Dick Francis - Under Orders

Ah, the real reason for the fluster.

‘I’ve been with another woman,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said pausing for a moment. ‘That’s all right then. I thought you might have been working.’

We giggled.

‘I went to Lambourn this morning,’ I said.

‘What, to ride?’

‘No, I went to Juliet Burns’s cottage.’

‘What on earth for?’ she asked.

I pulled out the pictures of Juliet’s wardrobe. ‘Look at these,’ I said.

She studied the six photographs. It wasn’t easy to tell what they were of unless you had seen it live, as it were.

‘So?’

‘They’re pictures of Juliet Burns’s wardrobe, in her bedroom.’

‘So you were in her bedroom, were you?’

‘She wasn’t there at the time.’

‘So what’s so special about Juliet Burns’s wardrobe?’ she asked.

‘It contains at least thirty thousand pounds’ worth of designer dresses, Jimmy Choo shoes and Fendi handbags.’

‘Wow!’ she said. She took another look at the pictures. ‘I take it you don’t think she obtained them through hard work and careful saving.’

‘I do not.’

‘But how did you know they were there?’ Marina asked.

‘I saw them when I took Juliet home the morning she found Bill dead.’ I suddenly wondered whether she had, in fact, ‘found’ him dead.

‘How come?’

‘I hung her jacket up in that wardrobe. But I didn’t realise what I was looking at until Jenny told me yesterday how much designer clothes cost.’

‘It doesn’t make her a murderer,’ said Marina.

‘There’s more.’ I told her about the hairbrush and the hairs and about Rosie having done a DNA test on them. And I told her about the card that had been waiting at Ebury Street for me and also about its hand-written message.

She went very quiet.

‘Well, whoever licked the envelope on Thursday is the same person that left the hairs on the hairbrush, and that has to be Juliet Burns herself.’

‘I take it that she didn’t actually invite you into her bedroom this morning,’ Marina said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She was at work.’

‘So what now?’ she asked. ‘Shouldn’t you tell the police about the clothes and the hairs and all that?’

‘The police are too busy with other things,’ I said. ‘As far as I can see, they aren’t even investigating your shooting. I was told they don’t have the resources. The Gloucestershire police are spending their time trying to find a child killer and Thames Valley believe that Bill killed himself anyway.’

‘Another policeman came to see me this morning,’ said Marina.

‘What did he want?’ I asked.

‘Just to know if I had remembered anything else,’ she said.

‘And have you?’ I asked.

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I told him about the flashes on the motorbike fuel tank and gave him the drawings. He didn’t think it helps much. Apparently masses of bikes have flashes on their fuel tanks.’

And lots of riders have flashes on their trousers, I thought.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘and another thing.’

‘What?’

‘The policeman told me that you had told him that I was your fiancée.’

‘Never!’

‘Yes, you did. I asked the surgeon and he said, yes, definitely, Mr Halley told everyone he was my fiancé. Everyone but me, it seems.’

‘It was the only way they would let me in to see you.’

‘Oh. You didn’t mean it then.’

‘I did ask you to marry me, on Thursday night,’ I said. ‘But you didn’t answer.’

‘That’s not fair. I was unconscious.’

‘Excuses. Excuses.’

‘If you really meant it, then ask me again.’

I looked deeply into her eyes. Did I want to spend the rest of my life with this person, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part? Yes, I did, but I worried that, unless I found the gunman soon, death might us part rather more quickly than we would like.

‘Do you want me to kneel?’ I asked her.

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Get down to my level.’

I knelt on one knee beside the bed and took her left hand in my right.

‘Marina van der Meer,’ I said smiling at her, ‘will you marry me?’

She looked away from my face.

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

I spent all of Saturday evening researching the running of horses from Bill Burton’s yard.

How did we manage before computers?

I was able to find out more in one evening using digital technology than I would have done in a week using the old-fashioned small-printed pages of the form books.

The Raceform database with its almost instant access to a whole mass of statistics proved invaluable as I delved into the running of all Bill’s horses over the last five years.

I was not so much looking for a needle in a haystack, as looking for a piece of hay in a haystack that was slightly shorter than it should have been. Even if I found it, I might still not be sure it was what I was looking for.

The classic tell-tale signs of race fixing have always been short-priced losers followed by long-priced winners. A horse is prevented from winning until the betting price lengthens, and then a big gamble is landed at long odds when the horse is really trying. But the ability to use the exchanges to bet on a horse to lose has changed all that. The classic signs no longer exist. Indeed, I asked myself, what signs might exist?

Tipsters and professional gamblers use patterns in performance as tools to select where a horse will tend to run well, and where less so. A course may be close by to the home stables and many horses do better when they don’t have to travel long distances to the races. Trainers who use uphill training gallops may have more success with uphill finishes such as at Towcester or Cheltenham.

There are many other reasons why horses run better or worse at different venues. Some racecourses are flat and others are undulating, some have gentle curves while others have sharp ones. In America all tracks are left-handed, so the horses run anticlockwise, but in England some are left-handed and others right-handed, and at Windsor and Fontwell the horses have to run both right-and left-handed in the same race as the tracks are shaped like figures of eight.

The serious gambler needs to know where a trainer, or even a particular horse, does well and where not. And Raceform Interactive allows the user to look for hitherto unseen patterns in performance, to ask his own questions and use the huge data available to answer them. Could the system, I wondered, be used to look for dodgy dealing in the Burton yard? Could it show me that Huw Walker had been developing a pattern of fixing races?

I tried my best by asking what I thought were the right questions but my computer refused to serve up the hoped-for answers. Either there was no pattern to find or else the pattern was so long established that variations to it didn’t show up over the past five years. And there had been no convenient, dramatic change to Bill Burton’s results when Juliet Burns had arrived in his yard three years ago.

Another dead end.

I went into the kitchen to make myself some coffee.

So what did I know about the race fixing allegations?

I knew that Jonny Enstone believed his horses had been running to someone else’s orders. He had told me so himself over lunch at the House of Lords. And the police had shown a list to Bill when they’d arrested him, which they said showed that the horses had not been running true to form.

I went back to my computer. Now I asked it to look only at the running of Lord Enstone’s horses. I spent ages giving every Enstone runner a user rating depending on whether it had run better or worse than its official rating would suggest. I then asked my machine if there was anything suspicious? Give me your answer do! Sadly, it was not into suspicion. Hard facts were its currency, not speculation.