Under Orders

They cancelled the last race of the day and closed the racecourse, refusing to let anyone leave, not even those in the central enclosure who didn’t have access to where Huw Walker had been found. Totally ill equipped to interview nearly sixty thousand people, they relented in the end and allowed the wet, angry and frustrated multitude to make their ways to the car parks and home but not before it was very dark and very cold.

In a way, I felt sorry for the policemen. They had no idea how to deal with a crowd of racegoers in shock and grief over a horse. Surely, they said, you are more concerned about the murder of a jockey than the death of an animal?

‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said one man standing near me. ‘All jockeys are bent, anyway. Got what he deserved, I reckon.’ Sadly, it was a common view. If it wins, it’s all the horse’s doing. If it loses, blame the pilot.

I didn’t get away quite so easily as I was a material witness and I reluctantly agreed to go to their hastily established incident room in one of the now vacated restaurants to give a statement. I pointed out that I hadn’t actually been the first to find poor Huw. However, the young woman who had was so shocked that she had been sedated by a doctor. She was asleep and unable to speak to the police. Lucky her.

Huw had been seen in the jockeys’ changing room before the Gold Cup but not after it. Bill Burton had been looking for him less than an hour later.

By the time they had set up their interview area and got round to asking me, it was clear they had received reports of the shouting match between trainer and jockey after Candlestick’s victory in the first. Bill Burton, it appeared, was already their prime suspect.

I pointed out to Detective Chief Inspector Carlisle of Gloucestershire CID that Huw had obviously been killed by an expert assassin who must have brought a gun with him to the races for the purpose and that Bill Burton couldn’t have magically produced a shooter out of thin air just because he had had a tiff with his jockey following the first race.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘maybe that’s what we are meant to think while, meantime, Burton had planned it all along.’

Yes, I had spoken to Huw Walker earlier in the day.

No, he didn’t say anything to me that could be of use to the police.

Yes, I had seen Huw Walker and Bill Burton together after the first race.

No, I didn’t know why anyone would want him dead.

Yes, I would contact them again if I thought of anything else which might be important.

I remembered the message on my London telephone and decided not to mention it. I wanted to listen to it first and the remote access system on my answer machine was broken.

The following morning, all the national dailies ran the ecstasy and agony of Oven Cleaner on their front pages. The Times ran the story over the first three pages with graphic photographs of his victory and the subsequent disaster.

Only on page seven was there a report of the discovery, late in the afternoon, of the body of jockey Huw Walker by Sid Halley, ex-champion jockey and now private detective. Even this item referred to the sad demise of the equine hero and, at first glance, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the two were connected. Somehow the impression was given that Walker’s death was a bizarre after-effect of the great horse’s passing, as if the jockey had killed himself in grief even though he had not himself ridden The Cleaner to victory. There was no mention of the three bullet wounds in Huw’s chest. As any one of the three would have been instantly fatal, the police, at least, were not treating his death as suicide.

The Racing Post went even further, with an eight-page spread of Oven Cleaner’s career and an obituary to rival that of a prime minister.

‘It was only a bloody horse,’ declared Charles over his breakfast. ‘Like that memorial in London for the animals in war. Ridiculous sentimental rubbish.’

‘Come on, Charles,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen you almost in tears over your dogs when they die. Same thing.’

‘Poppycock!’ But he knew it was true. ‘When are you off?’ he asked, changing the subject.

‘After breakfast. I have some reports to write.’

‘Come again. Come as often as you like. I like having you here and I miss you when you’re gone.’

I was surprised, but pleased. He had initially detested his daughter marrying a jockey. Not a suitable match, he’d thought, for the daughter of an admiral. A game of chess, which I had won, had been the catalyst to an enduring friendship that had survived the break-up of my marriage, had survived the destruction of my racing career, and had been instrumental in the blossoming of my new life out of the saddle. Charles was not one to show his emotions openly; command in the services was lonely and one had to learn to be emotionally robust in the face of junior officers.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I enjoy being here and I will come again soon.’

We both knew that I tended to come to Aynsford only when I was in trouble or when I was depressed, or both. Aynsford had become my sanctuary and my therapy. It was my rock in the turbulent waters I had chosen as my home.

I left promptly after breakfast and drove home to London along a relatively empty M40. The rain beat relentlessly on the roof of my Audi as I made my way round Hyde Park Corner and into Belgravia. I lived in a fourth- floor flat in Ebury Street near Victoria Station and, after five years, it was beginning to feel like home. Not least because I did not live there on my own.

Who Sid Halley was presently ‘screwing’, the secret I kept from Chris Beecher, was Marina van der Meer, a Dutch beauty, a natural blonde with brains, and a member of a team of chemists at the Cancer Research UK laboratories in Lincoln’s Inn Fields searching for the Holy Grail — a simple blood test to find cancers long before any symptoms appear. Earlier detection, she said, leads to easier cure.

When I arrived at noon she was sitting in our large bed, wearing a fluffy pink towelling robe and reading the Saturday papers.

‘Well, well, quite the little Sherlock Holmes!’ She pointed to a picture of me in the Telegraph. It was the one they often used of me, smiling broadly as I received a racing trophy. That photo was now more than ten years old and pre the flecks of grey that were now appearing at my temples. I didn’t mind.

‘It says here that you discovered the body. I bet Colonel Mustard did it in the conservatory with the lead piping.’ Her English was perfect with a faint hint of accent, more a rising and lowering of inflection than a specific style of pronunciation. Music to my ears.

‘Well, he might have done, but he must have melted the lead piping into bullets first.’

‘It doesn’t say he was shot.’ She looked surprised and tapped the paper. ‘It even gives the impression it was natural causes or suicide.’

‘Difficult to shoot yourself three times in the heart. The police kept that gem to themselves and I didn’t tell the Press either.’

‘Wow!’

‘What are you still doing in bed, anyway?’ I asked, lying down beside her on the duvet. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Fancy working up an appetite?’ I grinned.

‘I thought you’d never ask.’ She giggled and shrugged the robe off her slender shoulders.

Chris Beecher, eat your heart out.

We lay in bed for much of the afternoon, watching the racing on the television while I should have been writing up reports for clients. We decided against a walk to St James’s Park because of the incessant rain but, eventually, did huddle under an umbrella and make our way to dinner at Santini, the Italian restaurant on the corner. Marina had chicken while I chose Dover sole, off the bone.

We contentedly shared a bottle of Chablis and caught up on the week.

‘Tell me more about the jockey who was killed,’ Marina asked.

‘He was nice enough,’ I said. ‘In fact, I spoke with him earlier.’ I remembered Huw’s message still sitting unheard on my machine.

‘He won the first race,’ I said. But I wondered if he should have. Had he been told to lose? Was that why he’d