“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Drop the rucksack,” he said, ignoring my question. He didn’t have a strong regional accent, at least not one I could notice.
“What’s your name?” I repeated.
“Never you mind,” he said. “Just give me the rucksack.”
“How did you find my house?” I asked him.
“A little birdie told me,” he said.
“Which little birdie?”
“Never you mind,” he said again. “Just drop the rucksack.” He held up his arms ready to catch it.
“It’s only full of Mr. Grady’s clothes,” I said. “I’ve searched it. There’s nothing else there.”
“Give it to me anyway,” he said.
“Who are you working for?” I asked.
“What?” he said.
“Who are you working for?” I repeated.
“No one,” he said. “Now, give me the bloody rucksack.”
“Who’s John Smith?” I asked.
In spite of only being able to see his eyes, I could still tell that there was no recognition of the name. He didn’t know a Mr. John Smith, but, then, that wasn’t his real name, now was it?
“Give me the bag,” he hissed at me in the same way as he’d hissed at my father at Ascot. “And give it to me now or I’ll break your bloody door down.”
I opened my hand and dropped the rucksack. In spite of having his hands up, he failed to catch it before it hit the concrete path, but he quickly snatched it up and was off, jogging down Station Road in just the same manner as I had previously seen him do in Paddington near the Lancaster Gate tube station.
I wondered how he had found out where I lived. If he had obtained the information that I had given the coroner at the inquest, then why had it taken him so long to arrive at my door? I thought back to what I had done over the previous twenty-four hours. Perhaps his little birdie had been at Banbury police station yesterday, or somewhere else in the Thames Valley Police. That e-fit would have been sent right around the force, and perhaps someone recognized the face, someone not completely honest, someone who had then told Kipper, who had made it.
I would never know exactly how he had found me, and I hoped that this would be the last time I would see him, but, somehow, I had my doubts.
He would certainly find that the microcoder and the glass-grain RFID chips were missing from the rucksack as Mr. John Smith now had them. And I had also kept back the three house keys on their ring and the passports, the two photocopied equine ones, and both of those with my father’s picture in them.
However, if Paddy Murphy was to be believed-and there was absolutely no guarantee of that-then it would be the stash of money that the man would be more concerned about. If he knew where to look, Kipper would find the three blue-plastic-wrapped packages of banknotes back in their original hiding place underneath the rucksack lining. But, if he inspected them more closely, he might spot that the packages had been opened and then carefully resealed using clear sticky tape. And, if he then counted the cash, he might also discover that he was two thousand pounds short from each package.
It had seemed a good idea at the time. But now I wasn’t so sure.
What the hell was all that about?” Sophie demanded when I went down the stairs.
She and Alice were standing in the hall, looking up at me with concerned but expectant expressions on their faces.
“Just an impatient man who wanted something I had,” I said to them, trying to make light of the encounter.
“But he was horrible,” said Sophie. “Why did you give it to him?”
“But it was you who told me to,” I said, slightly exasperated.
“Whose rucksack was it anyway?” she asked.
“It belongs to a man called Alan Grady,” I said. “He gave it to me to keep safe.”
“Who’s Alan Grady?” she asked.
“Just a man from Australia that I met at Royal Ascot.”
“He’s not going to be very pleased with you for giving his rucksack away to someone else.”
She seemed to have completely forgotten the fear and panic that had gripped her when the man had been standing outside our front door.
“I don’t think he’ll mind too much,” I said without elaborating further. I smiled at the two of them. “Now, what’s for supper?”
“He won’t come back, will he?” Alice asked nervously as I ate my macaroni and cheese, the three of us sitting around the kitchen table.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s got what he came for.”
At least he got most of it, I thought. But would he come back for the rest? There was no doubt that he now knew exactly where I lived, and, even though I had been half expecting him to turn up, it was still rather a shock that he had.
After my supper, I went up into my little office to log on to the Internet while the girls took themselves off to bed.
HRF Holdings Ltd was indeed a parent company, and one of the businesses it owned I knew very well. Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd, to give it its full title, was one of the big-five High Street betting shop chains. Their shops were presently mostly confined to London and the southeast of England, but the business was expanding rapidly north and westwards.
I made a search of the Companies House WebCHeck service and downloaded the most recent annual report for Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd and for HRF Holdings Ltd. They were both private limited companies, and the report recorded the names of the directors and the company secretaries, as well as a list of the current shareholders, of each entity.
Just as there is no longer an individual called William Hill in charge of the William Hill bookmaking company, there was no sign in the report of anyone actually called Tony Bateman either as a director or as a shareholder at Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd. It must have been a name from the past, I thought, possibly the company founder or maybe an individual bookmaker who was, at some distant time, bought out by a bigger concern.
I did, however, recognize one name prominent amongst the list of both the directors and the shareholders of the company. Henry Richard Feldman was well known on British racetracks. Now in his late sixties, he had made his money in property development, specifically in the docklands of both London and Liverpool, although there were reports that a recent fall in house prices had hit him hard. For the past twenty years or so, he had been a prolific and successful racehorse owner, mostly jumpers. He was also the sole shareholder of HRF Holdings Ltd.
But why did he or, more precisely, why did Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd want to buy my business?
Ever since betting shops were made legal in Britain in 1961, the big firms had been expanding their domains by buying out the small independent bookies. But mostly it had been the individual town-center betting shops they had been after. However, more recently they had also been turning up in the betting rings on the tracks, using their influence to further control the on-course prices.
Now, it would seem, it was the turn of my business to be in their sights whether I liked it or not. Tony Bateman Ltd wasn’t so much after me and Luca, or even our customers; they were after our lucrative pitch positions at the racetracks. And, it appeared, they were prepared to resort to threats and intimidation to get them.
Sophie was fast asleep when, well after midnight, I finally went along the landing to bed. As always, coming home from the hospital had completely exhausted her.
I crept quietly into our bedroom and, last thing, with both shifty-eyed Kipper and the bullyboys from HRF Holdings still out there somewhere, I put Sophie’s dressing-table chair under the door handle.
Just to be on the safe side.
