back seat of the car as I drove out on to Ebury Street. Anyone watching would have thought I was on my own and assumed that Marina was alone upstairs.
I jumped two sets of red lights and went round Hyde Park Corner three times before I was satisfied that we weren’t being followed.
I drove, very carefully, along the M40 to Oxford and then cross-country to Aynsford, arriving there soon after midnight. Marina, having transferred to the front passenger seat, slept most of the way but was finally woken by the constant turning of the narrow lanes and the humpback bridge over the canal as we approached the village.
‘Nearly there, my angel,’ I said, stroking her knee with my unfeeling hand.
‘My bloody mouth hurts.’
‘I’ll get you something for that as soon as we get in.’
Charles was not only still up but he was still dressed, and in a dark blue blazer and tie.
No one could ever accuse Charles of being under-dressed. He had once worn his dinner jacket to a ‘formal’ dinner for his great-nephews. The formality of the dinner meant that the great-nephews had to use a knife and fork rather than their fingers, and Charles had looked a little out of place in Pizzaland in his bow-tie. He hadn’t cared. Better to be over than under, he’d said, better than wearing a lounge suit to a Royal Naval ‘Dining In’ night, better than wearing a sweater to church.
He came out to meet us as I pulled up in front of the house and fussed over Marina. He was genuinely shocked that anyone could have hit a woman, especially one clearly so beautiful as Marina. Her face didn’t look very beautiful at the moment with a badly swollen lip and two blackening eyes. I knew it would look worse in the morning.
‘It’s outrageous,’ he said. ‘Only a coward would hit a woman.’
Charles was a great believer in chivalry. He didn’t care that many of his ideals were out of date. He had said to me once that, at his age, people expected him to have old-fashioned views so he didn’t disappoint them.
Charles found some painkillers and a sleeping pill for Marina and she was soon tucked up in bed. He and I retired to his small sitting room for a whisky.
‘I hope I’m not keeping you up,’ I said.
‘You are,’ he replied, ‘but I’m happy to be kept up. What’s this all about?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘It’s a long night.’
‘Do you remember Gold Cup day at Cheltenham?’ I asked.
‘Difficult to forget.’
‘Huw Walker was murdered over something to do with race fixing. Murder seems to be a bit of an over- reaction for a little fiddle on the horses so I think there must be something more to it than that.’
‘How can you be sure it was something to do with fixing races?’ Charles asked.
‘Because Huw left two messages on my London answering machine the night before he died and as good as said it was. He was frightened that someone might kill him for not doing as he was told.’
‘I thought Bill Burton had killed him for playing around with his wife.’
I raised my eyebrows, both at the fact that Charles had heard the rumour and the way he expressed it.
‘So someone told me,’ he added. He had clearly used their exact turn of phrase.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I think Huw’s murder was premeditated. Bill Burton didn’t believe that, as you say, Huw was playing around with his wife until just before the first race that afternoon. Bill couldn’t have suddenly magicked a gun out of thin air. And Huw certainly left the first message on my answering machine hours before Bill had any hint that there was an affair going on between him and Kate. It wasn’t Bill who Huw was frightened of. So I think we can discount the tidy solution that Bill killed him.’
‘But Burton was bloody angry with Walker for winning on Candlestick. I saw it myself.’
‘No, he wasn’t. He was bloody angry because he had just found out it was true that Kate and Huw had been at it.’
‘Oh.’ Charles went over to the drinks tray and poured two more large single malts. It was indeed going to be a long night.
‘Bill Burton was murdered as well,’ I said. ‘I’m sure of that, too. It was made to look like a suicide but it wasn’t.’
‘The police seem to think it was, or so everyone says on the racecourse.’
‘I’ve been doing my best to cast doubts as to the accuracy of that theory. That’s why Marina got beaten up. It came with a message to me to leave things be, to stop sticking my nose into Huw’s death and allow Bill to carry the can.’
‘So that the case will be closed and the guilty party will still be free?’
‘Exactly,’ I said.
‘So are you?’
‘Am I what?’
‘Are you going to stop sticking your nose into Huw’s death?’
‘I don’t know.’
I swallowed a mouthful of Glenmorangie’s best 10-year-old and allowed the golden fluid to send a shiver round my body, the prelude to a comforting warm glow that emanated from deep down. I realised that I had eaten hardly anything all day and that drinking on an empty stomach was a sure-fire way to a hangover. But who cared?
‘No one has been able to stop you in the past.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But this is different somehow… hurting Marina is out of order.’
‘Hurting you is all right, I suppose?’
‘Well… yes. I know how much I can take. I’m somehow in control, even when I’m not.’ I paused. ‘Do you remember that time when it all was too much? When Chico and I were almost flayed alive with the chains?’
He nodded. He had seen the damage first hand.
‘Well, that was done to stop me investigating. At least they thought I would stop. They thought that I would have had enough, that surely I would get the message and run away. What they didn’t understand was that I was going after them all the more, simply because of what they’d done to try and stop me. I really believe that nothing, short of actually killing me, would stop me if I thought it was right.’
‘Didn’t a man once threaten to cut off your right hand if you didn’t stop trying to nail him for something?’
‘Yes.’ I paused.
I remembered the paralysing fear, the absolute dread of losing a second hand. I remembered the utter collapse it had caused in me. I remembered the struggle it had taken to rebuild my life, the willpower required to face another day. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I remembered it all too well.
‘That didn’t stop you, either.’
No, I thought, not in the end, although it had for a while.
‘Nearly,’ I croaked. My tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of my mouth.
‘You are surely not going to be stopped by a couple of punches to the face.’
‘But it’s not
‘Shooting hostages never stopped the French Resistance killing Germans,’ he said profoundly.
‘It would have done if it had been their families.’
We finally went up to bed past two o’clock. By then, we had polished off the bottle and I had more than made up for the lack of calories in my missed dinner.
I slipped in next to Marina and kissed her sleeping head. How could I knowingly put this precious human being into danger? But how could I not? Suddenly, for the first time since I had started this caper, I was vulnerable to the ‘we’ll not get you, we’ll get your girl’ syndrome. What was the future? How could I continue? How could I operate if I were forever fearful of what ‘they’ might do to Marina?
I tossed this dilemma round in my whisky-fuzzed brain, found no acceptable solution, and finally drifted into an uneasy sleep.
