I padded in bare feet along the hallway to the kitchen to get some water and noticed the flashing light on the answering machine through the open door of the bedroom that doubled as my office. I pushed the button and the mechanical voice answered: ‘You have six messages.’
The second was from Huw Walker.
‘Hi, Sid,’ he said in his usual jovial manner. ‘Bugger! I wish you were there. Anyway, I need to talk to you.’ The laughter had faded from his voice. ‘I’m in a bit of trouble and I…’ he paused, ‘I know this sounds daft but I’m frightened.’
There was another brief pause.
‘Actually, Sid, no kidding, I’m really frightened. Someone called me on the phone and threatened to kill me. I thought they were bloody joking so I told them to eff off and put the phone down. But they rang back and it’s given me the willies. I thought it was all a bit of a lark but now I find that it ain’t. I need your bloody help this time, mate, and no mistake. Call me back. Please call me back.’
There was another long pause as if he had waited in case I picked up at my end. Then there was a click and the next message played. It was from my financial adviser reminding me to buy an ISA before the end of the tax year.
There were, in fact, two messages from Huw, not one. Message four was also his.
‘Where are you when I need you, you bugger?’ His voice was slurred and he had obviously been drinking in the time between messages. ‘Come on, pick up the bloody phone, you bastard! Can’t you tell when a mate’s in trouble?’ There was a pause in which I could hear him swallow. ‘Just a few losers, they says, for a few hundred in readies, they says. OK, I says, but make it a few grand.’ He sighed loudly. ‘Do as we tell you, they says, or the only grand you’ll see is the drop from the top of the effing grandstand.’ He was now crying. ‘Should have bloody listened, shouldn’t I?’
The message ended abruptly.
I stood in the dark and thought of him as I had last seen him; three closely grouped deadly holes in his heart.
Yes, he should have bloody listened.
CHAPTER 4
Archie Kirk called me at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning as Marina and I were still sitting in bed in our robes, surrounded by the newspapers.
‘Thought you were meant to be a private detective.’ He emphasised the word private. ‘Not very private to be splashed across the front pages.’
The Sundays had taken up where the Saturdays had left off, with hundreds of column inches bemoaning the death of Oven Cleaner. One red-top rag even called for a national day of mourning and a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.
However, I assumed Archie was referring to the front-page banner headline in The Pump that read ‘Sid Halley in Cheltenham Murder Mystery’ above a three-column photograph of me looking extremely furtive. At first glance, anyone would have thought that it was me who had been murdered. The Pump and I had crossed swords in the past and maybe the headline was just wishful thinking by the editor.
Someone in their newsroom clearly had a source in the Cheltenham police who had reported that ‘Sid Halley, ex-champion steeplechase jockey, has been interviewed by senior officers and is helping the police with their enquiries into the murder of jockey Huw Walker at Cheltenham races on Friday. No arrest has been made at this time.’
Clearly The Pump expected me to be hung, drawn and quartered by lunchtime. The piece went on to imply that all of the world’s ills could be placed at my door. ‘Sid Halley, crippled ex-jockey, is now searching the gutters for rats as a minor private dick. He should feel nicely at home amongst the low-life…’
‘Ridiculous,’ I said. ‘They’re fishing.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Archie, ‘enough people will believe it.’
Archie was always concerned for my welfare and now, it appeared, he wanted to protect my reputation as well.
He was some sort of civil servant but he didn’t belong to any specific department. Nominally, he answered to the Cabinet Office, but he appeared to work in his own way with little contact or regard for his superiors. He was the chairman of a small group who were tasked with attempting to foretell the future. Their remit was to try and work out the consequences of proposed legislation, to try and ensure that it would actually do what it was intended without any unpleasant side effects that had been overlooked. Officially they were called the Standing Cabinet Sub-Committee on Legislative Outcomes but they were referred to by the few who knew of their existence as the Crystal Ball Club. Archie tended to label them the Cassandra Committee after the Greek mythological heroine who was both blessed and cursed by the god Apollo with the ability to correctly predict the future whilst no one believed her.
‘Any publicity is good publicity,’ I quipped.
‘Tell that to Gerald Ratner.’
I respected Archie and had grown to like him more and more as, over the past four years, I had become his very private ears and eyes.
Legislation in a democracy is, by its very nature, a compromise, a negotiated settlement somewhere in the middle ground. Whether it be a government-backed initiative or a private member’s bill, there is usually some horse-trading to be done. Some amendments may be accepted, others declined, paragraphs may be removed, word orders may be changed. Laws passed by Parliament are often substantially different from those drafted.
Archie and his Crystal Ball Club tried to look at legislation from the perspective of the end user, the members of the general public who would be affected. History is littered with examples where law makers had grossly misjudged the reaction that their well-intentioned deeds would produce.
After World War I, no less than forty-five of the then forty-eight states of the US voted to amend the American Constitution to prohibit the importation, manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the hope and expectation of reducing crime and corruption. Only the state of Rhode Island voted against. Fourteen murderous years later, during which time the federal prison inmate population increased by more than 350 %, the same state legislators voted another amendment to the Constitution repealing their blunder, again in the hope and expectation of reducing crime and corruption.
In 1990, the United Kingdom Government of the day decided that in order to make local taxes fairer they would introduce a single flat charge, equal for all. What could be fairer, they thought? The Community Charge, as they called it, was soon dubbed the Poll Tax and resulted in violent demonstrations across the country. The law was repealed in 1993 but the damage had been done. The Government’s reputation was terminally wounded. They lost the next election in a landslide.
Archie’s team was set up to try and foresee just such problems. They spent much of their time on private member’s bills, providing their political chiefs with a best guess at the effect that would be produced if a specific bill were to be passed into law. Many such proposed bills were the direct result of single-issue pressure groups that could be very persuasive without necessarily revealing the whole truth behind their argument. The chance of a private member’s bill reaching the statute book was largely dependent on whether the government of the day supported the measure and hence provided the parliamentary time. The grounds for such support were a combination of politics, practicality and expediency. Archie’s job was to advise as to the practicality and expediency. However, political considerations sometimes outweighed everything else.