Dick Francis - Twice Shy

'And may they choke him,' Cassie said.

I smiled. 'They may not. I'd guess Ted Pitts is worth a million.'

'Really?' Her eyebrows shot up. 'Then why don't we-?'

'It takes time and work. Ted Pitts lives right at the London end of the Ml, half a mile off the country's biggest artery. I'll bet he spends countless days beating up that road to towns in the north, traipsing round betting shops, sucking his honey. It's what I guess he does, anyway. He was near Manchester yesterday, his wife said. A different town every day, so that no one gets to know him.'

'What difference would that make?' Bananas said.

I explained what happened to constant winners. 'I'll bet there isn't a single bookie who knows Ted Pitts by sight.'

'If you did it,' Bananas said thoughtfully, 'I suppose they'd know you at once.'

I shook my head. 'Only on the racecourse. Round the backstreet betting shops in any big town I'd be just another mug.'

They both looked at me expectantly.

'Yeah,' I said. 'I can just see me spending my life that way.'

'Think of the loot,' Bananas said.

'And no tax,' said Cassie.

I thought of Ted Pitts's splendid house and of my own lack of amassed goods. Thought of him walking the upper slopes of Swiss mountains, restoring his spirit, wandering but coming home. Thought of my lack of a settled life-pattern and my hatred of being tied down. Thought of the way I'd enjoyed the past months, making decisions, running a business, knowing all the time it was just for a year, not a lifetime, and being reassured by such impermanency. Thought of spending hot summer days and wet winter afternoons in betting shops, playing the percentages, joylessly, methodically making a million.

'Well?' Bananas said.

'Maybe one day, when I'm hungry.'

'You've no sense.'

'You do it then,' I said. 'Give up the pub. Give up the cooking. Take to the road.'

He stared at me while he thought about it, then grimaced and said,

'There's more to life than making money. Not a lot, but some.'

'One of these days,' said Cassie with sweet certainty, 'you'll both do it. Not even a saint could sit on a goldmine and be too lazy to pick up the nuggets.'

'You think it's just lazy-?'

'I sure do. Where's your buccaneering heart? Where's the glint of piracy? What about the battlecry of those old north-country industrialists- where there's muck there's brass?' She looked alight with enthusiasm, a glow I guessed derived as much from Angelo's absence as from the thought of an available fortune.

'If you feel the same when I've finished for Luke Houston,' I said, 'I'll give it a trial. Just for a while.'

'Picky,' she said. 'That's what you are.'

All the same it was in better spirits that I set about cleaning the cellar and making it fit for fishing gear to live in; and in the late afternoon, all three of us sat in the sun on the cottage grass while Cassie and Bananas discussed how they would spend the lolly they thought I would inevitably chase.

They already felt as I did that Angelo's revengeful lust had been at last dissipated, and they said he had even done us a favour as without his violent attack I would never have sought out Ted Pitts.

'Good can come of bad,' Cassie said with satisfaction.

And bad of good, I thought. Jonathan's conjuring tricks had trapped Angelo thoroughly and made it certain that he would be convicted empty handed. Had ensured that for fourteen years Angelo would be unable to kill anyone else. But that particular good sequence of actions which had seemed so final at the time had proved to be only a plug for a simmering volcano. The psychopathic young man had at length erupted as a full-blown coarsened thug, no longer as Jonathan had described him, occasionally high on the drug of recklessness, but more plainly, comprehensively, violent.

Time changed perspectives. From disasters could come successes, and from successes, disasters. A pity, I thought, that one could never perceive whether to weep or cheer at the actual event.

Our lives gradually quietened to sensible proportions. Cassie went back to work in a sling and Bananas invented a new delight involving liquid spiced beef: and I began a series of forays to stud farms to take preliminary peeks at the yearlings soon to be offered at the sales, all too aware that the climax of my year was approaching, the test by which Luke would judge me, looking back. To buy young stock that would win would be satisfactory; to buy a colt to sire a dynasty would be luck. Somewhere between the two lay an area in which judgment would turn out to have been good, indifferent or absent, and it was there that I hoped to make as few mistakes as possible.

For about a week I mosied around all over the place with detours to race meetings and to Luke's two trainers in Berkshire, and spent every spare waking minute with the Stud Book. Sim Shell said severely that he wished to be present and in full consultation whenever I bought anything for him personally to train, and Mort with every nerve twitching asked for Sir Ivor, Nijinsky and Northern Dancer, all at once, and at the very least.

Cassie came with me to the evening session on the first day of the sales, roaming about on the forever legs and listening engrossed to the gossip. Every year Newmarket sale ring saw fortunes lost quicker than crashing stock markets, but the talk was all of hope and expectation, of slashing speed and breeding potential, all first-day euphoria and unspent cheques.

'What excitement,' Cassie said. 'You can see it in every face.'

'The joy of acquisition. Disillusion comes next week. Then optimistic gloom. Then, if you're lucky, complacent relief.'

'But today…'

'Today,' I nodded. 'There's still the chance of buying the winner of the Derby.'

I bought two colts and a filly on that evening for staggering sums, reassured to a point by having competed against top echelons of bloodstock agents but pursued by the sapping fear that it was I who had pressed on too far, not they who had stopped too soon.

We stayed to the end of the programme, partly because of Cassie's fascination with a new world but also because it was when the big buyers had gone home that a bargain sometimes arose, and I did in fact buy the last lot of the day, a thin-looking pony-like creature, because I liked his bright eyes.

The breeder thanked me. 'Is it really for Luke Houston?'

'Yes,'I said.

'He won't be sorry. He's intelligent, that little colt.'

'He looks it.'

'He'll grow, you know,' he told me earnestly. 'His dam's family are all late growers. Come and have a drink. It isn't every day I sell one to Luke Houston.'

We went back, however, to drink and eat with Bananas, and from there to the cottage, where I sent off a telexed report to Luke, for whom our midnight was three in the afternoon.

Luke liked telexes. If he wanted to discuss what I'd sent he would telephone after his evening dinner, catching me at six in the morning before I left for the gallops, but more normally he would reply by telex or not at all.

The dining-room was filled with equipment provided by Luke: a video-disc recorder for re-watching and analysing past races, a printout calculator, photo-copier, a row of filing cabinets, an electric typewriter, the telex machine and a complicated affair which answered the telephone, took messages, gave messages, and recorded every word it heard, including my own live conversations. It worked on a separate line from the telephone in the sitting room, a good arrangement which most simply divorced our private calls from his business, allowing me to pay for one and him the other. All he hadn't given me – or had had me collect from an unwilling Warrington Marsh-was a computer.

When I came down the following morning I found the telex had chattered during the night.