Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [3]
I came upon the back of the traffic congestion just south of Stoke, the mass of red brake lights ahead of me shining brightly in the darkness.
I have to admit that I am usually an impatient driver. I suppose it is a case of “once a racer, always a racer.” It makes little difference to me if my steed has four legs or four wheels, if I see a gap I’d tend to take it. It’s the way I’d ridden during my all-too-short four years as a jockey and it had served me well.
But, that evening, I didn’t have the energy to get irritated by the queues of near-stationary cars. Instead I sat quietly in the outside lane as we crawled past an upturned motor home that had spread its load of human and domestic clutter across half the carriageway. One shouldn’t look at others’ misfortune, but, of course, we all did, and thanked our lucky stars it wasn’t us lying there on the cold tarmac receiving medical assistance.
I stopped at one of the motorway service areas and called home.
Claudia, my girlfriend, answered at the second ring.
“Hello, it’s me,” I said. “I’m on my way home, but I’ll be a couple of hours more at least.”
“Good day?” she asked.
“Have you seen the news?”
“No. Why?”
I knew she wouldn’t have. Claudia was an artist and she had planned to spend the day painting in what she called her studio but what was actually the guest bedroom of the house we shared. Once she closed the door, turned up the music on her iPod headphones and set to work on a canvas, it would take an earthquake or a nuclear strike to penetrate her bubble. I had been quite surprised that she had answered the phone.
“The National was canceled,” I said.
“Canceled?”
“Well, there’s talk of them holding the race on Monday, but it was canceled for today.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Someone was murdered.”
“How inconvenient of them.” There was laughter in her voice.
“It was Herb,” I said.
“What was Herb?” she asked. The laughter had gone.
“It was Herb who was murdered.”
“Oh my God!” she screamed. “How?”
“Watch the news.”
“But Nick,” she said, concerned. “I mean—are you OK?”
“I’m fine. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”
Next I tried to call my boss—Herb’s boss—to warn him of the coming disruption to business, as I was sure there would be, but there was no answer. I decided against leaving a message. Somehow voice mail didn’t seem the right medium for bad news.
I set off southwards again and spent the remainder of the journey as I had the first part, thinking about Herb and wondering why anyone should want to kill him. But there were so many questions and so few answers.
How did the murderer know Herb would be at Aintree today?
Had we been followed from London and stalked around the racetrack?
Had Herb really been the target or had it been a case of mistaken identity?
And why would anyone commit murder with sixty thousand potential witnesses in close attendance when surely it would be safer to lure their victim alone into some dark, quiet alley?
I’d said as much to the detective inspector, but he hadn’t thought it particularly unusual. “Sometimes it is easier for an assailant to get away if there is a big crowd to hide in,” he’d said. “Also it can pander to their ego to do it in a public place with witnesses.”
“But it must make it more likely that he would be recognized, or at least allow you to get a good description.”
“You’d be surprised,” he’d said. “More witnesses often mean more confusion. They all see things differently, and we end up with a description of a black white man with straight curly hair, four arms and two heads. And everyone tends to look at the bleeding victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. We often get a great description of the corpse but nothing about the murderer.”
“But how about CCTV?” I’d asked him.
“It appears that the particular spot behind the grandstands where Mr. Kovak was shot is not in view of any of the racetrack security cameras and