Dick Francis's Refusal Read online

  Three of the nine had been hurdle races, and the remaining six were steeplechases. All had been run during the preceding six months, the main months of the jumping season, always on major racing days, but none of them was actually the big race of the day. Only two had been won by the favorite or the second favorite, and all of them had been won at prices of six-to-one or greater.

  Nevertheless, I could see nothing particularly noteworthy or unusual about any of them.

  So why were they on this list?

  Sir Richard Stewart may have been fanciful in his suspicions, but he was not stupid. There had to be a reason why he had put this list together, and he had obviously expected me to notice it. But I couldn’t, at first glance. Perhaps watching the video of each race would help.

  “Afternoon, Mr. Halley,” called a voice.

  I looked up from the papers in front of me and over to the school gates on my right.

  “Hello, Mrs. Squire,” I called back through the open window.

  Mrs. Squire was the head teacher, and it was her habit to stand at the school gate at the end of the day as the children departed.

  “I understand you’re also collecting Annabel Gaucin today.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Mrs. Squire nodded at me and then turned to speak to a group of mothers waiting near the gate, some of them with strollers occupied by future school pupils.

  The children spilled out of the building, and there was the usual mad rush across the playground. I climbed out of the Range Rover and crossed the road. Sassy was always one of the first to get to the gate—I put it down to her racing heritage—but Annabel was clearly more ladylike in allowing others to go first, so Sassy and I had to wait a few seconds for her to join us.

  “Hello, Daddy,” shouted Sassy, waving madly.

  I would surely never tire of being called Daddy.

  “Hello, darling,” I shouted back.

  Mrs. Squire allowed her through the gate, and she rushed over to me and took my hand, my right hand, my real hand, rather than the plastic-and-steel doppelgänger that existed on my left.

  In due course, Mrs. Squire also released Annabel, and she joined us.

  “Take Saskia’s other hand,” I told her, and we crossed the road safely in a line, continually looking both ways. There were almost no cars moving in the village other than those collecting the children from the school, but one could never be too careful.

  Saskia was my pride and joy, arriving exactly nine months to the day after my marriage to Marina.

  “Wedding-night baby,” a friend had once said to me with a wink. “Good job she wasn’t early.”

  I had smiled back at him, knowing that, in fact, it had been a good job she’d been late. Marina had definitely said “I do” with a bun already cooking nicely in the oven.

  It had all seemed so easy. We had ceased the birth-control precautions, and—hey presto!—Marina had become pregnant instantly. It made it all the more frustrating that she had been unable to conceive again since Saskia’s birth.

  We had seen every fertility doctor worth his salt, and they all said there was no medical reason why. Just relax, they said, and it will happen. Well, we had relaxed, but it hadn’t happened in six years, and we were beginning to be resigned to the fact that Sassy would be our only child.

  However, Marina was still young enough, so we went on trying most nights with enthusiasm.

  • • •

  MARINA TOOK the two girls off for a walk around the village with the dogs while I went into my study and looked at the videos of each of the nine races on the Racing Post website.

  Something that I hadn’t appreciated from the bare written details was that none of the races had been close contests. On each occasion, the winner had come home well in front, largely unchallenged by the others.

  Not that this made them unusual. Many steeplechases are won by good jumping around the whole track rather than by a sprint over the last furlong.

  So was Sir Richard suspicious because he thought the other runners hadn’t been trying?

  I looked up the jockeys who had ridden in the races.

  Many of the same jockeys had ridden in more than one. But there was no general pattern with, for example, the same jockey winning each time.

  I looked again at the typed list. At the end of the factual information about each race someone, presumably Sir Richard, had added a few comments and observations.

  After one particular race at Sandown he had written, “Starting price 8/1, Tote paid only £5.60 for the win.” After another, at Newbury, he had put, “Winner at 10/1, Tote paid only £7.20.”

  Many of the others had the same sort of comments. The only thing that seemed to be consistent about each race was that the Tote win payout was much lower than might have been expected compared to the starting price.

  The Tote doesn’t use odds as a bookmaker would.

  If a bookmaker offers you a price of eight-to-one, then if the horse wins, the bookmaker will pay you out eight for every one that you staked, irrespective of how many people made the same bet. And the official starting price is an average of the bookmakers’ prices at the time the race starts.

  The Tote, however, is short for Totalizator and is a pari-mutuel system, meaning that the total of all the money staked on all the horses in the race is simply divided by the number of winning tickets to determine the payout, or return. Consequently, the Tote return odds are rarely exactly the same as the starting price, sometimes being greater and sometimes less, but it is very unusual for it to be so much smaller than the starting price, as it had been for all the races on the list.

  The only explanation for the low Tote return was that a disproportionately large amount of money had been bet on the winning horses with the Tote compared to that bet on the same horses with the bookmakers.

  Maybe this was the reason behind Sir Richard’s suspicions.

  But it didn’t seem that much to get excited about.

  Everyone in racing was well aware that placing very large bets on the Tote could be counterproductive as it tended to reduce the effective odds of the return. You were simply winning back the money you had wagered minus the twenty-four percent slice the Tote keeps back to cover its costs and to provide itself with a profit.

  Why would anyone do that? It was crazy. Particularly when you could get better odds with the bookmakers.

  But betting on the Tote is far more anonymous than with the bookies, who tend to recognize a regular client with a bulging wallet. And the bookmakers are the first to cry foul if a long-odds and heavily backed horse romps home by a distance, causing them to be seriously out of pocket. But the Tote doesn’t care which horse wins. It takes its twenty-four percent cut, and the only thing that matters is the total money staked on all horses. The more staked, the more it makes. There is no one to complain that disproportionally large bets had been placed on the winner, other than perhaps the other holders of winning tickets who would put it down to their bad luck that the Tote return was less than they might have expected. And, after all, who would complain when they had just backed a winner and made some money? They were far more likely to celebrate.

  At the big meetings there are literally hundreds of different Tote terminals, and the busy staff take little or no notice of who is handing them cash. During a whole afternoon, a determined individual could stake many thousands of pounds, if not many tens of thousands, on any given horse without anyone raising an eyebrow.

  I looked again at the list.

  All of the nine races had been in the latter half of the day’s card, and seven had been either the second-to-last or last race of the day.

  Plenty of time to get the money on.

  And with a substantial betting crowd on a big-race day, the win pool would generally be so large that a big bet would have less of a “diluting” effect, and odds of five
- or six-to-one weren’t exactly bad.

  Especially if, as Sir Richard had implied, someone knew the outcome of the races beforehand.

  2

  Daddy, Daddy, come and play with us.”

  Sassy and Annabel came running into my office.

  “Where’s Mommy?” I asked.

  “Ironing,” said Sassy in an ironic tone. “She said to ask you.”

  I inwardly laughed. Marina hated ironing.

  “Please,” Sassy whined.

  “OK,” I said. “What do you want to play?”

  “Catch,” said Annabel, excitedly jumping up and down.

  No, I thought, not catch. Not with only one real hand.

  “How about Ping-Pong?”

  “Yes, yes,” the girls shouted with enthusiasm.

  So we went into the garage, where I’d set up a table, and spent the next half hour with me at one end and the two girls at the other, hitting balls back and forth, but mostly collecting them from the floor or under the table.

  “Who’d like an ice cream?” I asked.

  Table-tennis bats were quickly abandoned, and we adjourned to the kitchen for scoops of raspberry ripple topped with sprinkles.

  “Mr. Halley,” Annabel said between mouthfuls.

  “Yes, Annabel?”

  “What’s wrong with your left hand?” She pointed at it with her spoon.

  The innocence, I thought, of the six-year-old child.

  “He hasn’t got one,” said Sassy matter-of-factly. “That’s made of plastic.”

  I glanced at Annabel, worried that she might be shocked by the revelation, but she seemed not to be alarmed in the slightest.

  “Can I look at it?” she asked.

  Reluctantly, I lifted my left hand up onto the kitchen table.

  Sassy unbuttoned my shirt cuff and pulled my sleeve up above my elbow. She had great fun explaining to Annabel everything about my myoelectric marvel.

  “This is the battery,” she said, pointing to a rectangular block, about three inches by one, clipped into the fiberglass forearm. “That’s what makes it work.”

  “What does it do?” Annabel asked.

  “Come on, Daddy,” Sassy said bossily, “open up.”

  I sent the nerve impulses, and, as if by magic, and accompanied by a barely audible whirring noise, the artificial fingers and thumb uncurled and the plastic hand opened.

  “Wow!” said Annabel. “That’s cool.”

  Cool was not a term I would have used.

  Sensors in the plastic arm picked up the nerve impulses from my skin and caused tiny hidden motors to move the latex-covered steel digits.

  It was certainly clever, but it was not cool.

  In fact, it was a bore, and one that I was beginning to increasingly detest. Some days I didn’t even put the thing on, but I knew that Marina felt it was better for Saskia to have a “normal-looking” father.

  Nowadays, I did everything almost exclusively right-handed.

  It hadn’t always been that way. Once I’d had two hands, and I had used them to good effect to be champion steeplechase jockey on four occasions. Then a racing fall had put paid to both my career and to the use of my left hand. A poker-wielding, sadistic villain had then finished off what the fall had started, and I’d lost the hand completely. That had been some fourteen years ago, but I’d never got properly used to it, nor would I.

  I still had two hands in my dreams.

  “Now close it again,” Sassy said.

  I sent more impulses, and the fingers closed. It may have looked and moved quite like the real thing, but it couldn’t feel. I couldn’t tell when, or how strongly, I was gripping something. Wineglasses could either slip from my grasp or be crushed to fragments, and I would be none the wiser.

  “Can I have a go?” Annabel asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” Sassy said to her. “You’d have to have your arm chopped off first.” She made a chopping motion with her right hand on her left forearm.

  The disappointed look on Annabel’s face implied that it might be worth it just to have a go with the plastic arm.

  “Go on, now, you two,” I said, pulling my sleeve down again to my wrist and rebuttoning the cuff, using the dexterous set of fingers on my right hand. “Off you go into the garden. I’ve got some work to do.”

  I stood by the kitchen sink for a while, looking out at them through the window. They were on the lawn, throwing a tennis ball back and forth, the dogs rushing from one to the other, hoping desperately that they would drop it, as they did continually.

  I smiled.

  What joy children brought.

  • • •

  I RANG Sir Richard Stewart’s home number at five o’clock.

  “I’ve looked at your lists,” I said.

  “That was quick,” he replied. “And what do you think?”

  “I can see why you think there may be some betting irregularities, perhaps with large winning bets being placed on the Tote, but I don’t see why you think that means the results must have been manipulated. There may have been other large Tote bets that lost.”

  “But there are patterns,” he persisted. “Major racing days, for example.”

  “Lots of punters go racing only on the big-race days,” I said. “Perhaps our Tote big bettor is one of them. And how do you think the results have been fixed?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I presume all the horses were tested.”

  “Yes, the first three were routinely dope-tested and all were negative.”

  “How about the others?” I asked.

  “There is occasionally some random testing on other runners, but I don’t know about those races in particular. But I do know there have been no positive test results on any jumpers so far this year.”

  “Have you questioned any of the jockeys?” I asked.

  “The head of the Security Service approached one or two after I raised my suspicions with him, but nothing came of it. I was accused of being delusional and told that I was making the whole thing up.”

  “I’m sure that isn’t true,” I said.

  “It is,” he replied quickly, the anger clear in his voice. “I know all the staff snigger behind my back and think I’m too old for this job, and that I’m losing my marbles, but, I tell you, I’m not.”

  He paused, and I said nothing.

  “That’s why I need you, Sid, to investigate what’s going on and to stop it before racing is irreparably damaged.”

  “Sir Richard, I told you, I don’t investigate anything anymore. If your own security service tell you there’s nothing going on, then, perhaps, you should listen to them. Peter Medicos is no fool, and he’s difficult to shake off if he smells even the slightest whiff of corruption.”

  Peter Medicos had been the head of the BHA Security Service since retiring from the Lancashire Police as a detective chief superintendent some seven years previously.

  “Huh,” Sir Richard snorted loudly down the line. Clearly, he didn’t have the same confidence. “I’m hugely disappointed in you, Sid. Why can no one else see what is going on?” He sounded thoroughly frustrated, and not a little frightened. “Well, I’m telling you, I intend to find out what’s happening. And I’ll not bloody rest until I do, with or without your help.”

  He hung up abruptly, leaving me holding the dead handset.

  Was there something going on or had he made the whole thing up?

  And did I care?

  Yes, perhaps I did.

  • • •

  I WENT TO FIND MARINA, who was in the living room with Sassy and Annabel, watching a Walt Disney cartoon on the television.

  “I’m going to see Charles,” I said. “I won’t be long. I’ll be back for supper.”

  Marina looked up at me from the sofa, and I c
ould tell that she wasn’t very pleased. She knew only too well why I wanted to talk to Charles.

  “Daddy, Daddy, please be back to read us a story,” piped up Sassy.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll be back by seven-thirty to read you both a story. But you must be in bed.”

  Suddenly, she wasn’t so keen. “But we’ve got Annabel staying. Can’t I stay up later tonight?” She looked up at me with doleful eyes.

  “No,” I said firmly. “That’s all the more reason to be in bed early. It will give you time to talk to each other as you go to sleep.”

  She cheered up, but only fractionally. Getting Sassy into bed each night was always a battle of wills, and hers was very strong.

  “I’ll take my bike,” I said to Marina. “I promise I’ll be back.”

  • • •

  THE MAIN REASON why Marina and I had looked for a house in West Oxfordshire was to be close to Charles, and we had amazingly found just what we wanted in a village only two miles away from his place at Aynsford.

  Admiral Charles Roland, Royal Navy Retired, was like a father to both Marina and me, in spite of not being a blood relative of either of us. He was, in fact, my ex-father-in-law, even though I generally dropped the ex-, and our friendship had not only survived the turbulent breakup of my marriage to his daughter but had become closer with every passing year. He had instantly taken to Marina, and was reveling in the role of honorary grandpa to Saskia, not having any true grandchildren of his own from either of his two daughters.

  He was now well past eighty, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at him. He was nearly six feet tall, still with a shock of black hair, and his back was as ramrod straight as it had been when he’d entered Dartmouth as an officer cadet some sixty-five years previously.

  He was waiting for me in the drawing room, wearing his favorite burgundy-colored, velvet-and-silk smoking jacket. He was standing in front of the fire, with two tumblers already filled with generous fingers of his best Scotch.

  “I thought you might need it,” he said, handing me one.