he had braked one little bit as he sped away towards the A46 roundabout.

Sophie was lying full-length across the backseat where I had thrown her, still with a black plastic tie binding her hands behind her back. “Ned, what’s happening?” Her voice was remarkably calm and collected for someone who had just had a knife at her throat. Where, I thought, was the expected panic?

The answer was that the panic was up here in front, with me.

I suppose if one had to be involved in an impromptu stock-car race along the highways and byways of Warwickshire, an old Volvo 940 2.3-liter turbocharged station wagon might actually be one’s car of choice. In their prime, they hadn’t been nicknamed the “Volvo Tank” for nothing.

At the A46 junction, I debated with myself which way to go. Kipper, in his silver hatchback, was right up against my tailgate, and I could feel the Volvo lurch every time he hit me. If I went down towards the M40, I would have to deal with the traffic lights at the motorway junction. Equally, if I went straight on the A425, towards Birmingham, there were traffic lights within a few hundred yards. So I decided to turn right onto the A46, back towards Kenilworth and Coventry.

I swept onto the roundabout so fast that my mobile phone slid off the passenger seat and down the gap between it and the door. Sod it, I thought. I’d wanted to call the police, but I would have had to stop the car to retrieve the phone from down there. And, at the moment, stopping was completely out of the question.

Kipper kept darting back and forth around the rear of the Volvo like an annoying insect. Twice he gave me such a big nudge that I feared I would lose control completely, and my car was still fishtailing badly as it sped down the on-ramp and onto the A46 divided highway.

In spite of being thrown around by the constant lurching of the car, Sophie had managed to get herself into a fairly upright position on the backseat. I smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She looked back at me with wide, frightened eyes.

“Can you untie me?” she asked.

“Not just at the moment, my darling. I need both hands to drive.”

The car lurched as it was struck again by the hatchback. Sophie lay back down on the seat.

Fortunately, the A46 was quite empty at that time of the evening, and I was able to put my foot down on the gas. The Volvo’s speedometer climbed to well over ninety miles per hour, but still I couldn’t get away from Kipper’s car, which seemed to be stuck to me like a limpet. Twice he tried to get alongside, but both times I swerved to cut him off, forcing him back. The road was only two lanes wide each way at this point, but I knew that it went to three after the next junction. Keeping him back, then, would not be so easy.

What I needed was a police car, but, of course, there wasn’t one to be seen.

Our two cars raced along the road together towards the junction. At the very last moment, I jerked the steering wheel to the left and went across the white-painted hatching on the road and up the off-ramp, hoping that Kipper wouldn’t be able to make the turn. Sadly, he was able to follow, slowing only momentarily to cross the grass verge, which sent up a shower of earth and stones.

I shot up the ramp to the roundabout at the top of the rise. I hoped that nothing was coming around it, for I wasn’t about to slow down. My tires squealed in objection as I took the first exit along the country road towards the village of Leek Wooton. It was a two-lane road, so I now had to cope with the oncoming traffic as well as trying to keep Kipper behind me.

I thought the best plan was to drive to the nearest police station and park right outside the door. Surely, even shifty-eyed Kipper wouldn’t be crazy enough to try anything there. The only police station that I knew well was in Kenilworth because I’d had to go there a couple of times to show them my driving documents. But I also knew it was a very small office and that it didn’t operate around the clock. Would it still be open at this time of the evening? I assumed there also must be a police station in Warwick, and I was aware there was a large one in Leamington Spa, but I didn’t know exactly where, and I wasn’t about to ask a bystander for directions.

Kenilworth would have to do, I thought. Even if the police station was shut, it might still be enough to put Kipper off.

I tore down the road towards Leek Wooton with the silver hatchback seemingly glued to the back of my Volvo. At one point, he tried to overtake me, so I pulled right into the middle of the road, swerving back to my side only at the last second to avoid an oncoming truck whose driver was leaning heavily on his horn.

At the new roundabout outside the entrance to the Warwickshire Golf Club, I had to slow down slightly in order to make it around. Kipper in the hatchback, however, went the wrong way around the circle to try to get an advantage, and he almost made it as we emerged side by side. But he was now on the wrong side of the road. I squeezed him over yet farther until his wheels were almost on the grass, but still he wouldn’t give up. I looked across at him and I swear he was laughing at me. Finally, an oncoming car forced him to brake and fall in once more behind me.

I ignored the thirty-miles-per-hour signs at the entrance to the village, hoping desperately that a child didn’t step out into my path. At more than double the speed limit, I would have had no chance to stop in time.

I realized that I didn’t even have my seat belt on, so I reached up behind me for it and clicked its buckle into the lock at my side. But Sophie had no chance of doing the same.

“Darling, please lie down on the floor behind the seats,” I said firmly. “Get as low as you can and brace yourself with your feet. Just in case we have an accident.” I glanced over to her and tried to give her a reassuring smile.

“When will all this stop?” she cried.

“We’re on our way to the police station right now,” I said. “It will stop there.”

But it didn’t. Because we never reached the police station.

Six months later, Sophie and I went to Australia to look for my sisters, while Luca, my new, fully documented, legal business partner, and his young full-time assistant, Douglas Masters, carried on our flourishing business at home without me.

“Don’t hurry back,” Luca had said the day before I left. “Duggie and I will do just fine. And Millie will help us when she can.” Millie, it seemed, had moved in with Luca, and she hadn’t yet been murdered for doing so by her sister, Betsy.

Since that glorious Monday in July at the Bangor-on-Dee races, I had discovered renewed energy and enthusiasm for my work. Bookmaking had become fun again, not least because Sophie had often stood with me, paying out winning tickets and bantering with the crowds as she’d never done before. She had clearly been taking lessons from Duggie.

It had actually been Sophie’s idea to go to Australia, but I’d jumped at it.

Understandably, she had had one or two problems after the events involving Kipper and the car crash. At the time, I’d been amazed at her calmness, but, according to the psychiatrists, this had been due to her brain bottling up the stress and literally switching off some of her emotions. Only afterwards did the fear and the panic manifest themselves with a physical reaction. I had found her four days later in the middle of the night, lying awake in our bed, shaking uncontrollably and soaked in sweat. It had been a very frightening experience for us both, and she had been returned immediately by ambulance to the hospital in Hemel Hempstead for further treatment.

Fortunately, the panic attack had been short-lived, and she was soon able to return home, but not before yet another full assessment of her condition. Since then, she had been doing really well, with only a couple of minor setbacks. On one occasion, when she had a particularly nasty cold, some of her cough medicine had reacted badly to the antidepressants, and she’d had a bit of a wobble. I had come home, stone-cold sober, from the races, and she accused me of being drunk. That was always the first sign to arrive and the last to leave. I had sat up all that night waiting for the expected decline into full mania, but in the morning she had been fine. The new drugs really were working, and both of us had begun to hope and to make plans for a future.

Slowly, over the months, I had recounted to her the complete story of those three weeks in late June and early July. I told her the full details of my father’s murder, about finding his rucksack and its hidden contents. I told her about Mr. John Smith and the microcoder, about finding him in our house and breaking his wrist. I even told her about Luca and Larry’s little games with the phones and Internet at Ascot, and how I had extracted revenge for the attack on me at Kempton by the big-firm bullyboys.

Once or twice, she told me off for not having contacted the police straightaway, and she was justifiably really quite cross that I had placed myself and her in such danger from a known murderer.

I had tried to explain to her that I didn’t like the policeman in charge of the case, but she, quite rightly, had said that personalities shouldn’t have made any difference. But of course they did. Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn’s poor opinion of bookmakers in general, and of me in particular, had clouded his judgment in the same way that my antipathy towards him had clouded mine. Even when it was all over, he had still been reluctant to admit that I’d had nothing to do with my father’s murder.

I had been to see him the day following the car crash, at the Thames Valley Police headquarters near Oxford. He’d told me that the driver of the silver hatchback, known to me as Kipper but now properly identified as a Mr. Mervyn Williams, had indeed survived, but he was still in a critical condition and had been transferred to the special head-injury unit at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol. Apparently, according to the police who had attended the scene, he hadn’t been wearing his seat belt at the time of the accident.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I’d said flatly. “The man was trying to shunt me off the road at the time, and I was just lucky that the truck hit him and not me.” I had decided against telling the chief inspector about me making an emergency stop in order to precipitate the crash in the first place.

“But why?” he had asked me.

“Because I think he’s the man who murdered my father. I presumed that he was trying to do the same to me, to eliminate me as a witness.”

“What makes you think it’s the man who murdered your father?” he’d asked.

“I think I recognized him at one point, when he tried to pass me.”

“How very interesting,” the chief inspector had said, and he’d lifted the telephone on his desk.

Mervyn Williams, I discovered at a second meeting with the chief inspector just a week later, was a qualified veterinary surgeon, originally from Chepstow in South Wales, but he had been living in Newbury for the past ten years as some sort of veterinary investigator for the RSPCA. A police search of his house had uncovered a black-and-red rucksack still with an airline baggage tag attached with GRADY printed on it. Results were eagerly awaited for a DNA test of blood spots discovered on the sleeve of a charcoal-gray hoodie from Mr. Williams’s wardrobe and consistent with my description of the Ascot attacker’s clothes. And a further search of the mangled remains of his silver hatchback had also uncovered a kitchen knife of the correct proportions to have inflicted the fatal wounds to my father’s abdomen.

I chose not to ask the chief inspector if they had also found the remote control to my kitchen television, although I could really have done with it back.

“So what happens now?” I’d asked instead.

“That depends on if, and how well, Mr. Williams recovers,” the chief inspector had said. “He’s been formally arrested on suspicion of murder, but the doctors are saying he has massive brain damage, so he’ll probably never be fit to plead even if he survives.”

“What does that mean?” I’d asked.

“If he’s unfit to plead, there would be no criminal trial as such. But there would be what is called a ‘trial of the facts,’ when the evidence is placed before a jury and they would effectively decide if he had done it or not. But, of course, there would be no actual declaration of guilt or innocence and no sentence.”

“So what would then happen to Mervyn Williams?”

“If he’s unfit to plead, he’d technically be a free man, but if he recovers enough so that he becomes fit he could still be tried for murder. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt that he was the man responsible, and the DNA should prove it. Your e-fit was remarkably accurate considering you saw him for only a second or two in the Ascot parking lot, and with his hood up too.”

I hadn’t enlightened him that the fleeting glimpse in the Ascot parking lot hadn’t been, in fact, the only occasion I’d seen the man.

The chief inspector had shown me a photograph of Mr. Mervyn Williams that the police had taken from his home. I looked once more at the man I had known only as shifty-eyed Kipper, with his eyes set rather too close together for the shape of his face, the man I’d last seen laughing at me as he’d tried to overtake me on the road to Leek Wooton.

“So is that it?” I’d said.

“For the moment,” the chief inspector had replied cautiously. “But I still have a niggling feeling you haven’t told me the whole truth.”

He was, I supposed, quite a good detective, really.