“That depends,” he said. “I thought it was Alan’s.”
“Wasn’t it?” I said.
“I think now that he may have stolen it,” he said.
“From the man with the shifty eyes?” I asked.
“No,” he said with certainty. “Not from him.”
“I thought you didn’t know who he was?” I said.
“I don’t,” he said, but without conviction. “But the chip writer definitely came from Australia. I know that.”
“And Shifty-eyes doesn’t?” I said.
“You’ll be a bloody sneaky little bastard,” he said. “To be sure.”
That may be, I thought, but I still hadn’t gathered much information from this Mr. Paddy Murphy.
“Why did my father come to see you two weeks ago?” I asked him.
“Who says that he did?” he said.
“I do,” I replied. “But why? And what’s your real name?”
“Inquisitive, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied.“And if I don’t get some answers from you pretty soon, I might just go and give your phone number to the policeman investigating my father’s murder. Then you can sit and wait for your Garda to turn up on your doorstep.”
“You wouldn’t be doing that, now would you?” he said.
“Try me.”
Another pause.
“What do you need to know?” he asked.
“What my father was doing in Ireland, for a start,” I said.
Pause.
“He was delivering something,” he said at last.
“What?” I demanded. “And to whom?”
“To me,” he said.
“What was it he was delivering?”
“Just something I’d bought from him,” he said.
“What was it?” I asked him again.
There was another pause. This was taking an age, I thought.
“Something for a horse,” he said.
“An electronic identification tag?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said slowly without elaborating.
“And a horse passport?”
“Yes,” he said slowly again.
“A forged horse passport and ID tag?” I asked.
Another pause.
“Come on,” I said loudly with frustration, “tell me.”
“But why should I?” he said.
“Because with Shifty-eyes on the lookout, I may be the only friend you have, Mr. Paddy Murphy, or whatever your real name is.”
“But why would he be after me?” he said.
“You tell me. You’re the one who knows who he is.”
“I can’t,” he wailed.
“Yes, you can,” I said. “And you must. Suppose he kills you too. You would want to know that he was then caught, wouldn’t you?”
“But I don’t know his real name,” he said.
There were so many people using false names, it was becoming ridiculous. Even I had effectively told Paddy Murphy that my name was Grady.
“Well, what do you know?” I asked him.
It was like getting blood from a stone.
“I know he kills horses,” he said.
“What!” I exclaimed. “How?”
“In all sorts of ways. I know he killed one by putting table-tennis balls up its nostrils so it began to suffocate. Horses can’t breathe through their mouths like we can, and it caused this particular horse to drop down dead from a heart attack.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“But he always kills them in a way which looks like it was an accident. For the insurance money.”
I did some quick thinking.
“So you switch a bad horse for a good one,” I said, “kill the bad one and claim the insurance money on the good one?”
“Exactly,” he said.
It was a much safer bet than selling the bad one and taking the chance that someone does a DNA check on his new purchase.
“What happens to the good horse?” I asked.
Now that he had started to tell me, it came easier. He was almost bragging at the cleverness of the scheme.
“It goes into training under the name of the nag, the bad one,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we can also make a killing backing it when it first runs in poor company, and wins easily at long odds.”
It was clever, I thought. But risky too. Making a horse’s death appear accidental wasn’t easy, and surely the insurance company would be suspicious.
“How about the insurers?” I said. “Don’t they check?”
“To be sure, they do,” he said. “They even have a special investigator who researches all horse deaths on which someone has made a claim in order to determine that they are genuine accidents.”
“So how come you can get away with it?” I asked.
“The insurer’s special investigator has his eyes set rather too close together.”
Much to my surprise, and his, Betsy was with Luca when they turned up at my house at ten to eleven.
“She just turned up at my place this morning as if nothing had happened,” Luca said to me while she was in the bathroom. “I can’t believe it. She hasn’t said a word about it.”
Perhaps she wasn’t so dumb after all. Luca was surely a catch worth pursuing. He, meanwhile, seemed quietly laid back about it. But I also thought he was secretly rather pleased.
The three of us set off for Uttoxeter just after eleven in my old Volvo, with Luca sitting up front as usual and Betsy in the back. As always, she was soon listening to her iPod through her white headphones, resting her head against the window and dozing.
“I’ve thought about what you asked,” I said to Luca.
“And?” he said, unable to disguise his eagerness.
“I’m prepared to offer you a full partnership in the business under certain conditions.”
“What conditions?” he said warily.
“Nothing too onerous,” I said. “The same conditions would apply to both partners.”
“What sort of conditions?” he asked again, using a tone of voice full of suspicion and disagreement.
“Hold on a minute,” I said. “There’s no need to get on your high horse. Look at it from my point of view. I’d be giving up half my business-and half the profits, remember-and for what? I need assurances on a number of things. You need to show your commitment to the business in the long term, for a start. That means we need a contract that would tie both of us to the business for at least five years, with penalties on either side for early departure. After five years, you would have fully earned your partnership with no financial input needed from you. But we do need to agree that within that five-year period, I have a deciding vote when there is no agreement between us.”
“Agreement about what?” he asked.
