‘She didn’t say goodbye,’ he’d said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Clare. She never said goodbye to me.’
‘Dad, she was hardly likely to ring you up to say goodbye before she killed herself.’
‘No, not that,’ he’d said, now openly crying. ‘I mean she never said goodbye to me when she left here that evening. We had argued. We always seem to these days. I can’t even remember what it was about. Something about the house, or the garden. She kept telling me I was getting too old to look after it. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what we argued about, suffice to say we did. And I told her that she was an insufferable spoiled brat who should know better than to speak to her parents like that.’
I could imagine the exchange. I’d had them myself with the old git.
‘She just walked out without another word,’ he’d said miserably. ‘She didn’t even say goodbye to your mother. I followed her outside telling her not to be so bloody stupid, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even look at me. She got in her car and drove away without a backward glance.’ He had sobbed again. ‘I feel so guilty.’
Join the club, I’d thought.
It was only about twelve o’clock when I turned in through the gates of Stratford racecourse and parked in one of the spaces reserved for the race-day officials. Terence Feynman, the judge for the day, pulled in beside me.
‘Hello, Terence,’ I said, climbing out of my car.
‘Hi, Mark. I’m so sorry about Clare.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Not great.’
‘No. And just as she had made the breakthrough into the big time. Funny old world.’
I didn’t feel like laughing.
‘Are you commentating or presenting?’
‘Commentating.’
‘See you later then, up top.’ He rushed away across the car park as if he was late, even though there was nearly two hours to pass before the first race.
The judge’s box was alongside the commentary position at the top of the grandstand, his being directly in line with the winning post to enable him to accurately call the winner, assisted, if necessary, by the photo-finish camera that sat immediately above him.
Prior to 1949 there were no photo-finish cameras, and the judge was the sole arbiter of who had won and who hadn’t.
Infamously, in the 1913 running of the Two Thousand Guineas, the judge, Charlie Robinson, announced a horse called Louvois as the winner when every single other person at Newmarket that day believed that Craganour had passed the post in front and had won easily, by a length.
Nevertheless, Louvois was declared the winner because the judge said so.
There was speculation and rumour at the time that Robinson had been influenced by the fact that he’d had friends who’d died on the Titanic the previous year. Craganour was owned by C. Bower Ismay, younger brother of J. Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, the company that had owned the Titanic. And it had been widely reported at the time, albeit wrongly, that J. Bruce Ismay had saved himself by securing a place in one of Titanic’s lifeboats disguised as a woman.
But, whatever anyone else might think, the judge’s decision is final and Louvois remained the official winner, and his name is still in the record books.
Not until 1983 were photo-finish cameras used at all British racecourses, and the first colour images were not available until 1989.
And it hasn’t been just the judge’s role that has changed due to modern technology.
The very first racecourse commentary in England was at Goodwood on 29 July 1952. For the previous eight hundred years, since the first documented racecourse at Smithfield in London in the twelfth century, races had been run in silence, the only sounds being the thudding of the horses’ hooves on the turf, and the cheering of the crowd.
Even as late as 1996, races at Keeneland, one of America’s premier racetracks in Lexington, Kentucky, were run without any public address, other than a bell being rung when the race began. At Ascot, they still ring a bell to alert the crowd when the runners enter the finishing straight even though there has been race commentary there since the mid 1950s.
I walked into Stratford racecourse through the main entrance only to come face to face with Toby Woodley from the Daily Gazette.
‘Have you seen my piece today?’ he asked in a loathsome, self-satisfied manner.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I never read your rag.’
‘You ought to,’ he sneered. ‘You might learn something. Especially today.’
He walked off towards the bar and I watched him go. I wondered if he could have been Clare’s secret boyfriend. No, surely that was impossible?
I walked round behind the stands to the Press Room, which was fortunately deserted so long before the first. In common with most racecourses, Stratford looked after members of the press pretty well, providing them with tea and coffee facilities, a tray of sandwiches and, occasionally, a supply of hot soup. However, I was in search of the newspapers that they regularly left in a stack by the door. In particular, I was looking for a copy of the Daily Gazette, which I spread out on one of the wooden desks.
My blood ran cold.
CLARE SHILLINGFORD WAS A RACE FIXER ran the headline in bold type across the back page.
However, the story beneath was speculative at best and related to a race the previous April when Clare had ridden a horse called Brain of Brixham into second place on the all-weather Polytrack at Wolverhampton. It had been at an evening meeting under lights and Clare claimed she had mistakenly thought that a pole used to support a TV camera on a wire had been the winning post. Hence she had stopped riding some twenty yards short of the finish and had been subsequently overtaken and beaten by another horse right on the line.
I’d seen the video of the race at the time and I remember thinking that Clare had been rather foolish, but it had definitely not been like the others I had found. As far as I could recall, it had been just a silly, but genuine, error.
But could I be totally sure?
The stewards at Wolverhampton had accepted Clare’s explanation that it had been accidental, and they had given her a fourteen-day suspension for careless riding. Now, Toby Woodley was claiming that she had done it on purpose, and had been paid handsomely by a betting syndicate for her trouble.
I heard the door open behind me.
‘So she wasn’t such an angel after all,’ said Woodley in his distinctive squeak.
I spun round. ‘You’re a bloody liar,’ I shouted. ‘That race was simply an error of judgement and you know it.’
‘How about the betting syndicate?’ he said. ‘They made a fortune laying that horse.’
‘Says who?’ I demanded. ‘This rubbish doesn’t name anyone.’ I waved my hand at the spread-out paper.
‘Sources,’ he said, tapping the side of his nose with his finger. ‘I have my sources.’
‘Your imagination, more like. You’ve made the whole thing up.’
‘You may think so,’ he sneered, ‘but this story will run and run.’
‘I’ll sue,’ I said.
‘On what grounds?’
‘Libel.’
‘Don’t you know?’ He grinned, showing me his nicotine-stained teeth. ‘Under English law, you can’t libel the dead.’ He laughed. ‘You should have spoken to me yesterday, at her funeral. I was treated like dirt.’
So was that what the story was about? Was he simply piqued by being shouted at by my father, and brushed off by me?
‘Not treated like dirt,’ I said. ‘More like shit.’
‘You’ll regret that.’
I picked up the newspaper and waved it at him. ‘And is this what you meant by saying yesterday that you’d been good to me. Ha! Don’t make me laugh. You don’t know what being good means.’