Clive rushed off towards his car, and so I hung around for a bit outside the weighing room, hoping to intercept Jimmy Shilstone again, but without any success. When I finally asked the official at the front door to try and find him for me, I was informed that he had already left for home via the side door of the jockeys’ medical room.

Horse racing is the only sport where the participants are actively pursued by medical teams—ambulances, doctors and vets—together with several other vehicles, along a special emergency service road adjacent to the track. One vehicle contains crews whose job is to set up screens around any injured horse or rider, and at some courses there is even another for the designated ‘loose-horse catcher’.

Shilstone must have been brought back to the medical room in another of those following vehicles, specifically the one assigned to pick up any fallen jockeys, at least those who didn’t need the services of the ambulance.

When I had started riding, there had been no such luxuries for jockeys, not even a chasing ambulance.

During my first season as a professional jockey, I could remember falling at the final fence down the back straight at Chepstow in the last race on a chilly, damp November afternoon. The racecourse at Chepstow is almost two miles round and is particularly long and thin, such that the distance from that fence back to the weighing room is the best part of a mile.

In spite of it being an easy fall with no resultant injury, I had decided to remain down on the turf, writhing as if in agony, in the hope and expectation that the fence attendant would use his white flag to summon the racecourse ambulance, which could then give me a lift all the way back to the changing room. However, I made the serious mistake of jumping up to my feet as the ambulance approached. When the driver saw that, in fact, I was unharmed by the fall, he immediately turned his vehicle round and drove away again, consigning me to a long, cold, wet trudge.

Having failed to doorstep Jimmy Shilstone, I went in search of Simon Paulson, but he too had slipped away, probably to avoid speaking to me.

Time for me to go too, I thought. As it was, I’d be back at Aynsford later than I had hoped. I had better call Charles to remind him to feed Rosie, and this time not with digestive biscuits.

I walked out to my car during the running of the seventh and last race, the bumper, but if I thought I could get away from Catterick that easily, I was very much mistaken.

CHAPTER

13

THERE WERE TWO large men in black balaclavas waiting for me beside my car, and they were both wielding baseball bats.

Oh Christ, I thought, not again.

‘Halley,’ one of them shouted, ‘we want a word with you.’