The Edge (2 page)

Welfram the corpse left the racecourse in an ambulance en route to the morgue and after a while I drove away from York in my unremarkable Audi, and punctually at five o’clock telephoned on my car phone to John Millington, my immediate boss, as required.

‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’ he demanded. ‘He can’t be.’

‘His heart stopped,’ I said.

‘Did someone kill him?’

Neither of us would have been surprised if someone had, but I said, ‘No, there wasn’t any sign of it. I’d been following him for ages. I didn’t see anyone bump into him, or anything like that. And there was apparently no blood. Nothing suspicious. He just died.’

‘Shit.’ His angry tone made it sound as if it were probably my fault. John Millington, retired policeman (Chief Inspector), currently Deputy Head of the Jockey Club Security Service, had never seemed to come to terms with my covert and indeterminate appointment to his department, even though in the three years I’d been working for him we’d seen a good few villains run off the racecourse.

‘The boy’s a blasted amateur,’ he’d protested when I was presented to him as a fact, not a suggestion. ‘The whole thing’s ridiculous.’

He no longer said it was ridiculous but we had never become close friends.

‘Did anyone make waves? Come asking for him?’ he demanded.

‘No, no one.’

‘Are you sure?’ He cast doubt as always on my ability.

‘Yes, positive.’ I told him of my vigils outside the various doors.

‘Who did he meet, then? Before he snuffed it?’

‘I don’t think he met anybody, unless it was very early in the day, before I spotted him. He wasn’t searching for anyone, anyway. He made a couple of bets on the Tote, drank a couple of beers, looked at the horses and watched the races. He wasn’t busy today.’

Millington let loose the four-letter word I’d stifled. ‘And we’re back where we started,’ he said furiously.

‘Mm,’ I agreed.

‘Call me Monday morning,’ Millington said, and I said, ‘Right,’ and put the phone down. Tonight was Saturday. Sunday was my regular day off, and Monday too, except in times of trouble. I could see my Monday vanishing fast.

Millington, in common with the whole Security Service and the Stewards of the Jockey Club, was still smarting from the collapse in court of their one great chance of seeing behind bars arguably the worst operator still lurking in the undergrowth of racing. Julius Apollo Filmer had been accused of conspiring to murder a stable lad who had been unwise enough to say loudly and drunkenly in a Newmarket pub that he knew things about Mr effing-blinding Filmer that would get the said arsehole chucked out of racing quicker than Shergar won the Derby.

The pathetic stable lad turned up in a ditch two days later with his neck broken, and the police (Millington assisting) put together a watertight-looking conspiracy case, establishing Julius Filmer as paymaster and planner of the crime. Then, on the day of his trial, odd things happened to the four prosecution witnesses. One had a nervous breakdown and was admitted in hysteria to a mental hospital, one disappeared altogether and was later seen in Spain, and two became mysteriously unclear about facts that had been razor-sharp in their memories earlier. The defence brought to the witness box a nice young man who swore on oath that Mr Filmer had been nowhere near the Newmarket hotel where the conspiracy was alleged to have been hatched but had instead been discussing business with him all night in a motel (bill produced) three hundred miles away. The jury was not allowed to know that the beautifully-mannered, well-dressed, blow-dried, quietly-spoken youth was already serving time for confidence tricks and had arrived at court in a Black Maria.

Almost everyone else in the court – lawyers, police, the judge himself – knew that the nice young man had been out on bail on the night in question, and that even though the actual murderer was still unknown, Filmer had beyond doubt arranged the stable lad’s killing.

Julius Apollo Filmer smirked with satisfaction at the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict and clasped his lawyer in a bear-hug. Justice had been mocked. The stable lad’s parents wept bitter tears over his grave and the Jockey Club ground its collective teeth. Millington swore to get Filmer somehow, anyhow, in the future, and had made it into a personal vendetta, the pursuit of this one villain filling his mind to the exclusion of nearly everything else.

He had spent a great deal of time in the Newmarket pubs going over the ground the regular police had already covered, trying to find out exactly what Paul Shacklebury, the dead stable lad, had known to the detriment of Filmer. No one knew – or no one was saying. And who could blame anyone for not risking a quick trip to the ditch.

Millington had had more luck with the hysterical witness, now back home but still suffering fits of the shivers. She, the witness, was a chambermaid in the hotel where Filmer had plotted. She had heard, and had originally been prepared to swear she had heard Filmer say to an unidentified man, ‘If he’s dead, he’s worth five grand to you and five to the hatchet, so go and fix it.’

She had been hanging fresh towels in the bathroom when the two men came in from the corridor, talking. Filmer had been abrupt with her and bundled her out and she hadn’t looked at the other man. She remembered the words clearly but hadn’t of course seen their significance until later. It was because of the word ‘hatchet’ that she remembered particularly.

A month after the trial Millington got from her a half-admission that she’d been threatened not to give evidence. Who had threatened her? A man she didn’t know. But she would deny it. She would deny everything, she would have another collapse. The man had threatened to harm her sixteen-year-old daughter. Harm … he’d spelled out all the dreadful programme lying ahead.

Millington, who could lay on the syrup if it pleased him, had persuaded her with many a honeyed promise (that he wouldn’t necessarily keep) to come for several days to the races, and there, from the safety of various strategically placed security offices, he’d invited her to look out of the window. She would be in shadow, seated, comfortable, invisible, and he would point out a few people to her. She was nervous and came in a wig and dark glasses. Millington got her to remove the glasses. She sat in an upright armchair and twisted her head to look over her shoulder at me, where I stood quietly behind her.

‘Never mind about him,’ Millington said. ‘He’s part of the scenery.’

All the world went past those windows on racing afternoons, which
was why, of course, the windows were where they were. Over three long sessions during a single week on three different racecourses Millington pointed out to her almost every known associate and friend of Filmer’s, but she shook her head to them all. At the fourth attempt, the following week, Filmer himself strolled past, and I thought we’d have a repeat of the hysterics: but though our chambermaid wobbled and wept and begged for repeated assurances he would never know she had seen him, she stayed at her post. And she astonished us, shortly after, by pointing towards a group of passing people we’d never before linked with Filmer.

‘That’s him,’ she said, gasping. ‘Oh my God … that’s him.… I’d know him anywhere.’

‘Which one?’ Millington said urgently.

‘In the navy … with the grey sort of hair. Oh my God … don’t let him know …’ Her voice rose with panic.

I could hear the beginnings of Millington’s reassurances as I fairly sprinted out of the office and through to the open air, slowing there at once to the much slower speed of the crowd making its way from paddock to stands for the next race. The navy suit with the silvery hair above it was in no hurry, going along with the press. I followed him discreetly for the rest of the afternoon, and only once did he touch base with Filmer, and then as if accidentally, as between strangers.

The exchange looked as if navy-suit asked Filmer the time. Filmer looked at his watch and spoke. Navy-suit nodded and walked on. Navy-suit was Filmer’s man, all right, but was never to be seen to be that in public: just like me and Millington.

I followed navy-suit from the racecourse in the going-home traffic and telephoned from my car to Millington.

‘He’s driving a Jaguar,’ I said, ‘licence number A576 FDD. He spoke to Filmer. He’s our man.’

‘Right.’

‘How’s the lady?’ I asked.

‘Who? Oh, her. I had to send Harrison all the way back to Newmarket with her. She was half off her rocker again. Have you still got our man in sight?’

‘Yep.’

‘I’ll get back to you.’

Harrison was one of Millington’s regular troops, an ex-policeman, heavy, avuncular, near to pensioned retirement. I’d never spoken to him, but I knew him well by sight, as I knew all the others. It had
taken me quite a while to get used to belonging to a body of men who didn’t know I was there; rather as if I were a ghost.

I was never noticeable. I was twenty-nine, six foot tall, brown haired, brown eyed, twelve stone in weight with, as they say, no distinguishing features. I was always part of the moving race crowd, looking at my race-card, wandering about, looking at horses, watching races, having a bet or two. It was easy because there were always a great many other people around doing exactly the same thing. I was a grazing sheep in a flock. I changed my clothes and general appearance from day to day and never made acquaintances, and it was lonely quite often, but also fascinating.

I knew by sight all the jockeys and trainers and very many owners, because all one needed for that was eyes and race-cards, but also I knew a lot of their histories from long memory, as I’d spent much of my childhood and teens on racecourses, towed along by the elderly race-mad aunt who had brought me up. Through her knowledge and via her witty tongue I had become a veritable walking data bank; and then, at eighteen, after her death, I’d gone world-wandering for seven years. When I returned, I no longer looked like the unmatured youth I’d been, and the eyes of the people who had known me vaguely as a child slid over me without recognition.

I returned to England finally because at twenty-five I’d come into the inheritances from both my aunt and my father, and my trustees were wanting instructions. I had been in touch with them from time to time, and they had despatched funds to far-flung outposts fairly often, but when I walked into the hushed book-lined law office of the senior partner of Cornborough, Cross and George, old Clement Cornborough greeted me with a frown and stayed sitting down behind his desk.

‘You’re not … er …’ he said, looking over my shoulder for the one he’d expected.

‘Well … yes, I am. Tor Kelsey.’

‘Good Lord.’ He stood up slowly, leaning forward to extend a hand. ‘But you’ve changed. You … er …’

‘Taller, heavier and older,’ I said, nodding. Also sun-tanned, at that moment, from a spell in Mexico.

‘I’d … er … pencilled in lunch,’ he said doubtfully.

‘That would be fine,’ I said.

He took me to a similarly hushed restaurant full of other solicitors who nodded to him austerely. Over roast beef he told me that I would never have to work for a living (which I knew) and in the same breath asked what I was going to do with my life, a question I couldn’t
answer. I’d spent seven years learning how to live, which was different, but I’d had no formal training in anything. I felt claustrophobic in offices and I was not academic. I understood machines and was quick with my hands. I had no overpowering ambitions. I wasn’t the entrepreneur my father had been, but nor would I squander the fortune he had left me.

‘What have you been doing?’ old Cornborough said, making conversation valiantly. ‘You’ve been to some interesting places, haven’t you?’

Travellers’ tales were pretty boring, I thought. It was always better to live it. ‘I mostly worked with horses,’ I said politely. ‘Australia, South America, United States, anywhere. Racehorses, polo ponies, a good deal in rodeos. Once in a circus.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘It’s not easy now, though, and getting harder, to work one’s passage. Too many countries won’t allow it. And I won’t go back to it. I’ve done enough. Grown out of it.’

‘So what next?’

‘Don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Look around. I’m not getting in touch with my mother’s people, so don’t tell them I’m here.’

‘If you say so.’

My mother had come from an impoverished hunting family who were scandalised when at twenty she married a sixty-five-year-old giant of a Yorkshireman with an empire in second-hand car auctions and no relatives in
Burke’s Peerage.
They’d said it was because he showered her with horses, but it always sounded to me as if she’d been truly attracted. He at any rate was besotted with her, as his sister, my aunt, had often told me, and he’d seen no point in living after she was killed in a hunting accident, when I was two. He’d lasted three years and died of cancer, and because my mother’s family hadn’t wanted me, my aunt Viv Kelsey had taken me over and made my young life a delight.

To Aunt Viv, unmarried, I was the longed for child she’d had no chance of bearing. She must have been sixty when she took me, though I never thought of her as old. She was always young inside; and I missed her dreadfully when she died.

Millington’s voice said, ‘The car you are following … are you still following it?’

‘Still in sight.’

‘It’s registered to a Derry Welfram. Ever heard of him?’

‘No.’

Millington still had connections in the police force and seemed to get useful computerised information effortlessly.

‘His address is down as Parkway Mansions, Maida Vale, London,’ he said. ‘If you lose him, try there.’

‘Right.’

Derry Welfram obligingly drove straight to Parkway Mansions and others of Millington’s minions later made a positive identification. Millington tried a photograph of him on each of the witnesses with the unreliable memories and, as he described to me afterwards, ‘They both shit themselves with fear and stuttered they’d never seen the man, never, never.’ But they’d been so effectively frightened, both of them, that Millington could get nothing out of them at all.

Millington told me to follow Derry Welfram if I saw him again at the races, to see who else he talked to, which I’d been doing for about a month on the day the navy-suit fell on its buttons. Welfram had talked intensely to about ten people by then and proved he was comprehensively a bearer of bad news, leaving behind him a trail of shocked, shivering, hollow-eyed stares at unwelcome realities. And because I had an ingenious camera built into binoculars (and another that looked like a cigarette lighter) we had recognisable portraits of most of Welfram’s shattered contacts, though so far identifications for less than half. Millington’s men were working on it.