Silks (17 page)

The box was about four metres square and the centre was taken up with a large rectangular cloth-covered table set for lunch. I quickly scanned the places. There would be twelve of us in all, about half of whom had so far arrived. I gratefully accepted a glass of champagne that was offered by a small dark-haired waitress and then went out to join some of the other guests that I could see on the balcony outside.

‘Hello,’ said one of them. ‘Remember me?’

‘Of course,’ I said, shaking his hand. I had last seen him at the equine hospital in November. ‘How’s the yearling?’

‘Two-year-old now,’ Simon Dacey said. ‘Almost ready for the racecourse. No apparent ill effects, but you never know. He may have been faster still without the muscle damage.’

I looked at the other three people on the balcony.

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Simon. ‘Can I introduce you to my wife, Francesca?’ I shook the offered petite hand. Francesca Dacey was blonde, tall, slim and wearing a yellow suit that touched
her in all the right places. We smiled at each other. Simon waved towards the other two, a middle-aged couple, he in a pinstripe suit and she in an elegant long brown open jacket over a cream top and brown slacks. ‘And Roger and Deborah Radcliffe.’ Ah, I realized, they were the Peninsula connections.

‘Congratulations last June,’ I said. ‘With the Derby.’

‘Thank you,’ said Deborah Radcliffe. ‘Greatest day of our lives.’

I could imagine. I was hoping that the following day would prove to be mine. To win at Cheltenham was a dream, to have done so at Epsom in the Derby must be anyone’s lifetime ambition. But I could remember Simon Dacey saying when we met in the equine hospital that his party had been the best day of his life – until, that was, Millie Barlow had decided to kill herself in the middle of it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Simon Dacey. ‘I remember you have horses with Paul Newington, but I’m afraid I have forgotten your name.’

‘Geoffrey Mason,’ I said.

‘Ah yes, Geoffrey Mason.’ The introductions were completed and hands shaken. ‘Lawyer, I think you said?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ I replied. ‘But I’m here as an amateur jockey.’ I smiled. ‘I have a ride in the Foxhunters tomorrow.’

‘Best of luck,’ said Deborah Radcliffe, rather dismissively. ‘We don’t have any jumpers.’ She said it in a way that gave the impression that she believed jumpers weren’t real racehorses and were more of a hobby than proper racing, not like the flat. More fool her, I thought. I had always believed the reverse.

Roger Radcliffe, who obviously agreed with her, took the opportunity to move back inside the box to replenish his champagne.
Why, I wondered, did they bother to come if they weren’t excited by the racing? But it was not my problem. I was in seventh heaven and my only concern was having too much to eat and drink today and having to put up overweight in the race tomorrow.

Francesca Dacey and Deborah Radcliffe moved to the far end of the balcony for, I imagined, some girly talk. It left Simon and me standing alone. There was an awkward silence for a few moments as we both drank from our champagne glasses.

‘Didn’t you say you were acting for Steve Mitchell?’ Simon Dacey finally asked, almost with relief.

‘That’s right,’ I said, relaxing. ‘I’m one of his barristers.’

‘When’s the trial?’ he asked.

‘Second week in May.’

‘Has Mitchell been inside all this time?’ he said.

‘Certainly has,’ I said. The defence had applied twice for bail without success. Two chances were all you had.

‘Can you get him off?’ he asked.

‘One doesn’t get people off,’ I said sarcastically. ‘It is my job to help the jury determine if he is guilty or not. I hope to provide them with sufficient doubt.’

‘Beyond a reasonable doubt,’ he said as if quoting.

‘Exactly.’

‘But there is always some doubt, isn’t there?’ he said. ‘Unless you have it on film.’

‘There’s some doubt even then,’ I said. ‘Gone are the days of a hard negative to work from. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that a digital camera never lies. They do, and often. No, my job is to persuade the jury that any doubt they may have is at least reasonable.’

‘How genteel.’ He laughed.

Genteel is not how I would describe the Julian Trent baseballbat approach to persuasion.

‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Julian Trent?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

‘I just wondered,’ I said. He hadn’t appeared to be lying. If he was, he was good at it.

‘Is he in racing?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I asked just on the off chance.’

‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘Our industry, racing that is, it’s very insular. Everyone in it knows everyone else but we really don’t know anyone not connected, anyone from outside.’

I knew what he meant. The law could be like that too. It was one of the reasons I had chosen to continue taking my pleasure from a sport so far removed from the formality and deathly slow pace of the courts.

The small dark-haired waitress popped her head out of the door and informed us that lunch was about to be served, so would we please take our seats.

The remaining guests had arrived while I had been out on the balcony and I found myself sitting on the long side of the table between Francesca Dacey and Joanna, wife of Nicholas Osbourne, the trainer I had gone to in Lambourn all those years ago. Nicholas and I had nodded cordially to each other as we had sat down. Sadly, there had been no warmth in our greeting. Too many years of animosity, I thought, and I couldn’t even remember why.

Joanna, meanwhile, couldn’t have been friendlier and even
squeezed my knee beneath the table cloth as I sat down. She had always flirted with me. I suddenly wondered if that was why Nick had become so antagonistic towards me. I looked across the table at him. He was fuming, so I winked at him and laughed. He didn’t seem at all certain how to react.

‘Nick,’ I said loudly. ‘Will you please tell your wife to stop flirting with me, I’m a married man.’

He seemed unsure how to reply.

‘But…’ he tailed off.

‘My wife might be dead,’ I said, with a smile that I didn’t feel. ‘But I’m still in love with her.’

He seemed to relax a little. ‘Joanna, my darling,’ he said. ‘Leave the poor boy alone.’ And he smiled back at me with the first genuine sign of friendship for fifteen years.

‘Silly old fool,’ Joanna said quietly to me. ‘He gets so jealous. I’d have left him years ago if I was ever going to.’

I squeezed her knee back. Nicholas would have had a fit.

‘So tell me what you’re up to,’ she said as we ate the starter of steamed asparagus with Hollandaise sauce.

‘I’m representing Steve Mitchell,’ I said.

Francesca Dacey, on my other side, jumped a little in her seat. The chairs were so close together round the table that I felt it clearly.

‘How exciting,’ said Joanna with relish. ‘Is he guilty?’

‘That’s for the jury to decide,’ I said.

‘Don’t be so boring,’ Joanna said, grabbing my knee again beneath the table. ‘Tell me. Did he do it?’

‘What do you think?’ I asked her. Francesca was trying not to show that she was listening.

‘He must have,’ she said. ‘Otherwise why have they kept him in prison for so long?’

‘But he hasn’t been tried yet,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but it stands to reason,’ she said. ‘They wouldn’t have arrested him if he didn’t do it. And everyone knows that Barlow and Mitchell hated each other’s guts.’

‘That doesn’t make him a murderer,’ I said. ‘In fact, if everyone knew that he hated Barlow so much then he was the obvious person to frame for his murder.’

‘That’s a bit far-fetched though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Doesn’t everyone who’s guilty say they were framed?’

‘A few must be telling the truth,’ I said.

Our empty starter plates were removed and were replaced with the main course of chicken breast in a mustard sauce. Francesca Dacey had the vegetarian option of penne pasta with pesto.

Joanna Osbourne turned to talk to the man on her left, another Lambourn trainer whose reputation I knew rather better than the man himself. I, meanwhile, turned to Francesca on my right. She was giving a good impression of a health inspector, so keen was she to keep her eyes firmly fixed on her food.

‘So how long have you known Steve Mitchell?’ I asked her quietly.

‘I don’t,’ she said. But both of us knew she was lying.

‘Were you with him the day Scot Barlow died?’ I asked her, so quietly that no one else would have been able to hear.

‘No,’ she replied in the same manner. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But we both did.

‘Were you really gone from Steve’s house by two thirty?’ I said, keeping my eyes firmly on my chicken.

‘Oh God,’ she said under her breath. I thought for a moment that she was going to get up and leave, but she took a couple
of deep breaths and went on studying her pasta. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Absolutely. I had to be home by two thirty to meet the plumber. He came to fix the dishwasher.’

So, just as Steve had told me, getting her involved wouldn’t actually give him an alibi for Barlow’s murder.

‘Steve didn’t tell me,’ I said to her, turning towards her ear so that others wouldn’t hear. ‘He refused to say who it was he was with.’

I wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or not.

‘Please.’ She gulped. ‘Please don’t tell my husband,’ she pleaded in a whisper.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No need to.’

She half coughed, half sobbed and then suddenly stood up.

‘Sorry,’ she croaked to our host. ‘Something went down the wrong way.’ She rushed out, holding a white linen napkin to her face. One of the other ladies followed her out. Simon Dacey watched in obvious embarrassment.

Cheltenham during the Festival is like no other day at the races anywhere in the world. After lunch I wandered around absorbing the atmosphere. I walked down to the Guinness Village, now an institution at the track and the transient home to thousands of Irish whose annual pilgrimage to Gloucestershire does much to make this event so unique. Irish folk bands and English rock bands vied for favour in the huge marquee behind a scaffold-built temporary grandstand, entertaining the crowd prior to the main attraction of the afternoon, the racing itself.

I leaned on the white plastic rail next to the horse walk to watch a quartet of happy punters from across the Irish Sea.
They all wore outrageous green and black huge leprechaun hats and they had linked arms in a line like a scene from
Zorba the Greek
. They were trying to perform an Irish jig and I laughed out loud as they came a cropper and sat down heavily on a grassy bank. All were in good humour, aided and abetted by a continuous flow of the black stuff, the Guinness.

‘Hello, stranger,’ said a familiar voice behind me. I smiled broadly and turned round.

‘Hello, Eleanor,’ I said, and I gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘How lovely to see you. Are you here for work or pleasure?

‘Both really,’ she said. ‘Busman’s holiday for me today. I am technically on call but that means I can do pretty much what I want. I just have to carry this bleep.’ She produced a small rectangular black item from her cavernous handbag.

‘Fancy a drink?’ I asked.

‘Yes, but not here,’ she said indicating the Guinness bar.

‘No,’ I agreed.

We went in search of one of the bars under the grandstand but they were all packed with a scrum ten deep to get served.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go up to the boxes.’

I was sure that Edward Cartwright, my host, wouldn’t mind me bringing Eleanor into his box and so it turned out. In fact, he rather monopolized her and left me wishing we had stayed in the crush downstairs.

I had seen Eleanor twice since the previous November. The first time had been in London just a week later, when I had asked her to a black-tie dinner in the Hall at Gray’s Inn. It hadn’t been a particularly successful evening. I should have opted for a table for two in a candle-lit Italian restaurant rather than the long refectory tables and benches in Hall.

The seating plan had us sitting opposite each other rather
than side by side as I had hoped and conversation between us had been difficult, not only due to the noise of three hundred people eating and talking at once, but also because the centre of the table was full of flowers, silver candelabras, and a detritus of wine glasses, condiments and place-cards.

We had hardly spoken a word to each other the whole evening and I think she had been bored by the speeches, which had contained too many ‘in’ jokes for the lawyers. At the end of the dinner she had jumped straight back into a cab and rushed off to Paddington for the last train home.

Why I had asked her to that dinner, I could not imagine. If I had wanted a romantic evening à deux, I couldn’t have chosen anything less appropriate. Maybe, that was the trouble. Maybe I hadn’t actually wanted a romantic evening à deux in the first place. It was silly to admit, but perhaps I was scared to embark on a new amorous adventure. It also made me feel guilty. Guilty that I was somehow deserting Angela.

The second time we had met had been even more of a disaster. We had both been guests at a Christmas ball thrown by a big racing sponsor in the grandstand at Newbury racecourse. I had been there in a party put together by Paul and Laura Newington, and Eleanor had been in another group, one of the many from Lambourn. I had been so delighted to see her again and had immediately asked her to dance. But she had been with someone else and he’d been determined that I wouldn’t get a look-in with ‘his’ girl. I had felt wretched all evening. It was not just that I had lost out to another, it was that, maybe, I had suddenly realized that the time was now right and I had missed my chance. The bus had come along willingly and had opened its doors to pick me up, but I had declined the offer and now it had driven off, leaving me standing alone at the bus-stop. I now
worried that it might have been the last bus, and that I would remain waiting at the stop for ever.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ Eleanor said, coming up behind me again. I had been leaning on the balcony rail aimlessly watching the massed crowds below and I hadn’t noticed her escape the clutches of Edward and come outside to join me.