Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,68

past four. I rang Caroline.

‘Hello,’ she called down the line. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

‘Good thoughts, I hope,’ I said.

‘Mostly.’ I wasn’t sure about her tone.

‘Not regretting last night, are you?’ I said.

‘Oh, you know. All a bit sudden.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. As far as I was concerned, all the best things in life were a bit sudden, and she was no exception. But I wasn’t going to push matters. Who was it, I thought, who said, ‘Things may come to those who wait’?

‘Have you had a good afternoon?’ I asked.

‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘I’ve played my viola for three whole hours. My fingers are tired but I feel so alive. Music is like oxygen, without it I’d suffocate.’

‘I thought you would be packing,’ I said.

‘I’m not going now until Monday,’ she said. ‘The first night in Chicago is not until Wednesday and the rest of the orchestra are going off to see Niagara Falls for the weekend. I will join them in Chicago on Monday night.’

‘Will you come back to Newmarket then?’ I asked.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m having my hair done tomorrow at four and I have to get ready for the trip.’

‘Oh,’ I said rather glumly. ‘When will I see you?’

‘Don’t sound so miserable,’ she said. ‘I said I can’t come to Newmarket, but you could come here if you want to.’

I did want to. ‘When?’

‘Whenever,’ she said. ‘Come tomorrow and stay till Monday morning. You can help me get to Heathrow with all my stuff and wave me off to the States.’

I hated the thought of waving her off anywhere. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll be at your place tomorrow around lunchtime.’

‘No, later,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go shopping before my hair appointment. Come at seven and we’ll go down the pub for dinner.’

‘That’ll be lovely,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you later.’

We hung up and I sat at my desk smiling. I had never been so eager to see someone in my life. Was this it? I wondered. It was all a bit sudden, and a bit scary.

I asked my computer who had said the words. It came back with the answer. Abraham Lincoln. But the full quote was: ‘Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.’ In the future, I resolved to hustle.

I spent another hour at my computer hunting for anything that would give me a direction in which to look. I dug out the copy of the Cambridge Evening News which had listed the dead and searched the Internet for any lead for each name. Nothing. I did discover that one of the Delafield men who had died, Gus Witney, had been connected with the equine world, being involved with a polo club. The Lake Country Polo Club to be precise.

I looked it up. The club had a very expansive website for what was clearly an expanding enterprise. Sure enough, Gus Witney was there, named as their president and there was even a smiling photograph of him. They clearly were not very quick at updating their site as nearly two weeks had now passed since their president had died and there was still no mention of it. The club was sponsored, not unexpectedly, by Delafield Industries Inc., and Rolf Schumann himself was named in the list of patrons and vice-presidents.

There was a link to the United States Polo Association and I was surprised to see that polo was such a big activity over there. Obviously, it wasn’t in the same league as baseball or American football, but there were more than four times as many polo clubs in the US as there were Thoroughbred racetracks. And about ten times as many clubs as in England. Now that was a surprise. I had always thought of polo as a minor sport and a peculiarly British minor sport at that, played by British army cavalry officers on the plains of India to while away the boredom of a long posting far from home.

‘You’ve got new mail,’ my computer said, via a little blue box in the bottom right corner of the screen.

It was from Detective Inspector Turner. It was the Delafield guest list for 2000 Guineas day. Good old DI Turner. However, it didn’t give me what I wanted. What he had sent was a scan of a piece of paper that had originally had the full invitation list printed on it. However, someone had drawn a thick black line through the seven names of those who had