close friends, as well as fierce competitors. I think Brian had only come to have dinner at the Hay Net that first time to support me, as the son of his dead friend, but he and h s wife had quickly become regular customers, which said a lot for how much they had enjoyed the food, both then and since.
Almost thirty years before, Brian had retired from the dangers of race riding and had joined Tattersalls, the company that owned and ran the world-famous Newmarket horse sales. He had worked hard and had risen steadily up the ladder to be Sales Manager. While he hadn’t been the overall decisionmaking boss, he had been the person whose job it was to make sure that everything ran smoothly on a day-to-day basis, and run smoothly it had. He had recently retired from this lofty position and had been settling down to what he had hoped would be a long and happy retirement, choosing to continue living in the town where his standing was quite high. High enough for him to have been included in the Delafield Industries guest list of local dignitaries at the 2000 Guineas; high enough for him to have been standing with his wife right next to where the bomb had exploded on Saturday. His long and happy retirement had lasted precisely six weeks and one day.
Brian and June had produced four, now grown-up, children between them but none was actually theirs together, both having been previously married and divorced. As June had often told me over an after-dinner port in my dining room, they were not very close to any of their children as both the divorces had been acrimonious and the children had tended to side with the other partner in each case. Consequently, their joint funeral, late in the afternoon at All Saints’, was more unemotional and functional than those I had attended earlier. Many of the same people, including George Kealy, who had earlier been across the High Street in the Catholic church for Elizabeth Jennings, gathered in the Anglican church for the Walterses. Was it ungracious of me, I thought, to wonder how many had passed the intervening hours in the bar of the Rutland Arms Hotel, which sat halfway between the two places of worship?
After the service I decided not to join the cortège of other mourners for the trip to the cemetery for the interment. Instead, I drove the fifteen or so miles from the church in Newmarket to the railway station in Cambridge. Yea, it seemed to me that I had walked all day through the valley of the shadow of death by the time I wearily boarded the six fifty train to London. I applied a gin and tonic to comfort me as I lay down beside the still waters in the green pastures of a first-class seat. I had had my fill of ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and the twenty-third psalm for one day.
I sat back, sipped my drink, and reflected on the events of the last week. It seemed much longer than that since I had been preparing the gala dinner in a tent at the racecourse the p revious Friday evening.
How seven days can change one’s life! Then I had been a confident businessman; diligent, respected, profitable and sleeping like a baby. And I had been happy with my lot. Now, in a mere week, I had become a self-doubting shambles: inactive, accused of being a mass poisoner and a liar, on my way to probable bankruptcy and being the victim of regular nightmares about a legless woman. Yet here I was, contemplating giving up this easy life for even more stress and anxiety in London. Perhaps I really was going mad.
The train pulled into King’s Cross station just before a quarter to eight. I should have been looking forward to my evening with Mark. But I wasn’t.
‘Rise above it,’ Mark said over dinner. ‘Have faith in yourself and bugger what people think.’
‘But you have to attract the customers,’ I said. ‘Surely it matters what they think?’
‘Gordon Ramsay just swears at everyone and they love him for it.’
‘Trust me, they wouldn’t in Newmarket,’ I said. ‘For all the earthiness of racing and its reputation for bad language, those within it value being given their due respect. Trainers may swear at their stable lads but they wouldn’t dream of swearing at their owners. The horses would disappear quicker than you could say abracadabra.’
‘But I’m not talking