Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,4

till eleven at the earliest,’ she said.

That sounded ominous, I thought. The racecourse manager not being in until eleven o’clock on 2000 Guineas day.

‘He’s had a bad night apparently,’ she went on. ‘Something he ate didn’t agree with him. Bloody nuisance if you ask me. How am I meant to cope on my own? I don’t get paid enough to cope on my own.’

The telephone on the desk beside her ample bottom rang at that moment and saved me from further observations. I withdrew and went back to the delivery truck.

‘Right,’ said the man from Stress-Free, ‘all your stuff’s up in the boxes. Do you want to check before signing for it?’

I always checked deliveries. All too often, I had found that the inventory was somewhat larger than the actuality. But today I decided I’d risk it and scribbled on his offered form.

‘Right,’ he said again. ‘I’ll see you later. I’ll collect at six.’

‘Fine,’ I replied. Six o’clock seemed a long way off. Thank goodness I had already done most of the preparation for the steak and kidney pies. All that was needed was to put the filling into the individual ceramic oval pie dishes, slap a pastry cover over the top and shove them into a hot oven for about thirty-five minutes. The fresh vegetables had already been blanched and were sitting in my cold-room at the restaurant, and the asparagus was trimmed and ready to steam. The individual small summer puddings had all been made on Thursday afternoon and also sat waiting in the restaurant cold-room. They just needed to be turned out of their moulds and garnished with some whipped cream and half a strawberry. MaryLou wasn’t to know that the strawberries came from southwest France.

As a rule I didn’t do ‘outside catering’ but Guineas weekend was different. For the past six years it had been my major marketing opportunity of the year.

The clientele of my restaurant were predominantly people involved in the racing business. It was a world I knew well and thought I understood. My father had been a moderately successful steeplechase jockey, and then a much more successful racehorse trainer until he was killed in a collision with a brick lorry on his way to Liverpool for the Grand National when I was eighteen. I would have been with him if my mother hadn’t insisted that I stay at home and revise for my A level exams. My elder half-brother, Toby, ten years my senior, had literally taken over the reins of the training business and was still making a living from it, albeit a meagre one.

I had spent my childhood riding ponies and surrounded by horses but I was never struck with Toby’s love of all things equine. As far as I was concerned both ends of a horse were dangerous and the middle was uncomfortable. One end kicks and the other end bites. And I had never been able to understand why riding had to be done at such an early hour on cold wet mornings when most sane people would be fast asleep in a nice warm bed.

More than thirteen years had now passed since the fateful day when a policeman had appeared at the front door of our house to inform my mother that what was left of my father’s Jaguar, with him still inside it, had been identified as belonging to a Mr George Moreton, late of the parish of East Hendred.

I had worked hard for my A levels to please my mother, and was accepted at Surrey University to read chemistry. But my life was changed for ever, not by the death of my father, but by what should have been my gap year and turned out to be my gap life.

I never went to Surrey or to any other university. The plan had been that I would work for six months to earn enough to go travelling in the Far East for the next six months. So I went as a pot-and-pan washer-upper, beer-crate carrier and general dogsbody to a country pub/restaurant/hotel overlooking the river Thames in Oxfordshire, which belonged to a widowed distant cousin of my mother’s. The normal term for such an employee is ‘kitchen porter’, but this is such a derogatory term in catering circles that my mother’s distant cousin referred to me as the ‘temporary assistant under-manager’, which was more of a mouthful and less accurate. The word ‘manager’ implies a level of responsibility. The only responsibility I was given was to rouse