Felix Francis - Triple Crown

‘Partly because George Raworth trains at Belmont Park. Do you remember telling me that FACSA had conducted a raid on a barn at Belmont last October but had found nothing, the whole place having been steam cleaned?’

‘Of course,’ Tony had said. ‘That was the raid that Jason Connor was so furious about.’

‘Can you recall the name of the trainer?’

‘Man called Mitchell, Adam Mitchell. But he’s now gone from Belmont permanently. He went back to Florida after that trouble and NYRA were glad to see the back of him. We interviewed him in Miami about Jason Connor and how he had been tipped off regarding our raid, but he wasn’t talking. It was a total dead end.’

‘How about his grooms?’

‘They mostly went down with him to Florida. We interviewed some of them too, but they all said they knew nothing. I think they were frightened of Mitchell. That’s why Connor tracked down the one at Laurel, he didn’t go with the others and was apparently prepared to talk, but now even he’s disappeared.’

‘And what that groom said to Connor is anyone’s guess.’

‘Exactly.’

‘There may still be some of Mitchell’s past grooms at Belmont, working for other trainers. I could try to find them.’

‘Seems like a long shot to me,’ Tony had said. ‘Is that the only reason to work for George Raworth?’

‘No. I also want to go there because he won the Kentucky Derby and he has since indicated that he intends to run three horses in the Preakness, including the Derby winner, Fire Point.’

‘What difference does that make?’

‘To start with, it means I may have more chance of getting to Pimlico, but mostly I’m curious as to whether his other two will actually be trying to beat Fire Point, or will they only be there to spoil the chances of the other runners.’

‘You’re a cynic.’ Tony had laughed.

‘Maybe I am. But I believe there is something very fishy about the way those three competitors conveniently all fell ill on the very morning of the Derby.’

‘The track veterinarian didn’t think so,’ Tony had said. ‘He said that it was not uncommon for horses to go off their food and run a fever, especially when being moved around. But, I grant you, it looks a bit suspicious for those three to have fallen ill on that particular day.’

I’d read the vet’s interim report. Not that I’d really understood much of it. It had all been a bit too scientific for me and it didn’t answer the most important question, which was what was wrong with the horses. One of his paragraphs had stuck in my mind: Antigenic drift of antigenically heterologous viruses may reduce the degree and duration of protection conferred by previous infection or vaccination.

The phrase ‘blinding with science’ came to mind. At least I could understand the last bit.

‘Does he think it may have been a new strain of equine influenza?’

‘He doesn’t know yet,’ Tony had replied. ‘Apparently he has to wait for the horses to produce antibodies and then test for those, rather than for the virus itself. It takes a few days.’

But, if it was equine influenza, one of the most infectious diseases around, why hadn’t it infected more of the horses? What was so special about those three? Other than, of course, they were three of the most fancied runners in the Kentucky Derby.

I thought that fact alone was sufficiently suspicious for me to go to work in Raworth’s stable, in order to find out.

My roommate returned from wherever he’d been at about ten minutes to four as I was still lying on my bed. He rushed into our room, grabbed some boots from his locker and was pulling them on before he even noticed me.

He was a short man that I took to be in his fifties. He looked up at me.

‘ Hola, ’ he said, totally unfazed to find another man in his bedroom. ‘ Mi nombre es Rafael Diaz. Y tu? ’

‘Paddy,’ I replied. ‘Paddy Murphy. From Ireland.’

‘ Mexicano, ’ Rafael said, pointing a finger at his chest. ‘ Vine aquí hace diez años. ’

I shook my head. ‘No Español .’

He had exhausted my Spanish by asking my name.

He smiled broadly, exposing the few teeth that still remained in his head, which themselves appeared to be in need of some urgent dental treatment.

‘Mexican,’ he said in heavily accented English. ‘I came to here ten years.’

I climbed down from my bunk and shook his hand. He grinned some more. ‘We go work. No late. Mr Keith say boss come.’

‘Yes,’ I said, looking at the watch on my wrist.

It was five minutes to four.

Don’t be late , Keith had said.

Rafael and I rushed along from the accommodation block to the barn.

‘Come on, you two,’ Charlie Hern shouted at us. ‘Hurry up and get in position.’

We quickly lined up with seven others, including Keith who stood on the end. It reminded me slightly of the FACSA special agent parade at the National Guard facility on the morning of the Hayden Ryder raid.

But that is where the similarity ended.

The FACSA team had been a crack outfit while this motley crew appeared anything but. Instead of a smart uniform, the nine of us wore a variety of T-shirts, jeans and assorted footwear ranging from Rafael’s ankle-high jodhpur boots to my off-white trainers.

George Raworth appeared from the office in which I had been interviewed earlier, and walked over to where we were paraded. He was casually dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt, in contrast to the last time I’d seen him wearing a suit and tie on the giant TV screen at Churchill Downs as he’d led Fire Point into the Derby winner’s circle.

During my stay with Tony and Harriet, I had used the Internet to do some research on Mr George S. Raworth.

He had been born near El Paso in western Texas where his great-great-grandfather had established a longhorn cattle ranch in the 1890s, just as soon as the railroad had arrived to transport the stock to markets in the north.

The 100,000-acre ranch was now run by two of George’s cousins, primarily producing beef for the California market, but also raising American Quarter Horses, a strong muscular breed with a compact body, favoured as cowboys’ working horses, and named for their prowess as the fastest equine breed over a quarter of a mile from a standing start.

George had started his adult life training the young Quarter Horses from the family ranch, racing them at the Lone Star racetrack near Dallas, before graduating to the more lucrative Thoroughbred circuit.

Initial successes had marked him as a new golden-boy of American racing but his reputation had been tarnished over the years by several cases involving the misuse of medications, especially steroids.

He was now in his mid-fifties but looked somewhat older, with a head of prematurely white hair and facial skin ravaged both by teenage acne and by too many of his former years having been spent in the harsh Texas sunshine.

He walked along the line of his staff and stopped in front of me.

‘And who are you?’ he asked in a voice that didn’t have as much drawl as I’d been expecting.

‘I’m Paddy, sir,’ I replied in my best Cork accent. ‘I has only started today.’

‘Well, Paddy,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the most successful training barn in the United States. Did you see the Derby on Saturday?’

‘Indeed I did, sir,’ I said, ‘On TV.’ I smiled broadly at him.

He smiled back and moved on down the line.

Satisfied by the inspection of his staff, he faced us.

‘Well done all,’ he said. ‘Now for the Preakness and then the Triple Crown.’

George turned and went back into the office.

Charlie Hern scowled at the line. ‘Go on then, the lot of you, get to work. Paddy, you go with Maria. She’ll show you what’s where. You’ll do four horses to start with until we see how you go. Maria, show him Stalls One to Four.’