I couldn’t have said afterwards what had won. With Derry Welfram dead my immediate job was going to be much more difficult, if not temporarily impossible. The three-thirty in those terms was irrelevant.
I left the bar in the general break-up after the race and wandered inconclusively about for a bit, looking for other things that were not as they should be and, as on many days, not seeing any. I particularly looked for anyone who might be looking for Derry Welfram, hanging around for that purpose outside the ambulance room door, but no one arrived to enquire. An announcement came over the loud-speakers presently asking for anyone who had accompanied a Mr D. Welfram to the races to report to the clerk of the course’s office, so I hung about outside there for a while also, but no one accepted the invitation.
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