Hands Down, page 7
No organisation likes to have its failings exposed, especially not by an outsider, and that is exactly what had happened to the BHA when I’d once revealed that the much-heralded head of their security service was, in fact, a villain.
‘So this would be another Sid Halley investigation done only for the good of racing rather than for hard cash?’ Her tone was full of irony. We had been here before. ‘Why don’t you just leave it all to the police and the racing authorities?’
‘You know why.’ I said it slowly and softly.
And she did. Sid Halley had never been one for leaving important things to anyone else. Maybe it was the self-belief, or perhaps a touch of arrogance, that I could do it better than others. It was part of my make-up, and delegation of duties had never been one of my strongest attributes. Add to that a burning desire to see wrongs righted in the sport I loved, especially when its very future was at risk, and there was no chance of me giving up just because I wasn’t being paid.
‘Would what I say make any difference?’ Marina asked.
Probably not, I thought, but I would still love to have her blessing, for her to be onside. There had been a time when she had found the whole process exciting. She had even nicknamed me ‘Sherlock’ for a time when we first got together.
‘Are you coming home?’ I asked, slightly dodging her own question, but her answer to mine might make a difference to my answer to hers.
She sighed. ‘I can’t at the moment. Mamma can’t cope with Pa on her own and the hospital won’t take him.’
What, I wondered, would have happened if she hadn’t been there?
‘How about Elmo? Can’t he help?’
Elmo was Marina’s elder brother. He’d lived in New York for many years and rarely came over to this side of the Atlantic. He hadn’t even made the trip when his little sister had married me.
‘He has too many commitments at work to come at the moment.’
As I had half expected, Marina’s brother wasn’t prepared to drop everything to come and help his mother. Perhaps he’d make it to his father’s funeral, I thought, when I believed he really should be coming now to say goodbye.
‘Is that house a suitable place for Sassy to be staying at the moment?’
‘Not really. She keeps asking me when Opa will get better. I’ve tried to tell her gently that he might not, but it’s hard. Today she asked me if he was going to go to Heaven like Tilly did.’
Tilly had been an Irish setter we had bought after one of our other dogs had been killed on a road. Very sadly, Tilly then died of bloat and a twisted gut aged only one and a half, and it had taken Saskia a long time to get over the loss. So distressed had she been by Tilly’s death that she opposed our plans to buy her another puppy, just in case it happened again.
‘She has been asking me if she can go to Annabel’s birthday party,’ I said.
‘I know, I heard. She’s been asking me the same thing, all the time, and also about her getting a phone.’
Our little girl was nothing if not determined. Just like her parents.
‘When is the party?’ I asked.
‘A week on Saturday.’
‘That’s still twelve days away. Let’s see how things develop.’
‘In what way?’ she asked.
‘I meant with your dad.’
‘Oh, yes, of course. And let’s see how other things develop too.’
‘Right, we will.’ I took a breath. ‘But, in the meantime, I plan to be off to Middleham in the morning to make some waves. And I’m going to ask Charles to look after Rosie, in case I’m not back in time to feed her.’
‘Okay. But, Sid, please be careful.’
So she did care.
* * *
Very early on Tuesday morning, having dropped Rosie off at Aynsford, this time with a supply of her usual dog biscuits, I drove my dark-blue Land Rover Discovery, complete with distinctive number plate, MY S1D, north from Oxfordshire to the Yorkshire Dales.
To make some waves, I’d said to Marina. But, given the seriousness of the situation, maybe causing a tsunami might be more fitting. So I had to produce an earthquake.
I drove into Middleham just before nine o’clock in the morning and, as always at this time of day, there were several strings of racehorses either making their way through the town to the exercise gallops, or home again afterwards.
At the top end of the town, near the castle, is the fifteenth-century Swine Cross, a set of double-sided steps surmounted by two large blocks, one of which was once the base for a market cross.
I parked nearby and went and stood on the top of the steps.
As the strings of horses passed, I caused my earthquake.
‘My name is Sid Halley,’ I shouted at all the riders going by, some of whom may have been licensed jockeys with agents. ‘Do any of you know someone called Anton Valance? Tell him I want to speak to him about the death of Gary Bremner.’
If that didn’t bring him out into the open, nothing would.
However, the first person to arrive was not Mr Valance but a uniformed policeman in a blue-and-yellow-checked patrol car, which screeched to a halt right in front of me.
‘Are you Mr Sid Halley?’ the policeman asked up to my lofted position through his open window.
‘Indeed I am.’
‘Then please come down off there. That’s a protected historic monument, not a soapbox.’
Did this policeman not know that, back in the Middle Ages, crosses such as this one were used for preaching and making public proclamations, as well as for defining a space of personal sanctuary? Was I not just carrying on a centuries-old tradition, protected from persecution and the law?
However, I decided against arguing the point with this particular officer of the law, and so I came down off the steps.
‘Now get in my car,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘My guv’nor wants to speak to you.’
‘Then tell him to come here.’
The policeman looked at me. ‘Are you trying to get yourself arrested for causing damage to listed property?’
I got into his car.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
He didn’t answer but he soon turned into a driveway. To my right I could see a fire engine with several yellow-helmeted firefighters still moving about in the burned-out remains of a stable yard. We drove past the ugly scene and pulled up some fifty yards further on, in front of what I could only imagine was Gary Bremner’s house.
‘Round the back,’ the policeman said, climbing out.
I followed him down the side of the building and into the rear garden.
The television report had said Gary’s body had been found in the undergrowth at the bottom of his garden, but the whole space was overgrown, with the grass looking like it hadn’t been cut for many years, probably since his wife and kids departed.
It was strikingly different to the lawns on either side of the driveway at the front, which were immaculate. Clearly, prospective horse owners weren’t shown round to this part of the estate.
Standing almost knee-deep among the stinging nettles and dandelions were two men engrossed in conversation. One was wearing a head-to-toe white forensic suit while the other was in black trousers and a blue waterproof jacket. Beyond them in the far left-hand corner was the blue tent I’d seen on the news.
‘Wait here,’ said the policeman who’d collected me.
I waited while he went to speak to the others and, presently, the man in the blue jacket came over to me.
‘Mr Halley, I’m Detective Chief Inspector Williams, North Yorks Police. Thank you for coming to see me.’
‘I didn’t have much choice in the matter,’ I said pointedly, implying I wouldn’t be here otherwise. I didn’t have any great respect for police officers since they had arrested me on the bogus child-abuse allegations.
But this one ignored the slight.
‘I understand that you have been making something of a spectacle of yourself this morning, standing on the Swine Cross in the town centre and shouting randomly at passers-by.’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not randomly.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Investigating.’
‘Investigating what?’ he asked, sticking his chin out towards me.
‘Just something. Nothing you need to worry about.’
He wrinkled his nose in displeasure. ‘Mr Halley, you should leave all investigating to the police. Do I make myself clear?’
‘It’s not a police matter,’ I said, although it was. ‘I am actually looking for someone, and I don’t have access to all the data you do. So it seemed logical for me to ask those people who might know where he is, and they were all on horseback. Hence I rose up to their level and had to shout above the sound of the horses’ hooves on the road surface. I assure you there was no spectacle.’
‘As may be but, nevertheless, there was a complaint of a breach of the peace.’
‘Who by?’ I asked. ‘And why have I then been brought here rather than to a police station? Do detective chief inspectors normally deal with breaches of the peace?’
‘You were heard to shout the name Gary Bremner. I am the senior investigating officer in the case of the unexplained death of someone of that name.’
‘But, surely,’ I said, ‘you mean his murder.’
9
Detective Chief Inspector Williams stared at me. ‘At the present time, Mr Bremner’s death is only being treated as unexplained.’
We were still standing in the overgrown garden of said Mr Bremner’s house.
‘The news reports imply you lot think it was suicide,’ I said in a sceptical tone.
‘But you don’t?’
‘Not for a second. I knew Gary. Have done for decades. He would never kill himself. He had far too much courage.’
‘Don’t you need courage to kill yourself?’ DCI Williams asked, surprised.
‘You need far more courage to go on living,’ I replied quickly. ‘Anyway, why would he?’
‘Because he was divorced, estranged from his children, and had now lost his livelihood.’
‘Why his livelihood? Stables can be rebuilt.’
‘How about his horses that were killed?’
‘They weren’t his, they belonged to the owners. He just trained them. Horses in yards are always coming and going. Some retire or die, or move to other trainers, and new ones arrive to take their place. And, as for his family, he didn’t care much for his ex-wife or his kids anyway.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He told me.’
‘When?’
Ah! What did I say?
If I told him I’d been with Gary on Sunday, or even that I’d spoken to him again on the telephone later that evening, then the detective would have had every right to ask me why I hadn’t reported the fact to the police when everyone had believed Gary had perished in the fire during the early hours of Saturday morning.
‘Recently,’ I said.
‘How recently?’
‘I spoke to him briefly on Friday afternoon and then again that evening. He called me at my Oxfordshire home on both occasions.’
It was the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.
And the police would probably know about those calls by now, I thought, by checking Gary’s phone records, at least those calls made when he’d still been using his SIM card. It wasn’t called the Subscriber Identity Module for nothing.
DCI Williams nodded. So he had known.
‘What did you talk about?’
‘Various things. Mostly old times. About when we were both riding in races together.’
‘What else?’
I’m not sure why I didn’t want to tell him about Gary’s accusations against jockeys’ agents, the threats he’d received, or why he’d been so frightened by them, or the fact that I had known he didn’t die in the fire.
Perhaps I was still smarting at having been effectively frogmarched over here from the centre of town. It was not that I didn’t trust the police, although that was questionable after the way they had treated me in the past. Or maybe my reticence was due to the Halley arrogance that Marina and I had touched on the previous evening. But did I really think I could do a better job at investigating Gary Bremner’s death than this professional investigator?
Maybe not, but my priority was different to his. I was only interested in protecting the good name of British horse racing.
Having newspaper banner headlines describing wrongdoing among BHA-licensed individuals, as would surely happen if I left it to the police, was unlikely to maintain trust in racing as a whole among the betting public. And that trust was essential.
Unlike in the United States, where it is a federal offence to lie to an FBI agent, in the United Kingdom it is not illegal to tell untruths and mislead the police, even though they would like you to think it is. Only if you sign a false sworn statement, or actually lie under oath in court, can you be liable for prosecution for perjury or perverting the course of justice.
‘So why do you believe that Gary killed himself?’ I asked the detective, dodging his own question. ‘Did you actually find a suicide note as the news reports suggest?’
The detective chief inspector pursed his lips in displeasure.
I wondered if it was because I’d asked him the question, or was it perhaps due to the fact that it confirmed he had a mole in his organisation passing on information to the press? I expected the latter.
‘And if so,’ I went on, ‘I hope you’ve had the handwriting analysed. Because I wouldn’t believe it even if I’d seen Gary write it himself.’
‘It wasn’t handwritten,’ said DCI Williams, who was clearly then immediately angry with himself for having said anything at all.
‘So where was it?’ I asked.
‘Typed on his iPhone.’
‘But anyone could have keyed that in. You cannot seriously be using that as evidence of suicide. What does the note actually say?’
He stayed silent for a moment, perhaps deciding whether to tell me or not.
‘Not much,’ he said finally. ‘It just said he was sorry but he had lost everything, his stable yard, his wife and his children, and he couldn’t go on any longer.’
‘But he hadn’t lost everything. He still had this house and the stables were fully insured.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He told me.’
‘So while you two were reminiscing about old times and races you rode in together, he not only told you that he didn’t care much for his ex-wife and children, but he also casually slipped into the conversation the fact that his stables were fully insured, and that just one day before they were burned to the ground? Would you call that somewhat suspicious, Mr Halley?’
This whole conversation was getting more awkward by the minute and I was beginning to regret not having told the detective everything in the first place. But I felt I could hardly go back now.
‘Why is it suspicious?’ I asked.
‘Because, if the insurance of his stables was on his mind the day before his stables were destroyed by fire, then I have to ask the question of whether he set them alight himself.’
In truth, after I’d been called by an alive Gary on Saturday afternoon, I had also briefly considered if he had set the fire himself as his way of proving to me that his horses really were in danger, but I had dismissed the notion almost as quickly as I’d thought it. There was no way he would have purposely put his horses at such risk, especially not his star performer, Kicking Rupert, which had died in the blaze.
I shook my head. ‘You must be wrong. Why would he do that?’
‘To collect the insurance money.’ He paused. ‘And perhaps the real reason he killed himself is because he couldn’t live with the guilt that his little scheme had gone wrong and he’d killed three of the horses, but he didn’t want to admit to that in his note.’
We were moving here into the realms of fantasy.
Racehorse trainers are very fond of the horses they train but not to that extent. Thoroughbreds are very delicate creatures, created by centuries of inbreeding in the quest for the ultimate racing machine. They may have strong bodies but they also have very thin legs, designed for speed. Those legs are fragile and every trainer, especially a long-standing jump trainer like Gary, has often experienced the anguish of losing a horse to mortal injury.
The death of a horse, in whatever circumstances, may often be something to cry over, but could it ever be a serious reason for suicide? I thought not, although Richard III, once owner of Middleham Castle down the road, had lost his life due to the lack of a horse to ride after his charger had been killed beneath him at the Battle of Bosworth Field – as William Shakespeare had written in his tragedy, King Richard the Third: ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’
‘What was used?’ I asked.
‘For what?’
‘To hang him.’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
So I wasn’t the only one withholding information.
‘How about his phone?’ I asked. ‘Have you examined that, other than to read the suicide note?’
‘Of course,’ the policeman replied with a don’t-tell-me-how-to-do-my-job expression. ‘And that digital search is ongoing.’
I wondered if, in spite of the SIM being removed, the phone itself would reveal that Gary had made calls to me on Saturday afternoon and Sunday evening. I would soon find out if it did, that was for sure.
‘Anything else you need me for?’ I asked.
‘Not at this time,’ the detective replied in true police-speak. ‘But I will need your contact details.’
‘You already have my phone number. It’s on Gary Bremner’s phone records.’
He nodded. ‘But also I need an address.’ He removed a notebook from the pocket of his coat. I gave him my home details and he wrote them down. ‘Thames Valley area,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘I did two years with them as a traffic cop when I first qualified, before coming north.’
‘Why the move?’ I asked.
‘My wife’s from up here. We moved for her to be nearer to her parents.’
