Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,50

the neck, and that the hyoid bone had been fractured, which was consistent with manual strangulation.

The piece concluded by stating that the deceased had been found to be pregnant at the time of her death, with a female fetus estimated at between eighteen and twenty weeks’ gestation.

Indeed, he had murdered her baby.

He had murdered my sister.

10

Ididn’t get to Newbury for the evening racing. Instead, I went straight home to Kenilworth.

I was angry.

In fact, I was absolutely livid.

How could my father have come to Ascot, just one week previously, and been so normal and so natural, even so agreeable, when he held the knowledge that he had murdered my mother together with her unborn child?

It was despicable, and I hated him for it.

Why had he come back from Australia and turned my life upside down?

Had he come because of the glass-grain RFIDs and the money? Surely it hadn’t been just to see me?

I lay awake for ages, tossing and turning, trying to sort it all out, but all I came up with were more and more questions, and no answers.

Whose money was it in his rucksack?

Was the money connected to the RFIDs and the black-box programmer?

Was he killed because he hadn’t handed over the money or was it the black box and the glass grains that were so important?

And what exactly were they for?

Every punter has a story of how they think a crooked trainer or owner has run the wrong horse in a race. How a “ringer” has been brought in to win when the expected horse would have had no chance. Unexpected winners have always made some people suspicious that foul play has been afoot, and, in the distant past, before racing was a well-organized industry, rumors of ringers abounded, and there must have been some truth to them.

But running a ringer has always been more difficult than most people believe, especially from a large, well-established training stable, and not only because horse identification has become more sophisticated with the introduction of the RFID chips. Sure, a horse will be scanned by an official vet the first time it runs and randomly thereafter, and this, together with the detailed horse passport, makes it difficult to substitute one horse for another. But the real reason is that too many people would have to be “in the know.”

There is an old Spanish proverb that runs: A secret between two is God’s secret, between three it is all men’s.

To run a horse as a ringer requires the inside knowledge of a good deal more than three men. The horse’s groom, the horsevan driver, the traveling head lad and the jockey just for a start, in addition to the trainer and the owner.

It would be impossible to keep it a secret from any of them because they would simply recognize that the horse was not the right one. People who work every day with horses see them as individuals with different features and characteristics rather than just as horses. It has often been said that every great trainer needs to know his horses’ characters better than he knows those of his own family. Lester Piggott was said to be able to recognize any horse he had ridden even when it was walking away from him in a rainstorm.

Just as everyone would realize pretty quickly, if not immediately, that a celebrity look-alike was not the real thing, so too would racing folk easily spot a ringer, unless it was far removed from its normal environment. And it was too much to expect that a secret conspiracy of even a handful of people would hold for very long.

So what real good were the rewritable identification RFIDs?

I finally went to sleep, still trying to work out the conundrum.

I was not sure what the noise was that woke me, but one moment I’d been fast asleep, the next I was fully conscious in the dark and knowing that something wasn’t quite right.

I listened intently, lying perfectly still on my back and keeping my breathing very quiet and shallow.

As usual in the summer, I had left open one of my bedroom windows for ventilation. But I could hear nothing out of the ordinary from outside the house. Nothing except for the breeze, which rustled the leaves of the beech tree by the road, and the occasional hum of a distant car on Abbey Hill.

I had begun to think I must have been wrong when I plainly heard the sound again. It was muffled slightly by the closed bedroom