Felix Francis - Triple Crown

Even if the three infected colts recovered sufficiently quickly from the disease itself to become champion racehorses, they would never be permitted to stand at stud for fear of infecting the mares they covered, often resulting in barren seasons or miscarriages.

I also discovered that a vaccine existed against EVA but it was not widely used in the United States or Europe unless there had been a specific outbreak.

The vaccine worked, as did most vaccines, by introducing a quantity of dead virus, which couldn’t infect the horse but nevertheless stimulated the production of antibodies in the blood. These antibodies would remain in the system and immediately kill off any live virus that might subsequently appear, so preventing infection.

Because the illness was relatively rare in Thoroughbreds and generally short-lived without any lasting complications, the racehorse population was not routinely vaccinated.

The only animals for which infection was a serious matter were stallions or sexually mature colts destined to be such. But there was an added problem. If vaccinated, a routine blood test of a colt would confirm EVA antibodies and it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove that those antibodies were as a result of the vaccine rather than due to the live virus.

Would you then take the chance of breeding the stallion with your best mare?

Hence colts were also not normally vaccinated as a matter of course. It was only given to valuable stallions, when it could be categorically proven by every single test available that they were free of the virus prior to vaccination.

So where did that leave the seventeen other colts that had made it to the starting gate in Louisville the previous Saturday and, in particular, the winner? Any colt that won the Kentucky Derby would be expected to retire to a lucrative career at stud after his racing days were over.

It was now almost five days since the three horses had become ill. With an incubation period of up to two weeks, there were still another nervous nine illness-free days to go before it could be safe to assume that Fire Point and the others had not also contracted the disease.

I clicked off the website and erased the web history. I am sure that some computer whiz kid would have been able to find out precisely what I’d been browsing, and there would definitely be a record on the server, but no one here would casually be able to look.

Next I checked my emails.

Among the usual junk were several messages from work colleagues in London, most of which I was able to ignore.

But there was one from Nigel Green that caught my eye.

He reported that Jimmy Robinson, the jockey nicked for buying banned diuretics in the A34 lay-by, had since been sacked as stable jockey for a top Newmarket establishment. He may not have done anything against the law of the land but British racing valued its integrity.

‘Be warned though,’ Nigel wrote, ‘there’s a strong rumour he’s off to ride for a trainer called Sidney Austin in New York.’

Nigel was one of the very few people at the horseracing authority who knew where I was, and why. Most of the others believed I was on extended unpaid leave, visiting friends in the Far East and Australia.

I scanned again through the list of emails.

There was nothing from Henrietta.

I hadn’t really expected there to be and, strangely, I wasn’t sure if I was happy or sad by the omission.

However, there was one from Faye.

She said that her new course of chemotherapy had started and it was making her tired but, as always, she was positive about the outcome and didn’t complain — although, God knows, she had enough to complain about.

As usual, she was more concerned with me than herself, asking how I was doing and reminding me that I was to (a) get enough sleep, (b) eat healthily and (c) launder my clothes regularly.

I smiled. She couldn’t help herself. Faye had taken over the maternal role when I was eight and she’d been twenty, when our dear mother had died from cancer.

Here we were, twenty-five years later, and nothing had changed.

I wrote back sending her all my love and wishing her success with the treatment. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be too emotional about it, so I wasn’t. I knew she could just about hold everything together provided everyone else was not wailing and whining on her behalf. We all had to be strong individually and collectively.

I also assured her that I was doing all the things she asked, even though privately I thought that getting enough sleep might be a problem. Maria had already told me we had to be at work at 4.30 a.m. now that May was here.

It seemed that George Raworth liked the horses to go out for their exercise before the heat of the day became too great. I couldn’t think why. All the racing at Belmont in summer was in the afternoon when the mercury was at its highest. Surely part of the training should be to get the horses accustomed to running fast when it was hot.

But it had been made very clear to me by Charlie Hern that my place as a groom was not to question anything — it was only to do exactly as I was told.

Sleep on the top bunk did not come easily, not least because of my flatulent roommate lying below.

I had returned from the recreation hall at eight-fifteen, as it was getting dark, to find that someone had been tampering with my belongings.

My holdall had been still there on my bed, where I’d left it and, as far as I could tell, nothing had been taken, but I was certain someone had been through it. I had purposely left the zips in a particular position so that I’d be able to tell, and there was no doubt they had been moved. They weren’t even close to where I’d left them.

I smiled to myself.

If I’d been working here and someone new turned up out of the blue, I’d have had a look through their stuff too. But that was probably because I was naturally curious.

I emptied the contents of the canvas bag onto my bed.

All my usual smart clothes, including my Armani suit and my silk ties, were safely hanging in the guest-room closet in Tony Andretti’s home, along with my polished black-leather shoes, my smart leather toilet bag, my Raymond Weil wristwatch and my suitcase.

I had spent some of Monday afternoon at a discount store at the Fair Oaks mall in Fairfax, buying five ten-dollar T-shirts, two pairs of bargain jeans, plus other sundry items like underwear and a patterned green nylon sweater that I wouldn’t ordinarily be seen dead in. I also picked up some discounted sneakers, a pair of faux-leather black loafers, a plastic wash bag, a cheap digital watch with an imitation crocodile strap, and a blue baseball cap with the interlinked LA logo of the Los Angeles Dodgers on the front from a sportswear shop.

I then amused Tony by rubbing the lot of them in the dirt in his backyard and scuffing the shoes against the brick wall of his garage. Next, the dirty clothes all went into his washer, together with the sneakers and the baseball cap, for a couple of cycles without any detergent or softener.

My new clothes hadn’t been particularly fashionable to start with but, afterwards, they looked just as I had wanted — drab and rather shabby, with the white underwear now a delicate shade of grey.

I stacked everything in my locker.

At the bottom of my holdall, underneath all the clothes, I had meticulously placed two pieces of folder paper with one of them sticking out from the other by precisely the width of my thumb.

The pieces were still there but now they were folded together in line. Someone had definitely been peeping.

Not that the papers were secret or anything. They weren’t. In fact, I had left them there in order for them to be looked at.