‘They’re off!’

I looked down at the image of the horses on my TV monitor and shielded my eyes from the bright September sunshine. An unremarkable seven-and-a-half-furlong sprint for maiden two-year-olds at Lingfield Park with twelve runners — just another horserace, one of more than fifteen hundred such races I would watch live this year.

But this particular race was to change my life for ever.

I was at Haxted Mill on time at eight and I chose a quiet corner table inside the restaurant, although they were still serving dinner on the terrace alongside the River Eden. The day may have been unseasonably warm for September but the temperature was dropping fast with the setting sun.

Clare arrived at ten past in faded blue denim jeans and a pink polo shirt.

‘Sorry I’m late, Marky,’ she said, sitting down opposite me.

‘No problem. What would you like to drink?’

‘Fizzy water.’

‘You can have a bed for the night if you want to drink.’

‘No, thanks,’ she replied. ‘I have to get back. I’m riding work in the morning, then racing.’

‘Newmarket?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘I’ve got three rides including one in the Cesarewitch Trial.’

‘I’ll be at Newbury so I’ll watch you on the television.’

A waitress arrived with the menus and I ordered a large bottle of sparkling mineral water.

‘Don’t let me stop you having something stronger,’ Clare said.

‘You won’t. I’ll have some wine with my dinner.’

We perused the menus in silence for a while.

‘How are Mum and Dad?’ I asked.

‘Oh, God awful, as always. They’re getting so old.’

The waitress returned with the water and poured two glasses.

‘Are you ready to order?’ she asked.

‘Just the haddock for me,’ Clare said. ‘And without the mash.’

‘No starter?’ I asked.

‘No, thanks. I’ve got to do seven stone thirteen tomorrow.’

‘Wow!’ I said. ‘That is light.’

‘Too bloody light.’

‘I’ll have the steak,’ I said to the patient waitress. ‘Medium rare, but no chips.’ I could hardly eat chips with Clare watching enviously. ‘And a glass of the red Bordeaux please.’

The waitress took our menus and left us.

‘I found it really depressing, going home,’ Clare said.

‘Why?’

‘Dad’s lost all his sparkle, and Mum’s not much better. I swear Dad gets more grumpy every day.’

‘But, as you said, they’re getting old. Dad will be seventy-eight next month and Mum’s only a couple of years behind him.’

Both our parents had been in their mid forties when we had unexpectedly come along. We had three much older siblings.

‘Getting old’s a real bugger,’ Clare said. ‘I’ve decided I’m never getting old.’

‘It’s better than the alternative.’

‘Is it?’ Clare replied. ‘I can’t imagine a time when I couldn’t ride any more. I wouldn’t want to go on living.’

‘Lester Piggott was nearly sixty when he stopped riding.’

‘Yeah, I know,’ she said. ‘And Scobie Breasley was fifty-two when he won the Derby for the second time. I looked it up.’

My, I thought, she really was worried about retirement, and she was only thirty-one. In my experience when jockeys started thinking about retiring they usually did so pretty quickly. Lots of them say they will retire in five years and then they stop in about five months, some in five weeks, or even less.

The waitress brought me my glass of wine and offered us bread, which we both declined.

‘And the house is looking old too,’ Clare said.

‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it?’ I said. According to the datestone on one of the gables, it had been built in 1607.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘It needs some TLC.’

‘A lick of paint on the windows,’ I agreed, nodding. ‘But Dad’s a bit too old to do that himself. He may be quite fit but I don’t think ladders are a good idea any more, not at his age.’

‘I think they should move,’ she said decisively. ‘Into somewhere smaller, or into an old folks’ home. I told them so.’

‘I bet that didn’t go down too well.’

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Dad was angry — as usual. But they have to be practical. That house is too big. I think they should go into a home now, while they still can.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘They don’t need to yet. And where would they put all their stuff?’

‘What worries me is what the other one will do when one of them dies. That place is far too big for both of them, let alone one. They’ll have to move then.’

‘I hope that’ll be years away. Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

‘That’s typical of you,’ Clare said, pointing her slender left forefinger at my chest. ‘Always burying your head in the sand and doing nothing.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I said.

‘Yes it is,’ she said defiantly. ‘You always put things off. That’s why you still live in that dreadful rented flat in Edenbridge.’

‘You liked it once,’ I whined.

‘I did when I was nineteen, but life moves on. You should have bought yourself a house years ago. You must be earning enough by now.’

She was right. She usually was.

Our meals arrived and we sat for a while in silence, eating.

‘How’s your love life?’ Clare asked finally.

‘None of your business,’ I replied, laughing. ‘How’s yours?’

‘Absolutely wonderful. I have a new man. Three months now. What a lover!’ She grinned and then laughed. He clearly made her happy.

‘Who is it?’ I asked, leaning forward.

‘Now that’s none of your business,’ she said.

‘Come on, Clare. Who is it?’

‘I’m not saying,’ she said seriously, drawing a finger across her mouth as if zipping it shut. She opened it, however, to pop in a piece of her haddock. ‘Are you still seeing Sarah?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

She looked down at her plate and shook her head.

‘And what’s that meant to mean?’ I asked.

‘Mark, it’s high time you had a proper girlfriend.’

‘I do.’

‘Sarah is not a proper girlfriend. She’s someone else’s wife.’

‘She’s working on it,’ I said defensively.

‘She’s been working on it for five years. When are you going to realize she won’t ever leave Mitchell? She can’t afford to.’

‘Give her time.’

‘God, Mark, you’re so weak. For once, do something about it. Tell her it’s now or never and you’re fed up waiting. You’re wasting your life.’

‘You can talk,’ I said. ‘Your love life has hardly been Mills and Boon.’ Clare had dated a string of what my father had rather generously called ‘unsuitable young men’, and not all of them had been that young either. ‘Which misfit is it you’re seeing now, anyway?’

‘I told you, that’s none of your bloody business,’ she replied curtly and without the humour that had been there earlier. ‘But at least I’m not living a lie.’

‘Aren’t you?’ I said.

‘And what is that meant to mean?’ she asked belligerently.

‘Oh, nothing.’

We ate again in silence.

Why did we always seem to fight these days? When we were kids, we had been so close that we didn’t even need to speak to know what the other was thinking. But recently our twin-intuition had waned and faded away, at least in my direction. I wondered if she could still read my mind. If so, she probably wouldn’t like it.

The waitress reappeared to collect our plates.

‘Dessert?’ she asked.

‘Just coffee,’ Clare said. ‘Black.’

‘Same for me, please.’

The waitress went away and we sat there once more in awkward silence.

‘Good win on Scusami,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ Clare replied, keeping her eyes on the table.

‘Do you think he’ll win the Guineas?’

‘I doubt it. That Peter Williams colt, Reading Glass, he’ll take a lot of beating. But Scusi’s good, and it would be nice to be the first lady jockey to win a Classic.’ She looked upwards wistfully. ‘One year, anyway.’

‘But you’ll ride him?’

‘Maybe,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘That’ll be up to Geoff.’ Scusami was trained by Geoffrey Grubb in Newmarket.

The coffee arrived.

‘Shame about Bangkok Flyer,’ I said.

Clare sat in silence and looked down at her cup.

‘Don’t you think?’ I prompted.

‘I’d forgotten you were commentating.’

‘You don’t deny it, then?’ I asked.

More silence.

‘Why, Clare?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘How can it be complicated?’ I asked incredulously. ‘You fixed the bloody race.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, looking up quickly. ‘I didn’t fix it, I just didn’t win it.’

‘Don’t split hairs with me,’ I said sharply.

‘Ooh! Look at you, getting on your high horse.’

‘Be serious.’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because it’s a serious matter,’ I said. ‘You could lose your licence, and your livelihood.’

‘Only if I get caught.’

‘I caught you.’

‘Yeah, but what are you going to do about it?’

I sat and watched her. I could tell that she already knew the answer.

‘Nothing. But someone else will be bound to notice if you do it again.’

‘No one has done so far.’

I looked at her in disbelief.

‘Are you saying this wasn’t the first time you’ve done this?’

She smiled at me. ‘Of course not.’

‘Clare!’

The couple on a table nearby both looked over at us. I lowered my voice but not my anger.

‘Are you telling me that you regularly don’t win races you should?’

‘I wouldn’t say regularly,’ she said. ‘But I have done.’

‘How often?’

She pursed her lips.

‘Three or four times, maybe five.’

‘But why?’

‘I told you. It’s complicated.’

I didn’t know what to say. She was so matter-of-fact about it all. If the British Horseracing Authority knew she had ‘stopped’ horses three, four or five times they would probably have taken away her licence for good and banned her from all racecourses for life.

And she didn’t seem bothered.

‘Well, don’t ever do it again,’ I said in my most domineering tone.

‘And what will you do about it if I do?’ She was mocking me.

‘Clare, please. Don’t do this. Don’t you understand. I love you and I don’t want to see you destroy all that you’ve built up.’

I glanced around to make sure no one was listening.

‘Don’t be so patronizing,’ Clare said.

I sat there stunned.

‘I’ve had to claw my way up in this business,’ she said with feeling, leaning forward across the table. ‘No one gives you an inch. Lady jockey — ha! Don’t make me laugh. Half of those in racing think we’re no bloody good and should leave it all to the men, while the other half are a bunch of dirty old men who fantasize about us wearing tight breeches with whips in our hands. I’ve had to bow and scrape to them all, and to sweat blood to get where I am today, and now, at last, it’s me who’s in control of them.’

‘Is that it, then?’ I asked. ‘Is this all about control?’

‘You bet. Control over the bloody trainers, and the owners.’

Control, I thought, could be a powerful force. What was that old adage? — Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Absolute power and unbridled control over others had led to the Nazis, and a world war had been needed to wrest the control from their dead fingers. Control over others was a dangerous concept.

‘I thought I knew you,’ I said slowly. ‘But I don’t.’

‘I’ve changed,’ she said, ‘and I’ve been hardened. I’ve had to climb the slippery pole while others kicked me in the teeth. Success didn’t just fall into my lap by chance.’

We both knew what she meant.

I had been in the right place at the right time.

It was now eight years since that day at Fontwell Park races when the paddock presenter for RacingTV had been taken seriously ill with a heart attack just before he was due to go on air. The back-up presenter, the much respected wife of an up-and-coming young trainer, turned out to be the main presenter’s mistress and she had insisted on going with him to hospital in the ambulance.

I was only there as a guest to watch because I’d carelessly put my hand up at a charity auction to spend a day with the RacingTV team. But I found myself putting up my hand again and volunteering to stand in.

‘Do you know the horses?’ the agitated producer had demanded while pulling out clumps of his already-thinning hair.

‘Yes,’ I’d replied.

And I had. As my sister had so correctly pointed out, I tended to drift rather a lot and I hadn’t actually acquired a proper job since returning from my brief sojourn in Lambourn two years before. Rather, I’d decided to earn my living as a professional gambler and had consequently spent most of my time studying the form. I knew the horses very well.

‘Only for the first race, then,’ the producer had said. ‘I’ve sent for a replacement but he won’t be here until two o’clock.’

I had talked easily to the camera about each horse in the first race and had even tipped the winner. When the replacement had arrived, he’d just sat and watched me all afternoon as I’d tipped the winner in three other races as well.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ the producer had asked as they were packing up.

‘Nothing,’ I’d replied honestly.

‘We’re at Wincanton. Fancy a job?’

Since that day I had never looked back, spreading into commentating again by accident when the race caller at Windsor had been held up by a big crash on the motorway and I had been asked to stand in.

Nowadays I split my time three ways — commentating at the racecourses, paddock presenting for RacingTV, and also hosting the TV coverage on Channel 4, the terrestrial broadcaster of horseracing in Britain.

But Clare firmly believed that I still didn’t have a ‘proper’ job, and that I would soon drift off into something else.

Maybe she was right.

‘I much preferred the old you,’ I said to her.

‘Oh, God!’ she said. ‘Don’t start all that again. I live in a competitive world. I have a competitive job. I have to compete. Otherwise I’d be trampled on.’

‘Do you have to compete on everything?’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

‘I just feel that, whenever we have a conversation these days, it’s a points scoring exercise.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

I wasn’t going to argue with her. There was no sense in it. For whatever I might say, she would have a riposte. Losing was not an option for her, except clearly, of course, when she lost on purpose.

I paid the bill and we went out together to the car park.

‘Is there anything I can say that would stop you doing it again?’

She turned to me. ‘Probably not.’

‘I might report you to the authorities.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Don’t bank on it,’ I said.

‘Mark, don’t be such a prat. You know perfectly well that you won’t tell anyone. For a start, it would reflect badly on you. So just keep your eyes and mouth shut.’

‘I can hardly do that in my job.’

‘Then you’ll have to turn a blind eye instead.’

‘Clare, seriously, if you do that once more when I’m commentating, I’ll never speak to you again.’

She opened the door of her silver Audi TT.

‘Your loss, not mine.’

She climbed into the sports car and slammed the door shut.

Again, I was stunned. Maybe it had been a careless thing to say, but I hadn’t expected such a brusque answer.

What had happened to my lovely twin sister?

She gunned the engine and spun the rear wheels on the gravel as she shot off without a wave, without even a glance.

‘Dead?’ I said, my voicebox seemingly detached from my body.

‘Yes, sir,’ said PC Davis. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Where?’ I asked in a croak.

I felt weak and swayed somewhat.

‘Shall we come in, sir?’ he said stepping forward and supporting me by the elbow.

There were two of them, the other was a female officer, and they guided me into my sitting room and down onto the sofa.

‘Liz, get some sweet tea,’ the policeman said to his colleague.

I watched as she went over to the kitchenette and opened cupboards, looking for mugs.

‘Top right,’ I said automatically.

Time seemed to stand still as the kettle boiled and a cup of hot tea was pressed into my hand.

‘Drink it, sir,’ said the constable. ‘It will do you good.’

I took a sip and winced. ‘I don’t take sugar.’

‘You do tonight, sir. Drink it.’

I drank some of the sweet liquid but it didn’t make me feel noticeably better.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Where is she?’ I asked again. ‘I must go to her.’

‘All in good time, sir. We need to ask you some questions first.’

I just looked at him.

‘Are you, in fact, Miss Shillingford’s next of kin?’ the female officer asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Her parents — our parents — they’re still alive. Does that make them the next of kin?’

‘No husband?’ she asked. ‘Or children?’

‘No.’

I drank some more of the tea.

‘How did you find me?’ I asked.

The two police officers looked at each other.

‘We had your address, sir,’ said the man.

‘How?’ I asked again.

‘It was amongst Miss Shillingford’s possessions,’ he said.

‘Where was she killed?’ I asked.

‘In central London. In Park Lane.’

I looked up at him. ‘How odd.’

‘Why odd, sir?’

‘She wouldn’t normally drive up Park Lane going from here to Newmarket.’

‘Was she here this evening?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, she was at Haxted Mill down the road. We had dinner there together.’

The policeman made a note in his notebook.

‘But she didn’t drink and drive, if that’s what you’re thinking. She only had fizzy water.’

‘What time did she leave?’ he asked.

‘About ten past nine,’ I said. I thought back to her spinning the wheels of her sports car as she left the car park. ‘I always said that bloody car would be the death of her.’

‘Oh no, sir,’ said the female officer. ‘It wasn’t a car crash that killed her.’

I stared at her.

‘What, then?’ I asked.

The police officers looked at each other once more.

‘It appears that Miss Shillingford may have fallen from the balcony of a hotel.’

I sat there with my mouth open.

‘Where?’ I said finally. ‘Which hotel?’

‘The Hilton Hotel on Park Lane.’

‘But, when?’

‘At half past eleven.’

Oh God! She had tried to call me twenty minutes before that.

‘How are you sure it was her?’ I asked in desperation. ‘It must be someone else.’

‘I am told, sir, that it is definitely Miss Clare Shillingford.’

‘But how can they know for sure?’

‘I don’t know that, sir. But I am told it’s one hundred per cent certain. Maybe there were witnesses.’

‘But it was an accident, right?’ I asked forlornly.

‘The incident is still under investigation. It will be up to the coroner to determine the cause of death.’

There was something in the way he said it that gave me no comfort.

‘Are you implying it wasn’t an accident?’

‘As I said, sir, that will be a matter for the coroner.’

‘But what was she doing at a hotel anyway?’ I asked. ‘She said she had to go straight home to Newmarket.’

‘I can’t say, sir,’ the policeman replied. ‘The investigating officer will no doubt look into that.’

I sat on my sofa not knowing what to think, or what to do. How could Clare be dead? It didn’t seem real. She had been so alive just a few hours ago. I found I couldn’t even cry. There were too many unanswered questions in my head.

‘Now, sir, do you have the address for Miss Shillingford’s parents? As next of kin, they need to be informed. There will also be a need for an official identification.’

Oh God, I thought. That would kill my mother.

‘How exactly did you have my address?’ I asked.

‘Apparently it was written on an envelope found in Miss Shillingford’s hotel room.’

‘What was in the envelope?’ I asked, perhaps not wanting to know the answer.

‘I can’t say, sir.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’ I asked.

‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘I was not at the scene and was simply informed about the presence of your address on the envelope. My colleague and I are not from the Metropolitan Police, we’re from Kent headquarters at Maidstone. Now, where do your parents live?’

‘Oxted,’ I said.

‘Surrey,’ the policeman said to his colleague with obvious displeasure. ‘We’ll have to contact Guildford.’

‘It’s only five miles away.’

‘Still outside our patch,’ said Constable Davis. ‘What address in Oxted?’

‘I’ll go and tell them,’ I said.

‘Fine, sir. But I will still need their address as they will have to be officially informed. There are procedures to follow.’

‘Yes, of course.’ I gave him the address and he wrote it in his notebook as well as relaying it through his personal radio. ‘Tell them to give me time to be there first.’

He spoke again into the radio but I couldn’t hear the reply.

‘The Surrey Police will be in no hurry, sir,’ he said. ‘They will probably visit your parents later in the morning.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I bet the Surrey Police would be delighted not to have to perform what must be a dreadful duty. I certainly didn’t relish the task. ‘I’ll go and see them right away. I’d also better call my two brothers and my other sister.’

‘I would recommend that, sir. The incident is already being reported on the BBC radio news and it will only be a matter of time before Miss Shillingford’s name is mentioned, her being something of a celebrity and all.’

‘You’ve heard of her, then?’ I was pleased.

‘Oh yes, sir. I follow the horses a bit. Like to have a flutter now and again. And I’ve watched you on the telly lots of times. I saw you last Saturday on Channel 4.’

Last Saturday suddenly seemed like a long time ago.

‘Will you be all right now, sir? We can stay a while longer if you’d like.’

‘No, thank you. I’ll be fine. I’ll get dressed and drive over to Oxted.’

‘Suicide?’ my father said loudly. ‘But that can’t be so.’

‘I’m afraid it appears to be,’ said the detective sergeant. He opened his briefcase and removed a clear plastic folder containing a single sheet of paper. ‘This was found in Miss Shillingford’s room at the hotel.’

He held out the folder and, as I was nearest, I took it, which was appropriate because the sheet of paper inside was a brief handwritten letter addressed to me on Hilton Hotel headed notepaper.

There was no signature but I recognized the handwriting, and only Clare had called me Marky. I couldn’t stop the tears running in streams down my cheeks. I passed it to Angela, who also sobbed.

‘What was it you were right about?’ the detective sergeant asked.

‘Just something about her riding at Lingfield yesterday,’ I replied, wiping my face with my fingers.

Suddenly it didn’t seem to be that important.

‘Was there anything she said at dinner that might have indicated she was troubled?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Quite the reverse. She was looking forward to riding today at Newmarket. And she was hopeful of being the first lady jockey to win a Classic next May. I can’t believe she would kill herself.’

‘She wouldn’t,’ my father said decisively from over by the window. ‘Clare was here only yesterday and she was talking about coming back to see us in two weeks. Why would she do that if she was contemplating suicide? It’s all nonsense.’

‘And,’ I said. ‘She hardly ate anything at dinner last night because she was due to be riding at seven stone thirteen today. Why would she bother?’

The phone vibrated in my pocket. In my business, ringing phones on-air were severely frowned upon and I had been caught out too often in the past. Nowadays I permanently left mine on vibrate-only.

It was Sarah, the lady Clare had called my non-proper girlfriend.

‘Excuse me a moment,’ I said, walking out into the hallway.

I answered the phone. ‘Hello.’

‘Mark, my darling, I’ve been watching the Morning Line. I can’t believe it. Oh, my love, I’m so sorry.’ She was crying.

‘Thank you for calling,’ I said inadequately. ‘I’m at my parents’ house and it’s a bit bloody here at the moment.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ll be at Newbury, then?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘OK. I’ll call you later,’ Sarah said.

‘Right. Bye now.’

She disconnected and I stood for a moment in the hallway thinking. What was it that Clare had said? When are you going to realize she won’t ever leave Mitchell? She can’t afford to.

Mitchell was her husband — Mitchell Stacey — her much older husband. He was one of the country’s leading steeplechase trainers with over eighty top horses in his yard in the village of East Ilsley, close to the A34 north of Newbury.

It had been five years now since that Friday night at Doncaster when Sarah and I had carelessly ended up in bed professing undying love for each other.

We had both been there for the two-day Christmas National Hunt Meeting. I had been commentating at the course and Mitchell had had runners on both days. He and Sarah had stayed over in the same hotel as me, where we had all dined together in a large party of racing folk. Mitchell and the others had gone to bed straight after dinner as, in my experience, was the norm for racehorse trainers, while Sarah and I had shared first another bottle of red wine, then a nightcap liqueur or two, and finally a passionate sexual encounter in my bedroom.

Since then we had survived on snatched hours here and there, sometimes even a night or two together whenever Mitchell was away at the sales, and I had run up huge telephone bills calling her mobile.

We had been due to see each other at Newbury races this afternoon and then afterwards for a while at a carefully selected discreet motel near Hungerford, one more fleeting assignation in our on-going dangerous liaison.

Another of Clare’s pearls of wisdom came floating into my mind — Tell her it’s now or never and you’re fed up waiting. You’re wasting your life.

Was I?

I was thirty-one and Sarah was four years my senior. Mitchell, however, was now in his sixties, having been married twice before. How he had wooed and won the then twenty-one-year-old Sarah remained a mystery to me, but perhaps it was something to do with his immense wealth, most of which he had inherited as a baby from his grandfather, an eccentric oil magnate.

They didn’t have any children of their own — Sarah told me that Mitchell had had a vasectomy before they met — but there were three boys from his previous marriages and Sarah was being the dutiful stepmother. The youngest was about to finish school and Sarah told me that, then, she would leave Mitchell and come and live with me. But, in truth, it was the latest in a long list of prospective departure dates and maybe Clare had been right: Sarah never would leave Mitchell. She couldn’t afford to.

But did I care? Was I, in fact, not content with how things were? The old joke — I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure — seemed to have been written for me. As things stood, sex was fairly frequent and exciting, but I also quite enjoyed the freedom of living on my own.

However, there was also the worry of being found out. Mitchell Stacey was a hugely influential character in racing and I wasn’t at all sure my job would be safe if he discovered that I’d been seducing his wife behind his back. But would it be any better if we came clean and Sarah left him for me? Probably not. The best thing, I decided, was simply to carry on as before, and not to get caught.

Nicholas, my brother-in-law, came out of the drawing room looking for me. ‘This policeman needs to ask you some more questions.’

‘Sorry. I’m coming.’

On Monday I went to the races, and back to work. It seemed like the logical thing to do.

I had sat at home alone all day on Sunday feeling miserable, answering the hundreds of e-mails that kindly people had sent and dealing with the fifty or so voice messages on my phones. How I wished Clare had left a message on Friday evening.

Why hadn’t I answered her call?

By Monday morning I’d been desperately in need of some human contact and the thought of going back to my family in Oxted had filled me with horror. So much so that I’d invented a sudden nasty cold in order to escape from them all day on Sunday.

‘Are you sure you can’t come?’ my mother had asked when I’d called early.

‘Quite sure,’ I’d replied while holding my nose. ‘I don’t want to give this cold to Dad.’

I’d been on safe ground. She knew as well as I did that my father was obsessive about avoiding people with colds. Indeed, he was obsessive about lots of things. How she had put up with him for fifty-two years I couldn’t imagine.

‘I didn’t think you’d be here today,’ Derek said from behind me as I climbed the half dozen steps up to RacingTV’s scanner, the blacked-out production truck parked in a compound near the Windsor racecourse stables. ‘I’ve arranged for Iain Ferguson to present.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ I said, turning round. ‘I’ll just help where I can. To be honest I don’t feel up to much anyway.’

‘No,’ said Derek. He paused. ‘Look, mate, I’m really sorry about Clare. I can’t actually believe it.’

‘Thanks, Derek,’ I replied. ‘I can’t believe it either. Half the time I feel that life has to go on as normal and then, the next minute, I wonder why I bother to do anything at all. I think it’s the frustration that’s the worst, frustration that I can’t turn back time, can’t bring her back.’

I was close to tears once more and it showed in my voice. Open displays of emotion could be unsettling, and I could tell that Derek didn’t quite know what to do.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, breathing deeply. ‘You must be busy. You get on.’

‘Right,’ he said, clearly relieved. ‘I had better. Are you coming to the production meeting?’

‘I thought I’d sit in at the back.’

Whether I was working for Channel 4 or for RacingTV, the first task of my day was always to attend the production meeting where the running order for the show was discussed and agreed. The meeting took place in the scanner at least three hours before the broadcast was due to begin.

The producer, Derek in this case, began by handing out the print-out of the draft running order. That afternoon RacingTV was covering all seven races here at Windsor and also seven from Leicester racecourse a hundred or so miles away to the north, the paddock presenter at Leicester joining the meeting via live video link.

The programme was on-air from two o’clock to six, four hours of high-octane adrenalin. If things went wrong and off-script, as they usually did at some point during the afternoon, then we just had to carry on regardless. The thing about live television was that mistakes were history as soon as you made them, there was nothing you could do to unmake the error. There was no saying ‘Let’s do that again’ as you might in a recorded programme where you could do it over and over until it was perfect.

In all, there were three race meetings taking place that afternoon, with Hamilton being broadcast on the other satellite network. Even though a race took place only every half hour at each course, the times were staggered so that across the three meetings a race was due to start every ten minutes from ten past two until five thirty, which was fine as long as all of them went off roughly on time.

If a horse got loose or lost a shoe on the way to the start, or if a stirrup leather or bridle broke, the delay could throw out the whole schedule, resulting in races at different courses running simultaneously. And that gave the producer a big headache.

Added to the actual broadcasting of the races were interviews with winning trainers and jockeys, trophy presentations, video footage of prior races of the main participants, as well as comments from the paddock presenters. And somewhere there also had to be found the time to fit in a set number of advertisement breaks and promos for future race days.

Manic it was not, but it was full-on nevertheless, and everyone would breathe a collective sigh of relief come three minutes to six o’clock when the production assistant would finally say ‘Shut-up’ into everyone’s ears, meaning the show was over and we were off-air.

Derek called the production meeting to order. ‘There’s to be a minute’s silence here at Windsor in memory of Clare Shillingford.’ Everyone in the scanner instinctively turned round to glance at me. ‘It will be before the first race at two twenty-five, after the horses have gone out onto the course. There will be a loud beep over the public address to start and also to finish the minute. Iain, do the introduction please but don’t talk during the minute, your mike will stay live. During it we will show the flag on the grandstand, which is flying at half mast, and then slowly fade to a picture of Clare after forty seconds. If we are on schedule it should come comfortably after the first from Leicester. If there’s a delay at Leicester and the silence occurs during their race, we will record the silence here at Windsor and play it back as if live immediately after. Iain, your cue to speak will be the second beep, and we’ll go pretty much straight to an ad break after a few words. Understand?’ Iain nodded. ‘And full silence please, everyone, for the whole minute, not even any talk-back.’

Talk-back was what played continually into everyone’s ear through an earpiece on a curly wire like those worn by secret service agents. The producer, his assistant and the director would all speak, giving cues to presenters, or instructions to cameramen and the vision mixer, or counting down time while the video clips were shown or ad breaks transmitted.

One became used to listening to all the chatter but picking up only the material that was relevant to you. The art of great presenting was to absorb and react to the talk-back while speaking live on-air at the same time. Only the very best could carry on an interview, listening and responding to their interviewee’s answers, and, at the same time, take in the appropriate information on the talk-back.

Derek went through the rest of the planned running order, sharing out the jobs to be done and detailing all the many expected ‘Astons’, the captions that are overlaid onto the pictures to give the viewers information, be it betting prices, horses’ and jockeys’ names, details of non-runners, and so on, and so on. It was the full-time job of two staff at the back of the scanner to type the Astons and have them ready whenever the producer called for them.

And then there were the video clips of prior races to be annotated and spoken about, all of which would be recorded before the programme went on-air so that the clips, or VTs, were stored and ready to broadcast. VT stood for video tape and the term was still used even though, these days, the recordings were stored not on tape but on a computer hard drive.

The magic of television allowed two complete race afternoons, one from Leicester and the other from Windsor, to be fitted into the time of just one of them.

By careful use of VTs, the runners could be shown in the parade ring while they were really on their way to the start. Interviews with trainers at Windsor might be recorded while races from Leicester were being run, then played back at a time when the trainers would have been unavailable and busy saddling their horses.

Often the only things that were ‘live’ in the whole broadcast were the races themselves, and that was a ‘must-do’ rule. The rest didn’t matter. Interviews recorded after the first race might be shown later in the afternoon if time permitted, or dropped altogether if no slot could be found. Everything was timed and cut to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle around the immovable races, filling up four hours of television that then seemed to whizz past in a flash.

I spent the first part of the afternoon in the scanner, sitting behind Derek and getting an unfamiliar view of the production as he marshalled his troops at the two racecourses, slotting everything together like a dry-stone waller taking irregular-sized segments and fashioning them to form a coherent and solid structure. It was an art, and Derek was one of the best.

Immediately after the third race at Windsor, I ventured out from the dark cavern of the scanner into the bright Berkshire sunlight.

As I walked across to the parade ring through the fairly meagre Monday afternoon crowd, it became apparent to me that the bereavement of others can be a disorienting and distressing experience for some. No end of people, including some I knew quite well, averted their eyes and hurried away as if they didn’t want to burst some imaginary grief-bubble that surrounded me. Even those who did talk to me seemed uncomfortable in doing so.

I think it was the concept of suicide rather than just of death that created the embarrassment. Somehow taking one’s own life has a greater stigma than even taking someone else’s.

I was beginning to wish I hadn’t left the comfort and security of the scanner but I was a man on a mission — I was looking for Geoff Grubb, the trainer of Scusami, who had a runner in the fourth.

‘Good God, Mark. What are you doing here?’ said a man, grabbing me by the arm as I was walking by. ‘I thought you’d be at Oxted.’

It was my cousin, Brendan Shillingford, the one who trained in my grandfather’s old yard in Newmarket.

‘I’m working with RacingTV. At least, I’m meant to be, but I don’t really know myself what I’m doing here. I just had to get away from the rest of the family.’

Brendan nodded. He knew all about his relations.

‘I spoke to both James and Stephen yesterday at Uncle Joe’s. They said things were pretty awful. What a bloody business.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A real bugger.’

‘Any news yet on a funeral?’

‘Not as yet,’ I said. ‘The police have to agree. The inquest was only opened and adjourned this morning.’

‘Police?’ Brendan asked. ‘Why are they involved?’

‘Something about all sudden deaths having to be investigated. They released a statement yesterday saying that there were no suspicious circumstances so I don’t suppose we’ll have to wait too long. The coroner may have already said we can go ahead. I just haven’t heard yet.’

‘Do you have any idea why she did it?’ Brendan asked.

‘None at all,’ I said. ‘Clare and I had grown slightly apart these last few months. But I know she’d been seeing someone she didn’t want anyone to find out about. Perhaps that had something to do with it.’

‘Who was it?’ he asked.

‘I’ve no idea. I’m looking for Geoff Grubb in the hope that he might be able to tell me.’

‘That’ll be a waste of time,’ Brendan said. He forced a smile. ‘Geoff wouldn’t know about anything unless it’s got four legs and a tail.’

‘I think I’ll ask him anyway. Give my love to Gillian.’ I started to move away.

‘Let me know about the funeral,’ Brendan called after me. ‘I need time to organize flights for Mum and Dad from Marbella. And try to avoid Thursday, Friday or Saturday next week. It’s the Cambridgeshire meeting.’

Good point, I thought. I had better make sure that my father or brothers weren’t in the process of fixing a funeral date without first referring to the racing calendar.

I found Geoff Grubb hurrying out of the weighing room with a tiny racing saddle over his arm.

‘Geoff,’ I said. ‘Do you have time for a word?’

He slowed. ‘Only a quick one. I’ve got to go and saddle Planters Inn.’

‘I’ll walk with you,’ I said, falling in beside him.

‘I’m really sorry about Clare. Bloody nuisance, too, I can tell you. I’ve had to find different jockeys for all my runners.’

I considered that to be a minor inconvenience, in the circumstances, but I let it pass.

‘Geoff, I know that Clare had been seeing someone recently.’

‘Seeing someone?’ he asked.

Perhaps Brendan had been right about it being a waste of time.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Seeing someone, you know, a boyfriend.’

‘Oh, right,’ Geoff said, nodding.

‘Do you have any idea who it might have been?’

‘It wasn’t me,’ he said seriously.

‘No,’ I agreed. Not even for a nano-second did I imagine that my sister had been having an affair of the heart with Geoff Grubb. He might have been outstanding with his horses, but his people skills were almost non-existent. ‘But do you know who it was?’

He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’

‘Did you ever see anyone coming and going from Clare’s place?’ Clare had lived in a cottage attached to Geoff’s training stables.

He shook his head again. ‘Not that I recall.’

‘Was there ever a car parked outside?’

‘That sports car of hers was there,’ he said unhelpfully.

‘Any others?’

‘A few, now and again, but not a regular one,’ he said. ‘Not that I can remember, anyway.’

It wasn’t that his memory was bad. He could have told me in detail about every race run by every horse in his expansive yard, not just this year but throughout their whole lives. He simply didn’t notice anything else going on around him, not unless it impacted on the training of his horses.

‘Do you mind if I come and have a look around her cottage?’

‘Help yourself,’ he said. ‘The rent’s paid for the rest of the month. Will you be clearing her things?’

‘Probably. Me or someone else in the family.’

‘There’s a spare key in the yard office.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll try to be up there sometime this week.’

He hurried off towards the saddling boxes and I watched him go.

Clare had ridden as his number one stable jockey for the past four years and they had made a good team. I wondered if he had been the one that Clare had liked to control. But she hadn’t ridden exclusively for Geoff Grubb. As was the case with all jockeys, she had also been engaged by other trainers when Geoff didn’t have any runners.

And I knew that Bangkok Flyer wasn’t one of Geoff’s.

It was a bit like the proverbial searching for a needle in a haystack.

During the past four months, the height of the flat-racing season, Clare had ridden almost every day, often four or five times in an afternoon and, sometimes, at an evening meeting as well.

According to the database, since the beginning of June, there had been four hundred and twenty-nine races run in which Clare had been one of the jockeys, and she’d been on the winner in thirty-seven of them, including her last ever ride at Lingfield the previous Friday on Scusami.

What was it that Clare had said when I asked her how often she had stopped a horse from winning? Three or four times, maybe five. And what had she written in her note? I don’t know what has been happening to me these last few months.

I assumed, therefore, that the three or four races, or maybe five, would have been in the last few months. I had better start at the beginning of the four hundred and twenty-nine and just go through them all, ignoring only the ones she had actually won. That left three hundred and ninety-two races to watch. I settled myself into the studio chair for a lengthy session.

But first I watched again her ride on Bangkok Flyer last Friday to remind me of exactly what I was looking for. The more I saw it, the more obvious it seemed. I was sure that I’d have no trouble spotting it again in a different race. All I really needed was to watch the final furlong.

I also looked to see who trained Bangkok Flyer. I knew most things about the horses that I watched regularly, including their owners and trainers, but Bangkok Flyer was a two-year-old maiden and Friday had been the first time I’d seen him run.

According to the database, he was trained in a Newmarket stable by Austin Reynolds, for a long time the nearly man of British flat racing. Austin was now in his mid to late fifties and he had never quite fulfilled his potential in the sport.

Perhaps too much had been expected of him because he’d enjoyed such phenomenal success very early, winning the Derby, the Oaks and the St Leger in only his second year as a young trainer. Since those heady days of more than twenty years ago, he had never again saddled a Classic winner and he’d precious few other big-race victories to his name either.

Nowadays he mostly sent his horses north to race on the Yorkshire circuits, marketing himself to businessmen from the area — prospective owners who might appreciate his fashionable Newmarket address.

Bangkok Flyer had raced three times prior to his run at Lingfield, once each at Redcar, Catterick and York, finishing second on all three occasions. But Clare hadn’t ridden him in any of those previous outings.

Nevertheless, I watched the VTs of all three. There was nothing untoward in any of them, at least there was nothing that I could spot. In fact, the colt had run exceptionally well last time out at York, beaten only half a length by a good horse that had itself recently gone on to win one of the major two-year-old races of the season. No wonder Bangkok Flyer had started as a red-hot favourite under Clare. On past form he should have won the race at Lingfield with ease, as he surely would have done without Clare’s untimely intervention.

I sat at home all day Friday and Saturday, moping round the flat feeling sorry for myself and, occasionally, watching the racing on the television.

I should have been at Newmarket presenting the programmes for Channel 4 and RacingTV, not sitting at home watching them.

Two or three times I shouted at my TV set in frustration. I also laughed out loud when Iain Ferguson made a classic mistake, calling the trainer he was interviewing, not once but twice, by the wrong first name. Idiot, I thought. It was a basic rule of presenting to get an interviewee’s name right because the audience at home would have it written across their screen on an Aston. They would all realize your error and think you were foolish, which, indeed, you were.

Perhaps Iain Ferguson wasn’t such a threat to my job after all.

On Saturday, after my tribute to Clare, and shown interspersed with the flat races from Newmarket, were four others from the jumping meeting at Market Rasen.

According to my early-morning-delivered copy of the Racing Post, Mitchell Stacey had three horses running at Market Rasen, one in each of the first three races. I hoped they’d all lose.

I had tried to call Sarah’s mobile four times on Thursday evening to ensure she was all right. The first occasion, the phone had rung a couple of times then gone to voicemail as if someone at the other end had declined the call. Thereafter it went straight to voicemail as if it was switched off.

I sent her a text message. There was no reply.

Finally, in desperation, I’d called the Staceys’ home number but Mitchell himself had answered, so I’d immediately hung up. I didn’t dare call again.

Now I studied the TV coverage from Market Rasen with particular attention to see if I could see Sarah, perhaps accompanying her husband into the parade ring before the first race. As always, the cameraman dwelt on the horses and not the people, and the horses were moving while the people were not. I caught a glimpse of Mitchell Stacey, his weather-beaten reddish face reminding me all too well of our close encounter at Newmarket on Thursday.

I couldn’t spot Sarah but, if Mitchell was definitely at Market Rasen, I could at least try to call her safely on their landline if she was at home.

‘Please, Mark,’ she said, answering after three rings. ‘I said we were not to speak again. Not ever.’

‘I just wanted to make sure you were all right.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. ‘You sound a bit funny.’

There was no reply.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Did he hit you?’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said.

It was as if she was speaking through cotton wool.

‘Did he split your lip?’

‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘What did you mean yesterday about paying the little shit?’

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘It must have been something. And why would you pay Mitchell anyway?’

‘Leave it, Mark. Move on. Forget me. I’ve already forgotten you. Goodbye.’

She hung up.

Dammit, I thought. Why did she let him get away with hitting her?

And, to top it all, Mitchell’s bloody horse went on to win the first race at Market Rasen, Mitchell’s horrible red face appearing joyful once again as the horse was led in to unsaddle. Oh, how I would have loved to punch his lights out, to split his lip, and to see how he liked it.

Clare’s funeral was brief. Far too brief, I would have said, but it wasn’t up to me as I had left all the arrangements to my father, my brothers and my sister. I’d thought that was the best policy to avoid further shouting and arguments. But as I sat in the Surrey and Sussex Crematorium Chapel at three o’clock on Monday afternoon, I deeply regretted that decision.

Not that the day had started well either. I had tried to call Detective Sergeant Sharp to ask him about the CCTV from the London Hilton, only to be informed that he was away on leave for the week, and no one else seemed to have any knowledge of any recordings or, indeed, of anything else to do with Clare’s death. Call back next week, they told me most unhelpfully, and speak to DS Sharp.

Next I’d called the Injured Jockeys Fund to ask them about the guest list for their gala dinner. Mrs Green, the organizer of the event, was in Portugal, I was told, enjoying a well-earned break after all her hard work. She also would be back next week.

Then my father’s insistence on ‘immediate family only’ at the funeral further added to my frustration.

The arrival at the crematorium, ten minutes before the service, of my father’s younger brother, my uncle George, and his wife Catherine from Spain had not been a welcome addition to the ‘immediate family’ as my father had obviously defined it. When Cousin Brendan had then turned up, along with his wife, Gillian, and their two teenage children, closely followed by his brother Joshua plus second wife, I thought my father was about to postpone the whole thing, but the minister had then made a timely appearance, ushering us all into the chapel.

So there was a total of seventeen of us who sat in the first three rows of chairs as four pallbearers from the undertaker’s carried the simple oak coffin past us and placed it on the high dais at the front. Five other mourners stood at the back near the door, having been banished there by my father, who had loudly accused them of invading his grief.

Not that I was particularly pleased to see one of them, Toby Woodley, the diminutive racing correspondent from the Daily Gazette, a tabloid red-top newspaper best known for celebrity exposés and rumour-mongering.

As well as trying to comfort my mother, I spent time looking out for the mystery boyfriend but none of the five non-family attendees appeared to fit the bill. Apart from Woodley there was an elderly couple I vaguely recognized, and two young women who told my father that they had known Clare from school, not that he had made them any more welcome for that.

Just as the minister was starting the service, the back doors of the chapel creaked open and one further individual joined the congregation. Geoff Grubb came forward and sat down in an empty row behind Uncle George and Aunt Catherine. My father stared angrily at him from across the aisle but, if Geoff noticed, he didn’t react.

If it hadn’t been so sad, it might have been funny.

My father couldn’t see past his anger with Clare for bringing this on us all. He couldn’t grasp that the death of a much-loved daughter and sister transcended the method of her passing, and that her memory should be cherished for what her life had been, not vilified for how it had ended.

The service was embarrassingly short with just a single hymn, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’, sung badly by us over a recorded backing track, a few prayers and a concise Bible reading that was delivered, not by a member of the family but by the minister himself.

The whole thing lasted less than ten minutes. There had been no eulogy, no family recollection of childhood, no... love.

I sat there fuming. How could my siblings have allowed this to happen?

I started to get up. Surely someone had to speak.

‘Don’t,’ my brother-in-law Nicholas said while grasping the tail of my jacket to stop me. ‘Trust me. Don’t.’

I turned and looked at him and also at my cousin Brendan sitting next to him.

‘Leave it,’ Nicholas whispered. ‘This is not the time or place.’

‘And not with him here,’ Brendan added, nodding towards Toby Woodley at the back of the church.

‘But this is precisely the time and place, and it’s so wrong,’ I whispered back to them.

‘I know it’s wrong,’ Nicholas said. ‘We have all said so but your father won’t be moved.’

Well, I was moved.

As the minister was starting the committal to conclude the proceedings, rather to his surprise, and mine, I stood up and went forward to stand close to the coffin.

I turned to face the Shillingford family and looked straight at my father. As was so often the case, his face was puce with rage, but I didn’t care. This service was for Clare, not for him.

‘I wish I had prepared a few profound words to say about Clare but I hadn’t expected to be the one speaking here. But now that I am, I suppose I’d better say something.’

In all, I spoke for nearly ten minutes.

I talked at length about our childhood and the bonds of being twins, about our teenage years and us both wanting to be jockeys, about Clare’s success in her career, and how we had all thought she had so much to live for.

My mother sobbed.

Finally, I turned to face the wooden box that contained the broken mortal remains of my dear twin.

‘Clare, we loved you, and we failed you. We should have prevented this and we are so sorry. I hope you are somewhere in a better place and you can forgive us.’

I went back to my seat and sat down with a heavy heart.

Nicholas patted me on the back. He was crying. Brendan next to him was crying. In fact, there was crying going on all around me.

I noticed that even my father was now in tears. Maybe it hadn’t simply been anger but guilt that had made him behave so strangely.

The minister completed the committal and the electrically operated curtains closed around the coffin, masking it from our sight.

‘Well done,’ Nicholas said to me as we stood up. ‘You were right.’

‘But what is wrong with you all?’ I said to him in frustration. ‘Was that really the best the collective minds of the Shillingford family could come up with?’

‘There’s no such thing as collective minds in our family,’ he replied. ‘You should know that by now. The truth is that no one did anything because we were all terrified of upsetting someone else so, in the end, nothing got done at all. This funeral wasn’t planned, it simply drifted into existence.’

Geoff Grubb came over to me. ‘I thought there would have been more people here.’

‘It was for immediate family only,’ I said.

‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize that.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I’m pleased you came.’

‘She was a nice girl.’ He, too, seemed close to tears. ‘I’ll miss her.’ He turned away from me and wiped his eyes, clearly embarrassed by his crying. ‘She was like immediate family to me. Looked after me, she did, since my Gloria passed away last year. We had no kids of our own.’

I was quite surprised by his show of emotion, as well as by the thought of Clare in any way looking after him. Everyone thought of Geoff Grubb as a training machine, with a heart of stone. But I still didn’t think he could possibly have been the elusive secret boyfriend.

Geoff and I walked out of the crematorium chapel together into the watery sunshine. My father was standing there.

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘This is Geoff Grubb, who Clare rode for. He also owns Stable Cottage where Clare lived.’

My father shook Geoff’s offered hand, and thankfully resisted the urge to ask him why he was here.

‘Well spoken, Mark,’ he said instead, looking me in the eye.

‘Thank you, Dad,’ I said, looking straight back at him.

It was the first time I could remember, in my whole life, that my father had praised me for anything. He held out his hand to me and I shook it warmly.

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice on my right, breaking the moment.

I turned to find the elderly couple who had been standing at the back. My father meanwhile faced the opposite direction, away from them, and walked off. I actually thought he was crying again.

‘Hello, Mark,’ said the man, holding out his hand.

‘Hello.’ I shook his hand. ‘And you are?’

‘You must remember us,’ the lady said.

I looked at them more closely.

‘Mr and Mrs Yates,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘How lovely to see you again.’

‘Fred and Emma,’ Mr Yates said. ‘It is good to see you again too, Mark, but it’s a shame about the circumstances. Clare was such a sweet girl.’

Fred and Emma Yates had been our regular babysitters when Clare and I had been kids, always coming to the house together, and even staying over if our parents were away. I hadn’t seen them for nearly twenty years.

‘We’ve always followed Clare’s riding,’ Fred said.

‘And you on the television,’ added his wife. ‘Really proud of both of you, aren’t we, Fred?’

‘Thank you,’ I said, meaning it.

The two young women who knew Clare from school were hovering to my right. I, meanwhile, was trying to look over them to see where my father had gone.

‘Hello,’ I said turning my eyes to the women. ‘Sorry about my father. He can be rather rude at times.’

‘We know,’ said the taller of the two, ‘from our school days.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t remember you from school.’

‘We were in the tennis team with Clare. I’m Hanna and this is Sally.’

We shook hands. ‘I’m Mark.’

‘We know,’ said Sally, smiling. ‘We always watch the racing on the telly. Mostly because of Clare. We loved it when she won. We even went to Ascot this year with some other friends just to see her ride. We were in the Silver Ring wearing our fancy hats. We stood by the rail and cheered every time she came past. And she waved to us on the way to the start for every race.’ She paused. ‘We loved Clare.’

Fred and Emma Yates, Hanna and Sally, Geoff Grubb: how many other people had loved Clare? How many were proud of her, and had admired her achievements?

But what about the race fixing? Would they be proud of her for that as well?

As far as I was aware, I was the only person who knew about the seven definite cases and the four possible ones that I had found on the database.

I must use that knowledge with care. The last thing I wanted to do was to blacken people’s memory of my sister.

On Tuesday morning I went back to work again, this time properly. Life, it seemed, had to continue and Clare’s death was last week’s news. The world, and racing, went on regardless, without her.

I was due to be the racecourse commentator at the jumps meeting at Stratford-upon-Avon, so I left my flat early and drove clockwise round the M25, then up the M40 to Warwickshire. I spent the journey thinking back to the previous afternoon and, in particular my rather strange encounter with my father at the conclusion of the proceedings.

With Nicholas’s wise words still fresh in my memory, and also with his troubles over the on/off nature of Tatiana’s birthday party, I had sought out my father for a quiet chat.

At first I hadn’t been able to find him anywhere but, eventually, I’d discovered him in his high-backed desk chair in his study, sitting in the quiet, facing the window.

‘Hi, Dad,’ I’d said. ‘You OK?’

He’d swivelled slowly round to face me.

‘Not really. You?’

‘No. Not at all.’

‘I’ve been a fool,’ he’d said. He had rotated the chair back so that he was again looking out at the garden, and he’d sat silently for some time.

‘In what way?’ I’d asked finally. But he’d been a fool in all sorts of ways.

‘Please leave me,’ he’d replied. ‘I’d rather be alone.’

I could tell from his voice that he’d been close to tears.

‘No, Dad. Talk to me.’

‘I can’t.’ His whole body had shaken with sobs.

Not only had the day been a first for him ever praising me, it was also the first time I had ever seen my father cry. He had always believed, and had stated loudly and often through my childhood, that crying was a sign of weakness. Yet there he had been, sobbing like a baby.

I hadn’t really known what to do. I was sure that he’d been embarrassed. Perhaps I should have left him alone to recover. Instead I’d grabbed the back of his chair and spun him round to face me.

‘Talk to me,’ I’d almost shouted at him. ‘We never communicate. We just argue.’

‘She didn’t say goodbye,’ he’d said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Clare. She never said goodbye to me.’

‘Dad, she was hardly likely to ring you up to say goodbye before she killed herself.’

‘No, not that,’ he’d said, now openly crying. ‘I mean she never said goodbye to me when she left here that evening. We had argued. We always seem to these days. I can’t even remember what it was about. Something about the house, or the garden. She kept telling me I was getting too old to look after it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we argued about, suffice to say we did. And I told her that she was an insufferable spoiled brat who should know better than to speak to her parents like that.’

I could imagine the exchange. I’d had them myself with the old git.

‘She just walked out without another word,’ he’d said miserably. ‘She didn’t even say goodbye to your mother. I followed her outside telling her not to be so bloody stupid, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at me. She got in her car and drove away without a backward glance.’ He had sobbed again. ‘I feel so guilty.’

Join the club, I’d thought.

Toby Woodley’s story didn’t fade away. Quite the opposite.

Wednesday morning’s Daily Gazette had upgraded it from the back page to the front with an ‘exclusive’ tag beneath a two-inch-high bold headline in capital letters: RACE FIXING.

The article beneath reiterated the allegation that Clare had stopped Brain of Brixham in the race at Wolverhampton and even gave further details of the amount of money that had supposedly been won by those laying the horse on the internet betting exchanges.

It must have been a quiet day for other news, I thought, and Toby Woodley’s imagination had obviously been running in overdrive to fill the gap.

But there was also an underlying tone to the piece that vaguely implied that Clare’s ride on Brain of Brixham might not have been an isolated incident but rather only one in a pattern.

Watch this space, it said at the end, for further revelations tomorrow, and not only about Clare Shillingford, but also about her brother, Mark.

I stared at it. What revelations about me was Toby Woodley going to make up now? He’s told me I’d regret saying at Stratford that he’d been treated at Clare’s funeral not like dirt but like shit. Now the little bastard would make me pay. At least, unlike Clare, I would be able to take him to court if he lied.

And this wasn’t the first time that the Daily Gazette had made accusations about race fixing either. It had done so the previous May, but not on its front page. On that occasion the whole thing had quickly died away to nothing as the paper had been unable to produce any firm evidence and had declined to name any individuals, probably for fear of being sued.

Even the Racing Post, which should have known better, had a report following up on the Gazette’s story, demanding answers and challenging Toby Woodley to reveal the identity of members of the betting syndicate ‘for the good of racing’. The Post’s tenor may have been more ‘put up, or shut up’, but it wouldn’t help to reduce the speculation. At least Jim Metcalf in UK Today had refused to join the chorus.

‘Now, Mr Shillingford, are you absolutely sure that Mr Woodley was alive when you first saw him in the car park?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Quite sure. He was leaning against the white van and he moved his head round to look at me when I spoke to him.’

I was sitting in a cubicle of a mobile police incident room that had been parked in a corner of the Kempton Park racecourse car park, well away from where a square white tent now stood over the spot where Toby Woodley had died.

And I was cold.

‘Can’t you get me something warmer?’ I asked the detective who was asking the questions. ‘I’m freezing in this.’ I fingered the white nylon coverall I had been given to put on when my clothes had been removed and bagged for forensic purposes. I had also been made to stand ignominiously shivering in my underpants as a masked forensic officer, also dressed from head to foot in white nylon, had examined my skin, hair, fingernails and mouth for any clues.

‘There’s a tracksuit on its way from the station,’ said the detective, ‘and a pair of trainers.’ He gesticulated at another policeman who had been sitting quietly listening to our conversation. The second policeman stood up and went out of the cubicle, closing the door behind him.

If the rest of me was cold, my feet were like ice blocks, resting as they were on the freezing metal floor of the glorified caravan.

‘Did Mr Woodley say anything to you?’ the detective asked once again.

‘No,’ I repeated. ‘I told you, he just slid down the side of the van and died.’

‘So why did you tell the paramedic that Mr Woodley had been stabbed?’

‘Because of the blood on the van,’ I said patiently. ‘I just presumed he’d been stabbed.’

‘I see,’ he said, making a note.

‘And was he?’ I asked.

‘Was he what?’

‘Stabbed?’

‘The post mortem examination will determine that, sir,’ the detective said formally.

The second policeman came back into the cubicle and sat down again on the same upright chair as before. He shook his head and I took that to mean the tracksuit and trainers were not yet here. I went on shivering.

‘When can I go home?’ I asked the detective.

‘That will be up to my superintendent,’ he replied unhelpfully.

I looked at my watch. It was well past eleven o’clock and nearly two hours since Toby Woodley’s life had expired.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Could you please tell your superintendent that I need to go home now. I’ve got to be up tomorrow in time to go to work.’

‘And what is your work, sir?’ the detective asked.

‘I’ve already told you.’ My patience was beginning to run rather thin. ‘I’m a race commentator and TV presenter. I was commentating here tonight and I found Mr Woodley in the car park as I was leaving. I tried to help him but I couldn’t. He died in spite of another man and me giving him artificial respiration. That’s all I can tell you. And now,’ I said, standing up, ‘I’d like to go home.’

The detective remained sitting in his chair and looked up at me.

‘Mr Shillingford,’ he said, ‘have you read today’s Daily Gazette?’

I sat and looked back at him. ‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked.

‘No, of course not,’ the detective said, smiling. ‘We just need you to remain here a while longer, to help us with our enquiries.’

‘And how about if I say I’m going home anyway?’

‘That wouldn’t be wise,’ he said.

No. Then I probably would be arrested.

I thought back over the interview.

‘You haven’t asked me why I think Mr Woodley was attacked.’

‘No, sir,’ said the detective without elaborating.

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘All in good time, sir,’ he replied.

We sat in silence for a while and I wondered what the police were doing that took so long. Looking for a knife, I supposed. That’s it, I thought, they couldn’t arrest me for stabbing Toby unless they could find the knife because otherwise there was no way I could have done it.

And maybe they wouldn’t ask me why I thought Toby had been stabbed until they knew whether I could have done it or not. Perhaps it would affect how they asked their questions.

I sat there hoping the killer had taken the murder weapon away with him. Knowing my luck, he’d have thrown it away under my car.

Someone came into the cubicle carrying a folded tracksuit and a pair of trainers. Thank goodness, I thought. My feet had lost all feeling.

I was left alone briefly to change but the detective and his sidekick soon returned, accompanied this time by another man who was clearly their boss — the superintendent.

‘Mr Shillingford,’ he said. ‘Detective Superintendent Cullen.’ He held out his hand towards me and I shook it. ‘I’m sorry you have been asked to stay here for so long. I hope my boys have been looking after you?’ He smiled.

No knife, I thought.

‘They have been charming,’ I said, smiling back. Two could play at this game. ‘And thank you for the tracksuit.’ We both smiled again.

Another chair was brought in and we all sat down, although the cubicle was hardly big enough for the four of us.

‘Can you think of any reason why Mr Woodley would be murdered?’ the superintendent asked.

‘Other than over today’s front page of the Daily Gazette?’ I said. There was little point in not mentioning it, and I thought it would be better if I did so first.

‘Exactly. Other than that.’

‘Lots of them,’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I can think of lots of reasons why someone might want to murder Toby Woodley. He was a horrible little man who preyed on other people’s weaknesses.’ I paused briefly. ‘I’d have happily stuck a knife into his back.’

‘And did you?’ he asked seriously.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Someone else seems to have done it for me.’

‘Is that an admission of a conspiracy?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘But if you’re expecting me to grieve over Toby Woodley, you’ll be disappointed. I hated the little creep.’

‘I understand,’ he said slowly, ‘that you have been telling people here this evening that he was nothing more than an insect that needed stamping on. Is that right?’

‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘Because he’s been trashing my late sister’s reputation with his lies and I couldn’t do anything about it.’

‘Someone may have.’

‘Well, it was not me.’

‘What were the revelations about you that Mr Woodley was going to write about?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I said. ‘I was rude to him at Stratford races yesterday and I expect he was planning to make up some nonsense about me in revenge.’

‘How were you rude to him?’

‘I basically told him he was a little shit,’ I said. ‘Because he was.’

Superintendent Cullen looked down at his notebook, then up at me.

‘Are you happy he’s dead?’

I sat there and looked at each of the three policemen in turn.

‘I tried to save his life, didn’t I? I put my mouth over his — over the mouth of someone I hated and despised — and I breathed into him.’ I instinctively wiped my mouth with the sleeve of the tracksuit. ‘Of course I’m not happy he’s dead. But, equally, I’m not especially sad about it either.’

On Friday morning I packed a suitcase and drove myself to Newmarket.

My original plan had been to come to Newmarket after racing at Warwick the previous day and stay for a couple of nights with Clare. But that plan had changed even before Clare’s death. About a month ago we had both sort of decided during a phone call that two nights was one night too many in the current belligerent atmosphere that had existed between us.

But Clare had then laughed and promised to hide all the kitchen knives during my stay. At least, I thought, we hadn’t gone too far down an irreversible path that we were unable to see the funny side and laugh at ourselves. But then the disastrous event in Park Lane had overtaken us.

Oh, how I longed again for her still to be alive. It was like an ache that wouldn’t go away. Painkillers had absolutely no effect. I’d tried.

I parked next to Clare’s cottage and collected the key from Geoff Grubb’s stable-yard office. There must have been another key in Clare’s handbag, and I presumed the police had that. I would have to ask Detective Sergeant Sharp for it on Monday. Would they also have her car? I would ask the detective about that as well.

The rent’s paid for the rest of the month, Geoff had said to me at Windsor races when I’d seen him just two days after Clare had died. Well, today was the last day of the month, so I had better get on and do something about clearing her stuff.

I let myself in and stood in her sitting room. It was only eight days since I’d last been there but so much seemed to have happened since. Somehow, though, I felt it was a little easier being here this time.

I took my things up the narrow staircase to the spare bedroom, hanging my dinner jacket in the wardrobe.

Clare and I had planned to go to Tatiana’s eighteenth birthday party together, and I did have a slight emotional wobble as I recalled Clare’s surprise at being asked.

‘I hardly know the girl,’ she had said. ‘You’re her godparent, not me.’

‘But you can’t really blame her. If you had a celebrity aunt you’d also invite her to your party.’

‘Celebrity, my arse,’ she’d replied with a laugh. ‘You’re the celebrity. That’s what being on TV does for you.’

But Clare had indeed been quite a celebrity, as the abundant column inches of obituary that had appeared in The Times and the Daily Telegraph had proved. All the more reason why I should endeavour to defend her reputation from the slurs in the Daily Gazette. And, I thought, all the more reason for ensuring that I told no one of her irregular riding practices on Bangkok Flyer and the like.

I sighed. I didn’t feel like going to an eighteenth birthday party. I could have done without all that noise for a start, not to mention a late night before I was due to appear on the Morning Line for Channel 4. But I had agreed ages ago to make the birthday speech so I had to be there. And I wanted to support Nicholas, my brother-in-law, who was still worrying himself sick over whether or not he should have postponed the whole thing.

He and Angela had asked me if I would like to be Tatiana’s godfather when I’d been only fourteen. I’d been really flattered but, to be honest, I probably hadn’t been the most conscientious of godfathers. I had no idea about her faith, but I’d always sent Christmas and birthday presents, which is what I reckoned were my main duties.

Nicholas and Angela lived near Royston, about twenty miles southwest of Newmarket and the party was in a marquee in their garden. According to the invitation, it started at eight o’clock so I decided that I should leave at about seven forty-five in order to arrive suitably early but without appearing to be too prompt. I reckoned that if I was there pretty much at the beginning, I could get away well before the end.

I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve midday. So I had nearly seven hours for sorting and packing before I needed to get ready. But where did I start? I wasn’t even sure how much of the furniture had belonged to Clare and how much had been rented with the cottage.

I decided to deal with Clare’s clothes first. I went out to my car to collect some large blue bags and some cardboard boxes that I had brought with me just for the purpose.

I started with the over-full drawers of frilly black-lace underwear, which filled up one of the large blue bags to overflowing. It made me sad that Clare had invested so much in something that almost no one saw. But I suppose it must have given her pleasure.

I managed to pack the rest of her clothes into four more of the blue bags, with shoes and boots filling two of the cardboard boxes. I took the bags and boxes down and stacked them in the space under the stairs.

Next I turned my attention to the desk in the corner of the sitting room. Her mobile phone bill was where I’d put it down and then forgotten to collect it last time. I now folded it carefully and put it in my pocket.

I sat down on the chair and started to look through Clare’s papers. I wasn’t sure what I was really looking for, if anything, but I couldn’t just throw stuff away without going through it first. There might be share certificates or other important documents. I hoped there might even have been a will.

The desk had three drawers each side of a central knee hole, and the top two drawers on the left-hand side were full to overflowing with payment advice slips from Weatherbys, the company that administers racing’s finances. They detailed all of Clare’s rides, showing the riding fees paid to her bank account along with any prize money percentage she’d been entitled to, and she had clearly been stuffing them into the drawers for some time.

The bottom drawer on the left contained her bank statements and these were in better order. I picked up the top one, which was for the previous month.

I thought it unlikely that Clare had killed herself due to any money worries. According to the statement, just two and a half weeks before she died, her current account balance had been on the plus side of twenty thousand pounds.

I skimmed through the credits for the previous four months. Almost all were direct transfers from Weatherbys with only a couple of small amounts paid in by cheques. There were certainly no unexplained credits that matched the dates of the seven definites and four possibles, although any payment for her riding of Bangkok Flyer would not yet have appeared on a statement.

I filled another cardboard box with the bank statements and the payment advice slips and turned my attention to the drawers on the right.

The top one contained all her office supplies: a stapler, pens, notepads, stamps and paper clips. There were also several chequebook stubs, held together with a red rubber band, and two pairs of sunglasses, one with a broken arm.

In the second drawer there were various documents including Clare’s birth certificate, her passport, her jockey’s licence and a stack of investment portfolio valuations, all of which showed that Clare had been sensibly providing for her future after riding. A future that would now never materialize.

At the very back of the drawer, behind the investment valuations, I found a sealed white envelope.

I opened it.

The envelope contained two thousand pounds in cash, all of it in twenty-pound notes in packs of a thousand, each pack held together with an inch wide paper band.

I didn’t immediately assume that the cash was in any way sinister or irregular. Lots of people I knew kept a supply of cash in case of emergencies, although two thousand pounds was rather on the high side. However, the thing that did raise some doubts in my mind was that the bands around the cash had Barclays Bank printed on them, while I knew from her bank statements that Clare banked with HSBC. It was not easy to get that amount of cash from a bank where you didn’t have an account.

And my suspicions were raised a further fifty or so notches by what was written on the front of the envelope in capital letters: AS AGREED, A.

Had Clare been paid a couple of thousand pounds for not winning? And who was A?

I leaned back in her chair and wondered if she had fully understood what she had become involved in. It wasn’t just a game, it was a full-blown criminal fraud for gain, and discovery would have resulted in not just the loss of her career but also in the likely loss of her freedom.

I was suddenly very angry with her.

How could she have been so stupid?

And why had she told me it was all about power and control when, at the same time, she was accepting a couple of grand from someone? It didn’t make sense. All I could think was that she hadn’t thought the money important. After all, her bank balance and her investment portfolios were very healthy, and the cash had still been in a sealed envelope as if she hadn’t even bothered to count it.

I wondered if there were any fingerprints on the envelope, fingerprints that might help identify who had given it to Clare. Or maybe some DNA if someone had licked the envelope to stick it shut. The problem, however, was that I would have to go to the police with my suspicions in order for them to find out, and did I really want to do that? Yes, I did, if it was pertinent to Clare’s death, but not otherwise. The difficulty was knowing which was the case.

I placed the cash back in the envelope, being careful to hold it only by the edges, and then I put it into a cardboard box along with the other stuff.

That left only the bottom drawer on the right and that was full of press cuttings. I looked through the lot. All but two of them were about Clare herself, stretching back over four years. I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the other two was about me, a racing background piece done by a national daily a year or so previously. But it was the final cutting that was the most intriguing.

It was the two-page spread run in the Daily Gazette the previous May about race fixing, and it had been written by Toby Woodley.

I had heard of the story at the time but I hadn’t actually seen the original article, so I now read through it from start to finish. There was no mention of Clare, or of any of the horses she had later ridden in any of my eleven suspect races. The piece was actually more speculative than factual, as was usually the case with the Daily Gazette, but it did seem to firmly imply that a well-known trainer was betting to lose on his horses.

Betting to lose was strictly against the Rules of Racing for certain individuals, in particular the owner and trainer of the horse. And not only were they banned from doing it directly, they were also banned from instructing others to do it on their behalf, and from receiving any proceeds from such activity.

But Toby Woodley had stated categorically that he knew of a racehorse trainer who regularly ‘layed’ his horses on the internet, and then ensured that the horses didn’t win. Needless to say, he hadn’t mentioned the trainer by name.

I was intrigued not so much by the article’s content, which I only half believed anyway, but why Clare had chosen to keep the cutting with all the others.

Perhaps she had known it was true.

‘And finally, will you all be upstanding and raise your glasses to join me in a toast to my favourite god-daughter — happy eighteenth birthday, Tatiana.’

‘Happy birthday, Tatiana,’ chorused the assembled guests.

We all sang ‘Happy Birthday to You’ as a magnificent cake with two rows of flaming candles was brought out by Nicholas. To rapturous cheers from her school friends, Tatiana blew out the eighteen candles, cut the cake, and then made a short speech of thanks to her parents with every second word being ‘amazing’.

‘Yours was a great speech. Well done,’ said Emily, again squeezing my hand.

‘Thanks.’

‘I hate speaking in public,’ she said. ‘I get so nervous.’

‘I do it for a living,’ I replied. ‘You get used to it.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ve seen you on television, but don’t you get one of those autocue things to read?’

‘Never,’ I said. ‘You only get those in a studio and I work exclusively on racecourses.’

At that moment the DJ decided to turn up the volume of the music from loud to ear-splitting, making further conversation difficult, if not impossible. I looked at my watch. It was already almost eleven o’clock.

‘Do you want to dance?’ Emily shouted into my ear.

‘Not really,’ I replied fortissimo into hers. ‘I need to go fairly soon. I’ve got an early start.’

‘I could come with you,’ she shouted, looking straight into my eyes. ‘If you want.’

Did I want?

‘I’m sorry, but not tonight,’ I said into her ear. ‘I am staying at my dead sister’s cottage. I think I’d rather be there alone. But thank you.’

‘We could go to my place.’

Was she being a tad too desperate?

‘I need to be at Newmarket racecourse at seven o’clock in the morning for the Morning Line, and it’s just a mile from my sister’s cottage. That’s why I’m staying there.’

‘I’ll take that as a no, then.’

‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that...’

‘You don’t need to explain,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s fine.’ But I could see from her expression that it wasn’t really.

‘I think I’d better go now.’ I leaned forward and gave her a brief kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s been lovely meeting you.’ It was a totally inadequate thing to say, and both of us knew it.

I stood up to go, but turned back to her.

‘Do you have a number?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps I could call you?’

She produced a pen from her handbag and wrote down a number on a scrap of paper, which she then handed to me.

‘Call me in the morning, after the programme,’ she said. ‘I’ll be watching.’

‘OK. I will.’

Was I being a fool? I’d already bemoaned to myself how lonely Clare’s cottage had seemed when I’d dressed there earlier, and here I was turning down the perfect opportunity not to have to spend the night there. But did I actually want to jump into bed with someone I’d only just met. Mind you, it wouldn’t have been the first time, not by a long way. But...

‘Go on, go,’ Emily shouted into my ear over the music. It was as if she knew what I was thinking. ‘Call me tomorrow.’

I went to find Angela and Nicholas to thank them for a lovely party. Angela was in the house, where it was, thankfully, much quieter.

‘Do you really have to go so soon?’ she asked.

‘I’m on the Morning Line,’ I said by way of explanation.

‘But what about Emily?’ she asked, looking over my shoulder.

‘She’s been very nice,’ I said.

‘But isn’t she going with you?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said, clearly disappointed.

‘Nice try, Sis,’ I said, giving her a kiss. ‘Enjoy the rest of the party. Where’s Nick?’

‘Trying to close the bar, I think. At least for a bit. Some of those girls are getting very drunk.’

I personally thought they’d been very drunk for ages. Long legs, short skirts and tipsy with it — some of the boys clearly thought that Christmas had come early this year, if only they themselves hadn’t drunk too much to make the most of the situation. I was quite glad that none of them were my concern.

‘Will you say goodbye to him for me?’ I said, collecting my coat. ‘And to Tatiana and the rest of the family. I don’t want to be a party-pooper by telling them I’m going so soon. I’ll call you tomorrow, but not too early.’

‘Early as you like,’ Angela said with a smile. ‘We’ve got fifty or so of Tat’s friends sleeping in the marquee tonight and we want them all out and gone by lunchtime.’

‘You must be mad,’ I said, opening the front door.

‘Totally. But thank God she’s only eighteen once.’

‘It’ll be her twenty-first next.’

‘Nope,’ she said. ‘This is the only one. She had the choice.’

‘Well, it’s a wonderful party, but I hope you have understanding neighbours.’

‘Both sides are here as guests. And Tatiana has been to all the houses in the street to tell them. The music will decrease in volume at one o’clock and stop completely by two.’

I gave Angela another kiss. ‘Tatiana’s a very lucky girl.’

‘Tell me about it.’ I could hear her laughing as she closed the door.

The music sounded significantly louder outside than in and, I thought, it wasn’t just those in this street Tatiana had needed to visit. The whole neighbourhood would be able to hear it.

I walked across and down the road to my car, which I’d parked about forty yards away.

Dammit, I thought. This was the first time for about six weeks I had been asked to be on the Morning Line, and it would just have to be the day after I wanted to stay out and play — or even stay in and play. There was no doubt that Emily had been willing, eager even. Had I made the wrong decision?

But I knew that I had to have some decent sleep if I was to be any good in the morning. Last year I’d been out late and had a few drinks the night before I was on, and I thought I’d been rubbish. Television is very unforgiving of puffy eyes and a pallid complexion. I knew of an ex-colleague who had arrived for a show slightly late and rather hung-over and he had never been invited on again. There are always those like Iain Ferguson standing in the wings waiting to take over when your star wanes, and I had no intention of giving anyone an easy ride into my seat.

I had started my old Ford and was reaching for the gear lever when something was thrown over my head and tightened around my neck. I grabbed at it but whoever was pulling was much too quick for me to get any fingers between the ligature and my skin.

My head was snapped back hard against the headrest. I tried to cry out but nothing happened. I couldn’t breathe, neither in nor out.

I began to panic and dug my fingers into my own neck trying to get them behind whatever was strangling me. But the harder I tried, the harder the person behind me pulled.

I reached back over my head but I couldn’t get my hands down far enough owing to the headrest.

I was dying. And I knew it.

I could feel my heart thumping extra fast, trying its best to pump blood to my ever-dulling brain. But the blood wasn’t getting there. There was a blockage at the neck.

My lungs were filling with carbon dioxide and they were bursting to breathe but there was no way out for the gas, and no way in for life-giving oxygen.

I thrashed around behind me with my hands but there was nothing to grab.

This was it. I was going. Unconsciousness and death were but seconds away.

I didn’t want to die.

I banged the steering wheel with my fist in anger and frustration, and I could hear the car horn sounding over the ringing in my ears.

The ignition must be on, I thought. Of course it was — I’d started the engine.

I reached forward with my left hand and, using the very ends of my fingers, I pushed the lever into first gear. Next I released the brake, then I positively stamped on the accelerator, released the clutch and hoped the car wouldn’t stall.

I couldn’t see — my vision had gone completely, but I felt the car lurch forward. I didn’t know where we were going but I didn’t care, I kept my right foot hard down on the gas, right to the floor.

It seemed an age before we hit anything but it was probably not more than a couple of seconds. There were two almighty crashes and another loud bang inside the car as the driver’s airbag deployed. Then everything went quiet, save for the music from the party.

But best of all, the pressure on my neck eased and I gasped in a huge gulp of night air. I leaned forward against the steering wheel holding my throbbing neck and trying to breathe in shallow breaths to reduce the excruciating pain.

Things began to return to normal in my brain.

My sight came back suddenly with a rush but all I could see was white. I realized my head was up against the now deflated airbag so I lifted it and looked through the windscreen.

We had bounced off another car and then hit Nicholas and Angela’s stone-pillar gatepost full on. The whole bonnet was crumpled. My dear old Ford looked to be mortally wounded, but it had clearly accelerated as well as any sports car.

I put my head back down again onto the steering wheel. It was more comfortable like that, but part of my re-oxygenated brain was suddenly screaming at me.

Danger! Danger!

The rest of my brain began to listen.

Someone was trying to kill me and they might still be here.

I quickly turned in the seat and looked behind me.

The back door on the driver’s side was open. Whoever had been there, whoever had tried to kill me, had now scarpered.

My sudden turning movement had resulted in a severe bout of dizziness so I rested my head once more on the steering wheel.

That was better.

In the distance, I could hear a wailing siren getting closer and closer.

I had just closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep when I was awakened again by the nurse to do her half-hourly check.

‘There are two people outside in the waiting room who want to see you,’ the nurse said as she listed the latest results on a chart. ‘That policeman said we weren’t to let anyone in, but they’ve been here for ages and they say they absolutely won’t go home without seeing you first.’

‘Who are they?’ I asked.

‘Two women,’ said the nurse. ‘One of them says she’s your sister.’

Clare, I immediately thought. But, of course, it couldn’t be Clare. It had to be Angela.

‘Would you please ask them to come in,’ I said, smiling at her. ‘I don’t think that policeman meant to keep my family out.’

‘If you’re sure,’ she said.

‘Perfectly sure,’ I replied. ‘And I won’t tell him if you don’t.’

She smiled back at me. ‘All right, then. I’ll go and get them.’

Indeed, it was Angela, and she had Emily with her, both of them looking worried, and tired.

‘You should both still be at Tatiana’s party,’ I said to them in my croaky voice.

‘That finished hours ago,’ said Angela. ‘In fact, it pretty much finished when you hit the gatepost.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I croaked.

‘Don’t be.’ Angela laughed. ‘At least it stopped everyone drinking.’

‘I wasn’t drunk,’ I said. And that was now official. I’d been breathalysed when I’d first arrived at the hospital and had passed with ease.

‘So what happened?’ asked Emily. ‘Nick told us something about you being strangled.’ I could tell from the tone of her voice that she clearly thought that Nick had been mistaken.

I wondered how much I should tell them. And how much they would believe. Attempted murders in rural Hertfordshire were hardly common, but I couldn’t really lie to them, especially as I assumed the police would soon be round asking them questions.

‘There was someone waiting for me in the car,’ I croaked, ‘in the back seat. He tried to strangle me.’

The two women looked suitably shocked.

‘Was he trying to rob you?’ Angela asked.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘Although it was a funny way to do it if he was. I actually think he was trying to kill me.’

‘But why would anyone want to do that?’ Emily asked.

I decided against mentioning anything to them about Mitchell Stacey or my affair with his wife. Clare had been the only member of the Shillingford family privy to that information, and I rather hoped to keep it that way.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘The police are investigating. They told me they’ll search my car for fingerprints.’

‘It was all wrapped up in blue plastic,’ Angela said, nodding. ‘And then it was taken away on a lorry. It took them ages and it didn’t please the caterers, I can tell you.’ She smiled. ‘They couldn’t get their van out of the drive. There was a flaming row between them and the police.’

‘So what happens now?’ Emily asked. ‘How much longer are you going to be stuck here?’

‘I don’t really know. I’m waiting for the doctor to do his round.’

‘I’ll go and find someone,’ Emily said, and she disappeared through the curtains.

‘God, you gave us all such a fright,’ said Angela, taking my hand. ‘I couldn’t bear to lose you as well.’ She was crying and she wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ I said.

Clare’s death was still very raw for all of us. Our emotions were on a knife-edge. One minute we could weep or laugh, and the next moment we could fly into a rage.

Emily returned with the doctor. I knew from personal experience that saying no to Emily was difficult, in fact, I now fervently wished I’d said yes to her. It might have saved all this bother.

‘How are you feeling?’ asked the doctor.

‘Fine,’ I croaked. ‘Apart from a sore neck and a croaky voice.’

‘Your vitals are good and stable,’ he said, looking at the chart. He came forward and examined my neck. ‘You were very lucky. Your larynx is only bruised and not fractured. I see no reason why you can’t go home, but you shouldn’t be left alone for the next twelve hours or so. Asphyxia patients can sometimes develop cerebral oedemas and they are very dangerous.’

‘What’s a cerebral oedema?’ Angela asked him.

‘A fluid build-up that causes the brain to swell in the skull. It’s very nasty and often the last person to realize they have one is the patient. But I don’t think you’ll have a problem. I would have expected to see something by now if you were.’

‘We’ll look after him,’ Emily said, holding my hand.

‘Fine,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ll get the discharge papers. But get him back here immediately if he starts to act strangely or slurs his words.’

The doctor went out of the cubicle and I swung my legs over the side of the couch. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past three.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘What did you say?’ Austin Reynolds said.

‘I asked how often Clare stopped horses for you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh, yes, I think you do,’ I said.

I had watched him intently as the VT of the race had been shown and there had been a distinct smirk of satisfaction on his face.

I was in no doubt whatsoever that Austin Reynolds had known exactly what would happen to Tortola Beach in that race at Doncaster, and that he had been delighted by the outcome.

‘Did you lay Tortola Beach to lose?’ I asked.

‘No. I told you, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, but he looked worried and sweat had appeared on his brow.

I thought back to what had been written on that white envelope in Clare’s desk: AS AGREED, A.

Had the ‘A’ stood for Austin?

‘And did you pay Clare two thousand pounds for stopping him?’

That shocked him. I could tell from his eyes.

It had been a bit of a guess on my part but I had clearly hit the bull’s-eye.

‘You can’t prove anything,’ he hissed.

‘You think so, do you?’ I said. ‘I wonder if the police can get fingerprints from twenty-pound notes. Or DNA from the stuck-down white envelope they were handed over in.’

He went quite pale.

‘And were you also sleeping with her?’

‘What?’

‘Were you having an affair with my sister?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I wasn’t.’

I was tempted to believe him on this point. He had been genuinely surprised by the question and I didn’t really think that he was Clare’s type, in spite of the fact that she tended to fall for older men. But Austin Reynolds was very much older, some twenty-five years older, and he didn’t much give the impression of being a great Lothario.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Austin asked miserably.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘At least, nothing just yet.’

‘So what should I do?’ he said.

‘Whatever you like,’ I said. ‘Running all your horses to win might be a good start.’

He looked at me with uncertainty in his eyes, mixed with a touch of hate and contempt.

‘But what about the money?’ he asked.

‘What about it? You surely don’t want it back?’

‘Not that money,’ he said. ‘The other money.’

‘What other money?’

‘Look, stop playing games with me.’ I thought he was close to tears. ‘I’m talking about the ten thousand you’ve asked for.’

‘I haven’t asked you for anything,’ I said. ‘I was aware that Clare had purposely stopped Tortola Beach from winning but I only realized that you also knew when I watched you looking at the race just now.’

‘Oh, God,’ Austin said. ‘Then who is it?’

‘Who is what?’ I asked.

‘Who is blackmailing me?’

At that point, rather inconveniently, Lisa arrived from the scanner and walked over towards us.

‘Aren’t you both coming for breakfast?’ she asked.

‘We’ll be there in a minute,’ I said. ‘Austin and I are just discussing the running of his horses.’

She looked at Austin. ‘Did Mark tell you that I said you should get a new car?’

‘I’m sorry I was late.’

‘Yeah, you’re a bloody nuisance,’ Lisa said.

She had a well-earned reputation for believing that it was she who was doing the favour for the guests who agreed to come on her programme, rather than the other way round. And she wasn’t against giving them a hard time if they didn’t do as they were told.

‘I said to be here by seven thirty, not twenty to nine.’

‘I couldn’t help it,’ he whined. ‘The battery was flat. I had to wait for the AA. I got here as soon as I could.’

I bet he was now wishing he hadn’t bothered to make it here at all.

Austin managed to escape from my attentions by saying he was going to the gents on our way to breakfast, and then disappearing altogether.

I didn’t mind too much. I knew where to find him. For a start, he would be with Tortola Beach in the parade ring before the third race later that afternoon.

‘So how come you got yourself strangled?’ Lisa asked as we tucked into bacon and eggs in one of the grandstand restaurants. ‘Whoever did it couldn’t have been much cop if you’re still here to tell the tale.’

‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ I said. ‘I tell you, I’m damn lucky not to have been murdered.’

I explained to her in detail how I had crashed my car in order to survive and how I’d spent half the night in Addenbrooke’s hospital.

At last, Lisa started to take me seriously. ‘Have you any idea who it was?’

‘None,’ I said. ‘And I’ve no idea why, either.’

I decided not to mention anything to her about Mitchell Stacey. The more I thought about it the less likely it seemed that he had been involved. Strangulation from behind just didn’t seem to be his sort of thing. But I suppose I couldn’t be sure.

‘Were you serious when you said it might have something to do with the murder of Toby Woodley?’

‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘Was it just coincidence that there were two “racing” attacks only two days apart, and I was present at both of them?’

‘Coincidences do happen, you know,’ Lisa said. ‘And Toby Woodley was such an awful little creep that there must have been a shedload of people queuing up to kill him. Me for one.’

‘He may have been an awful little creep but his death was still horrible. And no one deserves to be stabbed in the back.’

‘Oh, please,’ she mocked. ‘Don’t make me cry. Toby Woodley deserved everything he got.’

‘You’re a hard woman, Lisa. You might think differently if he’d died in your lap.’

‘Why, did he die in yours?’

‘As a matter of fact, he did.’

She was surprised. ‘I’d heard a rumour that you’d helped to give him CPR but I didn’t really believe it.’

‘All true, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Guilty as charged. Not that it did him any good. He bled to death, and quickly too. Very nasty.’

‘Do the police have any idea who did it?’

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said, ‘but they’d hardly tell me, anyway.’

‘Probably someone who got fed up with his bloody sniping. I don’t believe that man ever wrote a single word of truth in that rag of his.’

‘Do you remember that piece he did in the summer about a trainer laying his horses on the internet and then ensuring they lost?’

‘Remember it!’ Lisa said with irritation. ‘We did a segment about it on the show. Even had Woodley on as a guest because he promised me he’d reveal who it was on air.’

‘And did he?’ I couldn’t remember it, but I’d been abroad on holiday in late May.

‘Did he hell! It was a total waste of time. One of my worst ever shows. Little creep just sat there grinning like the Cheshire Cat, making promises he never kept. I reckon he simply made it all up. Load of old tosh. The bastard made me look like a fool.’

So that was why Lisa hated him so much.

‘And, madam, what were you doing on Wednesday evening last at nine o’clock?’ I mimicked a policeman holding a notebook.

‘Ha, ha,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘I was at home, officer, watching The Apprentice on television, and I have witnesses to prove it.’

I thought about Austin Reynolds. Had he been the trainer in the story? Had Toby Woodley, in fact, been much closer to the truth than Lisa, or anyone else, had imagined?

‘You don’t think that story had anything to do with his death, then?’ I asked.

‘Do you?’

I could hardly say yes without backing it up with some sort of evidence and I didn’t really want to do that. Lisa had an uncanny ability for smelling out a story and the last thing I wanted was to put her on the scent of Clare and race fixing.

‘I don’t know,’ I said tamely, ‘but there must have been some motive. People don’t just stab someone for no reason.’

‘Don’t they?’ she said. ‘Haven’t you watched the news recently?’

Lisa lost interest in our conversation and started talking to the show’s director on her other side.

I sat there thinking about Austin Reynolds and what he had said about being blackmailed. Someone else must have known about his involvement with the race fixing.

Had it been Toby Woodley? Was that why he’d been killed?

Where, I wondered, had Austin Reynolds been at nine o’clock last Wednesday evening? Could he have been in the car park at Kempton races, murdering Toby to save having to pay his blackmail demands?

But that didn’t make any sense. Not half an hour ago, when I’d confronted him, Austin had clearly thought that it must have been me who was blackmailing him. So why would he think that if he’d believed Toby was responsible, and to the point of murdering him?

No. There had to be a fourth party involved. At least. And that was assuming Toby’s death had indeed been something to do with the race-fixing story in the first place, something that was by no means certain.

I went out to meet Emily immediately after the production meeting, just in case she was early.

I realized that I had no idea what type of car she drove so I stood next to the entry road staring intently at the driver of every vehicle that passed me in case I missed her. But I needn’t have worried. Bang on time, at precisely twelve thirty, she arrived flashing her lights and sounding her horn as soon as she saw me.

And I should have guessed her choice of car. She drove a metallic-red Mercedes SLK sports roadster, and she had the roof down.

I was laughing as I climbed in beside her, in the sure knowledge there was no strangler lurking in a back seat because there were no back seats.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ I said, leaning over and giving her a brief kiss.

‘Where to?’ she asked, grinning broadly.

‘Straight on down to the end,’ I said. ‘We’ll park in the press area, it’s nearer to the entrance than the public car park.’

What was it that Jim Metcalf had said about me not being very discreet in my private life? Well, there was nothing in the slightest bit discreet about Emily’s and my arrival in the Newmarket racecourse press car park.

For a start, not many members of the press drive Mercedes sports cars and even fewer arrive for a race meeting in October with the roof down. Then there was the spin of the rear wheels on the gravel by the entrance, and the slight drift of the back end on the damp grass as she turned sharply into the parking space.

Next came the dramatic closing of the electric roof and, as if there were not enough of the press watching already, there was Emily’s loud squeal of delight as she came round the back of the car, enveloped me in her arms and kissed me passionately, full on the mouth.

Perhaps, I thought, the public car park would have been better after all. But, at least, this might kill off any belief lingering amongst the Fourth Estate that I was still romantically involved with Sarah Stacey.

We went through the racecourse entrance and I took her round into the fenced-off compound where the Channel 4 scanner and the other broadcast vehicles were parked. There was still over an hour until we went on-air but I had to do the voice-over recordings for some of the VTs that would be shown later during the live transmission.

I also had some script notes I wanted to write out in preparation for what was likely to be a busy afternoon with races from both Ascot and Redcar in the programme as well as three from here at Newmarket. The more material we had prepared and ready to transmit at the touch of a button, the better we would be able to cope with any unexpected problems that might arise, as they surely would.

It was very much a case of the nine Ps: proper prior planning prevents piss poor programme presenter performance.

Emily sat in the scanner and watched while I recorded the voice-over for a host of video clips of previous races, highlighting the running of some of the horses that were in action again today. The whole VT would be used as part of the introduction for the afternoon.

‘It’s fascinating,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘It all seems so seamless when you watch on a Saturday.’

‘Ah, the magic of live television,’ I said. ‘Never believe anything you see on the box. It’s all done with smoke and mirrors.’

‘Don’t tease me,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘I mean it. We will show eight races from three different racecourses hundreds of miles apart all within the space of two and a half hours and the viewers believe that the whole thing is sequential and under our control, which it isn’t. Now that’s what I call magic.’

‘Does it ever go wrong?’ she asked.

‘Often,’ I said. ‘And the real trick is to carry on regardless and make out that everything is proceeding exactly as we had expected it to, and only to stop talking when you drop down dead or the programme finishes, whichever comes first.’

‘You’re crazy.’ She laughed.

‘Bonkers,’ I said, laughing back.

It was the first time I’d felt even the slightest bit happy since Clare had died. Emily was clearly good for me.

‘Are you going to sit there all day? I’m thirsty.’

I turned round to find Emily standing provocatively in the kitchen doorway and, unlike me, she obviously had no qualms about being naked in this house.

She walked over and ran her fingers through my hair. ‘Are you coming back to bed, or do I have to go and play with myself?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m just coming.’

‘What are you looking at, anyway?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I said, starting to fold the paper, but Emily was already reading it over my shoulder.

‘Oh my God!’ she screamed. ‘It’s a blackmail note. Who sent you that?’

‘No one,’ I said.

‘And what was it that you did on purpose?’

‘It wasn’t sent to me,’ I said. ‘I found it in the freezer.’

‘In the freezer? Where?’

‘In amongst the ice. It was taped to the inside of the hopper with this DVD. Clare must have hidden them in there.’

‘Were they sent to her?’

‘I assume so.’

‘Who by?’ Emily asked. ‘And what was it that she did?’

‘It can’t have been very much, not if two hundred pounds is all the blackmailer asked for. Perhaps the DVD will give us a clue.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said breathlessly. ‘How exciting.’

Excitement wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind but I was intrigued nonetheless.

‘There’s a DVD player in the sitting room,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and see.’

Emily ran upstairs and then quickly reappeared wearing one of Clare’s dressing gowns, while I loaded the disc.

I was a bit apprehensive as I pushed the play button. Did I really want to know what Clare had been up to? And, in particular, did I want Emily to find out as well? But it was too late to stop now. I had to see, and there was no way I was going to get Emily to go back upstairs and wait for me in the bedroom while I had a quick look at the DVD on my own. She was perched on the edge of the sofa in eager anticipation, bouncing up and down gently like a child waiting for Christmas presents.

I thought it quite likely that the DVD would contain a recording of a race, but I was really surprised that it was the one at Wolverhampton the previous April when Clare had ridden Brain of Brixham into second place while mistaking the camera-support pole for the winning post.

‘What’s so special about that?’ Emily asked, obviously disappointed not to have seen some more salacious footage.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘So what’s she supposed to have done on purpose?’

‘I presume it was that she didn’t win.’

I played the film through again and explained to Emily what had happened.

‘But how can you blackmail someone for making a silly mistake?’

‘That’s a very good question.’

I went up the stairs a little to retrieve my shoes and trousers from where they had been discarded earlier.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I need my laptop. It’s in your car.’

I went out to get it, and then looked up on the Racing Post website to see who trained Brain of Brixham.

Why was I not surprised to discover that it was Austin Reynolds?

Time, I thought, for me to go and ask him some more questions.

On Sunday, Emily drove me along the A14 from Newmarket to Huntingdon racecourse, where I was due to commentate on the six-race card.

Racing on Sundays in England was first introduced at Doncaster on 26 July 1992 although, to start with, it was still against the law to charge for entry to a sporting occasion on a Sunday. All sorts of tricks were used, like on that first day, when people were charged to come in to the racecourse to listen to the band of the Irish Guards, and then given a free afternoon’s racing. And the situation was further confused by the fact that cash betting was then also illegal on Sundays, but using a bookmaker’s account, or even a credit or a debit card, was not.

Since those days the rules have been relaxed somewhat and Sunday is now just like any other day of the week with at least two race meetings on every Sunday of the year. Indeed, there are now only four days in the whole calendar when there is no racing on British racecourses: Good Friday, Christmas Day, and the two days before Christmas.

The public love the Sunday meetings, and Huntingdon racecourse was already filling nicely by the time we arrived at about one o’clock, over an hour before the first race.

Emily pulled her red Mercedes into the racecourse car park and followed the directions of the attendant to the next place at the end of the parked cars. Only when we had stopped did I notice with dismay and alarm that we had drawn up alongside Mitchell Stacey’s car, and he was still sitting in it.

Bugger, I thought. And moving was now impossible as we were hemmed in by more cars parked behind us with a line of tape in front. Perhaps Mitchell wouldn’t notice.

‘Stay in the car,’ I said to Emily.

‘Why?’

‘I really don’t want to have to talk to the man in the car next to us.’

Emily looked to her left, past my nose.

‘Who is it?’ she asked.

‘A man called Mitchell Stacey.’

‘And why don’t you want to talk to him?’

‘He’s a trainer,’ I said. ‘He’s got runners here today. And he doesn’t like me very much.’

‘Why not?’

I could hardly tell her that he was my ex-girlfriend’s husband and I had cuckolded him, or that he had threatened to kill me.

‘He just doesn’t.’

‘Kiss me, then,’ she said, ‘and he’ll go away.’

I leaned over and kissed her, long and passionately, as Mitchell climbed out of his car, collected his coat from the boot, and walked away towards the enclosures. I had no idea if he’d even seen us, let alone if he had recognized me.

‘He’s gone,’ Emily said.

We watched him go through the entrance and into the racecourse.

‘I’d rather not be here when he comes back.’

She must have detected something in my voice. ‘Are you frightened of him?’

‘He has a very nasty temper,’ I said, ‘and I’ve been on the end of it.’

‘What did you do?’ she asked, ‘sleep with his wife?’

I looked at her in astonishment. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.’

She laughed. ‘You men. No sense of decorum. Can’t you control your little willies?’

‘It wasn’t all that little last night,’ I said with a grin.

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ she said, giggling. ‘I’ve seen bigger.’

I decided not to continue this discussion, for fear of being completely humiliated.

‘Come on,’ I said, getting out of the car, ‘I’ve got work to do.’

I was not at all sure how I managed to commentate on the juvenile hurdlers.

My eyes had watched the horses being mounted in the parade ring but none of the data received had reached my conscious brain. My mind had been racing with too much other information and too many unanswered questions.

Had Toby Woodley been murdered at Kempton Park races because of the blackmail?

I didn’t even properly learn the jockeys’ colours as the horses circled at the start and, suddenly, the race was under way. I had to keep glancing down to my racecard to see which horse was which as they jumped the two hurdles in the straight for the first time.

Had it been one of Toby Woodley’s blackmail victims that had done us all a favour?

It was not proving to be my greatest ever commentary. Concentrate, I told myself as the horses swept right-handed away from the grandstand to start their second circuit. For God’s sake, concentrate!

But how could Toby Woodley have sent a blackmail note to Austin Reynolds on Thursday when he’d been murdered on Wednesday night?

The horses galloped down the back of the course and on at least two occasions I called one of them by the wrong name, using ‘Woodley’ when the horse was properly called ‘Woodmill’.

Could Toby Woodley have posted the note on Wednesday evening after the last collection so that it hadn’t been franked until Thursday?

The horses turned into the finishing straight for the second and final time and, by now, even the crowd knew the colours better than I did. But, thankfully, I called the correct names of the leading pair as they jumped the last hurdle together up-sides.

But Harry Jacobs had said that he’d only received his latest note yesterday. Could that note really have taken three days to arrive?

The two horses fought out another close finish, flashing past the winning post with hardly a cigarette paper between them.

‘Photograph, photograph,’ called the judge once more.

Or, had Toby Woodley had an accomplice, who was now acting on his own?

I lay in the semi-darkness of a hospital room in utter despair.

It was my fault.

I should never have placed Emily in such danger.

It was true that I’d known her for only two days, and maybe there had been something of the ‘rebound’ about our coming together after my break-up from Sarah, but, even so soon, I truly felt that I’d finally met someone I would have been happy to live with, someone with whom to share the rest of my life.

And now she was gone. Snatched away in an instant.

Why?

It was me who should be dead, not her.

But why would anyone want me dead? There was no question that they did. Attempted strangulation on Friday, and now a hit-and-run in a darkened pub car park on Sunday. But why?

Everything in my head came back to Mitchell Stacey.

Who else was there?

That is what Detective Chief Inspector Perry had asked me just as soon as the doctor decided I was well enough to be interviewed by him and another plain-clothes policeman.

‘You told me I’d be perfectly safe,’ I’d said to him in an accusing tone.

‘I thought you would be,’ he had said in reply. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘How about Mitchell Stacey?’ I’d asked. ‘What did he have to say?’

‘Mr Stacey was interviewed by officers from Thames Valley Police early yesterday morning and he provided an alibi for his whereabouts on Friday evening. He could not have been the man who tried to strangle you.’

‘But he could have arranged it, and it might have been him in the pub car park tonight,’ I’d said.

‘That will now be up to the Cambridgeshire force to determine.’ He’d indicated towards the other policeman. ‘DCI Coaker here is dealing with the enquiry into the murder of Mrs Lowther. I’m assisting him only because of last Friday’s incident.’

I had spent the next two hours answering the two policemen’s questions in increasing frustration and anger.

‘Could you identify the car?’

‘No.’

‘Could you identify the driver?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know why anyone would want you dead?’

‘No — other than Mitchell Stacey.’

They asked me at least ten times about the sequence of events in the pub car park and, each time, I gave them the same answers.

I continually asked them how Emily had died and, in the end, they told me that her neck had been broken. She must have been rolled under the car for ten or fifteen yards. It would have been enough to break anything.

Now, alone at last, I grieved for her, and also for me, and for what we might have been together.

‘What did you say?’ I asked him in astonishment.

‘I said there was nothing else, other than her being pregnant.’

‘Pregnant?’ I almost shouted it into the phone.

‘I assumed you knew,’ DS Sharp said. ‘Miss Shillingford was six or seven weeks pregnant when she died.’

I was flabbergasted. I sat there staring at the wall above the desk not really knowing what to think.

‘But surely you might have thought that being pregnant could have been pertinent to her death,’ I said.

‘In what way?’ he asked.

‘Well, for a start, it might have affected her state of mind, to say nothing of the hormone changes that must accompany pregnancy.’

He said nothing.

‘And,’ I went on, ‘it would have been nice to have known at her funeral. Prayers could have been said for the unborn child.’

‘As I said, I assumed you knew. Your father had been informed.’

Bloody hell, I thought.

Why hadn’t the stupid old bastard said something? Probably because he was embarrassed by the fact that his unmarried daughter was pregnant.

God save me from my parents, and their old-fashioned opinions.

‘I’m sorry,’ DS Sharp said finally. ‘I should have told you.’

‘Yes, you should,’ I said. ‘But at least you’re telling me now. And there is something else I’d like to know.’

‘Fire away,’ he said, clearly relieved that I hadn’t shouted at him more.

‘Is there any CCTV footage from the hotel? Maybe for when Clare arrived and checked in? I’ve been to the hotel lobby and there are cameras all over the place, and also some in the lifts. She must have been filmed by lots of them.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have copies of all the hotel’s CCTV recordings for that evening. I suppose you want to see them?’

‘You suppose correctly,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

‘At Charing Cross police station.’

‘Can I come and have a look?’ I asked.

‘I can’t think that it will do any good,’ he said, ‘but, I suppose so.’

‘Later this afternoon?’

‘I’ll be here until about six,’ he said. ‘Come to the main entrance on Agar Street and ask for me.’

I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to one and it would take me a good two hours to get there, especially as I had to go via Cambridge to collect my bag.

And there were a couple of other things I had to do first.

‘I’ll try and be there by five.’

I arrived back home at five past ten and it was as lonely and cold as I had feared, and it was starting to rain.

Ever since leaving Newmarket I’d kept a keen eye on the Honda’s rear-view mirror to ensure I wasn’t being followed but, nevertheless, I was very wary when I parked the car on the street outside my flat and walked quickly to the front door.

I let myself in and put my Chinese take-away supper in the oven to keep warm while I collected the rest of the things from the car.

Street lighting in my part of Edenbridge could hardly be described as comprehensive. There was a lamppost about twenty yards away in each direction up and down the road, but their meagre glow hardly made it to my door. Consequently I was spooked by every shadow, seeing in my mind a potential murderer behind every bush.

My ribs were too painful to carry much at once, so it took me six separate damp trips to bring in the boxes of Clare’s paperwork, plus the other things like the racing trophies and some of the stuff that Angela had sorted from the kitchen.

With the help of one of Geoff Grubb’s stable staff, Clare’s clothes and shoes had been packed into my rented Honda, and I’d driven them to a charity shop in Newmarket High Street. There had been great excitement and giggling amongst the three middle-aged women who ran it when they’d unpacked the bag overflowing with the black lace undies.

‘We don’t normally resell people’s underwear,’ one of them had said, chuckling and holding up a pair, ‘but these are beautiful and I think we’ll make an exception. Once they’ve been washed, of course.’ The woman had giggled again and I rather wished I’d just thrown them all away.

I was very glad when everything from the car was finally in the flat and I was able to lock my front door, with me safely on the inside. Not that I considered this particular home to be much of a castle. It had taken Austin Reynolds six mighty blows with a sledgehammer to break into Clare’s cottage. Looking at the simple latch lock on my own front door, I thought a well-placed kick might be enough to gain entry. I’d never considered it much of an issue as I had precious little that anyone would want to steal. But was it enough to keep out a murderer while I was sleeping?

I propped one of my two kitchen chairs against the door, tucking the back of it under the doorknob. It probably wouldn’t be enough to keep out an averagely determined child but at least it might give me a few moments’ warning of their arrival.

I then sat on my other kitchen chair at the table to eat chicken chop suey and egg fried rice that I’d collected from a local Chinese restaurant in Edenbridge. It was not especially tasty but I was hungry as I hadn’t eaten anything since my bland hospital breakfast at seven o’clock that morning.

Had that really been only this morning? So much had happened since then.

I pushed the empty plate away and leaned back in the chair.

Where did I go from here, I wondered, and I didn’t only mean physically.

I cracked open the fortune cookie that Mr Woo at the Forbidden City restaurant had kindly put in the brown bag with the rice and chop suey.

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

I read and re-read the little strip of paper with its Chinese proverb.

What particular talents did I have that I should use wisely?

I hadn’t imagined there would be so many policemen. They stood in groups of two or three inside each of the racecourse entrances with clipboards asking everyone who came in if they had been there the previous Wednesday, the day of Toby Woodley’s murder.

I had arrived at Kempton really early in order to help set up the equipment but now I wasn’t at all sure if the whole thing hadn’t been a waste of time.

With all these coppers around, surely only a fool would attempt to collect blackmail money. But the blackmailer had been the one to specify the time and place, and you couldn’t actually see the police from the car park.

I’d telephoned Austin Reynolds earlier, just to check that he wasn’t getting cold feet and also to finalize when and where he was to park his car. I had to take a chance that the blackmailer wouldn’t be made suspicious by Austin parking close to where the RacingTV scanner would be situated.

‘Park close to the big blue television outside-broadcast vehicles that are at the far side of the car park, near the fence behind the saddling boxes.’

‘How can I do that?’ Austin had asked. ‘Don’t I have to go where I’m told by the car park attendants?’

‘There won’t be any attendants,’ I’d said. ‘They don’t have them for the night meetings because parking is free and the crowds are small. People park where they like, mostly as close as they can to the enclosure entrances. There are always plenty of spaces. Arrive at precisely half past four, and enter by the racecourse main gate on Staines Road. Drive round towards the television vehicles and try to choose a space that has an unoccupied one alongside on its right. I promise you, the car park will not be busy, especially over an hour before the first race.’

‘All right.’ He hadn’t sounded very confident.

‘Austin,’ I’d said. ‘This is all you have to do, so do it right.’

I wasn’t at all sure that he would even turn up at Kempton, but he did, and at precisely the right time, turning his large blue BMW through the main gate at exactly four thirty.

I had been waiting for him out on Staines Road in the rented Honda Civic, and I now pulled out into the traffic and followed him into the racecourse car park and round towards the TV vehicles.

Austin parked in a free space just three away from the end of the scanner and I pulled the Honda into the space on his right, immediately alongside him. Perfect, I thought. I couldn’t have positioned the two cars better if I’d painted white crosses on the tarmac.

I climbed out of the Honda and walked directly to the scanner without looking once at Austin or his car. One never knew who was watching.

‘Ideal,’ said Gareth, one of the bright young RacingTV technicians who had been as keen as mustard to help out. ‘Anything for some bleedin’ excitement.’

Gareth had spent the morning and afternoon setting up all the camera equipment around the racecourse, and he would take it all down again later, after the racing had finished. He was only there in between times in case any part of the system actually broke down, when his job was then to fix it. He always joked that he was the only member of the broadcast team who actively wanted something to go wrong in order to alleviate the mind-numbing boredom of the actual programme.

Gareth didn’t really like racing, but he absolutely loved television cameras.

‘Can it be done?’ I’d asked him.

‘Course it can, me old sugar,’ he’d replied in his strong London accent. ‘I can do bloody anything when it comes to cameras. Mr Bleedin’ Magic, I am.’

And he was.

He hadn’t even wanted to know why I needed a particular car to be kept under constant observation. To him, it was clearly just a game and the reasons for it didn’t matter. ‘Ask no bleedin’ questions,’ he’d said, ‘and I’ll be told no bleedin’ lies.’

He’d set up one of the small hand-held cameras in the back of the Honda so that it pointed out of the side window behind the rear door, and he’d shown me how to park the car for maximum coverage. We now sat together in the scanner looking at a monitor that showed the images received from the camera through a link Gareth had established between the roof of the Honda and the signals-relay vehicle.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just some stones,’ I said.

‘Diamonds?’ Gareth was suddenly quite interested.

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

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

‘How about the other camera?’ I asked.

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

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

Gareth returned and seemed satisfied with his handiwork.

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

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

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

No girls tonight.

Oh, God! Don’t remind me.

Run, my body told me, flooding adrenalin into my bloodstream ready for the flight. But where to? The only way out was past Brendan.

Or was it? I dragged some fragment of memory back into my mind.

Fire escape.

Hadn’t I once been told that there was a way out over the roof in case of a fire?

I turned and ran the other way, away from him, sprinting down to the far end of the corridor and up the metal staircase towards the photo-finish box, and the door to the roof, rummaging madly to get my phone out of my pocket.

I could hear Brendan coming after me.

I wondered if he’d have a knife. I didn’t want to look.

I fumbled with the door and finally turned the lock, tripped over the step, and fell out onto the grandstand roof, dropping my phone in the process. I searched madly for it with my hands, but it had fallen through the metal grille of the walkway floor, and my fingers couldn’t reach.

I could now hear Brendan on the stairs, so I moved quickly away from the door, down the walkway towards the back of the roof, to the spot where I had watched the horses the previous week. I looked down at the now deserted parade ring. Where was a policeman when you needed him most?

The sky above was pitch black but there was enough light spillage from the racecourse floodlights for me to see across the roof quite well.

There was a junction in the walkway and I had to make a decision. Which way was the fire escape?

Surely, I thought, there should have been a sign.

I went right but quickly learned that it was wrong. The walkway came to an abrupt end after about fifteen yards, next to an electrical junction box.

I turned round and came face to face with Brendan.

He was standing about ten or so paces away and looking pretty pleased with himself. Something flashed in his right hand.

‘Is that the same knife you used to kill Toby Woodley?’ I had to shout over the continuous whirr of the air-conditioners.

If he was surprised by the question he didn’t show it.

He took a step towards me.

‘And did you murder Clare too?’ I shouted.

He took another step forward.

I threw my black leather bag at him then ducked under the walkway’s railings and ran over the corrugated steel roof.

Brendan followed.

The grandstand roof wasn’t flat, and I don’t just mean the corrugations.

The whole structure sloped up at the front like a giant ramp. And there was a lighting gantry, an enormous framework that extended some twenty feet outwards and upwards from the front edge, holding several banks of floodlights.

I clambered through the main spar that ran right across the middle of the roof. I was trying to double back to the fire escape, or return to the door, but Brendan cut me off and drove me on towards the front of the grandstand, towards the slope.

Twice he got so close that I could feel him grabbing for the collar of my coat but, each time, I managed to pull myself away.

I was thirty-one and Brendan was nearly ten years older, but I was hampered by my broken ribs that made scrambling over the large steel pipes of the structure exceedingly painful. He, meanwhile, seemed to skip over them with ease.

I reached one of the walkways, rolled myself through the railings, stood up, and ran.

But still it wasn’t the right way for the fire escape.

The walkway ended next to another junction box.

Dammit.

I turned round, kicking something loose on the floor. I looked down. There were several poles, like scaffolding poles but smaller in diameter. They appeared to be the same stuff that the railings round the walkways were made of, probably left behind after construction.

I quickly bent down and picked up one that was about six feet in length.

Brendan was facing me on the walkway.

I jabbed the end of the pole towards him and he stepped back a stride, so I did it again.

We stood like that for what seemed an age, but it was probably only a few seconds.

It was a stand-off — me with the pole and him with a knife.

I advanced a stride, jabbing the pole forward. He retreated slightly.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him. ‘I’m your cousin.’

He didn’t reply. He just stared at me with no emotion visible on his face.

‘Did you kill Toby Woodley?’

No reply.

‘How about Clare?’ I shouted. ‘Did you kill her too?’

‘I loved Clare,’ Brendan said. ‘And she loved me.’

The mystery boyfriend, I thought. The wonderful lover who had made her happy.

Her own cousin.

My cousin.

My married cousin with two teenage children.

‘What happened in that hotel room?’ I shouted at him.

He said nothing.

‘Did you push her off the balcony?’

He continued to stare at me but, in spite of the dimness, I thought I could read some pain in his eyes.

‘Did you know she was pregnant?’ I shouted.

He went on staring at me.

‘She was six or seven weeks pregnant.’

Still nothing. He had known.

‘Was it yours?’

It had to be, but he went on saying nothing.

‘Was that why you killed her? Did she want an abortion?’

His head came up a bit. ‘Shut up.’

‘So was that it?’ I said. ‘You wanted the child and she didn’t?’

He slowly shook his head. ‘It was the other way round.’ He spoke quietly and I had to strain to hear him. ‘She did it on purpose, to trap me.’

It was not an excuse. There can be no excuse for murder.

I thought I could see tears on his face. Crocodile tears.

‘It’s no good crying now,’ I shouted at him. ‘You shouldn’t have killed her.’

‘It was an accident,’ he shouted back.

‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, mocking him. ‘Just like it was an accident in the pub car park on Sunday? You killed Clare, just like you killed Emily, and you nearly killed me, twice. Why don’t you admit it, you bastard?’

‘I told you,’ he screamed at me. ‘It was an accident. I just pushed her away and she...’ He tailed off. ‘She tripped. I didn’t mean her to fall.’

He was mad with anger, and with grief.

That made two of us.

‘Did you make her write the note?’ I shouted.

‘What note?’

‘The suicide note.’

‘There was no note. I told you, it was a bloody accident.’

‘And was sticking a knife into Toby Woodley’s back also a bloody accident?’

‘He deserved it,’ Brendan said with real menace in his voice. ‘The bastard was blackmailing me.’

‘He was blackmailing everyone,’ I said, ‘but no one else killed him.’

‘He knew about Clare and me. He said he’d put it in the paper.’

I wondered whether Toby had really known, or had just been guessing. Perhaps a blackmail note had given him the true answer. It had certainly condemned him to death.

‘But you blackmailed people too,’ I said. I thought back to the handwritten zeros added to the amounts. ‘And you were much greedier than Toby.’

‘It seemed like an opportunity not to be missed.’ He was suddenly smiling as if pleased with himself. I couldn’t think why. To continue the blackmail had been stupid and far too risky, and it had finally given him away.

‘And what about me?’ I said. ‘Why did you try to kill me?’

‘You said at the funeral that you were going to see the video from the hotel.’

‘And you thought I’d recognize you?’

He nodded.

He’d almost been right.

He suddenly lunged forward and grabbed the end of the pole with his left hand, pulling it sharply towards him, with me along with it.

He slashed at my hands with the knife and I had to let go or else I’d have lost my fingers.

Now the tables were turned and he jabbed the end of the pole towards my face, forcing me to duck wildly sideways.

This really isn’t funny, I thought, and, maybe for the first time, I was scared, very scared.

I tried to reach down to pick up another of the poles but Brendan swung the one he had in a great arc, bringing it down heavily on my back between my shoulder blades. It would have landed on my head and killed me if I hadn’t seen it at the last second and ducked.

Even so, the blow was bad enough, driving the air out of my lungs and causing me to drop to my knees. My broken ribs didn’t like it much either.

I sensed, rather than saw, the pole being lifted again for another blow. This time, I thought, it will be fatal.

I rolled to my left out through the railings of the walkway and onto the roof proper, as the pole smacked down into the place where I had just been.

I was not going to bloody die, I told myself. Not here. Not now.

I stood up, dragged some air into my aching and injured lungs, and ran.

I ran on the corrugated steel, towards the front of the grandstand, and I could hear Brendan running behind me. I didn’t have time to look back but I was sure he’d have the pole in his hands, ready to strike me down as soon as he got within range.

I ran up the slope of the roof and didn’t stop when I got to the brink. I didn’t even pause, I ran like a tightrope walker, straight out from the edge on one of the cylindrical spars of the lighting gantry.

Desperate situations necessitate desperate measures, and running as fast as I could along an eight-inch diameter metal spar with nothing but air beneath for more than a hundred feet was desperate indeed.

And the spar wasn’t horizontal. It sloped up at an ever-increasing angle as I moved away from the edge of the roof towards the floodlights. I was tightrope-walking uphill and my stability only came from the movement.

As the slope caused me to slow, I began to wobble.

I went down on my hands and knees, clutching with my fingers at the metal, trying to dig my nails into the smooth, hard paint.

Nevertheless, I began to slide backwards, down the spar, back towards the edge of the grandstand roof, and back towards Brendan and his pole.

It wouldn’t take much for him to push me off with it.

All there was below me was hard, unforgiving and deserted concrete, a hundred and twenty feet away, straight down. The fifteenth floor of the Hilton Hotel, or the roof of the Kempton Park grandstand — different distances, maybe, but the outcome would be much the same.

I could imagine what would be said: It’s such a shame — Mark never came to terms with his twin sister’s suicide, nor the loss of another close friend and the break-up of a long-term relationship. But he found a way out of his pain.

I managed to turn myself over so that I was now sitting on the spar with my ankles locked together beneath it, and my hands down in front of me on the cold metal.

But still I slid down, inch by inch.

Brendan was standing just short of the edge of the grandstand roof proper, holding the pole in both hands and watching me intently as I moved ever so slowly, but inexorably, towards him.

He stepped forward and swung the pole at me.

I had time to see it coming and, keeping my legs tight round the spar, I leaned right back flat against it as the pole whizzed past harmlessly just inches from my eyes.

But the sudden movement meant that I slid still further down the spar.

Next time I’d easily be in range. I knew it and so did Brendan.

I tried my best to climb away from him but, for all my efforts, I only managed to slide even closer.

Brendan was smiling again. He was sure he had me now.

But not if I could help it.

As he swung the metal pole at me I purposely leaned forward into it, taking a heavy blow on my left wrist, which made my whole left arm go numb.

However, at the same time, I grabbed the pole firmly with my right hand, and pulled hard.

Just as it had done with me earlier, it caught Brendan unawares.

He should have let go.

Even so, he would probably have been all right if the grandstand roof had been flat at the front edge, enabling him to have a steady stance. But it wasn’t. The slope meant that he was leaning forward slightly anyway, and now my sharp tug on the pole had him reeling over the abyss.

I could see the horror on his face as he pitched forward, grasping desperately for the wire stays that criss-crossed the framework to give it added stiffness.

But he didn’t fall.

The bulk of his body had come over the edge of the roof but it was still supported by the pole that lay underneath him, held up at one end by a wire stay.

The other end of the pole was still in my right hand, and Brendan’s weight was beginning to rotate me alarmingly around the spar.

I looked across at him and he stared back at me, terror deeply etched in his features, a dreadful realization apparent in his eyes — his zombie eyes.

I thought of my darling sister Clare, and also of the lovely Emily, and what might have been.

Maybe I could have saved him if I’d wanted to, or maybe I couldn’t.

I’d never know.

I let the pole slip through my fingers, and decided to look upwards at the black sky rather than downwards at the concrete.

I had no wish to witness another of Brendan’s ‘accidents’.

Two months later, on a bright cold morning just two days before Christmas, a thanksgiving service was held for Clare in Ely Cathedral and, this time, I organized everything myself.

The original plan had been to hold it at St Mary’s parish church in Newmarket but, such had been the demand for tickets, somewhere larger had to be found and Ely Cathedral, just half an hour up the road, was perfect.

There is something very grand about our great churches and Ely Cathedral is certainly no exception, sitting as it does on a small mound surrounded by the flatlands of the Fens.

The service matched the surroundings, and, unlike at her funeral, there was lots of live music, with the cathedral choir adding to the splendour.

Geoff Grubb read a lesson, as did James and Stephen, while Angela and I both gave eulogies.

Indeed, the Shillingford family had turned out in force.

Even Joshua, Brendan’s younger brother, was present although Gillian, Brendan’s widow, and their boys were not.

Life for them had been far from easy.

Not only had their father died that night at Kempton, but he had been shown to be a murderer, and the press had not been kind to him.

Toby Woodley may not have been the most popular member of the press, but he was still one of their brotherhood, and the others had devoured his killer like a pack of hungry dogs.

‘You can’t libel the dead,’ Toby had said to me at Stratford races.

So right he was.

Jim Metcalf and his fellow journalists had taken full advantage of that fact, dismantling any semblance of good reputation that Brendan had built up over his years as a trainer.

It had even been widely reported by some that Brendan had been the trainer who had layed his horses to lose, the trainer about whom Toby Woodley had written in the Daily Gazette the previous May.

That, I was sure, had come as a great relief to Austin Reynolds, although both he and I knew it wasn’t true.

The service concluded with a five-minute tribute film to Clare that was shown on big screens set up on either side of the altar, and also on a number of televisions placed down the nave.

The previous week I had spent a whole day in RacingTV’s edit suite in Oxford putting the film together. It started with a montage of photographs of Clare from throughout her life together with some home movies of her riding her pony as a child. Then there was footage of her riding career, including big-race victories intercut with snippets of interviews and celebrations. And, for the soundtrack, I had appropriately chosen the song ‘The Winner Takes It All’ by ABBA.

When I had first played the finished film through to myself it had made me cry, and now, as the music echoed around the arches and vaulted roof of the Norman cathedral, there were many more tears all around me.

But the film wasn’t all doom and gloom. Quite the contrary.

There was laughter too, and spontaneous applause when it finished with a still image of Clare, standing high in her stirrup irons, all smiles and happiness, punching the air having just won a race at Royal Ascot.