Silks (12 page)

Bruce dropped me back at the Swan Inn to collect my rental car, before making his apologies and rushing off for a meeting with another client. Meanwhile I decided, as I was almost there, to go and revive some memories by driving around Lambourn, and also to take the opportunity to see Steve Mitchell’s place, at least from the outside.

It had been nearly fifteen years since I had lived in Lambourn and I had only been back there a couple of times in the interim, but nothing much had changed, except that there were now many more houses on the outskirts of the village and some of the shops had different names. The place felt the same. Just being here rekindled that feeling of excitement that had gripped me as a twenty-one-year-old starting an adventure, chasing a dream.

I stopped the car on the road opposite the end of the driveway
belonging to the trainer for whom I had worked as an unpaid assistant all those years ago. Nicholas Osbourne still trained at the same establishment and I was tempted to drive up to his yard but, in truth, and for reasons I couldn’t really understand, our relationship had not been great since my departure. It was why, one day, I had suddenly transferred my horses from him to Paul Newington, and that hadn’t helped Nick’s feelings either. So I now moved on and went in search of Steve Mitchell’s house.

He lived in a modern red-brick detached monstrosity on the edge of the village set back from the Wantage Road. Behind the house was a small stable yard of half a dozen boxes with a small feed store and tack room. It wasn’t yet big enough to be a full commercial racehorse training concern but there was plenty of room for expansion on the grassy field behind. I imagined that Steve had built the place himself with a view to turning to training after retiring from the saddle.

Everywhere was quiet and deserted so I wandered around the empty yard and looked into the six stable boxes. Two of them showed evidence of recent equine habitation with brown peat horse bedding still down on the concrete floor and water in the troughs in the corners. Two of the others had an assortment of contents ranging from some wooden garden furniture put away for the winter and an old push-along mower in one, to an old disconnected central-heating boiler and a stack of large cardboard boxes in the other, the latter obviously still unpacked from some past house move.

The last two stables in the line were empty, as was the tack room, save for a couple of horse rugs bundled in a corner. The feed store contained a small stack of hay and several bags of horse nuts, together with four bales of the brown horse bedding,
one of them broken open and half used. Leaning up against the far end wall of the store were two long-handled, double-pronged pitchforks, identical, I imagined, to the one found embedded in Scot Barlow’s chest on Monday afternoon.

The house was not so conveniently open as the stable block so I walked round the outside, looking in turn into each of the plentiful ground-floor windows. The daylight was beginning to fade fast before I had made my way completely round the house and I might have missed something, but there was absolutely nothing I could see to help me either way. So dark had it become by the time I had finished that several of the security lights were switched on by their movement sensors as I made my way back to the Hertz Mondeo and drove away.

I looked at the car clock. It told me that it was almost five o’clock. Five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. The start of the weekend. Funny, I thought, I hadn’t liked weekends much since Angela had died. Occasionally I went racing and, more occasionally, I actually rode in a race, but overall I found the break from chambers life rather lonely.

I drove back into the centre of Lambourn, to the equine hospital on Upper Lambourn Road, and explained to the receptionist through a sliding glass panel that I was looking for someone who had shared a room with Millie Barlow before last June.

‘Sorry,’ she said in a high-pitched squeak, ‘I’m new here. You’ll have to ask one of the vets.’

‘OK,’ I said looking round the bare vestibule. ‘Where are they?’

‘We’ve got a bit of an emergency at the moment,’ she went on in her squeak. ‘They’re all in the operating theatre.’

‘How long are they going to be?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I don’t really know,’ she squeaked. ‘They have been in there for quite some time already. But you’re welcome to wait.’ I looked about me again, there were no chairs. ‘Oh,’ she said again with realization. ‘You can wait in the waiting room if you like. Through there.’ She pointed at a wooden door opposite.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Please will you let the vets know that I am here.’

‘Yes, OK,’ she said. ‘As soon as I can.’

I didn’t have much confidence that she would remember.

I went through the door into the waiting room. It reminded me of going to the dentist. Adozen pink upholstered armchairs with pale wooden legs and arms were arranged around the walls with a few occasional tables between some of them. There was another door at the far end with a half-full wire magazine rack standing beside it, and the hard floor was covered with a thin blue carpet. It was functional rather than comfortable.

A man sat on one of the chairs on the right-hand side and he looked up as I entered. We nodded at each other in informal greeting and he went back to reading some of the papers he had spread out around him. I sat down opposite him and glanced through a copy of
Country Life
that someone had left on a chair.

Ten minutes or so passed. I went back out to the receptionist, who assured me that the vets were still operating but shouldn’t be much longer. I was sure she actually had no notion how long they would be but, nevertheless, I went back into the waiting room and sat down.

I had looked at all the estate agents’ adverts in the
Country Life
and was beginning to read the book reviews when someone
came through the far door. It was a woman wearing green scrub tunic and trousers with short green wellington boots. Avet, I surmised, fresh from the operating theatre. But it wasn’t me she was after. The other man stood up as she entered.

‘How’s it going?’ he said eagerly.

‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘I think we have managed to save most of the muscle mass in the shoulder. It shouldn’t greatly impair him after proper healing.’

The man let out a sigh of relief. ‘Mr Radcliffe will be relieved to hear it.’ He didn’t sound to me like he was the only one.

‘I have to get back in there now,’ said the vet. ‘To finish off. We will keep him here overnight and see how he’s doing in the morning.’

‘Fine,’ said the man. ‘Thank you. I’ll call you around nine.’

‘OK,’ she said. The man knelt down and began to collect together some of the papers he had been working on. The vet turned to me and raised her eyebrows as a question. ‘Are you being looked after?’ she said.

‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘I was hoping to talk to someone who knew one of the vets that used to work here.’

‘Which vet?’ she asked.

‘Millie Barlow,’ I said.

The reaction from the man was dramatic. ‘Right little bitch,’ he said almost under his breath, but quite audibly in the quiet of the waiting room.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said to him.

‘I said that she was a right little bitch,’ he repeated standing up and looking at me. ‘And she was.’

‘Look, I’m sorry,’ the vet said to me. ‘I have to go and close up the wound on the horse we have been operating on. If you’d like to wait, I’ll talk to you when I’m finished.’

‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and she disappeared through the door.

The man had almost collected his stuff.

‘Why was she a right little bitch?’ I asked him.

‘Who wants to know?’ he said.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m Geoffrey Mason, I’m a barrister.’

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You have horses with Paul Newington.’

‘I do indeed,’ I said. ‘But you now have the advantage over me.’ I looked at him quizzically.

‘Simon Dacey,’ he said holding out his hand.

Ah, I thought, no wonder he thinks Millie Barlow was a little bitch, she had ruined his party by killing herself in one of his bedrooms.

‘Do you have a problem?’ I asked him, nodding towards the door through which the vet had disappeared.

‘One of my yearlings got loose,’ he said. ‘Gashed himself on a parked car. Always happens to one of the good ones.’

‘Will he be all right?’ I asked.

‘I sincerely hope so,’ he said. ‘He cost almost half a million at the sales last month.’

‘But he must be insured,’ I said.

‘Just for transport home and thirty days,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? That ran out last Monday.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘aren’t all racehorses insured?’ I knew mine was.

‘Mr Radcliffe, that’s the owner, he says that the premiums are too high. He has about a dozen with me and he says he would rather spend the money he saves on another horse. He maintains that’s the best insurance.’

I knew that my insurance premium on Sandeman was quite high, more than a tenth of his value. But that was relatively small as he’d been gelded and there were no stud prospects. For
a potential stallion with a good bloodline the premium would be enormous. But, even so, it was quite a risk.

‘Doesn’t he insure any of them?’ I asked.

‘Not normally, but I know he insured Peninsula against being infertile or being injured so he couldn’t perform at stud.’

Oh, I thought, Mr Radcliffe owned Peninsula. He wouldn’t be short of a bob or two.

‘So tell me why Millie Barlow was a right little bitch,’ I said, bringing the subject back to what really interested me.

‘She ruined my party,’ he said.

‘That’s a bit ungracious,’ I said. ‘The poor girl was so troubled that she killed herself. She probably didn’t ruin your party on purpose.’

‘But she did ruin it, nevertheless,’ he said. ‘Why didn’t she go and do it somewhere else? That party for winning the Derby was the best day of my life until she spoiled it. How would you like it? Some of my guests were royalty. What chance do you think I have of them coming again? I’ll tell you. None. The damn police even ended up questioning a Crown Prince about his visa. I ask you.’

I could see his point of view.

‘Do you know why she killed herself?’ I asked him.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘I hardly knew her.’

‘Did you know she was having an affair with Steve Mitchell?’ I asked.

‘God, yes,’ he said. ‘Everybody knew that. Worst kept secret in Lambourn. Look, I really have to go now. Evening stables are already well under way.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks. Can I call you again if I need any more answers?’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘I’m representing Steve Mitchell,’ I said, handing him one of my cards.

‘Oh, are you?’ He smiled, looking at it. ‘Seems you may have your work cut out there.’

‘Why does everyone think he did it?’ I asked him.

‘Because everyone in Lambourn would have heard them arguing at one time or another. They have been heard standing in the street shouting at each other. And word is that either of them would have thought nothing of putting the other through the wings.’ Putting someone through the wings of a fence by squeezing them for room was one of the worst crimes one jump jockey could do to another. Even though the wings were nowadays made of bendable plastic, it was still one of the most dangerous of falls, and one of the most likely to cause serious injury.

‘And no one much cares for either of them,’ he went on. ‘Barlow was slightly weird, and Steve Mitchell is arrogant.’

‘But do you really think he’s a murderer?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I have to say I was surprised when I heard he’d been arrested. But people do funny things when they’re angry. They lose control.’

How right he was. I’d once helped prosecute a psychopath who’s family had sworn that he wouldn’t normally have even said boo to a goose, but in a rage he had literally torn his wife limb from limb, with nothing more than his bare hands and a potato peeler.

‘So can I call you if I need to ask you anything else?’ I asked.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘But I can’t think I would know anything that everybody else wouldn’t know. I didn’t have much to do with either of them. I don’t have jumpers in my yard.’

‘Sometimes even the smallest thing is important in a defence,’ I replied.

‘Do you really think he’s innocent?’ he asked me.

‘That’s not relevant,’ I said. ‘My job is to cast doubt on the prosecution’s case. I don’t have to prove his innocence, just create a reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind about his guilt.’

‘But surely,’ he said, ‘if you believe he’s guilty then you’re not doing the public any service by getting him off.’

‘It is the prosecution’s job to ensure that the jury have no reasonable doubt, not mine.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s a funny old system,’ he said.

‘I agree,’ I said. ‘But it has worked pretty well for hundreds of years.’

The jury system had its origins in Roman times, when huge juries would vote on the guilt or innocence of the accused. The right to be judged by a jury of one’s peers was established under law in England as far back as the thirteenth century, although there were semblances of it even before then. Under English law there is a right to trial by jury for all but very minor offences, as there is enshrined in the United States Constitution. But that is not the case around the world, not even across Europe. There is no such thing as a jury trial in modern Germany, for example, where a judge or panel of judges decide alone on guilt or innocence.

‘I really must go,’ said Simon Dacey, collecting the last of his things.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Nice to have met you. Good luck with the yearling.’

‘Thanks.’

We didn’t shake hands because his were full of papers, so we nodded again as we had done when I had arrived and
he departed, me holding the door open for him on his way out.

I sat down again on a red armchair. The clock on the wall read 6.15.

What was I doing? I asked myself. I had now told far too many people that I was the barrister acting for the defence in Steve Mitchell’s case, but I knew that I shouldn’t act. I couldn’t act. I was a potential witness in the case, but only I was aware of that. No one, apart from Scot Barlow and I, knew of our little exchange at Sandown. Or did they? Had Barlow told someone that he had been seen by a ‘bloody amateur’ in the showers? I doubted it. So what should I do?