Even Money

11

On Wednesday I went to Stratford Races. Whoever thought that jump racing in June was a good idea hadn’t envisaged racing at Stratford after a prolonged drought, when the river Avon was so low that the racetrack watering system hadn’t been able to keep up with the evaporation from the sunbaked earth. The ground for weeks had been as hard as concrete, and very few trainers were willing to run their steeplechasers in such conditions.

The overnight declared runners for Stratford had been so few that it was hardly worth the journey, even though Stratford was the second-nearest course to my home, Warwick being a few miles closer.

Add the fact that Mother Nature had decided that, on this day, the six-week drought would break with numerous thunderstorms moving north from France, and one could understand why the midweek race-day crowd was not really worthy of the name.

Only four bookmakers had bothered to turn up to try to wring a few pounds out of the miserable, rain-soaked gathering. Even Norman Joyner, who almost always came to Stratford, hadn’t bothered. And most of the public who had come had the good sense to stay dry in the tote-betting hall under the grandstand, leaving us four bookies to huddle under our large umbrellas with the raindrops bouncing back off the tarmac. Royal Ascot in the sunshine, it was not.

The first race was a two-mile novice hurdle. According to the morning papers, there were five declared runners, but one of them had been withdrawn. The reason given by the horse’s trainer was that the rain had affected the going, but that was a joke. The ground was so dry, it would have needed rain akin to the Noachian Deluge to make any noticeable difference.

The four remaining runners appeared on the course and went down to the two-mile start while a few hardy punters made a dash across the ring towards us to place bets, before hurrying back to the shelter of the grandstand.

“It’s not much fun today,” said Luca in my ear.

“It was your idea,” I said, turning to him. “I’d have been happy staying in bed on a day like this.”

After my disturbed night, staying in bed had sounded like an excellent plan, but Luca had called me twice during the morning to see if I was coming to Stratford that afternoon.

“You don’t have to come,” he’d said in the second call. “Betsy and I can cope on our own, if you want. We had a good night at Newbury without you.”

I had begun to feel I was being eased out of my own business, and that made me even more determined to be here. But now, as another rivulet of rainwater cascaded off the umbrella and down my neck, I wasn’t at all sure that it had been the right decision.

“We must be mad,” shouted Larry Porter, again our neighboring bookie.

“Bonkers,” I agreed.

I thought it was funny how we use certain words. Here were Larry and I, in full control of our mental capacities, using terms like “mad” and “bonkers” to describe each other, while the likes of Sophie, and worse, institutionalized in mental health facilities, were never any longer referred to in such terms even in private. And the terms “lunatic asylum” and “loony bin” were now as archaic and taboo as “spastic” and “cripple.”

The betting business was so slow that Betsy had complained about the rain and taken herself off to the drier conditions of the bar, and I was beginning to wish I could join her.

“Whose stupid idea was it to come to Stratford?” I said to Luca.

“Would you have preferred Carlisle?” he said.

Kenilworth to Carlisle was more than two hundred miles, while the distance from my house to Stratford-upon-Avon racetrack was less than twenty.

“No,” I said.

“Well, shut up, then,” said Luca with a grin. “You’ve got a waterproof skin, so what are you worrying about? As least it’s not cold.”

“It’s hardly hot,” I replied.

“No pleasing some people,” he said to the world in general.

“Why don’t you just go home and leave Betsy and me to make you a living.”

“But Betsy’s gone off in a strop,” I said.

“She’s only in a strop because she wants to do your job and she can’t because you’re doing it,” he said.

He said it with a smile, but he meant it nevertheless.

It seemed I really was being eased out of my own business. But I suppose it was better than losing Luca and Betsy to a new outfit.

“You mean it, don’t you?” I said seriously.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “We need to be more ambitious, more proactive, more ruthless.”

I wasn’t sure whether the “we” included me or not.

“In what way do you want to be more ruthless?” I asked him.

“All that stuff at Ascot last week has shown me that the big boys are not invincible,” he said. “Someone gave them a bloody nose, and good luck to them. Bookmaking should be all about what happens here.” He spread his arms wide. “Well, not exactly here today, but you know what I mean. Bookmaking is about standing at a pitch on the course, not being stuck in some anonymous betting shop watching a computer screen.”

I was amazed. I thought it was the computer gambling that made Luca tick.

“But you love the Internet,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “But only as a tool for what happens here. The on-course bookies need to set the prices, and they should not be driven by the exchanges. By rights, it should be the other way round. We should be prepared to alter our prices for our advantage, not for those of anyone else.”

“You sound like you’re at war,” I said with a laugh.

“We are,” he said seriously. “And if we don’t fight, we’ll go under.”

I remembered back to the time when I had been assisting my grandfather for a couple of years or so. I’d had the same sort of discussion with him then. Bookmaking was an evolving science, and new blood, like Luca, needed to be ever pushing the boundaries. As he had said, without it, we’d go under.

As is so often the case with small fields, the four horses in the race finished in extended line astern, the favorite winning it at a canter by at least ten lengths. There was hardly a cheer from the measly crowd, and the winner returned to an almost deserted unsaddling enclosure.

As Luca had said, it wasn’t much fun.

A man in a suit came striding across from beneath the grandstand just as the rain began to fall in a torrent. He was holding an umbrella, but it didn’t appear to be keeping him very dry. Too much water was bouncing back from the ground. His feet must have been soaked by the time he stopped in front of me.

“What the bloody hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” I asked him in all innocence.

“With the bloody prices?” he said loudly.

“What about the prices?” I asked him.

“How come that winner was returned at two-to-one when everyone knows it should have been odds-on?”

“Nothing to do with me,” I said, spreading my hands out wide.

“Don’t get bloody clever with us,” the man said with menace, pointing his finger at me.

“And who is us, exactly?” I demanded, trying to disregard the implied threat.

He ignored me and went over to remonstrate with Larry Porter, who told him to go away and procreate, or words to that effect.

The man was far from pleased. “I’m warning you two,” he said, pointing at both Larry and me. “We won’t stand for that.”

Larry shouted at him again to go away, using some pretty colorful language that made even me wince.

“What was all that about?” I said to Luca.

“Just trying to rustle up a bit more business,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

“I thought we might tempt a few more punters over here if we offered a better price on the favorite,” he said, grinning at me. “That’s all.”

I stood there looking at him.

“You silly bugger. We don’t play games with these guys,” I said seriously. “Their bite is far worse than their bark.”

“Don’t be so boring,” he said.

“I mean it. They are powerful people, and they stamp on irritations.”

Was this what he meant by “being at war”?

The starting price was not set by a single bookmaker’s prices. It was a sort of average, but was actually the mode of the offered prices rather than a true average. A mode is that value that occurs most frequently in a sample.

At Ascot the previous week the number of bookmakers was very high, so a representative sample of, say, twelve bookmakers’ prices was used. The twelve were chosen not quite randomly, as they always included those bookies at the highest-traffic end of the betting ring. If, in the sample of twelve, five of the bookmakers had the price of a certain horse as the race started at, say, three-to-one, then its starting price would be three-to-one, even if four of them had the price at seven-to-two and the other three at four-to-one. Three-to-one was the mode because it was the price that occurred most frequently.

If there were two modes because, say in the above example, five bookies had the price at three-to-one, and five of them had it at seven-to-two, then the starting price was always taken as the higher of the two odds. So in that case it would have been seven-to-two.

At Stratford on this particular wet Wednesday in June, there were only four ring bookmakers, so the sample included all of them, but it was still only four. Only two of them needed to offer higher prices than was “true” for the starting price to be recorded as “too high.”

So Luca could not have affected the price on his own.

“Was it Larry’s idea or yours?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” he said, all innocent.

“It needed two of you,” I said.

“You were there too,” he said with a degree of accusation in his voice.

It was true. I was there, and it was my name on the board, or it was my surname at least. So I would carry the can, if a can indeed had to be carried. But I now realized how much I had subconsciously delegated to Luca and his computer.

“So was it Larry’s idea?” I asked, knowing full well that Luca had brains far in excess of Larry Porter and that it really was bound to have been Luca’s idea. But I wanted him to give me the option of not disposing with his services, to give him the chance to lie to me so that I could try to fool myself that maybe he wouldn’t try it again the next time I wasn’t there.

Was that why he had been so keen for me to stay at home and leave things to him and Betsy? Was that really why Betsy was in such a strop and had decided to absent herself from the scene of the crime?

I could almost hear the cogs whirling in his brain. He knew exactly what I had asked him and why. It wasn’t that I truly wanted to know whose idea and plan it had been. What I was really asking him was whether he wanted to keep his job.

If he started out in business on his own, he would have to purchase a number at a pitch auction in the future, which would require considerable outlay to obtain a decent spot in the ring. And he would most likely end up with a high number and hence a lowly choice of position. Those bookies with the best pitches took the most money, and, in a recession, it was no time to move further down the pack.

From my own point of view, I had come to rely very heavily on Luca. His expertise with our computer and Internet gambling had been instrumental in keeping the name of Teddy Talbot in the higher echelons of bookmaking circles. We had been remarkably profitable over the last few years, and I was not naïve enough to think that it came solely down to me. It was all to do with the teamwork that Luca and I had perfected. Finding a new bookmaker’s assistant wouldn’t be easy, perhaps impossible to find one as good as Luca.

The trouble was, he knew it.

But, that said, I couldn’t keep him on if I didn’t trust him not to bring my business down, either in standing or in monetary terms. If my grandfather had taught me one thing, it was that reputation was important. Most bookmakers are not held in great respect by the majority on the racetrack. Punters tend to think they are being forever robbed blind by the bookies. But I considered that I had always acted fairly and honorably towards the betting public, and also towards my fellow bookmakers, something that had not gone unnoticed by my regular customers. I wasn’t about to see all that change, and Luca had to make his mind up if he could play by my rules. I might be sure that I needed him, but he, in turn, was now deciding if he needed me.

“How about offering me a proper partnership?” he said with a smile.

I took that as a positive sign.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t take too long,” he said seriously, the smile having vanished.

Was he threatening me, I wondered, or simply warning me that he’d had offers from elsewhere?

Being a bookmaker’s assistant was, for some, a self-employed business in itself. In our case, Luca was my full-time employee, but he could do equally well, and maybe better, offering his expert services freelance on a daily basis to the highest bidder. Over the past seven years, since my grandfather had died and I had taken on Luca, I had often engaged a professional bookmaker’s assistant for various days here and there, either when one of us was ill or away on holiday or, in my case, tending to the needs of my sick wife. I tried to use the same man each time, but there were half a dozen or so who were all highly capable and in regular demand.

Maybe Luca was considering joining their ranks, or perhaps he’d had an offer from another bookmaker to become a partner.

I looked over at Larry Porter.

Surely not him, I thought. I had always considered that I was a better businessman than Larry, but maybe he thought the same about me.

“Hi, Larry,” I called across the deserted, rain-swept six feet between us. “What price will you give me on the favorite in the next?”

“Piss off,” he shouted back, “you self-righteous git.”

Charming, I thought. It might have been funny if it wasn’t for the fact that he and Luca had put us all in jeopardy by so blatantly changing the prices.

Larry clearly wasn’t enjoying his afternoon at the races. And he wasn’t the only one.

The day progressed with, if anything, a deterioration in the weather. The individual thunderstorms had coalesced into a single expanse of dark, menacing cloud stretching right across the sky, and the rain fell continuously straight downwards in the still air while the humidity rose to an oppressive hundred percent.

No doubt the gardeners of middle England were delighted by the downpour, but the punters at Stratford plainly were not. We took just two bets on the big race of the day, if that was an appropriate way of describing it.

The three-mile steeplechase on rock-hard going had attracted a paltry field of just three, in pursuit of a prize put up by a well-known Midlands building company. It was not the lovely summer’s day that the firm’s directors would have hoped for to entertain their clients when they had handed over their sponsorship check to the racetrack. Two small groups of their guests stood around under company-logo-printed umbrellas, watching the horses in the parade ring and trying unsuccessfully to look happy. Then they scuttled off back to their private box in the grandstand to dry off and to sip another glass of bubbly.

In the betting ring there was noticeably more activity than for the first couple of races, though that was due not to an increase in the number of punters braving the conditions but to the fact that several “suits” from the big outfits had turned up. They stood around getting wet, scrutinizing the prices on our boards more closely than a stamp collector studying a Penny Black.

Nothing untoward occurred, of course, but I caught a brief glimpse of Luca and Larry Porter having a secret smile at each other. Just how long, I thought, would it be before they couldn’t resist trying it again?

The race itself could hardly be described as exciting. The short-priced favorite, the only decent horse of the three, jumped off in front at the start and led the other two around and around the course by an ever-increasing margin, winning by a distance, almost at the trot. One of the remaining two slipped over at the last fence to leave the other to finish second, but so far behind the winner that the stands had emptied long before.

To add insult to injury, the stewards decided to abandon the rest of the day’s racing, citing the hazardous nature of the course. It seemed that the heavy rain, coming down as it had on the rock-hard ground, was causing the top surface of the grass to skid off the underlying dry, compacted soil, making the going treacherous.

Personally, I thought the stewards had done everyone a favor, and we gratefully packed up our stuff and made our way to the parking lots.

“Are you still OK for Leicester tomorrow evening without me?” I asked Luca.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Looking forward to it.” He smiled at me. I stopped pulling the trolley. “OK, OK,” he said. “I know. No funny business. I promise.”

“Let’s talk at the weekend,” I said.

“Fine,” he replied. “I want to talk things through with Betsy anyway.”

Betsy had appeared from the bar and had helped us to pack away the last few things. I was never quite sure what was going on in her head, and that day she had been more obtuse than ever. She had said hardly a word to me since a brief “Hello” when she and Luca arrived.

We loaded the equipment in the trunk of his car while Betsy simply sat inside it in the passenger seat. She didn’t say good-bye to me.

“Have a good day tomorrow,” said Luca. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I hope it all goes well.”

Sophie was due to have an assessment with a consultant psychiatrist from a different hospital. It was the final hurdle for her pass in order to be able to come home. Just as there needed to be agreement between two psychiatrists for her to be sectioned in the first place, there was also a need for such agreement for her to be “released back into the community,” as they put it.

The stress of an assessment was, paradoxically, bad for her condition, so I always tried to be on hand to provide her with reassurance and comfort between the sessions.

I wasn’t at all sure whether it was a good idea to leave Luca and Betsy to go to Leicester together without me, and without the services of one of the freelance bookmaker’s assistants. It was an evening meeting with the first race at twenty to seven. I supposed I might have been able to get there after spending the day at the hospital. Hemel Hempstead to Leicester was just a quick trip up the M1 highway.

“Betsy and I will be fine,” Luca said, clearly reading the dilemma in my face. “I promised, didn’t I?”

I must have still looked doubtful.

“Look,” he said. “We will be doing the best for the business in every respect. No point in fouling it all up if you’re thinking of offering me a partnership, is there?” He smiled at me.

“OK,” I said. “But…”

“Do you trust me or not?” he said, interrupting me.

“Yes, of course,” I said, hoping it was true.

“Then leave it,” he said seriously. “I’ll do tomorrow evening with Betsy, on our own. Like you said, we’ll talk at the weekend.”

He then climbed into the car next to Betsy and drove away, with me standing there watching them and wondering if life could ever be the same again.

The rain had thankfully eased a little as we had packed up the stuff, but now it began again in earnest, drumming noisily on the roofs of the cars around me.

I threw my umbrella in the back of my car, jumped in the front and started the engine. I was about to drive away when the passenger door suddenly opened and a man in a blue gabardine mackintosh climbed in beside me.

“Can you give me a lift?” he asked.

I looked at him in amazement, but he just stared forwards through the windshield, ignoring me.

“Where to?” I said finally. “The local police station?”

“I’d really rather not, if you don’t mind,” said the man.“Couldn’t you just drive for a bit?”

“And what makes you think I’d want to do that?” I asked him icily.

He turned towards me. “I thought you might want to talk.”

My audacious hitchhiker was the fourth stranger from the inquest, my unwanted nocturnal visitor of the previous night, complete with fresh plaster cast on his right arm.

“OK,” I said. “You talk and I’ll listen.”

I put the car into gear.