I set my phone up to play the recording while I made the coffee, and it was the bit when Valance was talking about hearsay that had me reaching for the replay button.

‘… anythin’ that you may claim Gary Bremner said to you is irrelevant. I’ve been told it would just be ’earsay, and would be inadmissible in court.’

I’ve been told …

Those were the exact words he had used.

Who had told him? His wife? His lawyer?

Surely not. So who?

Then the alarm bells went off, this time loud and clear in my head.

I remembered the something else that had been niggling away in my brain since the previous afternoon. It was the words Simon Paulson had used when he’d told me about calling Valance to tell him that Night Shadow would be running on his merits in the fifth race at Catterick. Simon’s exact words to me had been: Claimed they had too much invested on the race and I would be liable for their losses if Night Shadow won.

They and their. Not he and his.

And Gary Bremner may have given me only a single name, that of Anton Valance, but he had always referred to the ‘bastards’ who had burned down his stable yard. Bastards—in the plural. I had thought that he must have meant Valance’s two goons, but maybe he hadn’t.

Was Valance not working alone, but with someone else?

And, if so, who was it?

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Chico said as I stood there with my coffee cup raised halfway to my mouth.

‘There are two of them,’ I said. ‘Maybe even more.’

‘Two of who?’

‘Valance has an accomplice.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. But we have to find out. That’s how we can outflank his defences.’

‘And how is that, exactly?’

‘By setting them against each other. And we also have to do the impossible.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Find out who this accomplice is, then defeat them both, and do it all by Friday.’

CHAPTER

27

AT NINE THIRTY, I received a call from Marcus Capes.

‘Valance just rang me,’ he said. ‘He told me I was not to win on my ride this afternoon at Hexham.’

‘What’s the name of the horse?’

‘Meeru. Five-year-old gelding trained by Mr Kline. It runs in the first, a two-mile handicap hurdle, at one o’clock.’

‘Does it have a chance?’

‘A good chance, I’d say. He’s filled out really well in the last couple of months and I won on him last time out at Wetherby.’

I looked up the race on the Racing Post website. There were eight declared runners for the Class 3 contest, and the website predicted that Meeru would probably start as favourite, at about three-to-one.

‘What do you plan to do?’ I asked him.