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to please keep me informed, but I had little faith that phoning his brother-in-law would be high on hispriority list unless it was to ask about progress in finding Kenneth’s erstwhile friend.
    How long should I wait before I called the hospital? Perhaps I shouldn’t call before noon. Or maybe at eleven-thirty. Or eleven.
    I looked up at the clock on the office wall for the umpteenth time. Ten past ten. The hands seemed to move so slowly. Had it stopped? I stared at the minute hand for a full minute, timing it against my wristwatch, until it clicked over to eleven minutes past ten. No, it was still working.
    I stood up and walked down the corridor to the little kitchen area to make myself a cup of coffee. Pacing up and back helped my nervousness, but the clock had grudgingly moved on just five minutes to ten-sixteen when I sat down again.
    Come on, I told myself. Do something useful. Take your mind off it.
    I forced myself back to the e-mails.
    Most were update reports from my colleagues. There were five out-and-out investigators in the department, of which I was one, three of the others being ex–police officers, and the fifth a financial expert who had recently joined our ranks, reflecting the increasing financial complexity of many of the dubious practices we spent our time investigating.
    In addition, there were eight equine integrity officers who were responsible, among other things, for checking that the runners in all races were indeed the horses that everyone expected them to be. The penalty for knowingly substituting a different horse or “running a ringer,” as it was called, was one of the harshest in the rule book, with an expected twenty years’ disqualification and exclusion from the sport even for a first offense.
    And then there were the stable inspectors who spent their daysmaking unannounced visits to licensed training facilities to check on the suitability of the premises and the welfare of the horses, and also arranging the random drug testing of the sport’s participants, both equine and human.
    We all regularly updated one another with progress and irregularities as we had found that it was not unusual for our investigations to overlap. An investigation into person A might throw up a connection to persons X and Y, while a completely separate inquiry into person B might show that he is also connected to one of or both X and Y and hence possibly to A.
    I scanned through the reports looking out for names that were familiar.
    Currently, I personally had three open cases, one of which concerned the continuing fallout from the Matthew Unwin affair. I was trying to ascertain if any other individuals had profited from the doping of the horses. In particular, did the betting records show any unusual patterns during the running of those horses? It was painstaking work searching through the race results and cross-referencing them against computer betting data. So far, it had not turned up any discrepancies and I was beginning to think that it wouldn’t.
    But the case was the reason Nigel and I had been on the lookout at Cheltenham on the previous Tuesday. One of our covert sources had provided information to the intelligence branch that had led us to believe Unwin might be at the races that day to meet someone who had benefited from the doping.
    Little had I realized he was there to commit murder.
    Had Jordan Furness been more than just the victim of a vicious knife attack? Had he also been profiting from Unwin’s doped horses?
    Racehorse trainers, typically, have little contact withbookmakers and vice versa, other than the placing of bets, one with the other. Social contact, although not prohibited, was discouraged by the authorities. It would be all too easy to pass on privileged information, and doing so for financial gain was strictly against the Rules of Racing.
    So had there been any previous contact between Matthew Unwin and Jordan Furness? And had Unwin’s former