“No,” I said. “The City of London.”
“Which firm?”
“Lyall and Black,” I said. “Our offices are in Lombard Street.”
He wrote it down.
“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want Mr. Kovak dead?”
It was the question I had been asking myself over and over again for the past two hours.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. Everyone liked Herb. He was always smiling and happy. He was the life and soul of any party.”
“How long did you say you have known him?” asked the detective.
“Five years. We joined the firm at the same time.”
“I understand he was an American citizen.”
“Yes,” I said. “He came from Louisville, in Kentucky. He used to go back to the States a couple of times a year.”
Everything was written down in the inspector’s notebook.
“Was he married?”
“No.”
“Girlfriend?”
“None that I knew of,” I said.
“Were you and he in a gay relationship?” the policeman asked in a deadpan tone of voice, his eyes still on his notes.
“No,” I said, equally deadpan.
“I’ll find out, you know,” he said, looking up.
“There’s nothing to find out,” I said. “I may have worked with Mr. Kovak, but I live with my girlfriend.”
“Where?”
“Finchley,” I said. “North London.”
I gave him my full address, and he wrote it down.
“Was Mr. Kovak involved in a gay relationship with anyone else?”
“What makes you think he was gay?” I asked.
“No wife. No girlfriend. What else should I think?”
“I have no reason to believe Herb was gay. In fact, I know he wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” The policeman leaned towards me purposefully.
I thought back to those rare occasions when Herb and I had spent any time together, sometimes in hotels where we would be staying overnight at financial conferences. He had never made any sort of pass at me, and he had occasionally chatted up the local girls and then boasted about his conquests over breakfast. It was true that I’d never actually seen him in a sexual situation with a woman, but I hadn’t seen him with a man either.
“I just know,” I said weakly.
“Hmm,” said the inspector, clearly not believing me and making another note in his book.
But did I really know? And did it matter?
“What difference would it make anyway?” I asked.
“Lots of murders have a sexual motive,” said the detective. “Until we know differently, we have to explore every avenue.”
I t was nearly dark before I was finally allowed to leave the racetrack, and it had also started raining. The courtesy shuttle service to the distant park-and-ride parking lot had long since ceased running, and I was cold, wet and thoroughly fed up by the time I reached my Mercedes. But I sat for some while in the car before setting off, once more going over and over in my mind the events of the day.
I had picked Herb up from his flat at Seymour Way in Hendon soon after eight in the morning and we had set off to Liverpool in great good humor. It was to be Herb’s first trip to the Grand National, and he was uncharacteristically excited by the prospect.
He had grown up in the shadow of the iconic twin spires of Churchill Downs racetrack, the venue of the Kentucky Derby and spiritual home of all American Thoroughbred racing, but he had always claimed that gambling on the horses had ruined his childhood.
I had asked him to come to the races with me quite a few times before but he had always declined, claiming that the memories were still too painful. However, there had been no sign of that today as we had motored north on the motorway chatting amicably about our work, our lives, and our hopes and fears for the future.
Little did we know then how short Herb’s future was going to be.
He and I had always got on fairly well over the past five years but mostly on a strictly colleague-to-colleague level. Today had been the first day of a promising deeper friendship. It had also been the last.
I sat alone in my car and grieved for my newfound, but so quickly lost, friend. But still I had no idea why anyone would want him dead.
My journey back to Finchley seemed to be never-ending. There was an accident on the M6 north of Birmingham with a five-mile backup. It said so on the radio, sandwiched between endless news bulletins about the murder of Herb and the cancellation of the Grand National. Not that they mentioned Herb by name, of course. He was just referred to as “a man.” I assumed the police would withhold his identity until his next of kin had been informed. But who, I wondered, were his next of kin? And how would the authorities find them? Thankfully, I thought, that wasn’t my problem.
I came upon the back of the traffic congestion just south of Stoke, the mass of red brake lights ahead of me shining brightly in the darkness.
I have to admit that I am usually an impatient driver. I suppose it is a case of “once a racer, always a racer.” It makes little difference to me if my steed has four legs or four wheels, if I see a gap I’d tend to take it. It’s the way I’d ridden during my all-too-short four years as a jockey and it had served me well.
But, that evening, I didn’t have the energy to get irritated by the queues of near-stationary cars. Instead I sat quietly in the outside lane as we crawled past an upturned motor home that had spread its load of human and domestic clutter across half the carriageway. One shouldn’t look at others’ misfortune, but, of course, we all did, and thanked our lucky stars it wasn’t us lying there on the cold tarmac receiving medical assistance.
I stopped at one of the motorway service areas and called home.
Claudia, my girlfriend, answered at the second ring.
“Hello, it’s me,” I said. “I’m on my way home, but I’ll be a couple of hours more at least.”
“Good day?” she asked.
“Have you seen the news?”
“No. Why?”
I knew she wouldn’t have. Claudia was an artist and she had planned to spend the day painting in what she called her studio but what was actually the guest bedroom of the house we shared. Once she closed the door, turned up the music on her iPod headphones and set to work on a canvas, it would take an earthquake or a nuclear strike to penetrate her bubble. I had been quite surprised that she had answered the phone.
“The National was canceled,” I said.
“Canceled?”
“Well, there’s talk of them holding the race on Monday, but it was canceled for today.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Someone was murdered.”
“How inconvenient of them.” There was laughter in her voice.
“It was Herb,” I said.
“What was Herb?” she asked. The laughter had gone.
“It was Herb who was murdered.”
“Oh my God!” she screamed. “How?”
“Watch the news.”
“But Nick,” she said, concerned. “I mean-are you OK?”
“I’m fine. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
