Felix Francis - Triple Crown

I ignored him.

I stayed close to Raworth’s barn right through until evening stables, waiting and watching, but nothing happened.

The horses spent the time in their stalls, alternately snoozing in the afternoon heat or munching from their haynets.

I wondered what dried grass tasted of, and how hungry a man would have to be to try it. I had certainly seen news items on the television where starving people had tried to sustain themselves by eating boiled leaves.

Thankfully, I wasn’t yet at that stage, although a dull ache of hunger had settled into the pit of my stomach and I was really looking forward to my supper.

At about three-thirty I stood up and stretched my legs, walking round the shedrow to stay in the shade. I could hear canned laughter from the office where Keith was again watching a comedy show on the TV.

I didn’t really want to have to chat to him so I avoided going past the open office door and retraced my steps down to the other end of the barn.

I tried the feed-store door.

It was locked. Of course it was locked.

The feed store was always kept locked except when Charlie Hern or Keith were actually issuing the horse nuts from the feed bins.

And the drug store within would also surely be locked, quite likely with frozen EVA-contaminated semen in the cryogenic flask hidden away in its bottom corner.

How I could have done with my lock picks to check.

Evening stables started at four o’clock under the close eye of Charlie Hern. With the departure from the barn of Paddleboat, I had been allocated another of the equine residents, a four-year-old gelding called Highlighter who was housed in Stall 15, close to the office and well away from my other three and, somewhat inconveniently, sandwiched between two horses cared for by Diego.

I had done my best all day to avoid him, but now I found myself right on his doorstep, even sharing a water tap at that end of the barn.

I left Highlighter right to the end in the hope that Diego would have given up waiting and gone to supper.

No such luck.

He came into Stall 15 after I had done the mucking out and just as I had finished brushing Highlighter’s coat to a nice shine. But he wasn’t intent, this time, on physical violence. Maybe that was because I was bigger than him, and he wasn’t accompanied by his back-up team. So, instead, he simply threw a full bucket of muddy water all over Highlighter’s back.

So juvenile, I thought.

Charlie Hern was already on his tour of inspection around the other side of the barn, and he certainly wouldn’t have been pleased to find one of the horses caked in mud. I didn’t have long enough to take Highlighter outside to the wash point, so I did my best to scrape the mud off his coat and out of his mane, brushing each vigorously with a stiff dandy brush. But, in spite of my efforts, the horse was still not looking very good by the time Charlie arrived.

‘Come on, Paddy,’ Charlie said, clearly irritated. ‘Get a move on. You know better than to present a horse to me in this state.’

‘Sorry, Mr Hern,’ I said meekly. ‘I’ll make sure he’s right before I go.’

‘Damn right you will,’ Charlie responded.

He felt down over the animal’s legs and tut-tutted under his breath, but not so quietly that I wouldn’t hear. Then he moved on to the next stall as I went back to my brushing.

‘Damn you, Diego, damn you,’ I repeated over and over in time with my brush strokes as I repaired his damage.

Consequently, I was the last in line as Charlie issued the correct quantity of concentrated feed for each horse.

‘Have you cleaned up Highlighter?’ he asked as he poured the feed into bowl 15.

‘Almost, sir,’ I said. ‘I just need to finish him off.’

‘Be sure you do,’ Charlie said sternly. ‘And check he eats up his supper.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, taking the bowl of feed and making my way back towards Stall 15.

I could do with eating up my supper as well.

I was still brushing out Highlighter’s mane and tail when I heard George Raworth arrive. He came into the barn shouting loudly for Charlie Hern, who was still down in the feed store.

They went into the office.

‘Keith,’ I heard George say, ‘go and make sure all the staff have gone to supper and then go yourself, will you? I need to talk to Charlie alone.’ I could hear him clearly through the wooden partitions between the office and the stall I was in.

‘OK, boss,’ Keith replied. ‘I think they’ve left already.’

‘Have a look anyway,’ George said.

I slipped out of the stall but, instead of leaving, I quickly climbed the ladder up to the bedding store and hid myself, lying down silently between the straw bales stacked above the office with my ear to the floor.

I glimpsed the top of Keith’s head as he made a complete circuit of the barn beneath me, without once looking up.

‘All clear,’ I heard Keith say as he went back to the office.

‘Right,’ George said. ‘You get going too.’

‘OK, boss,’ Keith said. ‘How long do you want?’

‘Give us a good half an hour,’ George said. ‘Come back after your meal.’

I heard the office door close and there was a pause, presumably for Keith to walk away.

‘Check, will you?’ I heard George ask.

I heard the office door open, then it closed again.

‘He’s gone,’ Charlie said. ‘Now what’s this about?’

‘I’ve had a call on my home phone from someone demanding money,’ George said, hissing it hardly louder than a whisper. But I could still hear him clearly.

‘What for?’ Charlie asked.

‘He told me I had a horse fail a dope test at Pimlico and ten thousand dollars in cash would make it all go away.’

‘Which horse?’ Charlie said.

‘He didn’t say but it has to be that damn nag Debenture for cobalt. Nothing else has had anything. Why did we ever think it was a good idea? The damn animal is useless and we should have recognised that.’

‘It should have been clear of his system before that race,’ Charlie said. ‘I was told he’d pee it all out in only a day or two.’

‘Well he obviously didn’t.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Charlie said. ‘I looked up the Maryland sanctions for cobalt before I even suggested it. They’re pathetic — a slap on the wrist and a five-hundred-buck fine, nowhere near ten grand. Just ride it out.’

‘So what do we do about tomorrow?’ George said.

‘In what way?’

‘Debenture is due to run in the last race. We’d better scratch him.’

‘No,’ Charlie said quickly. ‘That’s ideal. It’s been over a week since he ran at Pimlico. The cobalt will have surely gone from his system by now. Let’s insist they do another test on him. He’ll be clear. That would help our case.’

‘It is not really the damn cobalt I’m worried about, it’s the other stuff.’ George was sounding agitated.

‘Relax,’ Charlie said. ‘No one can possibly know about that.’

How wrong he was.

‘But what if NYRA do a search?’

‘They won’t. The positive was not even on their watch and no one would do a search for a single positive for cobalt. Others have been done for far more than that, and they’ve laughed it off. It wasn’t as if we used much of the stuff anyway.’

Well done, Charlie, I thought. Keep talking George out of moving the flask.

‘Look,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ll get rid of what’s left of the cobalt, just in case. But relax. All will be fine.

No it won’t, I reflected.

My hungry stomach rumbled loudly.

I held my breath. Had they heard? It had seemed very loud to me. I went on lying as still as I could, silently berating my noisy stomach, without actually telling it that it was now unlikely to get any supper as well.