He waved me away and I drove the two miles back to Nutwell, and to a cold, empty house.

I fed Rosie, who wolfed down her food quickly, as if fearful I might take it away again. But she wasn’t the only one who was hungry. I had managed to grab a mediocre ham sandwich at a motorway services on my way south but, apart from that, I’d had nothing to eat all day.

I searched the dark recesses of the fridge, but there was precious little to be found. In the end, I simply made myself some scrambled eggs on toast and washed them down with a large glass of red wine. Nice, but hardly glamorous.

I poured myself another glass of wine and thought about what I’d heard earlier. And what I should do about it.

The simple answer was to go to the racing authorities and tell them exactly what was going on, but Simon Paulson had made it perfectly clear to me that he would deny ever telling me anything. And, as he had maintained, the trainers’ premium, just like an auctioneer’s buyers’ premium, was not illegal, and I could find nothing in the Rules of Racing that outlawed it either.

Indeed, whereas valet fees are fixed and automatically deducted from a jockey’s riding fee by Weatherbys, the rules state quite clearly that an agent’s fee is negotiated solely between the jockey and the agent, and payment of such fees is not the business of the Authority. And at no place in the rules does it maintain that any agent is forbidden from also charging a fee to the trainer.

However, what I found infinitely more disturbing was Gary Bremner’s assertion that the agents were also directing where and when trainers should run their horses, and whether they would then win or not. That was clearly a serious breach of racing’s integrity regulations, which could undermine the trust in racing that is essential for the gambling industry, something that racing depends on for its lifeblood.

But I had no evidence other than the rantings of a man who everyone else believed had been consumed by fire.

I decided that, before I went to the authorities, I would need to find greater corroboration of what Gary had said than just my inferences from Simon Paulson’s body language.

I turned on the television to watch the ten o’clock news. The bulletin was dominated by the fallout from the cabinet resignation, with leaders of the opposition parties calling for the prime minister to step down as well, amid accusations of cronyism and sleaze. Only right at the end was there a brief mention of the fire in Middleham, with no indication of any human remains being found, or not. Hence, I assumed that Gary Bremner was still lying low and the Old Bill hadn’t found him yet in his garden hideaway.