The rent’s paid for the rest of the month, Geoff had said to me at Windsor races when I’d seen him just two days after Clare had died. Well, today was the last day of the month, so I had better get on and do something about clearing her stuff.
I let myself in and stood in her sitting room. It was only eight days since I’d last been there but so much seemed to have happened since. Somehow, though, I felt it was a little easier being here this time.
I took my things up the narrow staircase to the spare bedroom, hanging my dinner jacket in the wardrobe.
Clare and I had planned to go to Tatiana’s eighteenth birthday party together, and I did have a slight emotional wobble as I recalled Clare’s surprise at being asked.
‘I hardly know the girl,’ she had said. ‘You’re her godparent, not me.’
‘But you can’t really blame her. If you had a celebrity aunt you’d also invite her to your party.’
‘Celebrity, my arse,’ she’d replied with a laugh. ‘You’re the celebrity. That’s what being on TV does for you.’
But Clare had indeed been quite a celebrity, as the abundant column inches of obituary that had appeared in The Times and the Daily Telegraph had proved. All the more reason why I should endeavour to defend her reputation from the slurs in the Daily Gazette. And, I thought, all the more reason for ensuring that I told no one of her irregular riding practices on Bangkok Flyer and the like.
I sighed. I didn’t feel like going to an eighteenth birthday party. I could have done without all that noise for a start, not to mention a late night before I was due to appear on the Morning Line for Channel 4. But I had agreed ages ago to make the birthday speech so I had to be there. And I wanted to support Nicholas, my brother-in-law, who was still worrying himself sick over whether or not he should have postponed the whole thing.
He and Angela had asked me if I would like to be Tatiana’s godfather when I’d been only fourteen. I’d been really flattered but, to be honest, I probably hadn’t been the most conscientious of godfathers. I had no idea about her faith, but I’d always sent Christmas and birthday presents, which is what I reckoned were my main duties.
Nicholas and Angela lived near Royston, about twenty miles southwest of Newmarket and the party was in a marquee in their garden. According to the invitation, it started at eight o’clock so I decided that I should leave at about seven forty-five in order to arrive suitably early but without appearing to be too prompt. I reckoned that if I was there pretty much at the beginning, I could get away well before the end.
I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve midday. So I had nearly seven hours for sorting and packing before I needed to get ready. But where did I start? I wasn’t even sure how much of the furniture had belonged to Clare and how much had been rented with the cottage.
I decided to deal with Clare’s clothes first. I went out to my car to collect some large blue bags and some cardboard boxes that I had brought with me just for the purpose.
I started with the over-full drawers of frilly black-lace underwear, which filled up one of the large blue bags to overflowing. It made me sad that Clare had invested so much in something that almost no one saw. But I suppose it must have given her pleasure.
I managed to pack the rest of her clothes into four more of the blue bags, with shoes and boots filling two of the cardboard boxes. I took the bags and boxes down and stacked them in the space under the stairs.
Next I turned my attention to the desk in the corner of the sitting room. Her mobile phone bill was where I’d put it down and then forgotten to collect it last time. I now folded it carefully and put it in my pocket.
I sat down on the chair and started to look through Clare’s papers. I wasn’t sure what I was really looking for, if anything, but I couldn’t just throw stuff away without going through it first. There might be share certificates or other important documents. I hoped there might even have been a will.
The desk had three drawers each side of a central knee hole, and the top two drawers on the left-hand side were full to overflowing with payment advice slips from Weatherbys, the company that administers racing’s finances. They detailed all of Clare’s rides, showing the riding fees paid to her bank account along with any prize money percentage she’d been entitled to, and she had clearly been stuffing them into the drawers for some time.
The bottom drawer on the left contained her bank statements and these were in better order. I picked up the top one, which was for the previous month.
I thought it unlikely that Clare had killed herself due to any money worries. According to the statement, just two and a half weeks before she died, her current account balance had been on the plus side of twenty thousand pounds.
I skimmed through the credits for the previous four months. Almost all were direct transfers from Weatherbys with only a couple of small amounts paid in by cheques. There were certainly no unexplained credits that matched the dates of the seven definites and four possibles, although any payment for her riding of Bangkok Flyer would not yet have appeared on a statement.
I filled another cardboard box with the bank statements and the payment advice slips and turned my attention to the drawers on the right.
The top one contained all her office supplies: a stapler, pens, notepads, stamps and paper clips. There were also several chequebook stubs, held together with a red rubber band, and two pairs of sunglasses, one with a broken arm.
In the second drawer there were various documents including Clare’s birth certificate, her passport, her jockey’s licence and a stack of investment portfolio valuations, all of which showed that Clare had been sensibly providing for her future after riding. A future that would now never materialize.
At the very back of the drawer, behind the investment valuations, I found a sealed white envelope.
I opened it.
The envelope contained two thousand pounds in cash, all of it in twenty-pound notes in packs of a thousand, each pack held together with an inch wide paper band.
I didn’t immediately assume that the cash was in any way sinister or irregular. Lots of people I knew kept a supply of cash in case of emergencies, although two thousand pounds was rather on the high side. However, the thing that did raise some doubts in my mind was that the bands around the cash had Barclays Bank printed on them, while I knew from her bank statements that Clare banked with HSBC. It was not easy to get that amount of cash from a bank where you didn’t have an account.
And my suspicions were raised a further fifty or so notches by what was written on the front of the envelope in capital letters: AS AGREED, A.
Had Clare been paid a couple of thousand pounds for not winning? And who was A?
I leaned back in her chair and wondered if she had fully understood what she had become involved in. It wasn’t just a game, it was a full-blown criminal fraud for gain, and discovery would have resulted in not just the loss of her career but also in the likely loss of her freedom.
I was suddenly very angry with her.
How could she have been so stupid?
And why had she told me it was all about power and control when, at the same time, she was accepting a couple of grand from someone? It didn’t make sense. All I could think was that she hadn’t thought the money important. After all, her bank balance and her investment portfolios were very healthy, and the cash had still been in a sealed envelope as if she hadn’t even bothered to count it.