by Dick Francis
‘He was there last night too,’ said one of the others. ‘Queer sort of bloke.’
‘What was queer about him?’ asked the boy who had stayed behind, he watching the television while I in an arm-chair caught up on some sleep.
‘I dunno,’ said Grits. ‘His eyes didn’t stay still, like.’
‘Sort as if he was looking for someone,’ added another voice.
Paddy said firmly from the wall on my right, ‘You just all keep clear of that chap, and Soupy too. I’m telling you. People like them are no good.’
‘But that chap, that one with that smashing gold tie, he bought us a round, you know he did. He can’t be too bad if he bought us a round…’
Paddy sighed with exasperation that anyone could be so simple. ‘If you’d have been Eve, you’d have eaten the apple as soon as look at it. You wouldn’t have needed a serpent.’
‘Oh well,’ yawned Grits. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be there tomorrow. I heard him say something to Soupy about time getting short.’
They muttered and murmured and went to sleep, and I lay awake in the dark thinking that perhaps I had just heard something very interesting indeed. Certainly a trip down to the pub was indicated for the following evening.
With a wrench I stopped my eyes from shutting, got out of my warm bed, repaired again to the bathroom, and read for another four hours until I had finished the typescript. I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the wall and stared sightlessly at the fixtures and fittings. There was nothing, not one single factor, that occurred in the life histories of all of the eleven microscopically investigated horses. No common denominator at all. There were quite a few things which were common to four or five – but not often the same four or five – like the make of saddle their jockeys used, the horse cube nuts they were fed with, or the auction rings they had been sold in: but the hopes I had had of finding a sizeable clue in those packages had altogether evaporated. Cold, stiff, and depressed, I crept back to bed.
The next evening at eight I walked alone down to Slaw, all the other lads saying they were skint until pay-day and that in any case they wanted to watch Z Cars on television.
‘I thought you lost all your cash on Sparks at Cheltenham,’ observed Grits.
‘I’ve about two bob left,’ I said, producing some pennies. ‘Enough for a pint.’
The pub, as often on Wednesdays, was empty. There was no sign of Soupy or his mysterious friend, and having bought some beer I amused myself at the dart board, throwing one-to-twenty sequences, and trying to make a complete ring in the trebles. Eventually I pulled the darts out of the board, looked at my watch, and decided I had wasted the walk; and it was at that moment that a man appeared in the doorway, not from the street, but from the saloon bar next door. He held a glass of gently fizzing amber liquid and a slim cigar in his left hand and pushed open the door with his right. Looking me up and down, he said, ‘Are you a stable lad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Granger’s or Inskip’s?’
‘Inskip’s.’
‘Hmm.’ He came further into the room and let the door swing shut behind him. ‘There’s ten bob for you if you can get one of your lads down here tomorrow night… and as much beer as you can both drink.’
I looked interested. ‘Which lad?’ I asked. ‘Any special one? Lots of them will be down here on Friday.’
‘Well, now, it had better be tomorrow, I think. Sooner the better, I always say. And as for which lad… er… you tell me their names and I’ll pick one of them… how’s that?’
I thought it was damn stupid, and also that he wished to avoid asking too directly, too memorably for… well… for me?
‘O.K. Paddy, Grits, Wally, Steve, Ron…’ I paused.
‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Reg, Norman, Dave, Jeff, Dan, Mike…’
His eyes brightened. ‘Dan,’ he said. ‘That’s a sensible sort of name. Bring Dan.’
‘I am Dan,’ I said.
There was an instant in which his balding scalp contracted and his eyes narrowed in annoyance.
‘Stop playing games,’ he said sharply.
‘It was you,’ I pointed out gently, ‘who began it.’
He sat down on one of the benches and carefully put his drink down on the table in front of him.
‘Why did you come here tonight, alone?’ he asked.
‘I was thirsty.’
There was a brief silence while he mentally drew up a plan of campaign. He was a short stocky man in a dark suit a size too small, the jacket hanging open to reveal a monogrammed cream shirt and golden silk tie. His fingers were fat and short, and a roll of flesh overhung his coat collar at the back, but there was nothing soft in the way he looked at me.
At length he said, ‘I believe there is a horse in your stable called Sparking Plug?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he runs at Leicester on Monday?’
‘As far as I know.’
‘What do you think his chances are?’ he asked.
‘Look, do you want a tip, mister, is that what it is? Well, I do Sparking Plug myself and I’m telling you there isn’t an animal in next Monday’s race to touch him.’
‘So you expect him to win?’
‘Yes, I told you.’
‘And you’ll bet on him I suppose.’
‘Of course.’
‘With half your pay? Four pounds, perhaps?’
‘Maybe.’
‘But he’ll be favourite. Sure to be. And at best you’ll probably only get even money. Another four quid. That doesn’t sound much, does it, when I could perhaps put you in the way of winning… a hundred?’
‘You’re barmy,’ I said, but with a sideways leer that told him that I wanted to hear more.
He leaned forward with confidence. ‘Now you can say no if you want to. You can say no, and I’ll go away, and no one will be any the wiser, but if you play your cards right I could do you a good turn.’
‘What would I have to do for a hundred quid?’ I asked flatly.
He looked round cautiously, and lowered his voice still further. ‘Just add a little something to Sparking Plug’s feed on Sunday night. Nothing to it, you see? Dead easy.’
‘Dead easy,’ I repeated: and so it was.
‘You’re on, then?’ he looked eager.
‘I don’t know your name,’ I said.
‘Never you mind.’ He shook his head with finality.
‘Are you a bookmaker?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not. And that’s enough with the questions. Are you on?’
‘If you’re not a bookmaker,’ I said slowly, thinking my way, ‘and you are willing to pay a hundred pounds to make sure a certain favourite doesn’t win, I’d guess that you didn’t want just to make money backing all the other runners, but that you intend to tip off a few bookmakers that the race is fixed, and they’ll be so grateful they’ll pay you say, fifty quid each, at the very least. There are about eleven thousand bookmakers in Britain. A nice big market. But I expect you go to the same ones over and over again. Sure of your welcome, I should think.’
His face was a study of consternation and disbelief, and I realized I had hit the target, bang on.
‘Who told you…’ he began weakly.
‘I wasn’t born yesterday,’ I said with a nasty grin. ‘Relax. No one told me.’ I paused. ‘I’ll give Sparking Plug his extra nosh, but I want more for it. Two hundred.’
‘No. The deal’s off.’ He mopped his forehead.
‘All right.’ I shrugged.
‘A hundred and fifty then,’ he said grudgingly.
‘A hundred and fifty,’ I agreed. ‘Before I do it.’
‘Half before, half after,’ he said automatically. It was by no means the first time he had done this sort of deal.
I agreed to that. He said if I came down to the pub on Saturday evening I would be given a packet for Sparking Plug and seventy-five pounds for myself, and I nodded and went away, leaving him staring moodily into
his glass.
On my way back up the hill I crossed Soupy off my list of potentially useful contacts. Certainly he had procured me for a doping job, but I had been asked to stop a favourite in a novice ’chase, not to accelerate a dim long priced selling plater. It was extremely unlikely that both types of fraud were the work of one set of people.
Unwilling to abandon Colonel Beckett’s typescript I spent chunks of that night and the following two nights in the bathroom, carefully rereading it. The only noticeable result was that during the day I found the endless stable work irksome because for five nights in a row I had had only three hours’ sleep. But I frankly dreaded having to tell October on Sunday that the eleven young men had made their mammoth investigation to no avail, and I had an unreasonable feeling that if I hammered away long enough I could still wring some useful message from those densely packed pages.
On Saturday morning, though it was bleak, bitter and windy, October’s daughters rode out with the first string. Elinor only came near enough to exchange polite good mornings, but Patty, who was again riding one of my horses, made my giving her a leg up a moment of eyelash-fluttering intimacy, deliberately and unnecessarily rubbing her body against mine.
‘You weren’t here last week, Danny boy,’ she said, putting her feet in the irons. ‘Where were you?’
‘At Cheltenham… miss.’
‘Oh. And next Saturday?’
‘I’ll be here.’
She said, with intentional insolence, ‘Then kindly remember next Saturday to shorten the leathers on the saddle before I mount. These are far too long.’
She made no move to shorten them herself, but gestured for me to do it for her. She watched me steadily, enjoying herself. While I was fastening the second buckle she robbed her knee forwards over my hands and kicked me none too gently in the ribs.
‘I wonder you stand me teasing you, Danny boy,’ she said softly, bending down, ‘a dishy guy like you should answer back more. Why don’t you?’
‘I don’t want the sack,’ I said, with a dead straight face.
‘A coward, too,’ she said sardonically, and twitched her horse away.
And she’ll get into bad trouble one day, if she keeps on like that, I thought. She was too provocative. Stunningly pretty of course, but that was only the beginning; and her hurtful little tricks were merely annoying. It was the latent invitation which disturbed and aroused.
I shrugged her out of my mind, fetched Sparking Plug, sprang up on to his back and moved out of the yard and up to the moor for the routine working gallops.
The weather that day got steadily worse until while we were out with the second string it began to rain heavily in fierce slashing gusts, and we struggled miserably back against it with stinging faces and sodden clothes. Perhaps because it went on raining, or possibly because it was, after all, Saturday, Wally for once refrained from making me work all afternoon, and I spent the three hours sitting with about nine other lads in the kitchen of the cottage, listening to the wind shrieking round the corners outside and watching Chepstow races on television, while our damp jerseys, breeches and socks steamed gently round the fire.
I put the previous season’s form book on the kitchen table and sat over it with my head propped on the knuckles of my left hand, idly turning the pages with my right. Depressed by my utter lack of success with the eleven horses’ dossiers, by the antipathy I had to arouse in the lads, and also, I think, by the absence of the hot sunshine I usually lived in at that time of the year, I began to feel that the whole masquerade had been from the start a ghastly mistake. And the trouble was that having taken October’s money I couldn’t back out; not for months. This thought depressed me further still. I sat slumped in unrelieved gloom, wasting my much needed free time.
I think now that it must have been the sense that I was failing in what I had set out to do, more than mere tiredness, which beset me that afternoon, because although later on I encountered worse things it was only for that short while that I ever truly regretted having listened to October, and unreservedly wished myself back in my comfortable Australian cage.
The lads watching the television were making disparaging remarks about the jockeys and striking private bets against each other on the outcome of the races.
‘The uphill finish will sort ’em out as usual,’ Paddy was saying. ‘It’s a long way from the last… Aladin’s the only one who’s got the stamina for the job.’
‘No,’ contradicted Grits. ‘Lobster Cocktail’s a flyer…’
Morosely I riffled the pages of the form book, aimlessly looking through them for the hundredth time, and came by chance on the map of Chepstow racecourse in the general information section at the beginning of the book. There were diagrammatic maps of all the main courses showing the shape of the tracks and the positioning of fences, stands, starting gates and winning posts, and I had looked before at those for Ludlow, Stafford and Hay-dock, without results. There was no map of Kelso or Sedgefield. Next to the map section were a few pages of information about the courses, the lengths of their circuits, the names and addresses of the officials, the record times for the races, and so on.
For something to do, I turned to Chepstow’s paragraph. Paddy’s ‘long way from the last’, was detailed there: two hundred and fifty yards. I looked up Kelso, Sedgefield, Ludlow, Stafford and Haydock. They had much longer run-ins than Chepstow. I looked up the run-ins of all the courses in the book. The Aintree Grand National run-in was the second longest. The longest of all was Sedgefield, and in third, fourth, fifth, and sixth positions came Ludlow, Haydock, Kelso and Stafford. All had run-ins of over four hundred yards.
Geography had nothing to do with it: those five courses had almost certainly been chosen by the dopers because in each case it was about a quarter of a mile from the last fence to the winning post.
It was an advance, even if a small one, to have made at least some pattern out of the chaos. In a slightly less abysmal frame of mind I shut the form book and at four o’clock followed the other lads out into the unwelcome rain-swept yard to spend an hour with each of my three charges, grooming them thoroughly to give their coats a clean healthy shine, tossing and tidying their straw beds, fetching their water, holding their heads while Inskip walked round, rugging them up comfortably for the night, and finally fetching their evening feed. As usual it was seven before we had all finished, and eight before we had eaten and changed and were bumping down the hill to Slaw, seven of us sardined into a rickety old Austin.
Bar billiards, darts, dominoes, the endless friendly bragging, the ingredients as before. Patiently, I sat and waited. It was nearly ten, the hour when the lads began to empty their glasses and think about having to get up the next morning, when Soupy strolled across the room towards the door, and, seeing my eyes on him, jerked his head for me to follow him. I got up and went out after him, and found him in the lavatories.
‘This is for you. The rest on Tuesday,’ he said economically; and treating me to a curled lip and stony stare to impress me with his toughness, he handed me a thick brown envelope. I put it in the inside pocket of my black leather jacket, and nodded to him. Still without speaking, without smiling, hard-eyed to match, I turned on my heel and went back into the bar: and after a while, casually, he followed.
So I crammed into the Austin and was driven up the hill, back to bed in the little dormitory, with seventy five pounds and a packet of white powder sitting snugly over my heart.
Chapter 6
October dipped his finger in the powder and tasted it.
‘I don’t know what it is either,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’ll get it analysed.’
I bent down and patted his dog, and fondled its ears.
He said ‘You do realise what a risk you’ll be running if you take his money and don’t give the dope to the horse?’
I grinned up at him.
‘It’s no laughing matter,’ he said seriously. ‘They can be pretty free with their boots, these people, and it would be no hel
p to us if you get your ribs kicked in…’
‘Actually,’ I said, straightening up, ‘I do think it might be best if Sparking Plug didn’t win… I could hardly hope to attract custom from the dopers we are really after if they heard I had double-crossed anyone before.’
‘You’re quite right.’ He sounded relieved. ‘Sparking Plug must lose; but Inskip… how on earth can I tell him that the jockey must pull back?’
‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘You don’t want them getting into trouble. But it won’t matter much if I do. The horse won’t win if I keep him thirsty tomorrow morning and give him a bucketful of water just before the race.’
He looked at me with amusement. ‘I see you’ve learned a thing or two.’
‘It’d make your hair stand on end, what I’ve learned.’
He smiled back. ‘All right then. I suppose it’s the only thing to do. I wonder what the National Hunt Committee would think of a Steward conspiring with one of his own stable lads to stop a favourite?’ He laughed. ‘I’ll tell Roddy Beckett what to expect… though it won’t be so funny for Inskip, nor for the lads here, if they back the horse, nor for the general public, who’ll lose their money.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
He folded the packet of white powder and tucked it back into the envelope with the money. The seventy-five pounds had foolishly been paid in a bundle of new fivers with consecutive numbers: and we had agreed that October would take them and try to discover to whom they had been issued.
I told him about the long run-ins on all of the courses where the eleven horses had won.
‘It almost sounds as if they might have been using vitamins after all,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You can’t detect them in dope tests because technically they are not dope at all, but food. The whole question of vitamins is very difficult.’
‘They increase stamina?’ I asked.
‘Yes, quite considerably. Horses which ‘die’ in the last half mile – and as you pointed out, all eleven are that type – would be ideal subjects. But vitamins were among the first things we considered, and we had to eliminate them. They can help horses to win, if they are injected in massive doses into the bloodstream, and they are undetectable in analysis because they are used up in the winning, but they are undetectable in other ways too. They don’t excite, they don’t bring a horse back from a race looking as though benzedrine were coming out of his ears.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know…’