The Edge Read Online Free Page A

nephew Torquil, as I expect you remember, you’ve met him often enough. Well done with your winner, Paddy …’ and Paddy had taken us off for a drink, buying me a coke.
    I came face to face unexpectedly with the trainer Paddy Fredericks that first day at Epsom and he hadn’t known me. There hadn’t been a pause or a flicker. Aunt Viv had been dead nearly eight years and I had changed too much; and I had been reassured from that early moment that my weird new non-identity was going to work.
    On the grounds that racing villains made it their business to know the Security Service comprehensively by sight, Brigadier Catto said that if he ever wanted to speak to me himself, it would never be on a racecourse but always in the bar of the Hobbs Sandwich, and so it had been for the past three years. He and Clement Cornborough had sponsored me for full membership of the club and encouraged me to go there occasionally on other days on my own, and although I’d thought the Brigadier’s passion for secrecy a shade obsessive I had fallen in with his wishes and come to enjoy it, even if I’d learned a lot more about cricket than I really wanted to.
    On the night of Derry Welfram’s death, I walked into the bar at ten to eight and ordered a glass of Burgundy and a couple of beef sandwiches which came promptly because of the post-cricket-season absence of a hundred devotees discussing leg-breaks and insider politics at the tops of their voices. There were still a good number of customers, but from late September to the middle of April one could talk all night without laryngitis the next day, and when the Brigadier arrived he greeted me audibly and cheerfully as a fellow member well met and began telling me his assessment of the Test team just assembled for the winter tour abroad.
    ‘They’ve disregarded Withers,’ he complained. ‘How are they ever going to get Balping out if they leave our best in-swinger biting his knuckles at home?’
    I hadn’t the faintest idea, and he knew it. With a gleam of a smile he bought himself a double Scotch drowned in a large glass of water, and led the way to one of the small tables round the edge of the room, still chatting on about the whys and wherefores of the selected team.
    ‘Now,’ he said without change of speed or volume, ‘Welfram’s dead, Shacklebury’s dead, Gideon’s dead, and the problem is what do we do next.’
    The question, I knew, had to be rhetorical. He never called me to the Hobbs Sandwich to ask my advice but always to direct me towards some new course of action, though he would listen and change his requirements if I put forward any huge objections, which I didn’t often. He waited for a while, though, as if for an answer, and took a slow contemplative mouthful of weak whisky.
    ‘Did Mr Gideon leave any notes?’ I asked eventually.
    ‘Not as far as we know. Nothing as helpful as telling us why he sold his horses to Filmer, if that’s what you mean. Not unless a letter comes in the post next week, which I very much doubt.’
    Gideon had been frightened beyond death, I thought. The threat must have been to the living: an ongoing perpetual threat.
    ‘Mr Gideon has daughters,’ I said.
    The Brigadier nodded. ‘Three. And five grandchildren. His wife died years ago, I suppose you know. Am I reading you aright?’
    ‘That the daughters and grandchildren were hostages? Yes. Do you think they could know it?’
    ‘Positive they don’t,’ the Brigadier said. ‘I talked with his eldest daughter today. Nice, sensible woman, about fifty. Gideon shot himself yesterday evening, around five they think, but no one found him for hours as he did it out in the woods. I went down to the house today. His daughter, Sarah, said he’s been ultra-depressed lately, going deeper and deeper, but she didn’t know what had caused it. He wouldn’t discuss it. Sarah was in tears, of course, and also of course feeling guilty because she didn’t prevent it, but she couldn’t have