Dick Francis - Twice Shy

'This way,' she said, going in. 'Come along. I think I'll trust you. You look all right. I'll take the risk.'

The house was dark inside and smelled of disuse. We seemed to be in a narrow passage, along which she drifted ahead of me, silent in her slippers, light as a sparrow.

'Old women living alone,' she said, 'should never take men they don't know into their houses.' As she was addressing the air in front of her, the admonishment seemed to be to herself. We continued along past various dark-painted closed doors, until the passage opened out into a central hall where such light as there was filtered through high-up windows of patterned stained glass.

'Edwardian,' she said, following my upward gaze. 'This way.'

I followed her into a spacious room whose elaborate bay window looked out onto the glory in the garden. Indoors, more mutedly, there were deep-blue velvet curtains, good-looking large rugs over the silver-grey carpet, blue velvet sofas and armchairs- and dozens and dozens of seascapes crowding the walls. Floor to ceiling. Billowing sails. Four-masters. Storms and seagulls and salt spray.

'Liam's,' she said briefly, seeing my head turn around them.

When Liam O'Rorke liked something, I thought fleetingly, he liked a lot of it.

'Sit down,' she said, pointing to an armchair. Tell me who you are and why you've come here.' She moved to a sofa where, to judge from the book and glass on the small table adjacent, she had been sitting before I arrived, and perched her small weight on the edge as if ready for flight.

I explained about Peter's link with Chris Norwood, saying that Chris Norwood had given what I thought might be her husband's papers to Peter for him to organise into computer programs. I said that Peter had done the job, and had recorded the programs on tape.

She brushed aside the difficult technicalities and came straight to the simple point. 'Do you mean,' she demanded, 'that your friend Peter has my papers?' The hope in her face was like a light.

'I'm afraid not. I don't know where the papers are.'

'Ask your friend.'

'He's been killed in an accident.'

'Oh.' She stared at me, intensely disappointed.

'But the tapes,' I said. 'I do know where those are – or at least I know where copies of them are. If the knowledge that's on them is yours, I could get them for you.'

She was a jumble of renewed hope and puzzlement. 'It would be wonderful. But these tapes, wherever they are, didn't you bring them with you?'

I shook my head. 'I didn't know you existed until a hour ago. It was a girl called Carol who told me about you. She works in the office of Angel Kitchens.'

'Oh yes.' Mrs O'Rorke made a small movement of embarrassment. 'I screeched at her. I was so angry. They wouldn't tell me where to find Chris Norwood in all those buildings and sheds. I'd said I'd scratch his eyes out. I've an Irish temper, you know. I can't always control it.'

I thought of the picture she must have presented to those girls, and reckoned their description of her 'making a fuss' had been charitable.

'The trouble is,' I said slowly, 'that someone else is looking for those tapes.' I told her a watered-down version of the visit to my house of the gunmen, to which she listened with open-mouthed attention. 'I don't know who they are,' I said, 'or where they come from. I began to think that so much ignorance might be dangerous. So I've been trying to find out what's going on.'

'And if you know?'

'Then I'll know what not to do. I mean, one can do such stupid things, with perhaps appalling consequences, just through not knowing some simple fact.'

She regarded me steadily with the first glimmer of a smile. 'All you're asking for, young man, is the secret that has eluded homo sapiens from day one.'

I was startled not so much by the thought as by the words she phrased it in, and as if sensing my surprise she said with dryness, 'One does not grow silly with age. If one was silly when young, one may be silly when old. If one were acute when young, why should acuteness wane?'

'I have done you,' I said slowly, 'an injustice.'

'Everyone does,' she said indifferently. 'I look in my mirror. I see an old face. Wrinkles. Yellow skin. As society is now constituted, to present this appearance is to be thrust into a category. Old woman, therefore silly, troublesome, can be pushed around.'

'No,' I said. 'It's not true.'

'Unless, of course,' she added as if I hadn't spoken, 'one is an achiever. Achievement is the saviour of the very old.'

'And are you not… an achiever?'

She made a small regretful movement with hands and head. 'I wish I were. I am averagely intelligent, but that's all. It gets you nowhere. It doesn't save you from rage. I apologise for my reaction in the garden.'

'But don't,' I said. 'Theft's an assault. Of course you'd be angry.'

She relaxed to the extent of sitting back into the sofa, where the cushions barely deflated under her weight.

'I will tell you as much as I can of what has happened. If it saves you from chasing Moses across the Red Sea, so much the better,'

To know what not to do…

I grinned at her.

She twitched her lips and said, 'What do you know about racing?'

'Not a great deal.'

'Liam did. My husband. Liam lived for the horses all his life. In Ireland, of course, when we were children. Then here. Newmarket,

Epsom, Cheltenham, that's where we've lived. Then back here to Newmarket. Always the horses.'

'Were they his job?'I asked.

'In a way. He was a gambler.' She looked at me calmly. 'I mean a professional gambler. He lived on his winnings. I still live on what's left.'

'I thought it wasn't possible,' I said.

'To beat the odds?' The words sounded wrong for her appearance. It was true, I thought, what she'd said about categories. Old women weren't expected to talk gambling; but this one did. 'In the old days it was perfectly possible to make a good living. Dozens did it. You worked on a profit expectation of ten per cent on turnover, and if you had any judgement at all, you achieved it. Then they introduced the Betting Tax. It took a slice off all the winnings, reduced the profit margin to almost nil, killed off all the old pros in no time. Your ten per cent was all going into the Revenue, do you see?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Liam had always made more than ten per cent. He took a pride in it. He reckoned he could win one race out of three. That means that every third bet, on average, would win. That's a very high percentage, day after day, year after year. And he did beat the tax. He tried new ways, added new factors. With his statistics, he said, you could always win in the long run. None of the bookies would take his bets.'

'Er, what?' I said.

'Didn't you know?' She sounded surprised. 'Bookmakers won't take bets from people who repeatedly win.'

'But I thought that's what they were in business for. I mean, to take people's bets.'

'To take bets from ordinary mug punters, yes,' she said. 'The sort who may win occasionally but never do in the end. But if you have an account with almost any bookie and you keep winning, he'll close your account.'

'Good grief,' I said weakly.

'At the races,' she said, 'all the bookies knew Liam. If they didn't know him to talk to, they knew him by sight. They'd only let him bet in cash at starting price, and then as soon as he'd got his money on they'd tic-tac it round the ring and they'd all reduce the price of that horse to ridiculously small odds, making the starting price very low, so that he wouldn't win much himself, and so that the other racegoers would be put off backing that horse, and stake their money on something else.'

There was a longish pause while I sorted out and digested what she'd said.

'And what,' I said, 'about the Tote?'