Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,24

some reason, it reminded me of a commuter rail crash in west London when the primary identification of some of the burnt bodies was achieved by checking the registration numbers of the cars in the Reading station car park that remained uncollected at the end of the day.

I climbed out of Carl’s car. ‘I’m going to go back to the restaurant this afternoon to continue working on the new menus,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

‘I might go back there too,’ he said. ‘Nothing else to do.’

‘OK, I’ll see you in a bit then, but I’m going home first.’

‘Right,’ he said again. I closed the car door and he drove off.

I stood there and looked over the hedge towards the grandstand. All was quiet save for a policeman standing guard and the flapping of some blue and white tape stretched across behind the grandstands, presumably to prevent people straying in and contaminating what had to be seen as a crime scene. I suspected there was more activity taking place out of sight round the front and also inside the building, where the forensic teams would probably still be searching for bomb fragments.

I limped my way over to the policeman and told him about the car in the car park and that it had belonged to one of the victims, Louisa Whitworth. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, and promised to tell the appropriate person to get it returned to her family. I suspected it was the last thing on their minds at the moment.

I thought of asking him if there was any more news about what had happened, but he wouldn’t have known, and, even if he had, he wouldn’t have told me. So I waved goodbye to him, went back to my car and drove away, leaving the sad little green Mini alone on the grass.

I went home and swallowed a couple of the painkillers to dull the ache in my knee. I had been walking and standing on it for too long and it was protesting. I lay on the sofa for a while to give the painkillers time to work, then I drove to the nearby garage to fill the car with petrol and to buy the local newspaper. The roads were very quiet and Barbara, the middle-aged woman in the garage who swiped my credit card through her till, assured me that the whole town was in shock. She told me at considerable length that she had been to the town supermarket and never seen it so empty. And those people who were there, she said, were talking in hushed tones as if speaking loudly would disturb the dead.

I entered my PIN in her machine and escaped back to my car, where I sat and read the reports of the bombing in the Cambridge Evening News whose front page carried a photo of the blue-tarpaulin-covered grandstand with the headline ‘MURDER AT THE RACES’. Even though the police had named only fourteen of the eighteen dead, the paper listed them all, and also gave the names of many of those seriously injured. The paper obviously had good contacts at the local hospitals and with the police.

I looked through the lists. Eight of the dead were Americans from Delafield Industries, including MaryLou Fordham. Elizabeth Jennings was there among the local residents known to have died, along with Louisa and four others, including another couple who were regular customers at the Hay Net. The remaining four victims included three I knew. There was a racehorse trainer and his wife who had lived in Lambourn, as well as a successful Irish businessman who had invested much of his wealth in high-speed Thoroughbreds. The seriously injured but alive list included Rolf Schumann, the Delafield chairman, as well as half a dozen or so others I recognized from the racing world. Along with their names, the paper had printed photographs of some of the non-American dead and injured, especially those with local racing connections.

What a dreadful waste, I thought. These were nice people who worked hard and didn’t deserve to be mutilated and killed by some unseen bomber who, it seemed, might have been motivated by political fervour far removed and alien to the close-knit community involved in the Sport of Kings. Sure, there was rivalry in racing. Sometimes that rivalry, and the will to win, may spill over into skulduggery and a bending of the rules and the law, but murder and maiming of innocents happened elsewhere in the world,