In a way, I suppose, I should be pleased to have at least found something but I was seriously dismayed to have had it confirmed that her irregular riding of Bangkok Flyer had not been an isolated incident.
The phone vibrated in my pocket. It was Sarah.
‘Hello, my darling,’ I said, answering it.
‘Where are you?’ she asked in a slightly pained voice.
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy I forgot.’
I looked at my watch. It was twenty past twelve and we’d agreed to meet at noon in a pub overlooking the River Thames just west of Oxford.
‘I’m on my way. Order me a glass of rosé. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’
I told the database technician I’d be back later and skipped out to my car. I was still excited every time I was on my way to see Sarah. If I wasn’t, I suppose, I’d have moved on by now.
The lunchtime traffic was bad and it was a good fifteen minutes before I turned into the pub car park and pulled my battered old Ford into the space alongside Sarah’s brand-new BMW.
I hurried inside.
‘What was making you so busy in Oxford that you forgot to come and meet me?’ She wasn’t really cross, just curious.
‘I’ve been at the RacingTV studio.’
‘Doing what, exactly?’
‘Oh, bits and pieces. Sorting out my work schedule for the coming months.’
I wondered why I hadn’t told her the truth.
‘And I’m also looking at some past races that Clare rode in for a tribute that I’m making on Thursday for Channel 4.’
‘Well, in that case you’re forgiven.’ She patted my hand. ‘How have things been?’
‘Pretty awful,’ I said. ‘I seem to be wandering round in a daze. Nothing seems real.’
‘Have you fixed a date yet for the funeral?’
‘Monday, at three,’ I said. ‘But that’s another thing I’m not very happy about.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘I spoke to my brothers last night. The coroner has given us the go ahead but my father wants it to be immediate family only, and near Oxted where he lives.’
‘Why is that a problem?’
‘Because Clare didn’t really get on with her immediate biological family. Racing was Clare’s world. They were her real family, and I think she would have preferred it if her funeral was held at Newmarket, where she lived, and all her racing friends able to be there.’
‘Darling,’ Sarah said, turning to me, ‘you can always have a memorial service in Newmarket later. And, in all honesty, it isn’t really what Clare would have wanted that’s now important.’
‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘And my father can be very obstinate. But for some goddamn reason, my brothers and sister seem to agree with him. I’ve tried my best but I’ve been voted down on this one. Personally, I think they only want a small quiet funeral because they’re embarrassed by the manner of her death.’
She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. There was nothing to say so we sat there in silence for a while. As always, I couldn’t get the image of Clare falling the fifteen floors out of my head. I was again close to tears.
‘Where’s Mitchell?’ I asked, purposely changing my thought pattern.
‘At Newton Abbot races, thank goodness.’ She shivered. ‘God, he was so horrible to me this morning before he went. He can be such a bully.’
‘Why don’t you just leave him?’
She didn’t answer and I tried to read her mind. Perhaps she was afraid of him, or had Clare been right and she simply couldn’t afford to leave?
‘When will he be back?’ I asked into the silence.
‘Not for hours. He’s got a runner in the last so he won’t be home until well after eight at the earliest.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy coming back with me for a while?’
In spite of everything, I was tempted.
‘How about Oscar?’ I asked. Oscar was the youngest of her stepchildren, the only one that still lived at home.
‘School play rehearsal. He won’t be home until at least ten. Please do come.’ She was almost pleading. ‘I need you. It’s been really dreadful knowing you’ve been in such pain and not being able to comfort you.’
I sighed. ‘I’ve got to go back to the RacingTV offices to finish what I’m doing. It’ll take another two or three hours at least.’
‘I’m only twenty minutes down the road. Come if you can.’
‘The offices close at six and the technician told me he wants to be gone by half past five, so I’ve got to be finished by then. I could come after that, for a little while, as long as you’re sure it’s safe.’
‘Safe as houses. I’ll watch Newton Abbot on the television just to make sure Mitch is still there for the last race.’
So would I.
Having been slightly irritated with me for arriving late, she now tried her best to hurry me away, so much so that I was back at the database studio reviewing more of Clare’s races well before two o’clock.
In all the races that Clare had ridden in, and not won, since the beginning of June, I found what I was pretty sure were seven examples of her purposely trying to lose, even though, in one of them, she didn’t really have much of a chance to win it anyway. And there were a further four races where I thought she’d not been doing her best to win when she might have done, although I couldn’t be sure that she was actively ‘stopping’ the horse.
I used the database system to make a copy of the eleven races in question onto a DVD, together with the information about all the horses that had run in each one.
There didn’t seem to be any common factors.
Of the seven definites, there was one pair that had the same trainer, but the five others were all different. Nine of the eleven had been trained in Newmarket, with one in Lambourn and the other at a stable near Stratford-upon-Avon. And all had different owners.
In addition to Bangkok Flyer, there was one other horse from the Austin Reynolds string, Tortola Beach, an exciting two-year-old prospect that Clare had ridden into third place at Doncaster in August when he had looked certain to win with just a furlong to go.
One of the others was from the Newmarket stable of Carla Topazio, a large domineering lady trainer of Italian descent who loved to sing operatic arias at every opportunity, mostly in the winners’ enclosure whenever her horses had won.
In another of the eleven, Clare had ridden a three-year-old filly called Jasmine Pearls, trained by our own cousin Brendan, which had finished a close fourth in the City Plate at Chester having led comfortably into the final furlong.
The only common thread I could see was that in none of the eleven suspect races had Clare been riding a horse trained by Geoff Grubb, her principal employer. Perhaps she had thought it would have been too great a risk. She had so much to lose if Geoff, for whatever reason, became unhappy with her riding — not just her stable-jockey job, but her home as well. Even though, at that final dinner, she had mocked me for not having bought my own house, she hadn’t done so either, choosing to live in Geoff’s rented Stable Cottage.
I sat staring at my list of definites and possibles, hoping that some other common denominator would leap out at me.
It didn’t.
Six of the eleven had started as the favourite, three at a price less than two-to-one, but two of the other five had been relative outsiders with odds greater than eight-to-one.
I looked up the trainers of the race winners, but they were mostly different as well. As were the jockeys, and the owners. Surely the eleven horses were not simply a random selection? Was there some shared characteristic that I wasn’t spotting? Maybe it was because I didn’t yet have all the necessary information to look at, and I needed to look at races earlier than June.
Perhaps Clare had been playing the ‘Race Fixing Game’ for much longer than just these last few months.