The display on the digital thermometer to my left read 105 degrees — 105 degrees Celsius that is, 221 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sweat ran off the end of my nose in a continuous stream and I could feel the heat deep in my chest as I breathed in the searing air.

I’d been in saunas before but never one this hot.

‘So what do you want?’ I asked.

My companion in this hellish place didn’t answer. He simply stared at the floor between his feet.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I haven’t come all this way for my health. It’s far too bloody hot in here. You wanted to talk to me, so talk.’

He lifted his head.

‘At least you’re not in one of these damn things.’ He tugged at the black nylon sweatsuit he was wearing. As if the heat alone wasn’t bad enough.

‘Maybe not, but I didn’t come here to be slow-roasted.’

He still didn’t talk. He just looked at me. Dave Swinton, twenty-nine years old and already eight times champion steeplechase jockey. At five foot ten, he had a continuous struggle with his weight, that was common knowledge, but owners and trainers were often happy to accept a touch overweight in order to have his exceptional skill in the saddle. And for good reason — the stats showed that he won almost a third of the races in which he rode.

‘Off the record?’ he said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I replied.

I was an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority, the organization responsible for regulatory control of all Thoroughbred racing in the United Kingdom. Nothing I saw or heard to do with racing could be off the record.

‘I’ll deny I said it.’

‘Said what?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been in this bloody oven now for over ten minutes and I’m starting to look like a lobster. Either you tell me why I’m here or I’m gone.’

I wondered why he’d been so insistent that we should talk in his sauna. I had thought it was because he needed to shed a pound or two before racing at Newbury that afternoon, but maybe it was actually to make sure that I had no recording equipment hidden about my person. As a rule I used my iPhone to record meetings but that was in the pocket of my jacket and it was hanging up on a peg outside, along with the rest of my clothes.

Dave went on looking at me as if still undecided.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I’m done.’ I stood up, wrapped the towel I had been sitting on round my waist and pushed open the sauna’s wooden door.

‘I lost a race this week.’

I put one foot through the doorway. ‘So? You can’t win them all.’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I lost it on purpose.’

I stopped and turned to him. I knew most of the Rules of Racing by heart. Rule (D)45.1 stated that a jockey was required, at all times, to have made a genuine attempt to obtain from his horse timely, real and substantial efforts to achieve the best possible placing.

To lose a race on purpose was to wilfully flout that rule, an offence that could carry a penalty of ten years’ disqualification from the sport.

‘Why?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer. He simply went back to studying the space between his feet.

‘Why?’ I asked him again.

‘Forget I ever said it.’

‘I can hardly do that,’ I said.

Winding back time wasn’t possible. Just as uninventing the atom bomb wasn’t ever going to happen.

I looked down at him but he went on scrutinizing the floor.

‘Can’t we get out of this bloody heat and talk about this over a glass of iced beer?’

‘I can’t drink anything,’ he replied sharply without moving his head. ‘Not even water. What the hell do you think I’m doing this for? I’ve got to lose two pounds to ride Integrated in the Hennessy.’

‘Won’t you be dehydrated?’

‘Usual state for me,’ he said, trying to produce a laugh. ‘I’ve been wasting every day since I was sixteen. I can’t remember what a square meal looks like. Nor a beer. In fact, I haven’t had a proper drink for years; alcohol contains far too many calories. Not that I miss it much, I don’t like the taste.’ He laughed again, but just the once. ‘Why do I do it? you ask. That’s a bloody good question.’

He stood up and we both went out of the wooden box into the coolness. I wondered how many people had a sauna in the corner of their garage, not that there wasn’t still plenty of room for a couple of expensive cars as well: a silver Mercedes saloon and a dark green Jaguar XK sports coupé, both adorned with personalized number plates.

Dave flicked off a big red switch next to the door.

‘It must cost a fortune to heat,’ I said.

‘I claim my electricity bill against tax as a business expense,’ he said, smiling. ‘This sauna is a necessity for my job.’

‘How often do you use it?’

‘Every day. I used to go to the one in the local gym but then they turned down the temperature — something to do with health and safety.’

He peeled off the nylon sweatsuit and stepped naked onto some bathroom scales.

‘What the hell is that?’ I said, pointing at an ugly purple-and-black ring on his back.

‘Something landed on me,’ he said with a smile. ‘Hoofprint.’

He looked down at the scales.

‘I’m still too heavy,’ he said with a sigh. ‘No lunch for me today, to go with my no breakfast.’

‘But you surely have to eat. You need the energy.’

‘Can’t afford to,’ he said. ‘According to his bloody owner, if I can’t do ten stone four stripped by two this afternoon, I don’t get to ride Integrated, and he’s one of the best young chasers in the country. He’s incredibly well handicapped for the Hennessy and, if I don’t ride him today and he wins, I can kiss goodbye to riding him any time in the future — maybe start kissing goodbye to my whole career.’

He could kiss goodbye to his career anyway if he’d been purposely losing races.

‘Tell me about the race you didn’t win,’ I said.

‘I need a shower,’ he replied, ignoring me and going into the house. ‘You can use the one in the guest bathroom if you like. Top of the stairs on the right.’

He bounded up the stairs and disappeared into what I presumed was his bedroom, closing the door firmly behind him.

Not for the first time, I wondered what I was doing here.

‘Come now, Jeff.’ That’s what Dave had said intently down the line when he’d called me at ten to seven that morning. ‘At once. I need to talk to you. Right now. It’s vital.’

‘Can’t we talk on the phone?’ I’d asked.

‘No. Absolutely not. Far too important. This has to be done face-to-face.’

Dave Swinton was one of the very few members of the racing fraternity that I called a friend. Mostly, I avoided social contact with those I was supposed to police but, two years previously, Dave and I had been stranded for twenty-four hours together by an unseasonal ice storm as we tried to return home to England after the Maryland Hunt Cup steeplechase, north of Baltimore. He was there as a guest rider and I had been invited to oversee the introduction of a new drug-testing regime for American steeplechase horses.

We had ended up spending a freezing night in an upstate country hotel with no heat or light, the power lines having been brought down by the ice. We had passed the night huddled under blankets in front of a log fire, and we had talked.

Hence I’d come when he’d asked, giving up a precious Saturday-morning lie-in to catch an early train from Paddington to Hungerford and then a taxi to Dave’s house just outside Lambourn.

He had dropped a bit of a bombshell with his claim to have lost a race on purpose but, if he refused to elaborate, I’d have made a wasted journey.

I went into his kitchen and gratefully drank down two large glassfuls of water from the cold tap. And still I was thirsty. How Dave could drink nothing after a session in that sauna was beyond me.

I followed Dave’s directions to the guest bathroom and had a shower but still had to wait downstairs for more than twenty minutes before he reappeared dressed in a dark green polo shirt, blue jeans and trainers, his standard work attire.

Whereas most top jockeys still dressed in suits and ties to go to the races in order to impress the owners and trainers, Dave Swinton had long forgone such niceties. Nowadays, Royal Ascot and the Derby meeting apart, racing in general was a more casual affair, and the current champion jockey was the most casual of them all.

‘I’m going to Newbury now,’ he said, picking up a grip that was lying in the hallway. ‘I want to run the course before the first.’

I looked at my watch. It was coming up to ten o’clock.

‘I came by train and taxi,’ I said. ‘Can you give me a lift?’

‘Where to?’

‘Newbury racecourse will be fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch the Hennessy and then take the train back to town.’

‘Why don’t you drive like everyone else?’ he said, clearly irritated.

‘I’ve no car,’ I said. ‘I don’t need one in London. I’ll come with you.’

He could hardly say no but I could tell that he wasn’t that happy. Whatever he had decided to tell me at seven o’clock that morning, he had clearly changed his mind since, and half an hour of us together in his car was not on his agenda, friends or not.

‘OK,’ he said grudgingly. ‘Are you ready?’

Dave Swinton and I were waved through by the Newbury-racecourse gateman, who recognized Dave and almost touched his forelock. ‘Morning, Mr Swinton,’ he said without bothering to look at the jockey’s pass hanging round Dave’s neck. He inspected my authorization more closely. It had my name, my photo and the words BHA Integrity Investigator clearly marked in black print. The gateman scowled. No one, it seems, likes a policeman, not even a racing policeman.

‘How did the blackmailer contact you?’ I asked when we were out of earshot.

‘He rang my mobile.’

‘Did you see his number?’ I asked.

‘It said withheld.’

Of course it would.

‘What did he say?’

‘He told me to lose a race.’

‘Yes,’ I said with some impatience, ‘but what exactly did he say? What were his actual words?’

‘He said I had to lose the race or he’d spill the beans to the taxman that I’d received big gifts from owners that I hadn’t declared.’

‘Did he use those precise words?’

‘Yeah, near enough.’

‘He must have told you which race to lose,’ I said.

‘He just said not to win on...’ He stopped.

‘On what?’ I encouraged.

‘Never you mind.’

‘But I do mind, Dave. Goddam it, I’m trying to help you.’

‘Then forget I ever said it.’

He hurried off towards the weighing room and into the safety of the jockeys’ changing room. Theoretically, my BHA credentials meant that I could have followed him in there, but I was sure it wouldn’t do any good. And it wouldn’t help me make any friends. I may have had an absolute right of entry into every part of the racecourse, but such entitlement was to be used most sparingly, if at all. If I invaded their personal space, any moral authority I might currently possess amongst the jockeys would evaporate faster than ether on a hotplate.

Instead, I meandered around enjoying the ‘feel’ of the racecourse on the morning of a big race — especially during this relatively quiet time before the bulk of the racegoers began spilling off the special race trains, surging through the entrances, filling the bars and raising the expectation level to fever pitch.

It was a while since I had been to Newbury, but it remained one of my favourite courses. The flat terrain gave spectators a good view of all the action from the grandstands, and the long final straight with four stiff fences to the finish provided a keen challenge for both horse and jockey.

The track at Newbury didn’t just have a long straight but it was also very wide. These two features combined to produce a foreshortening optical illusion that made the winning post always appear closer than it actually was, tempting the inexperienced or unwary to make a final effort too soon, only to find that the post was still on the horizon and more patient jockeys were sitting quietly behind, ready to pounce.

Conversely, waiting too long could be a disaster as well. No jockey receives more abuse than one who leaves it too late and then just fails to get up on a fast finisher.

This was supposedly my weekend away from work but I was never completely off duty when on a racecourse. I walked around with my eyes and ears firmly open, watching and listening for anything that shouldn’t be there. It was habit, I suppose, and one I couldn’t shake off — not that I was trying very hard.

I went through the Berkshire Stand and then on to the betting ring, where the lines of bookmakers were busily setting up on their pitches, erecting their electronic price-boards and logging their computers on to the racecourse’s wireless network. How things had changed since the days of chalk and the big ledger recording books that had given these men their name.

I went back into the grandstand to warm up and get myself a coffee. I was still desperately thirsty after my stint in Dave’s sauna. How he could go without anything to drink at all was beyond me, especially as he was, even now, running around the nearly two-mile-long course in a sweatsuit, trying to remove yet another pound of liquid from his system.

The enclosures began to fill quickly as the expected crowd of over seventeen thousand arrived in their droves and I wandered amongst them, listening out for any snippets of information that might be useful.

‘Jeff Hinkley?’ called a voice behind me.

I turned. A shortish well-dressed man with swept-back grey hair was walking towards me with his hand held out. I shook it warmly.

‘Mr Smith,’ I said. ‘How lovely to see you again.’

‘Call me Derrick, please.’

Derrick Smith was a leading owner whose many horses in training had included the great Camelot, winner of both the Two Thousand Guineas and the Derby.

Derrick introduced me to the person he was with, a tall grey-haired man, smartly dressed in a fawn overcoat with a brown velvet collar over a tweed suit.

‘Jeff Hinkley, this is Sir Richard Reynard.’ He said it in a manner that made me think I should know who Sir Richard Reynard was.

I didn’t.

‘Good to meet you,’ I said, shaking his hand.

‘Are you all set for next week?’ Derrick asked.

‘Definitely,’ I said. ‘Thank you. I’m looking forward to it.’

He had asked me for lunch in his box at Sandown on the following Saturday as a thank-you for uncovering and foiling a plot to kidnap one of his horses on the eve of Royal Ascot in June.

‘Good,’ he said.

‘Do you have any runners today?’ I asked Derrick.

‘No. Richard and I are here as guests of Hennessy. Why don’t you come up with us and have a drink? I’m sure they won’t mind.’

‘I’m hardly dressed for it.’ They were in suits but I had on only a sports jacket and no tie.

‘Nonsense. You’ll be fine.’

The three of us rode up together in the lift to the fourth level of the Berkshire Stand and into the large Hennessy Cognac hospitality area, where a champagne cocktail was thrust into my hands.

The room was already half full and many of the faces were known to me.

And I was clearly known to several of them. There were even a few cautious glances in my direction from the few with whom I’d had professional contact — me as an investigator and they as the investigated.

‘Godfrey,’ Derrick called to the chairman of the cognac company, taking him by the arm and forcing him to turn towards us, ‘have you met Jeff Hinkley? He’s the man who saved my horse at Ascot.’

Godfrey, or Viscount Marylebone as he was more formally known, was our host. He shook my offered hand with a quizzical look on his face that suggested he was desperately trying to remember the guest list.

I wasn’t on it.

‘Thank you for the drink, My Lord,’ I said. ‘Mr Smith brought me in with him but I won’t be staying long.’

Godfrey Marylebone was not very good at concealing his relief. ‘I see. Nice to meet you,’ he said, but he was already looking over my shoulder towards some of his other guests, those who were expected. He moved away towards them. Derrick Smith, meanwhile, had turned to speak to someone else and had taken Sir Richard Reynard with him.

I took the opportunity to go out onto the viewing balcony. It wasn’t often that I had the chance to look over a racecourse from such an exalted position. I was usually down on the lower levels in pursuit of lesser mortals.

There were two men outside braving the cold and they were in earnest conversation, their heads bowed together. The shorter of the two was very angry with the other, as he was making very plain. ‘You’re a total fucking idiot!’ I heard him say. ‘You absolutely shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t even be in the country. It’s far too risky.’

‘No one will ever know,’ said the other man.

‘I know, and that in itself is bad enough,’ replied the first.

At that moment the two seemed to notice my presence and instantly stopped talking. One of them even pointedly turned away from me so I couldn’t see his face.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Don’t mind me. I’m just getting some air.’

They just stood there, waiting, so I went back inside.

The room was, by now, getting very full indeed and people were beginning to move towards their places at the tables that were laid for lunch. Time to go, I thought.

I looked round for Derrick Smith and for Lord Marylebone to say my goodbyes, but they were both busy talking to others at the far end of the room, so I worked my way towards the exit to leave quietly. Sir Richard Reynard was standing there on his own, next to the coat rack.

‘Please say goodbye to Mr Smith for me,’ I said to him.

He looked at me and nodded.

As I turned towards the door, I glanced back through the windows towards the balcony. The two men were still deep in discussion but, this time, I was able to see both their faces.

I whipped my iPhone out of my pocket and took a quick long-distance photo of them. As I’d lifted the phone, they both happened to look straight at me so I had a good shot of their full faces.

One never knew when such things might be useful.

For the second morning running, Dave Swinton woke me by calling before seven o’clock.

‘Jeff, I need to talk to you.’

‘That’s what you said yesterday,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I know. I’m sorry. But I do need to talk to you now.’

‘Talk to me on the phone,’ I said.

‘No. It has to be face to face.’

‘Then you’ll have to come to London to see me. You wasted my time yesterday and I have no intention of allowing it to happen again.’

‘I can’t come to London,’ he said. ‘I’ve got five rides later today and I need to take a spell in the sauna first. I celebrated the Hennessy with a steak last night and it’s made me fat.’

Whatever words that could have been chosen to describe him, fat was not one of them.

‘Look, Dave,’ I said, ‘there’s little point in me coming all the way to Lambourn again unless you’re going to tell me what’s going on. And I mean everything that’s going on. Yesterday was a total waste of time.’

‘You got to see me win the Hennessy — that wasn’t a waste of time.’ I could visualize him grinning at the other end of the line.

‘Yeah, OK. That was good,’ I agreed. ‘Well done.’

‘So will you come?’

I sighed.

‘Promise me you have something important to tell me.’

‘I have,’ he said. ‘For a start, I know who it is.’

‘Who who is?’ I asked.

‘You know, what we talked about yesterday. I know who it is.’

I assumed he meant that he knew who was blackmailing him.

‘Then tell me now, on the phone.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding, mate,’ he said. ‘I don’t trust these things any more.’

I suppose I couldn’t really blame him. Dave Swinton had been one of those whose phone had been previously hacked by a red-top Sunday newspaper.

‘OK,’ I said with resignation. ‘I’ll come, but you had better not be messing with me again.’

‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘I promise. But come right now. I’ve a ride in the first race at Towcester and that’s at twelve forty-five, so I have to be gone from here by half past ten, absolute latest.’

The trains on a Sunday were not as frequent or as fast as they had been the day before, and I had to change at Reading to catch a local stopping service that seemed to take for ever to get to Hungerford.

There was just one taxi waiting outside the station and I beat another would-be fare down the stairs from the platform to the road by only a little more than Integrated had won the Hennessy.

‘I’m going to Lambourn,’ I said to the loser, a white-haired man with a walking stick, whom I reckoned was in his early seventies. ‘Do you want to share?’

He shook his head. ‘No, thanks, I’m going the other way.’

I was half inclined to allow the older man to take the taxi, but I was in serious danger of missing Dave altogether if I was delayed any more. Rather ashamedly, I climbed in and slammed the door shut.

‘I’m the only taxi working in Hungerford today,’ said the driver as we drove away. ‘He’ll be there for quite a while — until I get back, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Was the driver trying to make me feel even worse? If so, he was succeeding.

As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I noticed, in fact, a small amount of light in the sauna.

There was a very small gap around the door and another spot on the far side where the wooden planking of the walls must not be quite in line, allowing through a tiny sliver of illumination.

I held my watch up to the widest gap around the door. It read ten thirty. I reckoned I had been in this sweatbox for about half an hour, much of that time with the temperature well above the boiling point of water, and of blood.

It was a wonder that I was still able to think at all.

But think I did.

Why would Dave Swinton lock me in his sauna with the temperature turned up to maximum and drive away? He must have known my life would have been in grave danger. Even if I’d had my phone in here with me, it would have probably taken the police more than twenty minutes to come to my aid. By that time, without me having disabled the heating elements, I would have been dead.

What did he have to gain in killing me?

True, I wouldn’t then have been able to report him to the BHA Disciplinary Committee for purposely losing a race, but that would surely be the least of his difficulties, with a dead body in his sauna to explain away.

It didn’t make any sense.

Now I had to get out of here — maybe before Dave came back to finish off the job properly.

But how?

I tried again to shove the door open but it didn’t move. I threw all my weight against it but still nothing.

I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed I was missing.

It was Sunday and the offices of the BHA in London would be closed, not that it would have made any difference. Although I had a permanent desk at HQ, I spent much of my time working away from it and it was hardly unusual for me not to appear there for days, sometimes even for weeks.

A year ago, my absence would have been noted by my then-fiancée, Lydia, but not any more — Lydia was no longer a part of my life.

I suppose it was my own fault.

I had procrastinated and evaded for so long, finding it difficult to commit to marriage, that by the time I had finally got round to it, Lydia was already casting an eye elsewhere.

And I hadn’t seen it coming.

I had believed all was well, apart from the fact that I knew she hadn’t liked my job. It had become a source of increasing friction between us. She thought it was too dangerous and maybe she had a point, especially if one considered my present predicament.

But it was not as if she had given me an ultimatum or anything. There had been no choose between me or the job stipulation.

I had come home from work one day during the previous January to find that she had simply packed up and gone.

She had left me a letter on the mantelpiece to say that she was very sorry but she had met someone else whose job was safer and she was moving in with him — and thanks for a great five years. The envelope had also contained the engagement ring I had bought for her only eight months previously.

I remember having stood there reading the letter over and over in total disbelief. It might have taken me much too long to get round to asking her to marry me but, having done so, I had been fully committed and we had started discussing a venue and a date for the wedding.

At first I’d been angry.

But I was angry more with myself than with Lydia. How had I not realized? I was an investigator, for goodness’ sake, accustomed to piecing together the reality from fragments of evidence, yet I hadn’t spotted what had been happening right under my nose.

I had tried to get her back but what was done was done, the trust between us had been shattered and there was no going back.

I even spent an unhealthy amount of time finding out everything I could about her new man, a commodity trader called Tony Pickering who worked at the London Metal Exchange in Leadenhall Street, at the very heart of the City of London.

I suppose I was fascinated to discover what Lydia thought he had that I didn’t.

Money, for one thing. As a trader, he would probably be earning several times what I was getting from the BHA, and had a family fortune to go with it.

I tried to tell myself that it must have been more than just the money but, if so, I couldn’t see it. I would have found his job deathly boring — buying and then selling derivatives involving thousands of tons of yet-to-be-mined copper for meaninglessly large sums in the hope that the selling price was a tiny fraction above the purchase one in order to make a ‘margin’ and hence a profit.

He never actually saw any copper. The transaction was all on paper or on a computer, and may as well have been for buttons for all it seemed to matter.

How could Lydia have preferred him to me?

My wandering thoughts were brought back to reality by the ringing of my mobile. I could hear it through the wooden walls of the sauna, tantalizingly close, but so far out of reach.

It rang six times, as always, before switching to voicemail.

I wondered who would be calling me.

Faye maybe.

Faye was my big sister, twelve years my senior, who had acted as a mother to me after our real mother had died when I was just eight. She still called me regularly to check that I was eating properly and to make sure I had washed behind my ears in spite of the fact that I was now thirty-two years old and she had more serious problems of her own to worry about.

The phone rang again.

It would be voicemail calling. Great.

They did believe me — just — in the end.

Initially, two young uniformed policemen arrived in a patrol car. They listened intently as I described what had happened and their eyes widened slightly when I showed them the garden fork. They widened even more when they saw the hole I had made in the wall of the sauna to escape. But it was when they discovered that I was accusing one of the country’s most well-known and best-loved sporting celebrities of attempted murder that reinforcements were summoned in the shape of a plain-clothes officer, who introduced himself as Detective Sergeant Jagger from the Thames Valley Police Major Crime Unit.

‘So, Mr Hinkley,’ said DS Jagger, ‘why do you think Mr Swinton wanted to kill you?’

Why did part of me still feel a need to keep confidential what Dave had told me yesterday? I surely was under no obligation to do so. I must be absolved from any promise I had made to him to try to forget what he had said. After all, he had tried to kill me.

‘I knew that he had purposely lost a horse race and I think he tried to kill me to stop me saying something to the authorities.’

The detective clearly thought it was a poor motive for murder.

‘Are you really telling me that Mr Swinton would risk a murder charge over something so trivial?’

I tried to point out to the policeman that purposely losing races was not trivial for a professional jockey, but he wouldn’t believe it. And part of me agreed with him. Why would Dave risk a lifelong prison sentence when he knew I didn’t have any real evidence that he’d stopped a horse anyway? Especially as I didn’t even know which horse or race was in question.

Had he expected to come home from Towcester that evening to find me dead, remove the garden fork, and then try to make out that it had been due to dreadful misfortune — he had left me in the sauna alone and I had obviously spent too long in the heat and had been overcome?

‘Why don’t you ask him that question?’ I said.

‘Oh, we will,’ said the detective sergeant. ‘Just as soon as we find him.’

‘He’ll be at Towcester races,’ I said, trying to be helpful. ‘He has five rides there this afternoon.’ I looked at my watch. ‘The first race will be in about ten minutes.’

‘Mr Swinton has so far not arrived at Towcester as had been expected. A request has been made to my Northamptonshire colleagues to detain him if, and when, he arrives.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Jockeys had to be at the course at least forty-five minutes before a race they were due to ride in. That put paid to my theory that Dave would continue to act as if nothing had happened and claim my death was just a terrible accident.

I had to go over my account one more time from the beginning while it was written down by a young detective constable. I was then asked to read and sign the statement.

‘What now?’ I asked.

‘You are free to go, Mr Hinkley,’ DS Jagger said.

‘Just like that?’

‘It is my understanding that you have declined any medical assistance. What else do you need?’

‘A lift to a railway station would be good.’

He reluctantly agreed and I was despatched with the young detective constable in an unmarked police car.

‘Hungerford do you?’ he asked.

‘That would be fine.’

He drove in silence out of Lambourn.

‘Is there much crime in these parts?’ I asked.

‘I’m based at Reading,’ he said. ‘There’s lots of serious crime in Reading.’ He sounded as if he was pleased. ‘Rapes, murders... all sorts.’

‘Is Detective Sergeant Jagger from there too?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘We call him Mick,’ the constable said with a laugh. ‘But not to his face, of course. He’s my guv’nor.’

‘Is he any good?’

He chanced a quick look at me.

‘Why?’

‘I want to know if I can rely on him to catch Dave Swinton,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time.’

‘Do you really believe he shut you in that sauna on purpose to kill you?’ He didn’t sound as if he believed it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do. Why otherwise would I call you lot?’

‘But it seems like a strange way to try and kill someone. Not very reliable.’

‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘If you had been in there with the temperature at a hundred and ten centigrade, you wouldn’t have thought so. I was bloody lucky to get out alive.’

‘Maybe. And I have to admit that bursting through the wall like that was impressive.’ He laughed. ‘Just like the Incredible Hulk.’ He laughed again.

This policeman had actually seen the garden fork in position and the hole I’d had to make in the side of the sauna to escape and he was still sceptical of the danger I’d been in. What chance would I have of convincing others?

Faye didn’t look very well when she opened the front door of her house overlooking Richmond Green.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked with concern.

‘You know that I have good days and not-so-good days?’ she said. ‘Well, this is one of the not-so-good, that’s all. It’s all to do with the drugs I have to take. They make me feel sick.’

‘I thought you were off the chemo.’

‘I am. These are drugs designed to boost my red-blood count. The chemo does more than kill the cancer — apparently it’s not too good for my bone marrow either.’ She sighed. ‘Such is life... and death. Anyway, enough about me. What have you been up to?’

‘Same old stuff,’ I said to her. ‘Nothing very interesting.’

Nothing very interesting except someone trying to kill me.

We went through into her kitchen.

‘Tea?’ she asked. ‘Or coffee? Or would you prefer wine?’

I looked at my watch. It was twenty past four.

‘It’s never too early on a Sunday,’ Faye said, smiling. ‘I’d like some.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘So would I.’

She took a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from the fridge and poured two generous glasses.

‘I need this,’ she said. ‘Somehow, alcohol helps reduce the feeling of nausea I get from the pills. I often have a brandy if it gets too bad.’

‘Why don’t you take the pills with a glass of brandy?’ I said. ‘Then you probably won’t feel sick in the first place.’

She laughed. ‘I can hardly have a glass of brandy to take pills when I wake up in the morning.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘It must be better than feeling ill all day.’

She laughed again. ‘Perhaps I’ll try it, though I’m not sure what Q would say.’

‘Tell him it’s medicinal.’

‘What’s medicinal?’ Quentin asked, coming into the kitchen.

‘Having brandy for breakfast,’ I said.

‘British soldiers in the First World War were given tots of rum for breakfast,’ Quentin said. ‘And most of the officers had cases of brandy sent out to them from home. Or whisky. Masses of it. It helped them cope.’

‘So were they all drunk when they went over the top?’

‘Absolutely,’ Quentin said. ‘A double ration of rum was issued to the men before the off. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone.’

‘There you are,’ I said to Faye with a smile. ‘So you can have brandy for breakfast.’

‘To help me cope?’ She burst into tears.

It was a reminder of how close to the edge Faye’s life had become, always living in dread of a return of the cancer. Treatment was ever more effective and the statistics were steadily improving but, deep down, even those patients given the final all-clear from the disease lived with the fear that it would get them in the end. That it would only be a matter of time. This year, next year, sometime — but not never.

I waited a second for Quentin to move but, when he didn’t, I went over and put my arm round Faye’s shoulders.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. ‘Occasionally it all gets to be too much.’

‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ I said. ‘It’s us who should be sorry for making light of something so serious.’

Faye took a deep breath. ‘I’m fine now,’ she said. ‘Now, what would you like for tea?’

On Tuesday morning I caught the 9.30 train from King’s Cross to Newark and then took a taxi to Southwell racecourse, arriving there just before eleven o’clock.

The first race was not until a quarter past midday but I wanted to speak to a couple of the trainers before they became too busy dealing with their horses.

One of them was Jason Butcher who also trained Garrick Party, the renowned front runner that had finished third at Haydock. According to the Racing Post, Jason had runners in both the first and third races, so I hung around outside the weighing room waiting for him to arrive.

All the talk was still about Dave Swinton. He had been due to ride at Southwell that afternoon and people were still saying that they couldn’t believe he was gone, and much of the talk reflected sympathy for him.

‘Poor man, fancy being driven to do that,’ I heard one man say.

‘I reckon it was his continuous dieting that was to blame,’ said his companion. ‘Lack of food probably affected his brain. Just like with Fred Archer.’

‘That was over a hundred years ago,’ replied the first man. ‘You do talk such bloody nonsense.’

‘You mark my words — it was starving himself all the time that was responsible.’

He may have had a point. I’d seen first hand what a struggle it had been. And it hadn’t just been the lack of food. Dave Swinton had lived in a permanent state of dehydration. Had that disturbed the balance of his mind?

My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Jason Butcher, who came bounding towards the weighing room to declare his runner in the first.

‘Jason Butcher?’ I said to him as he went to go past me.

He stopped. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘My name is Jeff Hinkley. I work for the BHA.’

I held out my credentials and he looked at them.

‘I’ve heard of you,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you involved in all that extortion business at the BHA a couple of years ago?’

I nodded, slightly taken aback that he knew about it.

‘What do you want of me?’ he asked.

‘Just a short word. I’ll wait while you go and make your declaration.’

He didn’t look especially happy and I didn’t really blame him. Just like the gateman at Newbury, no one likes someone in authority, especially someone in authority asking them questions.

I waited outside until he reappeared.

‘Now, what’s all this about?’ he asked with just a slight nervous timbre to his voice.

‘It’s about Garrick Party,’ I said. ‘Specifically, it’s about the race at Haydock the Saturday before last in which Garrick Party finished third.’

If he was unduly worried, he didn’t show it.

‘What about it?’

‘I understand you were interviewed by the stewards and asked about the running of the horse.’

‘Bloody ridiculous,’ he said.

‘What was?’

‘Dave bloody Swinton.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Perhaps one shouldn’t speak badly about him at the moment, but he was right out of order.’

‘In what way?’

‘He should have been aware that old Garrick likes to make the running and has a finish only as fast as my grandmother on her Zimmer frame but, oh no, he suddenly thinks at Haydock he knows better. Holds the old boy up for a run from the second last. I ask you. The man’s a bloody idiot.’

‘Did you actually tell him how to ride the horse?’ I asked.

He raised his eyebrows towards his hairline and lowered his voice even more. ‘You never tell Dave Swinton anything. If you are lucky enough for him to condescend to ride your horses, you have to sit back and watch them run as he thinks fit. He reckons he knows best, and mostly he does. But not with old Garrick, that’s for sure — even though he’d ridden him several times before as a front runner, and won.’

‘Did he say anything to you afterwards?’

‘He made some absurd excuse about thinking the horse would run better in heavy going if he was held up. It was all utter garbage but the stewards seemed to accept it. Maybe he believed it himself but, I’ll tell you now, he won’t be riding old Garrick next time out.’ He stopped and blushed slightly as he realized what he’d just said. ‘No, I suppose he won’t anyway.’

‘What did the owner say?’

‘Silly old fool. It was his idea to ask Swinton to ride the horse in the first place. Thought it gave him some sort of kudos to have the champion jockey riding his horse. Stupid nonsense. And it’s not the first time I blame Swinton for not winning on one of my horses.’

‘Explain,’ I said.

‘About three weeks ago he rode a novice hurdler for me at Doncaster, horse called Perambulator. In my opinion, Swinton got the tactics all wrong and left it far too late at the end to make his run. Beaten by a head, we were, but Pram was the fastest finisher by a streak. He’d have won if the post had been just a couple of yards farther away. He should have won that race, easy.’ There was real bitterness in his voice and I wondered how much he had gambled, and lost.

‘But things like that happen in racing all the time,’ I said.

‘Well, they shouldn’t. Not when you’ve paid the extra to have the maestro riding for you.’ His tone was sarcastic and clearly reflected what had been said to him, probably by Dave Swinton himself.

‘Extra?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. The extra cash he demands to ride one of your horses.’

‘How much extra?’ I asked.

‘A jump jockey’s fee is just over a hundred and sixty pounds for each ride. But if you want D. Swinton in the saddle it’d cost you the same again in readies. He even has the nerve to call it a present — Let’s just call it a gift, shall we? he’d say.’

I wondered if those were the ‘gifts’ Dave had been referring to when he’d been talking about his taxes.

‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ Jason Butcher said, looking around him to check that no one else was listening, ‘racing will be much better off without him.’

Unlike nearly everyone else, Jason Butcher was obviously not a fan of the deceased champion jockey, if indeed it had been Dave Swinton dead in the burning Mercedes.

‘It was definitely Mr David Swinton in the burning Mercedes. We now have a positive identification of the remains.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

DS Jagger called me at eight o’clock on Wednesday morning as I was in the shower.

‘Did the DNA match?’ I asked.

‘In the end we didn’t need to resort to DNA. Mr Swinton had twice broken his right leg in racing falls, once above and once below the knee. On both occasions, surgeons had inserted a titanium plate into the leg. The two plates had serial numbers stamped into them and the numbers matched those on similar plates found in the remains. There is no doubt.’

‘Thank you for letting me know.’

‘This call is also to inform you officially that, as a result of the formal identification of the body of Mr Swinton, there will be no further investigation into the events in the sauna at his home on Sunday morning.’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘But those events may well have had a material bearing on his death and, as the last-known person to see him alive, you will almost certainly be called as a witness at the inquest.’

‘I didn’t actually see him. He pushed me into the sauna from behind and slammed the door shut before I could turn round.’

‘Nevertheless, you should expect a summons from the coroner in due course.’

‘Are you sure it was suicide?’ I asked. ‘Burning oneself to death with petrol is a particularly nasty way to kill yourself.’ I shivered again at the memory of the TV images of the figure sitting amongst the flames.

‘Is there such a thing as a nice way?’ he said. ‘All I can say is that, bearing in mind what he did to you and what you’ve told us, we are currently not looking for anyone else in regard to the death.’

‘Is that police-speak for Yes, it was suicide?’

‘I suppose it is.’

‘How about the petrol? Where did he get that?’

‘An empty metal petrol can was discovered in the burnt-out vehicle. It matched a second one found in Mr Swinton’s garage that was full. Mr Swinton’s gardener has confirmed that two such cans were used to store fuel for the lawnmower and that he, the gardener, had filled both the cans the previous week.’

So he had taken the petrol from his own garage.

‘Not much doubt, then.’

‘No.’

He disconnected and I stood there still dripping water onto my bedroom carpet.

So Dave had been the body in the car. So much for my crazy theory that it was someone else. But it still didn’t make sense.

If he had taken the can of petrol from his garage, he knew before he left home what he was going to do. And yet he had still left me to die in the sauna.

Was he such a heartless man?

That was not the Dave Swinton that people knew and loved. All he’d had to do was flick off the electricity. He hadn’t needed to let me out so I could stop him.

I’d thought of him as my friend. Had I been so wrong?

And why drive nearly an hour to Otmoor to set himself on fire?

There were plenty of isolated spots on the Downs above Lambourn where no one would have interrupted him.

Had he gone to Otmoor for a specific purpose, perhaps to meet someone?

I spent Thursday cooped up in my office catching up on neglected paperwork but, on Friday, I escaped to Sandown Park for the first day of the Tingle Creek Christmas Festival meeting, named after the popular horse of the 1970s that had been a Sandown specialist.

These two days of racing were always very popular with the public and I was joined by many others as I walked the mile or so from Esher railway station to the racecourse entrance, some of them wearing bright red Christmas hats in true festive spirit.

I was there specifically to further a separate ongoing investigation into the conduct of a Mr Leslie Morris, who, according to an anonymous source, had been placing suspicious bets with racecourse bookmakers on behalf of a friend who was an excluded person. The source had also stated that Mr Morris would be at Sandown that afternoon to do it again.

An ‘excluded person’ was exactly that — excluded from any BHA licensed premises, which includes all racing stables, training gallops, equine pools and, in particular, anywhere on a British racecourse.

Sadly, there was nothing in the Rules of Racing that prevented an excluded person from placing bets, either on an internet betting site or in a high-street betting shop, but neither of those methods was very anonymous. The internet sites kept computer records and needed the account holder’s credit card details, while all betting shops were now equipped with closed-circuit television that recorded every transaction over the counter.

Until they also started introducing personal CCTV, only the racecourse bookmakers provided a suitable opportunity for someone to place untraceable bets. And it was not uncommon for a single bet of a thousand pounds or more to be made in cash with the racecourse bookies, especially at the big meetings like the Tingle Creek Festival.

Mr Leslie Morris was a BHA-registered racehorse owner and, as such, was subject to Rule (A)30.3, which states that a registered person must not associate with a person who is excluded in connection with horseracing in Great Britain unless he obtains the prior permission of the Authority.

Placing bets on behalf of an excluded person was definitely an association in connection with horseracing, and no such prior permission had been granted.

I waited for Leslie Morris near the entrance to the racecourse enclosures.

I knew what he looked like because I had studied the pictures of him in BHA files, but I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me even if he had known me beforehand. I had resurrected one of my favourite disguises, long dark wig under a brown beanie plus a goatee beard stuck to my face with latex-based glue. For good measure I had added a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

I also wore an unremarkable olive-green anorak over an open-necked blue shirt and khaki chinos, the perfect gear for spending time in the betting ring.

I was beginning to worry that I might have missed him when he appeared in a full-length dark grey overcoat, brown leather gloves and a blue felt fedora covering his white hair. I smiled to myself. He couldn’t have worn something easier for me to follow if he’d tried.

But I had to do more than simply follow him. I had to get close enough to observe which horses he backed and how much he staked.

I followed him in through the main entrance foyer, where he used his racehorse owners’ pass to gain entry.

He turned right and went into the gents, so I hung around outside until he reappeared. I suppose he might have gone in there to meet someone but I would have been taking too much of a chance to follow him into such a small space and then to be very close to him later in the betting ring.

I kept about ten to fifteen yards behind him as he made his way towards the owners and trainers’ facility next to the weighing room, where there was complimentary food on offer and a cash bar.

The first race was about to start and I walked over to lean on the white rail around the unsaddling enclosure in front of the weighing room, as if waiting for the horses to return, but all the while keeping an eye on the door to the bar.

‘So do you think he fell off deliberately?’

‘I’m not sure that he intended coming right off, maybe he just wanted Wisden Wonder to blunder badly and lose interest in the race. But I do think it is something worth looking at again.’

I was speaking on the phone to Paul Maldini on Saturday morning.

‘Are you going back to Sandown again today?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought I might.’

I actually had an invitation to lunch in a private box but I wasn’t going to tell Paul that. He’d want to know who with, and why, and I didn’t want to tell him. He might not have approved.

‘Is McKenzie riding at Sandown today?’ Paul asked.

‘That depends on whether the scans showed anything. He’s still down in the Racing Post to ride but he won’t be if he was concussed yesterday.’

All jockeys are stood down from riding for at least a week with concussion, often longer.

‘Will you speak to him if he’s there?’

‘That’s up to you,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that I should. If there was something dodgy about that race, do we want to show our hand just yet, or do we want to investigate further on the quiet? McKenzie will know immediately that something’s up if I question him and he would most likely then tell Morris. At the moment, I think we can assume that neither of them believes we are suspicious about that race, and I’d really like to keep it that way.’

‘Why is that so important?’ Paul would have gone straight in and questioned Leslie Morris and Bill McKenzie, maybe even calling them in to a disciplinary panel in the offices at High Holborn.

‘The tip-off we received stated only that Morris was placing bets for a friend who was excluded. We don’t know who his friend is. If we alert Morris now, then it becomes far more difficult for me to find out. He would simply go to ground and cover his tracks. We would have no case.’

‘But he might do it again,’ Paul said. ‘The BHA can’t be seen to allow something that’s against the Rules of Racing to happen for a second time, not when we know already it’s happened before.’

‘Then I’d better catch him quickly.’

‘OK,’ he said slowly, as if not fully convinced. ‘You do as you think best for the moment. And keep me informed.’

‘Will do.’

‘And you also believe the betting on the race was suspect?’

‘I certainly do,’ I said. ‘As far as I can tell, Morris backed every horse in the race except Wisden Wonder, which was the six-to-four favourite.’

‘Mmm, that does sound rather dubious.’

‘I think it sounds considerably more than rather dubious,’ I said. ‘It sounds positively dishonest.’

‘Do we need to send in the police?’

‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘not yet. We need to be sure before we do anything.’ Paul was again for jumping in with both feet. ‘If we call in the police I won’t be able to investigate anything further — they wouldn’t allow it. And we don’t want another high-profile race-fixing trial to collapse from lack of evidence. I’m not even a hundred per cent sure that Morris did back everything except Wisden Wonder. The bookies were not that helpful.’

‘They never are.’

Paul didn’t like bookmakers although he had to admit that, without any betting, racing would surely die.

It was the gambling public that ultimately delivered the revenue on which the sport depended. Everyone was trying to back a winner, but it was the losers we relied on.

The only sure way of backing a winner was to bet on every horse running in the race, but that approach was unlikely to make you any profit.

Suppose you want to end up with a return of a hundred pounds.

On a horse quoted at four-to-one, you would win four pounds for each one you stake, provided the horse won the race. So, if you bet twenty pounds with a bookmaker, you would win eighty. You would also get back your stake of twenty, hence the bookmaker would pay out one hundred pounds.

If the horse was at nine-to-one, you would need to bet ten pounds on it so that, if it comes in first, you win ninety pounds, plus your stake of ten, giving you the hundred you want. For a horse at odds of six-to-four, you would win six pounds for every four pounds you bet so, if you staked forty pounds and it won, you would win sixty. Add back your stake of forty and you would have your return of a hundred.

In this way, you can calculate how much you would need to bet on each horse to have one hundred pounds in your hand after the race.

It sounds simple.

However, there is a major snag.

In order to be sure of having a hundred pounds after the race, you would have to bet more than a hundred pounds in the first place. You would always back the winner but you would lose money each time. In fact, you would have to bet, on average, about a hundred and ten pounds on each race to receive back just a hundred.

That is how bookmakers make their money. Provided they have done their sums right and posted odds in the correct ratios to encourage an even spread of bets on all the horses, they will take in a hundred and ten pounds for every hundred they have to pay out.

This is why the odds can change as the betting continues in the minutes before the race. If a bookmaker is taking too much money on a certain horse and not enough on another, he will shorten the odds on the first horse, to deter further bets, and lengthen them on the second horse to encourage them.

No one in their right mind would stake a hundred and ten pounds on a race to get back only a hundred but, if you knew for sure that the six-to-four shot was not going to win, you wouldn’t have to bet the forty pounds on that horse. You would only have to stake seventy pounds to be certain of winning a hundred, irrespective of which of the other horses won.

Now, that looks like a good bet — in fact, it’s a sure-fire winner.

If that is what had been going on in the race at Sandown then, to end up with twenty-four thousand pounds in his coat pockets, Morris had needed to stake sixteen thousand, eight hundred pounds. That gave him a tidy profit of over seven thousand pounds on just the one race — a return on his investment of over forty per cent at a time when bank interest rates were at an historic low — and with absolutely no risk of losing his money.

No risk, that was, unless an undercover investigator like me had spotted what was going on.

Sandown Park racecourse on the first Saturday afternoon in December was heaving with people, all of them in great spirits under a sunny sky.

Tingle Creek day had finally arrived and there was huge excitement as the country’s leading two-mile chasers were set to go head-to-head. In addition, there were numerous Christmas-themed stalls and festive music provided by a band of badly dressed elves together with a scruffy Father Christmas.

On this day, I was here as myself, having put the wig, beanie hat and glasses back in the wardrobe along with the khaki chinos and the olive-green anorak. Instead, I was trying to be respectable in a suit and tie for my lunch engagement in Derrick Smith’s private box.

I arrived at the racecourse early, having again taken a train from Willesden Junction to Esher, via Clapham Junction. It was highly unusual for me to have such an exciting invitation and I didn’t want to be late.

Having arrived early, I used the time to wander around the enclosures, soaking up the atmosphere while also keeping my eyes open for any wrongdoing. Fortunately, there was none I could spot that would keep me from my lunch, so I presented myself as requested at the box at half past eleven.

‘My dear boy, come in, come in,’ welcomed Mr Smith at the door, extending his hand once again and shaking mine vigorously. ‘So glad you could make it. Here, have some champagne.’

He passed me a glass full of the sparkling golden liquid from a tray being held by one of the waiters.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It is lovely to be here. You are very kind.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘It is I who should be grateful to you.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Come and meet my wife.’

He guided me out to the balcony where there were already more than a dozen people holding drinks and chatting amongst themselves.

‘Gaysie, darling,’ Derrick said loudly, causing all the conversations to stop. ‘Can I introduce Jeff Hinkley. He’s the young man who prevented Secret Ways from being stolen at Ascot in June.’

All the heads turned towards me.

I wished he hadn’t broadcast the fact so openly. It had been an undercover operation and even those arrested still had no idea that it had been me who had caused their downfall. Without my knowledge or agreement, the BHA chairman had taken it upon himself to inform the horse’s owner of all the details, albeit supposedly in strict confidence.

‘It’s all meant to be hush-hush,’ I said quietly to Derrick.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Give credit where credit’s due. Secret Ways went on to win the Coventry Stakes and he’s favourite for next year’s Guineas. Without you, young Jeff, he’d have ended up as dog meat.’ He slapped me on the back, smiling broadly.

A slight, very attractive, blonde-haired woman came over from one of the groups.

‘Mr Hinkley,’ she said. ‘I’m Gay Smith, Derrick’s wife.’

‘I’m delighted to meet you,’ I said, shaking the offered hand. ‘It is very kind of you to invite me.’

‘Derrick was very taken with the idea,’ she said, smiling at her husband. ‘He’s been singing your praises to anyone who’ll listen.’

I was beginning to think that accepting his invitation to lunch had been a mistake. I had only done so out of self-indulgence and vanity.

‘It was just part of my job,’ I said.

‘And a job well done,’ Derrick said. ‘Come on and meet the others.’

He introduced me to another of his guests before disappearing off to greet some new arrivals.

‘I hear you’re Derrick’s personal James Bond,’ said a laughing Alfie Hart, one of the country’s top trainers, whom I knew by reputation but had never actually met before. ‘All that cloak-and-dagger stuff must be exciting.’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’d hardly describe lying in wet ditches or picking through someone’s smelly rubbish as particularly exciting. Certainly not as exciting as training a Breeders’ Cup winner.’

He smiled at me and I smiled back. Alfie Hart had trained the winner of the previous October’s Breeders’ Cup Mile and I could tell he was pleased that I knew.

‘I’m surprised to see you at a jumps meeting,’ I said to him. ‘I thought you trained exclusively on the flat.’

‘I do,’ he said. He looked about him and lowered his voice. ‘But one never says no to Derrick.’

‘No,’ I agreed. And not, I thought, when Derrick has more than a dozen seriously good horses in one’s stable.

Alfie went back inside the box to get himself a refill of champagne but I was not alone for long. Derrick returned with the tall grey-haired man I’d seen with him the previous week.

‘This is Sir Richard Reynard,’ Derrick said.

‘We met at Newbury.’

‘Yes, of course you did. Sir Richard is fairly new to racing and I’m trying to convince him to buy a horse.’

‘Derrick’s just been telling me about your exploits at Ascot,’ Sir Richard said. ‘I’m very impressed.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I was only doing my job.’

‘And what job is that?’ he asked.

‘I’m an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority,’ I said.

‘Is there much in horseracing to investigate?’

‘Some,’ I said. ‘Maybe not as much as some people would have you believe, but enough to keep me occupied.’

He smiled. ‘So is it safe enough for me to invest in a horse?’

‘It depends on what you mean by safe,’ I said. ‘Very few racehorse owners make a positive return on their investment. Most do it for the love of the sport and the thrill of winning races — even if the prize money doesn’t usually cover the training fees, let alone the capital outlay.’

I could tell he didn’t think much of that.

‘But Derrick says there are fortunes to be made from breeding.’

‘Only if you are lucky enough, like him, to have owned a Derby winner,’ I said. ‘Almost all male horses in the jumping game are geldings.’

‘I wasn’t considering the jumping game,’ he said, staring into space.

From the look on his face I imagined he was visualizing himself leading the winner into the famous Derby unsaddling circles at Epsom or Churchill Downs. It was a fantasy that most owners entertained at some point in their lives yet only a handful of them ever fulfilled it in reality.

‘Jeff,’ said Gay Smith, taking my arm. ‘Come and meet some friends of ours from the Cayman Islands.’

She guided me to the other end of the balcony where a smartly dressed and suntanned couple were standing together holding half-full glasses of champagne. I would have put them both in their early to mid-forties.

‘Theresa and Martin,’ Gay called to them, ‘meet Jeff Hinkley.’

We shook hands.

‘Gay says you live in the Cayman Islands,’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Theresa. ‘We have a house on Seven Mile Beach not that far from Gay and Derrick’s place.’

‘Have you been there long?’ I asked.

‘Ten years now,’ Theresa replied. ‘We love it there, don’t we, Martin?’

Martin didn’t say anything, but I was used to him not replying.

Martin was the man who had turned away from me on the balcony of the hospitality room at Newbury on Hennessy Gold Cup day. The man who was then being told that he was a total fucking idiot.

We sat down to lunch just before noon, by which time some other guests had arrived, making twenty of us in all in the box.

‘I’m sorry we have to eat so early,’ said Derrick, ushering everyone in from the balcony. ‘It’s high time they installed some floodlights at Sandown so that racing could be later in the day during the winter.’

We were seated at two round tables for ten and I found myself placed between Gay Smith and an attractive young woman in a smart tweed suit whom I had been spying from afar ever since she’d arrived.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name’s Henri, Henrietta Shawcross.’

‘Jeff Hinkley,’ I replied, shaking her hand.

‘Oh, I know who you are,’ Henri said. ‘I think everyone here does. You’re Derrick’s superhero.’

‘He exaggerates.’

‘How did you do it?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Save his horse.’

‘I merely uncovered a conspiracy to steal the horse and set a trap to catch the villains in the act. It was nothing very special.’

She looked disappointed. ‘It must have been a tiny bit exciting.’

I thought back. It had been far more worrying than exciting as I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that it would happen and I’d mobilized the whole of the BHA integrity team plus several members of the Thames Valley Police Force.

We had secretly lain in wait outside the Ascot racecourse stables for nearly two hours and I was worried that I’d been wrong and would look foolish if nothing happened. But, thankfully, right on cue, the bad guys had turned up just as Secret Ways was being unloaded from the horsebox that had brought him to the racecourse.

One of them had managed to knock over the groom and even had his hand on the horse’s halter when the trap was sprung.

In truth, it had been very satisfying and, yes, rather exciting.

‘A tiny bit,’ I agreed with a smile. ‘What do you do?’

‘I work for a recruitment agency,’ she said. ‘We recruit chefs, waiters and waitresses for the catering business.’

‘And is that a tiny bit exciting?’ I asked.

‘Don’t poke fun at me,’ she said, slightly offended. ‘I work hard at my job and I enjoy it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’ Just funny. And it had backfired. ‘So how long have you known Derrick?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

‘I met him for the first time today,’ she said. ‘I’m here with my uncle.’ She pointed at Sir Richard Reynard, who was sitting at the other table.

I must have involuntarily raised a questioning eyebrow.

She laughed. ‘No, really, he is my uncle. I promise you. He’s my mother’s elder brother. I’m only here because my aunt Mary couldn’t make it. She’s organizing a Christmas fair in their local church hall so Uncle Richard asked me to come with him instead.’

‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’

‘Shut up,’ she said, laughing and bashing me playfully on the arm. ‘It’s true, I tell you.’

‘OK, I believe you,’ I said between guffaws. ‘But countless others might not.’

‘What are you two laughing at?’ asked Gay Smith, turning towards us.

‘Miss Goody Two-shoes here is trying to tell me she came here with her uncle while I’m convinced he’s actually her sugar daddy.’

‘From what I’ve heard,’ Gay said, ‘Henrietta Shawcross doesn’t need a sugar daddy. And, yes, Sir Richard Reynard is indeed her uncle.’

That put me in my place.

‘Sorry,’ I said again.

‘Don’t be,’ Henri said. ‘That’s the best laugh I’ve had in ages.’

‘Do you know anyone else here?’ I asked her.

‘A few,’ she said.

I dropped my voice. ‘How about the suntanned couple at the other table. The wife is sitting next to your uncle.’

‘You mean Theresa and Martin.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Exactly.’

‘Martin’s my cousin. Uncle Richard is his father. Martin’s the one who’s mad keen on racing. He’s the real reason why we’re all here. Martin and Theresa want Uncle Richard to start owning racehorses. They’ve roped Derrick Smith in to help them convince him it’s a good idea.’

I nodded. ‘Your cousin and Derrick both have houses in the Cayman Islands,’ I said.

‘Yes. I’ve been there. It’s lovely.’

A waitress placed a potted shrimp starter in front of me. I wanted to go on talking to Henri about Martin Reynard but Gay put her hand on my arm as if to indicate she wanted my full attention.

‘So you work for the Jockey Club?’ she said, taking a mouthful of the shrimps.

‘Sort of,’ I replied. ‘Not actually for the Jockey Club, but I do work for the racing authorities. I’m an investigator.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought there was enough to investigate for it to be a full-time job.’

‘There’s plenty to keep me busy, believe me, and the other four investigators in my team. There is always someone trying to beat the system and, if it’s against the rules, our job is to stop them.’

‘Is it possible to beat the system without breaking the rules?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘And some trainers are very good at it.’

‘How?’ Gay asked.

‘It’s called beating the handicapper,’ I said. ‘Other than those just starting out on their racing careers, every horse in training in the UK is given an official handicap rating each Tuesday depending on how it has run and how those it has raced against have also performed. If a horse runs well compared to others, its rating will go up and, if it runs badly, the rating will go down. And the rating is used to determine the weight it has to carry in handicap races.’

‘So?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘For a horse to be officially rated it has to either win a race, or it has to have run in three races and be placed in the first six in at least one of them. Suppose a trainer has a horse that has been specifically bred to be good at middle and long distances. He runs it in three moderate sprints over just five furlongs as a young, green two-year-old and, predictably, it doesn’t do very well but it does manage to come in sixth in one of them, maybe out of only six or seven runners. So the horse gets an official rating that is very low but, crucially, it is now qualified to run in handicaps.

‘The trainer then doesn’t run the horse again until the following year, by which time it has fully developed and is ready to race over a much greater distance. The trainer now places it in a mile-and-a-half handicap for horses with similarly poor ratings and, not surprisingly, it wins easily. If the trainer goes on entering the horse in the right races, it can run up a whole series of wins against moderate opposition before the handicapper “catches up” and raises its rating to a more appropriate value.’

‘Is that legal?’ Gay asked.

‘Yes, completely legal. It’s simply the trainer playing the handicap system to his advantage.’

I looked across the table at Alfie Hart. He was one of the best exponents of the practice.

‘How fascinating,’ Gay Smith said, but I feared I was boring her as she turned away to talk to the person on her far side.

I finished my shrimps and turned back to Henri, but she was chatting away merrily to another lady beyond her, so I spent some time studying the afternoon’s racecard. I noticed that Bill McKenzie was still down to ride two horses, one of them in the first race and the other in the fourth.

‘Trying to pick a winner?’ Henri said. ‘Do tell.’

‘Don’t ask me, I’m hopeless at choosing winners,’ I said. ‘My best tip of the day is to keep your money in your pocket.’

‘Boring!’ Henri said loudly. She received a stern glare from her uncle on the other table.

She blushed.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ she said to me.

‘Don’t blame me,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ She smiled. ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Are you gay?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Most men I know of my age are either married or gay.’

‘Well, I’m neither,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘That’s a secret.’

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. I’d already checked.

She opened her racecard. ‘Come on, pick me a winner.’

‘Autumn Statement,’ I said, ‘in the second.’

She looked down at the printed race details.

‘Why that one?’ she asked, clearly unimpressed by the horse’s lowly status.

‘He ran on Tuesday at Southwell. I was there and watched the race. He was only beaten a short head by a very good horse that’s not running today. His rating is sure to rise considerably this coming week but he can still run today on the old rating, which means he’s very well handicapped.’

‘I thought you said you were hopeless at picking winners.’

‘He hasn’t won yet and he’ll probably start at fairly short odds.’

‘How about in the first race? Do you fancy Medication? He’s the favourite.’

‘I’ve no idea but you had better be quick if you want to make a bet because they’re already at the start.’

She stood up and rushed out of the box, along with some of the other guests.

I looked up at the television screen in the corner of the room. Bill McKenzie was indeed riding as advertised, which meant that he wasn’t concussed. I wondered if the confusion he had exhibited in the medical room the previous evening had been because his mind had been on other matters — like how long he would be banned from riding if anyone knew he had lost the race on purpose.

I decided against going back to Derrick and Gay Smith’s box just yet and watched the fourth race from the grandstand steps.

The Henry VIII Novice Chase was named after the king who had resided at Hampton Court Palace just a couple of miles down the road from Sandown Park, even though the racecourse hadn’t been established until some three hundred and thirty years after Henry’s death.

The race was over two miles and the starting gate was at the far end of the home straight, so that the horses had to negotiate just over one complete circuit of the track.

I looked to my right and used my binoculars to watch as the horses circled waiting for the starter to send them on their way.

From the stands, Bill McKenzie didn’t appear any different from the other six jockeys but his mind must have been elsewhere as he completely missed the start, Lost Moon being left flatfooted as the others raced away from him towards the first fence.

Two-mile chases are always run at a good pace and Lost Moon was still some ten lengths behind the other six as they came towards the second, an open ditch.

And that is where his race ended.

Trying hard to catch up, the horse over-jumped, pitched forward on his knees while landing and crumpled to the turf, tossing his jockey out in front, before rolling right over him. Lost Moon then struggled to his feet before bolting off, riderless, in pursuit of the others. His former rider, meanwhile, was left lying motionless on the grass.

I went on watching the prone figure of Bill McKenzie, ignoring the remaining horses, which galloped up past the grandstands and the winning post for the first time and then swung right-handed down the hill towards the third fence.

Horseracing is the only sport where the competitors are chased by an ambulance. Indeed, the Rules of Racing state that a jump meeting cannot start unless there are at least three fully equipped ambulances present, each of them dedicated only to the care of the jockeys rather than being available for the spectators. One ambulance would generally chase the field while the other two would be strategically placed out on the course, with their engines running, to ensure a maximum response time of one minute to any fallen rider.

The chasing ambulance stopped closest to the fence and two green-clad paramedics carrying backpacks ran across towards the prostrate jockey. They were followed by another man in a suit, whom I took to be one of the racecourse medical officers — a doctor.

The race, meanwhile, continued apace, as the remaining runners safely negotiated the seven quick-fire fences in the back straight, but I only had eyes for the activity at the open ditch to my right.

I could see that Bill McKenzie was still flat out on the grass with both the paramedics and the doctor kneeling beside him. As I watched, my line of sight was annoyingly obstructed by a green screen that was put up by the fence attendants to provide the injured jockey with some degree of privacy.

The race itself was beginning to come to a conclusion, the noise of the crowd building as the three most fancied runners jumped side by side over the pond fence and then galloped neck and neck into the home straight.

Fortunately, the open ditch where Lost Moon had fallen was not jumped again in the race, the horses being directed over the adjacent plain fence, so there was no need for any of the obstacle-bypass procedure to be put in place in spite of the fact that Bill McKenzie had still not been removed from the turf.

The three leading horses were all in the air together over the last and the crowd cheered enthusiastically as they sprinted up the hill to the line in a blanket finish.

Some of those around me began to move down the steps towards the bars and the betting ring, but I and many others stayed precisely where we were, watching events unfold down the course.

The ambulance was driven across the track to be near the fence and there were worried faces all around me, as people feared the worst. Then there was a huge sigh of relief and a spontaneous round of applause as Bill McKenzie appeared from behind the green screen. He had a red blanket draped over his shoulders and was supported by a paramedic, but he was walking towards the vehicle, albeit slowly, clutching his elbow.

People around me smiled and slapped one another on the back. Walking wounded meant no damage to the spinal cord, and injuries elsewhere would heal.

I went through the grandstand, past the parade ring and into the weighing room, showing my BHA pass to the official at the door.

The senior medical officer was in the jockeys’ medical room.

‘Is Bill McKenzie coming in here or going directly to hospital?’ I asked.

‘You can’t come in here,’ the doctor replied pompously while trying to usher me out. ‘Medical staff and jockeys only.’

I handed him my BHA authorization card that gave me official access to absolutely everywhere on a racecourse, including the jockeys’ medical room. He studied the card closely, but I could tell he didn’t like it. Yet another example of the seemingly universal dislike of authority. I might have expected better from a doctor.

‘What do you want?’ he asked.

‘To speak with Bill McKenzie.’

‘I am sorry but that won’t be possible.’ He didn’t exactly sound like he was sorry. ‘That particular jockey will be going to hospital. The doctor on the course believes he may have sustained a fracture to his left clavicle.’

A broken collarbone.

‘So is the racecourse ambulance taking him directly to Kingston Hospital?’ I asked.

‘No. A local ambulance has been called. We can’t spare one of ours, not with three races still to run. It will collect him from here.’

As I had hoped. Bill McKenzie was on his way to the medical room.

‘I’ll wait for him.’

‘He’s injured,’ said the doctor. ‘He won’t be able to speak to you.’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘He’s broken his collarbone, not his jaw.’

‘Nevertheless, he might be in pain and he’s entitled to some privacy.’

Not if he’d been fixing races, I thought, but I didn’t say so.

I never did get back to Derrick and Gay Smith’s box for afternoon tea, as I spent the next three hours at Kingston Hospital with Bill McKenzie.

The X-ray confirmed that he had, indeed, broken his collarbone and I silently berated myself for not having fully believed it. Perhaps I would have been slightly more sympathetic if I had realized he wasn’t just trying to find another way of avoiding having to talk to me.

In fact, the break was pretty severe with the ends of the bones overlapping, so surgery was needed to realign them, and to have a plate and screws fitted to keep it that way.

I sat next to him as he lay on a trolley in a curtained-off emergency cubicle while we waited for the on-call orthopaedic surgeon to be roused from his Saturday-afternoon slumbers.

‘If you are not being blackmailed,’ I said, ‘why did you do it?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he said for the umpteenth time. ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I still didn’t believe him.

‘The BHA will demand to see your phone records, you know. And those of Leslie Morris. If there’s been any contact between the two of you or the slightest bit of evidence that you’ve been lying to me, well... you can kiss goodbye to your career as a jockey. How old are you? Twenty-six?’ He nodded. ‘You’d be banned for so many years that you’d be far too old to come back.’ I paused. ‘You have a wife, don’t you?’

He nodded. ‘And a kid. Plus another one on the way.’

‘What will they do if you lose your livelihood?’

He looked miserable. ‘Why would I tell you anything even if I was up to no good? You’d ban me anyway. Do you think I’m stupid or something?’

‘Actually, yes, I do. Otherwise you would never have got mixed up with race fixing in the first place.’

He sighed deeply, which was clearly not a good move as the pain in his shoulder made him wince. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘Try me,’ I said.

He started to cry.

While it was not the response I had been expecting, it was a change from the continual denials he had been spouting since we arrived.

Bill McKenzie was a competent and experienced jockey who was, perhaps, never going to reach the ‘superstar’ level, but he was doing all right. He was generally more at home on the small Midland courses where he rode frequently for a number of different trainers, although he had recently had rides at some of the bigger tracks as well. He was having his best ever season and currently stood tenth on the jockeys list with forty or so winners from about three hundred rides.

As yet, he had no big-race wins under his belt but he should still be making a pretty good living from his riding, especially if one added in a share of prize money, plus regular schooling fees.

If I was right about the fix, Leslie Morris had pocketed about seven thousand pounds from Bill McKenzie falling off Wisden Wonder.

I wondered how much would be the jockey’s share.

Half, at best, or maybe a third? Probably even less.

Would he jeopardize his whole career for a couple of thousand pounds?

Did I really think he was that stupid?

My thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the surgeon in blue theatre scrubs and a dishcloth hat, and he was carrying a green folder.

‘Mr McKenzie,’ he said, studying the folder, ‘I see that you’re a jockey.’

He’d hardly had to read that in the paperwork, I thought. The patient was still wearing his britches and the cut-off racing silks were draped over the end of the couch.

‘Is this injury as a result of a racing fall?’

‘Yes,’ said Bill. ‘At Sandown.’

The surgeon made a note in the folder.

‘Have you broken your collarbone before?’

‘Not on this side,’ he said, pointing to his left shoulder. ‘But I’ve done the other one three times.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said the surgeon. ‘Why don’t you do something safer for a living?’

‘Because I’m no good at anything else,’ Bill said, and then he looked straight at me. ‘Racing is my life.’

I raised my eyebrows in response. He knew exactly what I was thinking — he was thinking it too.

The surgeon took a thick marker pen from his pocket and drew two big black arrows on Bill’s left shoulder, one on his front and the other on his back.

He smiled. ‘We don’t want to open you up on the wrong side, now do we?’

Next the surgeon produced a consent form from his folder.

‘How long will I be off?’ Bill asked him as he signed.

‘Bones generally take six to eight weeks to heal.’

‘Six to eight weeks! No way. I need to be back sooner than that. I’ve got a ride in the King George on Boxing Day.’

‘The plate might help. It will provide the support needed. When I plate a broken hip, I try to get the patient up standing on it the following day.’

‘So how long?’ Bill asked again.

‘A couple of weeks, maybe.’

‘A couple of days more like,’ said Bill with a grin.

‘See, you are crazy,’ the surgeon said again, smiling back at him. ‘Completely crazy.’

Twice more my home phone rang and no one spoke from the other end. And twice more I dialled 1471 to get the number. Each time it was different. My gas-bill envelope now had all three numbers written on it and each of them, when called back, produced the no incoming calls message.

The second call was made as I was getting into bed on Saturday evening and the third woke me at seven o’clock on Sunday morning. Each time I was convinced someone was there listening because the line didn’t sound completely dead and, at one point, I was sure I could hear some traffic in the background.

The calls made me feel a little uneasy, as if someone was stalking me.

And it wouldn’t be the first time. Over the years I had investigated a number of less than agreeable characters, some of whom had taken against me personally for exposing their own wrongdoing. I had been threatened, beaten up and, on one occasion, knocked down by a speeding car.

Most had been attempts to prevent me from carrying out an investigation, but a couple had been out of revenge for getting someone banned from racing.

I couldn’t think of anyone in particular that I had recently upset by getting them disqualified or excluded from the sport. There might be, however, somebody who’d ended up in prison as a result of their fraud, and was now released and bent on settling an old score.

I would have to just get on with my life as usual, and watch my back, as I always did, avoiding dark alleyways and dimly lit multi-storey car parks.

A police car and an ambulance turned up together, both with multiple bright blue flashing lights that lit up the street and hurt my eyes.

It became clear that a stabbing in a London street was not sufficiently unusual for either the police officers or the ambulance crew to get too excited. In fact, I found the perceived indifference to apprehending my assailants to be frustrating.

‘Can’t you get the helicopter up?’ I urged the police as soon as they arrived.

‘Helicopters cost money,’ one of them replied, shaking his head. ‘Especially on Sunday evenings.’

I was carried on a stretcher, half sitting, half lying, into the back of the ambulance and we set off with one of the policemen sitting on a chair near my head, just as I had done the previous day with Bill McKenzie.

‘My front door is wide open,’ I said. ‘The key is still in the lock.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ said the policeman. ‘My colleague will look after your house.’

The paramedic cut my shirt away and raised his eyebrows in surprise.

‘You have at least a dozen stab wounds on your torso,’ he said. ‘How come you’re still alive?’

The policeman suddenly took a slightly greater interest.

‘I don’t think they’re very deep,’ I said. ‘My overcoat saved me.’

The paramedic placed several electrodes on the bits of my chest with no knife punctures and wired them up to a metal box above my head. Next, he slipped a blood-pressure cuff over my arm. He also attached a sort of bulldog clip to my finger, and then inserted a needle into a vein on the back of my hand to set up a drip.

‘To stop dehydration,’ he said when I looked at him quizzically. ‘You’ve lost a fair amount of blood.’

‘So who stabbed you?’ the policeman asked.

‘There were two of them,’ I said. ‘They were waiting for me in my flat.’

‘Associates, were they?’ he asked in a tone that implied he didn’t care much. It dawned on me why.

‘No,’ I said to him. ‘They were not associates, and I am not a drug dealer. I am a senior investigator for the Integrity Service of the British Horseracing Authority. I am the horseracing police and two men have just tried to kill me. I would like, please, to speak to a higher-ranking officer.’

The policeman swiftly changed his tune, asking me for a description of the men so he could put out a call.

A description?

‘I spent most of the time with my eyes glued to the knife,’ I said. ‘I didn’t really look at their faces.’

‘But you saw them well enough to know they were not associates,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ Funny how the mind works. I couldn’t remember seeing their faces yet I must have done. Enough, anyway, to realize I didn’t know them.

‘White or black?’ he asked.

‘White,’ I said with certainty. The overhead light in my hallway had been off but there had been enough illumination from the one in the open porch.

‘Masks and gloves?’

‘Gloves, yes,’ I said. ‘Leather gloves. But no masks.’

‘They obviously didn’t expect you to survive long enough to provide us with a description.’

I was beginning to feel seriously unwell and I was having great difficulty breathing. I leaned my head back on the pillow.

‘Blues and twos,’ the paramedic shouted at his colleague who was driving. ‘Blood pressure’s dropping and his O saturation has fallen below ninety.’

I heard the ambulance’s siren start up. It couldn’t go quick enough as far as I was concerned.

The medic put an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, which made me feel marginally better, but I was so tired — I could hardly keep my eyes open.

‘Stay with us,’ the paramedic said loudly into my ear. ‘Stay with us.’

He briefly disconnected the drip from the needle in the back of my hand and replaced it with a full syringe. ‘Adrenalin,’ he said, pushing the plunger, but I was barely listening. I was drifting off.

‘Don’t go to sleep,’ said the paramedic leaning over me and putting his face close to mine. ‘Come on, Mr Hinkley, you must stay awake.’

I forced my eyes open and was not greatly heartened by the worry lines on his forehead as he listened to my chest with a stethoscope.

‘I need you to sit up some more,’ he said, placing his arm around my shoulders and pulling me forward. The move helped a little but my breathing was becoming more and more laboured as I gasped for air, and still I felt so extraordinarily fatigued.

I was going to sleep and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

In my last conscious moment before oblivion, I thought with despair: this is it — I’m dying.

Doctor Shwan came back to see me the following morning. The forty-eight hours was up and I hadn’t developed a fever. No infection.

‘What day is it?’ I asked him.

‘Wednesday.’

‘Where, exactly, am I?’

‘Critical Care Unit, University College Hospital, Euston Road.’

‘When can I go home?’

‘Soon.’ He smiled. ‘Good.’

‘What’s good?’ I asked.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You didn’t ask me questions like that on Monday because you were only interested in your body. Now you are well enough to think outside that. I think it’s time to remove all the monitors and tubes and send you to a regular ward.’

‘I want to go home,’ I said.

‘Not just yet,’ replied the doctor. ‘We still need to keep an eye on you for a while longer. Your body has suffered a considerable trauma and your breastbone needs to heal some more before you go running around, undoing all my handiwork.’

‘My breastbone?’

‘I had to saw it in half to get to your heart. I joined it back together with stainless-steel wire but the bone needs time to begin to bind naturally before you can put any stress on it.’

No wonder it hurt so much.

‘So when can I go home?’ I asked.

‘The earliest would be at the weekend.’

‘Friday?’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Saturday, maybe, but only if you continue to make good progress. And you must promise not to do anything strenuous for at least another three or four weeks. And no lifting anything heavier than a cup of tea. Your abdominal wall needs to heal as well.’

The doctor went away still chuckling to himself and, presently, a couple of nurses arrived to disconnect the mass of tubes and wires that sprouted out of various points on my body.

‘What are they all for?’ I asked.

‘Those in your neck include a monitor for measuring the blood pressure actually in your heart and lungs, a tube for taking antibiotics direct to the heart, and some pacemaker wires just in case your heart needed an electrical stimulus to make it pump. Then there are three separate tubes in your chest to drain away any excess fluid, a line in each elbow for intravenous infusions, a nasogastric tube that goes through your nose and down your throat to feed you, and a catheter in your bladder to assist urination.’

Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked.

‘Plus, of course, the ECG electrodes that are stuck on your torso.’

Of course.

Everything was removed other than the single IV line in my right arm. According to the nurses, that was so I could receive any fluids and medication without the need for separate injections. I was all in favour of that.

‘Now it’s time to get you up and walking,’ said one of them.

They helped me first sit on the edge of the bed and then to stand up, one of them hovering on each side of me in case I keeled over. I didn’t, and I was soon walking around without any real problems other than the continuous throbbing that went all the way down my front where both the doctor and the knifeman had made their various incisions.

By Thursday morning I was more than ready to be discharged. For a start, I was getting fed up with hospital food, and I was not sleeping very well. Not that it was a bad thing — I had one eye always open for a short stocky man with a carving knife in his hand.

‘Can I please go home?’ I asked Doctor Shwan, who popped in to see me at seven thirty on his way to his day shift in A & E.

‘We need to give things a little longer to heal with you resting here,’ he said.

‘I can rest at home,’ I pointed out.

‘But would you? It’s only been four days since I had your heart actually beating in my hand. I’ll admit you’ve made remarkable progress so far, but you must give your body a chance to recover from having had both your chest and your abdomen opened, otherwise you’ll be back here in worse shape. I’ve said that you might be able to go home on Saturday, but that’s really too soon. The sutures won’t come out until the middle of next week and, while they remain, there’s always a risk of infection.’

‘I’ll take that as a no, then,’ I said.

He smiled and nodded. ‘You do that.’

‘Can you give me something to help me sleep? I’m lying awake for hours every night.’

‘It’s not unusual for open-heart patients to complain about having insomnia after their surgery, but I’m loath to give you sedatives. They can slow the healing process. If it’s pain that’s keeping you awake, we can give you something for that.’

‘It’s not so much pain as the bloody itching of the wounds. It’s driving me crazy, especially in the quiet of the night when it seems to come on the worst.’

‘Itching is actually a good thing,’ he said. ‘It means you’re mending. However, try not to scratch as that can cause infection. When they’ve healed a bit more you can use a cream. But not yet. Sorry.’

The doctor departed and I went back to studying the ceiling of my room while trying hard not to rub at the incisions on my chest and abdomen.

I was frustrated.

I had promised Faye that I would get on and live my life to the full. Instead, I was stuck here in a hospital room, marking time.

There were things I wanted to do. Not least, finding out who had tried to kill me.

Paul stared at me. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible to drive a car at the same time as you are tied up in the boot.’

Paul went on staring.

‘The police found plastic cable ties in the boot of the Mercedes with Dave’s blood on them.’ I went on to tell him everything that DS Jagger had told me. ‘And, if Dave himself was already trussed up in his car like a chicken, the person who shoved me into the sauna to die is most likely the same person who killed him. And it may be the same person who tried again this Sunday with a carving knife.’

‘But why would anyone want you dead?’ Paul asked.

It was the question I had been asking myself, over and over.

‘Maybe I know something that someone doesn’t want me to tell anyone else about.’

‘What?’ Paul said.

‘If I knew that, then I’d shout it loudly to everybody so that there’d be no need to kill me to prevent it.’

‘I don’t suppose it has anything to do with McKenzie falling off Wisden Wonder at Sandown,’ Paul said. ‘With you indisposed in here, I’ve asked Nigel to have a look into that. And I’ve arranged for a letter to be sent to McKenzie summoning him to a disciplinary panel in January to explain his riding of the horse.’

I would have much preferred it if Paul had left that for me to deal with later.

I was an advocate of doing the investigating first, preferably furtively and in secret, and then calling the miscreants to account based on my findings.

Paul, meanwhile, tended to believe that the early summons to a disciplinary panel would put the fear of God into the accused and could produce dividends in the form of a confession. He seemed not to appreciate the fact that accomplices, or even the brains behind the scam, might go to ground and never be implicated.

In this particular case, Bill McKenzie was already well aware that I was suspicious of his riding of Wisden Wonder and so I reckoned that no further damage would have been done by Paul’s intervention.

We discussed a few of the other outstanding cases that were sitting on my desk, some of which were waiting for me to produce a report, but we kept coming back to Dave Swinton.

‘Do you know which race he purposely didn’t win?’ Paul asked.

‘I think so,’ I said, and I told him about Garrick Party’s run at Haydock. ‘The horse is a well-known front runner with no great finishing speed but, on this occasion, Dave held him up for a late run that the horse, predictably, was unable to produce. He finished third out of eight.’

‘At what price?’

‘He started as favourite at thirteen-to-eight.’

‘Did the stewards on the day have him in?’

‘Yes. They questioned both Dave and the trainer, Jason Butcher, but they accepted the excuse that the horse had been held up due to the heavy going. But I don’t buy it. The horse had previously won twice in the mud, both times from the front.’

‘Difficult to prove,’ Paul said.

‘Impossible.’

My friend with the carving knife, and his taller chum with the red baseball boots, came a-calling sometime between one and two o’clock on Friday morning, well outside visiting hours.

Fortunately, I was awake.

In fact, I was more than awake, I was up and wandering around in my brand-new silk dressing gown and slippers.

When he’d said it, I hadn’t particularly agreed with Doctor Shwan that the itching in my chest was a good thing, yet it had been that itching, together with my desperate urge to scratch, that had woken me and driven me from my bed at the same time my unwanted visitors made their appearance.

The itching saved my life.

The duty night nurse had suggested that a cup of hot chocolate might help me sleep. Hence I was standing in the small ward kitchen with her, heating milk in a saucepan, when the buzzer sounded at the main door.

‘I wonder who that is?’ said the nurse. ‘The doors are locked at night, but all the staff have key cards. Can you manage a moment?’

‘Sure,’ I said. She went to open the main door while I was left to mind the milk.

Unexpected visitors in the dead of night? Alarm bells started ringing in my head. I flicked off the light and peered around the doorframe of the kitchen.

I recognized the two men as soon as I saw them. It was something about their heights and body shapes rather than their facial features, which, this time, were covered by dark balaclava masks.

One of them was holding the nurse from behind, his arm across her neck, while the other stood in front of her holding the long thin carving knife in his right hand.

Bugger, I thought. I should have asked for that stab-proof vest.

‘Where’s Hinkley?’ I heard the knifeman ask the terrified nurse.

She nodded towards my room.

The man with the knife disappeared but soon returned.

‘Where is he?’ he hissed at the poor woman, raising the knife towards her face.

She made an involuntary glance right at me.

I ducked back into the kitchen before the men could turn, and waited in the dark.

I saw the knife first, then the hand holding it as the man edged towards the doorway. But I didn’t wait for him to see me.

I picked up the saucepan from the hotplate, stepped forward and threw the boiling milk straight into his face, following it up with a swipe of the pan that made a satisfying clunk as it connected with his nose.

The man screamed, dropped the knife and tore away the balaclava from his burning face, but I wasn’t finished with him yet. I hit him again with the heavy base of the saucepan as hard as I could on the side of his head and he went down to the floor.

The knife? I thought, looking around me desperately. Where’s the bloody knife?

Meanwhile, the other man had tossed the nurse to one side and was now coming across to help his friend. Did he have a knife too?

I didn’t wait to check. Instead, I went for him, yelling loudly and wielding the saucepan high above my head. At first he wavered, then he turned on his red baseball boots and ran fast for the exit.

There was a sharp pain in my tummy. I’d done myself some mischief. I was sure of that. I reached down my front with my left hand and could feel wetness on my pyjama jacket.

Blood.

I’d burst some stitches, but I wasn’t ready to give up.

I turned back to the knifeman and was greatly dismayed to see that he was neither unconscious nor dead, as I had hoped. Indeed, he was beginning to get to his knees and he had recovered his knife from the floor.

Shit.

I was in no state to fight him off again. The way I was suddenly feeling, I’d have had some difficulty fighting off a fly.

He stood up and looked at me. I looked back, deep into his unfeeling dark eyes.

Underhand, I thought. He was holding the knife underhand, with the point facing up. Would it make any difference? I was not wearing a tweed jacket and thick overcoat this time to protect me, just a pair of striped pyjamas and a thin silk dressing gown.

The Grim Reaper was waiting in the wings, about to make his appearance.

The cavalry arrived suddenly in the shape of four scrubs-wearing medical staff running into the ward pushing a trolley. The knifeman took one look at these unexpected reinforcements and obviously decided that flight was the wisest course of action. He grabbed his discarded balaclava, pushed past the new arrivals and scarpered in the direction of the stairwell.

‘Where?’ one of the medics shouted at me urgently.

‘Where what?’ I asked.

‘Where’s the cardiac arrest?’ he shouted again.

In my chest, I thought.

‘What cardiac arrest?’ I asked blankly.

‘You pushed the cardiac arrest alarm,’ he said accusingly.

‘I did that,’ said the ward duty night nurse, coming out from behind the nurses’ station desk where she’d taken refuge. ‘We needed help fast. It was the best I could think of.’

Good girl, I thought.

I sat down on the floor. I wasn’t feeling at all well.

Oh God, not again.

After speaking with DI Galvin, I called Faye and asked her if she could fetch my mobile phone from my flat. She came to the hospital at noon to collect the key.

‘The phone should be on the floor in the hallway,’ I said. ‘And the charger as well, if you can find it. That’ll be on the worktop in the kitchen next to the microwave.’

‘Nothing else? How about some clothes?’

‘No. I’m fine. I have clothes.’

I did think about asking her to get my laptop but I could do most things via the internet with just my iPhone. Furthermore, my laptop was somewhere in my bedroom and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted Faye exploring more of my home than was absolutely necessary. To be honest, I would have been much happier if the police had agreed to retrieve my phone. I knew that asking my sister to go there was a mistake.

Faye was a naturally tidy person. She had been since childhood, and she had unsuccessfully tried to instil into her younger brother the same culture of neatness and order. Hence, since Lydia’s departure and the move to my new flat, I had resisted all Faye’s attempts to come over to check up on me.

And now here I was sending her there unaccompanied. I must be crazy. But I really needed that phone. And surely, whatever the state of the place, sending Faye was better than asking Henri to go.

Only after she had gone did I worry about her security.

What if Darryl Gareth Lawrence and his sidekick were waiting in the bushes outside my front door?

But why would they do anything to Faye? Lawrence had specifically asked the nurse, Where’s Hinkley? It was me they wanted, not my sister.

Nevertheless, I was greatly relieved when Faye returned about an hour and a half later with my phone plus charger.

‘How are things?’ I asked.

‘It’s not very tidy,’ she said in an accusing manner.

‘That must have been due to my attackers. Or possibly the police forensic team.’

She looked at me. ‘I don’t suppose either of those would be responsible for the stack of dirty mugs and plates in the sink, or for the washing hung on the back of your sofa, or even for the clothes lying on the floor of your bedroom.’

I looked rather sheepishly at her.

‘And they surely wouldn’t have packed up those removal boxes to leave in the hallway. How long have you been there now? Nearly a year? Isn’t it time you unpacked?’

‘I will,’ I said.

And I would. I’d tidy the place too, especially if I was going to entertain a certain Miss Henrietta Shawcross there anytime soon, as I dearly hoped I would be.

‘So, are you coming out tomorrow?’ Faye asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I had to have some of my stitches redone this morning.’

‘Why?’

‘A few of those on my abdomen split open.’

‘You haven’t been doing those press-ups again, I hope,’ Faye said with a laugh, but she must have seen something in my face because she stopped laughing. ‘What happened?’

‘I had some unexpected and unwanted visitors in the night.’

‘Not the same men?’

I nodded.

‘But that’s dreadful. How did they know you were here? And how the hell did they get in?’

‘That’s what the police are trying to find out,’ I said. ‘But at least we now know who one of them is. I recognized him from a police photo.’

‘Who is it?’

‘Someone called Darryl Lawrence.’

She stared at me with a blank expression.

‘I’ve never heard of him either,’ I said, ‘but he’s had lots of previous convictions for violence and has spent time in prison.’

‘Why is he coming after you?’

‘I don’t know. I can only imagine that someone is paying him to kill me. The police are searching for him, so we might find out more when they find him.’

Faye was distressed.

She had been under the erroneous impression that the attack at my home had been as a result of a random burglary which had somehow gone terribly wrong. To discover that her little brother was being specifically targeted by a hired killer came as an unwelcome shock.

‘But who would want to kill you?’ she asked desperately, like a mother wondering how anyone could harm her beloved child.

‘That is exactly what I’ve been trying to figure out.’

‘It’s that bloody job of yours,’ she said angrily. ‘Why can’t you do something safer? Q has connections and you’re smart. I am sure you could get a nice safe banking job in the City.’

‘I don’t want a banking job in the City,’ I said. ‘I’d be bored to death. I like what I do.’

‘It’s so dangerous.’

Maybe that’s why I liked it, but I wasn’t going to say so.

Not today.

After constant badgering, the doctors finally agreed that I could go home on Sunday morning. I think they were glad to see the back of me — I know the nurses were. They didn’t appreciate having a potential killer on the prowl.

To be honest, and for the same reason, I was grateful when Quentin arrived in his BMW to drive me to Richmond rather than to my flat in Harlesden.

I’d been in hospital for a whole week but, in many ways, it seemed longer.

I was eager to get back to work in spite of the dire warnings I’d been given by Doctor Shwan about having to take things easy for a while. In particular, I wanted to continue my look into Bill McKenzie’s riding and the gambling habits of Leslie Morris, and to rescue the investigation from the desk of Paul Maldini.

Was it just eight days since I’d met Henrietta Shawcross at Sandown Park races? It seemed that I had known her for ever.

She had come into the hospital on Saturday afternoon and we had watched the Channel 4 coverage of racing at Cheltenham and Doncaster.

‘I’m sorry I can’t stay late tonight,’ she’d said. ‘I’m going to a dinner at the Dorchester. It’s the Christmas party for all our UK staff and their wives. We do it every year.’

‘For Reynard Shipping?’

‘Yes. I promised Uncle Richard I’d be there.’

‘Will your cousin Martin also be there?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s the host tonight. That’s why he’s over here.’

‘From the Cayman Islands?’ I’d asked.

‘From Singapore. He has a place in the Caymans, but he spends much of his time in Singapore running our operation out there, although he was here for most of the summer restructuring the UK business. He’s our new managing director, now that Uncle Richard is taking things a bit easier.’

‘Well, I hope you have a great evening,’ I’d said. ‘Much better than staying here.’

‘I doubt that. The Christmas party always turns into a nightmare. Everyone drinks too much and then they start telling me what they really think of us.’

‘Which is?’

‘That we don’t pay them enough, we have too many Asia-based staff, and that the company makes the family too much money.’

‘And does it?’

‘No. My great-grandfather took a job as a stevedore in the London Docks after returning from the battlefields of France in 1918. He started his own ship-loading business in 1920 and, since then, it’s been the Reynard family that has built the business up to what it is today, so why shouldn’t we enjoy the spoils?’

It sounded to me like something she was well used to justifying.

‘Everyone who works for us is well paid. We certainly have no trouble recruiting from our competitors. And, these days, our main hub is in Singapore, so we are bound to have lots of Asia-based staff, aren’t we?’

‘Are you much involved?’

‘I sit on the board as a non-exec director.’

‘But you work full-time elsewhere?’

‘Yes,’ she’d said.

I had been desperate to ask her why, but I’d said nothing. She would tell me if she wanted to. And she did.

‘I run a recruitment agency in Fulham,’ she had said finally.

‘You told me at Sandown that you worked for an agency, not that you ran it.’

‘I didn’t want to brag. I set it up from scratch about six years ago after a friend complained how difficult it was to get catering staff for her kids’ parties, and it’s sort of blossomed from there into quite an enterprise. I now have six full-time employees, including me, and literally hundreds of people on our books. Clients come to us with their requirements and we act as the middlemen, putting them together with our self-employed chefs, waiters and waitresses. We do all the contract work and arrange payment to the staff. And we charge the clients a fee for doing it all.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘It is,’ she’d said, beaming. ‘The agency makes a healthy profit and it’s all because of me rather than my family.’

I could see how important that was to her.

‘I’ve just started a section recruiting entertainers and magicians for events.’

I could do with a magician, I thought, to make Darryl Gareth Lawrence disappear.

‘But I want to see you,’ Henri said on the phone at Monday lunchtime. ‘I’ll come to Richmond after work.’

To be honest, I’d tried to put her off, although I wasn’t sure why.

Perhaps I was worried about what Faye would think of her. Or maybe it was because Quentin could be so abrupt and offhand that I didn’t want Henri to be offended to the point of never coming back.

‘What’s your sister’s address?’

I told her. Of course I told her. It had been two whole days since she had kissed me goodbye in the hospital on Saturday and I was desperate to see her again.

‘I’ll be there sometime after six,’ she said.

‘Lovely.’

I was following Faye’s instructions and taking things easy at home, my feet up on the sofa, watching highlights of cricket from Australia, when Detective Inspector Galvin telephoned around lunchtime on Thursday.

‘I think we may have Darryl Lawrence’s accomplice in custody,’ he said. ‘I’m not certain, but his height and shape fit the man in the hospital CCTV images.’

‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘But can you hold him on such flimsy evidence?’

‘Currently, he’s under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Darryl Lawrence. CCTV footage at Victoria shows him entering the Tube station with Lawrence but leaving it again on his own after the incident.’

‘Does it actually show him pushing Lawrence under the train?’

‘Sadly not, but we do have a couple of eyewitnesses. The transport police have now handed the case over to us. We’ve arranged an old-fashioned line-up for this afternoon. Would you come and see if you recognize him from the attack at your flat?’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Charing Cross police station. Come to the main entrance on Agar Street at three o’clock.’

‘I’ll be there.’

On Saturday I went again to Ascot for the second day of the pre-Christmas meeting.

I had briefly thought of asking Henri if she would like to come with me, but I’d quickly dismissed the notion.

I was always working when on a racecourse. Even the day at Sandown when I’d first met Henri, my work had been the higher priority — I had gone off to hospital with Bill McKenzie rather than accepting Gay Smith’s invitation to go back to the box for tea.

That day, it had been a difficult decision, and the right one, as it was again now.

‘I couldn’t come with you, anyway,’ Henri had said when I’d called to explain why I wasn’t asking her. ‘I’m going to a wedding in Kent.’

‘As long as it’s not your wedding,’ I’d said with a laugh.

‘There’s no chance of that.’

I hadn’t been quite sure what to make of that answer, but it was not the right time to delve deeper into the matter, and definitely not when on the telephone.

I wandered down to the Ascot weighing room still thinking about her and looking forward to spending some decent time with her in the warmth of the Caribbean. I wondered if we were going to Martin Reynard’s place in the Cayman Islands. Henri had said that she would be away with her uncle and aunt, so it would be quite likely that her cousin would be there too.

Bill McKenzie was standing on the terrace in front of the weighing room and he was clearly not happy to see me.

‘How’s the shoulder?’ I said.

‘Mending slowly.’

‘I thought you’d be resting it at home.’

‘I don’t want any of the trainers to think I’m going to be out for long,’ he said. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ He wasn’t even wearing a sling. ‘I need to be back in good time for the King George.’

That would be just three short weeks after the fall at Sandown. His surgeon had been right — he was crazy.

‘Do you fancy a quiet talk over a drink or a sandwich?’ I asked.

‘What, with you?’ He sounded incredulous.

‘Yes. With me.’

‘Now, why would I want to do that?’

‘Because, Bill, I may be the only friend you have.’ He didn’t look like he believed it. ‘There’s a disciplinary hearing next month and, as far as I can tell from the evidence, you’re going to lose your jockey’s licence for a very long time, maybe for ever. Then it won’t matter whether the trainers see you or not. You won’t be riding. You won’t even be allowed on a racecourse.’

He looked miserable.

‘Is that what you want?’ I asked.

‘Of course it bloody isn’t.’

‘So speak to me,’ I said. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘I can’t.’ He was again almost in tears.

‘Come on,’ I said in my most persuasive tone. ‘Let’s go and find a quiet place to have that drink and a chat.’

I steered him not to a bar but to the lifts, which took us up to the private hospitality area of the Ascot Authority, the organization that operates the racecourse on behalf of the Queen, who owns the place.

As I had suspected, even though there were some guests, the hospitality area at a jumps meeting was far from full and I was able to secure a table in a quiet corner, well away from where the others were enjoying a champagne reception near the viewing balcony.

I went over to the waitresses’ station and one of them poured me a couple of glasses of white wine.

‘I can’t have anything to drink,’ Bill said. ‘I’m having enough trouble with my weight as it is. Lack of riding is making me flabby.’

‘Drink it,’ I said, handing him one of the glasses. ‘You need it.’

And, I thought, it might loosen his tongue.

He drank it down in just a few large gulps, and I waved at the waitress to bring him another.

‘Tell me what’s going on.’

‘I can’t,’ he said pitifully.

‘Are you sure you’re not being blackmailed?’ I asked.

He took a gulp of wine from his new glass.

‘No.’ He sighed. ‘Not for money, anyway.’

‘Is someone making you ride to lose?’

He didn’t say anything, he just nodded slightly, as if not voicing the admission somehow made it less damaging.

‘How?’

‘I love my wife,’ he said gloomily. ‘She’s five months pregnant and I absolutely adore her. And Oscar, my son. He’s now nearly two.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ I said, not immediately realizing the significance.

‘I don’t want to lose them,’ he said, looking down at the table with tears running down his cheeks.

‘Why would you?’ I asked.

‘There are some photos,’ he said. ‘This man calls me and says he’ll send them to my Julie unless I lose the races.’

So he was being blackmailed after all.

‘What are the photos of?’

He looked up at me. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Me and a girl.’

‘Have you seen them?’

‘No. I don’t want to. But the man swears he has them.’

‘Where and when were they taken?’ I asked.

‘In May,’ he said. ‘I went to Paris to ride in the Grand Steeple-Chase. I was in a hotel near the track and I got picked up by some bird in the bar. The next thing I know it’s the morning and I’m waking up in bed next to her, and both of us are stark-bollock naked. I must have had more red wine than I’d realized because I don’t really remember much, but this geezer on the phone says he’s got some graphic pictures of me and the girl having sex.’

‘Didn’t you ask to see them?’ I asked. ‘He may be bluffing.’

‘Does it matter?’ he said. ‘Even if he just tells my missus that I’ve been sleeping with some French floozy, with or without pictures, she’d hit the roof and I’d be out on my ear.’

‘Was it a set-up?’

‘Yeah, ’course it was. I remember being flattered by her attention. It seemed harmless enough. And I was a long way from home. At first we were just laughing and chatting. And drinking. Then she was all over me, kissing me and such. I never intended screwing her or anything, but...’ He tailed off.

‘Whose bed?’ I asked. ‘Hers or yours?’

‘Mine. Upstairs in the hotel. I don’t even remember going up to the room, let alone doing anything with her when I got there.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m bloody finished, aren’t I? My job’s going down the Swanee over this Wisden Wonder business. And my marriage will be in ruins too. I might as well go and top myself.’

He downed the rest of his wine.

‘Come on, Bill,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to talk like that.’

‘Isn’t there? My life’s over either way.’

I felt sorry for him because it did rather sound like he’d been specifically targeted.

‘I’ll see what I can do for you,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, tell me about riding Pool Table at Cheltenham. Was that another race you were told to lose?’

He hung his head, as if in shame. ‘That was the first time.’

‘How were you contacted?’ I asked.

‘By phone,’ he said. ‘I got a call at home one night when I’m watching telly. My missus was there in the room with me. It was bloody awful. I couldn’t believe what the man was saying. My mouth went completely dry and I remember going hot and cold all over. I started sweating and such. I was convinced Julie must be able to tell just by looking at me. I’ve never felt so wretched in my whole life.’

‘Was it by phone every time?’ I asked.

‘It’s only been twice,’ he said. ‘Stopping one, that is. Not twice with other girls. That was just the once, and I’d give anything for that not to have happened at all.’

‘Do you know who it was who called?’

‘He didn’t give his name,’ Bill said.

There was something about his tone of voice that made me think he did know.

‘Was it a man called Leslie Morris?’ I asked.

He looked up at me sharply.

‘When I asked you about him before, you said you’d never heard of him, but you blushed, so I knew you were lying. So was it Morris who called you?’

He looked down again at the empty wineglass in his hand.

Then he nodded. ‘He didn’t actually say so, but I think it was him.’

‘Why did you lie to me about knowing him?’ I said.

‘Because I was worried about what he might say to you.’

‘Have you known him long?’ I asked.

‘Only since May. It was his bloody horse I went to Paris to ride. Morris called me out of the blue after Aintree. He was dead keen for me to go — paid my fare and everything, although, at the time, I couldn’t think why he bothered. Useless nag finished tailed-off last.’

So Morris had been lying about that too. Bill McKenzie had indeed ridden his horse, but in France. I silently berated myself for not having checked the French records as well as those for the UK and Ireland.

‘So Morris was over there with you?’

‘Yeah, together with his son. Nasty piece of work he is, I can tell you.’

‘Does Morris know about the girl?’ I asked.

‘I reckon he might.’

I believed there was no might about it. I’d wager my life savings that, not only did Morris know about it, he’d set it up. He’d probably arranged for the girl to get McKenzie drunk or, more likely, to slip him a mickey. Rohypnol maybe.

Easy.

Help him up to his room, remove all his clothes, lie him on the bed with the naked girl in a few compromising positions on top, snap a few photos just to be sure, and, hey presto, he had cause for blackmail and control. Rohypnol even caused temporary amnesia as a side effect so he wouldn’t have remembered much, but just enough not to question that it had happened.

Bill probably never even had sex with the girl. He’d have been incapable. But how would he be able to convince his wife of that?

‘Who else knows?’ I asked.

‘No one,’ he said. ‘I’ve not mentioned it to a soul before you. Please don’t tell anyone.’ He was begging me. ‘I don’t want Julie finding out.’

‘There may be nothing for her to find out about,’ I said. ‘If you don’t remember anything happening, then it’s quite likely that nothing actually did happen. Especially if you were unconscious.’

‘I chatted up the girl in the first place,’ he said gloomily.

‘If every wife divorced her husband simply because he’d chatted up some other girl, there’d hardly be a single marriage left intact.’

‘You don’t know my Julie. She can be very jealous.’

More fool her, I thought. But, then, I wouldn’t have wanted Henri chatting up some other man at the wedding in Kent.

I wondered what she was doing right now.

‘I was determined not to go through with it,’ Bill said, bringing me back from my daydreaming.

‘With what?’ I asked.

‘Stopping Wisden Wonder from winning. I’d done it once with Pool Table and I told the man that that was enough. But he says that I should think very carefully before I subjected my wife to such distressing news.’ Bill laughed forlornly. ‘I told him it wasn’t bloody me who would be subjecting her to the distressing news. He just replied that I should have thought about that before I fucked another woman.’

I could appreciate his dilemma.

‘I did consider trying to win the race anyway and to hell with him. If I’d won, perhaps it would screw the man good and proper. And, if I didn’t, then it wouldn’t matter because at least I hadn’t stopped the horse on purpose.’

‘So why didn’t you try and win?’ I asked.

‘I didn’t want to risk it. The man would have sent the pictures to Julie.’ He put his head in his hands again. ‘I even tried to get you lot to stop him.’

‘What?’ I said, surprised.

He looked up. ‘I tried to get the BHA to stop him by phoning that anonymous tip-off line. I was hoping you might arrest Morris or something. Then I’d be off the hook, so to speak. But I saw him standing by the paddock exit at Sandown as I was going out on Wisden Wonder, all bold as brass in his bloody hat. He didn’t say anything, he just glared at me. It gave me the bloody willies, I can tell you. So I made damn sure I couldn’t win. I fell off.’

‘Why did you tell the tip-off line that he was placing bets for an excluded person?’

‘I was hardly going to say that he was betting on a fixed race, was I, not when I was the bloody fixer? Don’t be daft. I tried to think of something that the BHA would have to act on. Something that would prevent him from being allowed into the racecourse. Something that wouldn’t implicate me.’

But it had implicated him.

It had been Bill’s telephone call that had alerted me to what was actually going on.

The irony wasn’t lost on him.

‘I suppose that was a bloody stupid idea.’

The following morning, having checked in the Racing Post that he wasn’t riding at either of the day’s two race meetings, I went to the village of East Hagbourne hoping to find Willy Mitchell at home.

My taxi drew up outside Mitchell’s place at noon. Willy was strapping his twin girls into their seats in a battered old Ford that stood in front of a modest-looking semi-detached bungalow.

‘Can you please wait?’ I said to the taxi driver. ‘I may be a while.’

‘Be as long as you like,’ he said, reclining his seat. ‘The meter’s still running.’

Willy Mitchell wasn’t pleased to see me.

‘We’re just going out for Sunday lunch,’ he said.

‘I won’t keep you long.’

His very young-looking wife came out of the front door carrying two plastic bags. She was little more than a girl herself.

‘Look after the twins for a minute, will you, love?’ Willy said to her. ‘This is about work. I won’t be long.’ He looked at me. ‘You’d better come inside.’

Mrs Mitchell looked quizzically in her husband’s direction but he said nothing more to her. He just led me through the front door and along into their kitchen, where we stood either side of a small table.

‘Now what?’ he said.

‘I’m on your side, Willy.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘It’s true, even if you don’t believe me.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Who is blackmailing you?’ I asked.

He didn’t say anything. As before at Ascot, he just stared at me.

I waited.

‘Who says I’m being blackmailed?’ he asked eventually.

‘You do,’ I replied. ‘It’s what your body language is shouting at me.’

He went back to saying nothing. I waited some more.

‘I’m trying to help you,’ I said.

‘Then go away and leave me in peace.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘Either talk to me now or you’ll end up at a disciplinary panel at the BHA and you will lose your licence to ride.’

‘If I talk to you, I’ll lose my licence anyway.’

‘Not if I can help it,’ I said. ‘Willy, I know that you are being forced to do something you don’t want to. You are not alone. There are other jockeys in the same position as you. I don’t want any of you punished. I just want the blackmailer.’

‘Come on, Willy,’ called a female voice from down the hall. ‘Hurry up, or we’ll be late.’

‘All right, Amy’ love,’ Willy shouted back. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’ We heard her go back outside. He looked at me. ‘We’re going to her mother’s place. She likes us there on time.’

‘I’m sure she’ll wait,’ I said. ‘Now, who is blackmailing you?’

He sighed. A big heavy sigh that had all the weight of the world on it. He slumped down onto one of the kitchen chairs.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking down at the table. ‘I really don’t know.’

‘What hold does he have over you?’ I asked.

He lifted his eyes to my face. There was fear in them. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

I thought about Bill McKenzie and the sex photos.

‘Have you been sleeping with another woman?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said emphatically, standing up and bunching his fists. ‘How dare you!’

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘Calm down.’

So it wasn’t tax, and it wasn’t adultery.

‘Willy, we have to go.’ His wife came down the hall into the kitchen and she was quite cross.

‘Where does your mother live?’ I asked her.

‘Didcot,’ she said flatly.

‘Then, Mrs Mitchell, why don’t you go on alone, with the children. I’ll bring Willy there shortly in my taxi. I have to go to Didcot anyway, to catch the train back to London.’

She didn’t like it. She looked at her husband.

‘Good idea, love,’ Willy said, clearly not giving her the support she was hoping for. ‘You go on. You know how much your mum is looking forward to seeing the girls. I’ll be there soon enough. In plenty of time for lunch.’

She opened her mouth as if to say something but then closed it again, turned on her heel and marched out. She slammed the front door behind her.

Willy went to go after her. I moved to block his way.

‘Tell me what you know,’ I said to him, ‘and I’ll do my best to get you out of this mess with your career intact.’

He stared through me as if I weren’t there.

‘How did the blackmailer contact you?’ I said. ‘Was it by phone?’

His eyes refocused on my face and he nodded. ‘A man called me here one night, straight out of the blue.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He asked me if I loved my twin girls,’ he said. ‘I ask you. What sort of question is that? Of course I love them. I absolutely adore them and I’ll do anything for them.’

He paused. What father wouldn’t?

‘And?’ I said, encouraging him to go on.

‘The man said I had to do what he asked or he would make sure that I’d lose them. He’d have them taken into care.’

His voice broke and there were tears in his eyes. He was really nothing more than a boy.

‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘No one can arrange to have other people’s children put into care just like that.’

There was a long silence.

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Tell me, then,’ I said.

There was another long silence. He audibly sighed.

‘Do you know what the sex offender register is?’ he asked.

‘I’ve heard of it,’ I said.

He sighed again.

‘I’m on it.’

Now it was my turn to be dumbstruck. There was no mention of that in his BHA file.

‘Four years ago, I was convicted of having sex with a child.’

I stood and stared at him, waiting silently for him to go on.

‘I was seventeen and the girl was fifteen. She became pregnant — that’s how they knew we’d done it. At first, they said they wouldn’t prosecute me, but I refused to promise not to see her again.’ He looked up to the heavens. ‘Bloody silly that was. Anyway, I was found guilty and sentenced to three months youth custody, suspended for two years. I was also put on the sex offender register for five years. I’m still on it.’

‘What happened to the girl?’ I asked.

‘I married her,’ he said. ‘You’ve just met her. Amy was pregnant with the twins. We are so much in love and everything was going brilliantly, until this happened.’

‘Why is someone able to blackmail you over it? The information must already be in the public domain.’

‘The man on the phone said that, unless I did as he wanted, he’d fix it for another girl of fourteen to make a complaint to the police that I’d been having sex with her.’ He swallowed. ‘I told him that was a lie. He said it didn’t matter. With my record, the social services would believe it and they’d take the twins away. The man told me I’d never get to hold my little girls again.’

He was in tears once again. Whether or not the threat was real, Willy Mitchell clearly believed it to be so.

‘Does Amy know about this?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘Well, of course she knows about the register and all that. She was in court when that happened. She told the judge we were madly in love and that we were getting married as soon as she turned sixteen, but he took no notice.’ The judge would have been bound by the law, I thought, and a suspended sentence had been quite lenient. ‘But she doesn’t know about the call from the man, or about the race at Newbury.’

‘Isn’t it time you told her?’ I said.

On Monday morning I caught another train from Paddington, this time to Reading, where I took a taxi to the police station for a booked appointment with Detective Sergeant Jagger.

‘Now, how can I help you?’ he said when we had both sat down in one of the interview rooms. We were accompanied by a detective constable with a pen and notebook.

‘I think it’s more about how I can help you,’ I replied.

‘I’m all ears,’ he said.

‘A lot of it was in the statement I gave to your colleague. But I now have more to tell you.’

I told him everything about my investigation into the race fixing, from my meeting with Dave Swinton in his sauna on the morning of the Hennessy Gold Cup, right up to my conversation with Willy Mitchell on the previous day. I told him of the dubious bets made by Leslie Morris and of my visit to Morris’s house in Raynes Park. I left out the actual identities of McKenzie and Mitchell, referring to them only as Jockey A and Jockey B. I also skipped over the true reasons why they were being blackmailed.

‘You know who these jockeys are, of course?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ I confirmed. ‘But I’d like to keep them out of it.’

There was a brief moment of silence, bar the scratching of the constable’s pen on his notebook.

‘Are you sure that Mr Swinton told you that he was aware who had been blackmailing him?’

I thought back to the conversation. Dave had been reluctant to say anything of substance down the phone line. But I was sure.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He told me on the morning that he died. He said that he knew who it was. I presume he had found out at Newbury races the day before, or maybe on the Saturday evening. Either way, he wouldn’t tell me the person’s name over the phone. He said he didn’t trust them after being a victim of hacking a few years ago. That’s why I went back to his house that Sunday morning.’

‘He hadn’t known who it was when you spoke to him on Saturday?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He told me that he’d kill him if he knew.’

The detective raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you think Mr Swinton might have set a trap for the blackmailer on Sunday morning? One that went badly wrong?’

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I said. ‘I tend to think that saying he’d kill him was only a turn of phrase, rather than an actual threat. Dave was ruthless in his riding, even aggressive, but he was a gentle soul underneath. That is why I was so surprised when I thought he had left me in his sauna to die.’

‘Do you believe that the same person is blackmailing the other jockeys?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. Otherwise it would be too much of a coincidence.’

‘The world is full of coincidences,’ the detective said. ‘Trust me, that’s something you learn very quickly in my business.’

‘So are you now going to arrest Leslie Morris?’

‘You say Mr Morris is a retired accountant?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well into his sixties?’

‘He’s sixty-six.’

‘Do you think a sixty-six-year-old would have the strength to overcome a young, fit jockey like Mr Swinton? And would he also have the strength to lift him into and then out of the boot of a car?’

They were good points.

‘But whoever it was had to have an accomplice with him anyway,’ I said. ‘To drive another car. Otherwise how did he get away from the burning Mercedes? You can hardly hitch a lift in the middle of Otmoor. And how did he get to Lambourn in the first place?’

‘But who was that accomplice?’

‘One of the jockeys told me that Morris has a son, and that he’s a nasty piece of work. And there’s also Darryl Lawrence and Gary Banks to consider.’

‘Are those the men who attacked you at your flat?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It seems they met a man at Esher station who pointed me out to them as their target. Maybe that was Leslie Morris, although I’m not sure how it could have been. But, if it was, then together they would easily be strong enough to lift Dave Swinton into the boot. Lawrence is now dead, and Banks is in custody for killing him. You had better speak to Detective Inspector Galvin.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Mr Hinkley, for your assistance.’

He stood up.

‘Is that it?’ I said.

‘Is there anything else you have to add?’ he asked.

‘No. But... you don’t seem to be very interested.’

‘I will have discussions with my colleagues,’ he said. ‘I will also speak with DI Galvin and other officers from the Met. We will act on your information, be assured of that, but we can’t just go in and arrest someone, with all our guns blazing, until we have considered the matter further. We have to be pretty sure before we detain anyone in these circumstances, not least because we would have only twenty-four hours to question him and complete our investigation, before we would be required to either charge or release him. We like to line up all the ducks before we start shooting at them.’

‘And in the meantime,’ I said, ‘I have to go on watching my back?’

‘That would seem to be a wise course of action. My constable will type up what you have just told us into a formal statement. Can you wait here while he does that, so you can sign it?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

‘Good.’ He started to leave but then turned back to face me. ‘Oh, yes, one more thing, Mr Hinkley. I will need the names of those other two jockeys. They’ll both have to be interviewed. And you don’t want to be the one arrested today, now do you, for obstructing the police?’

There was absolutely no humour in his voice whatsoever.

I was outside Luton Airport Parkway railway station in good time at ten minutes to eight on Wednesday morning when my phone rang.

I thought it was going to be Henri but it was Detective Sergeant Jagger.

‘Having spoken to the jockey Bill McKenzie, and having checked his phone records, we have now arrested Leslie Morris, on suspicion of blackmail.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Thank you for letting me know.’

‘My superior officer, DCI Owens, now heads the inquiry into the death of Mr David Swinton. He wants to interview you himself concerning the events in Lambourn on the morning that Mr Swinton died.’

‘When?’ I asked with some trepidation.

‘As soon as possible. Can you come to Reading today?’

‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question. I’m currently at the airport and am flying to the Cayman Islands for Christmas.’

‘Hmm.’ He didn’t sound very happy at that news. ‘When are you back?’

‘Not until the third of January,’ I said. That didn’t seem to please him much either. ‘But I have nothing more to add than I have already given you in my statements. Are you charging Morris with Dave Swinton’s murder?’

‘At present he is being interviewed only concerning the blackmail of Mr William McKenzie.’

‘Well, if I were you, I’d also ask him about the blackmail of Dave Swinton and Willy Mitchell.’

‘All in due course, Mr Hinkley. All in due course. One doesn’t need to rush these things.’

I wondered if it gave them more time to hold Morris in custody if they arrested him for each offence in turn.

‘Have you searched Morris’s house?’ I asked.

‘Not yet, but it will be done later today.’

‘See if you can find a small red notebook,’ I said. ‘It contains the records of all his bets on the dubious race at Sandown, and that should be enough to prove Morris knew beforehand that McKenzie wouldn’t win.’

A large black Range Rover drew up in front of the station with Henri waving at me through the back window. I waved back.

‘Look,’ I said to DS Jagger. ‘I’ve got to go now. I’ll call you from the Cayman Islands tomorrow. I can speak to Chief Inspector Owens then, if he wants.’

A smartly dressed chauffeur climbed out of the driver’s seat and loaded my suitcase into the Range Rover’s boot. I meanwhile climbed in the back next to Henri.

There were two other people already in the vehicle.

Sir Richard Reynard was sitting in the front seat and there was another woman in the back with Henri.

‘This is my aunt Mary,’ Henri said.

‘I’m so pleased to meet you,’ I said, shaking her hand.

‘Me too. I’ve heard much about you from my husband.’

The driver climbed back in and drove off, but we didn’t go to the regular passenger terminal. Instead, we went to the other side of the airport to the private aviation centre where a Reynard Shipping liveried twin-engined jet aircraft awaited us. We even drove out in the Range Rover, across the concrete apron, to the base of the aircraft steps.

It suddenly dawned on me that we were going to the Cayman Islands, not on a knees-to-your-chest charter flight, but on a private jet.

No wonder I hadn’t had to book my own ticket.

Henri grinned like a Cheshire cat. ‘I didn’t think you knew.’

‘But why only one suitcase?’ I asked.

‘Uncle Richard and Aunt Mary always have at least two each but lesser mortals like us can have only one. There’s not that much room in the hold and, if the aircraft’s too heavy, we have to make two fuel stops instead of one.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘Last time it was Bermuda but I think it depends on the winds.’

‘Who else is coming?’

‘Martin and Theresa were meant to be with us but Martin had to go on ahead, over a week ago. I don’t know if Theresa will be coming.’

We found out soon enough as another vehicle drew up beside the Range Rover and Theresa Reynard got out of one side while Bentley Robertson, the creepy, lecherous lawyer, got out of the other.

‘Oh God!’ Henri said. ‘What’s he doing here?’

Travelling with us, it seemed, as we watched his single bag being loaded into the luggage hold alongside ours. Henri was not at all pleased, and I could tell from Bentley’s unfriendly stare that he was just as unhappy about my presence as I was about his.

‘Please keep him away from me,’ she said.

‘I’ll do my best.’

We went on board the jet.

The interior was laid out with no luxury spared. There were ten passenger seats in total, each of them cream leather armchairs that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a stately home.

‘How the other half live,’ I said quietly to myself.

The ten seats were laid out in three distinct sections with one either side at the front, then a group of four — two each side of a table facing one another — and then four more at the back in coach style.

Henri went straight to the very back and sat in the seat nearest the window while beckoning me to quickly take the one next to her. I knew why. In this way she was protecting herself from having to sit next to or opposite Bentley Robertson.

She needn’t have worried.

Bentley came on board and immediately sat in one of the seats at the table. He spread out papers from his briefcase and concentrated only on them.

Theresa Reynard boarded next and sat down next to Bentley. My suspicious mind went into overdrive, wondering if there was a sexual rapport between the two of them. There was just something about their body language that shouted ‘lovers’ at me.

‘Do you think Martin and Theresa’s marriage is OK?’ I asked Henri.

‘Yeah, I think so,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I just wondered why Martin went on ahead and Theresa didn’t go with him.’

‘I expect she was too busy Christmas shopping,’ she said, smiling.

Sir Richard and Lady Mary Reynard came on board and sat in the two seats at the very front. And then we waited. There seemed to be no urgency to close the cabin door and get going.

The reason became obvious after about ten minutes when a chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up at the steps. I watched through the window as Derrick and Gay Smith climbed out of the vehicle and came on board as their copious luggage was shoehorned into the aircraft’s hold. Clearly, no one had informed them of the one-bag limit.

Gay and Derrick greeted Sir Richard and Lady Mary with polite kisses, and then came along the cabin to the two seats in front of Henri and myself.

I stood up in the aisle.

‘Hello, Jeff,’ Gay said with a broad smile. ‘What an unexpected pleasure.’

She gave me a peck on the cheek while Derrick shook my hand. ‘We are just cadging a lift back home,’ he said. ‘Sorry we’re late.’

It was clear that the Smiths were the last of the passengers to arrive, as there was now some activity up front, with the main door being closed and the engines started.

‘Do you always travel like this?’ I asked Henri.

‘I wish. The trust is so tight with my money that I’m usually in economy, although I have been on this baby a few times. But not so often that I’m not really excited every time.’

I was excited too. Extremely. And it wasn’t all to do with flying on a private jet. I’d be excited to be anywhere with Henrietta Shawcross.

Even though Henri and I had known each other for almost three whole weeks, this was our first time, and it was a journey of discovery and delight, of tenderness and love, with moments of primeval rawness and desire.

For me, it was like a reawakening of my emotions after almost a year of abstinence, a release of sexual tension that sent multiple shudders through my body.

‘Wow!’ It was now Henri’s turn to say it. ‘You sure needed that.’

I certainly did.

Afterwards, we lay entwined on the bed, our naked skin glistening wet from the exertion. So much for my promise to Faye to take things easy.

I snuggled up to Henri, happy and content, and also rather relieved that my aerobics appeared not to have reopened any of my various incisions.

‘Come on,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Don’t go to sleep. It’s nearly time to confront the family.’

‘What did Martin say when you told him I was coming with you?’ I asked, not moving.

‘I didn’t tell him,’ she said. ‘I only asked Uncle Richard. He’s the one who matters. Even though Martin has taken over as managing director, Uncle Richard is the chairman and he’s still very much the boss.’

‘Martin didn’t seem particularly surprised to see me at the airport. He just ignored me.’

‘Perhaps Theresa told him. I had to ask her if it was all right to bring you to Christmas lunch. It’s at their place.’

She rolled off the bed and I watched as she walked into the bathroom. What a fabulous sight.

I heard the shower start and I soon joined her under the spray.

‘That was more lovely than I had ever imagined,’ I said.

‘For me too,’ she replied.

We embraced again and kissed in the stream of water, causing me to shudder once more with pleasure.

‘And we still have eleven nights left.’

Henri went to her Reynard Shipping board meeting at nine thirty, collected by her cousin Martin, while I called Bill McKenzie.

‘What’s all this nonsense about you telling the police you’re not sure if it was Morris who was blackmailing you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, almost in a whisper.

‘You were pretty sure when I spoke to you before.’

‘That’s as may be,’ he said. ‘But now I’m not.’

‘What’s changed?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. I could hear the nervous timbre in his voice even from four and a half thousand miles away.

‘Has Morris contacted you?’

‘No,’ he said, but I knew he was lying from the slight hesitation before he answered.

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing,’ he said again.

‘Did he promise to give you the pictures if you didn’t help the police?’

There was a long pause, which was answer enough.

‘You’re stupid,’ I said. ‘Do you really trust him? The only way to stop your wife seeing those pictures is to get Morris locked up.’

‘And how long would that be for?’ he said. ‘A year, two maybe? Then what? And you can still arrange to have things sent from prison, you know.’

He was right.

‘But even if he sends you a set of prints, he’ll still have the original image files. He could print off some more, or send them to your wife in an e-mail.’

‘I’ll have to take that risk.’

Bill McKenzie was in a very deep hole whatever he did. I suppose I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to accept a ladder from the very man who’d put him down there in the first place.

‘Bill,’ I said, ‘I’ll have no chance of saving your jockey’s licence unless you cooperate.’

His only reply was to whimper down the line.

‘Your best course of action is to bite the bullet and tell your wife about your French adventure. Then Morris would have nothing on you.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. It was more of a plea than anything.

‘It would be much better coming from you than from Morris. I’m sure your wife will forgive you when she knows you were drugged and set up.’

‘She won’t,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what she’s like.’

That made me wonder if his marriage was even worth saving, but there was his child to consider, and another on the way.

Christmas Day dawned sunny and calm, and Henri and I were out on the beach by seven o’clock in our swimwear and T-shirts. Even though the sun had only just peeped over the eastern horizon, the temperature was already in the mid-twenties, which gave every indication of a very warm day to come. As Quentin had said, it really was going to be a hot Christmas.

We walked up the beach towards Martin and Theresa’s place and found the dive boat was already there with a hive of activity going on around it. Bags of diving gear were being loaded on board from the beach, along with eight scuba air tanks. Martin Reynard was directing operations while two other men appeared to be doing all the work.

‘Morning,’ said Martin as we approached. ‘Merry Christmas.’

Henri gave him a kiss on the cheek.

‘This is Truman Ebanks,’ Martin said, pointing at a large dark-skinned man standing on the sand. ‘He’s our dive master. And also Carson Ebanks.’ Martin pointed at the man on the boat. ‘He’s the captain and our safety officer.’

Truman was passing the gear to Carson.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Are you brothers?’

‘No, man,’ said Carson in a deep resonant voice.

‘I thought both being called Ebanks...’

He laughed. ‘Lots of people hereabouts are named Ebanks. Those that ain’t Boddens.’ I loved the way his local accent gave the words a rhythm, almost as if he was singing them.

‘I suppose we must be related somehow,’ Truman said with a similar lilt, grinning with his large white teeth showing brightly against his dark face, ‘but from way back.’

The equipment was almost fully loaded when Bentley came walking down the beach to join us.

‘I thought I’d come too,’ he said to Martin. ‘Just for the ride.’

Henri clearly wasn’t happy.

‘Fine,’ Martin said. ‘Let’s get going.’

I thought for a moment that Henri wasn’t going to come, so I took her hand and squeezed it. She smiled at me and shrugged her shoulders in acceptance.

‘OK,’ she said.

The dive boat consisted mostly of a single flat platform that ran right through from bow to stern, with the driver position situated in the centre, a bench down each side with dive-tank holders behind, and an overhead awning that provided shade to most of the boat. The bow had been run aground on the sand and Martin, Bentley, Henri and I now climbed a short ladder to get on board. Truman then pushed us off the beach into deeper water.

The trip out was wonderful with the movement of the boat causing a refreshing breeze to blow into our faces, keeping us cool.

From out at sea, I could assess the whole sweep of Seven Mile Beach with its array of hotels and condominiums stretching away into the distance in both directions.

‘Do most people live near the beach?’ I asked Henri.

‘Nowhere is that far away,’ she said, ‘but this is certainly the busiest end. Three-quarters of the whole population live in George Town or West Bay. Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.’

‘Here you are, Jeff,’ Martin said, placing a blue mesh bag full of gear by my feet. ‘All you need is in here. Take the yellow guest tanks. The yellow will make it easier for Truman and me to keep an eye on you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

All the scuba tanks I had ever used before had been a uniformly boring grey aluminium that came with the dive boat, but here we had eight smart brightly painted ones, two each in white, yellow, red and light blue. I’d heard of personalized number plates, of course, but I’d never come across personalized dive tanks before. The red ones had HENRI painted in large black letters down them; the white had MARTIN, the blue had THERESA, and the yellow, GUEST.

Bentley, it seemed, really was only there for the ride, as he obviously wasn’t planning on getting wet. He hadn’t brought any swimmers with him.

‘Where are we diving?’ Henri asked. ‘I don’t want to go too deep.’

‘The wall first, then Kittiwake after,’ Martin said. ‘It will be good to do Kittiwake without the usual mass of tourists getting in the way. No one else dives on Christmas Day.’

‘What is Kittiwake?’ I asked him.

‘The USS Kittiwake. It’s a retired naval ship that was deliberately sunk here in 2011 to provide an artificial reef and a dive site.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ I said. I’d never dived on a wreck before. ‘How deep is it?’

‘It sits on the seafloor at about sixty feet. But we’re going to do a wall-dive first. That will be a deeper but a shorter dive.’

Like every diver the world over, I’d heard of the Cayman Wall, that point where the shallow shelf on which the island sits ends and the surrounding deepness begins. It is characterized by an abrupt and almost vertical falling away of the seafloor down into the Cayman Trench, the deepest part of the Caribbean at a depth of over twenty-five thousand feet. But, of course, we would only be exploring the very top of the ‘wall’.

‘I’ll skip the first dive,’ Henri said. ‘It’s too deep for me.’

I watched as Martin and Truman began to pull on a wetsuit each.

‘Do we actually need a wetsuit?’ I asked. ‘I’ve done all my diving in the Red Sea without one.’

‘It may be hot up here in the sunshine,’ Truman said, ‘but it’s still wintertime. The water will be cool a hundred feet down.’

I pulled the wetsuit out of my mesh bag and started to put it on.

‘I must have a photo,’ Henri said, laughing, as I grappled with the black neoprene outfit that was none too big for me. She took my iPhone and snapped away on it as I struggled to pull up the long zip at the back.

‘Very funny,’ I said to her, pulling a face.

I felt like the Michelin Man.

‘It’s Theresa’s,’ Martin said. ‘It’s the largest spare one I could find.’

Even though Theresa was only an inch or so shorter than I, she was considerably less substantial around the waist. But I managed to do it up in the end with some extra help from the giggling Henri.

Next out of the bag came a BC, a buoyancy compensator, a short jacket that has an air bladder between the inner and outer layers, which, when connected to a tank, could be filled with air to make a diver neutrally buoyant, so that he neither floated up nor sank down but remained level in the water as if weightless.

I attached the BC to one of the yellow tanks and connected the regulator to the valve, checking that the pressure in the tank was well above 2,500 pounds per square inch. The pressure gauge, together with a depth indicator, was housed in a console about eight inches long that was attached by a length of high-pressure hose to the tank’s valve.

I next tested the two mouthpieces, breathing through both the primary and the emergency alternate.

All seemed fine.

It had been several years since I had last been diving and I was pleased that at least I hadn’t forgotten how to set up the equipment.

‘You’ll need a weight belt,’ Truman said to me. ‘The air trapped in the neoprene will make you float otherwise.’

‘You’d just bob round on the surface like a cork,’ said Martin, laughing. ‘Ten to twelve pounds should be enough.’

I attached several rectangular lead blocks to a two-inch-wide belt and placed it around my waist. Next I tried on the flippers and the mask.

I was ready.

The note of the engine dropped away as we arrived at the first location and the boat was tied to one of the coloured buoys that mark every dive site in Cayman waters.

‘Have fun,’ Henri said as Carson carried my heavy gear over to the boarding ladder. I had decided that going down the ladder was a preferable means of entry for my still-delicate abdomen to jumping off the side.

I sat on the bottom step, put on the BC, flippers and mask, and slipped gently into the clear blue Caribbean water. Martin and I were acting as dive buddies, hence we would constantly check one another for safety, but, after so long a break from the water, I was pleased that Truman, the dive master, was also coming with us.

As we descended the buoy’s anchor line I equalized the pressure in my ears by frequently holding my nose and blowing air into my sinuses. We arrived at the bottom almost at the point where the sandy floor disappeared over the top of the wall into the abyss.

‘Remember to continually check your depth,’ Truman had told us in the pre-dive briefing. ‘It is far too easy to go over the edge and down too deep. One hundred feet maximum. Bottom time no more than fifteen minutes.’

I reached around for the hose to the console and looked at the depth reading on the indicator. Seventy feet. Theoretically, therefore, I could go some thirty feet down the wall face, but I was happy staying up near the top where there was plenty of bright coral.

Truman had also told us to be aware that we were diving in a designated marine park and that we should not touch or remove anything. But looking was all I was interested in doing anyway.

What a delight it was to be down here exploring a world so different from the one above the surface that it could have easily been on another planet, yet it was, in fact, just a few short yards from life as we knew it.

Back in the 1940s, Jacques Cousteau had perfected the open-circuit scuba equipment we were now using, solving the problem of a diver having to inhale air at a low pressure by attaching a gas regulator to a highly pressurized tank. But he probably had no idea at the time that he would also be creating a whole new leisure industry.

The ability to breathe underwater must have been a dream of human beings since they first walked on dry land, and here we were doing it.

I checked the pressure in my tank. It was fine, a little below 2,000 psi.

I looked around for Martin.

He was below me, his white tank clearly visible against the darkness beneath. He and Truman were some way down the wall but I was happy remaining close to the lip. I was enchanted by the multi-coloured anemones swaying in the gentle current, and by the shoals of black-and-yellow-striped sergeant major fish, or the beautiful cobalt blue angelfish as they nibbled away at some invisible food on the surface of the coral.

Truman swam up to join me and placed his thumb and index finger together, making a circle in the universal dive signal for OK. He was asking if I was all right. I answered in the affirmative by repeating the signal. He pointed at his watch and then held up his open right hand. I repeated the OK, indicating that I’d understood. Five more minutes.

I again checked the pressure in my tank. It had now dropped to 1,700. To be on the safe side, it needed to still be above 800 when I surfaced.

No problem.

After the five minutes, the three of us ascended slowly towards the surface, stopping for prearranged decompression safety stops at forty and twenty feet. The last thing any of us wanted was to get the ‘bends’, the agonizing, hugely dangerous and potentially lethal condition that can occur when a sudden reduction in pressure causes bubbles of gas to form within the body in the same way that they do in a bottle of fizzy drink when the top is rapidly unscrewed.

‘That was fabulous,’ I said to Henri as I sat on the bottom step of the ladder to take off the heavy equipment. ‘I’d forgotten how much fun diving could be.’

She used my iPhone to snap more pictures of me.

‘You’ll break the lens,’ I said, laughing.

When the three of us were back on board, Carson manoeuvred the boat the few hundred yards to the Kittiwake dive site, where we again tied up to the buoy.

‘I’m definitely coming with you on this one,’ Henri said, opening her dive bag. ‘I’m not staying on the boat again with Bentley. He didn’t take his lecherous eyes off me for a second while you were under. I kept moving away to the other end of the boat, and he kept following me.’ She shivered with disgust.

So Henri and I would be dive buddies on this dive, with Martin pairing up with Truman.

I helped Henri zip up the back of her wetsuit. Whereas I looked like I was bursting out of mine in all the wrong places, she looked fantastic with the tightness of the neoprene showing off her amazing curves to perfection.

‘Wow!’ I whispered in her ear. ‘I could go down with you all day long.’

‘Stop it,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t give Bentley ideas.’

It wasn’t me who would be giving Bentley ideas, her wetsuit would have done that. He just sat on the opposite bench, watching us, and I wondered what was going on in his head.

I switched my BC from one yellow tank to the other, while Henri attached hers to one of the red ones. Soon we were set to go.

‘Bottom time for this dive will be a max of thirty minutes,’ Truman said, giving us the briefing. ‘You may go inside the wreck if you want, but be careful not to snag your gear on the hatches. And don’t go in on your own in case you get stuck. Maximum depth is sixty-four feet so no decompression stops are required. Nevertheless, rise and surface slowly. Have fun, everybody.’

Carson again carried my BC and tank to the steps, and I was soon descending once more into the magical and alien underwater world, following Henri down the buoy’s anchor line.

We swam away from the line and the shape of the ship soon came into view.

The USS Kittiwake had been a submarine rescue craft for the US Navy and had served all over the world since being commissioned in 1946. Perhaps its most memorable task had been to recover the ‘black box’ flight recorder from the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger, which had blown up over the Atlantic during launch in January 1986.

Now Kittiwake sat rather forlornly on the sandy seafloor, its superstructure already beginning to show the effects of the marine life that had begun to colonize the grey steel hull.

Henri and I first went into the ship’s bridge through the windows from which the glass had been removed. Then we ventured deeper into the vessel, moving down companionways to the lower decks. At one point we were even able to surface in a compartment where there was an air pocket.

It was an eerie feeling, moving through these watery spaces where once over a hundred men had lived and worked; past the mess deck where the tables at which they had eaten still remained in rows, bolted to the steel floor; along the corridor of the officers’ quarters and into the captain’s cabin.

I checked my watch. We had been down now for fifteen minutes and I had developed a splitting headache that was thumping away behind my eyes. I reckoned I must not be used to the continuous pressure changes in my nasal passages.

I went on following Henri deeper into the structure, but I was beginning to feel decidedly unwell.

I grabbed Henri’s flipper and indicated that I would like to go back to the surface by first pointing at myself and then putting my thumb up. At first she thought I was liking the dive and giving it the ‘thumbs up’ but she soon realized something was amiss when I next rotated my hand horizontally from side to side at the wrist and pointed at my head.

We exited the ship through one of the holes that had been cut in the hull and started to go up slowly.

But, halfway to the surface, I was attacked by a giant sea monster that swallowed me whole and blacked out my world entirely.

I woke up lying on my back with a man kneeling beside me, forcing a plastic mask tightly over my nose and mouth.

Oxygen mask, I thought, knowingly. I’d had one of those on before, in hospital in London.

Was I back in the same hospital?

No. I couldn’t be. I was all wet and I was lying in the sun.

So where was I?

My brain was scrambled and drifting, like the swirling of a fog.

Was I drunk? I couldn’t remember being drunk — but, then again, I couldn’t remember anything.

I tried to move but my limbs seemed to have minds of their own.

‘Thank God he’s awake,’ said a female voice from somewhere over my head.

Henri, I thought. That was Henri. I recognized her voice. And it was Carson who was fitting the mask.

Suddenly, the fog in my head cleared and I could remember everything, including the sea monster.

‘What happened?’ I tried to say. The mask was so tight on my face that I couldn’t properly enunciate the words.

‘Just you rest, man,’ Carson said. ‘You have the bends, man. We’re getting you ashore real quick.’

The throbbing in my head continued in perfect time with my heartbeat. I also felt sick, waves of nausea washing over me every few seconds.

I was lying on the platform of the dive boat with a rolled-up towel under my neck. Henri came and kneeled down next to me, opposite Carson. She took my left hand in hers.

‘You really frightened me,’ she said.

I’d really frightened myself.

‘What happened?’ I tried to say again.

‘You passed out as we were on our way up and then you started sinking back down again. I grabbed you and hauled you up to the surface, forcing my alternate air line into your mouth to breath through. I thought your own tank must have emptied. Luckily there was enough air left in it for me to inflate your BC, which kept you up. Carson then dived into the water to help pull you out.’

‘I banged the hull to alert the others, man,’ Carson said. ‘Now on our way to the nearest beach. I called an ambulance, man. It’ll meet us there.’

Good old Carson, man.

An uneasy truce was established between Henri and myself, helped in part by the Chanel № 5 Christmas present, which she adored.

‘It’s my favourite,’ she said, kissing me. ‘Thank you so much.’

However, she was still cross with me, not so much for my initial accusation, but for then not agreeing with her that it was ridiculous, and for not apologizing to Martin.

We had been invited by Theresa to go up to their place for a light supper and some Christmas games. But I was not really in the mood for party games. And especially not for Murder in the Dark.

‘You go,’ I said. ‘I’ll stay here and watch the television. I could do with the rest.’ I leaned my head back on the sofa and put my feet up on the footstool.

‘I’m not going without you,’ she said adamantly. ‘I’m not letting you sulk here like a spoilt schoolboy. So move your blooming arse and get yourself changed.’

I was still wearing the baggy tracksuit I’d been lent by the hospital to come home in.

‘OK, you win.’ I dragged myself upright. ‘Do you know what happened to the shirt I had with me on the boat? And also my phone is missing.’

‘Sorry, I’ve no idea,’ Henri said. ‘I was too busy worrying about you. But I’m sure they’re safe somewhere. Carson Ebanks probably has them.’

I hoped so. Even though I occasionally backed up everything from my phone to my laptop, I hadn’t done it for a while and I’d hate to lose the photos taken on this trip.

Henri and I ordered a taxi and, with the help of a couple of calls from my mobile, we eventually found our way to Derrick and Gay Smith’s house for drinks at six o’clock on Boxing Day evening.

They lived on the wonderfully named Conch Point Road in a large house set well back from the road, out of sight behind a stone wall, and with no name shown on the unpretentious gateway. Hence we had driven past it twice without realizing.

‘Welcome,’ Gay said, meeting us at the front door. ‘Well done for finding us. We like to keep a low profile. Come on in.’

We were ushered out to a covered veranda with its magnificent view north-eastward towards the sea.

We were not their sole guests.

Peter Darwin, the governor, and his wife, Annabel, were there ahead of us.

‘You should have much in common with Peter,’ Gay said to me. ‘He loves his racing.’

‘Just my luck to be posted to a country without a racecourse,’ Peter said with a laugh. ‘When I was told I was being sent to the West Indies, I secretly hoped it would be Barbados. I’ve always fancied going racing on Garrison Savannah.’

‘Wasn’t that a horse?’ I asked, dragging up a distant memory.

‘Yes, indeed,’ he said. ‘It won the Cheltenham Gold Cup back in the nineties. But it was named after the racecourse on Barbados.’

‘I’m so sorry Cayman is such a disappointment to you,’ Derrick said, handing around glasses of champagne.

‘I’ve got over it,’ Peter said with another laugh. ‘I keep in touch with things on the internet, as much as I can, and we go racing whenever we’re back home on leave. Don’t we, darling?’

‘As much as possible,’ Annabel agreed. ‘We always try and get to the Cheltenham Festival in March. Peter effectively grew up on Cheltenham racecourse.’

‘There are worse places,’ he said, laughing.

‘And we adore going racing at Stratford,’ Annabel said, looking lovingly at her husband. ‘That’s where Peter and I met.’

‘How romantic,’ Henri said. ‘Jeff and I met at Sandown races.’

‘In my box,’ Derrick said, all smiles.

Annabel beamed at us, her big blue eyes positively sparkling with delight.

‘Peter’s father was a jump jockey, and I once worked for the British Jockey Club.’

‘Jeff, don’t you work for the Jockey Club?’ Gay asked.

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘But I do work for the racing authorities.’

Derrick again recounted the story of how I had saved his horse from being stolen at Ascot. I’d given up trying to tell him it was meant to be confidential. But if you couldn’t tell someone in the diplomatic service a secret, whom could you tell? Diplomats were meant to be good at keeping secrets. But they were also meant to be fairly proficient at lying for their country as well.

‘When was your father a jockey?’ I asked Peter.

‘Back in the sixties,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t famous or anything. He only ever rode four winners. He’d just started out on his career when he was killed in a road accident.’

‘How awful,’ I said.

‘I was only an infant at the time. I don’t remember him at all.’

‘I’ll look him up in the records. What was his first name?’

‘Paul,’ Peter said, pleased that I had taken some interest. ‘He was actually Paul Perry. I only became a Darwin when I was twelve and my mother remarried.’

‘Any relation to...?’ I asked.

‘None,’ he replied quickly, with one of those wan smiles that told me that he’d been asked that too many times before, and he was bored with it.

We watched as the last of the daylight faded away and then marvelled as the full moon seemed to emerge straight out of the water, its orange disc appearing unnaturally large and almost frighteningly close.

‘Magnificent,’ Peter said. ‘Quite enough to drive a man mad.’

‘Lunatic,’ I said.

‘Exactly so.’

I went back to bed but I still couldn’t sleep.

I lay on my back in the dark, thinking and asking myself many questions, but I came up with very few definitive answers.

Apart from the one in Dave Swinton’s sauna, were the other attempts on my life nothing to do with the blackmailing of jockeys to fix races?

Were they all to do with the fact that I knew Martin Reynard had been at Newbury races on Hennessy Gold Cup day, and I’d taken a photograph to prove it?

It seemed rather extreme, as others would surely have also seen him there on that day.

Was it Martin Reynard, not Leslie Morris, who’d sent a couple of London’s criminal fraternity to kill me with a carving knife?

Indeed, when those attempts had failed, had he resolved to murder me here in Cayman with the contaminated dive tank?

And perhaps the most important question of all — if I was right, how did I stop him from trying again?

If it had been Martin who had taken the opportunity to delete the photo from my iPhone during the confusion on the boat, was that enough? Was that an end to it? Or did he still feel the need to bump me off?

Could I take that chance?

So far, I’d been very lucky to survive; the doctors kept telling me so.

Could I trust that my luck would hold? I had to be lucky every time whereas my would-be murderer had to be lucky only once.

I could report my suspicions to the revenue, but it wouldn’t result in an arrest — not yet, anyway. There would be weeks, months or even years of investigation.

Maybe not even that.

I suspected that no crime had yet taken place, as we must still be in the tax year in question. Any tax return for the current year would not be due to be filed until well into the year after next, more than twelve months away. A crime would be committed only at that point if a tax return was not submitted, and the due tax not paid.

A year’s income tax didn’t seem worth murdering me over, not on the off chance that I might have spotted what was going on, especially as the attempts had done nothing more than make me increasingly determined to discover why.

But Derrick Smith had been constantly telling people that I was some sort of secret-agent super sleuth who could spot and prevent wrongdoing from afar with almost mystical powers.

Had Martin believed it and simply decided to act sooner rather than later?

But murder?

All he had to do was accept his responsibilities and pay his tax, like everybody else. End of story.

Other than the minor fact that he may have tried three times to cause my untimely death, I didn’t have any particular axe to grind against Martin — after all, I was an investigator for the BHA not the tax authorities. But would it make it safer for me if I told him that I believed he had become UK tax resident for the current year, and that I had informed many others including the revenue? He could hardly murder everyone, so would he then have anything to gain by killing me?

No.

Except, perhaps, for revenge.

Henri went on working on her tan for the rest of the morning while I sat in the shade complaining that it was far too hot in the midday sun even for mad dogs and Englishmen.

‘Would you like a cold drink?’ I asked, standing up.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Water or wine?’

‘Both,’ she said. ‘Together. I’ll have a spritzer. With some ice, please.’

‘Sounds lovely. I’ll have the same.’

I walked the few yards into the apartment and went into the kitchen to fix the two spritzers, but I didn’t go straight back outside. Instead, I went into the master bedroom and took out the packet of Henri’s board papers from the bedside drawer where she’d put them.

Atherton, Bradley and Partners, Attorneys at Law was printed across the top of an accompanying letter that gave the details of the Christmas Eve meeting to be held at their offices. I found a notepad and copied down the address and telephone number. I tore off the sheet and put it in my pocket.

I skimmed through the stack of papers, looking for any financial accounts that might indicate the identity of the company’s accountants, but there was nothing. In fact, the board papers appeared to be very sparse for the main annual meeting of the directors of such a big organization. Henri had clearly been right when she said that most of the discussion and decisions were taken at the management board level and the main board was only there to rubber-stamp their findings.

I glanced briefly at the documents pertaining to the sale of the Hong Kong end of the business. The amount of money being paid for it made me whistle. I reckoned the Reynard family would soon be moving further up the Sunday Times Rich List, some considerable way further up.

I put the papers back how I’d found them in the drawer and took the drinks out to Henri, who hadn’t moved an inch.

‘Lovely,’ she said, taking one of them. ‘Thank you.’

We clinked our glasses. How perfect was this?

I decided not to tell Henri that I intended to go home the following evening. I would make up some work-related excuse in the morning and then try to slip away before Martin even realized I had gone. I certainly wasn’t going to spoil our last wonderful day together in this paradise.

‘Do they still have the death penalty for murder in the West Indies?’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s enough time for your whole life to flash before your eyes between the trap opening and the rope breaking your neck.’

I was trying to unnerve my captors but it didn’t seem to be working. They seemed happy to let me babble on without reply.

‘Dead bodies are hard to dispose of, you know. Even here. Especially ones with bullet holes in them. The police will be knocking on your door before you know it.’

Still no response.

I tried another tactic.

‘My brother-in-law is aware of everything I know, so killing me will not stop it being passed to the relevant tax authorities.’

I now wished that I’d sent a few more e-mails, including one to the taxman.

‘Why don’t you just stop the car and let me out?’ I said. ‘Make Martin pay his tax and that will be an end to it. I’ll make no further complaint against any of you.’

Sir Richard went on driving, and the creepy Bentley said nothing. He just continued to smile at me, and the gun in his hand wavered not an iota.

We turned off the main road down little more than a track, with no visible lights from any nearby houses. What had Henri said? Most of the eastern half of the island is just deserted mangrove swamp.

It didn’t look particularly promising for my long-term prospects.

Was my good luck finally running out?

But at least now I would die knowing the reason I was being killed.

Did that make me any happier?

Probably not, but maybe it was better than being randomly knifed to death in my flat without having the slightest idea why.

The track seemed to go on for ever until we eventually stopped at the very end, where it ran out into a small beach surrounded by the mangroves. Through the windscreen, in the glow of the headlights, I could see a boat with an outboard engine, its bow pulled up on the white sand. This was no spur-of-the-moment plan, not if that boat had been pre-positioned.

The two men got out of the car, leaving the headlights on. Bentley then opened the rear door next to me. He was still aiming the gun at my chest.

‘Get out,’ he ordered.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘I said, get out.’

‘And I said, no.’

‘I’ll shoot you,’ he said, lifting the gun to his eyeline and aiming it at my face.

‘If I get out, you’ll definitely shoot me,’ I said. ‘In here, maybe not. Your car, is it? Or hired? Either way it would take too much explaining if my blood and brains were splattered all over the inside.’

‘Get out!’ He was almost screaming.

‘No,’ I repeated.

He clearly hadn’t envisaged such an impasse. He looked to Sir Richard for assistance.

‘Shoot him in the foot,’ Sir Richard said without any visible emotion.

‘He’ll still bleed,’ said Bentley.

Sir Richard walked around the car to our side and took the pistol from Bentley.

‘Get out of the car,’ he said, pointing the gun at my right leg. ‘I’ll shoot you in the foot first, then in your knee. Get out of the car now. You have three seconds.’

It was his matter-of-fact tone that was most appalling. This was clearly a man very accustomed to getting his own way, and I could detect the ruthlessness in him that would have been needed to transform the small ship-loading company of his grandfather into the multi-national corporation it was today.

I could also recall the words of the Special Forces sergeant, who had run the ‘escape and evasion’ part of the army captains’ course: Resist your captors if you can, but try to avoid leg injuries. If you can’t walk or run, then you’ll not be able to take advantage of an escape opportunity, if it arises. Lack of mobility is a sure death sentence.

‘OK,’ I said.

I got out of the car.

Sir Richard Reynard smiled broadly. Just like Dave Swinton, he always liked to win.

‘Over to the boat,’ he said, waving the gun to the left.

I walked in front of him while Bentley kept well to the side, out of reach and out of the line of fire.

There was a diver’s buoyancy compensator in the bow attached to a common-or-garden, plain grey aluminium dive tank, connected to a regulator set.

‘Not more carbon monoxide,’ I said.

‘That was Bentley’s idea,’ Sir Richard said, smiling. ‘And it almost worked.’

And it would have, I thought, if it hadn’t been for Henri pulling me up to the surface and Carson Ebanks’s timely intervention with his oxygen.

‘Put it on,’ Sir Richard said.

‘I’ll wash up somewhere on a beach. How are you going to explain away a diver with bullet wounds? Fish don’t have guns.’

‘You’ll not wash up from where you’re going,’ Bentley said with a smile. ‘Over the wall and down into the depths. They say the sea is three miles deep just a mile off-shore in these parts.’

Perhaps for the first time I was truly frightened.

I had hoped and half expected that they wouldn’t go through with it — that they would come to their senses and work out that the risks outweighed the benefits. But proving murder without a body was always difficult, if not impossible.

In 1660, three people were convicted and hanged for the murder of a local official who subsequently turned up alive and well, having been away abroad. Since that time, English common law adopted the ‘no body, no murder’ rule, maintaining that there could be no conviction for murder without the victim’s body. The rule has been overturned in only a handful of cases in recent years when other circumstantial and modern forensic evidence has been overwhelming.

I would have to try to leave some of my DNA, in the hope it would be found.

‘Put it on,’ Sir Richard repeated.

I leaned over and spat into the bottom of the boat, first scraping the inside of my cheek with my teeth to ensure that there were plenty of my cells present. Then I picked up the scuba equipment. It was heavy.

My abdomen complained, but that was the least of my worries. I knew that from the moment I was in the boat with the equipment on, my time was up. It was not easy to dress a body, even in scuba gear. And lifting my literal ‘dead weight’ into the boat would be far from easy, especially for a man of sixty-nine and his diminutive sidekick. But once I was in there, it would be a fairly simple task for even just one of them to roll my lifeless form over the side into the water.

I checked the console at the end of its hose. The pressure gauge read zero. The tank was empty. What’s more, I could see that the valve assembly was loose. As soon as this tank was submerged it would fill with water and provide the necessary ballast to take me all the way to the bottom.

I placed the tank on the edge of the boat and put my arms into the sleeves of the BC jacket.

‘I thought Martin would be here to help you,’ I said.

‘Martin is a fool,’ Sir Richard pronounced. ‘It was he who got us into this mess. Now Bentley and I have to pick up the pieces.’

‘Why not pay the tax?’ I said. ‘It can’t be that much.’

‘Shut up,’ Bentley said.

I ignored him.

‘Even the corporation tax can’t be worth murdering for,’ I said.

Although I couldn’t be sure of that.

Martin had stayed too long in the UK, which meant that, of the five main-board directors of Reynard Shipping Limited, the majority were now UK tax residents. Consequently, it would be considered by the revenue to be a UK-based company, subject to British tax on all its worldwide profits, including the eye-watering capital gain realized from the sale of the Hong Kong operation.

The tax would run into many hundreds of millions of pounds. Maybe as much as half a billion.

Was that worth murdering for?

‘I need that money for my new yacht,’ Sir Richard said.

So, I was to be sacrificed on the altar of Sir Richard Reynard’s new yacht, no doubt a huge multi-suite gin-palace with every luxury, including gold taps and a helicopter landing pad on the deck.

Even if Quentin did follow things through and report my suspicions to the tax authorities, it wouldn’t save me now from a watery grave.

It made me angry. Bloody angry.

‘Hurry up!’ Sir Richard shouted. ‘Get into the boat.’

‘What does Martin think of this little caper?’ I asked.

‘Martin will do as he’s told.’

Something about the way he said it made me realize that Martin had no idea whatsoever that this was going on.

I had been wrong.

All the time I’d thought that it was Martin who was behind the attempts on my life, but it had been his father, aided and abetted by his creepy lawyer.

No wonder Martin had been affronted when I’d accused him of deliberately filling the guest dive tank with carbon monoxide. Bentley must have done it while we were at the governor’s residence watching the carol singing.

I did up the fastening on the front of the buoyancy compensator and stood up, the weight of the tank causing me to gasp slightly at the stress on my chest.

‘Get in the boat,’ Sir Richard said again.

My time was running out fast.

I started to turn towards the boat but then turned back to face him, taking the console hose in my right hand.

‘Are you aware that your friend Bentley, here, is screwing your daughter-in-law?’

He took his eyes off me for just one second to look at Bentley.

It was enough.

I swung the console with all my might at the hand holding the gun and caught him across the wrist, just behind the base of the thumb. The impact was hard enough to break the glass face of the depth-display dial.

He screamed and dropped the gun and I fell on it like a starving dog onto a juicy steak.

Sir Richard reacted more quickly than I would have expected for a man of his age, stepping forward and taking a wild kick at my head.

The weight of the dive tank was hampering my movement, holding me down, and I desperately tore, one-handed, at the fastening on the BC. My other hand was on the gun but that was stuck beneath me.

Bentley weighed in with some footwork of his own, trying to stamp on my neck. Fortunately, all he managed to do was kick the tank valve and hurt his foot.

Finally, I was free of the scuba gear and I rolled it off my back. But the two men had teamed up. Sir Richard was trying to use my head as a rugby ball, running up and kicking at it as if to hack it off my shoulders and send it over the posts for a conversion, while Bentley had taken to stamping on my now-unprotected lower back.

‘Enough,’ I shouted, but they took no notice.

It had been only three weeks or so since my chest had been open and my heart manually massaged. I was still in no fit shape to fight, especially when the odds were not in my favour by two-to-one, even if one of them was more than twice my age.

I curled myself into a ball to protect my delicate chest and abdomen.

I still had my hand on the gun beneath me but I was loath to use it. I didn’t want to shoot anyone. Indeed, in spite of my years in the army, I had never fired a gun in anger and I wasn’t keen to start. I’d been an intelligence officer and, right now, I was trying to use my intelligence to stop this madness without any loss of life.

But Sir Richard and Bentley were clearly not reading the same script. They seemed intent on murder, as they continued to rain down brutal kicks on my body.

Then things got more serious.

Bentley went over to the boat and returned holding the anchor, a sort of grappling-iron contraption with a central rod connected to four arms set at right-angles to each other, with sharp-looking points on their ends. There was a rope attached to the central rod, and Bentley was using it to swing the anchor in a big circle over his head before aiming it right at me.

I rolled over as the anchor bit into the sand where I’d been lying just a fraction of a second earlier.

I tried to grab it but Bentley tugged it away with the rope before I could reach.

He swung the anchor over his head again for another go. I was now lying on my back and far more vulnerable to the attack.

I lifted the gun in my right hand and shot him.

I didn’t try anything fancy, I just aimed at the widest part of his trunk and pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit him just below the heart, a red star appearing vividly in the centre of his white shirt.

The anchor seemed to stop in mid swing, falling harmlessly to the sand in front of him, while Bentley himself had a look of immense surprise on his face.

He pitched forward, falling right across the sharp arms of the anchor, his body adopting a grotesquely twisted pose with the crown of his head pointing down onto the sand.

Sir Richard stopped kicking me.

He stood, unmoving, staring at Bentley, the look on his face seeming to suggest that he had, only now, grasped the true enormity of what they’d been doing. It was also a look of intense grief and I recalled what Henri had said about her uncle Richard wishing that Bentley had been his son, rather than Martin.

He went over to his trusted lawyer and pulled him off the anchor, laying him flat on the sand and going down on his knees beside him.

Bentley’s eyes were still wide open but he was no longer seeing.

‘You’ve murdered him,’ Sir Richard said, looking across at me. His tone of accusation somehow implying that Bentley trying to kill me had been all right, but the other way round was hugely wicked.

I continued to stare at him, holding the gun ready, wary that he might try to complete with the anchor what Bentley had started. But the fight seemed to have drained out of him, and he suddenly looked every one of his sixty-nine years.

He stood up and stumbled wide-eyed back to the car. I made no attempt to go after him. There was nowhere for him to run to, not on this island.

He started the engine, turned the car around and drove away down the track, leaving me in the sudden darkness.

I rolled over onto my knees and rested my head in my hands.

In spite of the warmth, I started shivering.

It was the shock of having killed someone, I told myself, and the relief of still being alive when I’d been so sure I would die.

After a couple of minutes the shivering abated and I reckoned it was time to move. I didn’t fancy still being here if Sir Richard came back with reinforcements.

As my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I could see Bentley lying on his back, motionless on the sand.

The situation didn’t seem real.

I stood up and went over to him.

To be sure, I felt for a pulse in his wrist, and also in his neck, but there was nothing. I’d come across dead bodies before but never one where I’d been so personally responsible for snuffing out the life that had once inhabited the corpse.

I felt into his trouser pocket for my iPhone.

Whom should I call?

The police for sure, but who else?

I might need someone who was an ally.

I dialled Derrick Smith’s number.

I didn’t catch the flight for which I’d made a reservation. In fact, I didn’t leave Cayman until four days later, boarding a commercial red-eye to London at seven o’clock on New Year’s Eve.

I slept through the actual moment of change from December to January, somewhere over the mid-Atlantic at thirty-six thousand feet.

As a journey, it couldn’t have been more different from that which had brought me to the islands. This was no private jet, more like a knees-to-the-chest charter. And Henrietta Shawcross was becoming a distant memory.

I had spent nearly twenty hours in custody at the Royal Cayman Islands Police headquarters in George Town, answering questions and trying to explain how I had come to be on a deserted beach in the middle of the mangroves, with a gun in my hand and a dead body on the sand.

At first, it had been fairly obvious that the police didn’t believe a single word I was telling them.

Even to my ears, the story seemed too far-fetched to be true. Things like that just didn’t happen in the idyllic Cayman Islands.

‘Consider yourself a bit of a James Bond, do you?’ one of the local detectives had said as his opening gambit. ‘Reckon you’ve got a licence to kill, do you?’

‘No,’ I’d replied. ‘I do not.’

‘That’s not what I’ve heard from Mr Smith.’

I wondered if calling Derrick had been a mistake. He must have told them the tale of the foiled kidnapping of Secret Ways at Ascot. They were clearly getting me mixed up with the name of the horse.

I’d been arrested on suspicion of the murder of Bentley Robertson and had spent a night tossing and turning on a hard mattress in a stifling-hot prison cell.

It was not knowing what was happening outside that was the most frustrating thing.

After an initial interview on that first evening, when I had gone through the whole story from start to finish, I’d been left alone in the cell without any further communication, not only for the rest of the night but throughout the whole of the next morning.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked the police constable who brought me some lunch at noon.

He didn’t reply.

I was most concerned about what Sir Richard Reynard might be telling them. What fabrication he had thought up to land me in deeper trouble.

At about three in the afternoon, the same detective as before came to the cell, opening the metal door wide.

‘You’re free to go, Mr Hinkley,’ he said. ‘There will be no charges.’

I was relieved.

‘Have you arrested Sir Richard Reynard?’ I asked him.

‘Richard Reynard is dead,’ he said. ‘He was found this morning in his son’s dive store. It appears that he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A petrol-driven air compressor was discovered still running in the store with insufficient ventilation for the exhaust fumes.’

‘Oh,’ I said. That had been Bentley’s idea.

‘We are treating his death as suicide,’ said the detective. ‘He left a note.’

No doubt, this time, then.

‘What was in the note?’ I asked.

He paused for a moment as if deciding whether or not he should tell me.

‘It was just four words long: I am so sorry.’

Unexpectedly, my overriding emotion was one of sorrow.

Up until last night, I had quite liked Uncle Richard. There had been a kind of magnetism about him, drawing people in under his wing, charmed by the strength of his personality.

But it had all been a façade.

His character had been deeply flawed by recklessness and greed.

And it had been his greed that had ultimately resulted in him taking his own life — that and the folly of imagining that he could somehow cover up Martin’s costly error by killing anyone who knew about it.

Part of me was surprised that he had chosen to take such a way out. I had half expected him to be more of a fighter and to brave it out, perhaps blaming everything on his dead lawyer. But Bentley had been like a son to him and maybe he didn’t want to further tarnish his memory.

‘You will have to remain on the island until the inquests for both Mr Reynard and Mr Robertson are opened,’ said the detective.

I wondered if he had intentionally dropped the ‘Sir Richard’, reducing him to a mere ‘Mr’.

‘When will that be?’ I asked.

‘In a few days’ time. At the very least, you will have to give evidence as to how Mr Robertson died.’

‘OK,’ I said, but I wondered where I would stay. The apartment at the Coral Stone Club was obviously out of the question, and all the hotels were full to overflowing at this peak time of the Christmas and New Year tourist season.

‘Mr Smith has indicated that you can stay with him,’ the detective said as if reading my mind.