Felix Francis - Triple Crown

To capture the Triple Crown of American racing, a horse has to win the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes.

The races are for three-year-olds only, so a horse gets only one chance.

Three championship races in a period of just five weeks.

In more than 140 years since the first running of all three races, only twelve horses have managed the feat.

Between the Triple Crown being won in 1978 and 2015, thirteen horses won the first two legs but then failed in their attempt to capture the most elusive prize in world sport.

‘Where are those goddamn cops?’ Tony Andretti said it under his breath, quiet as a whisper, but it was full of frustration nonetheless.

‘Calm down,’ I murmured back. ‘They’ll be here soon enough.’

Tony and I were lying side by side, out of sight in the bushes, next to a lay-by off the A34 trunk road north of Oxford. We’d been in position for several hours, getting ever wetter thanks to the persistent rain.

‘Call them in now, Jeff,’ Tony hissed at me angrily. ‘Or we’ll lose them.’

I ignored him and went on watching through my binoculars.

Two men were standing in the lay-by, between the cars in which they had recently arrived, their heads bent close together as if they didn’t want to be over-heard. Not that there was much chance of that, I thought, not with a line of heavy lorries thundering past noisily on the dual carriageway only a dozen or so yards away.

One of the men, the shorter of the two, removed a white envelope from his trouser pocket and handed it to the other, who then turned away from the road, conveniently facing directly towards me, as he counted the banknotes it contained.

I used the camera built into my binoculars to take a couple of still shots as the man thumbed through the wad, then I switched to video mode and zoomed in, first on the money in the man’s hands and then up to his face. The light wasn’t perfect but my top-of-the-range digital system would be well able to cope.

Obviously satisfied with its contents, the taller man stuffed the white envelope into his anorak and then handed over a small flat package. I filmed it all.

‘Now, Nigel,’ I said quietly but distinctly into the microphone taped to my left wrist.

I went on filming as the two men briefly shook hands and then started to return to their respective cars.

‘We’re losing them,’ Tony said to me in an irritated tone.

I was beginning to think that he might be right, that I’d left it too late, when a couple of police squad cars arrived at speed, screeching to a halt and blocking in the vehicles in the lay-by. Even before they had come to a complete stop, the doors were flung open and four uniformed officers spilled out.

The shorter of the two men stood stock still, openmouthed in disbelief, but the taller one turned and ran — away from the police, and straight at me, at the same time removing a long-bladed knife from his coat pocket.

‘Knife!’ Tony shouted loudly from beside me, as he struggled to stand up.

The man changed from looking back at the police to looking forward to where Tony and I had been hiding. He saw Tony, who was now on his feet, and turned slightly to go directly for him, the blade facing upwards in his left hand in a manner that suggested to me that he knew exactly how to use it.

I rolled over, grabbed Tony by the ankles and pulled hard.

He came down on top of me, his considerable bulk sprawling over my legs.

‘Let go of me,’ Tony shouted angrily, trying to kick out towards my face.

I hung on tight.

The man with the knife hurdled the two of us and ran off into the trees behind, pursued by a pair of the policemen.

They’re welcome to him, I thought, even with their anti-stab vests. I’d been on the wrong end of a carving knife once before and had no wish to repeat the experience.

I released Tony’s legs and we clambered to our feet.

‘What the hell were you doing?’ Tony shouted at me, his face puce with rage. ‘I could have had him.’

‘He’d have had you, more like,’ I said. ‘Better to live to fight another day.’

Tony stood staring at me, his hands bunched into fists, adrenalin still coursing through his veins. I stared back at him.

Slowly he relaxed and his fingers uncurled.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Thanks. But I’d have taken him down if I’d had a piece.’

‘Tony, you’re no longer with the NYPD.’

As a younger man, Tony had been a cop, one of ‘New York’s Finest’.

‘I can’t get my head round you Brits and guns. Not even your cops carry them. You’re just asking to get yourselves killed.’

I resisted pointing out to him that, in the previous ten years, only a handful of British police officers had been killed on duty, whereas hundreds of American cops had died in the same period.

The remaining two police officers had arrested the shorter of the men and were applying handcuffs to his wrists while relieving him of the package, which was then carefully enclosed in a plastic evidence bag.

Nigel had followed the police in his own car and was now standing to one side watching. Tony and I went over to join him.

‘Well done,’ I said, slapping Nigel gently on the back.

‘You’re certainly a cool one, and no mistake,’ Nigel said, smiling at me. ‘It was as much as I could do to stop the boys in blue turning up as soon as they knew the men had arrived.’

I smiled back at him. Nigel Green was a colleague of mine in the integrity service of the BHA, the British Horseracing Authority, and we had together spent several weeks setting up this operation after a tip-off. We had been surprised that the police had been so cooperative, agreeing to wait in a farm lane with Nigel until I called them in. Word of our past successes, when they alone had previously failed, had clearly filtered up to the powers that be.

‘Damn right he’s cool,’ Tony said. ‘Nerves of steel. I’d have called the cops in far sooner.’

‘I’m not cool,’ I said jokily. ‘At least, not in that sense.’ In temperature terms, I was extremely cool, and very wet. I shivered. ‘If the posse had turned up before the package was handed over we wouldn’t have been able to implicate both men. That’s all.’

‘Do you think those guys will get their man?’ Tony asked in his rich New York accent, looking over his shoulder towards the woods.

‘Eventually,’ I said. ‘If not today then sometime soon. I have all the evidence we need on disc.’ I tapped the binocular-camera round my neck.

The arrested man was frogmarched past us towards the police cars by two tall officers who made him look even smaller than he actually was.

He stared at me with hatred in his eyes.

‘Hinkley, you’re a bastard.’ He said it with feeling.

‘You shouldn’t get mixed up with drugs, Jimmy,’ I said.

The man was placed in the back of the police car.

‘He knows you, then?’ Tony said to me.

‘Indeed he does,’ I said. ‘Jimmy and I have crossed swords before.’

Jimmy Robinson was a jockey, quite a good jockey, who had previously tested positive for cocaine and been banned from riding for six months as a result. That had been two years ago but he had clearly not learned his lesson.

‘I thought you always worked undercover.’