‘What about the note?’ said scatty Helen. ‘It certainly looked like a suicide note to me.’
Over her head I watched as my father gave her a contemptuous stare. He had never been slow in expressing his disapproval of James’s choice of wife, and she was clearly not endearing herself to him right now.
‘But why would she kill herself?’ Angela wailed, putting into words once more what we were all asking inside our heads.
‘Maybe because living in this family is not always easy,’ Helen said somewhat tactlessly.
I thought my father was going to explode behind her.
‘Shut up, you silly woman,’ he bellowed from somewhere close to her ear.
Helen instantly burst into tears and was comforted by James, who tried to defend his wife.
‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘Helen is right. We are all so competitive.’
Yes, I suppose we were.
It was how we had been brought up. Top of the class, top of the class, you must strive to be top of the class. It had been drummed into us as children. School, university, first-class degree, job in the City. It had been like a mantra for our father.
He had been appalled and outraged when both Clare and I had announced that we had no wish to follow our older siblings to Oxford or Cambridge, or to any other university, but were determined to go straight into racing. Not that racing had been a departure for the Shillingford family.
Prior to his retirement to a villa in southern Spain, our uncle, my father’s younger brother, had been a multi-Classic-winning Newmarket trainer, and he had himself taken over the stable from our grandfather. Two of my cousins were also in the racing business, one as a trainer in the family yard and the other as the owner of a racehorse transport firm. Indeed, the Shillingfords were a much respected racing family and had been owners, trainers and, occasionally, jockeys in and around Newmarket since the days of Charles II and the founding of the Jockey Club.
It had been my father who had been the one to take a different route becoming the first Shillingford on record to get a university degree, let alone a first-class one from Merton College, Oxford.
But there was no doubt that the family as a whole, whether in the City of London or on a racecourse, had a huge competitive streak in its make up. Clare certainly had, and she’d said so at our dinner at Haxted Mill.
Only I amongst the Shillingford clan, it seemed, hadn’t been born with fire in his belly to be The Very Best of the Best. But even I could be pretty competitive if pushed, and I didn’t like it much when people said that I wasn’t the best commentator in racing, although I knew what they were saying was true.
‘Perhaps we drove her to it,’ James said gloomily.
‘What utter nonsense,’ my father stated, restarting his pacing. This time, however, he didn’t pace aimlessly back and forth but made a beeline for the drinks cabinet in the corner. ‘I need a drink,’ he said, sloshing a hefty slug of whisky into a tumbler and knocking it back in one gulp.
I looked at my watch. It was only a quarter to five, but it felt much later. I’d already been up for almost fourteen hours and I’d had far less than a full night’s sleep before that.
I too could have done with a drink, but I didn’t say so.
And I did tend to agree with my father on one point: I also couldn’t envisage how the family could have driven Clare to kill herself. Sure, we were all competitive but, if anything, Clare was more competitive than the rest of us put together. And she had thrived on it.
People who took their own lives, I’d always believed, were driven to it by failure and rejection, not by success and widespread affection. But I knew that wasn’t universally true. I could recall several high-profile suicides whose deaths had staggered the public, where an outward persona of joy, happiness and huge achievement had masked some inner self of depression and hopelessness.
The real truth was that one never knew what was going on in someone else’s head.
And the big question that wouldn’t leave mine was whether Clare’s death was related to me confronting her about her riding of Bangkok Flyer and her subsequent admission of race fixing.
Her note might seem to imply so, but her unconcerned, almost blasé, reaction at dinner hardly seemed to fit with her being so tormented by it that she had thrown herself from a balcony only two and a half hours later. However, I decided that now was neither the time nor the place to introduce this new factor into the discussion.
Nothing prepares a family for death, particularly not for the death of one of its youngest members. But my family had responded in true Shillingford fashion, shouting each other down and refusing to countenance any opinion but their own. Only Nicholas demonstrated any real decorum and, I realized, he was the only one amongst them I actually liked.
I finally escaped from this family hotbed of accusation and blame, using the excuse that there were insufficient bedrooms for us all to stay and, as I lived closest, it was easiest for me to come and go.
So I went, and just as soon as I could.
5
On Monday I went to the races, and back to work. It seemed like the logical thing to do.
I had sat at home alone all day on Sunday feeling miserable, answering the hundreds of e-mails that kindly people had sent and dealing with the fifty or so voice messages on my phones. How I wished Clare had left a message on Friday evening.
Why hadn’t I answered her call?
By Monday morning I’d been desperately in need of some human contact and the thought of going back to my family in Oxted had filled me with horror. So much so that I’d invented a sudden nasty cold in order to escape from them all day on Sunday.
‘Are you sure you can’t come?’ my mother had asked when I’d called early.
‘Quite sure,’ I’d replied while holding my nose. ‘I don’t want to give this cold to Dad.’
I’d been on safe ground. She knew as well as I did that my father was obsessive about avoiding people with colds. Indeed, he was obsessive about lots of things. How she had put up with him for fifty-two years I couldn’t imagine.
‘I didn’t think you’d be here today,’ Derek said from behind me as I climbed the half dozen steps up to RacingTV’s scanner, the blacked-out production truck parked in a compound near the Windsor racecourse stables. ‘I’ve arranged for Iain Ferguson to present.’
‘That’s fine by me,’ I said, turning round. ‘I’ll just help where I can. To be honest I don’t feel up to much anyway.’
‘No,’ said Derek. He paused. ‘Look, mate, I’m really sorry about Clare. I can’t actually believe it.’
‘Thanks, Derek,’ I replied. ‘I can’t believe it either. Half the time I feel that life has to go on as normal and then, the next minute, I wonder why I bother to do anything at all. I think it’s the frustration that’s the worst, frustration that I can’t turn back time, can’t bring her back.’
I was close to tears once more and it showed in my voice. Open displays of emotion could be unsettling, and I could tell that Derek didn’t quite know what to do.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, breathing deeply. ‘You must be busy. You get on.’
‘Right,’ he said, clearly relieved. ‘I had better. Are you coming to the production meeting?’
‘I thought I’d sit in at the back.’
Whether I was working for Channel 4 or for RacingTV, the first task of my day was always to attend the production meeting where the running order for the show was discussed and agreed. The meeting took place in the scanner at least three hours before the broadcast was due to begin.
The producer, Derek in this case, began by handing out the print-out of the draft running order. That afternoon RacingTV was covering all seven races here at Windsor and also seven from Leicester racecourse a hundred or so miles away to the north, the paddock presenter at Leicester joining the meeting via live video link.