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second place in a close finish that should have had the crowd on their feet shouting. Such was the mood that the jockey on the winner didn’t even look happy at having won. Many of the crowd had already departed and I, too, decided I’d had enough. I opted to wait for Charles at his car in the hope that he would also want to leave before the last race.
    I was making my way past the rows of outside broadcast TV vans when a wide-eyed young woman came stumbling towards me. She was unable to speak but she pointed down the gap between two of the vans.
    She had found Huw Walker.
    He sat leaned up against the wheel of one of the vans looking at me with an expression of surprise. Except that his staring eyes were not seeing and never would again.
    He was still wearing his riding clothes, breeches, lightweightriding boots and a thin white roll-neck top worn under a blue anorak to keep out the rain and the March chill. His anorak hung open so that I could clearly see the three closely grouped bullet wounds in the middle of his chest showing red against the white cotton. I knew what one bullet could do to a man’s guts as I had myself once carelessly been on the receiving end, but these three were closer to the heart and there seemed little doubt as to the cause of death.

C HAPTER 3
    Charles and I didn’t arrive back at Aynsford until after midnight.
    As is so often the case, the police ran roughshod over everything with no care for people’s feelings and, it seemed, with little or no common sense.
    They cancelled the last race of the day and closed the racecourse, refusing to let anyone leave, not even those in the central enclosure who didn’t have access to where Huw Walker had been found. Totally ill equipped to interview nearly sixty thousand people, they relented in the end and allowed the wet, angry and frustrated multitude to make their ways to the car parks and home but not before it was very dark and very cold.
    In a way, I felt sorry for the policemen. They had no idea how to deal with a crowd of racegoers in shock and grief over a horse. Surely, they said, you are more concerned about the murder of a jockey than the death of an animal?
    ‘Don’t be bloody daft,’ said one man standing near me. ‘All jockeys are bent, anyway. Got what he deserved, I reckon.’ Sadly, it was a common view. If it wins, it’s all the horse’s doing. If it loses, blame the pilot.
    I didn’t get away quite so easily as I was a material witness and I reluctantly agreed to go to their hastily established incident room in one of the now vacated restaurants to give a statement. I pointed out that I hadn’t actually been the first to find poor Huw. However, the young woman who had was so shocked that she had been sedated by a doctor. She was asleep and unable to speak to the police. Lucky her.
    Huw had been seen in the jockeys’ changing room before the Gold Cup but not after it. Bill Burton had been looking for him less than an hour later.
    By the time they had set up their interview area and got round to asking me, it was clear they had received reports of the shouting match between trainer and jockey after Candlestick’s victory in the first. Bill Burton, it appeared, was already their prime suspect.
    I pointed out to Detective Chief Inspector Carlisle of Gloucestershire CID that Huw had obviously been killed by an expert assassin who must have brought a gun with him to the races for the purpose and that Bill Burton couldn’t have magically produced a shooter out of thin air just because he had had a tiff with his jockey following the first race.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘maybe that’s what we are meant to think while, meantime, Burton had planned it all along.’
    Yes, I had spoken to Huw Walker earlier in the day.
    No, he didn’t say anything to me that could be of use to the police.
    Yes, I had seen Huw Walker and Bill Burton together after the first race.
    No, I didn’t know why anyone would want him dead.
    Yes, I would contact