In the early twenty-first century, the self-electing and largely aristocratic nature of the Jockey Club was considered inappropriate for the body charged with regulating a modern major industry, and so the governance of racing was passed to an independent institution, the British Horseracing Authority.

However, one of the consequences of this change has been that the new chiefs were often career sports administrators who may have come to racing with little or no prior knowledge of our particular sport.

For me, whereas I had once been able to have a quiet word of warning concerning racing’s integrity with a senior member of the Jockey Club, many of whom had owned horses I had ridden, I was seen now as just another face in the crowd, and every communication with the powers that be had to be officially logged.

I thought back to what Sid Halley in his investigating heyday would have done.

Whereas subterfuge and evasion might have paid dividends eventually, a full-frontal attack had usually produced results more quickly.

Hence, I resolved to go back to Middleham the following day, to make myself known in full sight, and to ask some difficult questions of anyone and everyone I could find, and at full volume.

CHAPTER

8

THE SIX O’CLOCK television news on Monday evening was dominated by a new development from Middleham, one that I found even more disturbing than the news of the fire.

Gary Bremner’s body had been found, not burned to a crisp as everyone else had thought, but hanging from a tree in the undergrowth at the bottom of his garden. The bulletin showed the deputy chief constable of the North Yorkshire Police being interviewed standing in front of a blue tent erected behind him.

‘It would appear,’ he said, ‘that Mr Bremner did not die in the fire at his stables, as has been widely reported over the last two days. At this time, we are treating the death of Mr Bremner as unexplained.’

The news reporter was then shown on camera stating that the authorities seemed to be treating it as a case of suicide. One of his police informants, he explained, had told him that they had found a note near the body. The reporter speculated that the loss of Gary’s training yard, and of his best horse, might have affected his state of mind.

I, meanwhile, believed nothing of the sort.

To me, even at a distance of two hundred miles, it had all the hallmarks of a murder made to look like a suicide. But the note was a problem. I hoped that the North Yorks Police would give it to a forensic handwriting specialist to compare it against other things Gary had written.