Hands down, p.3
Hands Down, page 3
I wanted to ask if she missed me.
‘She’s gone out with Mamma to help feed the chickens and collect the eggs.’
I smiled again. That was always her favourite thing to do when staying with her grandparents.
‘What did you say to her?’
‘Nothing. I just told her we were going to stay with Opa and Oma.’
‘Did she ask you why I’m not there?’
‘I told her you were busy with work and you might come out later.’
‘And will I?’
This time there was a very long pause from the other end of the line.
Into the silence, I couldn’t help myself. I asked the question that had been burning a huge hole through my brain for the past twenty hours.
‘Is there somebody else?’
‘What do you mean?’
I sighed.
‘You know exactly what I mean. Are you leaving me for somebody else? Is the hand thing just an excuse?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I’m not being stupid. You spend half of every week away from me. Are you living as another man’s lover during that time?’
‘Stop it, Sid. You’re being ridiculous.’
‘Marina, I need to know.’
‘In that case… no, there isn’t anyone else. There, are you happy now?’
Did I believe her?
I suddenly realized that I should never have asked. Would she have told me even if there were? So was I any the wiser? All I had done was further undermine the trust between us.
‘I’m going,’ she said, clearly angry, and she abruptly hung up.
I berated myself for being such a fool. I had spent most of the past twenty years investigating people, knowing if and when to ask the right telling questions, but here, with my own wife, I had committed the cardinal sin of exposing my own position without getting anything from her in return.
Marina was right, I had been stupid. Really stupid.
My plan to make life with Sid Halley more attractive than life without him had got off to a very poor start, and it was all my own fault.
* * *
I watched the eight o’clock BBC news bulletin.
The fire had been pushed to second place in the headlines by the high-profile resignation of a senior member of the cabinet who had been caught on CCTV kissing his secretary but the reporter in the red anorak was still at the scene in Middleham, which was now bathed in bright spring sunshine. Someone had clearly sent up a drone to give an aerial view, and a team of firemen in yellow helmets could be seen damping down the still-smouldering stable yard.
‘Three horses are now known to have died in the fire,’ said the reporter over pictures of the collapsed roof, ‘and the police are very worried about the racehorse trainer Gary Bremner, who hasn’t been seen since the early hours of the morning when he was spotted entering the burning building in a failed attempt to save the horses. A full police investigation of the fire, together with the search for human remains, will begin as soon as the fire brigade confirm that it is safe.’
What should I do?
Did I contact the North Yorkshire Police to tell them that Gary Bremner had called me last night, several hours prior to the fire, and told me that someone had threatened to kill his horses?
But, according to Gary, they would already know that. He told me he’d spoken to them about it but they had accused him of making it all up. I wondered what they would be thinking now.
Perhaps I would wait and see what the fire investigation threw up. However, whether it turned out to be an accident or arson, murder or manslaughter, I resolved that I would leave the investigation of it solely to the police. They wouldn’t welcome a private individual sticking his nose in, even though I had solved a few cases in the past after the boys in blue had tried and failed dismally.
I took a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered toast through to my office. Investigating wrongdoing might be my passion, and it had been my sole wage-earner in the past, but nowadays it was my dealings on the world’s financial markets that paid the ever-increasing gas bills. In spite of it being a Saturday, there were things I needed to do in the run-up to the end of the tax year on 5 April.
Why was it, I wondered, that the UK tax year was so out of step with the calendar one?
I sat at my desk and sent an email authorising my stockbroker to sell some of my portfolio, utilising my annual Capital Gains Tax allowance, and to use the funds to invest my maximum annual permitted amount in an ISA, a tax-free Individual Savings Account. If I left either until after the tax year ended, it would be too late.
But it took me ages. I wasn’t paying proper attention and I had to read carefully through the instruction twice, correcting several errors before I sent it.
My mind kept wandering to the two big topics in my head – Gary Bremner and Marina, especially Marina. They circled in my brain, like a pair of hungry hyenas stalking their prey, attacking my concentration whenever I let down my guard, so much so that I finally abandoned any notion of doing any further useful work. I was far too likely to make a mistake, and mistakes in financial dealings were always expensive.
I went back to the kitchen feeling lonely and miserable.
Saturday mornings were usually a highlight of the week. The house would be alive with activity – Saskia doing her music practice on the piano in the sitting room, while Marina would bake bread or cakes in the kitchen, and Rosie would run back and forward between them like a mad dog, never quite sure whether she wanted to be with Sassy, as was usual, or with Marina in the hope of a dropped titbit she could then consume.
Or maybe Marina would ask some of our neighbours to pop round for a coffee, especially Tim and Paula Gaucin and their daughter Annabel, Sassy’s best friend from school.
But none of that was happening today.
Instead, Rosie lay on her bed, looking up at me with a questioning expression, as if asking what had happened to her playmates.
Irish setters in general have an unjustified reputation for being stupid dogs but Rosie clearly realized that something wasn’t right. At one point, she came over and leaned against my leg, as if wanting to give me some comfort. Aged eight and a half, she was now getting to be quite an old lady in dog years. We’d had two other red setters in her lifetime, one older, one much younger, but they had both died early and Rosie now seemed content to be alone as the centre of attention.
I wondered if Saskia was missing Rosie more than she was missing me? And what would happen to our lovely dog if I couldn’t get my family back together again. Never mind Rosie, I suddenly thought. What would happen to me? I would be fifty in a couple of months. What would I do? Was I too old to start again? Oh, God.
I decided I had to stop feeling sorry for myself. There were worse things that could happen, like dying in a fire.
The thought made me reflect on the death of Thomas Cranmer, first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII, who, in spite of signing papers recanting his Protestant faith, was later burned at the stake as a heretic by the Catholic Queen Mary. In his final moments, he declared that Protestantism was the only true religion and he should never have signed the recantations, thrusting what he called his ‘unworthy’ signing hand first into the flames.
Life, and death, is clearly all about hands. That and religion.
Pushing such morbid images aside, I made a cheese and pickle sandwich for my lunch and marvelled, not for the first time, how wonderful it was to be able to spread butter on a piece of bread using my two hands – one holding the knife and the other the bread. With just one, you could find yourself chasing the bread all the way round the kitchen worktop. I knew. I’d done it hundreds of times.
I looked down at my left hand. It was undoubtedly part of me. Could I ever contemplate having it removed again, even to save my marriage?
I ate my sandwich and turned on the television for the BBC lunchtime news.
The Middleham stable fire had been shunted even further down the running order, mostly because there was nothing new to report – the cause of the fire was, as yet, unknown and there was still no sign of Gary Bremner.
Again I wondered if I should call the North Yorkshire police.
Maybe later.
I flicked over to a different channel to watch the racing from Doncaster.
Doncaster on this Saturday in late March, or the first in early April, had traditionally always been the first day of the flat-racing season in Britain; but now, in a world driven by gambling, flat racing takes place throughout the winter months on the ‘all-weather’ sand tracks. But Doncaster is still the first day of the year when the flat horses race on turf, with the Lincoln Handicap being the feature race, and the TV station was making a big deal of it.
Before the racing started, they included a segment about the fire in Middleham, the glum-faced presenters paying tribute to the ex-jockey turned trainer Gary Bremner, emphasising the fact that it was assumed he had died a hero’s death trying to save his horses.
They also named the three horses known to have died, one of which, Kicking Rupert, I’d heard of as it had finished second in the Cheltenham Gold Cup just two weeks previously. A big bold grey, much loved by the racing public, it had been Gary’s best horse. Such a waste.
My phone rang and I grabbed it in the hope it would be Marina.
It wasn’t.
‘So now do you believe me?’ said a squeaky northern voice.
4
On Sunday morning, having dropped Rosie off at Charles’s house, I drove the two hundred miles north to the Yorkshire Dales town of Middleham.
I thought back to the very strange telephone conversation I’d had with Gary Bremner the previous afternoon.
‘So now do you believe me?’ he’d said.
It was quite a shock but I kept my voice calm.
‘The police think you’re dead.’
‘And it’s better for me if they go on thinking that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because then they might investigate who killed my horses.’
‘Surely they’ll investigate that anyway, if the fire was arson.’
He’d laughed. ‘They won’t prove that. We’re not dealing with bloody amateurs here. There’ll be no incriminating empty petrol can or an open box of firelighters. Someone will have just tossed a burning match or a lit cigarette into the hay store and whoosh, up it goes. You watch. It will be concluded that the fire was accidental – they’ll say that either one of my stupid staff was smoking where he shouldn’t have been, or even that the hay spontaneously combusted. It can, you know, if it’s not been properly dried.’
I did know. Farmers are always being warned about the fire risk but that was usually in freshly cut hay, not in March.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Lie low for a bit. But I still need you here.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘Never you mind. If you don’t know where I am, you can’t be accused of withholding the information from the police.’
But should I tell them he was alive? I did know that. And they could probably trace his whereabouts from his phone signal.
‘What about the other horses? Those that survived.’
‘What about them?’
‘Don’t you need to look after them?’
He’d laughed again. ‘And where do you think I should do that? Have you seen the remains of my yard? They’ll all have to go somewhere else – probably already have. My fellow Middleham trainers will have probably been swarming round them all day like bees round a honey pot, trying to poach them for themselves. Especially as they all think I’m dead.’
‘But surely you’d get them all back when you reappear.’
There had been a pause.
‘I’m not really sure I want them back. Not now.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘To nail the bastards who did this. Nail them good and proper, preferably to a fence post and then leave them there to rot.’
I thought back to that former Northern Irish terrorist that Charles and I had had some unfortunate dealings with in the past, a man who’d had a penchant for nailing people to the floor and leaving them there to die of thirst. I shivered just thinking about it.
‘Do you have any idea at all who the bastards are?’ I asked Gary.
‘I’ll tell you when you get here.’
‘You seem very sure that I’ll come.’
‘Course you’ll come. Don’t you want to find out who killed my horses? The Sid Halley I know wouldn’t give up this opportunity.’
Maybe I was no longer the Sid Halley he knew.
After my hand injury forced my retirement from the saddle, I’d been employed by the detective agency only because it had a racing-mad owner.
Deep down, I knew that I’d been offered the job more out of pity for a now-crippled former champion jockey rather than in any expectation of me doing any real detecting. However, with the dramatic intervention of Charles Roland, I had been thrown into a situation where I’d had no choice but to investigate and, furthermore, I’d discovered that I had a flair for it.
Jump jockeys are renowned for accepting risks – without taking them they would never win anything – and that was the same attitude I employed in my pursuit of the wrongdoers, with no real concern for my own safety. So much so that, in fact, I had earned a bit of a reputation. In the criminal underworld it became well known that attacking Sid Halley in an attempt to stop him investigating something would be counterproductive – the harder you hit him, the harder he would come after you.
Only with the arrival of Marina in my life had things begun to change, and that was because the criminals had started hitting her instead. Whereas I could bear injuries to my own body – I had got used to those from racing falls – I couldn’t stand by and watch my girlfriend having her head split open.
So I had stopped my investigating and spent my time sitting at a desk, risking only my money rather than my own body, and those of my loved ones.
Only once had I come out of this self-imposed isolation, to deal with the Irish terrorist, and then I had immediately returned to my hermit-like existence. It’s what Marina had wanted, at least she had said so, loudly and often. She had constantly urged me to quit my investigating for the safety of her and Saskia.
So I had.
But it had obviously made Sid Halley rather a dull boy, and now Marina had left me. Would a return to the risk-taking, swashbuckling, superman-like Sid Halley, the ultimate symbol of truth, justice and hope, be more attractive to her as a mate?
Only one way to find out.
‘All right, I’ll come,’ I’d said, wondering if I was doing the right thing. ‘But I make no promises. If I feel that the police are more appropriate to carry out the investigation, we’ll leave it to them, okay?’
‘Attaboy.’
I could almost hear his smile coming down the line.
‘So how do I find you?’
‘How well do you know Middleham?’
‘Not at all. I went there a couple of times when I was riding but haven’t been since.’
‘Come to the marketplace and then take the road signposted towards Coverham. About three-quarters of a mile out of town there’s a big pond on your right. It’s called Pinker’s Pond. You can’t miss it. I’ll meet you there at noon. What sort of car do you drive?’
‘A dark-blue Discovery Sport.’
‘With that fancy number plate of yours?’
Several years ago, in a moment of madness, Marina had paid a small fortune to buy me the number plate MYS 1D, and had then spaced the letters illegally to read MY S1D.
‘How do you know about that?’ I asked.
‘Like I said before, I keep my eye on you. That plate’s too distinctive. Have you got anything else?’
I’d thought of Marina’s car sitting unused on the drive.
‘My wife has a grey Skoda. That’s if I can find the key.’
‘Perfect. Come in that. Park it well off the road near the pond and I’ll find you. And don’t let anyone see you. Wear a disguise of something. We don’t want to put the bastards on the alert, now, do we?’
I’d thought he was being rather overdramatic but here I was, at half past eleven, driving Marina’s grey Skoda into Middleham wearing dark glasses and with a cap pulled down over my forehead.
I had found the Skoda key thanks to my Christmas present to Marina – a NeverLoseIt tag, a fancy new electronic tracking device designed to help you find your stuff. She was always losing her car keys, indeed we had permanently lost one of them, so I had given her a bright-red leather key ring with the NeverLoseIt tag included, to ensure we didn’t lose the other.
On this occasion, she had left the key ring in the top drawer of her dressing table and the NeverLoseIt app had taken me straight there. I’d been worried that it might have shown the key to be in Fryslân but my fears had been unfounded.
I drove the Skoda past the wide Middleham cobbled marketplace, where there was a Sunday market in full swing, with two lines of brightly coloured stalls and lots of people milling around.
I pulled the cap down even further over my eyes.
The previous evening, I had looked up the town on the internet.
After the Norman invasion of 1066, great swathes of land in the area were given by William the Conqueror to his cousin Alan Rufus and the town itself was included in the Domesday Book, the great survey of England in 1086. But it was the building of Middleham Castle at the end of the twelfth century that put the town properly on the map, and it is still dominated by the medieval castle, although the buildings themselves are mostly ruins today, with no roofs.
The castle and the town became a centre for commerce and politics, especially during the lifetime of King Richard III, who spent many of his teenage years living as a guest at Middleham, and he later acquired the castle for himself by marrying the former owner’s daughter.
After Richard’s defeat and death in 1485, the castle became the property of the victorious Henry Tudor and remained owned by the Crown until it was sold by James I in 1604 but, by this time, the castle fabric was already in decline.
