Felix Francis - Dick Francis's Gamble

I had also discovered that being regularly seen at the races was the best way to recruit new clients, which was why I was currently standing on the terrace in front of the Weighing Room, warming myself in the midday April sunshine, more than ninety minutes before the first race.

“Hi, Foxy. Penny for your thoughts? What a lovely day, eh? Did you see the National yesterday?” Martin Gifford was a large, jovial, middle-ranking racehorse trainer who always joked that he had never made it as a jockey due to his large feet. The fact that he stood more than six feet tall and had a waist measurement that a sumo wrestler would have been proud of seemed to have escaped him.

“No,” I said, “I missed it. I was stuck in the office all day. I just saw the short report on the television news. But I’d been at Aintree on Saturday.”

“Bloody rum business, that was,” Martin said. “Fancy postponing the Grand National just because some bastard got themselves killed.”

He had obviously been reading the papers.

“How do you know he was a bastard?” I asked.

Martin looked at me strangely. “Because it said so in the paper.”

“I thought you knew better than to believe what you read in the papers.” I paused, deciding whether to go on. “The person murdered was a friend of mine. I was standing right next to him when he was shot.”

“Bloody hell!” shouted Martin. “God, I’m sorry. Trust me to jump in with both feet.”

Trust him, indeed. “It’s OK,” I said. “Forget it.”

I was suddenly cross with myself for even mentioning it to him. Why hadn’t I just kept quiet? Everyone in racing knew that Martin Gifford was a five-star gossip. In an industry where there were many who believed that there was no such thing as a private conversation or a secret, Martin was the past master. He seemed to have a talent for knowing other people’s private business and passing it on to anyone who would listen. Telling Martin that the murder victim had been a friend of mine was akin to placing a full-page spread in the Racing Post to advertise the fact, except quicker. Everyone at Cheltenham would probably know by the end of the afternoon, and I was already regretting my indiscretion.

“So was the National a good race?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“I suppose so,” he said. “Diplomatic Leak won easily in the end, but he made a right hash of the Canal Turn first time round. Nearly ended up in the canal.”

“Were there many people there?” I asked.

“Looked pretty full to me,” he said. “But I watched it on the television.”

“No runners?” I asked, but I knew he hadn’t any.

“I haven’t had a National horse for years,” he said. “Not since Frosty Branch in the nineties, and it was the death of him, poor fellow.”

“Any runners today?” I asked.

“Fallen Leaf in the first and Yellow Digger in the three-mile chase.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“Yeah. We’ll need it,” he said. “Fallen Leaf probably wouldn’t win if he started now, and I don’t rate Yellow Digger very highly at all. He has no chance.” He paused. “So who was this friend of yours who got killed?”

Dammit, I thought. I’d hoped he would leave it, but I should have known better. Martin Gifford hadn’t earned his reputation for nothing.

“He was just a work colleague, really,” I said, trying to sound indifferent.

“What was his name?”

I wondered if I should I tell him. But why not? It had been in all of yesterday’s papers.

“Herbert Kovak.”

“And why was he killed?” Martin demanded.

“I’ve no idea,” I said. “As I told you, he was only a work colleague.”

“Come on, Foxy,” Martin said in an inviting tone. “You must have some inkling.”

“No. None. Nothing.”

He looked disappointed, like a child told he can’t have any sweets.

“Go on,” he implored once more. “I know you’re holding something back. You can tell me.”

And half the world, I thought.

“Honestly, Martin,” I said. “I have absolutely no idea why he was killed or who did it. And if I did, I’d be telling the police, not you.”

Martin shrugged his shoulders as if to imply he didn’t fully believe me. Too bad, I thought. It was true.

I was saved from further inquisition by another trainer, Jan Setter, who was everything that Martin Gifford wasn’t-short, slim, attractive and fun. She grabbed my arm and turned me around, away from Martin.

“Hello, lover boy,” she whispered in my ear while giving me a kiss on the cheek. “Fancy a dirty weekend away?”

“I’m ready when you are,” I whispered back. “Just name your hotel.”

She pulled back and laughed.

“Oh, you’re such a tease,” she said, looking up at me beguilingly from beneath her heavily mascaraed eyelids.

But it was she who was the tease, and she’d been doing it since we had first met more than ten years ago. Back then I had been an impressionable eighteen-year-old, just starting out, and she was an established trainer for whom I was riding. I hadn’t really known how to react, whether to be flattered or frightened. Apart from anything else, she’d been a married woman at the time.

Nowadays, she was a mid- to late-forties divorcée who seemed intent on enjoying life. Not that she didn’t work hard. Her stables in Lambourn were full, with about seventy horses in training, and, as I knew from experience, she ran the place with great efficiency and determination.

Jan had been one of my clients now for three years, ever since she had acquired a substantial sum from her ex during a very public High Court divorce case.

I adored her, and not just for her patronage. Perhaps I should accept her invitation to a dirty weekend away, but that would then have changed everything.

“How’s my money?” she asked.

“Alive and kicking,” I replied.

“And growing, I hope.” She laughed.

So did I. “How was the preview?”

“Fabulous,” she said. “I took my daughter, Maria, and a college friend of hers. We had a really wonderful time. The show was terrific.”

At my suggestion, Jan had invested a considerable sum in a new West End musical based on the life of Florence Nightingale set during the Crimean War. The true opening night was a week or so away, but the previews had just started, and I’d read some of the newspaper reports and prereviews. They had been somewhat mixed but that didn’t always mean the show wouldn’t be a success. The Wizard of Oz spin-off musical, Wicked , had been panned by the New York Times after its opening night on Broadway, but it was still running there more than seven years and three thousand performances later, and it was breaking box-office records all around the world.

“Some of the prereviews are not great,” I said.

“I can’t think why,” Jan replied with surprise. “That girl that plays Florence is gorgeous, and what a voice! I think she’ll make me a fortune. I am sure the proper reviews after the first night will be fabulous.” She laughed. “But I’ll blame my financial adviser if they aren’t and I lose it all.”

“I hear he has broad shoulders,” I said, laughing back.

But it wasn’t necessarily a laughing matter. Investing in the theater had always been a high-risk strategy and fortunes had been lost far more often than they’d been won. Not that investing in anything was certain. It was always a gamble. I had known some seemingly cast-iron and gold-plated investments go belly-up almost without warning. Shares in big established companies were usually safe, with expected steady growth, but that was not always the case. Enron shares had fallen from a healthy ninety dollars each to just a few cents within ten weeks, while Health South Inc., once one of America’s largest health care providers, had lost ninety-eight percent of its value on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Both those collapses had been due to fraud or dodgy accounting practices, inflating their revenues and profits, but business catastrophes can have the same effect. BP shares fell in value by more than fifty percent in a month when an oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico even though the costs associated with the explosion, and the subsequent oil clearup, represented far less than half the company’s assets.