Field of Thirteen

by Dick Francis

  Angela listened, disbelieving.

  ‘Some horses,’ he said, ‘won’t gallop at home. Magic won’t and so we thought… I thought… that he couldn’t race either. But I’m not so sure now.’

  Angela shrugged. ‘It doesn’t change anything. But I’ll find out when he runs in the Whitbread.’

  ‘No.’ He squirmed. ‘We never meant to run him in the Whitbread.’

  ‘But he’s entered,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but… well, Mr Scott will tell you, a day or two before the race, that Magic has a temperature, or has bruised his foot, or something, and can’t run. He… we… planned it. We reckoned you wouldn’t quibble about the price if you thought Magic was Whitbread class…’

  Angela let out an ‘Oh’ like a deep sigh. She looked down at the young man who was pleating his sheets aimlessly in his fingers and not meeting her eyes. She saw the shame and the tiredness and the echo of pain from his leg, and she thought that what she had felt for him had been as destructive to him as to herself.

  At home, Angela phoned Clement. ‘Dear Clement, how is Magic?’

  ‘None the worse, Angela, I’m glad to say.’

  ‘How splendid,’ she said warmly. ‘And now there’s the Whitbread to look forward to, isn’t there?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ He chuckled. ‘Better buy a new hat, my dear.’

  ‘Clement,’ Angela said sweetly, ‘I am counting on you to keep Magic fit and well-fed and uninjured in every way. I’m counting on his turning up to start in the Whitbread, and on his showing us just exactly how bad he is.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Because if he doesn’t, Clement dear, I might just find myself chattering to one or two people… you know, press men and even the tax man, and people like that… about your buying Magic for five thousand one day and selling him to me for nineteen thousand the next.’

  Angela listened to the silence travelling thunderously down the wire, and she smiled with healthy mischief. ‘And Clement dear, we’ll both give his new jockey instructions to win if he can, won’t we? Because it’s got to be a fair test, don’t you think? And just to encourage you, I’ll promise you that if I’m satisfied that Magic has done his very best, win or lose, I won’t mention to anyone what I paid for him. And that’s a bargain, Clement dear, that you can trust.’

  Clement put the receiver down with a crash and swore aloud. ‘Bloody old bag. She must have checked up.’ He telephoned to Yorkshire and found that indeed she had. Damn and blast her, he thought. He was going to look a proper fool in the eyes of the racing world, running rubbish like Magic in one of the top races. It would do his reputation no damn good at all.

  Clement Scott felt not the slightest twinge of guilt. He had, after all, cheated a whole succession of foolish ladies in the same way. But if Angela talked – and she could talk for hours when she liked – he would find that the gullible widowed darlings were all suddenly suspicious and buying their horses from someone else. Magic, he saw furiously, would have to be trained as thoroughly as possible, and ridden by the best jockey free.

  In the parade ring before the Whitbread, Angela was entirely her old self again: kind and gushing and bright-eyed.

  She spoke to her new jockey, who was unlike Derek Roberts to a comfortable degree. ‘I expect you’ve talked it over with darling Clement,’ she said gaily, ‘but I think it would be best, don’t you, if you keep Magic back a bit among all the other runners for most of the way, and then about a mile from the winning post tell him to start winning, if you see what I mean, and, of course, after that it’s up to both of you just to do what you can. I have my money on you, you know.’

  The jockey glanced uncertainly at the stony face of Clement Scott. ‘Do what the lady wants,’ Clement said.

  The jockey, who knew his business, carried out the instructions to the letter. A mile from home he dug Magic sharply in the ribs and was astonished at the response. Magic – young, lightly raced, and carrying bottom weight – surged past several older, tireder contenders, and came towards the last fence lying fifth.

  Clement could hardly believe his eyes. Angela could hardly breathe. Magic floated over the last fence and charged up the straight and finished third.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘isn’t that lovely.’

  Since almost no one else had backed her horse, Angela collected a fortune in place money from the Tote; and a few days later, for exactly what she’d paid, she sold Magic to a scrap-metal merchant from Kent.

  Angela sent Derek Roberts a get-well card. A week later she sent him an impersonal case of champagne and a simple message: ‘Thanks’.

  ‘I’ve learnt a lot,’ she thought, ‘because of him. A lot about greed and gullibility, about facades and consequences and the transience of love. And about racing… too much.’

  She sold Billyboy and Hamlet and went on her cruise.

  BLIND CHANCE

  In 1979 Julian Symons, Eminence of The Detection Club, hit on a wheeze to earn money to swell the Club’s depleted coffers. As Editor, he invited a fistful of crime writers to contribute a short story towards a volume whose title was to be Verdict of Thirteen: a Detection Club Anthology.

  Not being skilled at court scenes, I wrote a racecourse tale called Twenty-one Good Men and True, and under that banner it was published by Faber in Britain and Harper in the US, both in 1979. In England the story was also run by the weekly magazine, Women’s Own, who gave it the title adopted here, Blind Chance.

  Arnold Roper whistled breathily while he boiled his kettle and spooned instant own-brand economy-pack coffee into the old blue souvenir from Brixham. Unmelodic and without rhythm, the whistling was none the less an expression of content – both with things in general and the immediate prospect ahead. Arnold Roper, as usual, was going to the races: and, as usual, if he had a bet, he would win. Neat, methodical, professional, he would operate his unbeatable system and grow richer, the one following the other as surely as chickens and eggs.

  Arnold Roper at forty-five was one of nature’s bachelors, a lean-bodied man accustomed to looking after himself, a man who found the chatter of companionship a nuisance. Like a sailor – though he had never been to sea – he kept his surroundings polished and shipshape, ordering his life in plastic dustbin-liners and reheated take-away food.

  The one mild problem on Arnold Roper’s horizon was his wealth. The getting of the money was his most intense enjoyment. The spending of it was something he postponed to a remote and dreamlike future, when he would exchange his sterile flat for a warm unending idyll under tropical palms. It was the interim storage of the money which was currently causing him, if not positive worry, at least occasional frowns of doubt. He might, he thought, as he stirred dried milk grains into a brownish brew, have to find space for yet another wardrobe in his already crowded bedroom.

  If anyone had told Arnold Roper he was a miser, he would have denied it indignantly. True, he lived frugally, but by habit rather than obsession: and he never took out his wealth just to look at it, and count, and gloat. He would not have admitted as miserliness the warm feeling that stole over him every night as he lay down to sleep, smiling from the knowledge that all round him, filling two oak-veneered sale-bargain bedroom suites, was a ton or two of negotiable paper.

  It was not that Arnold Roper distrusted banks. He knew, too, that money won by betting could not be lost by tax. He would not have kept his growing gains physically around him were it not that his unbeatable system was also a splendid fraud.

  The best frauds are only ever discovered by accident, and Arnold could not envisage any such accident happening to him.

  Jamie Finland woke to his usual darkness and thought three disconnected thoughts within seconds of consciousness. ‘The sun is shining. It is Wednesday. They are racing today here at Ascot.’ He stretched out a hand and put his ringers delicately down on the top of his bedside tape-recorder. There was a cassette lying there. Jamie smiled, slid the cassette into the recorder, and switched on.

  His mot
her’s voice spoke to him. ‘Jamie, don’t forget the man is coming to mend the television at ten-thirty and please put the washing into the machine, there’s a dear, as I am so pushed this morning, and would you mind having yesterday’s soup again for lunch. I’ve left it in a saucepan ready. Don’t lose all that money this afternoon or I’ll cut the plug off your stereo. Home soon after eight, love.’

  Jamie Finland’s thirty-eight-year-old mother supported them both on her earnings as an agency nurse, and she had made a fair job, her son considered, of bringing up a child who could not see. He was fifteen. He studied in Braille at home and passed exams with credit.

  He rose gracefully from bed and put on his clothes: blue shirt, blue jeans. ‘Blue is Jamie’s favourite colour,’ his mother would say. and her friends would say, ‘Oh yes?’ and she could see them thinking: how could he possibly know? But Jamie could identify blue as surely as his mother’s voice, and red, and yellow and every colour in the spectrum, as long as it was daylight.

  ‘I can’t see in the dark,’ he had said when he was six, and only his mother, from watching his sureness by day and his stumbling by night, had understood what he meant. Walking rad.ir, she called him. Like many young blind people he could sense easily the wavelength of light, and distinguish the infinitesimal changes of frequency reflected from coloured things close to him. Strangers thought him uncanny. Jamie believed everyone could see that way if they wanted to, and could not clearly understand what was meant by sight.

  He made and ate some toast and thankfully opened the door to the television-fixer. ‘In my room,’ he said, leading the way. ‘We’ve got sound but no picture.’

  The television-fixer looked at the blind eyes and shrugged. If the boy wanted a picture he was entitled to it, same as everyone else who paid their rental. ‘Have to take it back to the workshop,’ he said, judicially pressing buttons.

  ‘The races are on,’ Jamie said. ‘Can you fix it by then?’

  ‘Races? Oh yeah. Well, tell you what, I’ll lend you another set. Got one in the van…’ He staggered off with the invalid set and returned with the replacement. ‘Not short of radios, are you?’ he said, looking around. ‘What do you want six for?’

  ‘I leave them tuned to different things,’ Jamie said. ‘That one’ – he pointed accurately ndash; ‘listens to aircraft, that one to the police, those three over there are on ordinary radio stations, and this one… local broadcasts.’

  ‘What you need is a transmitter. Put you in touch with all the world.’

  ‘I’m working on it,’ Jamie said. ‘Starting today.’ He closed the door after the man and wondered whether betting on a certainty was in itself a crime.

  Greg Simpson had no such qualms. He paid his way into the Ascot paddock, and ambled off to add a beer and sandwich to a comfortable paunch. Two years now, he thought, munching, since he had first set foot on the Turf: two years since he had exchanged his principles for prosperity and been released from paralysing depression.

  They seemed a distant memory, now, those fifteen months in the wilderness; the awful humiliating collapse of his seemingly secure and pensionable world. There was no comfort in knowing that mergers and cutbacks had thrown countless near-top managers like himself straight on to the redundancy heap.

  At fifty-two, with long success-strewn experience and genuine administrative skill, he had expected that he at least would find another suitable post easily, but door after closed door, and a regretful chorus of ‘Sorry, Greg’, ‘Sorry, old chap’, ‘Sorry, Mr Simpson, we need someone younger’, had finally thrust him into agonised despair. And it was just when, in spite of all their anxious economies, his wife had had to deny their two children even the money to go swimming, that he had seen the curious advertisement:

  ‘Jobs offered to mature respectable persons who must have been unwillingly unemployed for at least twelve months.’

  Part of his mind told him he was being invited to commit a crime, but he had gone none the less to the subsequently arranged interview in a London pub, and he had been relieved, after all, to meet the very ordinary man holding out salvation – a man like himself, middle-aged, middle-educated, wearing a suit and tie and indoor skin.

  ‘Do you go to the races?’ Arnold Roper asked him bluntly, fixing a penetrating gaze on him. ‘Do you gamble on anything at all? Do you follow the horses? Play to win?’

  ‘No,’ Greg Simpson said, prudishly, seeing the job prospect disappear but feeling all the same superior. ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Do you bet on dogs? Go to bingo? Do the pools? Play bridge? Feel attracted by roulette?’ the man persisted.

  Greg Simpson silently but emphatically shook his head and prepared to leave.

  ‘Good,’ said Arnold Roper, cheerfully. ‘Gamblers are no good to me, not for this job.’

  Greg Simpson relaxed into a glow of self-congratulation on his own virtue. ‘What job, then?’ he asked.

  Arnold Roper wiped out Simpson’s complacent smugness. ‘Going to the races,’ he said bluntly. ‘Betting when I say bet, and never at any other time. You would have to go to race meetings most days, like any other job. You would be betting on certainties, and after every win I would expect you to send me my reward.’ Ht named a very reasonable sum. ‘Anything you made above that would be yours. It is foolproof, and safe. If you go about it in a businesslike way, and don’t get tempted into the mug’s game of backing your own fancy, you’ll do very well. Think it over. If you’re interested, meet me here again tomorrow.’

  Betting on certainties… every one a winner: Arnold Roper had been as good as his word, and Greg Simpson’s lifestyle had returned to normal. His qualms had evaporated once he learned that even if the fraud were discovered, he himself would not be involved. He did not know how his employer acquired his infallible information and, if he speculated, he didn’t ask.

  He knew him only as Bob Smith, and had never met him since those first two days; but he heeded his warning that if he failed to attend the specified race meetings or failed to send his agreed payment, the bounty would stop dead.

  He finished his sandwich and went down to mingle with the bookmakers as the horses cantered down to the post for the start of the first race.

  From high on the stands Arnold Roper looked down through powerful binoculars, spotting his men one by one. The perfect workforce he thought: no absenteeism, no union troubles, no complaints.

  There were twenty-one of them at present on his register, all contentedly receiving his information, all dutifully returning their moderate levies, and none of them knowing of the existence of the others. In an average week, after expenses, he easily added a thousand or more in readies to his bedroom hoard.

  In the five years since he had begun in a small way to put his scheme into operation, he had never picked a defaulter. The thinking-it-over time gave the timid and the honest an easy way out; and if Arnold himself had doubts, he simply failed to return on day two.

  The rest, added gradually one by one to the fold, lived comfortably with quiet minds and prayed that their benefactor would never be rumbled.

  Arnold himself couldn’t see why he ever should be. He put down the binoculars and began in his methodical fashion to get on with his day’s work. There was always a good deal to see to in the way of filling in forms, testing equipment, and checking that the nearby telephone was working. Arnold never left anything to chance.

  Down at the starting gate, sixteen two-year-olds bucked and skittered as they were fed by the handlers into the stalls. Two-year-old colts, thought the starter resignedly, looking at his watch, could behave like a pack of prima donnas in a heatwave in Milan. If they didn’t hurry with that chestnut at present squealing and backing away, he would let the other runners off without him.

  He was all too aware of the television cameras pointing his way. mercilessly awaiting his smallest error. Starters who got the races off minutes late were unpopular. Starters who got the races off early were asking for official reprimands and universal
curses, because of the fiddles that had been worked in the past on premature departures.

  The starter ruled the chestnut out of the race and pulled his lever at time plus three minutes twenty seconds, entering the figure meticulously in his records. The gates crashed open, the fifteen remaining colts roared out of the stalls, and along on the stands the serried ranks of race glasses followed their progress over the five furlongs.

  Alone in his special box, the judge watched intently. A big pack of two-year-olds over five furlongs was a problem, presenting occasionally even to his practised eyes a multiple dead heat.

  He had learned all the horses by name and all the colours by heart, a chore he shared every day with the race-reading commentators, and from long acquaintance he could recognise most of the jockeys by their riding style alone, but still the ignominy of making a mistake flitted uneasily through his dreams.

  Up in his eyrie the television commentator looked through his high-magnification binoculars, which were mounted rock-steady like a telescope, and spoke unhurriedly into his microphone.

  ‘Among the early leaders are Breakaway and Middle Park, followed closely by Pickup, Jetset, Darling Boy and Gumshoe… Coming to the furlong marker the leaders are bunched, with Jetset, Darling Boy, Breakaway all showing… One furlong out, there is nothing to choose between Darling Boy, Jetset, Gumshoe, Pickup… In the last hundred yards… Jetset, Darling Boy…’

  The colts stretched their necks, the jockeys swung their whips, the crowd rose on tiptoes and yelled in a roar which drowned the commentary, and in his box the judge’s eyes ached with effort. Darling Boy, Jetset, Gumshoe and Pickup swept past the winning post in line abreast, and an impersonal voice over the widespread loudspeakers announced: ‘Photograph. Photograph.’

  Half a mile away in his own room, Jamie Finland listened to the race on television and tried to imagine the pictures on the screen. Racing was misty to him. He knew the shape of horses from handling toys and riding a rocker, but their size and speed were mysterious; he had no conception at all of a broad sweep of a railed racecourse, or of the size or appearance of trees.