‘Money?’
‘Yeah, something about Zoe being entitled to it. Her inheritance or something. Usual problem when an ageing father marries a younger woman. The only thing the kids see is the family fortune going to her instead of to them.’
At this point, Ryan came stomping into the office and clearly didn’t like me being there talking to Janie.
Time to change the subject, I thought, preferably to something that was nothing to do with the Chadwicks or racing. But I wondered how much of our conversation he had already heard.
‘Did you have a good birthday dinner last night?’ I asked.
‘Janie,’ Ryan said loudly before she could answer me. ‘Are all the declarations complete and ready?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All ready. Jockeys too. On your screen. You just need to check them, input your access code and then push the send button.’
He strode over to the computer on another desk and tapped a few keys on the keyboard, seemingly without even glancing at the information on the screen. Then he walked out again without saying another word, not even a ‘thank you’.
Janie and I watched him go and sat there in silence until we heard the kitchen door close.
‘We had a lovely birthday dinner,’ Janie said. ‘We had Chinese at The Fountain. Eight of us in all. Great food. I ate and drank far too much. As always. Had real trouble getting up this morning.’ She laughed but only briefly.
It was not really a morning for laughter.
‘What does your sister do?’ I asked.
‘I know what she did last night. She wouldn’t stop bloody talking about you. She wanted to know all about you and what you were doing here.’ Janie looked at me. ‘And that’s actually a very good question.’
She raised her eyebrows at me in a questioning manner.
‘I represent Sheikh Karim,’ I said. ‘He wants me to find out why his horses died.’
‘And have you?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Is that why you’re still snooping around the place?’
‘I wouldn’t call it snooping,’ I said in my defence.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Because that’s exactly what you’re doing, asking me all these questions about Zoe.’
I was having some difficulty reading her. Was she actually angry with me? Or being playful?
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘No need. Snoop away. We all want to know why the horses died, and Zoe too. I’m loyal, but not that loyal. And I don’t know for how much longer I’m going to have a job here anyway.’
It was my turn to look quizzically at her. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Isn’t it obvious? Whole place is going down the tubes if you ask me. The loss of those seven horses will be the last straw, I reckon, unless we get some winners soon. Mr Ryan even cut my pay last month. Said he couldn’t afford me.’
How odd, I thought. Oliver had told me that the business couldn’t run without her and yet his son had cut her wages. Ryan really was an idiot.
Suddenly Janie became very concerned that she’d revealed too much.
‘Well, no, it’s not that bad,’ she said, trying to back-pedal furiously. ‘It’s really not. I shouldn’t be telling you anything anyway, not with you representing one of our owners. I’m just tired, and upset about Zoe. Ignore what I just said.’
Difficult, I thought.
‘But that’s why Prince of Troy is such a huge loss for us,’ said Janie, digging herself back into the mire. ‘He would have won the Derby, no doubt about it, and that would’ve eased all our troubles.’
She fell silent and I could see from her facial expression that she regretted saying anything to me at all, let alone her prediction of doom and gloom at Castleton House Stables.
‘Did Kate really talk about me last night?’ I asked.
‘What?’ Her mind was elsewhere, and it clearly wasn’t a happy place.
‘Did your sister really talk about me all through dinner?’
‘Yes she bloody did. Yap, yap, yap. Never stopped. Harry Foster this, Harry Foster that. In the end we all had to tell her to shut up.’
I smiled.
‘Give her my number, will you?’ I wrote it down on a notepad on her desk. ‘Ask her to call me.’
Janie tore the piece of paper off the pad and looked at it.
‘I might,’ she said. ‘Or I might not.’
11
I was back in the Bedford Lodge Hotel in time to catch the end of breakfast.
Was it still only breakfast time? I felt that I’d been up for at least half a day.
I sat at a table for one and had scrambled eggs on toast with bacon. Living on my own meant that I very rarely had a cooked breakfast, or even any breakfast at all.
A middle-aged couple beat the ten o’clock curfew by a mere second or two and sat down at the table next to me, him with a copy of the Racing Post, her with a fashion magazine.
The man’s phone went beep-beep and he looked down at the screen. ‘They’ve identified the body in that fire at the Chadwick place. Someone called Zoe Robertson.’
Bad news travels fast, I thought.
‘Who’s she?’ the woman asked, looking up from her magazine.
‘His daughter.’
‘Ryan’s daughter?’
‘No. Oliver’s. From a previous marriage.’
‘Well, I never did,’ she said.
The man was still reading from his phone.
‘They’re implying she started it.’
‘Poor Oliver,’ the woman said. ‘Bad enough losing your best horses without then discovering it’s your own daughter that was the cause.’
‘That hasn’t been confirmed.’
‘But you say they imply it?’
‘Yeah, well, sort of. The police haven’t said so but, according to this, she’d been convicted before for arson. But they’re only going by what’s been posted on social media.’
Social media had much to answer for, I thought. It was a rumour-monger’s paradise.
The couple went back to their reading material while I finished my scrambled eggs, and then returned to my room.
I flicked on the BBC News Channel and it too was reporting the same social-media ‘fact’ that Zoe Robertson had started the fire, clearly working on the principle that one couldn’t slander the already dead. If Zoe had still been alive, the BBC wouldn’t have dared repeat such an allegation without good evidence to back it up.
I checked my emails.
There was one from the Simpson White Research Team with their preliminary findings on the Chadwicks. Someone had clearly been very busy overnight.
The report was broken down member-by-member of the Chadwick family with Oliver first. Some of the information I already knew, as it had been in Georgina’s brief on the day I’d first arrived at Newmarket. But there was plenty of new stuff and some of it was highly detailed. Good job, I thought, and, not for the first time, I wondered how the wizards in the office had found it all out.
Oliver had been born at the now-closed Mill Road Maternity Hospital in Cambridge in early 1950 and educated at the Leys School, also in Cambridge, from where he had failed to win a place at university. Hence he had joined his elder brother, James, in working for their father at the stables in Bury Road. His first marriage had been in May 1975 to Miss Audrey Parker, the daughter of another racehorse trainer in Newmarket, and they’d quickly had two sons — Ryan and Declan. Audrey had died of liver cancer in March 1982 when the boys had been just six and four, and Oliver had remarried to Yvonne Jefferies eighteen months later. Two more children followed — Tony and Zoe. That marriage had lasted almost thirty years but it was said to have been tempestuous and unhappy, and had finally ended in divorce when Oliver admitted his long-term and ongoing adultery with one Maria Webster, a former personal trainer from the local fitness and leisure centre. Oliver had then married Maria when it became known that she was pregnant with his child, but she had miscarried the baby only six days after the wedding ceremony.