Dick Francis - Even Money

Many in the racing industry, both privately and publicly, called all bookmakers “the enemy.” They accused us of taking money out of racing. But we were only making a living, just like them. They too bought their fancy cars and enjoyed their foreign holidays, and what was that if it wasn’t “taking money out of racing”? The big firms, although no friends of mine, spent millions of their profits on race sponsorship, and we all paid extra tax on gambling profits on top of the “levy,” a sum that was also taken from bookmakers’ profits and put back into racing via the Horserace Betting Levy Board.

The betting levy provided more than half the country’s total race prize money, as well as contributing to the cost of the dope testing, the patrol cameras and the photo-finish systems. Plenty of the trainers hated all bookmakers with a passion, but they still bet with them, and they couldn’t seem to see that the future of racing, and consequently their own futures, relied totally on the public continuing to gamble on the horses.

“Larry,” I said, “did your Internet go down just before the last race on Tuesday?”

“I believe it did,” he said. “But it happens all the time. You know that.”

“Yes,” I said. “But did you know that all the mobile phones went off at the same time?”

“Did they indeed,” he said. “Anyone hit?”

“Not that I know of,” I replied.

“I’ll bet there was quite a queue at the pay phone on the High Street,” he said with a laugh. There was a public telephone just outside the racetrack, one of the few remaining now that everyone seemed to have a mobile.

“Yeah,” I said, joining in with his amusement, “I bet you’re right.”

Business was brisk in the run-up to the first race. As always when there was a really big crowd, many punters liked to place all their bets for the whole day before the first so that they didn’t have to relinquish their viewing spots between races. Acquiring seats in the Royal Enclosure viewing area on the fourth floor of the grandstand was as difficult as obtaining a straight answer from a politician. Once secured, they were not given up lightly.

Consequently, we were taking bets for all races, able to quote our odds thanks to the prices offered on the Internet gambling sites, where bets would have been made all morning. Again, it was the computer running the show, with us humans at its beck and call.

“What did that copper want yesterday afternoon?” Betsy asked me.

“Just a few more questions about getting mugged on Tuesday,” I replied matter-of-factly. Even though I had initially asked Betsy to take over for just a few minutes, I had actually left her and Luca for the whole of the last race. They had also had to pack up all our equipment on their own while I had spoken with Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn for well over an hour. But it was not often that a man discovers that his mother was murdered by his father.

I thought back to what the detective chief inspector had told me.

“Your mother was strangled,” he’d said. It had turned me icy cold on one of the hottest days of the year.

“But how do you know that my father was responsible?” I’d asked him.

“Well,” he’d said, “it seems it was suspected when he suddenly disappeared at the same time. According to the records, some people thought he must have killed himself as well, though no body was ever found, of course. But the DNA match has proved it.”

“How?” I asked, although I was dreading the answer.

“Your mother apparently scratched her attacker, and his skin was found under her fingernails. At the time of the murder, DNA testing wasn’t available but the evidence samples were kept. During a cold-case review about five years ago, a DNA profile of the killer was produced and added to the national DNA database. As we have now discovered, it matches your father exactly.” He had said it in a very deadpan manner, unaware of the torment such knowledge was creating in my head.

In less than a single twenty-four-hour period, I had first met my father and realized that I was not the orphan I thought I had been for the past thirty-seven years, watched helplessly while my newfound parent was fatally stabbed, and, finally, discovered that he had been nothing more than a callous murderer, the killer of my mother. It wasn’t my father’s life that was the soap opera, it was mine.

“Do they have any idea who did it?” asked Betsy, suddenly bringing me back from my daydreaming.

“Did what?” I asked.

“The mugging, stupid.”

“Oh,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. They didn’t say so anyway.”

“Probably some kids,” she said. She was little more than a kid herself. “Larking about.”

I didn’t think that murder was exactly larking about, but I decided not to say so. Family secrets were best kept that way-secret.

The afternoon seemed to slip by without me really noticing. Luca had to keep reminding me to pay attention to our customers.

“For God’s sake, Ned,” he shouted in my ear, “get the bloody things right.” He exchanged yet another inaccurate ticket. “What’s wrong with you today?”

“Nothing,” I replied. But I felt lousy, and my mind was elsewhere.

“Could have fooled me,” he said. “You never normally make mistakes.”

I did, but I was usually more expert at covering them up. “Sophie’s not good,” I said. It was the easy excuse. Luca knew all about Sophie’s condition. I may have wanted to keep it a secret, even from him, but that had been impossible over the years. Too often I had been forced to take days off work in order to be with her. Luca Mandini was a licensed bookmaker in his own right, and he’d often covered for me, first with a friend and, more recently, with Betsy, who could hardly conceal her excitement when she knew I would be away.

“Sorry,” Luca said. He never asked for details. He seemed almost embarrassed. “Bloody hell,” he suddenly shouted.

“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.

“Internet’s gone down again,” he said, stabbing his keyboard with his finger.

I looked at my watch. A little less than five minutes to go before the Gold Cup was due to start.

“How about the phones?” I asked him, turning around.

He was already pushing the buttons on his mobile.

“Nothing,” he said, looking up at me. “No signal. Same as before.”

I turned and looked around the betting ring at the other bookmakers, especially those to my right along the Royal Enclosure rail. Outwardly, there appeared to be no sense of alarm. Business was being carried on as usual. I could see a few of the boys from the big outfits pushing buttons on their phones with no success. One or two of them dashed away to seek other forms of communication with their head offices, and the man from the Press Association who was responsible for setting the starting prices had come down from his place in the stands to look at the bookies’ boards. No Internet connection also meant he didn’t get the necessary information directly to his computer screen.

“Two monkeys, six horse,” said a punter in front of me.

A “monkey” was betting slang for five hundred pounds, two monkeys was a thousand, or a grand. It was a fair-sized bet, and bigger than most, but, over the year, we took lots of bets of a thousand pounds or more, so it was not that unusual. However, I took a careful look at my customer. Was it a coincidence, I wondered, that our biggest bet of the day was laid just seconds after the Internet and the phones went off?

There was nothing about the man that made me think that he was up to no good. He was a regular racegoer, with a white shirt open at the neck and fawn chinos. I didn’t recognize him as one of the regular boys from the big outfits, but I would know him again, I made sure of that.