was not the right one. People who work every day with horses see them as individuals with different features and characteristics rather than just as horses. It has often been said that every great trainer needs to know his horses’ characters better than he knows those of his own family. Lester Piggott was said to be able to recognize any horse he had ridden even when it was walking away from him in a rainstorm.
Just as everyone would realize pretty quickly, if not immediately, that a celebrity look-alike was not the real thing, so too would racing folk easily spot a ringer, unless it was far removed from its normal environment. And it was too much to expect that a secret conspiracy of even a handful of people would hold for very long.
So what real good were the rewritable identification RFIDs?
I finally went to sleep, still trying to work out the conundrum.
I was not sure what the noise was that woke me, but one moment I’d been fast asleep, the next I was fully conscious in the dark and knowing that something wasn’t quite right.
I listened intently, lying perfectly still on my back and keeping my breathing very quiet and shallow.
As usual in the summer, I had left open one of my bedroom windows for ventilation. But I could hear nothing out of the ordinary from outside the house. Nothing except for the breeze, which rustled the leaves of the beech tree by the road, and the occasional hum of a distant car on Abbey Hill.
I had begun to think I must have been wrong when I plainly heard the sound again. It was muffled slightly by the closed bedroom door, but I knew immediately what it was. Someone was downstairs, and he was opening the kitchen cabinets. The cabinet doors were held shut by little magnetic catches. The sound I had heard was the noise made when one of the catches was opened.
I lay there wondering what I should do.
Detective Sergeant Murray had warned me that witnesses to murder were an endangered species, and now I began to wish I had taken his warning a bit more seriously.
Was the person downstairs intent on doing me harm or was he happy to go on exploring while leaving me to sleep?
The problem was that I didn’t really imagine my intruder was searching through my kitchen cabinets for something with which to make himself a cup of tea or coffee. He would be after my father’s rucksack and its hidden contents, and they were not downstairs in the kitchen but deep in the recesses of my wardrobe, up here with me in my bedroom. It would only be a matter of time before he would have to come upstairs, and then he surely would know that I must be awake.
I thought about making lots of noise, stamping my way down the stairs and demanding to know who was in my house, in the hope that he might be frightened away. But then I remembered the two stab wounds that had killed my father. Was my visitor the shifty-eyed man from the Ascot parking lot, and did he have his twelve-centimeter- long blade with him ready to turn my guts into mincemeat as well?
Ever so quietly, I stretched out my hand towards the telephone that sat on my bedside table, intending to call the police. I decided it was better to be still alive, even if it did mean I would have the difficult task of explaining why there was thirty thousand pounds’ worth of someone else’s cash in my wardrobe. Much better, I thought, than drowning in my own blood.
But there was no dial tone when I lifted the receiver. My guest downstairs must have seen to that.
And, as always, I had left my mobile in the car.
What, I wondered, was plan C?
There was nothing to be gained from simply lying there in bed and waiting for him to come up and plunge his knife into my body. I was sure he wouldn’t just go away when he failed to find what he had come for downstairs. Clearly, he would rather have found the booty and departed silently, leaving me blissfully asleep, or else he would have come up and dealt with me first. But I was under no illusion that he would give up before he had searched everywhere, whether or not I was wide awake or fast asleep, or very dead.
It wasn’t that dying particularly frightened me. But I didn’t really want to go yet, not when Sophie was making such good progress. And not now that I knew I had sisters to meet in Australia. And particularly not before I had discovered what this was all about. I had always felt rather sorry for soldiers who died in wars, not only because they were dead but because they would never know who won or if their sacrifice had been worth it.
Maybe I just wanted to die in my own time, not at someone else’s wish and whim.
I looked around in the dim luminosity that filtered through the curtains from the ambient streetlight glow outside. Sadly, my bedroom wasn’t very well equipped with any form of handy weapon.
I gently levered myself out of bed and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts. I might not be able to prevent myself being killed, but I was determined that I would not be found in a state of total undress.
Perhaps I should just throw the money and the other things down the stairs and let my visitor take them away. Anything to stop him coming up to get them himself, with murder in mind.
I silently crossed the room to the wardrobe, but before I had a chance to open it I heard the third tread of the staircase creak. I had been meaning to fix that step for years but couldn’t be bothered to lift all the carpet. I had become so obsessed with the creak that I missed it out, always taking two steps together at that point. The wear of the carpet there-or, rather, the lack of it-was even becoming noticeable against the others.
My visitor hadn’t known about it, and in the darkness he wouldn’t have spotted the underused carpet. But I knew that the step always creaked as weight was applied and also creaked again as weight was removed.
I stood absolutely stock-still beside my wardrobe, listening. I was holding my breath, and I could begin to hear the blood rushing in my ears. There had definitely been only one creak. The intruder had stopped on the stairs in midclimb and was, no doubt, listening for any movement from me as hard as I was from him.
I had to breathe.
I decided to snort through my nose like a pig. I snored loudly, and then exhaled in a long rasping wheeze. I snored once more, and, quite clearly, I heard the third step creak again as my nocturnal visitor removed his weight from it. I assumed he was still on the way up, not going back down. I snored a third time, then grunted as if turning over in bed.
The wardrobe was behind my bedroom door.
I flattened myself against the wall and stared at the door handle, which was a brass lever with a small scroll on the end. My heart was thumping so hard in my chest that I was sure it must be audible out on the landing.
The handle began to depress, and my heart almost went into palpitations. Slowly the door opened towards me.
Attack had to be the best form of defense.
When the door was about halfway open, I threw myself against it with all the force I could muster, attempting to slam it shut again. But the door didn’t fully close because my visitor’s right arm was preventing it. I could clearly see his gloved hand and his wrist protruding into my bedroom. There was a gratifying groan from its owner each time I pushed against the door, repeatedly throwing my weight against the wood.
“You’ve broken my bloody arm!” he shouted.
Good, I thought. Pity I hadn’t torn it off completely.
“What do you want?” I shouted back through the door, still refusing to ease up the pressure to release his arm.
“Sod off,” he shouted back. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard.”
Not if I had any say in the matter, he wasn’t.
I put my right foot down on the floor to stop the door from opening, leaned back and then threw my whole weight against it once more.
This time, he didn’t just groan, he screamed.
So I repeated it. He screamed again.
“What do you want?” I shouted again.
“I want to break your fucking neck,” he said back to me through the door, sounding very close indeed.
I pressed again, the door squeezing against his damaged arm.
“And what exactly are you looking for?” I said.
“The microcoder,” he said
“What’s that?”
“It’s a microcoder,” he repeated unhelpfully.
“What does it look like?” I asked.
