Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,70

a d next to them, I knew eleven. I suspected that the others, the ones I didn’t recognize, were Delafield people, one of whom, according to Ms Harding at the newspaper, had since died from her burns. The eleven that I did recognize included one couple who were regulars at the Hay Net and four others who lived locally and had been occasional customers. The remaining five were from further afield and included a trainer and his wife from Middleham in Yorkshire, the wife of the Irish businessman who had been killed and an ex-jockey from the West Country who now made a meagre living giving tips to corporate guests at race meetings. I couldn’t remember him giving a talk before the lunch but I would have been in the kitchen by then anyway. None of them looked likely targets for a terrorist.

The last one was Rolf Schumann. Was he the target?

I checked my e-mail again. Nothing new.

I looked at my watch and the half-hour was up. DI Turner would have gone off duty for the day, maybe for the weekend, so I would just have to be patient and wait.

It was seven thirty and the restaurant dinner service was beginning to get into full swing so I went into the kitchen to check if everything was going well and was promptly ordered out by Carl.

‘You’re sick,’ he said. ‘Go home and let us get on with it.’

‘I’m not sick,’ I said. ‘I’ve just got a headache. You can’t catch concussion, you know.’

He grinned at me. ‘No matter. We are coping fine without you. This is Oscar.’ Carl pointed at a new face in the kitchen. ‘He’s doing fine.’ Oscar smiled. Gary didn’t. He was clearly not having one of his good days. I left them and returned to my office. I would have loved to go home but I still wanted to search a little more on the Internet and I had no computer at home.

I checked my e-mail yet again but still nothing more. I was beginning to give up on DI Turner when my phone rang. It was him.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I have found a copy of the original list but I can’t seem to work this damn scanner now the secretary’s gone home. And I’ve got to go home now as well. I’m meant to be taking the missus out to the cinema for her birthday and I’m going to be late as it is. I’ll send it to you next week.’

‘Couldn’t you just read it out?’ I said. ‘I’ll write them down.’

‘Oh all right. But quickly.’

I grabbed a pen and wrote down the names on the back of an old menu card. Neil Jennings was there as expected, as were George and Emma Kealy, and I knew of two of the other four, Patrick and Margaret Jacobs, who together ran a successful saddlery business in the town. The other couple I’d never heard of. Their names were Pyotr and Tatiana Komarov.

I thanked him and wished him a pleasant evening with his wife and to blame me for his lateness. He said he intended to, and hung up.

I looked at the names I had written on the menu. Why had I thought that the key to everything would be the names of those invited to but not present in the bombed box? Patrick and Margaret Jacobs were nice people who, I knew, looked after their customers with efficiency and charm. They seemed well respected, even liked, by most of the local Newmarket trainers, some of whom had even brought them to dinner at the Hay Net. I searched through the copy of the guest list for the Friday-night dinner and, sure enough, Mr and Mrs Patrick Jacobs were listed as having been present.

There was no such luck with the Komarovs, who were absent from the Friday-night list. That didn’t necessarily mean they hadn’t been at the dinner, just that they were not named.

I typed ‘Komarov’ into my computer. My Google search engine threw up over a million hits. I tried ‘Pyotr Komarov’ and cut it down to about thirty-eight thousand. The one I wanted could be any of them, most of whom were Russians. I asked my machine to look for ‘Tatiana Komarov’. ‘Do you mean Tatiana Komarova?’ it asked me. I remembered that, in Russian and in other Slavic languages, the female version of a surname ends in a. I tried ‘Tatiana Komarova’. Another eighteen thousand hits. ‘Pyotr and Tatiana Komarov’ together produced sixteen thousand.