I glanced at my watch. It was ten past five and the technician was hovering and clearly itching for me to go. Any further searches would have to wait.
I quickly made another DVD with four of Clare’s big race victories on it, as well as her final race on Scusami. Sadly, I couldn’t find a VT of her first ever ride or even her first winner, but I still had more than enough to make the tribute piece for Channel 4.
I collected my two DVDs, thanked the technician, and left the studio.
The one thing that was certain about every TV company I had ever known was that, in their reception area, you would find a large-screen television showing the current output, and RacingTV was no exception.
I stood next to the office security desk and watched the sixth, and last, race from Newton Abbot. Mitchell Stacey’s horse won it easily at a canter, and the happy trainer was shown on the screen beaming from ear to ear as his victorious animal was led into the winners’ enclosure.
Newton Abbot racecourse to East Ilsley was about a hundred and sixty miles. Even taking into account that most of the journey was on motorways, and also allowing for the excessive speed at which Mitchell Stacey regularly drove, there was absolutely no way he could be at home within the next two hours.
I climbed excitedly into my old Ford, sped the twenty minutes down the A34, and jumped straight into bed with Sarah.
‘My poor darling,’ Sarah said as we lay together after lovemaking, ‘this is such a horrid business.’ She lightly stroked her fingertips across my bare chest, causing shivers to go right down my legs. ‘It’s so unbelievable.’
Indeed, it was unbelievable and I still hoped that I’d soon wake up from this nightmare and everything would be all right. Somehow it felt wrong that I could go on eating, sleeping, breathing, and even lying here with Sarah. Should I feel guilty for that too?
‘What I can’t understand,’ I said, ‘is what she was doing in London anyway. She told me she was going straight home.’
‘But people do change their minds,’ Sarah said.
I shook my head, not because I didn’t believe Sarah, but in distress at what Clare had done. ‘She also told me she would be riding work at Newmarket on Saturday morning. How was she going to do that if she was staying in London?’
‘Which hotel was it?’ Sarah asked.
‘The Hilton. You know, that tall one at the bottom of Park Lane.’
Too tall, I thought.
Sarah suddenly sat bolt upright in bed. ‘But Mitch and I were at the Hilton on Friday night for that big Injured Jockeys dinner. We had a table of our owners.’
‘Didn’t you see anything?’ I asked. ‘An ambulance or something?’
‘No. Nothing at all.’
‘What time did you leave?’ I asked.
‘Not very late. You know what racing people are like about going to bed early. The dinner started at seven and it was over by half past ten.’
‘Clare fell around eleven thirty.’
‘We’d gone long before then. We were back here by midnight.’
‘But did you see her in the hotel lobby? According to the police, she checked in at twenty past ten.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘I would have remembered if I’d seen her, because she always reminded me of you. You have the same cheekbones.’
She smiled and lay back down next to me again, putting her arm round my waist.
‘How many people were at the dinner?’ I asked.
‘Hundreds,’ she said. ‘The place was packed. They had that comedian with the funny spiky hair, you know, the one that does all those amazing impressions.’ She laughed at the memory. ‘I was actually quite surprised you weren’t there. I remember spending most of the evening looking out for you.’
‘The tickets had all gone by the time I got round to applying.’
‘You should have told me. We had a spare place at our table. Someone dropped out at the last minute.’
‘I couldn’t have come, anyway. By then, I’d arranged to have dinner with Clare.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Sarah said quietly. ‘So you had.’
How different things might have been if only I’d been a bit more organized.
On Thursday morning I drove to Newmarket and went to Clare’s cottage.
I collected the spare key from the yard office, as Geoff Grubb had suggested, and let myself in through the front door.
There was a stack of unopened mail on the doormat, most of it addressed not to Clare, but to me. I knew what it would be. I’d spent most of the previous day answering condolence letters, and the people who’d sent these ones obviously didn’t know the address of my flat.
I collected it all together. There were only a couple of other items — a bill from a mobile phone company, and a notice from Suffolk County Council about a change to refuse collection in the area. I opened the telephone bill and scanned through the list of the numbers that Clare had called. I recognized my own and also that of my parents, but what I was really looking for was a number that she had called regularly, say every day, a number that might have belonged to her mystery boyfriend.
There was no single one that stood out but there were quite a few she had rung more than ten times or so during the monthly billing period. Sadly, the bill did not include the numbers she had called last Friday night after leaving me. Perhaps I would ask the phone company for those. I put the bill down on the desk in the sitting room to look at later, and went upstairs.
It was strange going through Clare’s things. It felt like I was invading her privacy.
Of course I’d been to this cottage many times during the preceding four years, regularly staying overnight whenever I was working at Newmarket or anywhere further north. But I’d been a guest, always sleeping in the spare room. Here I was searching Clare’s own bedroom, pulling open drawers overflowing with what Americans would call ‘intimate apparel’. And intimate it was too. She’d clearly had a fondness for sexy black-lace underwear and I was rather embarrassed to find it.
There was precious little else to find.
Even as a child, Clare had been frugal in the clothes department and her wardrobe, with the exception of the lace undies, was fairly sparse and consisted mostly of jeans, polo shirts, and sleeveless puffer jackets, her usual attire.
There were only a couple of dresses hanging in the closet, one of which she had worn to our parents’ golden wedding party. It was the only time in years I could recall her not wearing trousers, mostly blue denim jeans. She had always tried to avoid occasions where she was expected to dress up.
I knew that coming to her cottage would be difficult but I hadn’t realized just how much I would miss her. Every single thing I touched reminded me of the blissful times I had enjoyed in this place.
My heart ached and ached and ached for her.
I sat down wearily on the side of her bed and longed for her to come back, to be here once more, to laugh, to bounce up the stairs with her endless energy, to be alive again — oh, to be alive again, alive, alive.
The bout of grief lasted ten to fifteen minutes, my body plagued by both pain, and guilt. There was little I could do but let the session take its course with a continuous stream of tears pouring down my cheeks.
In a strange way, the experience made me feel a little better. Perhaps it was the body’s natural healing mechanism at work.
I would have to come back later though, I thought. Her loss was still too recent, too raw and too painful. I simply couldn’t do much sorting of her things at the moment.
I collected the condolence letters, went out to my car and drove away.
I was due to record my tribute to Clare at Newmarket racecourse.
Channel 4 was broadcasting both the Friday and the Saturday of the Cambridgeshire meeting and Thursday was the day that the equipment would be set up in preparation.