Ah! What did I say?

If I told him I’d been with Gary on Sunday, or even that I’d spoken to him again on the telephone later that evening, then the detective would have had every right to ask me why I hadn’t reported the fact to the police when everyone had believed Gary had perished in the fire during the early hours of Saturday morning.

‘Recently,’ I said.

‘How recently?’

‘I spoke to him briefly on Friday afternoon and then again that evening. He called me at my Oxfordshire home on both occasions.’

It was the truth, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.

And the police would probably know about those calls by now, I thought, by checking Gary’s phone records, at least those calls made when he’d still been using his SIM card. It wasn’t called the Subscriber Identity Module for nothing.

DCI Williams nodded. So he had known.

‘What did you talk about?’

‘Various things. Mostly old times. About when we were both riding in races together.’

‘What else?’

I’m not sure why I didn’t want to tell him about Gary’s accusations against jockeys’ agents, the threats he’d received, or why he’d been so frightened by them, or the fact that I had known he didn’t die in the fire.

Perhaps I was still smarting at having been effectively frog-marched over here from the centre of town. It was not that I didn’t trust the police, although that was questionable after the way they had treated me in the past. Or maybe my reticence was due to the Halley arrogance that Marina and I had touched on the previous evening. But did I really think I could do a better job at investigating Gary Bremner’s death than this professional investigator?

Maybe not, but my priority was different to his. I was only interested in protecting the good name of British horse racing.

Having newspaper banner headlines describing wrongdoing among BHA-licensed individuals, as would surely happen if I left it to the police, was unlikely to maintain trust in racing as a whole among the betting public. And that trust was essential.

Unlike in the United States, where it is a federal offence to lie to an FBI agent, in the United Kingdom it is not illegal to tell untruths and mislead the police, even though they would like you to think it is. Only if you sign a false sworn statement, or actually lie under oath in court, can you be liable for prosecution for perjury or perverting the course of justice.

‘So why do you believe that Gary killed himself?’ I asked the detective, dodging his own question. ‘Did you actually find a suicide note as the news reports suggest?’

The detective chief inspector pursed his lips in displeasure.