I leaned my head back against the window and waited for these details to mean something significant, but all that happened was that my inability to think increased.

Lodge went on. 'The taxi line was bought from Tudor by nominees, and that's where the fog begins. There have been so many transfers of ownership from company to company, mostly through nominees who can't be traced, that no one can discover who is the actual present owner. All business matters are settled by a Mr Fielder, the manager. He says he consults with a person he calls the Chairman by telephone, but that the Chairman rings him up every morning, and never the other way round. He says the Chairman's name is Claud Thiveridge, but he doesn't know his address or telephone number.'

'It sounds very fishy to me,' said my father.

'It is,' said Lodge. There is no Claud Thiveridge on the electoral register, or in any other official list, including the telephone accounts department, in the whole of Kent, Surrey, or Sussex. The operators in the telephone exchange are sure the office doesn't receive a long distance call regularly every morning, yet the morning call has been standard office routine for the last four years.

As this means that the call must be a local one, it seems fairly certain that Claud Thiveridge is not the gentleman's real name.'

He rubbed the palm of his hand round the back of his neck and looked at me steadily. 'You know a lot more than you've told me, amnesia or not,' he said. 'Spill the beans, there's a good chap.'

'You haven't told me what the Brighton police think of the Marconi-cars,' I said.

Lodge hesitated. 'Well, they were a little touchy on the subject, I would say. It seems they have had several complaints, but not much evidence that will stand up in court. What I have just told you is the result of their inquiries over the last few years.'

'They would not seem,' said my father dryly, 'to have made spectacular progress. Come on, Alan, tell us what's going on.'

Lodge turned his head towards him in surprise. My father smiled.

'My son is Sherlock Holmes reincarnated, didn't you know?' he said. 'After he went to England I had to employ a detective to do the work he used to do in connection with frauds and swindles. As one of my head clerks put it, Mr Alan has an unerring instinct for smelling out crooks.'

'Mr Alan's unerring instinct is no longer functioning,' I said gloomily.

'Don't be infuriating, Alan,' said my father. 'Elucidate.'

'Oh, all right. 'There's a lot I don't know,' I said, 'but the general gist appears to be this. The Marconi-cars have been in the protection racket for the last four years, intimidating small concerns like cafés and free house pubs. About a year ago, owing to the strongmindedness of one particular publican, my host of The Blue Duck, business in the protection line began to get, 'unexpectedly rough for the protectors. He set Alsatians on them, in fact.' I told my fascinated father and an aghast Lodge what Kate and I had learned in The Blue Duck's kitchen, carefully watched by the yellow-eyed Prince.

'Ex-Regimental Sergeant-Major Thomkins made such serious inroads into the illicit profits of Marconi-cars,' I continued, 'that as a racket it was more or less defunct. The legitimate side hasn't been doing too well during the winter either, according to the typists who work in the office. There are too many taxis in Brighton for the number of fares at this time of year, I should think. Anyway, it seems to me that the Marconi-car boss – the Chairman, your mysterious Claud Thiveridge – set about mending his fortunes by branching out into another form of crime. He bought, I think, the shaky bookmaking business on the floor above the Marconi-cars, in the same building.'

I could almost smell the cabbage in the Olde Oake café as I remembered it. 'An earnest lady told me the bookmakers had been taken over by a new firm about six months ago, but that its name was still the same. L. C. Perth, written in neon. She was very wrought up about them sticking such a garish sign on an architectural gem, and she and her old buildings society, whose name I forget, had tried to reason with the new owners to take down what they had just put up. Only they couldn't find out who the new owner was. It's too much of a coincidence to have two businesses, both shady, one above the other, both with invisible and untraceable owners. They must be owned by the same person.'

'It doesn't follow, and I don't see the point,' said my father.

'You will in a minute,' I said. 'Bill died because he wouldn't stop his horse winning a race. I know his death wasn't necessarily intended, but force was used against him. He was told not to win by a husky-voiced man on the telephone. Henry, Bill's elder son, he's eight -' I explained to Lodge, 'has a habit of listening on the extension upstairs, and he heard every word. Two days before Bill died, Henry says, the voice offered him five hundred pounds to stop his horse winning, and when Bill laughed at this, the voice told him he wouldn't win because his horse would fall.'

I paused, but neither Lodge nor my father said anything. Swallowing the last of the brandy, I went on. 'There is a jockey called Joe Nantwich who during the last six months, ever since L. C. Perth changed hands, has regularly accepted a hundred pounds, sometimes more, to stop a horse winning. Joe gets his instructions by telephone from a husky-voiced man he has never met.'

Lodge stirred on his hard, self-chosen chair.

I went on. 'I, as you know, was set upon by the Marconi-car drivers, and a few days later the man with the husky voice rang me up and told me to take heed of the warning I had been given in the horse-box. One doesn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that the crooked racing and the Marconi-car protection racket were being run by the same man.' I stopped.

'Finish it off, then,' said my father impatiently.

'The only person who would offer a jockey a large sum to lose a race is a crooked bookmaker. If he knows a well-fancied horse is not going to win, he can accept any amount of money on that horse without risk.'

'Enlarge,' said Lodge.

'Normally bookmakers try to balance their books so that whichever horse wins they come out on the winning side,' I said. 'If too many people want to back one horse, they accept the bets, but they back the horse themselves with another bookmaker; then if that horse wins, they collect their winnings from the second bookmaker, and pay it out to their customers. It's a universal system known as laying off. Now suppose you were a crooked bookmaker and Joe Nantwich is to ride a fancied horse. You tip Joe the wink to lose. Then however much is betted with you on that horse, you do no laying off, because you know you won't have to pay out.'

'There's a bit more to it, of course,' I said. 'If a bookmaker knows he hasn't got to pay out on a certain horse, he can offer better odds on it. I stood up and went towards the door, saying, 'I'll show you something.'

I went up to my room and fetched the racing form book and the little bunch of bookmakers' tickets, and shuffled back to the drawing-room. I laid the tickets out on the table in front of Lodge, and my father came over to have a look.

'These,' I explained, 'are some tickets Bill kept for his children to play with. Three of them, as you see, were issued by L. C. Perth, and all the others are from different firms, no two alike. Bill was a methodical man. On the backs of all the tickets he wrote the date, the details of his bet, and the name of the horse he'd put his money on.

'I looked up all the other cards as well,' I said. 'Of course, all the horses lost; but on only one of them did he get better odds than you'd expect. Joe didn't ride it.'

Presently Lodge said, 'I can see why your father misses you as a fraud spotter.'

'All that remains, as far as I'm concerned, is for you to tell us who is organizing the whole thing,' said my father with a touch of mockery, which from long understanding I interpreted as approval.

'That, dear Pa, I fear I cannot do,' I said.

But Lodge said seriously, 'Could it be anyone you know on the racecourse? It must be someone connected with racing. How about Perth, the bookmaker?'

'It could be. I don't know him. His name won't actually be Perth of course. That name was sold with the business. I'll have a bet on with him next time I go racing and see what happens,' I said.

'You will do no such thing,' said my father emphatically, and I felt too listless to argue.

'How about a jockey, or a trainer, or an owner?' asked Lodge.

'You'd better include the Stewards and the National Hunt Committee,' I said, ironically. 'They were almost the first to know I had discovered the wire and was looking into it. The man we are after knew very early on that I was inquisitive. I didn't tell many people I suspected more than an accident, or ask many pointed questions, before that affair in the horse-box.'

'People you know -' said Lodge, musingly. 'How about Gregory?'

'No,' I said.

'Why not? He lives near Brighton, near enough for the Marconi-car morning telephone call.'

'He wouldn't risk hurting Bill or Admiral,' I said.

'How can you be sure?' asked Lodge. 'People aren't always what they seem, and murderers are often fond of animals, until they get in the way

‘It isn't Pete,' I said.

'Faith or evidence?' persisted Lodge.

'Faith,' I said grudgingly, because I was quite sure.

'Jockeys?' suggested Lodge, leaving it.

'None of them strikes me as being the type we're looking for,' I said, 'and I think you're overlooking the fact that racing came second on the programme and may even have been adopted solely because a shaky bookmaking business existed on the floor above the Marconi-cars. I mean, that in itself may have turned the boss of Marconi-cars towards racing.'

'You may be right,' admitted Lodge.

My father said, 'It's just possible that the man who originally owned Marconi-cars decided to launch out into crime, and faked a sale to cover his tracks.'

'Clifford Tudor, do you mean?' asked Lodge with interest. My father nodded, and Lodge said to me, 'How about it?'

'Tudor pops up all over the place,' I said. 'He knew Bill, and Bill had his address noted down on a scrap of paper.' I put my hand into my jacket pocket. The old envelope was still there. I drew it out and looked at it again. 'Tudor told me he had asked Bill to ride a horse for him.'

'When did he tell you that?' asked Lodge.

'I gave him a lift from Plumpton races into Brighton, four days after Bill died. We talked about him on the way.'

'Anything else?' asked Lodge.

'Well - Tudor's horses have been ridden – up until lately – by our corrupted friend Joe Nantwich. It was on Tudor's horse Bolingbroke that Joe won once when he had been instructed to lose - but at Cheltenham he threw away a race on a horse of Tudor's, and Tudor was very angry about it.'

'Camouflage,' suggested my father.

But I rested my aching head against the window, and said, 'I don't think Tudor can possibly be the crook we're looking for.'

'Why not?' asked Lodge. 'He has the organizing ability, he lives in Brighton, he owned the taxis, he employs Joe Nantwich, and he knew Major Davidson. He seems the best proposition so far.'

'No,' I said tiredly. 'The best lead we've had is the taxis. If I hadn't recognized that the men who stopped me in the horse-box were also taxi-drivers, I'd never have found out anything at all. Whoever put them on to me can't possibly have imagined I would know them, or he wouldn't have done it. But if there's one person who knew I would recognize them, it's Clifford Tudor. He was standing near me while the taxi-drivers fought, and he knew I'd had time to look at them after the police had herded them into two groups.'

'I don't rule him out altogether, even so,' said Lodge, gathering his papers together, and putting them back into his briefcase. 'Criminals often make the stupidest mistakes.'

I said, 'If we ever do find your Claud Thiveridge, I think he will turn out to be someone I've never met and never heard of. A complete stranger. It's far more likely.'

I wanted to believe it.

I did not want to have to face another possibility, one that I shied away from so uncomfortably that I could not bring myself even to lay it open for Lodge's inspection.

Who, besides Tudor, knew before the horse-box incident that I wanted Bill's death avenged? Kate. And to whom had she passed this on? To Uncle George. Uncle George, who, I suspected, housed a lean and hungry soul in his fat body, behind his fatuous expression.

Uncle George, out of the blue, had bought a horse for his niece. Why? To widen her interests, he had said. But through her, I thought, he would learn much of what went on at the races.

And Uncle George had sent Heavens Above to be trained in the stable which housed Bill's horse. Was it a coincidence - or the beginning of a scheme which Bill's unexpected death had cut short?

It was nebulous, unconvincing. It was based only on supposition, not on facts, and bolstered only by memory of the shock on Uncle George's face when Kate told him we had been to The Blue Duck – shock which he had called indigestion. And perhaps it had been indigestion, after all.

And all those primitive weapons in his study, the ritual objects and the scalp - were they the playthings of a man who relished violence? Or who loathed it? Or did both at the same time?

Scilla came into the drawing-room, carrying a copper bowl filled with forsythia and daffodils.

'Alan looks very tired,' she said. 'What have you been doing?'

'Talking,' I said, smiling at her.

'You'll find yourself back in hospital if you're not careful,' she scolded mildly, and without pausing offered mid-morning coffee to Lodge and my father.

I was glad of the interruption, because I had not wished to discuss with them what was to be done next in pursuit of Mr Claud Thiveridge.

I would get closer to Thiveridge. He would hit out again, and in doing it show me the next step towards him, like the flash of a gunshot in the dark revealing the hiding-place of a sniper.