Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,86

Now, I admit I thought that was odd.”

“Are you now telling me more lies?” he said.

“No, of course I’m not,” I said crossly. “I’ve come here to help you with an e-fit. Don’t you think I want you to catch my father’s killer?”

“I’m not so sure that you do,” he said slowly. “And, Mr. Talbot, don’t go away anywhere without telling us first.”

“Why not?” I asked him sharply. “Am I under arrest or something?”

“Not yet, no,” he said. “Not yet.”

Producing the police e-fit was easy. I had dreamed so much about Shifty-eyes that I had little trouble transferring the image in my head to a picture on a computer. The young “e-fit technician,” as he was called, was an expert.

“A little bit wider,” I said about the man’s face.

The technician turned the wheel on his computer mouse with his right forefinger, and the face in front of me squeezed in or stretched out until it was just right. His eyes were added, rather too close together for the width of the face, and then a nose, mouth and ears, each in turn adjusted in height, width and thickness by the rotation of the mouse wheel. Finally, short, straight fair hair was grown instantly and made to stand upright on the top of the head.

Shifty-eyes, or Kipper as Paddy Murphy had called him, looked out at me from the screen, and it sent a shiver down my back.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Great,” the technician replied, punching the SAVE button on his keyboard. “The chief inspector will be delighted.”

I doubted that, I thought.

I wondered if my image was anything like any of those produced by the other witnesses. But I had an advantage over them. I’d not just seen him in the Ascot parking lot, I’d seen him again in Sussex Gardens, and without his hoodie and scarf.

By the time I arrived back at Station Road, peace had broken out between the sisters.Alice had conceded that Sophie would be allowed to enter her own kitchen to help with the dinner preparations, and Sophie, in her turn, had agreed to allow Alice to do all the cleaning up after her. It seemed like an excellent deal to me, especially as all I had to do was eat.

“We’re having Thai green chicken curry and sticky rice,” said Sophie with a flourish. “They never once served spicy food in the hospital, and I’m desperate for some. Alice and I walked down to the shops while you were out.”

“Great,” I said, meaning it.

“Where did you go?” she asked.

“Banbury,” I said.

“What for?”

Quick, think!

“I went to see someone who has a new device which he wants us to buy to put on our computer, at the races.”

“Oh,” she said, uninterested. “And did you buy it?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t much good, and it was too expensive.”

What was I doing? Lying to the police was one thing, but lying to Sophie was quite another. I didn’t like it. And it would have to stop. This whole secret-agent circus had to stop, and soon. Just as soon as Shifty-eyes was arrested for my father’s murder and the police, in the person of Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, got off my back.

I spent much of Tuesday morning sitting in my little office doing some research, both on the Internet and using the two printed volumes most familiar to anyone in racing: the Directory of the Turf and Horses in Training.

I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for.

First, I searched back through the online editions of the Racing Post until I found the piece I had read about a horse dying. The horse had been called Oriental Suite, and, according to the newspaper, he had died as a result of complications arising from a bout of severe colic. Oriental Suite had won the Triumph Hurdle, a high-class hurdle race for four-year-old novices, going away from his rivals up the Cheltenham hill last March. He had been tipped to be a future Champion Hurdler. The obituary quoted the horse’s owner as being distraught over the untimely death. Racing, he declared, had been cruelly robbed of a future megastar.

If Paddy Murphy was right and the horse had been switched and therefore wasn’t actually dead, the real truth was not that racing had been cruelly robbed of a future star, but that an insurance company had been cruelly robbed of a reasonable-sized fortune.

I removed from the top drawer of my desk the photocopies of the horse passports I had found in my father’s rucksack. One of