Dick Francis's Damage (12 page)

“Been pocketing any old notes?” Daniel asked.

“Sadly not,” I said to him. “I mostly sit at a desk recording numbers.”

The other two looked on quizzically.

“Tony here has a job in the Bank of England tearing up money that's got too old.”

I smiled. “Something like that. I don't actually tear it up. I help bundle it into packages to be sent to a furnace for destruction.”

“It must really save on the Bank's fuel bill to burn banknotes to heat the place,” said Mike with a grimace. “Talk about burning government money.”

“Can't you swap a bundle of newspaper for a stack of fifties?” said John. “No one would know, surely.”

“They would when the fifties turned up again at the bank with numbers that should have already been destroyed.”

I needed to change the subject. I'd only made up the Bank of
England story so that Daniel couldn't have been able to phone me at work.

“What do you guys do?” I asked.

“I work with Daniel at Hawthorn's,” John said. “I'm a broker.” He made it sound seductive.

“And I'm at Lloyd's,” said Mike, “as a managing agent for syndicates.” He took a business card from his breast pocket and handed it over in a manner that suggested he had done the same thing many times before. I looked down at it.
Lloyd's of London, Michael Kennedy, Managing Agent
, complete with his office address and cell number. Convenient, I thought. One thing less I needed to find out.

“Sounds interesting,” I said.

The conversation continued for a while about jobs, and I bought Daniel another drink.

“What are you doing this evening?” Daniel asked. “We go to the gym every Wednesday. Do you fancy joining us?”

I remembered back to Daniel's Facebook page. One of his
Likes
had been the Fit Man gym in Soho, the one with the big sauna.

“Oh, do come,” John said. “It's great fun. And we might get to see that lovely body of yours.” He reached down and ran his fingers up the inside of my thigh.

I wondered just how far I was expected to go to save the judicial career of my cantankerous brother-in-law.

O
n Thursday morning I took the Tube to Bethnal Green to see Ken Calderfield. I wanted to show him some video footage.

The previous evening I'd managed to avoid a visit to the gym in Soho, but not without a struggle.

Daniel, Mike and especially John had been very insistent that I should join them.

“I have things to do,” I said. “And my mother will have my dinner ready.”

As an excuse, it wasn't the best, but it was all I could come up with on the spur of the moment.

They all laughed at me.

“Still living at home, are you? At your age?”

They laughed again, but it simply increased John's determination to help me “break free” from my mother's apron strings.

“Come with us,” he said, putting his arm around my waist
inside my jacket. “We'll show you a good time. Make you into a real man.”

He slid his hand down and squeezed my bottom, looking into my eyes and smiling at me all the while.

At that point, the phone rang in my pocket. I had been waiting for it to do so. I had had a fake-call app installed and I'd set it to make my phone ring ten minutes after I'd entered the pub. I used it often in such circumstances just in case I needed an excuse to leave or, as in this case, a reason to get my smartphone out.

I pulled myself away from John's wandering hands and answered the fake call, putting the phone to my ear while, at the same time, switching on the phone's built-in camera to record my surroundings.

I turned away from the others as if making the call more private but actually to ensure that all three of them featured large in the video I was taking.

I spoke into the phone to my nonexistent and long-dead mother. “Yes, mom. I'm just having a quick drink with some friends, but I'll be home by seven. Yes, mom, I will. I promise. See you soon. Yes, mom, I love you too. Bye for now.”

The three of them laughed at me again, but I kept the phone in my hand. And perhaps they wouldn't have been laughing so much if they'd known I was still recording their faces in high-definition close-up.

“Sorry, guys,” I said. “I've got to go.”

“That's a real shame,” said John. “I'd rather fancied getting my hands properly on that bottom of yours.”

“Daniel's got some ice, if you'd like it,” Mike said.

“Ice? In my beer?”

“Not that sort of ice,” Daniel said, laughing. “Proper ice. One hundred percent pure Tina. You can have your first wrap for just a tenner if you come with us.”

“Sorry,” I said again. “Not this time. My mom will be waiting.”

I downed the last of my beer, picked up my backpack and dragged myself out of John's reach.

“See you again sometime.” Daniel said it without much hope or expectation in his voice.

But he could count on it.

I switched off the camera as I walked out into the street.

—

“THAT'S DANIEL!”
Ken said excitedly as I showed him the video. “How did you find him?”

“What about the other two?” I asked. “Do you recognize either of them?”

He looked closely at the screen.

“Yes,” he said. “That one's called John.” He pointed at the shaven-headed man. “And I recognize the other one too but I'm not sure of his name.”

“It's Mike,” I said. “Mike Kennedy. He works at Lloyd's of London. Were these two of the men you met at the Fit Man gym?'

“Yes.” Ken said it uneasily as if embarrassed. “How did you find them?”

“I traced Daniel to where he works and met the others with him.”

I played another video to him.

He stared at the screen of my phone with his eyes almost popping out of his head in disbelief.

The images showed the front of the gym in Greek Street with a brightly lit sign above the door together with several pictures of muscular young men wearing nothing but small white towels around their waists.

“Is this the place?” I asked.

“Y-yes?” Ken stammered, clearly shocked. “Oh God. Please don't show my dad.”

“Are you sure you met those men in this gym, or did they take you there?”

“Does it matter?” he mumbled, clearly not wanting to talk about it.

“It might,” I said. “I actually met them in a pub.”

He nodded. “I did too. Then they took me to the gym. Almost dragged me there. It was John mainly—he couldn't keep his bloody hands off me.” He'd nearly done the same to me and I was older, more street-smart, and emotionally stronger than Ken.

“But you've been back since then, haven't you?” I said.

He looked down as if unwilling to answer.

“Ken,” I said. “I'm not judging you. You're a grown man who can make his own decisions about what you do. I'm just trying to find out the facts so I can help you.”

“I went back several times before all this blew up,” he said finally. “I enjoyed going. It was the only place where I felt I could be myself, be free.”

“And did you ever see Daniel or Mike or John on those visits?”

“Daniel was there sometimes. I don't remember about the others. Tell me what Daniel said about his statement to the police.”

“I haven't asked him about that yet. But I will.”

I would maybe also talk to shaven-headed John to ask why
he thought it reasonable to proposition young men in pubs for sex.

Shaven-headed John's full name was Jonathan George McClure and he lived not that far away from me in a flat on Uxbridge Road overlooking Shepherd's Bush Green. I knew because I'd followed him home the previous evening.

I'd left The William Ball pub soon after six o'clock, but the three men didn't arrive at the gym until nearly nine.

I had spent some of the intervening time in the gents of the St. Paul's Hotel, removing my stuck-on facial hair and exchanging my jacket and tie for a black roll-neck sweater and a baseball cap from my backpack.

Fortunately, it was a mild evening, so I sat outside a Greek Street café drinking endless coffee while I waited.

I chose a table directly under an overhanging streetlight so that the peak of the baseball cap would throw my eyes into darker shadow. It was similar to observing someone from inside a stationary car—it was always better to park immediately beneath a light. Its brightness on the exterior of the car somehow made the darkness of the interior deeper and any occupant more difficult to see.

In this case it was my eyes that I wanted to be invisible. It was always the eyes that gave people away, in terms of both recognition and emotion.

Eyes were the picture windows to the soul.

The three men arrived at the gym at eight-fifty, chatting and joking, almost hyper in their excitement, and they were not alone. They had another, much younger man with them, and John was guiding the seemingly reluctant individual eagerly towards the door. Not one of them was paying any attention to the customers at the café across the road.

I settled in for a long night, moving at one point from the café to the bar next door, where I could sit in the window and watch the gym entrance.

Shaven-headed John appeared first, at twenty minutes past ten, exiting the gym and walking briskly away without a backwards glance. I followed him across Soho Square, right into Oxford Street and along to Tottenham Court Road tube station, where he caught a Central Line train heading westwards.

He never once looked behind him, and, even though we were in the same car on the train, he didn't once glance in my direction as I observed him via his reflection in the window of the interconnecting door.

As we traveled out from the city center the number of passengers decreased as more people left the train than got on, but there were still enough to blend into as we approached Shepherd's Bush Station, where John stood up and alighted.

I pulled the baseball cap farther down over my eyes as I followed him up the escalator to street level, but, again, he never looked around. I tailed him out of the station and along Uxbridge Road to a point where he stopped and used a key to open a front door squeezed between an optician and a fast-food outlet.

I watched from across the road as the lights went on in the first floor and John appeared at the window to close the curtains. I walked over to the front door. There were two bell buttons, presumably for two flats. One had no name displayed in the space provided next to it, but the other did—
McClure
.

Like an unruly schoolboy, I pressed the McClure button for two seconds and then ran away across the road onto Shepherd's Bush Green and the dark shadows. I stood behind a tree and watched as shaven-headed John opened the door and looked
around. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and peered both ways along Uxbridge Road before retreating inside again and closing the door.

John McClure.

When I'd finally arrived home, I used the Internet to look him up on the electoral register and also on Facebook and Twitter.

John McClure was not only brazen in pubs, he was also somewhat indiscreet on social media.

There were a mass of photographs of him in various states of undress and also numerous posts about his “conquests,” with graphic descriptions of his sexual encounters. Why would anyone want to make such information public? Clearly, it was his way of bragging.

At least Kenneth Calderfield was a little more discreet about his private life.

“
Please
don't tell my dad about the gym,” he pleaded once more. “I'm so ashamed.”

“Don't be ashamed for being gay,” I said.

“I'm not. But I am ashamed for going to that place. I'd never done anything like that before.”

But he had done it several times since.

“How was it, then,” I asked, “that you had a party here in your flat for the men you met at the gym?”

“It was all Daniel's idea. He wouldn't stop talking about it. He organized it and asked his friends to come. I couldn't stop him.” His shoulders slumped. “What a fucking mess. I feel so bloody stupid. I didn't want the party in the first place, but Daniel absolutely insisted. I wish I'd never given in to him.” He was almost in tears again. “My dad will kill me.”

“Don't worry, Ken,” I said, “I'm sure it won't be that bad.”

—

I ARRIVED
at Scrutton's Club in St. James's at five to nine on Friday morning in time for the BHA meeting.

The Board members were sitting around a large conference table when Crispin Larson and I came into the room and, by the look of the empty coffee cups, they had been there for a while.

The chairman, Roger Vincent, called the meeting back to order by tapping his knuckles on the table. I looked around at the familiar faces. Ian Tulloch again sat next to Bill Ripley, with my champion Neil Wallinger on his other side and Piers Pottinger beyond him next to George Searle. Howard Lever, Stephen Kohli, Crispin Larson and I—“the home team,” as it were—were together in a row facing the chairman and Charles Payne.

“So what have you discovered?” asked Ian Tulloch, his tone of voice indicating that he didn't expect it to be very much.

“The methylphenidate was given to the horses via the water supply in the racetrack stables. Analysis has shown that all of the water samples I collected from the Cheltenham stables had a concentration high enough to provide the positive dope tests in horses that had drunk only a small quantity. None of the three horses that tested negative at Cheltenham had been given any of the stable water to drink.”

Crispin had given me the results outside in the hall just seconds before we came in. He'd also confirmed that initial tests had shown that Graham Perry's horses had distinct traces of methylphenidate in their hair samples.

Was that another coincidence or were we dealing with the same man?

“How easy is it to obtain this methyl stuff?” Howard Lever asked.

“Pretty easy,” I said. “It is controlled, which means you should require a doctor's prescription to get it, but it is widely available on the Internet without one. And it is readily soluble in water. I believe it was added to the water storage tank above the stable manager's office at Cheltenham. I assume a similar situation occurred at Newbury, but I haven't yet checked.”

“On Wednesday,” Howard Lever added, “I instructed that until further notice, all horses in all the British racetrack stables are to be given water to drink only from special trucks that are filled at secret locations well away from the racetracks.”

There were nods of agreement around the table.

“Does that mean we've defeated this man?” asked Charles Payne. “And we don't need to pay him anything?”

“It may not be as easy as that,” Crispin said. “We are aware—that is, Jeff and I are aware—that methylphenidate has also been administered to other horses at their home stables, and we are of the opinion that it's likely to have been done by the same man.”

“Whose stables?” Stephen Kohli demanded, leaning forward to look down the table at Crispin and me.

Crispin was about to speak again when I cut him off.

“We would prefer not to say at present.”

“But you must,” spluttered Stephen in disbelief. “I insist. I should have been informed so that the appropriate action could be initiated.”

By “appropriate action,” I assumed, he meant the setting up of a disciplinary panel and the subsequent disqualification of the trainer. Stephen was apt to assume that all participants in the sport were trying to break the rules at all times. Certainly the
current BHA Rules of Racing handbook, produced under his stewardship, seemed to me to be largely a list of penalties that would be handed out for even the slightest misdemeanor, intentional or otherwise.

“I obtained the test results only this morning,” Crispin said. “And the trainer in question is unaware that samples have been taken from his horses.”