Dick Francis's Front Runner

9

I spent Thursday cooped up in my office catching up on neglected paperwork but, on Friday, I escaped to Sandown Park for the first day of the Tingle Creek Christmas Festival meeting, named after the popular horse of the 1970s that had been a Sandown specialist.

These two days of racing were always very popular with the public and I was joined by many others as I walked the mile or so from Esher railway station to the racecourse entrance, some of them wearing bright red Christmas hats in true festive spirit.

I was there specifically to further a separate ongoing investigation into the conduct of a Mr Leslie Morris, who, according to an anonymous source, had been placing suspicious bets with racecourse bookmakers on behalf of a friend who was an excluded person. The source had also stated that Mr Morris would be at Sandown that afternoon to do it again.

An ‘excluded person’ was exactly that — excluded from any BHA licensed premises, which includes all racing stables, training gallops, equine pools and, in particular, anywhere on a British racecourse.

Sadly, there was nothing in the Rules of Racing that prevented an excluded person from placing bets, either on an internet betting site or in a high-street betting shop, but neither of those methods was very anonymous. The internet sites kept computer records and needed the account holder’s credit card details, while all betting shops were now equipped with closed-circuit television that recorded every transaction over the counter.

Until they also started introducing personal CCTV, only the racecourse bookmakers provided a suitable opportunity for someone to place untraceable bets. And it was not uncommon for a single bet of a thousand pounds or more to be made in cash with the racecourse bookies, especially at the big meetings like the Tingle Creek Festival.

Mr Leslie Morris was a BHA-registered racehorse owner and, as such, was subject to Rule (A)30.3, which states that a registered person must not associate with a person who is excluded in connection with horseracing in Great Britain unless he obtains the prior permission of the Authority.

Placing bets on behalf of an excluded person was definitely an association in connection with horseracing, and no such prior permission had been granted.

I waited for Leslie Morris near the entrance to the racecourse enclosures.

I knew what he looked like because I had studied the pictures of him in BHA files, but I was sure he wouldn’t recognize me even if he had known me beforehand. I had resurrected one of my favourite disguises, long dark wig under a brown beanie plus a goatee beard stuck to my face with latex-based glue. For good measure I had added a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.

I also wore an unremarkable olive-green anorak over an open-necked blue shirt and khaki chinos, the perfect gear for spending time in the betting ring.

I was beginning to worry that I might have missed him when he appeared in a full-length dark grey overcoat, brown leather gloves and a blue felt fedora covering his white hair. I smiled to myself. He couldn’t have worn something easier for me to follow if he’d tried.

But I had to do more than simply follow him. I had to get close enough to observe which horses he backed and how much he staked.

I followed him in through the main entrance foyer, where he used his racehorse owners’ pass to gain entry.

He turned right and went into the gents, so I hung around outside until he reappeared. I suppose he might have gone in there to meet someone but I would have been taking too much of a chance to follow him into such a small space and then to be very close to him later in the betting ring.

I kept about ten to fifteen yards behind him as he made his way towards the owners and trainers’ facility next to the weighing room, where there was complimentary food on offer and a cash bar.

The first race was about to start and I walked over to lean on the white rail around the unsaddling enclosure in front of the weighing room, as if waiting for the horses to return, but all the while keeping an eye on the door to the bar.

Leslie Morris remained inside the owners and trainers’ bar throughout both the first and second races and appeared again only as the runners for the third were being saddled and taken to the parade ring.

By this stage, I had shifted my position over to the far side of the weighing room to be less conspicuous and, from there, I was able to observe as he made his way over to the paddock rail and stood close to the point where the horses would leave to go out to the track.

Once the horses had all passed him, he walked through the grandstand and out to the betting ring beyond, with me in close formation behind him.

There were more than fifty bookmakers located in three rows, with more on the rail between the ring and the premier enclosure.

‘Come on. Let’s be having you,’ shouted one of the bookies as I walked nearby. ‘Best value here. Six-to-four the field.’

I looked up at his board with the horse names and the odds brightly lit up in yellow and red lights. There were eight runners in the race and the prices varied from the favourite at six-to-four to a couple of rank outsiders quoted at fifty- and hundred-to-one respectively.

Leslie Morris walked quickly up and down the rows of boards looking at the offered prices and I acted as his shadow. Fortunately, he was too busy to notice me as he was concentrating on the odds boards and also on a red notebook and a small calculator that he held in his hands. He tapped in figures on the calculator and made notes in the book. Try as I might, I couldn’t get quite close enough to read what he was writing.

Suddenly, he began moving down the lines of bookmakers, stopping about every second one to make a single bet using high-value banknotes that he peeled from a large bundle of cash he had in his coat pocket. I pretended to make a call on my mobile phone while actually taking several photos and a short video of him making the bets.

Even though I wasn’t close enough to catch what Morris himself said, I could sometimes hear the bookmaker as he repeated the bet to his assistant, who then logged it into a computer and printed the ticket. Morris wasn’t putting money on the same horse on each occasion, that was for sure. As far as I could tell, he was backing most of the eight runners, some of them multiple times with different bookmakers.

It was a slick operation and, in all, he must have placed between thirty and thirty-five separate bets, each with a different bookmaker. He had timed his approach well, when most other punters had already made their selections and gone to watch the race from the grandstand. Hence making each of his bets took just a few seconds and, by the time the race began, the large bundle of cash in his pocket had reduced to nothing.

I followed him as he also climbed the grandstand steps to watch. With a tiny bit of pushing, I managed to position myself a few steps above and behind him.

The race was a two-and-a-half-mile novice hurdle for four-year-olds and, initially, it was a slow-run affair with none of the eight jockeys seemingly wanting to make the running from the start.

They popped over the early flight of hurdles at barely a gallop, and it was not until they turned into the home straight for the first time that a couple of them kicked on and decided to make a proper race of it. The others followed suit and all eight were fairly closely bunched as they passed the winning post with a complete circuit still to run.

The pace began to quicken as the horses ran downhill away from the grandstand, all of them safely negotiating the first three flights of hurdles although the two outsiders came under pressure early, their jockeys pushing hard and giving their mounts a few ‘hurry-up’ slaps with their whips, but without any great response.

However, at the last hurdle on the far side, Wisden Wonder, the favourite, hardly jumped at all, crashing through the obstacle and unseating his rider, much to the displeasure of the crowd, which groaned loudly en masse.

By the time they turned for home around the bottom end of the course, the remaining seven were well spaced out. One of them pulled up before the last two hurdles and the other six finished in line astern, with the winner returned at a starting price of five-to-one.

Leslie Morris had not cheered the winner home, nor had he moved a muscle when the favourite had come to grief. Now he merely stood in the grandstand sorting out his betting slips before moving back to the lines of bookmakers to collect his winnings, making notes all the time in his red notebook.

And the winnings were considerable.

By the time he had collected from eight different bookmakers, Morris had two large bundles of banknotes in his coat pockets. But he didn’t hang around to reinvest any of the winnings on the remaining races. Instead, he walked quickly out through the grandstand to the main foyer and exited the racecourse.

I followed him out to the owners and trainers’ car park and watched as he climbed into a silver Audi A4 and drove rapidly away. He had departed so quickly that even if I’d wanted to stop him, I doubt that I would have been successful. And he would probably have thought I was trying to rob him.

He’d have been right.

I particularly wanted to get my hands on that red notebook.

My questioning of bookmakers about the bets they have taken and paid out on is a delicate area.

Racecourse bookmakers are not registered or licensed by the BHA in spite of the fact that they ply their trade on BHA-licensed property. Rather, they hold operating licences from the Gambling Commission.

Hence my authority is severely restricted and not helped by the fact that many bookmakers consider the BHA to be obstructive in not allowing jockeys and trainers to discuss openly with them the prospects of their horses.

In spite of all that, I went back to the betting ring and went up to one of the bookies who had paid out to Mr Morris.

‘How much did the man in the blue fedora win?’ I asked.

‘Who wants to know?’ he replied in a less-than-friendly manner.

I showed him my BHA credentials with the word ‘investigator’ and he then looked up at my face. ‘Was it fixed?’ he asked.

‘Was what fixed?’

‘The race.’

Good question.

‘Not that I’m aware of,’ I said nonchalantly. ‘I’m only interested in how much you paid the man in the blue fedora.’

‘Three grand,’ said the bookie. ‘He’d a monkey on at fives.’

A ‘monkey’ was betting slang for five hundred pounds. At odds of five-to-one the winnings would be two thousand five hundred pounds. Add back the stake money and the payout was three thousand.

I went to each of the seven other bookmakers Leslie Morris had collected from. Three wouldn’t tell me but four confirmed that he’d had a bet of five hundred pounds at five-to-one. If all eight bets had each paid out three thousand pounds then Mr Morris had left the racecourse with twenty-four thousand pounds in cash in his coat pockets.

But how much had he started with?

I went down the line of bookmakers speaking to each of those I could remember Morris betting with but not winning. I asked them how much the man in the blue fedora had wagered and on which horse but none of them could really remember. The eight he had collected from had only remembered him because a three-thousand-pound cash payout was a little unusual.

I asked them all if they had taken many bets of five hundred pounds from Morris but it seemed that he had bet varying amounts on the different horses.

One bookmaker told me he knew he’d taken a monkey on the fifteen-to-one shot but couldn’t be sure it was from a man in a blue hat. ‘Punters are punters,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy checking for counterfeit notes to worry about what they’re wearing.’ He was also far too busy taking bets for the fourth race to give me any more of his time.

‘Come back after the last,’ he said, but, if he couldn’t remember now, he would have even less chance in a couple of hours’ time.

I asked all the bookies if they’d taken any bets on Wisden Wonder from the man in the blue fedora. None of them thought so, and I certainly hadn’t heard him placing one. They all said they’d taken lots of big bets on the favourite from other punters and they were very grateful not to have had to pay out.

I walked back through the grandstand to the weighing room and into the broadcast centre, the room from where all the racecourse public address and closed-circuit television coverage was transmitted.

‘Can I help you?’ asked the technician in charge.

I showed him my BHA credentials.

‘I’d like to see the video of the third race.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But not just at the moment. The fourth is about to start and I need to concentrate.’

I sat on a stool next to him and together we watched on a screen as the fourth race unfolded.

‘We have Channel 4 here today,’ he said. ‘They do all the TV production but I have to be sure that the racecourse closed-circuit systems are all working and tied in to their output. And we have our own commentary team separate from them to pipe through the on-course speakers.’

I sat patiently as he nervously monitored the bank of electronic equipment but all seemed to be working well and he relaxed as the race came to a conclusion.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘how can I help?’

‘Video of the third,’ I said.

‘No problem. Just let me make a copy of that race to give to the winning owner.’

He put a blank DVD into his recorder and burned the copy before handing it to a waiting official.

‘Now,’ he said, pushing buttons on the equipment, ‘do you want to see the whole race?’

‘Just the last hurdle in the back straight second time,’ I said. ‘Where Wisden Wonder was unseated.’

I watched the incident from two different camera angles, in full speed and in slow motion.

The horse had hit the hurdle hard and had pecked on landing, stumbling badly and almost going down on its knees. Bill McKenzie, the jockey, had little chance of remaining in the saddle and had gone past the horse’s head onto the turf. He’d even received a kick or two for his trouble.

But I was more interested in what had happened in the run-up to the jump.

Wisden Wonder had been lying fifth of the eight runners at the time and had been closely following the two right in front of him who were side by side. Wisden Wonder had seemingly not even seen the obstacle until he was upon it. If he’d been given any warning by McKenzie to jump, he had failed to act.

‘Is there a problem?’ asked the technician.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

‘The stewards had a look at the same incident after the race but they didn’t seem that bothered. They only watched it once.’

‘Do you know if they interviewed the jockey?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it. I think he went straight off to hospital.’

I’d been so engaged watching Leslie Morris collect his winnings that I hadn’t noticed what had happened to the jockey.

‘I’ll take a look at the stewards’ report,’ I said, standing up. ‘Thanks.’

‘Anytime.’

I left him to his electronics and walked across the weighing room to the medical room.

‘Bill McKenzie?’ I asked one of the nursing staff, showing her my ID card.

‘He’s gone to Kingston Hospital,’ she said. ‘Possible concussion after a fall.’

‘How was he when he left here?’

‘Conscious,’ she said, ‘but confused. The doctor did some concussion tests that all showed negative but he was still slightly worried about the apparent confusion, so he sent him for a CT scan of his head, just to be on the safe side. You can’t be too sure with head injuries.’

‘Did he go in an ambulance?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘In a car, with my colleague.’

Why did I think that it was rather convenient for him not to have to answer any difficult questions about his fall?