Dead Cert Read online

  At this point, greatly disturbed, I began the walk back. It was already growing dark. I had been longer at the fence than I had realised, and when I at length reached the weighing room, intending to tell the Clerk of the Course about the wire, I found everyone except the caretaker had gone.

  The caretaker, who was old and bad-tempered and incessantly sucked his teeth, told me he did not know where the Clerk of the Course could be found. He said the racecourse manager had driven off towards the town five minutes earlier. He did not know where the manager had been going, nor when he would be back; and with a grumbling tale that he had five separate stoves besides the central boiler to see to, and that the fog was bad for his bronchitis, the caretaker shuffled purposefully off towards the dim murky bulk of the grandstand.

  Undecided, I watched him go. I ought, I knew, to tell someone in authority about the wire. But who? The Stewards who had been at the meeting were all on their way home, creeping wearily through the fog, unreachable. The manager had gone; the Clerk of the Course’s office, I discovered, was locked. It would take me a long time to locate any of them, persuade them to return to the racecourse and get them to drive down the course over the rough ground in the dark; and after that there would be discussion, repetition, statements. It would be hours before I could get away.

  Meanwhile Bill was fighting for his life in Maidenhead hospital, and I wanted profoundly to know if he were winning. Scilla faced racking hours of anxiety and I had promised to be with her as soon as I could. Already I had delayed too long. The wire, fogbound and firmly twisted round the post, would keep until tomorrow, I thought; but Bill might not.

  Bill’s Jaguar was alone in the car park. I climbed in, switched on the side lights and the fog lights and drove off. I turned left at the gates, went gingerly along the road for two miles, turned left again over the river, twisted through Maidenhead’s one way streets, and finally arrived at the hospital.

  There was no sign of Scilla in the brightly lit busy hall. I asked the porter.

  ‘Mrs Davidson? Husband a jockey? That’s right, she’s down there in the waiting room. Fourth door on the left.’

  I found her. Her dark eyes looked enormous, shadowed with grey smudges beneath them. All other colour had gone from her sad strained face, and she had taken off her frivolous hat.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. They just tell me not to worry.’ She was very close to tears.

  I sat down beside her and held her hand.

  ‘You’re a comfort, Alan,’ she said.

  Presently the door opened and a fair young doctor came in, stethoscope dangling.

  ‘Mrs Davidson, I think…’ he paused, ‘I think you should come and sit with your husband.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Not… very well. We are doing all we can.’ Turning to me he said, ‘Are you a relative?’

  ‘A friend. I am going to drive Mrs Davidson home.’

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Will you wait, or come back for her? Later this evening.’ There was meaning in his careful voice, his neutral words. I looked closely into his face, and I knew that Bill was dying.

  ‘I’ll wait.’

  ‘Good.’

  I waited for four hours, getting to know intimately the pattern of the curtains and the cracks in the brown linoleum. Mostly, I thought about wire.

  At last a nurse came, serious, young, pretty.

  ‘I am so sorry… Major Davidson is dead.’

  Mrs Davidson would like me to go and see him, she said, if I would follow her. She took me down the long corridors, and into a white room, not very big, where Scilla sat beside the single bed.

  Scilla looked up at me. She couldn’t speak.

  Bill lay there, grey and quiet, finished. The best friend a man could wish for.

  TWO

  Early next morning I drove Scilla, worn out from the vigil she had insisted on keeping all night beside Bill’s body, and heavily drugged now with sedatives, home to the Cotswolds. The children came out and met her on the doorstep, their three faces solemn and round-eyed. Behind them stood Joan, the briskly competent girl who looked after them, and to whom I had telephoned the news the evening before.

  There on the step Scilla sat down and wept. The children knelt and sat beside her, putting their arms round her, doing their best to comfort a grief they could only dimly understand.

  Presently Scilla went upstairs to bed. I drew the curtains for her and tucked her in, and kissed her cheek. She was exhausted and very sleepy, and I hoped it would be many hours before she woke again.

  I went along to my own room and changed my clothes. Downstairs I found Joan putting coffee, bacon and eggs and hot rolls for me on the kitchen table. I gave the children the chocolate bars I had bought for them the previous morning (how very long ago it seemed) and they sat with me, munching, while I ate my breakfast. Joan poured herself some coffee.

  ‘Alan?’ said William. He was five, the youngest, and he would never go on speaking until you said ‘Yes?’ to show you were listening.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘What happened to Daddy?’

  So I told them about it, all of it except the wire.

  They were unusually silent for a while. Then Henry, just eight, asked calmly, ‘Is he going to be buried or burnt?’

  Before I could answer, he and his elder sister Polly launched into a heated and astonishingly well-informed discussion about the respective merits of burial and cremation. I was horrified, but relieved too, and Joan, catching my eye, was hard put to it not to laugh.

  The innocent toughness of their conversation started me on my way back to Maidenhead in a more cheerful frame of mind. I put Bill’s big car in the garage and set off in my own little dark blue Lotus. The fog had completely gone, but I drove slowly (for me), working out what was best to do.

  First I called at the hospital. I collected Bill’s clothes, signed forms, made arrangements. There was to be a routine post mortem examination the next day.

  It was Sunday. I drove to the racecourse, but the gates were locked. Back in the town the Clerk of the Course’s office was shut and empty. I telephoned his home, but there was no answer.

  After some hesitation I rang up the Senior Steward of the National Hunt Committee, going straight to the top steeplechase authority. Sir Creswell Stampe’s butler said he would see if Sir Creswell was available. I said it was very important that I should speak with him. Presently he came on the line.

  ‘I certainly hope what you have to say is very important, Mr York. I am in the middle of luncheon with my guests.’

  ‘Have you heard, sir, that Major Davidson died yesterday evening?’

  ‘Yes. I’m very sorry about it, very sorry indeed.’ He waited. I took a deep breath.

  ‘His fall wasn’t an accident,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Major Davidson’s horse was brought down by wire,’ I said.

  I told him about my search at the fence, and what I had found there.

  ‘You have let Mr Dace know about this?’ he asked. Mr Dace was the Clerk of the Course.

  I explained that I had been unable to find him.

  ‘So you rang me. I see.’ He paused. ‘Well, Mr York, if you are right, this is too serious to be dealt with entirely by the National Hunt Committee. I think you should inform the police in Maidenhead without delay. Let me know this evening, without fail, what is happening. I will try to get in touch with Mr Dace.’

  I put down the receiver. The buck had been passed, I thought. I could imagine the Stampe roast beef congealing on the plate while Sir Creswell set the wires humming.

  The police station in the deserted Sunday street was dark, dusty-looking and uninviting. I went in. There were three desks behind the counter, and at one of them sat a young constable reading a newspaper of the juicier sort. Keeping up with his crime, I reflected.

  ‘Can I help you sir?’ he said, getting up.

  ‘Is there anyone else
here?’ I asked. ‘I mean, someone senior? It’s about a… a death.’

  ‘Just a minute sir.’ He went out of a door at the back, and returned to say, ‘Will you come in here, please?’

  He stood aside to let me into a little inner office, and shut the door behind me.

  The man who rose to his feet was small for a policeman, thick-set, dark, and in his late thirties. He looked more of a fighter than a thinker, but I found later that his brain matched his physique. His desk was littered with papers and heavy looking law books. The gas fire had made a comfortable warm fug, and his ashtray was overflowing. He, too, was spending his Sunday afternoon reading up crime.

  ‘Good afternoon. I am Inspector Lodge,’ he said. He gestured to a chair facing his desk, asking me to sit down. He sat down again himself, and began to shape his papers into neat piles.

  ‘You have come about a death?’ My own words, repeated, sounded foolish, but his tone was matter-of-fact.

  ‘It’s about a Major Davidson…’ I began.

  ‘Oh yes. We had a report. He died in the hospital last night after a fall at the races.’ He waited politely for me to go on.

  ‘That fall was engineered,’ I said bluntly.

  Inspector Lodge looked at me steadily, then drew a sheet of paper out of a drawer, unscrewed his fountain pen, and wrote, I could see, the date and the time. A methodical man.

  ‘I think we had better start at the beginning,’ he said. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Alan York.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Twenty-four.’

  ‘Address?’

  I gave Davidsons’ address, explaining whose it was, and that I lived there a good deal.

  ‘Where is your own home?’

  ‘In Southern Rhodesia,’ I said. ‘On a cattle station near a village called Induna, about fifteen miles from Bulawayo.’

  ‘Occupation?’

  ‘I represent my father in his London office.’

  ‘And your father’s business?’

  ‘The Bailey York Trading Company.’

  ‘What do you trade in?’ asked Lodge.

  ‘Copper, lead, cattle. Anything and everything. We’re transporters mainly.’ I said.

  He wrote it all down, in quick distinctive script.

  ‘Now then,’ he put down the pen, ‘what is it all about?’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s about,’ I said, ‘but this is what happened.’ I told him the whole thing. He listened without interrupting, then he said, ‘What made you even begin to suspect that this was not a normal fall?’

  ‘Admiral is the safest jumper there is. He’s surefooted, like a cat. He doesn’t make mistakes.’

  But I could see from his politely surprised expression that he knew little, if anything, about steeplechasing, and thought that one horse was as likely to fall as another.

  I tried again. ‘Admiral is brilliant over fences. He would never fall like that, going into an easy fence in his own time, not being pressed. He took off perfectly. I saw him. That fall was unnatural. It looked to me as though something had been used to bring him down. I thought it might be wire, and I went back to look, and it was. That’s all.’

  ‘Hm. Was the horse likely to win?’ asked Lodge.

  ‘Certain,’ I said.

  ‘And who did win?’

  ‘I did,’ I said.

  Lodge paused, and bit the end of his pen.

  ‘How do the racecourse attendants get their jobs?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t really know. They are casual staff, taken on for the meeting, I think,’ I said.

  ‘Why would a racecourse attendant wish to harm Major Davidson?’ He said this naively, and I looked at him sharply.

  ‘Do you think I have made it all up?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose I don’t. Perhaps I should have said, how difficult would it be for someone who wished to harm Major Davidson to get taken on as a racecourse attendant?’

  ‘Easy,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll have to find out.’ He reflected. ‘It’s a very chancy way to murder a man.’

  ‘Whoever planned it can’t have meant to kill him,’ I said flatly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it was so unlikely that he would die. I should think it was simply meant to stop him winning.’

  ‘Why was such a fall unlikely to result in death?’ said Lodge. ‘It sounds highly dangerous to me.’

  I said: ‘It could have been meant to injure him, I suppose. Usually, when a horse is going fast and hits a fence hard when you’re not expecting it, you get catapulted out of the saddle. You fly through the air and hit the ground way out in front of where your horse falls. That may do a lot of damage, but it doesn’t often kill. But Bill Davidson wasn’t flung off forwards. His toe may have stuck in his stirrup, though that’s not very likely. Perhaps the wire caught round his leg and pulled him back. Anyway, he fell straight down and his horse crashed on top of him. Even then it was sheer bad luck that the saddle tree hit him in the stomach. You couldn’t even hope to kill a man like that on purpose.’

  ‘I see. You seem to have given it some thought.’

  ‘Yes.’ The pattern of the hospital waiting room curtains, the brown linoleum, came back into my mind in association.

  ‘Can you think of anyone who might wish to hurt Major Davidson?’ asked Lodge.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He was very well liked.’

  Lodge got up and stretched. ‘We’ll go and have a look at your wire,’ he said. He put his head out into the big office. ‘Wright, go and see if Hawkins is there, and tell him I want a car if there’s one available.’

  There was a car. Hawkins (I presumed) drove; I sat in the back with Lodge. The main gates of the racecourse were still locked, but there were ways and means, I found. A police key opened another, inconspicuous, gate in the wooden fence.

  ‘In case of fire,’ said Lodge, seeing my sideways look.

  There was no one about in the racecourse buildings: the manager was out. Hawkins drove over the course into the centre and headed down towards the farthest fence. We bumped a good deal on the uneven ground. The car drew up just short of the inside wing, and Lodge and I climbed out.

  I led the way past the fence to the outer wing.

  ‘The wire is over here,’ I said.

  But I was wrong.

  There was the post, the wing, the long grass, the birch fence. And no coil of wire.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right fence?’ said Lodge.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. We stood looking at the course set out in front of us. We were at the very far end, the stands a blurred massive block in the distance. The fence by which we stood was alone on a short straight between two curves, and the nearest fence to us was three hundred yards to the left, round a shallow bend.

  ‘You jump that fence,’ I said, pointing away to it. ‘Then there’s quite a long run, as you can see, to this one.’ I patted the fence beside us. ‘Then twenty yards after we land over this one there is that sharpish left turn into the straight. The next fence is some way up the straight, to allow the horses to balance themselves properly after coming round the bend, before they have to jump. It’s a good course.’

  ‘You couldn’t have made a mistake in the mist?’

  ‘No. This is the fence,’ I said.

  Lodge sighed. ‘Well, we’ll take a closer look.’

  But all there was to be seen was a shallow groove on the once white inner post, and a deeper groove on the outer post, where the wire had bitten into the wood. Both grooves needed looking for and would ordinarily have been unnoticed. Both were at the same level, six feet, six inches from the ground.

  ‘Very inconclusive indeed,’ said Lodge.

  We went back to Maidenhead in silence. Glum and feeling foolish, I knew now that even though I could reach no one in authority, I should have found someone, anyone, even the caretaker, the day before, to go back to the fence with me, after I had found the wire, to see it in its place. A witnes
s who had seen wire fastened to a fence, even though it would have been dark and foggy, even though perhaps he could not swear at which fence he had seen it, would definitely have been better than no witness at all. I tried to console myself with the possibility that the attendant had been returning to the fence with his wire clippers at the same time that I was walking back to the stands, and that even if I had returned at once with a witness, it would already have been too late.

  From Maidenhead police station I called Sir Creswell Stampe. I had parted him this time, he said, from his toasted muffins. The news that the wire had disappeared didn’t please him either.

  ‘You should have got someone else to see it at once. Photographed it. Removed it. We can’t proceed without evidence. I can’t think why you didn’t have sense enough to act more quickly, either. You have been very irresponsible, Mr York.’ And with these few kind words he put down his receiver.

  Depressed, I drove home.

  I put my head quietly round Scilla’s door. Her room was dark, but I could hear her even breathing. She was still sound asleep.

  Downstairs Joan and the children were sitting on the floor in front of the welcoming log fire playing poker. I had introduced them to the game one rainy day when the children were tired of snap and rummy and had been behaving very badly, quarrelling and shouting and raising tempers all round. Poker, the hitherto mysterious game of the cowboys in Westerns, had worked a miracle.

  Henry developed in a few weeks into the sort of player you wouldn’t sit down with twice without careful thought. His razor-sharp mathematical mind knew the odds to a fraction against any particular card turning up: his visual memory was formidable; and his air of slight bewilderment, calculated to be misleading, led many an unsuspecting adult straight into his traps. I admired Henry. He could out-bluff an angel.

  Polly played well enough for me to be sure she would never lose continually in ordinary company, and even William knew a running flush from a full house.