The ceiling light was dimly lit, and in its glow we could see Amanda lying asleep on her back in the bed, her long blonde hair spreading out over the pillow on either side of her head. She looked quite calm but, at the same time, somehow very vulnerable.
‘Oh, my darling,’ Georgina cried softly. She tried to move forward into the room but Justin, the security man, put out his hand to block her.
‘Sorry,’ he said firmly. ‘No one is allowed in here.’ He pulled the door shut. ‘My colleague will show you out now. We are changing shift.’
‘Thank you,’ I said to him. ‘It is good to see her being so well looked after.’
We were escorted back to the A&E department.
‘I want to stay,’ Georgina said. ‘So I’m here when she wakes up.’
‘My love,’ I said. ‘We have to go home and get some sleep ourselves. We will be no use to Amanda if we are so tired we can’t keep our eyes open.’
‘But she might need me.’
‘The hospital staff will look after her. And the police will want to interview her before we can see her anyway. Come on — let’s go home. We can come back in the morning.’
She didn’t want to — I could see that — but she eventually allowed me to steer her out to our car, which unsurprisingly didn’t have a parking ticket on the windscreen.
James was still not in bed when we arrived home, but he was fast asleep.
All the lights were still on throughout the house, and he was snoring gently on the sofa in the sitting room. I picked up a throw from the footstool and placed it over him.
‘Let him be,’ I said to Georgina. ‘He’s going to have quite a hangover in the morning.’
As was I, but not from drinking.
Georgina had dozed all the way home from Reading, but my mind had been sharp and awake, and asking questions.
Who had phoned me? What did they want me to do?
And — perhaps the most pressing of the questions I was trying to answer — should I report the call to the police?
Part of my brain said, Of course you must because it’s a police matter.
But another part said, No, you mustn’t because it might put Amanda in danger.
The man — I thought of the caller as a man because I doubted that a woman would have had the strength to carry Amanda away — hadn’t actually told me not to call the police. Was that because he was confident of not being identified even if I did?
Georgina and I went to bed, turning out the light at half past five, when the sun had already been up for more than half an hour, and was shining brightly against our bedroom window.
Even though I had been awake now for over twenty-four hours, I couldn’t sleep, endlessly tossing and turning as I tried to get the squeaky voice out of my head.
I must have eventually gone to sleep, because I was awakened by my phone ringing on my bedside table. In trepidation I picked it up. The screen showed me the time was eight-thirty. It also gave me the name of the caller — Owen Reynolds. Relieved, I answered it.
‘Morning, Owen,’ I said.
‘Morning, Chester. I hope I’m not too early.’ Eight-thirty was positively late for a trainer who would be up at five o’clock every day. ‘Did your party go well?’
‘It was definitely one I will never forget,’ I replied. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Eleanor and I are having a bit of a bash here at five o’clock this afternoon, to celebrate the Derby win. It’s mostly for my stable staff and some neighbours from our village, but we thought it would be nice to also invite the owning syndicate, and yourself and Georgina, of course. Potassium will also parade. But I need the syndicate members’ telephone numbers to invite them.’
‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I’ll email them over to you.’
‘Great. Could you also bring the trophy with you, for display?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Great,’ he said again. ‘See you later.’
He disconnected and I lay back on the pillow, holding my mobile. The last thing I really wanted to do was to drive over to Owen’s yard and be full of bonhomie, but it came with the territory.
I continually needed more and more syndicate members, as those I had were becoming older, and some had dropped off the list altogether, either through death or because they couldn’t afford horse ownership in their retirement.
Winning the Derby was the best marketing tool I could have ever asked for, and much of it would be done by word of mouth from the existing syndicate. Hence I needed to be there to press their flesh and get across the message that it was Victrix that gave you wings, at least with the horses.
Owning racehorses is all about dreaming.
Most owners — nay, almost all of them — lose money. Certainly, no one does it to make a fortune. Buying a racehorse, whether it be outright or with others in a syndicate, is to buy into a certain lifestyle.
Make no mistake, I was in the luxury-goods market. Owning racehorses isn’t cheap, but it is a price that some are prepared to pay to live the high life. And occasionally they strike it rich — like owning the winner of the Derby.
It was the slot-machine logic. Everyone knows that the casinos have fixed the systems so that, over time, slots never pay out as much cash as they consume. That’s why they’re known as ‘one-arm bandits.’ But still people play them. Partly for the thrill of the gamble but also in the knowledge that, maybe this time, they will hit the jackpot.
And the Las Vegas casinos absolutely love it when someone actually does win a million dollars of their money on a giant slot machine. They know that, with the publicity such a win generates, tens of thousands more punters will flood through their doors to try their luck.
So here I was, hoping for the same thing.
Potassium’s win in the Derby, and the publicity it would generate, should have prospective syndicate members queuing at my door, chasing the same dream.
Hence, I would go to Owen Reynolds’s stable yard at five o’clock, although whether I could convince Georgina to come with me was another matter. She hadn’t wanted to do much recently. She blamed her hormones, as she had done for most things for quite a long while now. ‘It’s the menopause,’ she would say, as if that was the excuse for everything, as indeed it might be. And pause was certainly the right word. Our whole lives together as a married couple seemed to be ‘on pause.’
I looked across at her, and decided to leave her sleeping. She could do with the sleep, something else she often couldn’t get enough of because of the hormones rampaging through her body. We would hear soon enough if there was any news from the Royal Berkshire Hospital.
I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of shorts and went downstairs.
James was still on the sofa in the sitting room, but he was just about awake, sitting up and holding his head.
‘Morning, James,’ I said. ‘How’s the hangover?’
‘Don’t ask,’ he replied. ‘Did you see Amanda?’
‘Only briefly.’
‘Did she tell you what happened?’
I shook my head. ‘She’d been sedated. But I hope to hear from her soon.’
Or from the police, I thought.
I went through the kitchen and to my office, to send Owen the email with the Potassium syndicate members’ telephone numbers. I was sure none of them would object to me sharing their personal information — not under the circumstances.
I sat at my desk for a while, answering the mass of congratulatory emails I had received from a large number of people, especially from members of my other syndicates, who seemed genuinely happy that a Victrix horse had won the Derby, even if it wasn’t the one they actually owned shares in.
As I was just finishing, someone rang the front door bell.