“Please!” Sassy squealed, pulling harder so that her body was almost at forty-five degrees to the vertical.
Marina smiled at me wryly. “What do you think?”
“Stick with other people. You’ll be fine.”
Marina allowed herself to be dragged slowly away towards the horses in the pre-parade ring, but she didn’t look very happy.
“Be back here well before the first,” I shouted after her.
• • •
I HAD COME to Newbury to speak to Jimmy Guernsey and Angus Drummond specifically, the two jockeys that had ridden in all nine of Sir Richard Stewart’s suspect races, and also to Tony Molson, who had ridden in four of them, but there was much more to the day than that.
I hadn’t been to the races for nearly two years, not since the Grand National before last when the brewery that sponsored the race had held a reunion for all living National-winning jockeys. And I couldn’t remember how long it had been before that. Without my investigating work, I had found it meaningless to do so.
I still longed to be one of those daring young men in their bright-colored silks, hurtling over fences at thirty miles an hour and risking life and limb on a daily basis. But I had risked a limb once too often, and, since then, I found no great pleasure in watching others still do what I hungered for.
So I had stopped going racing altogether. It had been less painful.
“Hello, Sid,” said one trainer that I used to ride for, placing his hand on my shoulder. “Long time no see.”
“Hello, Paul,” I replied, smiling at him.
“Sid,” called another trainer, hurrying past, “have you got yer saddle? I need a jock in the fourth. Mine’s ill.”
“Don’t tempt me,” I said, laughing.
I looked up in the race program to see which jockey it was. Dammit, I thought. It was Tony Molson, one of those I’d come specifically to speak to.
I spent the next five to ten minutes or so greeting old friends and slipping back into racing life like a hand into a well-worn glove. It all fit snugly around me, and the pain of not being directly involved seemed to have eased a little. I resolved not to be away from my love for so long again.
All the while I kept a lookout for either Jimmy Guernsey or Angus Drummond and, presently, I saw them both walking in together from the direction of the parking lot, chatting amicably. I wanted to speak to them separately rather than together, so I allowed them to walk past me into the Weighing Room and the jockeys’ changing room beyond. According to the race program, Jimmy had a ride in the second race while Angus’s first engagement was in the third.
“Sid, me old mucker. How’s the world treating you?” I was slapped on the back and turned to find Paddy O’Fitch, a fellow ex-jockey and a walking racing encyclopedia and, before last Thursday, the only man I’d known who spoke with a broad Belfast accent. “I thought you must be dead.”
“Not yet, Paddy, not quite,” I said, smiling. “And how are you keeping?”
“Well, I think,” he said. “My bloody doctor keeps going on about me drinking too much Guinness. But as I tells him, if I drinks less of the black stuff, then I eats more, and that puts me cholesterol right up like a rocket. Can’t bloody win, can I?”
I had been secretly hoping that Paddy might be at Newbury. Not that Paddy was his real name. He had been born plain Harold Fitch in Liverpool, but he was more Irish than the Irish, and he loved everything green—except, that was, his beer, which he liked black with a white head.
“Can I buy you a drink?” I asked him.
He looked around in a guilty manner, perhaps checking for his “bloody doctor.”
“I shouldn’t,” he said. “If I get started before the horses have even gone out for the first, then I’ll be paralytic before the end of the day. How about later?”
“After the fourth?” I said. “In the Champagne Bar.”
“Do they serve Guinness?”
“I’m sure they will for you,” I said. “Otherwise, we’ll go elsewhere.”
“Right y’are,” he said. “After the fourth.” He looked at his watch. He didn’t look too happy. “Can you make it after the third? I’m not sure I can wait until after the fourth.”
He could always have gone earlier and bought himself a pint, but then I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of his sober, sharp mind.
“OK,” I said. “After the third. But don’t drink anything before then.”
“Me? Drink? Whatever gave you dat idea?”
“See you after the third, then,” I said. “In the Champagne Bar.”
“Right y’are, Sid. But what is it that you’ll be wanting?”
“Why should I be wanting anything?” I asked.
“Don’t be daft, of course you’ll be wanting something. No one buys me drink just for the fun of it.”
I laughed. “See you after the third.”
He walked away from me, steadily, upright and in a straight line. I wondered how long it would last. After his riding years, Paddy O’Fitch had made his living by writing brief histories of racing and selling them in the racetrack parking lots. The business had flourished and developed into a multimillion-pound enterprise, which Paddy had then sold to an international media consortium for a fortune. Without the business to run, Paddy had become bored and was now seemingly intent on drinking away all the proceeds from the sale. But he seemed happy enough, and I could think of worse ways of spending one’s retirement. He was also the most knowledgeable man on a racetrack of anything and everything that was happening. At least he was when he was sober.
With the help of the official standing guard over the jockeys’ changing room door, I managed to collar Angus Drummond on his own outside the Weighing Room between the first and second races.
“Angus,” I said, “do you remember riding Leaping Gold at Sandown in February? On the day of the Mercia Gold Cup?”
“Yeah,” he said, “sure do. Novice chase, weren’t it?”
Angus Drummond may have had a Scottish-sounding name, after his Scottish grandfather, but he was a West Country lad through and through, with an accent to match.
“Yes,” I said. “Second-last race of the day.”
“What about it?”
“Can you remember why Leaping Gold ran so badly? He started favorite but finished seventh, a long way back.”
“He hit the third fence,” Angus said confidently, “good and proper. Knocked the stuffing right out of him. Wouldn’t bloody go after that.”
“How about Enterprise in the two-and-a-half-mile novice hurdle at Ascot the week after?” I asked.
“What’s this?” he asked. “Twenty questions?” He laughed.
“I’ve got a client who is looking to buy a decent horse, and he wanted me to check up on those runs before he parts with any money.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, you can tell your client that I knows how to ride them if he’s looking for a good jockey.”
“But you didn’t ride Enterprise very well at Ascot, did you?”
“What d’yer mean?” The laughter had suddenly disappeared from his voice.
“You went off too fast at the start, and the horse ran out of puff well before the finish. You were tailed off and pulled up before the last hurdle.”
“The horse didn’t stay,” Angus said aggressively, sticking out his jaw.
“The horse wasn’t given the chance to stay,” I said, purposely trying to provoke a response. “I’m surprised the stewards didn’t have you in to explain your riding.”
“They did,” he said sheepishly. As I had known they had. “But they agreed that it wasn’t my fault as the horse had run away with me at the start.”
Indeed, it had. I’d watched the video. But Angus Drummond was an experienced professional jockey, and horses shouldn’t run away in such hands. So had the horse been allowed to run a
way on purpose?
I decided against asking Angus that question.
For the time being anyway.
• • •
PADDY WAS WAITING for me at a high cocktail table in the Champagne Bar after the third race, and he was quite surprised to discover that I was not on my own.
“Paddy,” I said, “this is Marina, my wife, and Saskia, our daughter.”
He wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers, then offered one to Marina. “Lovely to meet you, Mrs. Halley,” he said, showing a nervousness I found quite amusing.
“And you,” Marina said, shaking the offered hand and doing a good job of disguising her shock at hearing another Belfast accent.
“Would you like a Guinness?” I asked Paddy.
“Well, yes, I would, to be sure,” he said. “But they don’t serve Guinness in here, so I took the liberty of fetching one, like, from the Long Bar under the grandstand. I was sure you’d pay me back.” He lifted a plastic pint beaker, half full of the black stuff, from the table.
“Is it your first?” I asked in mock accusation.
“To be sure, it is,” he said, smiling and holding the beaker to his lips to take a hefty swig.
I was pretty “to be sure” that it wasn’t, but there was not much I could do about it.
I collected a glass of champagne for Marina and two Cokes for Saskia and me. The girls moved away to the next table while I leaned closer to Paddy to speak directly into his ear.
“Now, tell me, Paddy, who else speaks with a broad Belfast accent at the track? Someone who fixes things? Someone who’s used to throwing his weight around and getting his own way?”
“Bejesus!” Paddy said, moving back a step or two. “Are you mad? Do you want to get yourself killed now?”
I was absolutely stunned by his reaction to my question. He went quite pale, and I thought he might faint. I looked around me for a glass of water to give him, but instead he took another large gulp of his Guinness and steadied himself against the side of the cocktail table.
“Now, why would you be asking me such a question? What have I ever done to you?”
“Paddy,” I said sharply. “Pull yourself together.”
“No,” he said, still wide-eyed. “You pull yourself together. If I’m thinking it is who you might be after, you’ve got to be crazy. Either that or just plain bloody stupid.”
“Who is it?” I said directly into his ear.
“Do you not know?”
“Paddy, I wouldn’t be asking if I knew.”
“Sid, you’ve been away too long.”
“All right, maybe I have, but who is it?”
“I’ll not be telling you,” he said with fear now in his wide eyes. “I’ll not be the one to tell you.”
“Write it down, then,” I said, passing over a pen and my race program.
He looked around him as if checking that no one was looking over his shoulder. Finally, when he was satisfied that none of the other bar patrons were watching, he wrote two words in capital letters on the edge of the program: BILLY MCCUSKER.
“And who’s he?” I asked, none the wiser.
Paddy took another look over his shoulder to check for eavesdroppers.
“He’s vicious,” Paddy whispered. “Don’t mess with him.”
I wasn’t sure I had any choice in the matter.
“But who is he?”
“New kid on the block,” Paddy said. “Now in his early forties. Grew up in West Belfast during the Troubles. His father ran a big construction firm and was murdered by the IRA for doing building work for the British Army. By the time young Billy was twenty, he was commanding a breakaway, hard-line Protestant group called the Shankill Road Volunteers, and his sole aim was to kill Roman Catholics who he believed lived in the wrong place. He also didn’t like Protestants who had anything to do with the Catholics. No proof, of course, but there’s little doubt that McCusker is responsible for over a dozen murders as well as scores of punishment beatings.”
“Nice,” I said.
“Not really,” Paddy said. “He was jailed for life in 1996 for the particularly gruesome murder of a young Protestant teenager whose only mistake was fathering a child with his Catholic girlfriend, but Billy was soon released under the terms of the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement. Not that he’s a reformed character or anything. He’s been involved in racketeering and extortion ever since. And he still hates all Roman Catholics, who he blames for killing his da.”
“So when did he come over to the mainland?”
Paddy looked around once more and was satisfied that there was still no one else listening. “About six years ago. It seems the Shankill Road Volunteers fell out with another Protestant paramilitary group over money, and a turf war ensued. Billy’s side lost, so he and his mates were run out of West Belfast in a hurry. Word is, they had to leave so quickly that they were left with only the clothes they were wearing at the time. They transferred to Manchester, but they hadn’t left so fast that they forgot to bring their nastiness with them.”
“So how did McCusker get into racing?” I asked.
“He quickly got involved with a Manchester-based bookmaking outfit, inappropriately named Honest Joe Bullen. Perhaps Billy bought Honest Joe out or maybe he took possession by force. Either way, he now controls the business, and it has expanded rapidly since then by buying up other independent betting shops in and around Manchester and Liverpool.”
“Or bullying them into submission,” I said.
“Far more likely,” Paddy agreed.
“How does a convicted terrorist get a bookmaker’s license anyway?” I asked.
“Perhaps it was some deal over the peace agreement, sectarian convictions struck from the record or something, or maybe it’s not him who holds the license. I don’t know, but, no matter, Billy McCusker definitely calls the shots at Honest Joe’s, and he’s not making any friends, to be sure.”
“But why are you so frightened of him?” I asked.
“Because I’m a Roman Catholic. In nomine Patris, et Filii,” he said, suddenly crossing himself, “et Spiritus Sancti.” Paddy finished his sign by pointing one of his slender fingers at my chest. “And you should be frightened of him too. Everyone should. Word on the street is, he eats Catholic babies for breakfast. Like I tells you, don’t mess with Billy McCusker.”
I wasn’t.
But was he the one messing with me?
6
Marina, Saskia and I waited outside the Weighing Room after the last race, and I caught Jimmy Guernsey as he emerged to go home.
“Well done, Jimmy,” I said as I stepped into stride alongside him, with Marina and Saskia hurrying along behind. “Good win in the last.”
“Huh, thanks, Sid,” he replied almost in a monotone. “I should have won the two-mile chase as well if that bloody horse Podcast could jump. Stupid lump of dog meat. Tripped over the sodding last with the race at his mercy.”
“Nice, easy fall, though,” I said, remembering back to how Jimmy had rolled over twice on the turf and then jumped up quickly. Fortunately, for him, there had been no following horse to land on his outstretched left palm with a razor-sharp horseshoe to slice through muscle, bone and sinew, as there had been in my career-ending last race.
“My pride was hurt more than my body,” he agreed. “What brings you here, then? Haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“Actually, I came to speak to you.”
“Really.” He seemed surprised. “Never heard of the telephone?”
“Much better in person,” I said.
“What about?”
“Red Rosette.”
“What about him?”
“His run at Sandown last month,” I said. “In the novice chase. Same day as the Mercia Gold Cup.”
He shook his head slightly. “Can’t remember. I rid
e lots of horses. I know he didn’t win. I’d have remembered that.”
“No,” I said, “he didn’t win. Made a hash of the last fence. You asked him to take an extra stride, but there wasn’t room. He got in too close and plowed his way through. Do you remember now?”
“Yeah, I believe I do. Silly mistake of mine. I thought he was too tired to stand off, and I misjudged the distance.”
“Yeah,” I echoed. “And how about Martian Man in the novice hurdle here at Newbury on the same day as the Hennessy? Was that a silly mistake as well?”
Jimmy stopped walking.
“What are you implying?” he asked, not looking at me.
“I’m not implying anything,” I said, although it was clear I was. “I just wondered if you had a theory of why a horse that on all his previous runs had been a front-runner with no noteworthy sprint finish had been held up for so long at the back of the field on this occasion that he’d never had a chance to overhaul the leaders in the straight.”
“I did nothing wrong,” he declared.
“Didn’t you?” I asked pointedly.
“Leave me alone,” he said, setting off again at an even faster pace.
I walked a few steps after him but then stopped and called out to him instead. “Is that what you said to Billy McCusker?”
There was an almost imperceptible break in his stride, only for a split second, but I’d noticed. He recovered quickly and walked away towards the racetrack exit without looking back.
“Who is Billy McCusker?” Marina asked.
“I think he may be the man on the telephone with the Northern Irish accent.”
• • •
“CALL THE POLICE,” Marina demanded.
“I will,” I said, “when I’m sure it’s him.”
We were sitting in our Range Rover, having safely negotiated the return trip across the parking lot.
“But who is he anyway?”
“A former Belfast paramilitary thug who’s now a bookmaker in Manchester.”
It wasn’t the answer that Marina had wanted or expected.
“My God!” she said. “That’s all we need. A bloody terrorist after us.”
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