'I took him to Sedgefield and he was 14-1 - we should've had a few quid on him!'

Princess Anne did not hang around to find out.

Knight Salute and Pied Piper were still on the track when Aintree's royal guest was shown into her shiny black car. By this point she had already unveiled a statue of Dick Francis, who a few hours earlier had succumbed to the fierce morning wind, falling back through a weighing-room window to leave shattered glass everywhere.

Given Francis was also robbed of Grand National glory aboard Devon Loch in 1956, one can only conclude that in both life and death, Liverpool has just not been his lucky city. Fortunately, in the years that followed the Devon Loch disaster, Francis became a celebrated thriller writer, one who knew all about telling a dramatic tale. That so, he would no doubt have admired the series of plot twists that characterised the afternoon's most absorbing story.