Felix Francis - Triple Crown

‘Is there much else to do?’ I asked.

‘We have classes. English most, but also reading and math.’

‘Hey, Maria,’ shouted one of the young men watching the baseball, ‘come and give us a kiss and a cuddle.’

She raised her middle finger to him but she wandered over to join them nevertheless. Maria clearly enjoyed being the centre of attention.

If possible, Diego looked even less happy.

I, meanwhile, went over to another group of eight grooms gathered at the far end of the hall.

‘May I join you?’ I asked in my best Cork accent.

None of them said anything but two shifted along a bench to make some room. I sat down.

‘I’m new here,’ I said. ‘Name’s Paddy. I’m Irish. I started today, on Raworth’s crew.’

All I received was a few nods.

‘I’ve come from working the barns at Santa Anita,’ I went on, ‘in California.’

I received a couple more nods.

‘How about you?’ I asked, turning to the boy sitting right next to me. ‘Been here long?’

‘A while,’ he said nervously, glancing across at an older man.

‘Where do you come from?’ I asked him.

‘Why do you want to know?’ the older man said sharply. He was probably in his early forties, with slicked-back black hair and a matching goatee, and was clearly the group’s leader.

‘I’m only being conversational,’ I said.

‘Well, don’t be,’ the man said abruptly. ‘We don’t like people asking questions. Especially about who we are and where we come from. Too many of us are trying to forget.’

I could see that finding any of Adam Mitchell’s previous grooms was going to be difficult, if not impossible.

This was not the first time I’d come across those with such a sentiment.

I thought of them as victims of a ‘here-and-now’ syndrome — people that exist only for the here and now, without any consideration of their future, and without learning any lessons from their past.

Many habitual criminals have it. It is not that they enjoy going to jail, they just persistently ignore previous experience and mistakenly believe that it will not happen to them again this time. The notion that long prison sentences act as a deterrent against criminal behaviour simply does not apply to such people.

In many respects, steeplechase jockeys have exactly the same here-and-now mentality. History should have taught them that future mounts will fall and they will be seriously injured, but they live only for the here and now, for the thrill of the race, not contemplating for one second the inevitable agony of broken bones or dislocated shoulders. Once they do, it is time to retire.

I stood up and went outside to find a quiet corner to call Tony Andretti.

‘Equine viral arteritis,’ Tony said. ‘EVA.’

‘What is that?’

‘It’s a disease caused by a virus. The three horses at Churchill have tested positive for antibodies in their blood. There’s no doubt. It seems it is quite common in some breeds but less so in Thoroughbreds.’

I’d never heard of it

‘How did they get it?’ I asked.

‘Strictly speaking, according to one of the veterinarians I spoke to, EVA is contagious rather than infectious,’ Tony said. ‘It is a respiratory disease but horses have to have their noses in contact to pass it on, as the virus exists in their nasal discharges — snot to you and me — rather than in the air. But it can also be transmitted via any nasal droplets left on shared tack or feed bowls, anything that is moved from one animal to another, as long as it is done immediately.’

‘How long is the incubation period?’

‘Anywhere from three to fourteen days depending on the strain of the virus and the amount transmitted.’

‘That means that one of them couldn’t have given it to the other two because all three went down with it on the same day. So where did it come from initially?’

‘Maybe there was another horse with a mild case of the disease,’ Tony said. ‘It seems that some horses don’t show any clinical symptoms when infected but they still shed the virus and so can infect others.’

‘Can you find out when those three horses arrived at Churchill Downs and where they stayed when they were there? If you can, find it out for all the Derby runners. See if any were together in a Stakes Barn.’

‘I’ll contact the Churchill backside manager,’ Tony said. ‘He must have had a list of where each horse was housed to know where to detail the sheriff’s deputies.’

‘Also try to discover if there’s anything else that might be a common denominator for those three. Perhaps they flew to Louisville on the same flight or something.’

‘OK,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll get on to it. Oh yes, there’s one more thing. We’ve had the results back from the samples taken from Hayden Ryder’s horses after he was killed in the raid at Churchill. At least half of them were dosed to the eyeballs with the steroid stanozolol and had obviously been running with it in their system.’

‘That’ll be why he was trying to ship them out to Chattanooga.’

‘Stupid man,’ Tony said. ‘Hardly worth dying for.’

I agreed.

‘Anything else?’

‘Not that I can think of at the moment,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you again tomorrow, same time.’

‘I’ll be here.’

I went back into the recreation hall. Maria was now sitting on one of the young men’s laps holding court, and cousin Diego was almost beside himself with rage. Meanwhile, the baseball was in the bottom of the fifth inning, not that anyone was taking much notice any longer.

There was now a far more interesting game to watch — sexual electricity.

I left them to it.

One of my greatest frustrations at working undercover was that I’d had to leave my laptop and iPhone at Tony’s house — a groom working on minimum wage would never have such things — and I desperately wanted to do some Internet research on EVA.

I left Maria to her admirers and sat myself at one of the recreation-hall computer workstations, the one at the far end closest to the wall. I angled the screen such that prying eyes could not see what I was reading.

According to a veterinary website, equine viral arteritis had been first isolated as a separate disease in horses in Ohio in the 1950s, although it had been blighting horses around the world for centuries. It was easily confused with other equine respiratory diseases such as influenza or herpes, and could be confirmed only by the detection of EVA antibodies in blood.

Most infected horses, even those badly affected with the associated hives, conjunctivitis and swelling of the legs, made complete clinical recoveries in three to four weeks without any specific treatment other than rest.

I learned that, apart from the snotty discharge route, it could also be sexually transmitted from stallion to mare.

What’s more, the virus was able to remain permanently active in equine sperm, totally unaffected by the animal’s natural immune system. It seemed that this was because testicles, both equine and human, are strange organs in immunological terms insofar that they generate proteins that are not present at birth. Nature has had to develop a mechanism to prevent the body’s own immune system from reacting against these alien substances when puberty comes around.

And the same process that prevents the immune system from attacking sperm tissue also means that it can’t kill off any virus that settles in the testicles. Consequently, stallions that become infected continue to shed EVA virus in their ejaculate for the rest of their lives, whilst otherwise being entirely healthy.

The owner I had seen weeping behind the media tent at Churchill Downs was about to have a fresh reason to cry. His hoped-for future stud-fee gold mine had struck iron pyrite — fool’s gold.