Dick Francis - Twice Shy

'Be glad to,' I said.

He nodded with customary brusqueness. 'See you there, then.'

'Good luck.'

He was going up on the Wednesday for the whole of the four-day meeting but I didn't particularly want to, not least because Cassie still found it difficult to manage on her own with the rigid arm. I left her on the Friday, though, and drove to Doncaster, and almost the first person I saw as I walked through the racecourse gates was Angelo.

I stopped abruptly and turned aside, willing him not to spot me, not to speak.

He was buying two racecards from one of the booths near the entrance, holding up the queue while he sorted out coins.

I supposed it was inevitable I would one day see him if he took to racegoing at all often, but somehow it was still a shock. I was glad when he turned away from the booth in the opposite direction to where I stood: there might be a truce between us but it was fragile at best.

I watched while he barged his way through the swelling crowd with elbows like battering rams and thighs like rocks: he was heading not to anywhere where he could place a bet but towards the less populated area near the rails of the track itself, where supporters had not yet flocked to see the first race. Reaching the rails, he stopped beside an elderly man in a wheelchair and unceremoniously thrust one of the racecards into his hands. Then he turned immediately on his heel and bulled his way purposefully towards the serried ranks of bookmakers inside the stands, where I lost sight of him, thankfully, for the rest of the day.

He was back, however, on the Saturday. Although I seldom bothered with gambling, I decided to have a small bet on Genotti in the St Leger, infected no doubt by Mort's fanatical eagerness, and as I stood near a little Welsh bookmaker whom I'd long known, I saw Angelo, thirty feet away, frowning heavily over a small notebook.

'Genotti,' my bookmaker friend said to his clerk who wrote down (in the book) every transaction, 'Three tenners at fives, William Derry.'

'Thanks, Taff,' I said.

Along the row Angelo began arguing about a price on offer, which was apparently less than he thought fair.

'Everyone else is at five to one.' His voice was a growl which I knew all too well.

'Try someone else, then. It's fours to you, Mister Gilbert.'

With half my mind I was satisfied that Angelo was indeed rushing in stupidly with the system where Liam O'Rorke and Ted Pitts had taken care not to tread, but also I was uneasy that he should be arousing opposition so soon. I positively needed for him to win for a while. I'd never envisaged him sticking to the anonymous drudgery required for long-term success, but the honeymoon period should not already have been over.

Taff-the-bookmaker glanced over his shoulder at the altercation and gave his clerk an eyes-to-heaven gesture.

'What's all the fuss about?' I asked.

'He's a right git, that man.' Taff divided his comment impartially between him, his clerk, and the world in general.

'Angeio Gilbert.'

Taff's gaze sharpened on me directly. 'Know him, do you?'

'Somebody pointed him out… he murdered somebody, years ago.'

'That's right. Just out of jug, he is. And stupid – you wouldn't credit it.'

'What's he done?'

'He came up to York last week with a fistful of banknotes, laying it about as if there were no tomorrow, and us not knowing who he was at that moment. And there's us thinking we were all taking lollipops off a baby when whammo, this outsider he'd invested about six big ones on comes cantering in from nowhere and we're all paying out and wincing and scratching our heads over where he got the info, because the trainer hadn't had as much as a quid on, as far as we knew. So Lancer, that bloke along there arguing with this Gilbert, he asks this geezer straight out who'd put him onto the winner, and the stupid git smirked and said Liam O'Rorke did.'

Taff peered at my face, which I felt must have mirrored my feeling of inner shock, but apparently it merely looked blank because Taff, who was a good sixty-plus, made a clicking sound with his mouth and said, 'Before your time, I suppose.'

'What was?'

Taff's attention was torn away by several customers who crowded to place bets, and he seemed vaguely surprised to see me still there when they'd gone.

'Are you that interested?' he asked.

'Got nothing else to do.'

Taff glanced along to where Angelo had been, but Angelo had gone. 'Thirty years ago. Thirty-five. Time does go quick. There was this old Irishman, Liam O'Rorke, he'd invented the only system I ever knew that would guarantee you'd win. Course, once we'd cottoned to him we weren't all that keen to take his bets. I mean, we wouldn't be, would we, knowing he had the edge on us somehow. Anyway, he would never part with his secret, how he did it, and it went with him to the grave, and good riddance, between you and me.'

'And now?'

'And now here's this geezer rocking us back on our heels with this huge win at York and then he's sneering at us and calling us mugs, and saying we don't know what's hit us yet, and what he's using on us is Liam O'Rorke's old system resurrected, and now he's all indignant and complaining that we won't give him a good price. Acting all hurt and angry.' Taff laughed contemptuously. 'I mean, how stupid can you get?'

Genotti won the St Leger by an easy four lengths.

Mort's excitement afterwards seemed to levitate him visibly off the ground, the static electricity about him crackling in the dry September sunshine. He wrung my hand with bone-scrunching enthusiasm and danced round the unsaddling enclosure giving rapturous responses to all who congratulated him, reacting with such uncomplicated delight to his victory that he had all the crowd smiling. It was easy, I reflected, to think of Mort as simple through and through, whereas, as I had gradually discovered, he traversed mental mazes of tortuous routes where pros battled cons like moves on a chessboard, and the plans and solutions which seemed so obvious once they had turned out to be right were the fruits of the mazes.

I collected my winnings from Taff, who gloomily said he would never have given anyone five to one if he'd known beforehand that Genotti was Angelo Gilbert's fancy.

'Did Angelo win?' I asked.

'Of course, he did. He must have had a grand on. None of us would take his money at the finish.'

'So he didn't get fives?'

'More like evens,' he said sourly.

At evens, Angelo would still have doubled his money, but for Angelo that might not be enough. Grievance, I could see, might raise a very ugly head.

'No system could win every single time,' I said. 'Angelo won't.'

'I dare say not,' Taff said with obstinancy. 'But you can take it from me that no bookie on the racecourse will in future give that arrogant so-and-so much more than evens, even if what he's backing is lame on three legs, carrying two stone overweight and ridden by my old dad.'

'At evens, he wouldn't win over all,' I said.

'So who's crying? We're not in the loving-kindness business, you know.'

'Fleece the mugs?'

'You got it.'

He began paying out other successful punters with the rapidity of long practice but it was seldom that he would go home from a racetrack with less cash than he'd brought. Few bookmakers were gamblers at heart and only the good mathematicians survived.

I drifted away from him and drank some champagne with the similarly fizzing Mort and a little later helped Sim to saddle the filly, who made it another hooray-for-Houston day by a short head. Sim took it more calmly than Mort, but with a satisfaction at least as deep, and he seemed to be admitting and acknowledging at last that I was not an ignorant bossy upstart but a well-meaning colleague and that all Luke's successes worked for our joint good. I wasn't sure how or why his attitude had changed, I knew only that a month earlier a friendly drink together in a racecourse bar to celebrate a Houston winner would have been unthinkable.