by Dick Francis
‘Burton was arrested for that, too, remember.’
‘Do you have an answer for everything?’ I said.
‘You pays your money and makes your choice.’
I drove back to the police station and pulled up in front of the entrance.
‘Will you do me a favour?’ I asked.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘I asked the police inspector at Bill’s house this morning to make sure that his forensic team check whether Bill had actually fired the gun or not — you know, residue on the hands. He seemed convinced that it was suicide and… well, could you check that the test is done?’
He nodded. ‘Standard practice but I will ask.’
‘And will you tell me the result?’
‘Don’t push your luck, Mr Halley.’
Pushing my luck is what I was about to discover I needed.
CHAPTER 9
Impotence is frustrating.
I don’t mean physical impotence, although that too must be exasperating. My current frustration stemmed from my impotence to get on with my investigations into Huw’s death. I needed some Viagra for the mind.
I was also failing in my task for Archie Kirk, having done little to delve into the world of the internet gambler.
Today was now Friday, a whole week since the Gold Cup and two days since I had been to see Carlisle in Cheltenham. And there was still no word from him as to the result of the forensics.
I’d been to Sandown races the previous day and had spent a tedious time asking anyone and everyone why they thought Huw Walker had become a murder victim. Some suggested race fixing as a possible reason, most having seen the antics between Huw and Bill last week either live or on the television and misreading the cause, as I had done. No one had been able to suggest any names other than Bill Burton as the likely murderer, many easily believing that, by killing himself, Bill had as good as confessed. I spent the afternoon sowing seeds of doubt to this theory and spreading the word that Sid Halley, at least, believed that Bill had been murdered, too.
I sat in the little office in my flat playing with the make-a-wager.com website. Come on, I thought, how could this be a big earner for organised crime? Gambling had always attracted more than its fair share of dodgy characters and internet gambling was sure to be no exception.
There were two obvious ways for a bookmaker to separate honest men from their money fraudulently. First, to fix the result so that he can take bets in the sure knowledge that he cannot lose. And, secondly, to contrive to make people gamble on an event where the result is already known, but only to himself. Nowadays, with television pictures of every race beamed straight to the betting shops and to any home with a satellite dish, there is little scope for the second. In the good old days of the wire services, a couple of minutes’ delay was easy.
The surest way has always been to fix the result. Not such an easy task in a race with plenty of runners, not unless nearly every jockey is in on the fix, which is very doubtful since the penalties for such behaviour are harsh. To be ‘Warned Off Newmarket Heath’ means to lose one’s livelihood and to be banned not only from Newmarket Heath but also from all racecourses and all racing stables. It is quite a deterrent. Fixing races, if done at all, has to be subtle, but just a slight manipulation of the odds can pay huge dividends in the long run.
Suppose you knew that a well-fancied horse was definitely not going to win because you had paid the jockey to make sure it didn’t, then you could offer considerably longer odds on that horse than its form would justify. You could even offer slightly better odds on the other runners, just a tiny fraction, mind, to encourage people to bet with you rather than someone else. Your extra losses on the winner would be far outweighed by the extra gains from the sure loser.
But make-a-wager.com was not a normal bookmaker. As an ‘exchange’, it didn’t stand to lose if the punters won. As long as individuals were prepared to match bets, there would always be commissions to collect. Unless, of course, it was the site itself that was matching the bets, betting to win and betting to lose, especially betting to lose, laying the sure-fire loser with long odds to attract the market.
The internet sites all claim, of course, that they are squeaky clean and that their detailed computer credit card records make the system secure and foolproof. But organised crime is no fool. It’s true that the system would show up any unusual pattern of gambling by individuals or groups, but the computer records themselves are under the control of the websites.
With the right results and a creative approach to the digital paperwork, make-a-wager.com could become make-a-fortune.com.
So it always came back to fixing the races.
I knew that Huw had been involved in fixing races, his voice from beyond death had said so. ‘They’, he’d said. ‘Do as we tell you, they says.’ Who were ‘they’? He hadn’t specified that ‘they’ were internet sites. I was simply putting that into the mix because of Archie. ‘They’ could have been a bookmaking firm, or even a gambling syndicate determined to improve the odds in their favour.
I used the internet to look up make-a-wager.com on the Companies House website. All UK companies have to be registered with Companies House and every year they have to submit their accounts. This information is in the public domain. So, as a member of the public, I downloaded it.
I discovered that make-a-wager.com was the internet site for Make A Wager Ltd, company number 07887551. I downloaded all the information I could find, including the annual accounts for the previous year. The company was doing very nicely, thank you, with a turnover in excess of a hundred million with a hefty operating profit of fifteen million. The increase over the previous year was staggering with more than a doubling of turnover and a trebling of profit. There was big money to be had in this business.
George Lochs was not listed as one of the five directors of the company but Clarence Lochstein was. So George/Clarence had never officially changed his name. But it was one of the non-executive directors listed that really caught my eye — John William Enstone.
I did another search and found that Jonny Enstone was quite a busy chap, with no less than fourteen different companies listed of which he was or had been a director. J. W. Best Ltd, his construction company, was there as expected, as was Make A Wager Ltd. I hadn’t heard of the others but, nevertheless, I downloaded the list and saved it on my computer.
Marina called my mobile and said that she would be home a little late that evening. A colleague, she explained, was leaving to work in America, and she and others were giving her a farewell drink.
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll be here.’
I made myself some scrambled eggs for lunch and ate them with a spoon straight out of the saucepan. Such decadence! My dear mother would have had a fit.
I spent the afternoon doing reference checks on four short-listed candidates for the post of manager of a smallish educational charity. Such checks were the bread and butter of my one-man business. As Carlisle had correctly said, I had a reputation for sorting the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately, the reputation was self-perpetuating as referees seemed reluctant to give me wrong or misleading information in case I were asked to do a reference on them at a later date.
There are two reasons for giving someone a glowing testimonial. One, because they actually are that good and, two, because they are useless and their current employer is trying to offload them on to someone else and thinks that a good reference will help. I knew that it was common practice for poor employees to be given a flattering reference on condition they looked for a new job.
On this occasion, in each of their three written references, all four of the candidates were described as hard working, reliable, loyal and as honest as the day is long. It was my usual practice to call the third listed referee first as I had found that this would often be the weak link if deceit were afoot. By the end of the day I had discovered that only one of the four candidates was as sound as his references would imply. Even he was not squeaky clean,
having had to leave his present employment reluctantly due to a minor assignation of the heart with the wife of a senior colleague. Of the others, one was just about all right while the other two had serious honesty problems. One of these was suspected of theft from other staff but the evidence was circumstantial, and the other had threatened to sue her boss for sexual harassment unless she was given a good reference.
I would write my report and leave the charity to make its own decision.
*
It was almost eight o’clock by the time I printed out the report for the charity and shut down my computer. Typing one-handed, indeed with only one finger, was one of the many annoyances of having a false hand. Not being able to massage the typing-induced ache in my right wrist was another.
I thought about food and decided that as soon as Marina arrived home we’d go out for a local Chinese. Meanwhile, I opened a bottle of red wine and flicked on the television.
I was gently snoozing in front of some magnificent wildlife images of life on the Nile when the buzzer from the front desk woke me.
‘Yes,’ I said, picking up the intercom phone from the wall next to the kitchen door.
‘You had better come down here, Mr Halley, at once,’ said Derek.
There was something about the tone of his voice that made me drop the intercom phone and rush for my door. I charged down the flights of concrete stairs to the lobby and was met there not by a complete disaster but by a pretty scary sight, nevertheless.
A very pale-looking Marina was half-sitting, half-lying on the sofa in the lobby, bleeding. She was wearing the light fawn suede coat I had given her for Christmas and it was never going to be the same again. The front was covered in red splodges.
‘Derek,’ I said, ‘go up to my flat, the door’s open, and fetch me a large bath towel from one of the bathrooms. Wet it first.’
He hesitated for a second.
‘Do it, please, Derek.’ The urgency in my voice cut through his indecision and he went up in the lift.
I sat down beside Marina who was staring at me with wide frightened eyes.
‘Fine mess you’ve got yourself into,’ I said with a smile.
‘Just the usual for a Friday night.’ She smiled back and I knew that she was fine on the inside. She was tough as well as smart. It was her beauty that worried me most. I could see that there were two places on her face from which the blood was flowing, one was a deep cut over her right eye and the other was a nasty split lower lip. Head wounds nearly always look worse than they are due to their profuse bleeding, but I could see that these two were bad enough for stitches and I hoped they wouldn’t leave scars.
Derek returned with not just one towel but with a whole armful.
‘Well done,’ I said. I took one and applied pressure with it to the deep cut in Marina’s eyebrow. It must have hurt like hell but she didn’t flinch or complain one bit. She took another of the towels and held it to her lip, which had already started to swell quite badly.
‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I think you are going to need some stitches in these cuts. We’re going to have to go and find a doctor.’ I had one in mind.
‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’ she mumbled through the towel.
‘You got mugged,’ I said. ‘What did they take?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You were lucky,’ I said.
‘You call this lucky!’ She almost laughed. ‘But I wasn’t being robbed. I was being given a message.’
‘What? What message?’
She removed the towel from her mouth and said, ‘Tell your boyfriend to leave things be. Tell him to leave it well alone. Savvy?’
Wow, I thought, I really must have touched a nerve at Sandown yesterday.
Derek hovered around us and asked if he should telephone for the police or for an ambulance.
‘No ambulance,’ I said. An ambulance meant casualty departments and a long wait to be stitched by the duty nurse who, on a Friday night, would be busy with her needle and thread on the fighting drunks. Speed rather than accuracy would be her tenet. No thanks.
‘Did you see him?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He grabbed me from behind. Anyway, he was wearing a scarf or a balaclava.’
Police would mean masses of time and endless interviews with no real chance of catching the non-mugger. He wouldn’t have set this up to get caught.
‘No police,’ I said. ‘Come on, my darling, let’s get you cleaned up and into the car. Time to go and see my doctor.’
‘No, not yet. I want to go upstairs first.’
I picked up the rapidly reddening towels and went to take her left hand to help her up. She pulled it away.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked, concerned that she might have other injuries.
‘Fine.’ She smiled rather crookedly at me. ‘You’ll see.’
I thanked Derek who appeared to have taken this fresh incident in his stride. Never a dull moment when you lived with the Halleys.
We went up in the lift. The cuts were now merely oozing rather than gushing and some colour had returned to Marina’s cheeks. Crisis over.
Marina went straight into our bedroom and picked up some nail scissors from her dressing table.
‘Can you fetch me a clean plastic bag from the drawer in the kitchen?’ she asked.
I found some small polythene sandwich bags and took one back to her.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
‘I scratched his neck.’ She smiled at me with her lopsided mouth. ‘Maybe I have some of his skin under my fingernails.’
‘Good girl. Perhaps we should involve the police after all?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you to get this bugger for Huw’s murder, not just for punching me.’
She used the scissors to cut the elegantly long fingernails on her left hand which she placed carefully in the plastic bag. She then scraped the ends of her fingers and placed the resulting material and the scissors in the bag together with the cut nails.
‘I can extract the DNA at the lab but we should go and do it now before it dries out too much. There might not be anything to find but it’s worth a try.’
‘After the doctor,’ I said.
‘No, before. This won’t take long.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to call the police?’ I said. ‘They could run a check against the National DNA Database?’
‘No police, Sid. I’m sure. We can always give them the DNA results later, if there are any. I really don’t want to spend the next few hours at a police station being poked about by some police doctor. No thank you!’ She picked up the plastic bag. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
In the world of racing, especially amongst jockeys, the need for medical services are frequent and crucial. A jockey with a broken bone needs immediate treatment for the injury, obviously, but he also needs to get back in the saddle in the shortest amount of time. A jockey not riding is a jockey not earning. They are paid by the ride. No ride means no cash. There is no sick pay for self-employed jockeys.
Hospital accident and emergency centres will lavish plaster of paris on the injured and tell them it must stay on for six weeks minimum. A whole industry has grown up that will get jockeys back in the saddle in half that time. Ballet dancers, footballers and all types of athletes have the same needs.
In the good old days, before jockeys had to ‘pass the doctor’ after every fall, many a race had been ridden with a broken collar-bone, or a fractured wrist. Losing a ride in one race may then result in losing the rides on that horse for good, especially if it had won.
My doctor, Geoffrey Kennedy, had managed to get me back in the saddle after injury in record time on many occasions. He knew not only how my body worked but my mind, too. He seemed to sense how much pain I could stand and how much I had been willing to endure in order to get back to racing. He had initially trained as a GP but had become a sports injury specialist after his brother, an international rugby player, had continuously comp
lained to him about the lack of understanding of sports injuries at the local hospital. Geoffrey had opened a specialist clinic in north London and soon a line of A-list sportsmen and women were queuing up at his door. He was now semi-retired and the Kennedy Sports Clinic was thriving in the hands of a younger man, but we old lags still preferred to deal with the master.
Since my riding days had ended, Geoffrey had continued to patch up the damage caused by two-legged rather than four-legged opponents, sometimes willing to turn a blind eye where others might have called in the police.
I rang him while Marina changed out of her bloody clothes. Sure, he’d said, no problem. He would pack his sewing kit and meet us at the Cancer Research UK London Institute in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He wasn’t doing anything except watching the television and it was a while since he had practised his sewing on a beautiful face. All you bloody jockeys are so ugly, he’d said, it’ll be nice to work on a face without a broken nose. His skills would be appreciated, at last.
As I drove, Marina told me what had happened.
‘I was almost home,’ her voice sounded a little strange due to the swollen lip. ‘I was passing those bushes outside Belgravia Court when I was grabbed from behind. He dragged me into that path between the bushes and I thought I was going to be raped.’ She paused. ‘I was quite calm but very frightened. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. He held me from behind and spoke into my ear. I think he might have let me go if I hadn’t scratched him. I reached over my head and felt the wool on his face. So I pulled it up from his neck and dug my nails in.’ She laughed in the dark. ‘He groaned. Serves him right. But he spun me round, called me something unprintable and hit me very hard in the face. I think it was his fists. He had gloves on with shiny bits on them.’
Gloved fists with brass knuckle-dusters, I thought. That fitted; there was too much damage for fists alone.
‘I went down on my knees and he ran off. It was quite a while before I could stand up and make it the twenty yards home.’