Front Runner

by Felix Francis

  And the winnings were considerable.

  By the time he had collected from eight different bookmakers, Morris had two large bundles of banknotes in his coat pockets. But he didn’t hang around to reinvest any of the winnings on the remaining races. Instead, he walked quickly out through the grandstand to the main foyer and exited the racetrack.

  I followed him out to the Owners and Trainers parking lot and watched as he climbed into a silver Audi A4 and drove rapidly away. He had departed so quickly that even if I’d wanted to stop him, I doubt that I would have been successful. And he would probably have thought I was trying to rob him.

  He’d have been right.

  I particularly wanted to get my hands on that red notebook.

  —

  MY QUESTIONING of bookmakers about the bets they have taken and paid out on is a delicate area.

  Racetrack bookmakers are not registered or licensed by the BHA in spite of the fact that they ply their trade on BHA-licensed property. Rather, they hold operating licenses from the Gambling Commission.

  Hence, my authority is severely restricted and not helped by the fact that many bookmakers consider the BHA to be obstructive in not allowing jockeys and trainers to discuss openly with them the prospects of their horses.

  In spite of all that, I went back to the betting ring and went up to one of the bookies who had paid out to Mr. Morris.

  “How much did the man in the blue fedora win?” I asked.

  “Who wants to know?” he replied in a less than friendly manner.

  I showed him my BHA credentials with the word INVESTIGATOR and he looked up at my face. “Was it fixed?” he asked.

  “Was what fixed?”

  “The race?”

  Good question.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I said nonchalantly. “I’m only interested in how much you paid the man in the blue fedora.”

  “Three grand,” said the bookie. “He’d a monkey on at fives.”

  A monkey was betting slang for “five hundred pounds.” At odds of five-to-one, the winnings would be two thousand five hundred pounds. Add back the stake money, the payout was three thousand.

  I went to each of the seven other bookmakers Leslie Morris had collected from. Three wouldn’t tell me, but four confirmed that he’d had a bet of five hundred pounds at five-to-one. If all eight bets had each paid out three thousand pounds, then Mr. Morris had left the racetrack with twenty-four thousand pounds in cash in his coat pockets.

  But how much had he started with?

  I went down the row of bookmakers, speaking to each I could remember Morris betting with but not winning. I asked them how much the man in the blue fedora had wagered and on which horse, but none of them could remember. The eight he had collected from had only remembered him because a three-thousand-pound cash payout was a little unusual.

  I asked them all if they had taken many bets of five hundred pounds from Morris but it seemed that he had bet varying amounts on the different horses.

  One bookmaker told me he knew he’d taken a monkey on the fifteen-to-one shot but couldn’t be sure it was from a man in a blue hat. “Punters are punters,” he said. “I’m too busy checking for counterfeit notes to worry about what they’re wearing.” He was also far too busy taking bets for the fourth race to give me any more of his time.

  “Come back after the last,” he said, but if he couldn’t remember now, he would have even less chance in a couple of hours’ time.

  I asked all the bookies if they’d taken any bets on Wisden Wonder from the man in the blue fedora. None of them thought so, and I certainly hadn’t heard him placing one. They all said they’d taken lots of big bets on the favorite from other punters and they were very grateful not to have had to pay out.

  Frustrated, I walked back through the grandstand to the weighing room and into the broadcast center, the room from where all the racetrack public address and closed-circuit television coverage was transmitted.

  “Can I help you?” asked the technician in charge.

  I showed him my BHA credentials.

  “I’d like to see the video of the third race.”

  “Sure,” he said. “But not just at the moment. The fourth is about to start and I need to concentrate.”

  I sat on a stool next to him and together we watched on a screen as the fourth race unfolded.

  “We have Channel 4 here today,” he said. “They do all the TV production but I have to be sure that the racetrack closed-circuit systems are all working and tied in to their output. And we have our own commentary team separate from them to pipe through the on-course speakers.”

  I sat patiently as he nervously monitored the bank of electronic equipment, but all seemed to be working well and he relaxed as the race came to a conclusion.

  “Now,” he said, “how can I help?”

  “Video of the third,” I said.

  “No problem. Just let me make a copy of that race to give to the winning owner.”

  He put a blank DVD into his recorder and burned the copy before handing it to a waiting official.

  “Now,” he said, pushing buttons on the equipment, “do you want to see the whole race?”

  “Just the last hurdle in the back stretch second time,” I said. “Where Wisden Wonder was unseated.”

  I watched the incident from two different camera angles, at full speed and in slow motion.

  The horse had hit the hurdle hard and had pitched forward on landing, stumbling badly and almost going down on its knees. Bill McKenzie, the jockey, had had little chance of remaining in the saddle and had gone past the horse’s head onto the turf. He’d even received a kick or two for his trouble.

  But I was more interested in what had happened in the run-up to the jump.

  Wisden Wonder had been lying fifth of the eight runners at the time and had been closely following the two right in front of him, who were side by side. Wisden Wonder had seemingly not even seen the obstacle until he was upon it. If he’d been given any warning by McKenzie to jump, he had failed to act.

  “Is there a problem?” asked the technician.

  “No,” I said. “No problem.”

  “The stewards had a look at the same incident after the race, but they didn’t seem that bothered. They only watched it once.”

  “Do you know if they interviewed the jockey?” I asked.

  “I doubt it. I think he went straight off to the hospital.”

  I’d been so engaged watching Leslie Morris collect his winnings that I hadn’t noticed what had happened to the jockey.

  “I’ll take a look at the stewards’ report,” I said, standing up. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  I left him to his electronics and walked across the weighing room to the medical room.

  “Bill McKenzie?” I asked one of the nursing staff, showing her my ID card.

  “He’s gone to Kingston Hospital,” she said. “Possible concussion after a fall.”

  “How was he when he left here?”

  “Conscious,” she said, “but confused. The doctor did some concussion tests that all showed negative, but he was still slightly worried about the apparent confusion so he sent him for a CT scan of his head just to be on the safe side. You can’t be too sure with head injuries.”

  “Did he go in an ambulance?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “In a car, with my colleague.”

  Why did I think that it was rather convenient for him not to have to answer any difficult questions about his fall?

  10

  So do you think he fell off deliberately?”

  “I’m not sure that he intended coming right off. Maybe he just wanted Wisden Wonder to blunder badly and lose interest in the race. But I do think it is something worth looking at again.”

  I was speaking on the phone t
o Paul Maldini on Saturday morning.

  “Are you going back to Sandown again today?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “I thought I might.”

  I actually had an invitation to lunch in a private box, but I wasn’t going to tell Paul that. He’d want to know who with, and why, and I didn’t want to tell him. He may not have approved.

  “Is McKenzie riding at Sandown today?” Paul asked.

  “That depends on whether the scans showed anything. He’s still down in the Racing Post to ride, but he won’t be if he was concussed yesterday.”

  All jockeys are stood down from riding for at least a week with concussion, often longer.

  “Will you speak to him if he’s there?”

  “That’s up to you,” I said. “I’m not sure that I should. If there was something dodgy about that race, do we want to show our hand just yet or do we want to investigate further on the quiet? McKenzie will know immediately that something’s up if I question him and he would most likely then tell Morris. At the moment, I think we can assume that neither of them believes we are suspicious about that race and I’d really like to keep it that way.”

  “Why is that so important?” Paul would have gone straight in and questioned Leslie Morris and Bill McKenzie, maybe even calling them in to a disciplinary panel in the offices at High Holborn.

  “The tip-off we received stated only that Morris was placing bets for a friend who was excluded. We don’t know who his friend is. If we alert Morris now, it becomes far more difficult for me to find out. He would simply go to ground and cover his tracks. We would have no case.”

  “But he might do it again,” Paul said. “The BHA can’t be seen to be allowing something that’s against the Rules of Racing to happen for a second time, not when we know already it’s happened before.”

  “Then I’d better catch him quickly.”

  “OK,” he said slowly, as if not fully convinced. “You do as you think best for the moment. And keep me informed.”

  “Will do.”

  “And you also believe the betting on the race was suspect?”

  “I certainly do,” I said. “As far as I can tell, Morris backed every horse in the race except Wisden Wonder, which was the six-to-four favorite.”

  “Mmm, that does sound rather dubious.”

  “I think it sounds considerably more than rather dubious,” I said. “It sounds positively dishonest.”

  “Do we need to send in the police?”

  “No,” I said quickly, “not yet. We need to be sure before we do anything.” Paul was again for jumping in with both feet. “If we call in the police, I won’t be able to investigate anything further—they wouldn’t allow it. And we don’t want another high-profile race-fixing trial to collapse from lack of evidence. I’m not even a hundred percent sure that Morris did back everything except Wisden Wonder. The bookies were not that helpful.”

  “They never are.”

  Paul didn’t like bookmakers, although he had to admit that without any betting racing would surely die.

  It was the gambling public that ultimately delivered the revenue on which the sport depended. Everyone was trying to back a winner, but it was the losers we relied on.

  The only sure way of backing a winner was to bet on every horse running in the race and that approach was unlikely to make you any profit.

  Suppose you want to end up with a return of a hundred pounds.

  On a horse quoted at four-to-one, you would win four pounds for each one you stake, provided the horse won the race. So if you bet twenty pounds with a bookmaker, you would win eighty. You would also get back your stake of twenty, hence the bookmaker would pay out one hundred pounds.

  If the horse was at nine-to-one, you would need to bet ten pounds on it so that if it comes in first you win ninety pounds, plus your stake of ten, giving you the hundred you want. For a horse at odds of six-to-four, you would win six pounds for every four pounds you bet, so if you staked forty pounds and won you would win sixty. Add back your stake of forty and you would have your return of a hundred.

  In this way, you can calculate how much you would need to bet on each horse to have one hundred pounds in your hand after the race.

  It sounds simple.

  However, there is a major snag.

  In order to be sure of having a hundred pounds after the race, you would have to bet more than a hundred pounds in the first place. You would always back the winner but you would lose money each time. In fact, you would have to bet, on average, about a hundred and ten pounds on each race to receive back just a hundred.

  That is how bookmakers make their money. Provided they have done their sums right and posted odds in the correct ratios to encourage an even spread of bets on all the horses, they will take in a hundred and ten pounds for every hundred they have to pay out.

  This is why the odds can change as the betting continues in the minutes before the race. If a bookmaker is taking too much money on a certain horse and not enough on another, he will shorten the odds on the first horse to deter further bets and lengthen them on the second horse to encourage bets.

  No one in their right mind would stake a hundred and ten pounds on a race to get back only a hundred, but if you knew for sure that the six-to-four shot was not going to win, you wouldn’t have to bet the forty pounds on that horse. You would only have to stake seventy pounds to be certain of winning a hundred, irrespective of which of the other horses won.

  That looks like a good bet—in fact, it’s a surefire winner.

  If that is what had been going on in the race at Sandown, then to end up with twenty-four thousand pounds in his coat pockets Morris had needed to stake sixteen thousand eight hundred pounds. That gave him a tidy profit of over seven thousand pounds on just the one race—a return on his investment of over forty percent at a time when bank interest rates were at an historic low—and with absolutely no risk of losing his money.

  No risk, that was, unless an undercover investigator like me had spotted what was going on.

  —

  SANDOWN PARK racetrack on the first Saturday afternoon in December was heaving with people, all of them in great spirits under a sunny sky.

  Tingle Creek day had finally arrived and there was huge excitement as the country’s leading two-mile chasers were set to go head-to-head. In addition, there were numerous Christmas-themed stalls and festive music provided by a band of badly dressed elves, together with a scruffy Santa.

  On this day, I was here as myself, having put the wig, beanie and glasses back in the closet, along with the khaki chinos and the olive green anorak. Instead, I was trying to be respectable in a suit and tie for my lunch engagement in Derrick Smith’s private box.

  I arrived at the racetrack early, having again taken a train from Willesden Junction to Esher via Clapham Junction. It was highly unusual for me to have such an exciting invitation and I didn’t want to be late.

  Having arrived early, I used the time to wander around the enclosures, soaking up the atmosphere while also keeping my eyes open for any wrongdoing. Fortunately, there was none I could spot that would keep me from my lunch, so I presented myself as requested at the box at half past eleven.

  “My dear boy, come in, come in,” welcomed Mr. Smith at the door, extending his hand once again and shaking mine vigorously. “So glad you could make it. Here, have some champagne.”

  He passed me a glass full of the sparkling golden liquid from a tray being held by one of the waiters.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It is lovely to be here. You are very kind.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “It is I who should be grateful to you.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Come and meet my wife.”

  He guided me out to the balcony, where there were already more than a dozen people holding drinks and chatting among themselves.

  “Gaysie, darli
ng,” Derrick said loudly, causing all the conversations to stop. “Can I introduce Jeff Hinkley? He’s the young man who prevented Secret Ways from being stolen at Ascot in June.”

  All the heads turned toward me.

  I wished he hadn’t broadcast the fact so openly. It had been an undercover operation, and even those arrested still had no idea that it had been me who had caused their downfall. Without my knowledge or agreement, the BHA chairman had taken it upon himself to inform the horse’s owner of all the details, albeit supposedly in strict confidence.

  “It’s all meant to be hush-hush,” I said quietly to Derrick.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “Give credit where credit’s due. Secret Ways went on to win the Coventry Stakes and he’s favorite for next year’s Guineas. Without you, young Jeff, he’d have ended up as dog meat.” He slapped me on the back, smiling broadly.

  A slight, very attractive blonde-haired woman came over from one of the groups.

  “Mr. Hinkley,” she said. “I’m Gay Smith, Derrick’s wife.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you,” I said, shaking the offered hand. “It is very kind of you to invite me.”

  “Derrick was very taken with the idea,” she said, smiling at her husband. “He’s been singing your praises to anyone who’ll listen.”

  I was beginning to think that accepting his invitation to lunch had been a mistake. I had only done so out of self-indulgence and vanity.

  “It was just part of my job,” I said.

  “And a job well done,” Derrick said. “Come on and meet the others.”

  He introduced me to another of his guests before disappearing off to greet some new arrivals.

  “I hear you’re Derrick’s personal James Bond,” said a laughing Alfie Hart, one of the country’s top trainers, who I knew by reputation but had never actually met before. “All that cloak-and-dagger stuff must be exciting.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I’d hardly describe lying in wet ditches or picking through someone’s smelly garbage as particularly exciting. Certainly not as exciting as training a Breeders’ Cup winner.”