The Nightingale Sings

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I’ve invested five grand already,’ Jack said. ‘I backed him ante post from four to one downwards.’

  ‘Then shore up on Dequadan,’ Cassie urged him. ‘If Wally’s taking a walk in the market and they’re laying the Newmarket horse, somebody knows something. And Dequadan comes from a big betting yard.’

  ‘More women’s intuition, eh?’ Jack smiled at her.

  ‘At least it comes free and you don’t get charged it as an extra on your training bill, Jack,’ Cassie replied.

  ‘But they can’t have got at Wally, surely?’ Fiona asked. ‘No-one could get through your security, Cassie.’

  ‘We’ll see, Fiona,’ Cassie replied. ‘But if he doesn’t run his true race it certainly won’t be Dexter’s doing. Now I’m off to check the horse. I’ll see the rest of you down there.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Jack said, following her out. ‘I’m going to go to the rails and see what they’re offering on this Dequadan. If those bastards are trying to hurt us, then I’m going to try to inflict a big hurt in return.’

  While Jack went to lay the possible new favourite with the rails bookmakers, Cassie hurried across to the preparade ring where Bridie was walking Big Wallow round in company with some of the other runners for the fourth race.

  ‘How is he?’ Cassie asked anxiously, half expecting to find the horse visibly out of sorts.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Bridie replied happily. ‘He travelled great, had a roll as soon as I put him in his box, and is his usual old laid-back self.’

  ‘You haven’t turned your back on him for a minute, Bridie, have you?’

  ‘Not for a second, Mrs Rosse. Either Phelim’s been with him all the time or I have. You know me. I’m not one to be running any risks now.’

  ‘Phelim?’ Cassie asked uncertainly, walking alongside the horse. ‘Teddy was meant to be travelling with you and the horse.’

  ‘Teddy was bucked off yesterday, Mrs Rosse,’ Bridie replied. ‘Liam said he wasn’t well enough to travel so brought Phelim instead. And believe you me, Phelim’s stuck to old Wally like a leech.’

  Bridie smiled at Cassie then led her charge off to the saddling boxes where the waiting lad was signalling to her. Cassie stood for a moment, unable temporarily to put a face to Phelim before she suddenly remembered he was the quiet whey-faced lad they’d taken on with a new batch of lads on the month. She knew little else about him except that according to Liam he’d passed his term of trial with flying colours as had the three other youngsters who’d had to be taken on owing to the arrival of eight more horses in the yard. Even so she was surprised that after such a short period of time Liam should have thought the lad experienced enough to travel as second lad to a well-fancied horse, but any further musings were put out of her head by the sudden and huge crescendo of noise which welled up from the grandstands behind Cassie as the vast crowd bagan to roar the favourite home in the big race.

  ‘Photograph!’ a voice announced over the public address. ‘Photograph between number one Biography and number seven Avant!’ But even before the result of the photograph was announced with Biography given as the winner, and despite her own horse’s seeming rude health, Cassie sensed a growing feeling of despair, as if as far as the fourth race was concerned the day was already lost.

  As the field rounded the home turn and swept into the straight Jack Madigan certainly did not share Cassie’s pessimism.

  ‘I should have paid no attention to you, Cassie!’ he shouted as everyone in his party stood with their race glasses fixed on the race. ‘I shouldn’t even have begun to listen to you! Will you look, you daft woman! Wally’s still on the bloody bridle!’

  Cassie didn’t want to contradict or discourage him, nor indeed anyone else in the private box who was shouting the Claremore horse home, but even though Dexter hadn’t yet asked Wally for an effort, the trainer’s expert eye could see that although the horse seemed still full of running he wasn’t striding out with his usual confidence. Big Wallow normally had a stride to go with his name but this afternoon on the perfect Ascot going his stride was foreshortened, and as soon as Dexter shook him up coming off the home turn, when it must have seemed to all his supporters the race was his for the taking, sure enough the horse’s head came up, his tail went round and his effort petered out to nothing. After giving his mount a couple of slaps to make sure he hadn’t just gone to sleep on him, Dexter must have sensed his horse wasn’t right because he dropped his hands and allowed Big Wallow to drop right back through the field to trail in last of all the nine runners.

  By the time Cassie had hurried down from the top of the grandstand and across the enclosures to where the beaten horses were being unsaddled Big Wallow was very distressed. Bridie and Phelim were in attendance, the boy leading the horse round while Bridie kept a weather eye on the horse in case he went down, but although Wally stayed on his feet there was no doubt about how afflicted he was. He was lathered in a foam of sweat, his eyes were dull and rolling and his legs seemed as if they were made of rubber.

  ‘Jeez, Mrs Rosse,’ Bridie said, barely able to control her tears, ‘you don’t think he’s had a heart attack or something, do you?’

  ‘No, Bridie, I’d say he’s just badly amiss,’ Cassie replied, rolling back the horse’s bottom lip to look at his gums before pulling one of the animal’s eyelids down to inspect the membranes there as well. ‘But what it’s due to – we won’t know that until they’ve run a dope test which I shall go and ask for now. And even then we might not know.’

  ‘But surely if he’s been got at, Mrs Rosse—’ Bridie began.

  ‘According to Niall some of the state of the art dope they’re using nowadays doesn’t show up in tests,’ Cassie said, anticipating the question. ‘And that’s before you even come to how they get to the horses anyway.’ She stood back from Big Wallow and stroked his sweat-soaked neck affectionately. ‘And this horse has most definitely been got at,’ she concluded.

  Just then another trainer whom Cassie knew only by sight arrived with an oxygen cylinder and ancillary apparatus which he offered to Cassie for her stricken horse. Apparently one of his own horses suffered from an oxygen deficiency and so he never travelled to the races without a couple of cylinders on board. Grateful for his kindness Cassie stood by while the trainer and Bridie got her horse to inhale a sufficient quantity of the vital element, happy to see that as soon as he had Wally began visibly to recover, so much so that after another three or four minutes of being walked around he was sufficiently strong to be removed to the stables to finish his recovery in comfort and privacy, away from the curious crowd which had gathered to watch his distress.

  ‘I didn’t even see what finally won the race,’ Cassie said grimly to a stone-faced Jack Madigan as they made their way back up to the row of private boxes. ‘I was too busy watching Wally.’

  ‘Dequadan trotted up, at even money,’ Jack growled. ‘Wally drifted out to two to one.’

  ‘The way he finished he should have been a hundred and two to one, Jack,’ Cassie returned. ‘What sort of a person can do that to a horse?’

  ‘Scum,’ Jack replied. ‘That is the work of the scum of the earth.’

  As they passed Box F where the party was in even fuller swing, Mike Gold who was standing by the half-open door spotted the Claremore party.

  ‘That was hard luck, Mrs Rosse!’ he called after Cassie from the doorway. ‘What happened to your horse?’

  Cassie stopped, took a quiet deep breath and then turned to face the bookmaker with a resigned look on her face. ‘He spread a plate,’ she replied. ‘Bryant thought he did it coming into the straight.’

  Gold clicked his tongue and shook his head once. ‘That’s racing for you,’ he said. ‘Hard luck. ‘Here.’ He put his hand in his pocket and taking out a wad of money peeled off four fifty pounds notes, folded them in two and gave them to Cassie. ‘One hundred to win a hundred at evens. And whatever you might be thinking, we’d much rather your horse had won.’

  �
��Come on into the box, Cassie, will you? I need a drink badly,’ Jack Madigan said from behind her, ‘so come in and shut the bloody door, will you? My nose tells me there’s something wrong with the plumbing!’

  Jack disappeared inside his own private box and as he did so the smile also disappeared off Mike Gold’s face. He just stood looking at Cassie as she hesitated before following Jack Madigan, looking at her as if she was the thing he hated most in the entire world. Then with a mock polite smile, he too disappeared back into the privacy of his own box.

  Thirty

  The first thing Cassie did on her return to Claremore was to check Tyrone’s betting ledgers. She had only let Joel have photocopies of all her records, since she was loath as always to let any original Claremore documents out of her sight, keeping the originals locked away in a bookcase in her study. Sure enough there were the entries exactly as she’d recalled them, winning horses with the amounts wagered neatly entered in one column, the prices obtained about them in the next, and then finally in the margin against some of the most successful punts either usually the single word Gold! or less commonly the two words Gold Again! When idly consulting the ledgers before Cassie had always assumed the words to mean that Tyrone had metaphorically struck gold due to the size of the bet and the generosity of the starting price, since the comments were always only written alongside some quite considerable wagers. But now she realized what Gold! really meant, because she remembered Tyrone telling her although not in any detail about a campaign he had once had against a bookmaker in the days when he was a young trainer, long before they ever met and married.

  Terry Gold had been the name of the bookmaker against whom he had waged this war.

  The father of Mike Gold.

  There was something else Cassie knew she should remember but it was gone from her for the moment. So in the hope that something on those few vital pages might serve as a reminder, Cassie reread them all again, over and over and over until she felt she knew the name of every horse backed and the amount of every wager won or lost.

  Then the first missing bit of the puzzle fell into place. The Gold! annotations covered only a brief period in Tyrone’s betting life.

  The campaign had been a limited one, fought over but four months of one Flat season during which time Tyrone had relieved Terry Gold’s satchel of a figure in the region of one hundred and eighty thousand pounds. At the end of those four months Cassie found a different remark in the margin of the ledger, the three letters AC C. After that there were no further Gold! exclamations, just the ongoing registry of bets laid and monies won or lost.

  But some of these entries, which were all winning ones, although not recording especially large touches, were marked significantly with an asterisk, thus: Speedy Cut sp 5/2fav win £75 *, even though the wins were usually at minor meetings, while other more significant and more profitable wins on the leading tracks were not awarded the asterisk accolade. These markings lasted for practically the whole of that season on the Flat, the last annotated win being on October 7th.

  Having studied these bets without learning anything new, other than the fact certain bets had been earmarked, Cassie then returned to trying to unscramble the mysterious hieroglyphic AC C. There were only two things Cassie knew AC stood for, and those were alternating current and account.

  Account. Of course, she muttered to herself, pursing her lips with irritation at her slowness. Tyrone always had a bookmaker’s account, just as she remembered him telling her that whenever he was ahead, the bookies were forever closing him down. So AC C must mean account closed.

  You took Terry Gold to the cleaners, Ty, Cassie said out aloud, running her finger down the entries marked Gold! You hammered him solid until he couldn’t take it any more so he closed you down. But then what? And why did you pick on Terry Gold? You usually broadcast your bets just so that they wouldn’t close you down. So why this guy’s jugular in particular?

  There was something else too, something of which Cassie could make no sense at all, yet because it made a very different pattern she knew it was integral to the whole story, namely the history of Tyrone’s bets in the last half of the previous season, the one before he decided to hammer Terry Gold. That whole year had been far less productive as far as betting had gone, with the figures at the end of the season showing Tyrone to be a little over five and a half thousand pounds in the red, the equivalant according to Cassie’s ready reckoning of about fifty thousand pounds in contemporary money. Tyrone had rarely ended a season down. When he had it had only been a matter of three or four hundred at most. Yet here was a season when his stables had been full of useful horses and when he himself had ended up in third place on the Irish trainers table, where he had lost the sort of money Cassie knew in those days Tyrone could never have afforded to lose. But why?

  Significantly, although Cassie could not yet work out the significance, the odds of his largest winning bet were 5/2, whereas in every other year the ledgers were full of entered-up wins at up to 10/1, sometimes even more, touches occasionally having been recorded at odds as long as 25/1 and on one glorious and famous occasion which had been logged surrounded by hand drawn stars Tyrone had landed a coup at Naas of a £100 to win £3300 after a particularly barren run.

  Yet this one season when he had ended up so badly in the red, with several well-fancied horses which he had backed as if they could not be beaten, Tyrone had ended up seriously embarrassed.

  Why? Cassie asked herself. Why why why?

  Liam knew why. Not that he’d been working at Claremore that year but his father had and Liam could remember as if it was yesterday his father coming home with the scandalous news.

  ‘“We have a spy, nipper!” he said, swinging me up and putting me on his knee. And I can remember it, guv’nor, as if ’twere yesterday, yet I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight at the time. I axed him what a spy was, what’s a spy, Pappy? I axed, and he said someone who tells someone else’s secrets, nipper. And the guv’nor, your late husband that was, Mrs Rosse, God rest his soul, the guv’nor, Pappy said, has kicked him out of the yard. Kicked him right down the drive he did, nipper, and told him and his pal never to set their feet within twenty mile of Claremore ever again. There was two of them, you see, Guv’nor, and weren’t they brothers. Mick and Kevin Molloy, they called themselves and they’d been working in the yard since the end of the jumping season, having come well enough recommended, or so the story now goes, from a top yard in Navan, no names no pack drill.’

  ‘You say they called themselves Molloy,’ Cassie said, picking up. ‘So Molloy wasn’t their real name?’

  ‘It was not. Weren’t the two of them Terry Gold’s brats whom he put about the place under their assumed name to spy for him in certain yards? Certain yards that is which Mr Gold knew liked to have a touch.’

  ‘Got you!’ Cassie said, clucking her tongue as if at her own stupidity. ‘Of course! That was why Tyrone never got anywhere near a decent price about his horses that season! Of course. The Gold brothers would know which horses were going to be backed and when, they’d tell their father well in advance and he’d trim the odds.’

  ‘Trim them, guv’nor?’ Liam laughed. ‘He’d hack ’em back to last year’s growth! And sure you know what bookies is like. I mean that bush telegraph of theirs. As soon as the word was out about one of the Claremore horses you’d be lucky to get your bet on at all. Now don’t ask me how your husband, God rest his soul, how he found out what was afoot, but as you knows every bit as well as I does, there was little ever got past the guv’nor. And when he found out all hell let loose. He’d never got rid of anyone like that before, I remember Pappy saying. Like yourself, he liked to choose his lads carefully and he liked to keep ’em. But somehow these two slippery sams got under the wire and cost the yard dear. It cost the whole yard, remember, for like yourself the guv’nor always kept us in the know when a horse was off and when it wasn’t. So as Pappy said it was just as well for those two smark alicks’ sake, that the gu
v’nor kicked ’em away out down the drive before the lads all got their hands on ’em.’

  ‘And the year after that my husband got his own back on their father. He went for Gold in every sense of the phrase, and as a result Gold closed down his account.’

  ‘Ah ha!’ Liam said with his broadest grin. ‘But that wasn’t the end of it, guv’nor. Because if I remember it right it seemed that your husband, God rest his soul, he wasn’t done with Mr Gold yet. Whenever he had a horse ready he’d let the village know and they’d let their friends know but only on condition they backed it in one of Terry Gold’s betting shops. Well you can imagine, can’t you.’

  ‘The horses with the asterisks,’ Cassie said out aloud but only to herself and then seeing Liam’s blank look told him not to mind her but to get on with finishing his story.

  ‘There’s not a lot more to tell, guv’nor,’ Liam said. ‘The stable was getting a good few winners at that time, and since they no longer knew which horses were off and which weren’t, they couldn’t close down the prices. So some hefty touches were landed, Pappy said. Both on the course and off it. They say that was what killed Terry Gold in the end. The fact your husband – God rest his soul of course – had him beaten.’

  Cassie stared at Liam hard. ‘They say it killed Terry Gold?’ she echoed. ‘This was well before my time, remember, Liam. My husband only ever told me the sketchiest version of this story. I don’t suppose he thought it would interest me. But believe you me, it does. It most certainly does.’

  ‘Ah sure half the stuff you hear round yards you have to take with a tin of salt, don’t you?’ Liam sighed. ‘Although I’m sure there’d have to be truth in the rumour that was going round even when I first came here.’

  ‘And what was that, Liam?’

  ‘That Mick Gold, the eldest of the two brothers, wouldn’t rest till he got even with your late husband, God rest his soul indeed.’