Dick Francis's Damage

Book 0: A Dick Francis Novel

by Felix Francis

Genres: Sports; Private Investigators; Suspense

Synopsis

Felix Francis is back with another edge-of-your-seat thriller, in the classic Dick Francis tradition.
Undercover investigator Jeff Hinkley is assigned by the British Horseracing Authority to look into the activities of a suspicious racehorse trainer, but as he’s tailing his quarry through the Cheltenham Racing Festival, the last thing he expects to witness is a gruesome murder. Could it have something to do with the reason the trainer was banned in the first place—the administration of illegal drugs to his horses?
Then many more horses test positive for prohibited stimulants, and someone starts making demands, threatening to completely destroy the integrity of the racing industry. In order to limit the damage to the sport, it’s critical that Jeff find the perpetrator ... but he’ll soon learn he’s up against someone who will stop at nothing to prevail.

Release date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

I’ve had the test results and the news isn’t good.”

I couldn’t get the words out of my head.

I was sitting in the shadows at the back of a race-program kiosk near the north entrance to Cheltenham racetrack, scanning the faces of the crowd as they flooded through the turnstiles.

I was looking out for any one of the fifty or so individuals who were banned from British racetracks, but my mind kept drifting back to the telephone conversation I’d had that morning with my sister.

“I’ve had the test results and the news isn’t good.”

“In what way?” I asked with rising dread.

“It’s cancer,” she said quietly.

I’d feared so but had hoped desperately that I was wrong.

I waited silently. She’d go on if she wanted to.

“It’s all a bit of a bugger.” She sighed audibly down the line. “I’ve got to have surgery next Monday and then some chemo.”

“What’s the surgery for?”

“To remove my gallbladder. That’s where the cancer is.”

“Can you live without it?”

She laughed. “The gallbladder or the cancer?”

“Both.”

“I hope so.” The laughter evaporated from her voice. “Time will tell. Things don’t appear very rosy at the moment. I may have only a few months left.”

Oh God, I thought. What does one do when given that scenario? Do you try to carry on as normal or attempt to cram as much into the remaining time as possible? In reality, I suspected that treatment and feeling ill would take over everything. Not very rosy indeed.

I realized that I hadn’t been paying attention to the flow of humanity passing by in front of me.

Concentrate, I said to myself, and went back to studying faces.

It was Champion Hurdle Day, the first of the annual Cheltenham Steeplechasing Festival, and, in spite of the inclement weather, a crowd of over fifty thousand was expected to cram into the Gloucestershire racetrack. Everyone had an umbrella or a rain hat of some kind—ideal conditions for the unwelcome few to hide among the masses.

I knew by sight all those who had racetrack-banning orders, but I was on the lookout for one particular individual that our intelligence branch had suggested might come to Cheltenham that day.

A large man walked up to the kiosk to buy a race program, standing there while he hunted for change in his pockets. I shifted my position to see past him, looking over the head of the program seller who sat directly in front of me.

It was a role I was used to.

My name was Jeff Hinkley and I was an investigator for the British Horseracing Authority. Hence, I spent much of my time half hidden, scanning faces, watching out for those who had no place in racing. Not that being banned from entering racetracks ever stopped them trying.

Cancer of the gallbladder.

How could Faye, my big sister, have cancer of the gallbladder?

Faye was forty-two, twelve years my senior, and she had acted like a mother to me after our real mom had died when I was eight.

I wondered if cancer was hereditary.

Our mom had died of it but I didn’t know where the cancer had been in her body. It was something that wasn’t talked about either before or after her death.

I spotted a face in the crowd.

Nick Ledder, an ex-jock, banned from all racetracks for three years for attempting to bribe another young jockey to lose. I watched as he scanned his ticket and hurried through the turnstile with his coat collar turned up against the icy wind and a tweed cap pulled down over his forehead. It was his eyes that I spotted. It was always the eyes.

But his was not the face I was really looking for.

Nick Ledder was a small-time crook of limited intelligence who hadn’t been able to resist taking a handful of readies to try to fix a race and he had paid a heavy price for his folly. He was hopeful of getting his riding license back early, but he’d hardly endear himself to the stewards by sneaking into Cheltenham while he was still banned.

I let him go by, I could always find him later, and went back to scanning other faces.

I thought about gallbladders. What did they do if you could live without one?

“Jeff, are you there?” said a voice in my earpiece.

“Here, Nigel,” I replied via the microphone I wore on my left wrist.

“Any sign?”

“No,” I said. “Nick Ledder’s here. I saw him. I’ll deal with him later.”

“Bloody fool.”

“How about you?”

“Nothing yet.”

Nigel Green was a colleague of mine in the BHA Integrity Service. He was watching the south entrance. Two other BHA staff were covering the remaining ways in, but Nigel and I reckoned that our target would most likely use either the north or south entrance where the crowds were bigger—that is, if he came at all.

I continued to study faces and tried to keep my mind off gallbladders and chemotherapy. How could she have cancer?

My task would have been easier if I had known none of the people funneling through the turnstiles. Then I would just have had to look for someone familiar. As it was, I knew about a quarter of those passing in front of me: owners, trainers, jockeys, as well as other regular racegoers that I had seen many times before. One of the reasons I had a job with the Integrity Service was because I had an uncanny knack of remembering faces and of putting names to them.

I watched as Duncan Johnson, a top steeplechase trainer, made his way into the racetrack followed closely, and rather indiscreetly, by a young woman twenty years his junior with whom he was currently having an affair. Mrs. Johnson, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. She would probably be at home in Lambourn waiting expectantly for James Sutton, a young groom from the village, who would come and spend the afternoon in bed with her, enjoying the racing on Channel 4 and other things, just as they did on most Saturdays.

It was amazing what one could discover simply by frequenting the Lambourn pubs and keeping one’s eyes and ears open. Snooping was a major part of my job, but I’d learned to be discreet and inconspicuous, asking very few questions myself whilst encouraging others to ask for me.

Duncan Johnson drifted away out of my sight with his high-heeled concubine clicking away on the tarmac five paces behind him, fooling nobody.

What sort of gall did a gallbladder store?

I hadn’t had time to search on the Internet as Faye had called me just as I was leaving my hotel for the racetrack. I’d look it up later.

The human swarm was beginning to thin out as the first race approached, most people having arrived early to grab a bite and a beer before the start of proceedings, with time to make their selections and place their bets. Those held up in the race-day traffic now hurried through the turnstiles, making a beeline for the betting ring and the grandstand.

“They’re off!” The public address announced the start of the first race of the Festival, greeted as always with a huge roar from the excited crowd.

Perhaps the cancer has been caught early.

I knew Faye had been for tests after having pains in her abdomen over Christmas, but she’d assumed it was kidney stones, something she’d had once before.

What had she said that morning? I may have only a few months left. But Faye always tended to look on the darker side of life.

As she had also said, time would tell.

My mind was drifting again and I almost missed him.

Just as the race was coming towards an exhilarating finale with the crowd cheering, the target came through the end turnstile in a rush, hurrying on as if he wanted to catch the finish, a red scarf wound around his neck and mouth and with a battered and damp trilby pulled down hard over his ears. Again, it was the eyes that gave him away.

“Bingo,” I said into my microphone. “He’s here. Following now.”

I slipped out of the race-program kiosk and scurried along behind him, keeping about ten yards back.

He went past the shops of the tented village then turned right towards the concourse between the parade ring and the grandstand. There was purpose in his progress as if he had a specific agenda rather than merely wandering around. Perhaps, as we suspected, he was on his way to meet someone. But why here when it would be safer to do so elsewhere in private?

Suddenly he stopped completely and turned around to face me.

Bugger.

I went past him without breaking step and without a glance in his direction, instead looking down at the iPhone in my hand.

I knew he wouldn’t know me.

I’d hardly recognized myself that morning as I looked in the hotel bathroom mirror. I was constantly being ribbed by my colleagues, but I believed that I was most effective if none of those I was pursuing knew what I really looked like. Hence, I used disguises, frequently changing the color of my own curls, or using wigs and various degrees of facial hair, glued in place with a latex-based adhesive.

A good disguise was all about distracting people’s attention away from the eyes. Give them something else to stare at and they might remember that feature but would not recognize the man beneath.

On that particular day I sported a well-trimmed goatee with collar-length dark hair under a brown woolen beanie, as well as a faded green anorak over a gray shirt and navy sweater, plus blue chinos. I purposely didn’t want to look like one of the “establishment,” but equally I needed to blend into the background.

I went on twenty strides and then stopped, half turning back. I put my cell to my ear as if making a call and, using my thumb on the touchscreen, I silently took two photos back towards the target.

He was moving again and I stood quite still, talking to no one on my phone, as he walked right past me. I waited for a moment, letting him get ten or fifteen yards away, before following him up past the bookshop and the confectionary kiosk and then on towards the Centaur Centre and the Tattersall end of the grandstand.

We were moving against the human traffic that was spilling out of the grandstand towards the winners’ enclosure now that the race was over.

The target pressed on into the stream, forcing his way through, as I struggled to keep up behind him.

I almost lost him altogether as a group of six well-built and inebriated punters insisted on walking in line abreast, jostling me to and fro with guffaws as I tried to get past.

“What’s the ’urry, mate?” said one as he pushed me back. “Got a date, ’ave you?”

He laughed enthusiastically at his own weak joke and took another swig from his beer while I ducked under his raised arm. How could anyone, I wondered, be drunk after only the first race?

I scanned the mass of heads in front of me, searching for a battered trilby.

Where had he gone?

I rushed forward in desperation and almost ran straight into the back of the target as he himself was slowed by the congestion in the pinch point beneath the Hall of Fame.

Calm down, I told myself.

“Have you still got him, Jeff?” Nigel asked into my ear.

“Yes,” I said quietly into my left sleeve.

“Need any help?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Where?”

“Under the Hall of Fame bridge.”

“On my way,” Nigel replied.

The target was on the move again, ducking into one of the bars beneath the grandstand.

“Going into the Winged Ox bar,” I said into my sleeve.

“OK,” came the reply. “One minute away.”

The bar was packed with long queues at every counter, but the target was clearly not here to get a drink. Instead, he weaved his way right through the throng and out onto the now almost empty viewing steps beyond.

I’d been close to him as he crossed the teeming bar, but now I hung back so as not to alert him to my presence.

I watched as he stood for a moment, moving his head from side to side as if searching for something, before setting off again down the steps.

What was he doing here? I asked myself again. Surely he must know that meeting someone at a racetrack was likely to provoke a reaction from the racing authorities.

I went out onto the viewing steps and looked down.

The target moved swiftly towards where the lines of bookmakers were sheltering from the rain under their multicolored and name-branded umbrellas.

Had he come to speak to a bookmaker?

Nigel Green joined me.

“That’s our man,” I said, pointing, “with the red scarf.”

The target was about twenty yards away and, as we watched, he took his right hand out of his coat pocket. His hand was not empty.

“Knife! Knife!” I shouted loudly, rushing down the steps.

My shouts were swept away by the wind and there was nothing I could do but watch as the target went straight up to one of the bookmakers and slashed at his throat. There was no warning, no words at all, just a clean swipe of the blade across the bookie’s unprotected skin, which turned instantly from pink to bright red.

It had occurred so fast that even those standing close by seemed not to realize what had happened until the bookmaker in question toppled face-first onto the wet tarmac, blood gushing from the wound in his neck like a scarlet fountain.

Meanwhile, the target moved away, walking fast along the line of bookmakers, dodging other racegoers, some of whom were running towards the spot behind him where a woman had begun screaming loudly.

I went on following the target while Nigel went to tend to the victim.

So that was why he’d come. Not to meet or to talk but to kill.

I followed him along to the end of the grandstand, where the food stalls were doing brisk business. He turned right and started up the slope towards the south exit. I hurried after him, the need for stealth now ended.

He glanced back over his shoulder, noticed me pushing my way through the hamburger queue, and began to run.

I ran after him, towards the entrance, where late arrivals were still streaming through the turnstiles.

The official at the exit gate alongside the turnstiles wouldn’t let the target out. He kept asking for his ticket so it could be scanned for reentry.

I was by now just a few feet away. The target looked up and saw me watching him.

He panicked and reached into his coat pocket for the knife, its blade still showing red.

“Get back,” he shouted, waving the knife in front of him. “Get back, all of you.”

I stepped back a pace or two while others moved much farther away.

“Give it up,” I said to him. “There’s no escape.”

He looked around with wide eyes and grabbed hold of the gateman, who had been cornered next to his gate.

“Open the gate,” the target ordered, ignoring the two large policemen in bright yellow jackets who had appeared on its far side, one of whom was talking urgently into his radio. “Open the bloody gate!” He was desperate.

The gateman tried to comply, but in his haste and nervousness he couldn’t get the latch to open.

“Give yourself up,” I shouted, but the target simply waved his knife more vigorously, slashing it towards me.

I retreated a few more steps.

More police arrived and a standoff ensued, with the target holding the unfortunate gateman in his left hand, with the knife in his right.

“Open the gate or I’ll kill him.” The knife was close to the gateman’s neck.

“Let him go and then we’ll open the gate,” shouted one of the policemen on the far side.

“No,” yelled the target in escalating distress. “Open the gate first.”

The impasse continued and was finally broken only when one of the newly arrived police officers stepped forward and shot him with a Taser stun gun.

The target instantly dropped to the ground, his body writhing around uncontrollably from the multithousand-volt electric shocks delivered by the Taser. Two more policemen came forward, carefully removing the knife before bending the target’s arm behind his back and applying a pair of sturdy handcuffs to his wrists.

Satisfied, they stood up, leaving the target lying facedown on the cold, wet tarmac.

“Who is he?” one of them asked me.

“Matthew Unwin,” I said. “He’s a banned ex–racehorse trainer.”

“Banned?” he said. “Banned from what?”

“All racetracks and racing stables.”

“So what’s he doing here, then?” the policeman asked.

Murdering a bookmaker.

2

You’re a pair of complete idiots.”

Nigel and I were sitting on a bed in our hotel getting a roasting from our immediate boss, Paul Maldini, head of operations at the BHA Integrity Service.

“You have Unwin under close surveillance and yet you allow him to just walk up and murder someone in broad daylight while you two stand by and watch!” Paul’s voice went up in both tone and volume, and he waved his arms around in the manner of his Italian ancestors.

Nigel and I knew better than to interrupt.

It would not have been helpful to point out that neither of us was actually standing still when Matthew Unwin had sliced right through the jugular vein of the hapless bookmaker, Jordan Furness. Or that it happened so fast that we couldn’t have stopped it even if we’d been standing right next to him. Or that it was only due to my continuing to follow Unwin after the event that he had been so rapidly detained by the police.

Nigel and I both knew that Paul needed to “blow his top,” as he did occasionally when operations did not pan out as planned.

“And whose stupid idea was it not to apprehend him at the racetrack entrance when he arrived?”

Nigel and I looked at each other. As far as we could remember, it had been Paul himself who had ultimately given the go-ahead to allow Unwin access to the racetrack so that we could see who he was there to meet. But now was clearly not the time nor the place to point that out.

And who was to say he wouldn’t then have used his knife on us?

As Paul Maldini droned on above my head, I thought back to the previous day. I had spent much of the afternoon and evening with Detective Sergeant Galley of Gloucestershire Police, going over again and again every detail of Matthew Unwin’s brief appearance at the racetrack.

In particular, he had wanted to know why Nigel and I had thought Unwin would be there.

“One of our intelligence analysts received a tip-off from a CHIS.”

“A CHIS?”

“Covert human intelligence source.”

“And who exactly was this CHIS?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.” I was sure he hadn’t believed me even though I’d been telling him the truth.

However, I did know that the source was considered to be very reliable.

All intelligence was graded as to the nature of the informant, from A to D, and the quality of the information, from 1 to 5. Something rated as A1 was pretty much considered as a fact, while anything below C3 was ignored completely as merely malicious rumor and gossip. B2 was fairly average, but, in this case, the analyst had given the info an A2 rating. Well worth acting on.

“Mr. Hinkley, can you tell me why Mr. Unwin was banned from Cheltenham racetrack?” the DS had asked.

“From all racetracks, not just Cheltenham. In January he was banned for eight years from all licensed racing premises.”

“Why?”

“He used to be a racehorse trainer and horses in his stable were found to have been given banned substances. They’d been doped.”

“Eight years seems rather harsh.”

“Not really. He could have been banned for up to twenty-five. Many in racing thought he’d got off rather lightly.”

“It won’t make much difference now,” the policeman had said. “He’ll be in prison for far more than eight years anyway after today’s little performance. Have you any idea why he would attack Mr. Furness?”

“None at all,” I’d said, “but I do know it was a deliberate choice. I watched as he searched with his eyes for the right man.”

Paul Maldini moaned on for another half an hour about our incompetence, but I wasn’t really listening. I’d heard it before and knew that he’d calm down in a day or two. Most of the time he really was pretty good at his job, although, in my opinion, he needed to learn to control his rages.

But at least he didn’t fire us.

Instead, he sent Nigel and me back to the racetrack for the second day of the Festival.

—

ALL THE TALK was about the murder of the bookmaker, but it was more because of the delay it caused to racing and the postponement of the last race due to failing light rather than any altruistic concerns for the man himself.

“I’m glad it wasn’t today,” I overheard one man say, laughing. “Their loss is our gain.” The postponed race had been rescheduled to be run before the official first race of day two.

Sympathy for the murdered bookmaker was in short supply in spite of the violent manner of his passing.

“He probably deserved it,” said a tweed-suited woman in the Arkle Bar, who received nodding agreement from those around her.

There was less talk but certainly more compassion for Matthew Unwin, the perpetrator of the crime.

“Obviously, driven to it, poor man,” said one of the stallholders in the tented village.

“Must have been desperate,” agreed his customer, pursing her lips and shaking her head.

I drifted around the enclosures, listening and watching. I was dressed and appeared as myself, not least because, as a result of Paul Maldini’s diatribe, I hadn’t had enough time to “make up.”

I had an official right of entry to everywhere on each of the fifty-eight currently operated British racetracks including, if I’d wanted, the jockeys’ changing rooms and the Royal Boxes. However, rather than putting on my BHA Access All Areas lanyard, which made me stand out as “an authority,” I usually arranged to wear a cardboard Owner badge that let me wander wherever I wanted in anonymity. On the rare occasions I had been asked which horse I owned I simply said that I was a member of a syndicate, an answer guaranteed to cause the inquisitor to instantly lose interest.

I watched the rescheduled race from the stand reserved for owners and trainers, my ears tuned for any tidbits of gossip.

“Did you hear about Peter and Marianne?” a lady said behind me to her companion. “A trial separation, they call it, but I know for a fact he’s screwing one of his stable girls. I hope Marianne takes him to the cleaners.”

“I see Lorne Taylor is pregnant again,” said a male voice on my right. “That’ll be their sixth. How many kids do they want, for goodness’ sake?”

“I heard from Trevor that Hot Target is to be gelded and sent to Lawrence Ford as a hurdler. Such a shame he’s been firing blanks.”

I absorbed it all like a sponge. One never knew if, when, or what information might be useful.

“Do you think we’ll win?” an excited lady owner asked the man on her far side, a middle-ability Lambourn-based trainer.

“He has a fair chance,” the trainer replied without any great enthusiasm. “Depends on how well he jumps.”

The horse in question jumped well enough but ran out of gas in the run up the hill to the line, finishing a creditable fifth out of twelve.

“Maybe next time,” the trainer said in comfort to his clearly disappointed owner as they departed to unsaddle their charge.

I wandered up to the lines of bookmakers in the betting ring.

Someone had been busy with a high-pressure hose and there was no sign of the blood that had been spilled there only twenty-four hours before. The only thing different was that there was no Jordan Furness–emblazoned umbrella in the line. Not that a respectful space had been left empty. All the other bookmakers had simply moved along one place to fill in the gap.

The detective sergeant had asked me over and over again if I had any inkling of why Matthew Unwin might have murdered Furness.

“Why don’t you ask him?” I’d said. “Perhaps he owed money.”

But murder was rather a drastic measure to get out of paying a debt.

I thought back to the case that had resulted in Unwin being disqualified and excluded from racing. Several of the horses in his stables had tested positive for banned performance-enhancing drugs after an anonymous telephone tip-off to the BHA.

Had that been a reason? Was it revenge?

But surely a bookmaker wouldn’t have been the one to make the call?

The ringing of my cell phone interrupted my thoughts.

“Hello?”

“Jeff? It’s Quentin.”

Quentin was my brother-in-law, Faye’s husband.

“Hi,” I said. “I am so sorry to hear the news about Faye.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s not looking too good, but she’s a fighter and determined to see this thing off.”

“Good.”

“I actually rang you about something else. I need your help.”

“Yes, of course. How?”

“I need something investigated and you’re an investigator.”

“But I only investigate horseracing,” I said.

“Look, I can’t tell you everything over the phone. Can you pop over and see me at home?”

“I can’t. I’m at Cheltenham until Friday night.”

“Saturday morning would be perfect.” Quentin could be very persistent.

“All right,” I said. “It will be good to see Faye.”

“Don’t mention any of this to Faye,” he said sharply. “She has enough troubles of her own at the moment. I don’t want her bothered by this.”

“OK,” I said somewhat uneasily. “How about eleven o’clock?”

“Make it nine,” he said decisively. “I have a conference call at ten-thirty.”

Bang went my hoped-for lie-in. But how could I say no? I had decided that I would go see Faye over the weekend as it was.

“OK,” I said again without enthusiasm. “I’ll be there at nine for our meeting, then I’ll spend some time after with Faye.”

“Don’t tell Faye about your investigation,” he snapped again.

“Look, Quentin,” I said, equally abruptly. “I haven’t even agreed to investigate anything for you yet and I’m not sure I will. But I will see you at nine o’clock on Saturday.”

I hung up.

Why, I thought, did my brother-in-law always manage to bring out the worst in me? Or maybe I brought out the worst in him. Either way, we had never really got on.

He was some ten years older than my sister and he had been married twice previously when, one summer’s day, he swept Faye off her feet in a whirlwind romance just as she was beginning to resign herself to the fact that at thirty-two and with no boyfriend, she would never get married.

Quentin Calderfield was an eminent barrister, known universally by his fellow advocates simply as QC, and Faye had been one of the junior clerks in his chambers. He was a man of immense self-confidence, used to getting his own way, and someone not to argue with unless you wanted to lose.

Quentin had risen rapidly up the legal ranks to become Quentin’s counsel and was therefore now more accurately known as QC,QC. His father had been a distinguished judge and a justice of the UK Supreme Court, having previously sat as a senior Law Lord in the House of Lords. Quentin was expected, at least by himself, to take a similar path to the pinnacle of the legal profession, and not many doubted that he’d get there.

I meandered up and down the lines of bookmakers, but my mind was preoccupied with Quentin and what he wanted investigating.

He surely knows masses of investigators, I thought. The courts must be full of them. So why did he need me? No doubt, I’d find out on Saturday.

—

THE REST OF THE WEEK at Cheltenham was uneventful i