Dick Francis - Twice Shy

'Yes please,' I said fervently. 'Or ask him where I can reach him, and I'll call him. Do tell him it's really urgent, beg him for me, would you? Say it's for Jonathan's sake more than mine.'

'I'll tell him,' she promised, 'as soon as he rings.'

'You're unscrupulous,' Cassie said as I put down the receiver. 'It's for your sake, not Jonathan's.'

'He wouldn't want to weep on his brother's grave.'

'William!'

'A joke,' I said hastily. 'A joke.'

Cassie shivered, however. 'What are you going to do?'

'Think,' I said.

The basic thought was that the more Angelo lost, the angrier he would get, and that the first objective was therefore to stop him betting. Taff and the others could hardly be persuaded not to accept such easy pickings, which left the source of the cash, Harry Gilbert himself. Precisely what, I wondered, could I say to Harry Gilbert which would cut off the stake money without sending Angelo straight round to vent his rage?

I could tell him that Liam O'Rorke's system no longer existed: that I'd got the tapes in good faith but had been tricked myself. I could tell him a lot of half-truths, but whether he would believe me, and whether he could restrain Angelo even if he himself were convinced, of those imponderables there was no forecast.

Realistically there was nothing else to do.

I didn't particularly want to try to trap Angelo into being sent back to jail: fourteen years was enough for any man. I only wanted, as I had all along, for him to leave me alone. I wanted him deflated, defused… docile. What a hope.

A night spent with my mind on pleasanter things produced no cleverer plan. A paragraph in the Sporting Life, read over a quick breakfast after an hour with the horses on the Heath, made me wish that Angelo would solve my problems himself by bashing someone else on the head: about as unlikely as him having a good week on the system. Lancer the bookmaker, said the paper, had been mugged on his own doorstep on returning from Newbury races on Friday evening. His wallet, containing approximately fifty-three pounds, had been stolen. Lancer was OK, police had no leads: poor old Lancer, too bad.

I sighed. Who, I wondered, could I get Angelo to bash?

Besides, of course, myself.

On account of the knee-groper, I was driving Cassie to work whenever possible, and on that morning after I'd dropped her I went straight on to Welwyn Garden City, not relishing my prospects but with not much alternative. I hoped to persuade both Harry Gilbert and Angelo that the havoc the years had caused to the O'Rorke system couldn't be undone, that it was blown, no longer existed, couldn't be recovered. I was going to tell them again that any violence from Angelo would find him back in a cell; to try to make them believe it… to fear it.

I was taller than Angelo and towered over a man in a wheel-chair. I intended slightly to crowd them, faintly to intimidate, certainly to leave a physical impression that it was time for them to back off. Even on Angelo, who must have known how to frighten from childhood, it might have some effect.

Eddy opened the front doors and tried at once to close them again when he saw who had called. I pushed him with force out of my way.

'Harry isn't dressed,' he said fearfully, though whether the fear was of me or of Harry wasn't clear.

'He'll see me,' I said.

'No. You can't.' He tried to bar my way to one of the wide doors at the side of the entrance hall, thereby showing me which way to go, and I walked over there with Eddy trying to edge me out of my path by leaning on me.

I thrust him again aside and opened the door, and found myself in a short passage which led into a large bedroom which was equipped first and most noticeably with another vast window looking out to the golf.

Harry Gilbert lay in a big bed facing the window, ill and growing old but still in some indefinable way not defenceless, even in pyjamas.

'I tried to stop him,' Eddy was saying ineffectually.

'Take this tray and go away,' Harry Gilbert said to him, and Eddy picked off the bedclothes the half-eaten breakfast which I had interrupted. 'Shut the door.' He waited until Eddy had retreated and then frostily to me said, 'Well?'

'I've discovered,' I said with urgency, 'that Liam O'Rorke's betting system has the equivalent of smallpox. It should be treated like the plague. It'll bring trouble to all who touch it. The old system has been through too many hands, been adulterated by the years. It's gone bad. If you want to save your cash, you'll stop Angelo using it, and it's pointless getting angry with me on any counts. I got the system for you in good faith and I'm furious to find it's useless. Bring Angelo in here and let me tell him.'

Harry Gilbert stared at me with his usual unreadable face, and it was without any visible consternation that he said in his semi-slurred way, 'Angelo isn't here. He is cashing my cheque at the bank. He is going to Leicester races.'

'He will lose,' I said. 'I didn't need to warn you. I'm warning you. Your money will be lost.'

Thoughts must have traversed the brain behind the cold eyes but nothing much showed. Finally, and it must have been with an inner effort, he said, 'Can you stop him?'

'Stop the cheque,' I said. 'Call the bank.'

He glanced at a clock beside him. 'Too late.'

'I can go to Leicester,' I said. 'I'll try to find him.'

After a pause he said, 'Very well.'

I nodded briefly and left him, and drove towards Leicester feeling that even if I had managed to convince Harry, which was in itself uncertain, I was facing the impossible with Angelo. The impossible all the same had to be tried: and at least, I thought, he wouldn't actually attack me on a busy racecourse.

Leicester races on that cold autumn day turned out to be as busy as a well-smoked beehive, with only a scattering of dark-coated figures trudging about doggedly, head-down to the biting wind. As sometimes happened on city-based tracks on weekdays, the crowd was thin to the point of embarrassment, the whole proceedings imbued with the perfunctory and temporary air of a ritual taking place without fervour.

Taff was stamping about by his beer crate, blowing on his fingers and complaining that he would have done better business if he'd gone to the day's other meeting at Bath.

'But there's the Midlands Cup here,' he said. 'It'll be a good race. I thought it would pull them- and look at them, not enough punters to sing auld lang syne round a tea-pot.' The Welsh accent was ripe with disgust.

'What are you making favourite?' I said smiling.

'Pink Flowers.'

'And what about Terrybow?'

'Who?'

'Runs in the Midlands Cup,' I said patiently. Terrybow, the computer's choice, top of the win factors. Terrybow with a habit of finishing tenth of twelve, or seventh of eight, or fifteenth of twenty: never actually last but a long way from success.

'Oh, Terrybow.' He consulted a notebook. 'Twenties, if you like.'

'Twenty to one?'

'Twenty-fives then. Can't say fairer than twenty-five. How much do you want?'

'How much would you take?'

'Whatever you like,' he said cheerfully. 'No limit. Not unless you know something I don't, like it's stuffed to the eyeballs with rocket dust.'

I shook my head and looked along the row of cold disgruntled bookmakers who were doing a fraction of their usual trade. If Angelo had been among them I would have seen him easily, but there was no sign of him. The Midlands Cup was the fourth race on the programme and still an hour ahead, and if Angelo was sticking rigidly to the disaster-laden system, Terrybow would be the only horse he would back.

'Have you seen Angelo Gilbert here today, Taff?' I asked.

'No.' He took a bet from a furtive-looking man in a raincoat and gave him a ticket. 'Ten at threes, Walkie-Talkie,' he told his clerk.