A few more people arrived who I recognised, mostly trainers and a few jockeys who had made the journey up from the south, but none of them were the person I was waiting for.

With just twenty minutes to go before the first race was due to start, Simon Paulson hurried in. I knew from the racecard that, in addition to Ricardian in the fifth, he had another runner in the second, and he was cutting things rather fine.

I let him go. He was not the man I was waiting for either.

Just when I was beginning to think that my prey wasn’t coming to the races at Sedgefield today after all, he appeared in his camel-coloured overcoat and battered trilby. But he wasn’t alone. He had a woman and a young boy with him.

That could make things awkward.

‘Didn’t he come?’ Chico asked when I finally waved him over to me.

‘Yes, he did. But he’s not alone.’

‘So?’

‘I was hoping to corner him as he arrived, but that was not possible.’

‘So what do we do now?’

‘We bide our time and watch the racing.’

CHAPTER

32

JAHAZ BAR DIDN’T win the second race but it was due to no fault of Marcus Capes. And, in an ironic twist, the race was actually won by Simon Paulson’s runner, even though it had no right to the triumph.

Jahaz Bar had shadowed the long-time front-runner throughout and, coming to the last fence, Marcus moved him almost up-sides of the leader, ready to strike for glory. The horse in third was half a furlong adrift, and the remaining four runners were completely out of sight and pulling up, after the fast-run three miles in testing ground had sapped all their stamina.

But it was the tiredness of the leader that was to prove decisive.

As he jumped the last, he twisted to his right in mid-air, pitched nose-down on landing, and fell forward right into Jahaz Bar’s path, causing both horses to crash to the turf. The third horse, which had itself almost pulled up, now staggered over the last and trotted the final hundred yards to the line for a totally undeserved victory.

Meanwhile, I kept my eyes on the carnage at the last fence and was relieved to see both horses and riders quickly rise to their feet. Being ‘brought down’ when in a winning position was a dreadful way to lose a race, but it happens, and had probably happened to every jockey at some stage or another. It certainly had to me.

‘Come on,’ I said to Chico. ‘Let’s go down and watch the winner come in.’

We went down from our lofty position in the grandstand, and I leaned on the rail of the unsaddling enclosure, while Chico stood some way off to my right.