Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,39

was George Kealy, the top Newmarket trainer whose wife kept a table on retainer at my restaurant each Saturday night.

‘Hello, George,’ I said to him. ‘This is a rum do, isn’t it?’

‘Dreadful.’ We stood together in silence.

Emma Kealy, George’s wife, stood alongside Neil Jennings ind held his hand as he finished saying his goodbyes at the church door. I remembered that Emma was Neil’s sister. I vvatched them both walk slowly over and climb into the back of a black limousine that then pulled away from the kerb behind the hearse for Elizabeth’s last journey to the cemetery.

George, beside me, shook his head and pursed his lips. I wondered why he hadn’t gone with Emma and Neil to the cemetery but it was no secret in the town that there was no love lost between the two great rival trainers, even if they were brothers-in-law. George suddenly turned back to me. ‘Sorry about Saturday night,’ he said. ‘After all that happened, Emma and I didn’t make it to your place for dinner.’

‘We didn’t open anyway,’ I said. I decided not to add anything about the padlocks.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I thought you might not.’ He paused. ‘Better cancel us for tomorrow as well. In fact, better leave it for a while. Emma will give you a call. OK?’

‘OK,’ I said, nodding. He turned to leave. ‘George?’ I called. He turned back. ‘Is your decision anything to do with the event at the racecourse last Friday evening?’

‘No,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘I don’t know. Both Emma and I were dreadfully ill, up all night. Look, I said we’ll give you a call, OK?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but strode off purposefully. I decided that persistence at this time would not be to my advantage in the future.

Next, at two thirty, it was Louisa’s funeral at the West Chapel at Cambridge Crematorium.

I had been to visit the Whitworths on Wednesday afternoon and I had almost been able to touch the sorrow and anguish present in their house. I had been much mistaken in thinking that Louisa’s parents might have blamed her death on her job at the restaurant. In fact, they couldn’t have been more effusive about how it had done so much to give her confidence in herself, as well as the financial independence that she had cherished.

‘Not that we didn’t help her out, of course,’ her father had said, choking back the tears. Beryl, Louisa’s mother, had clung so tightly to my hand, as if doing so might have brought her daughter back to life. So grief-stricken was she that she had been unable to speak a single word to me throughout my half-hour visit. What cruelty, I thought, had been visited on these dear, simple people whose great pleasure in life was to have a beautiful, clever and fun-loving daughter, only to have her snatched away from them for ever in such a brutal manner.

I had left their house more disturbed than I had expected and had sat in my car for quite some time before I was able to drive myself back to the restaurant. And her funeral became the biggest ordeal of the day.

I pride myself on being a fairly emotionally stable character, not easily moved either to tears or to anger. However, I suffered dearly in that chapel with both tears and anger very close to the surface. I clenched my teeth together so hard to control myself that my jaw ached for hours afterwards.

As one would imagine, at least two thirds of those present were young people in their teens, school friends of Louisa. I guessed that, for many of them, this was the first funeral they had ever attended. If the grief displayed was a measure of the love and affection that existed for the deceased, then Louisa had been large in the hearts of so many. If grief is the price we pay for love, then overwhelming grief is the price paid for adoration, and Louisa had been adored by her friends. Before the service finished, several of them needed to be helped outside to sit in the fresh air to recover from near hysteria. By the time I returned to my car in the crematorium car park, I was totally exhausted.

And still the day had more sorrow to come.

Brian and June Walters had been two of my first customers when I had opened the restaurant. Brian had once been a fellow steeplechase jockey of my father’s, and for years they hid been