Free Front Runner by Felix Francis Page A

that it was someone else. But it still didn’t make sense.
    If he had taken the can of gas from his garage, he knew before he left home what he was going to do. And yet he had still left me to die in the sauna.
    Was he such a heartless man?
    That was not the Dave Swinton that people knew and loved. All he’d had to do was flick off the electricity. He hadn’t needed to let me out so I could stop him.
    I’d thought of him as my friend. Had I been so wrong?
    And why drive nearly an hour to Otmoor to set himself on fire?
    There were plenty of isolated spots on the Downs above Lambourn where no one would have interrupted him.
    Had he gone to Otmoor for a specific purpose, perhaps to meet someone?
    â€”
    I SPENT the rest of the day at the BHA headquarters in High Holborn.
    The news of the positive identification of the body in the car had been reported to the media and it gradually filtered through the office grapevine. No one was surprised, but it didn’t exactly help lift the sense of gloom that had descended on the place.
    Dave Swinton had been due to be in the offices that Wednesday for a meeting of the Racing Needs You! campaign. Everyone had been looking forward to it, and a buffet lunch had been planned for the staff to meet him.
    It was most unusual for the stars of the sport to make such visits. All too often, they were only present at HQ to face disciplinary panel hearings, and social niceties, such as lunch with the staff, were never on the agenda for those occasions.
    Needless to say, after the events of Sunday, the buffet lunch had been canceled, but that didn’t stop people speculating on what might have been.
    I, meanwhile, went back to watching race videos from the BHA database.
    I should have been looking at the other open files on my desk, but I kept being drawn back to the questions surrounding Dave Swinton.
    I studied again his rides on Garrick Party at Haydock and on Chiltern Line at Ludlow.
    Having spoken to Jason Butcher, I was more convinced than ever that Garrick Party had not been given the opportunity to win the race at Haydock because Dave Swinton had decided not to allow him to run freely as a front runner, as was his forte. That was not to say that the horse would have definitely won if he had been allowed to do so. That was impossible to say.
    However, the big question remained: Did Dave make that decision with the express intention of not winning?
    The race at Ludlow was less clear-cut. If Chiltern Line’s trainer, Tom Cheek, had said that the horse liked to be kept tight to the running rail, it was well within the realm of probability that even a jockey of Dave Swinton’s ability could have found himself badly boxed in.
    I also pulled up the race at Doncaster in which Dave had finished second on Perambulator.
    I could understand Jason Butcher’s frustration, as the horse seemed to come from nowhere to within a stride of victory, but there was no evidence on the film to show that Dave Swinton had been in any way at fault. It clearly showed him making continuous efforts to get the horse to quicken from the last fence onward, but he was rewarded by a response only in the last hundred yards or so. A lesser jockey might have had no response at all.
    If Dave had lost that race on purpose, then he had been very clever at disguising what he had done.
    I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling.
    But Dave Swinton
had been
very clever.
    Next, I looked up his statistics for the previous full season.
    He had ridden in just over nine hundred races in the United Kingdom. At one hundred and sixty pounds each ride, that represented an annual official riding fee income of a little over a hundred and forty thousand pounds. Pretty good, but hardly a huge return for risking one’s life on a daily basis. Some Premier League soccer players earned that sort of money in a week.
    There was no record of the falls D. Swinton had suffered, but, statistically, a jump jockey