But that was why we called them wizards. They were able to use their special magic to find out things that we lesser mortals couldn’t.
However, I decided I should keep that last piece of information very much to myself.
I sat for a while reading and rereading all the material until I was sure I had the various relationships understood and committed to memory. Not that any of it gave me any insight as to why Zoe Robertson had ended up alone and dead in her father’s burned-out stables, seventy miles away from her home.
I next spent some time thinking about Kate Logan and wondering if Janie had passed on my telephone number. Not that she would have needed my mobile number in order to contact me — she knew I was staying at the Bedford Lodge.
Had it really only been the previous evening that I had met her?
An awful lot seemed to have happened since then.
My phone rang and I grabbed it but, sadly and unexpectedly, it was not Kate but DCI Eastwood on the line.
‘Thank you, Mr Foster, for your direction concerning Zoe Robertson.’
‘You’re very welcome,’ I replied.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Most helpful, but we would have discovered her identity anyway. It is routine to scan the national DNA database whenever we have an unidentified sample.’
Then why are you calling me now, I thought.
I found out quickly enough.
‘Perhaps you could further help us with our enquiries?’ he asked.
‘Anything,’ I said.
‘You said yesterday that you were with Mr Declan Chadwick when Mr Robertson called to tell him that Zoe was missing.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Peter Robertson actually spoke to Mrs Chadwick. I was with Declan when his wife relayed the message.’
‘Did either of them indicate that they had recently been in contact with Zoe Robertson or her husband?’
‘Not exactly,’ I said slowly, thinking back to the way Declan had gone so pale at the news. ‘But...’ There was something else too. Something I’d considered slightly odd at the time. Now, what was it?
‘Yes?’ prompted the policeman.
‘I remember thinking it was slightly strange that Arabella announced that Zoe had gone missing again. As if she’d known Zoe had gone missing before.’
‘Mr Foster,’ replied the chief inspector, his tone full of irony. ‘Everyone in Newmarket knows that Zoe Chadwick had gone missing before. Police officers knocked on every door in the damn town during an intensive two-week search for her almost twelve years ago. What a complete waste of resources that was. I was a detective sergeant on the case at the time.’
So that is what he hadn’t been telling me during our meeting yesterday, and he sounded as if he was still angry about it.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but Arabella told me Zoe went missing regularly. And she also referred to Peter Robertson as Pete. One doesn’t do that unless you’ve been in fairly regular contact.’
‘Thank you, Mr Foster. That is most helpful.’
He was terminating the call.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said quickly. ‘Don’t go. Have you found out anything more about how the fire started? Was it Zoe who started it?’
He hesitated, as if deciding whether to say anything or not.
‘After the results of the post-mortem, we now consider it unlikely that Mrs Robertson started the fire.’
There was a distinct pause while the magnitude of what he had just said sank into my brain.
‘Because she was already dead,’ I said slowly.
There was another pause. A much longer one.
‘There are clearly no flies on you, Mr Foster,’ the detective chief inspector said eventually. ‘I can see that I should have been more guarded. I’ll be drummed out of the force if I’m not careful.’ He cleared his throat as if emphasising the gravity of what was to follow. ‘That is highly confidential information, Mr Foster. You are not to pass it on to any member of the Chadwick family, or anyone else for that matter. That would be construed by me as obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I bet he was now wishing he’d said nothing at all. I had simply jumped to home plate from a throwaway comment way out in left field.
‘But how do you know?’ I asked him, not wanting to lose the opportunity.
He hesitated again but clearly decided that, having already inadvertently given me the treasure, there was no problem in also handing over the map.
‘In spite of the intensity of the fire, the core of the body was largely intact, in particular the chest cavity, and, according to the pathologist, no smoke residue or fire damage was detectable in the lungs.’
‘So she hadn’t been breathing,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Either she’d already been dead when the fire started or she died suddenly just as it did so, maybe from something like a heart attack. The pathologist is still investigating that remote possibility.’
‘So you believe she was murdered.’
It was more of a statement than a question and precipitated another long pause from the detective.
‘We cannot say that for sure at present.’ Such was his unease at giving me any more information that he almost whispered the response. ‘As yet, we have no definitive cause of death. Maybe we never will, such is the extent of fire damage to the head, neck and the other extremities of the body. But murder is definitely one of the possibilities. Perhaps the most likely. Maybe she was strangled or hit over the head or something. Someone then may have set the stables on fire in an attempt to cover up what they’d done.’
But who?
And why?
12
About three in the afternoon, having dispensed with the car and driver, I walked from the Bedford Lodge Hotel along Bury Road past Oliver Chadwick’s house.
It was almost as much as I could do not to pop into Janie’s office and ask if she’d yet given my number to Kate. But best not to be seen to be too eager, I thought, and kept on walking towards the town centre, for I was a man on a mission and I had a difficult decision to make.
I had to decide on just one of the thirteen available.
It was a big question.
Which one?
Which one?
In which one of the thirteen betting shops in Newmarket would I make my bet?
I felt it was time to further my education. I’d never been in a betting shop before. Indeed, I’d never placed a bet in my life other than buying the occasional lottery ticket, and surely that didn’t count.
But that was all about to change.
I’d done a bit of homework on the internet, looking up odds and bet types.
I had naively believed that placing a bet was a straightforward exercise — you just choose the horse you think will be first in the race and hand over your stake money to the bookmaker, who will pay you out if the horse actually wins, or keep your stake for himself if it doesn’t.
Simple.
And, indeed, you can bet like that, but I found there are far more things to consider.
For a start, not every bookmaker offers the same odds. You need to search for the best available price, just like in every other type of shopping. There is no sense in making a bet at odds of five-to-one at one shop when another down the road is offering six-to-one.
And then not all bets are ‘win only’. In some races, you can back a horse to finish in the first three, or even in the first four. And there are other bets called forecasts, tricasts, exactas and perfectas, where multiple horses in the same race have to come in first and second, or first, second and third in any order, or in the right order.