Tip Off (24 page)

I nodded keenly.

‘They managed to get hold of a urine sample from that horse Free Willy that Connor napped at Cheltenham last Friday – the one that dumped its rider,' she said.

‘A sample of urine from a Free Willy? Sounds right,' I laughed.

‘For God's sake, Simon,' Matt snapped. ‘Try to be serious for a few minutes.'

‘Matt,' Sara protested, ‘don't be such a miserable git. Anyway,' she turned back to me, ‘they couriered the sample to the lab in Florida, and the result came back yesterday. Apparently the horse was clean as a whistle.'

‘I never really thought it wouldn't be,' I said.

‘But listen to this,' she went on excitedly. ‘They also sent a sample from another runner – the second favourite, I think – and it was stuffed full of Demosedan!'

‘Bloody hell!' I stared at her. ‘Wasn't it masked?'

‘No, not as far as we know, but the animal was passed totally clean in the post-race test at Newmarket.'

‘I don't believe it!' I gasped.

‘It's true,' Matt said. ‘Sara saw the American result for herself.' Matt turned to me. ‘What does Demosedan do?'

‘It's a serious sedative. Just half a cc in a muscle would slow a horse right down. And it only takes a couple of minutes to work.' I put a hand to my forehead, trying to make sense of what had been happening. ‘So the winner hadn't been doped, and another horse had. But they don't always test the winners, so why did they choose Free Willy and this other horse?'

‘We've been over this already,' Matt said tetchily. ‘We've established no common factor between all the naps, including Jockey Club stewards, local stewards and stipes, who do the choosing. It's got to be the lab, yet we ran a check on everybody there after they sent us the personnel list, didn't we?'

Matt opened up the file he'd been building on the Jockey Club case and leafed through the stack of notes and print-outs that had accumulated in it. ‘We asked the Jockey Club to verify security clearance on all parties who might have been involved in monitoring and checking, yes,' he confirmed, ‘and all staff at the Equine Forensic Lab were cleared.'

‘We'll have to check them individually.'

‘Agreed, but we won't get anywhere with that today. The place isn't open on Saturdays.'

I turned to Sara. ‘What are the chances that either the wrong sample was sent to the States, or that the American lab got it wrong?'

‘As far as I can tell, absolutely negligible. You've got to work on the basis that this horse and some of the other runners in the races where the naps won were well and truly doped. But you've been thinking along doping lines for some time, haven't you?'

‘For want of any other logical explanation, yes. But we were always stuck with the problem of how they weren't caught by the Forensic Lab. Maybe we should go and see them again.'

‘Our first priority's to get our hands on this photographer and see if he's noticed anything,' Matt said.

I nodded, and picked up the phone to dial Connor McDonagh's line.

Three minutes later, I put the phone down with a satisfied smile. ‘Good news. We've only got to go to Newbury – Tahiti Bride in the novice hurdle. We'd better get hold of Dougie and Jack. We'll need a couple of fresh faces.'

 

There was no sign of either target until Tahiti Bride's race. Matt spotted the photographer first and, almost immediately afterwards, the man Larry had lost at Ascot, both down by the two-mile hurdle start.

Whatever the photographer was doing, it looked to us from where we stood in the stands as if the other man was following him. Matt pointed him out to Dougie and Jack who made their way down to the side of the track so that they wouldn't lose sight of him.

There was a slight mist across the course, and soon after the start the runners disappeared from sight on the far side. When they came back into view, I could see Tahiti Bride's colours leading the pack towards the second last flight. A minute later, she hurtled past the post to huge applause. Matt and I walked briskly from the Members' stand to the unsaddling enclosure, when Dougie's voice crackled over my radio.

‘The camera man's heading for the car-park, and so's the other.'

Matt grabbed the radio. ‘Dougie – stop the second man! Any way you like, but just get him off the scent. And tell Jack to follow the photographer. We're coming through to the car-park.'

A moment later we had the photographer, his tail and Dougie in sight, but from the way he was moving, it looked as if the photographer already sensed that something was wrong. His pace had increased until he was almost running. He was heading straight towards us as we turned and ambled slowly in the same direction.

We could hear his breathing, the irregular rhythm of an anxious man, as he gained on us. A few moments later he brushed right by Matt, who tripped him, so that he fell out of sight between two cars. He hit the ground hard and was grunting with pain.

Matt swiftly leaned down and grabbed the camera, but the man threw out a hand and grasped the leather strap. For an instant he must have thought he had it but then the buckle gave way under the strain and Matt ran off into the crowd.

I turned on my heel and walked briskly back to my car. I got in and drove for the exit where Matt was waiting. We'd seen no sign of the photographer by the time we passed through the gates and were heading back towards the A4. I hoped Dougie was still on to him.

Matt chucked the photographic bag on the rear seat and pulled out his own radio.

‘Jack? How are you doing?'

‘Okay. I stopped yer man.' Jack's unruffled cockney voice echoed over the short waves. ‘'E wasn't happy. Turns out 'e's with Jockey Club security.'

‘Shit!' Matt spat out the word with feeling. ‘Why didn't we think of that! Jack, does he know who you are or who you're working for?'

‘No way,' Jack chuckled. ‘'E just knows some drunken geezer barged into 'im and sort of fell on top of 'im. There's no sign of our camera man now.'

‘What about Dougie?'

‘Nor 'im.'

We didn't hear anything from either man during the half an hour it took us to get back to our office. When we arrived there, the first thing I did was to open up the back of the camera to take out the film.

There wasn't one.

‘He must have taken it out already,' Matt said, ‘I'll look in the bag.'

He tipped the contents of the large canvas hold-all on to a table. Frustratingly, there was no film there either. We'd been assuming that this would give us some clue to what had been going on.

I picked up the camera – a Leica with the massive 800mm lens I had seen through my binoculars. I opened the back again to inspect it more closely.

Where the film should have been, there was a miniature compressed gas canister.

I showed Matt. ‘What the hell do you suppose this is?'

‘I don't know,' he admitted. ‘Maybe it's something to do with the motordrive.' He turned back to the pile of objects that had come out of the bag. ‘There are four more of them here . . . and what are these?' He had picked up and opened a small plain tin with a screw lid, like an old-fashioned lozenge tin. He tipped it over on the table and poured out a dozen metal pellets, about ten millimetres in diameter, each with a small pointed glass capsule on the front.

I stared at them, then back at the camera in my hand. Slowly I turned it over to remove the cap over the long lens, and revealed not a glass lens, but a flat, matt black metal disc, in the centre of which was a circular aperture, about ten millimetres across.

‘Good God!' I held it for Matt to see. ‘This isn't a camera, it's some kind of gun – for firing these little capsules.' I nodded at the pellets.

Matt took the weapon. After five minutes of fiddling about with it, replacing what turned out to be a spent cylinder with a fresh one, he looked through what was obviously a sighting aperture and fired a capsule somewhere into the bushes below the window of my office.

‘I guess the sights have been adjusted to perform at an optimum distance, maybe ten yards or so, which is as close as he could reasonably expect to get to the runners at the start. How big a target area would he have?'

‘I don't know for certain,' I admitted. ‘I'm not a vet, but generally if you are giving a horse a booster, it has to be in a vein. Otherwise something like dope can go into any muscle, though they tend to do it in the quarters.'

Matt picked up another of the pellets. ‘These little capsules would be more or less invisible, I suppose. I presume they just break off and release whatever's in them straight into the blood stream, and from there it would take just a few seconds to get to the heart.'

I shrugged. This was uncharted territory for me. ‘Sounds right. I guess we and the Jockey Club man must have got on to the photographer at just about the same time.'

Matt nodded. ‘And Lincoln was there already – or was he part of it?'

‘There was no sign of him at Newbury today and Larry hasn't called in with a sighting in London, has he?'

 

When Matt had gone back to Henley to meet up with Sara, I rang Wetherdown. Frank Gurney answered.

‘It's Simon here. How's Jane?'

‘So-so. I'm taking her out to dinner later. I think she'd benefit from seeing a few other people around.'

‘I was going to come over to see her and pick up Emma.'

‘The lovely Emma has gone back to Ivydene.'

I thought I could detect a hint of wistfulness in his voice. ‘I'll go there, then,' I said. ‘Give Jane my love.'

‘I will. And, Simon, we ought to talk again – sometime in the next few days?'

‘Whenever you like.'

‘Okay. I'm not going back to France for a while so if nothing else comes up in the meantime, let's be in touch next week.'

I put the phone down with a feeling that Frank was a man who didn't waste people's time. Anything he wanted to tell me would be enlightening.

Before I drove into Ivydene, I phoned Emma to let her know I was coming.

‘Good,' she said. ‘My father's here, and he's not in a good mood.'

That much was obvious the moment I walked into the big black-and-white tiled hall of Lord Tintern's house. He cornered me there before I'd even seen Emma.

‘I'd like a word with you,' he said without a glimmer of his normal charm, and opened the door to his study.

I could, I supposed, have refused to go, but I thought I might as well hear what he had to say now and get it over with.

Inside the room he made no attempt to offer me a seat and came straight to the point. ‘Did you or did you not receive a fax from Portman Square at the beginning of the week?'

‘Confirming your instruction to cease our investigations?'

He nodded curtly.

‘Yes, we did.'

‘Then why have you ignored it?' he rasped.

‘We haven't,' I said simply. ‘We sent a final report and account and, as far as we're concerned, we aren't acting for the Jockey Club in any capacity at all.'

‘Why, then, were you interfering with a Jockey Club official going about his business at Newbury today?'

I was annoyed that he'd already worked that out, but there didn't seem to be any point in denying it was us. ‘We've been instructed by another client to examine the circumstances surrounding Toby's death,' I said calmly. ‘We had no idea the man you're talking about was one of your people. We'd never seen him before.'

‘You'd never seen him before because he's newly appointed. I deliberately wanted a new face to handle this because you people got nowhere and this absurd string of winners hasn't dried up. I've come in for some very sharp criticism for hiring you and your gung-ho partner. And now, just when one of our own people looks as though he's getting somewhere, you stick your oar in and we lose our suspect.' He glared at me. ‘Am I right?'

‘Up to a point,' I said. ‘But do you think the people responsible will still try to carry on what they were doing?' I was fishing; I wanted to know just how much Tintern's appointee had discovered.

‘Maybe not,' he said, ‘for the moment, but we need to produce a culprit and thanks to you, that's going to be very difficult.'

‘I can only say I'm sorry if we've hampered your investigations, but I think you'll find we did nothing we weren't entitled to.'

‘I wouldn't be so sure. Somebody assaulted our man, and I strongly suspect you had other people out on the course where they shouldn't have been.' He paused. When he started to speak again, his manner was milder. ‘Now listen, Simon. I don't want you interfering in Jockey Club business, but if you do find out anything at all connected to this tipping business, let me know. We really do need to get to the bottom of it.'

‘Of course,' I agreed. ‘And I may well need your help. For instance, do you happen to know much about the personnel at the Equine Forensic Lab?'

‘I remember distinctly giving you all relevant information about that. There's a man called Rupert Greeves who's responsible for security there. He'd have told us long ago if we had anything to worry about there.'

To my relief, at that moment Emma burst into the study.

She ignored the annoyance in Tintern's face. ‘Sorry, Dad.' I could hear her forcing out the word. ‘I've got to drag Simon off or we'll be late for dinner.'

I shrugged my shoulders and gratefully followed her from the room.