Dick Francis - Twice Shy

Thinking more of Mort and Sim and the horses than of the still active spectre of Angelo, I drove from Doncaster to collect Cassie, and from there to a late dinner with Bananas. He too, it appeared, had backed Genotti, more than doubling my own winnings.

'I had a hundred on,' he said.

'I didn't know you ever bet.'

'On the quiet, now and then. Hearing all I do, how could I not?'

'So what did you hear about Genotti?'

He looked at me pityingly. 'Every time you've seen that colt work on the gallops, you've come back like a kid with tickets to the Cup Final.'

'More to the point,' Cassie said, 'if you'd used Liam O'Rorke's system, would it have come up with Genotti?'

'Ah.' I read Bananas's new menu and wondered what he meant by Prisoner Chicken. Said casually, 'Angelo Gilbert backed him.'

'What?'

I explained about Angelo, the bookmakers, and stupidity in general.

'He's blown it,' Cassie said, not without satisfaction.

I nodded. 'Into fragments.'

Bananas looked at me thoughtfully. 'What's it going to do for the dear man's temper?'

'It's not William's fault,' Cassie said.

'That trifle didn't stop him before.'

Cassie looked frowningly alarmed. 'What's Prisoner Chicken?' I said.

Bananas smirked. 'Breast of chicken marinated in lemon juice and baked under match-stick thin bars of herb pastry.'

'It sounds dry,'! said with jaundice.

'Bread and water are optional extras.'

Cassie laughed and Angelo retreated a little. We ate the Prisoner Chicken which was predictably a delight of juice and flavour and reminded us not at all of its inspiration.

I'm going to Ireland tomorrow,' I said to Cassie. 'Like to come?'

' Ireland? There and back?'

I nodded. 'To see a man about a horse.'

'What else?'

So we spent some of my winnings on her fare, and went down south of Wexford to see the colt all the world wanted: and half the world, it seemed, was there on the same errand, standing around an untidy stable yard with blank faces all carefully not expressing identical inner thoughts.

Cassie watched as the beautifully coupled brown yearling skittered around under the calming hands of the stud groom and unprofessionally pronounced him 'sweet'.

'A money machine on the hoof,' I said. 'Look at the greed in all those shuttered faces.'

'They just seem uninterested to me.'

'Enthusiasm puts the price up.'

One or two of the bored-looking onlookers advanced to run exploratory hands down the straight young bones, stepping back with poker-playing non-committal eyes, the whole procedure hushed as if in church.

'Aren't you going to feel its legs?' Cassie asked.

'Might as well.'

I took my turn in the ritual, and found like everyone else that the young limbs were cool and firm with tendons like fiddle strings in all the right places. There was also a good strong neck, a well-shaped quarter and most importantly a good depth of chest. Quite apart from his pedigree, which resounded with Classic winners, one couldn't, I thought, even imagine a better-looking animal: all of which meant that the bidding at the sale on Wednesday would rise faster than Bananas Frisby.

We flew thoughtfully back to England and I sent a telex to Luke. 'Bidding for the Hansel colt will be astronomical. I've seen him. He is without fault. How high do you want me to go?'

To which, during the night, I received a reply. 'It's your job, fella. You decide.'

Ouch, I thought. Where is the ceiling? How high is disaster?

Newmarket filled up again for the new week of sales, the most important programme of yearling sales of the whole season. Everyone in racing with money to spend brought determination and dreams, and the four-legged babies came in horseboxes from just up the road, from Kent and the Cotswolds, from Devon and Scotland, from across the Irish Sea.

The Hansel colt from Wexford was due to be sold at the prime time of seven-thirty on the Wednesday evening and by seven the high-rising banks of seats of the sale ring were invisible under a sea of bodies, Cassie somewhere among them. Down near the floor in the pen reserved for probable bidders, Donavan was breathing heavily at my elbow as he had been all afternoon, determinedly sober and all the gloomier for it.

'Now you get that little colt, now, you get him for me.' If he'd said it once he'd said it a hundred times, as if repetition of desire could somehow make the purchase certain.

They brought the colt into the ring in the sudden hush of a host of lungs holding back their breath all at once, and the light gleamed on the walking gem and he did in truth look like a prince who could sire a dynasty.

The bidding for him started not in thousands but in tens of thousands, leaping in seconds to the quarter million and racing away beyond. I waited until the first pause and raised the price by a giant twenty-five thousand, to be immediately capped by a decisive nod from an agent along to my right. I raised another twenty-five and lost it as quickly, and another, and another: and I could go on nodding, I thought, until my head fell off. Nothing easier in the world than spending someone else's money as fast as noughts running through the meter on a petrol pump.

At eight hundred thousand guineas I just stopped. The auctioneer looked at me enquiringly. I didn't blink. 'Against you, sir,' he said.

'Go on,' said Donavan, thinking I'd merely overlooked that it was my turn. 'Go on, go on.'

I shook my head. Donavan turned and literally punched me on the arm in an agony of fear that my dithering would lose him the colt. 'Go on, it's you. Bid, you bugger, bid.'

'Any more, sir?' the auctioneer said.

I again shook my head. Donavan kicked my leg. The auctioneer looked around the silent sale ring. 'All done, then?' he said: and after a lifetime's pause his gavel came down sharply, the clap of opportunity gone for ever. 'Sold to Mr O'Flaherty. Next lot, please.'

Under the buzz of comment that followed the super-colt out of the ring, Donavan thrust a furious purple face towards mine and yelled uninhibitedly, 'You buggering bastard. Do you know who bought that colt?'

'Yes I do.'

'I'll kill you, so I will.'

Shades of Angelo…

'There's no reason,' I said, 'why Luke should pay for your feud with Mick O'Flaherty.'

'That colt will win the Derby.'

I shook my head. 'You're afraid it will.'

'I'll write to Luke, so I will. I'll tell him it's you who's afraid. Bloody English. I'd kill the lot of you.'

He stalked away with rage pouring visibly from every pore, and I watched him with regret because I would indeed have liked to buy him his little fellow and seen him croon over him to make him a champion.

'Why did you stop?' Cassie asked, taking my arm.

'Does it worry you?'

She blinked. 'You know what they're saying?'

'That I didn't have the nerve to go on?'

'It was just that I heard…'

I smiled lop-sidedly. 'My first big battle, and I retreated. Something like that?'

'Something.'

'O'Flaherty and Donavan hate each other so much it curdles their judgment. I meant to go as far as seven hundred and fifty thousand guineas and I thought I'd get the colt, I really did, because that's an extremely high price for any yearling. I went one bid higher still, but it wasn't enough. O'Flaherty was standing behind his agent prodding him in the back to make him carry on. I could see him. O'Flaherty was absolutely determined to buy the colt. To spite Donavan, I think. It isn't sense to go on bidding against someone compelled by raw emotion, so I stopped.'

'But what if he does win the Derby?'

'About ten thousand thoroughbred colts were born last year in the British Isles alone. Then there's France and America too. One colt from that huge crop will win the Derby the year after next, when he's three. The odds are against it being this one.'