Pulse Page 15

  Jack looked at me strangely. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just ask them.’

  ‘Chris, if you have reason to believe that a jockey should be tested for drugs, then you need to go through the proper channels.’ He was being very formal.

  ‘Via Adrian Kings?’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t think so.’

  He looked awkward. ‘I must go. Adrian wants everyone there early today.’

  Everyone except me.

  Jack hurried off towards the entrance and my watch showed me it was half past eleven. Still two hours until the first race and an hour before I was due to meet with the police.

  The police.

  I made a call.

  ‘DC Filippos,’ said the voice that answered.

  ‘Ask Jason Conway about the envelope in his right trouser pocket,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ said the policeman. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Chris Rankin,’ I said. ‘Ask Conway about the envelope. Or, better still, search him.’

  ‘Dr Rankin,’ he said with a somewhat exasperated tone, ‘we can’t just search people without good reason. What is in this envelope?’

  ‘I thought you could stop and search anyone.’

  ‘Only if we have reasonable grounds for suspicion. Now, what is in the envelope?’

  ‘Drugs,’ I said, jumping to a conclusion. ‘I saw it being handed over from a black Mercedes in the car park.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  I hesitated. ‘No, I’m not sure, but why else would something be handed over in such a furtive manner so that no one else could see?’

  ‘But you saw.’

  ‘Only because I was following him.’

  ‘Dr Rankin,’ the policeman said in a rather condescending manner, ‘I have already told you to leave any investigating to us.’

  ‘I am,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m telling you about the envelope. So that you can investigate it.’

  I decided not to mention my photograph of the Mercedes number plate, not yet anyway. Best to see what was in the envelope first.

  I hung around for a while longer in the car park but either Dick McGee was late or he had slipped in during my excursion up the line of cars behind Jason Conway.

  I was concerned that my ‘Authorised Doctor’ pass might have been revoked but it allowed me to safely negotiate the entrance turnstiles.

  I kept well away from the weighing room and the parade ring, and I carefully bypassed the Vestey Bar in making my way up towards The Centaur, a big indoor space that could be used for all sorts of events from weddings and dinner dances to live-band music concerts and conferences.

  During the racing festival, the space was used simply as an extension of the grandstand with bars, food outlets and bookmakers catering for the many who preferred to remain inside away from the elements, watching the action on a huge-screen projection TV.

  I was at the police control room in the foyer bang on the appointed time but I still had to wait. Indeed, it was almost one o’clock before detectives Merryweather and Filippos arrived, and they weren’t particularly happy with me.

  I was ushered into a small interview room containing a table and four chairs. I sat on one side of the table while the two policemen sat opposite.

  ‘Am I under arrest, or something?’ I asked with a hollow laugh.

  Neither of them laughed back.

  ‘Not at this time,’ said DS Merryweather seriously. ‘However, we are concerned that you are interfering with our investigation, something that has to stop.’

  ‘I’m only trying to help,’ I said sheepishly.

  ‘Well, you’re not,’ he said angrily. ‘And, if you don’t cease immediately, I will have you arrested for wasting police time.’

  He was trying to bully me, and I didn’t like it.

  ‘How exactly have I wasted your time?’ I said, robustly defending myself. ‘If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have found anyone who knew who the nameless man was.’

  ‘We still haven’t,’ he replied.

  ‘But those jockeys know who he is.’

  ‘They deny that. Two of them agree that they may have had an argument with the man in the car park but they maintain they have no idea who he was.’

  ‘They’re lying,’ I said flatly.

  ‘How do you know?’ DS Merryweather said.

  ‘From their reaction to his picture. They were worried. They must know who he was. Can’t you do a lie-detector test on them?’

  ‘The polygraph is not standard equipment for use by UK police forces.’

  More’s the pity, I thought.

  ‘And how about the envelope?’ I asked. ‘It was me who saw that transferred in the car park.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the detective said sarcastically. ‘The envelope. You told my constable here that it contained drugs. Why was that?’

  ‘Didn’t it?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘What did it contain?’ I asked.

  ‘A train time,’ he said. ‘Nothing more. Just a piece of paper with the name of a London railway station and the time of a train.’

  ‘Which station?’ I asked.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, his anger again rising. ‘We searched Jason Conway on your say-so and you made us look foolish when we found nothing sinister.’

  ‘What about my tyres?’ I asked. ‘Did you ask him about those?’

  ‘Indeed we did,’ replied the detective, the sarcasm still thick in his voice. ‘Are you aware that Jason Conway’s horse won the sixth race yesterday?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I watched it.’ I remembered back to the man who had staked too much on him and was in danger of not being able to pay his hotel bill.

  ‘But are you also aware that the horse kicked Conway on the knee as he was removing his saddle? He was in the jockeys’ medical room receiving treatment from the physiotherapist until nearly seven o’clock last night. He could not have let your tyres down.’

  ‘Then it must have been Dick McGee or Mike Sheraton. Did you ask them?’

  ‘Both denied any knowledge of the incident. They also were adamant that neither of them even knows what your car looks like.’

  ‘They’re lying,’ I said again. ‘It has to be one of them. No one else knew I’d been asking questions about the dead man.’ But I could tell from their demeanour that neither of the detectives believed me.

  ‘Do you think I put that note on my windscreen myself?’ I asked in exasperation. ‘What about fingerprints on it? Did you test for them?’

  For some reason they were uneasy about it, which probably meant no, they hadn’t.

  ‘We can’t just fingerprint anyone we want, you know, not unless we’ve arrested them first.’

  ‘You haven’t even taken mine to eliminate them,’ I said with resignation. ‘Anyone would think you don’t want to know who the nameless man was or why he died.’

  ‘Our enquiries are ongoing,’ said the detective sergeant in true police-speak.

  ‘What enquiries?’ I asked, my tone rather mocking. ‘You don’t even rate the man’s death as suspicious.’

  ‘We are treating it as unexplained. That means we still have an open mind as to the full circumstances of his death. However, we do know that the man died of a cocaine overdose that was most likely consumed from a contaminated bottle of whisky that had his fingerprints all over it. He was found in a lavatory cubicle that had been locked from the inside and there were no obvious signs of a struggle. Our inference from the facts is that the man died either by suicide or by an accidental overdose.’

  ‘But the very fact that he had no means of identification and you still can’t find out his name is surely suspicious.’

  ‘You might be surprised how many unidentified dead people we have on our files.’

  ‘How many?’ I asked. ‘Three? Four? Five, maybe?’

  ‘Nationwide, well over a thousand.’

  I must have sat there with my mouth hanging open for several seconds.

&nbs
p; ‘A thousand!’

  ‘There were one hundred and fifty unidentified human remains found last year alone,’ DS Merryweather said. ‘The man in the Cheltenham Grandstand toilet was just one of those.’

  ‘That’s incredible.’

  ‘Many are decomposed but a sizable number are, like our man, alive when first found or, at least, have only just died. And only about one in ten of those turns out to be suspicious.’

  ‘Don’t people contact you when a family member fails to come home?’

  ‘We get those calls all the time. We’ve had nearly forty about this particular man but none of them have delivered a credible name. There’ve even been two visits to the morgue by families claiming the man was theirs but both have been excluded by DNA testing.’

  I felt slightly ashamed that I thought the police had done nothing.

  ‘Many of the unidentified are completely estranged from families, while others are foreigners who die while over in the UK. Quite a lot are suicides. About half will have a name put to them eventually, but the others will simply remain on file as unknown.’

  ‘What happens to them?’ I asked.

  ‘There is no national agreed protocol. Some councils provide basic burials, but many are stored in morgues for years.’

  I shuddered slightly. My medical career had always been concerned with the living, not least because of my parents’ infatuation with the dead. I’d never had any wish to move into pathology, even though I could appreciate the excitement of uncovering the mystery of the causes of sudden death.

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ I asked.

  ‘You go nowhere,’ DS Merryweather said firmly. ‘We will continue our enquiries. We’re trying a new technique called isotope analysis, which looks at the make-up of a body in terms of its chemical isotopes. On the basis that you are what you eat, we hope it can reveal where in the world our man had been living.’

  ‘So you think he was foreign?’ I asked.

  ‘It is an open line of enquiry.’

  ‘Any news from India?’

  ‘Not as yet, but it’s early days.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how he travelled to the racecourse in the first place?’ I asked. ‘You surely don’t believe that nonsense about him parking his car in the jockeys’ reserved section?’

  ‘We have an open mind about that,’ the detective said again. ‘We have no evidence that he came either by car or by train. There were no train tickets found on him.’

  ‘Nor any car keys,’ I said.

  ‘No. Those neither. But he could have had a lift from someone, even someone he didn’t know.’

  ‘How about CCTV?’

  ‘The racecourse system failed to spot him entering and the cameras at the train station were out of order on the day in question.’

  How typical was that, I thought.

  ‘How about the bookmaker’s slip in the man’s pocket?’

  ‘Dead end.’

  ‘Which bookmaker?’ I asked.

  There was a pause while the sergeant worked out in his own mind if telling me was a good idea or a bad one.

  ‘Come on,’ I said imploringly. ‘Tell me. Which bookmaker?’

  ‘Tommy Berkley,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We showed him the photo but he says he can’t remember the man. Seems he only ever remembers the big winners and big losers, and our man was neither of those.’

  ‘How much was the bet?’ I asked. That too would have been printed on the slip.

  ‘Five pounds to win. Not very memorable.’

  ‘Which horse?’

  ‘I can’t recall,’ the detective sergeant replied with some irritation. ‘It doesn’t matter which horse.’

  ‘Fabricated,’ interjected DC Filippos, the first thing he’d said all interview.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Merryweather. ‘The horse’s name was Fabricated.’

  Just like the jockeys’ story about the man parking his car in their spaces.

  After more than half an hour, I was sent on my way with another strongly worded warning still ringing in my ears.

  ‘Leave it all to us,’ DS Merryweather commanded firmly, ‘or else you will be arrested and charged with obstructing the police in the execution of their duty.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘No buts,’ he said, holding up a hand to interrupt me. ‘Absolutely no buts.’

  But there were buts, I thought. Lots of them.

  But I was certain that the man’s death actually was suspicious.

  But I was the only person who had actually seen the reaction from Dick McGee and the other jockeys when they had seen the image of the dead man.

  But I was the only person who therefore knew they were lying.

  And finally, but this was very important to me, and not just for the dead man’s sake. My whole future mental well-being might depend on it.

  So I had no intention whatsoever of leaving it all to the police.

  19

  Racing was well under way by the time I emerged from the police control room.

  What should I do now?

  I wandered aimlessly among the huge crowd, surrounded on every side by those having a good time yet feeling totally isolated and alone. Somehow, up until this point, I had considered myself part of a team that was trying to solve the mystery of the dead man. Suddenly, I had been cast out, unwelcome and unappreciated.

  Not wanted as a consultant at the hospital, not wanted as a doctor at the racecourse, and now seemingly ‘not wanted’ in any capacity, I would have had every right and excuse for descending once more into a depression-fuelled abyss. However, far from feeling miserable about my situation, I was spurred on by it.

  I would discover why the man died.

  I may have failed him in life, but I would not do so again in death.

  I watched the third race from the jam-packed viewing steps of the grandstand, crammed in between a group of six young men on a day trip from Birmingham and another of five, over from County Cork across the Irish Sea. I knew this because they introduced each other at length, every one of them insisting on shaking hands with all the members of the other group, something not easy when we were all squashed together like sardines.

  I was unintentionally swept up in this example of international friendship, shaking my hand with all of them and even receiving a few beery kisses along the way.

  It made me laugh, and it was just what I needed.

  The favourite won the race to a great cheer from the crowd and was welcomed into the winner’s circle like a returning war hero.

  I, meanwhile, made my way through the throng to the betting ring, that open space in front of the grandstand where the majority of the bookmakers stood at their pitches, their price boards glowing brightly with red and yellow lights.

  ‘Let’s be ’aving you,’ one of them shouted enthusiastically at the milling mass of prospective customers, ‘eleven-to-four the field for the Gold Cup.’

  The punters moved up and down the lines of bookmakers looking for the best-offered odds for their selected horse. The odds could vary slightly from bookie to bookie, and also in time as the race approached. Odds would shorten if large bets were made on a particular horse, while others might drift longer on less-fancied runners.

  It was the way the bookmakers controlled the total bet with them on each horse, to maintain their ‘book’ in profit whatever the outcome. The official ‘starting price’ was the most frequent odds on the boards in the betting ring at the moment the race started.

  However, the only odds I was really interested in were those displayed on the board of bookmaker Tommy Berkley.

  I stood and watched him as he took banknotes from his customers, adding them to the large wedge in his left hand. He shouted out the bet to his assistant behind him, who entered it into a computer. A printer produced a slip showing the bet details, which was then passed to the punter. Each transaction took only a second or two to complete and Tommy was looking for his next customer even before the slip wa
s handed over – a slip just like the one DC Filippos had found in the unnamed man’s pocket.

  All the bookmakers were doing brisk business as the time approached for the main event of the day, indeed the main event of the week, if not the whole year. The Cheltenham Gold Cup was the absolute pinnacle of jump racing, the stuff of dreams and legends, and the atmosphere in the betting ring was alive with the static of hope and expectancy.

  I looked closely at the names and odds on Tommy Berkley’s board.

  Card Reader was quoted at three-to-one, his name flashing on and off to indicate he was the favourite in the market. I wondered how Dave Leigh was feeling, doing his piece to camera in the jockeys’ changing room for the TV broadcaster with his broken collarbone, while Mike Sheraton donned the silks that Dave believed were rightly his.

  But it was another horse’s name on the board that really caught my eye.

  I looked something up in the racecard, then took out my mobile phone and dialled a number.

  ‘DC Filippos.’

  ‘What was the name of the London railway station on the piece of paper in the envelope?’ I asked.

  ‘Dr Rankin,’ he said firmly, ‘DS Merryweather told you to leave everything to us. Please do as he asks.’

  ‘I only want the name of the station.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘Was it Liverpool Street?’ I asked.

  There was a long pause from the other end of the line.

  ‘And was the train time three-thirty?’

  Another pause.

  ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s not a station and a train time,’ I said. ‘Liverpool Street is the name of a horse running in the Gold Cup, a race due off at three-thirty.’

  I waited while the information sank in.

  ‘And Jason Conway is its jockey.’

  There was the customary huge cheer from the crowd as the starter lowered his flag and set the twelve runners in the field for the Gold Cup on their way at three-thirty precisely.

  Jason Conway went straight to the front on Liverpool Street, jumping the first fence a good two lengths clear of the rest of the field before reining back and settling down at the front of the pack.

  The race is run over two complete laps of the course, three and a quarter miles with twenty-two fences to be jumped, and the twelve runners remained well bunched throughout the first circuit, which was run at a steady tempo.