‘And did you?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he answered quickly. ‘She was alive when I left her.’
‘I know.’
‘How could you know?’ he asked.
‘The hotel CCTV cameras picked you up leaving half an hour before she fell.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Good.’
Even down the telephone line, I could hear the relief in his voice.
‘So why did you go up to her room?’ I asked, not wanting his relief to be too long lasting. ‘And how did you know she was even there?’
‘She texted me,’ he said. ‘It was rather embarrassing, actually. It was during the speeches. I’d forgotten to turn my phone off.’
‘What exactly did she text?’
‘She said she had to talk to me about Bangkok Flyer’s race that afternoon and that it might be a problem.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Hold on, I’ll get my mobile.’
I could hear him moving in the background.
‘Half past nine,’ he said. ‘Nine twenty-seven, to be precise.’
About ten to fifteen minutes after she’d left me at Haxted Mill.
‘She said she was coming straight to see me in Newmarket, but I texted back to say I wasn’t at home, I was at that dinner at the Hilton. She then said she’d come to the hotel.’
She must have been really worried.
But she wouldn’t have checked into a room just to see Austin. She could have spoken to him in the lobby, or in the bar. She must have checked in to stay the night with the other man, her mystery lover.
‘How did you know which room she was in?’
‘She texted me again later saying she was there, giving me the room number.’
‘So you went up to see her?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as soon as the dinner was over. But I only stayed in her room about ten or so minutes, then I left and went home. I caught the eleven-thirty train from King’s Cross. My wife picked me up from Cambridge station. She doesn’t really like going to those big events in London.’
‘What did you and Clare talk about?’ I asked.
‘Not much, really,’ he said. ‘I remember that most of the time I was there she was arguing with one of the hotel security men about unlocking the balcony door. What’s the point, she was saying, of having a balcony room if the balcony is locked? Anyway, the man unlocked it when I was there. I’m not really sure what it was about, but Clare kept calling me darling and pretending to the man that she and I were going to spend the night there together and therefore the door could be opened.’
The ‘two in a room’ rule, I thought.
‘So what did Clare say after the man had gone?’
‘She said that someone knew about her riding Bangkok Flyer to lose. She seemed quite worried about it. I asked her who it was but she wouldn’t tell me.’
‘It was me,’ I said.
‘I know that now,’ Austin replied curtly.
‘So what was so urgent that she had needed to see you that night?’ I asked. ‘Why couldn’t it wait until the morning?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Why was it so urgent?’
‘Because we had planned to do it again the next day, in the last race at Newmarket, and she knew that I would lay the horse on the internet early on Saturday morning. But she didn’t want to go through with it. In fact, she said she’d never ever do it again. From now on, she was always going to ride to win.’
I sat there holding the phone with tears streaming down my cheeks.
‘Did she say anything about killing herself?’ I asked, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘She seemed happy, almost as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. That’s why I couldn’t believe it when I heard on the Morning Line the next day that she was dead.’
‘Did she say anything to you about writing a suicide note?’
‘No, of course not,’ Austin said. ‘I told you, I don’t think she was planning to kill herself when I left her.’
What on earth had happened in the subsequent half hour?
Almost as soon as I had put my phone down, it rang again, and this time it was my father. What the hell did he want at this time of the morning?
‘Hello, Dad,’ I said as enthusiastically as I could manage. ‘How are you?’
‘What’s all this bloody nonsense in the newspaper?’ he replied, as always ignoring the normal niceties of polite conversation.
‘Which newspaper?’ I asked.
‘UK Today.’
Jim Metcalf, I thought. ‘What does it say?’
‘Something about you being strangled last week.’ I could tell from his tone that he didn’t believe it.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That was why I crashed my car into Angela and Nicholas’s gatepost on Friday night.’
‘What nonsense,’ he said. ‘You were drunk. I heard one of those policemen say so. He said you must have been blind drunk to hit that post so hard.’
‘Dad, I was not drunk. Someone was trying to kill me.’
‘Hmph.’ He clearly still didn’t believe me.
‘And whoever it was tried to murder me again on Sunday night.’
‘But why would anyone want to murder you?’ He said it in a manner that I felt was rather belittling, as if I wasn’t worthy of being murdered.
But it was still a good question.
I’d been asking myself the same thing for almost thirty-six hours, since the disaster in the Three Horseshoes car park.
And I hadn’t yet come up with a credible answer.
‘I don’t know, Dad,’ I said. ‘But I intend finding out.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’ he asked, his voice again full of doubt that I could do anything. Our little moment of mutual understanding that had existed at Clare’s funeral had clearly evaporated.
I decided to ignore him. He had considered my whole life a disaster from the moment I’d told him, aged seventeen, that I wasn’t going to university. In his narrow opinion, not getting a degree was tantamount to failure, and the fact that I now earned at least twice what he ever had was completely immaterial.
Use your talents wisely. That’s why you have them.
I did have talents and I suddenly realized how I could use them to unravel this mystery. I just hoped it was wise to do so.
I drove my rented Honda to Brighton races, checking frequently that I was not being followed.
I arrived early, well before the racing was due to start, as there were people I needed to see.
‘No problem,’ said Derek, the RacingTV producer, when I asked him about my plans for the following evening at Kempton. ‘Night racing is always less frenetic than the afternoons because there’s only ever a single meeting, so we’ll have a full half an hour between races. Masses of time.’
‘Dead easy,’ said Jack Laver, the technician who ran the racecourse broadcast centre.
More of the easy, I thought, and less of the dead.
I always liked racing at Brighton. It is one of the more unusual of the British racecourses in so far as, like Epsom and Newmarket, it is not a complete loop but a long curving mile-and-a-half horseshoe-shaped track that runs along the undulating ridge of Race Hill, part of the South Downs range of chalk hills, two miles to the east of the city centre.
The view from the top of the grandstand on that particular October Tuesday was magnificent. The Indian summer of the past weeks had been swept away by a series of Atlantic weather fronts that had finally cleared through overnight, leaving cool, crisp conditions with spectacular visibility.
Away to my right, the bright sunlight reflected with a million flashes off the surface of the sea and, in the far distance, I could see a line of shipping making its way eastward towards the Straits of Dover.