Dick Francis's Front Runner

11

We sat down to lunch just before noon, by which time some other guests had arrived, making twenty of us in all in the box.

‘I’m sorry we have to eat so early,’ said Derrick, ushering everyone in from the balcony. ‘It’s high time they installed some floodlights at Sandown so that racing could be later in the day during the winter.’

We were seated at two round tables for ten and I found myself placed between Gay Smith and an attractive young woman in a smart tweed suit whom I had been spying from afar ever since she’d arrived.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name’s Henri, Henrietta Shawcross.’

‘Jeff Hinkley,’ I replied, shaking her hand.

‘Oh, I know who you are,’ Henri said. ‘I think everyone here does. You’re Derrick’s superhero.’

‘He exaggerates.’

‘How did you do it?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Save his horse.’

‘I merely uncovered a conspiracy to steal the horse and set a trap to catch the villains in the act. It was nothing very special.’

She looked disappointed. ‘It must have been a tiny bit exciting.’

I thought back. It had been far more worrying than exciting as I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure that it would happen and I’d mobilized the whole of the BHA integrity team plus several members of the Thames Valley Police Force.

We had secretly lain in wait outside the Ascot racecourse stables for nearly two hours and I was worried that I’d been wrong and would look foolish if nothing happened. But, thankfully, right on cue, the bad guys had turned up just as Secret Ways was being unloaded from the horsebox that had brought him to the racecourse.

One of them had managed to knock over the groom and even had his hand on the horse’s halter when the trap was sprung.

In truth, it had been very satisfying and, yes, rather exciting.

‘A tiny bit,’ I agreed with a smile. ‘What do you do?’

‘I work for a recruitment agency,’ she said. ‘We recruit chefs, waiters and waitresses for the catering business.’

‘And is that a tiny bit exciting?’ I asked.

‘Don’t poke fun at me,’ she said, slightly offended. ‘I work hard at my job and I enjoy it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’ Just funny. And it had backfired. ‘So how long have you known Derrick?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.

‘I met him for the first time today,’ she said. ‘I’m here with my uncle.’ She pointed at Sir Richard Reynard, who was sitting at the other table.

I must have involuntarily raised a questioning eyebrow.

She laughed. ‘No, really, he is my uncle. I promise you. He’s my mother’s elder brother. I’m only here because my aunt Mary couldn’t make it. She’s organizing a Christmas fair in their local church hall so Uncle Richard asked me to come with him instead.’

‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’

‘Shut up,’ she said, laughing and bashing me playfully on the arm. ‘It’s true, I tell you.’

‘OK, I believe you,’ I said between guffaws. ‘But countless others might not.’

‘What are you two laughing at?’ asked Gay Smith, turning towards us.

‘Miss Goody Two-shoes here is trying to tell me she came here with her uncle while I’m convinced he’s actually her sugar daddy.’

‘From what I’ve heard,’ Gay said, ‘Henrietta Shawcross doesn’t need a sugar daddy. And, yes, Sir Richard Reynard is indeed her uncle.’

That put me in my place.

‘Sorry,’ I said again.

‘Don’t be,’ Henri said. ‘That’s the best laugh I’ve had in ages.’

‘Do you know anyone else here?’ I asked her.

‘A few,’ she said.

I dropped my voice. ‘How about the suntanned couple at the other table. The wife is sitting next to your uncle.’

‘You mean Theresa and Martin.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Exactly.’

‘Martin’s my cousin. Uncle Richard is his father. Martin’s the one who’s mad keen on racing. He’s the real reason why we’re all here. Martin and Theresa want Uncle Richard to start owning racehorses. They’ve roped Derrick Smith in to help them convince him it’s a good idea.’

I nodded. ‘Your cousin and Derrick both have houses in the Cayman Islands,’ I said.

‘Yes. I’ve been there. It’s lovely.’

A waitress placed a potted shrimp starter in front of me. I wanted to go on talking to Henri about Martin Reynard but Gay put her hand on my arm as if to indicate she wanted my full attention.

‘So you work for the Jockey Club?’ she said, taking a mouthful of the shrimps.

‘Sort of,’ I replied. ‘Not actually for the Jockey Club, but I do work for the racing authorities. I’m an investigator.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought there was enough to investigate for it to be a full-time job.’

‘There’s plenty to keep me busy, believe me, and the other four investigators in my team. There is always someone trying to beat the system and, if it’s against the rules, our job is to stop them.’

‘Is it possible to beat the system without breaking the rules?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘And some trainers are very good at it.’

‘How?’ Gay asked.

‘It’s called beating the handicapper,’ I said. ‘Other than those just starting out on their racing careers, every horse in training in the UK is given an official handicap rating each Tuesday depending on how it has run and how those it has raced against have also performed. If a horse runs well compared to others, its rating will go up and, if it runs badly, the rating will go down. And the rating is used to determine the weight it has to carry in handicap races.’

‘So?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘For a horse to be officially rated it has to either win a race, or it has to have run in three races and be placed in the first six in at least one of them. Suppose a trainer has a horse that has been specifically bred to be good at middle and long distances. He runs it in three moderate sprints over just five furlongs as a young, green two-year-old and, predictably, it doesn’t do very well but it does manage to come in sixth in one of them, maybe out of only six or seven runners. So the horse gets an official rating that is very low but, crucially, it is now qualified to run in handicaps.

‘The trainer then doesn’t run the horse again until the following year, by which time it has fully developed and is ready to race over a much greater distance. The trainer now places it in a mile-and-a-half handicap for horses with similarly poor ratings and, not surprisingly, it wins easily. If the trainer goes on entering the horse in the right races, it can run up a whole series of wins against moderate opposition before the handicapper “catches up” and raises its rating to a more appropriate value.’

‘Is that legal?’ Gay asked.

‘Yes, completely legal. It’s simply the trainer playing the handicap system to his advantage.’

I looked across the table at Alfie Hart. He was one of the best exponents of the practice.

‘How fascinating,’ Gay Smith said, but I feared I was boring her as she turned away to talk to the person on her far side.

I finished my shrimps and turned back to Henri, but she was chatting away merrily to another lady beyond her, so I spent some time studying the afternoon’s racecard. I noticed that Bill McKenzie was still down to ride two horses, one of them in the first race and the other in the fourth.

‘Trying to pick a winner?’ Henri said. ‘Do tell.’

‘Don’t ask me, I’m hopeless at choosing winners,’ I said. ‘My best tip of the day is to keep your money in your pocket.’

‘Boring!’ Henri said loudly. She received a stern glare from her uncle on the other table.

She blushed.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ she said to me.

‘Don’t blame me,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ She smiled. ‘Are you married?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Are you gay?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Most men I know of my age are either married or gay.’

‘Well, I’m neither,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘That’s a secret.’

She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. I’d already checked.

She opened her racecard. ‘Come on, pick me a winner.’

‘Autumn Statement,’ I said, ‘in the second.’

She looked down at the printed race details.

‘Why that one?’ she asked, clearly unimpressed by the horse’s lowly status.

‘He ran on Tuesday at Southwell. I was there and watched the race. He was only beaten a short head by a very good horse that’s not running today. His rating is sure to rise considerably this coming week but he can still run today on the old rating, which means he’s very well handicapped.’

‘I thought you said you were hopeless at picking winners.’

‘He hasn’t won yet and he’ll probably start at fairly short odds.’

‘How about in the first race? Do you fancy Medication? He’s the favourite.’

‘I’ve no idea but you had better be quick if you want to make a bet because they’re already at the start.’

She stood up and rushed out of the box, along with some of the other guests.

I looked up at the television screen in the corner of the room. Bill McKenzie was indeed riding as advertised, which meant that he wasn’t concussed. I wondered if the confusion he had exhibited in the medical room the previous evening had been because his mind had been on other matters — like how long he would be banned from riding if anyone knew he had lost the race on purpose.

Autumn Statement won the second race by two lengths at the surprisingly long price of six-to-one. Obviously the betting public hadn’t appreciated his potential as much as I had.

‘Three hundred quid!’ squealed Henri as we watched the finish on the television in the box during our dessert. ‘I’ve just won three hundred quid.’

‘How much did you put on?’ I asked.

‘Fifty quid, on the nose.’

‘You’re crazy,’ I said. ‘Either that or you’ve more money than sense.’

‘Maybe I am a bit crazy,’ she said, laughing. ‘And what if I do have more money than sense. You’re the one who tipped it. Surely you backed it as well.’

I hadn’t. In fact I very rarely had any bet at all. Even though there was no rule actually preventing me from gambling on the races, I was concerned that some people might think there was a conflict of interest if I wanted one horse to win more than another. The Authority was meant to be impartial in all matters.

Or maybe it was because my tipping skills were generally so poor and I didn’t like losing my hard-earned cash.

‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘But I’m pleased for you that it won.’ I smiled at her.

‘You’re a strange bird, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’ I said, slightly taken aback. ‘In what way?’

‘Do you always live within the rules?’

‘Rules or laws?’

‘Both,’ she said. ‘The laws of the land and the rules of convention and polite society.’

‘Are you implying that you don’t?’

‘Dead right, I don’t. But I’m on my best behaviour today. I was warned by Uncle Richard not to make, what he calls, a scene. Otherwise he’d be bloody cross and take me straight home.’ She mimicked an angry male voice.

‘And would he then spank you for being a naughty girl?’

She blushed again and, I dare say, I did as well.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I mumbled, hugely embarrassed. ‘I’m not sure what came over me. It must be the champagne. Please forget I ever said that.’

‘My,’ she replied. ‘You’re even stranger than I thought.’

How could I have said it? It was so out of character. Had I been trying to break away from the live within the rules of polite society classification in which Henri had so accurately placed me? Or, maybe I was just frustrated. Either way, I’d made a complete fool of myself.

I stood up. ‘I think I had better be going.’

‘Don’t go,’ commanded Gay Smith from my other side, turning briefly towards me. ‘I haven’t spent enough time talking to you. And we haven’t had our coffee yet.’

I sat down again slowly and, to add to my discomfiture, Henri was shaking from a fit of giggles.

‘Stop it,’ I said to her quietly.

She took a deep breath and stopped laughing.

‘And what are you going to do if I don’t? Spank me?’

She started giggling again immediately, this time twice as badly. And giggles are highly infectious. It was as much as I could do not to join in.

The rest of the lunch was a torment as I tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to ignore Henri, who went on sniggering throughout.

Although, to be honest, part of me didn’t want to ignore her at all.

I watched the third race from the balcony with Gay Smith and then made my apologies and left, going down to the weighing room and the paddock, to my more familiar surroundings on a racecourse.

‘Do come back for tea after the fifth,’ Gay had said as I departed. But we’d only just finished an enormous lunch. Many more days like this would see my waistline expand, but I suppose it was better than spending every day trying to keep one’s body weight at twenty pounds below what was natural, as Dave Swinton had done.

Even six days after the event, the main topic of conversation was still his suicide. He had been expected to ride Ebury Tiger, the red-hot favourite in the Tingle Creek Chase later in the afternoon, having ridden it on each of its nine previous victories over hurdles and fences.

There was a general acceptance that it had been a good thing for the racing authorities to have cancelled all race meetings for the following Monday, the day of Dave’s funeral, as a mark of respect for the loss of one of the sport’s greats. Very many racing fans had lost their hero and the Morning Line on Channel 4 that day had broadcast such a gushing obituary that all the presenters had been in tears.

I, meanwhile, was not feeling quite so reverential about the late champion jockey but, there again, he had tried to kill me. And I was still having nightmares about my time in that sauna.

I stood by the rail gazing at the horses for the fourth race as they circled in the parade ring, but my thoughts were in a different place. The mounting bell was rung and I found myself looking across as Bill McKenzie was given a leg-up onto a horse called Lost Moon. No sign of confusion now, I thought, as he gathered the reins and placed his feet in the stirrup irons.

I went on staring at him absent-mindedly as I weighed up the pros and cons of returning to Derrick Smith’s box for tea, and of returning to the giggling Henri.

But, from Bill McKenzie’s perspective, it must have appeared that I was interested only in him.

As he saw me watching him, the colour visibly drained from his face, and he began to shake. I was mesmerized by the effect my presence was causing so I went on staring at him as the horses walked past, McKenzie’s head turning slowly to allow him to stare back at me with wide frightened eyes.

Bugger, I thought.

That had been extremely careless on my part. I had intended to give Bill McKenzie no reason whatsoever to think that I was in any way suspicious of him and yet it had been obvious that I was. But at least it forced my hand. I would now have to question him today before he had a chance to concoct some cock-and-bull story with Leslie Morris.

And it was clear that he knew exactly who I was.

Our paths had only officially crossed once before, eighteen months previously, when I had investigated an allegation that mobile telephones were being used in the jockeys’ changing-room toilets, contrary to the Rules of Racing.

Even though the finger had not been pointed at any specific individual, I had formally interviewed seven or eight jockeys at the BHA offices, including Bill McKenzie. After an extensive inquiry, I had concluded that the evidence of wrongdoing was merely circumstantial and too unreliable for any disciplinary action to be taken. Instead, a notice had been sent to all jockeys reminding them of their obligation to comply with the mobile phone regulations.

Bill McKenzie had undoubtedly remembered.