Even Money

12

Well?” I said. “Talk to me.” I drove along the Stratford-to-Warwick road.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” he said.

“How do you know I didn’t?” I glanced across at him.

“I stayed to watch. No one came.”

“That doesn’t mean I didn’t call them.”

“I watched you through the window,” he said. “You vacuumed up the mess I left, and no one does that if he’s called the police.”

I felt uneasy at the thought of him being outside my home, watching me. “How long did you wait?” I asked him.

“Not long,” he said. “My arm hurt too much.”

“Serves you right.”

“You broke my wrist.”

“Good.”

We sat in silence for a while.

“Who the hell are you anyway?” I asked him.

“Just call me John,” he said.

“John who?”

“Just John.”

“And what do you want?” I asked him again.

“The microcoder,” he said. “Like I told you last night.”

“What makes you think that I’ve got it?”

“Where else would it be?”

“It could be anywhere,” I said.

“You have it,” he said with finality.

“Even if I did have it-and I don’t-what right do you think you have breaking into my house to look for it?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said. “And I didn’t break in. You left a window open. You were just asking to be burgled.”

“So that’s what you are, is it?” I said. “A burglar.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said.

I looked across at him. “I’m not the one with a broken wrist.”

“OK,” he said, “I agree. That wasn’t so clever.”

Again I drove in silence.

“Where to, then?” I asked.

“To wherever the microcoder is.”

“I told you, I don’t have it.”

“And I told you, I don’t believe you.” He turned in his seat and looked at me. “For a start, if you didn’t know what I was talking about, then you would surely have telephoned the police last night. And second, we know it was you that retrieved your father’s rucksack from the hotel in Paddington.”

“What rucksack?” I said, trying to keep my voice as level and calm as possible and wondering, once more, if this John fellow and Shifty-eyes were working together. He had said “we.” Was I, after all, on my way to meet again the man with the twelve-centimeter knife?

“Oh, come on,” he said. “We’d been looking for his luggage too, you know. And I’d been looking for your father as well, for weeks. Ever since he stole the microcoder.”

“Who are ‘we’?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He just turned back and looked out at the road.

“Why did you murder my father?” I said slowly.

“I didn’t,” he said, still looking ahead.

“But you had it done,” I said.

“No.” He turned again to face me. “That was not me.”

“Then who was it?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“And you expect me to believe you?” I said. “Perhaps we should go to the police station and you can then explain to them exactly who you are and why you were in my house last night.”

“I’ll deny it,” he said. “You vacuumed up the evidence, remember?”

I pulled the Volvo into a rest area and stopped the engine. I turned to him.

“And what is it you really want?” I asked.

“The microcoder,” he said flatly. “That’s all.”

“And what exactly is this bloody microcoder anyway?” I said.

“An electronic device.”

“Yes, but what does it do?” I asked.

He sat silently for a moment or two clearly debating with himself as to how much he should tell me.

“It writes coded information onto animal-identification tags,” he said.

“RFIDs,” I said absentmindedly.

“So you do know what it is,” he said, slapping his knee. “So where the hell is it?”

Now it was my turn to sit silently debating with myself how much I was going to tell this Just call me John mysterious stranger.

“Are you some sort of secret agent?” I asked.

He laughed. “What makes you think that?”

“You seem pretty secretive,” I said. “And you talk about ‘we’ and ‘us’ as if you were part of an organization.”

He again stared for a moment through the windshield.

“Indirectly,” he said. “I work for the Australian Racing Board.”

“Do they know you break into people’s houses?”

“They would deny any knowledge of my existence.”

“You don’t sound Australian.”

“I’m not,” he said. “English to the core. Can’t stand the Aussies. Too bloody good at cricket, if you ask me.”

“So this so-called microcoder is to do with Australian racing?”

“It’s to do with all racing, everywhere.”

“But is there much racing in Australia?” I asked. “I’ve heard of the Melbourne Cup, of course, but not much else.”

“There’s a lot more racing in Australia than that,” he said. “There are six times as many racetracks in Australia than here in Great Britain, and twice as many horses in training. It’s big business.”

“Do they have licensed bookmakers?” I asked.

“Yes, plenty of them,” he said. “But all off-track betting is through the TAB, their equivalent of the tote.”

“Well, you live and learn.”

“And you must have heard of Phar Lap?” he said. “Most famous racehorse that ever lived.”

“The name rings a bell.”

“Well, he was an Australian horse,” John said. “Back in the thirties. He won fourteen group races in a row one year, including the Melbourne Cup.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah, but he was poisoned with arsenic during a visit to the United States. Some said the horse was killed on the orders of the Chicago mob to prevent him winning again and costing them a packet in illegal bets.”

“Why are bookies always cast as the villains?” I asked.

“That’s because you are,” he said, smiling at me. “Now, where’s my microcoder?”

“So it’s yours, is it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“How can I be so sure? And why is it so important?”

“It just is,” he said. “And I know you have it.”

“How?”

“I had a description of the man who collected your father’s luggage from the hotel in Paddington, though I didn’t know it was you, not until I saw you at the inquest.”

“Lots of people look like me,” I said.

“Stop playing games with me, Mr. Talbot,” he said seriously. “The lady at the Royal Sovereign Hotel described you absolutely perfectly, including your black eye, though why she didn’t question your name being Dick Van Dyke I’ll never know.”

I couldn’t help smiling, and he noticed.

“What on earth made you come up with that?” he said.

Perhaps he was unaware that my father had used the name Willem Van Buren when he’d checked in. The hotel lady had said he was called Van-something, and Dick Van Dyke had been all I could come up with at the time.

“If you know so much, how come you took so long to find him-so long, in fact, that I found his luggage before you did?”

“Because he wasn’t using his real name,” he said.

“And what is his real name?” I asked.

“You tell me,” he said. “You formally identified him at the inquest two days ago. So it’s now officially recorded by the coroner as Peter James Talbot. But is that right? Who, then, is Alan Charles Grady?”

And who, I also thought, was Willem Van Buren, of South Africa?

“Tell me what you know about my father,” I said to John.

“Why should I?” he said.

“Do you want your microcoder back or not?” I asked.

“You probably won’t like it.”

I was sure of that, if what I knew already was any indication.

“Well, for a start, I knew him only as Alan Grady. The first time I heard the name Talbot was after he was dead. I had been keeping a tight eye on Mr. Grady for some time. He was followed from Melbourne, but I lost him at Heathrow. I now think that he never came through immigration but took another international flight straight out. But I don’t know where to.”

I thought about the e-ticket receipt I had found tucked into the Alan Grady passport in my father’s rucksack. There had been no other flights listed there, other than his return to Australia.

“Was he using the name Grady?” I asked.

“I don’t know that either,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have access to airline passenger lists.”

“An unofficial tail, then?” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said. “As I told you, officially I don’t exist.”

I wished.

“For how long, exactly, have you been keeping a close eye on my father?” I asked him.

“For years,” he said. “Must be twenty at least. As far as I know, he’s always been known to the racing authorities. He used to run an illegal backstreet bookmaking business in Melbourne.”

“But I thought you said that bookmaking was legal in Australia?”

“Only on-course bookmakers are legal,” he said. “Needless to say, our friend Mr. Grady was not one of those.”

“But I am, remember,” I said to him.

“Oh yes, so you are.” He looked like he had stepped in something nasty.

“You’re showing your prejudices. We’re not all bad, you know.”

“Aren’t you?” he said, laughing. “Well, Alan Grady had been hovering around the edges of racing in Australia for as long as I’ve been working there. He mostly was very good at keeping one step ahead of the security service, doing just enough to keep himself out of court.”

I was surprisingly quite pleased that he was good at something. “Only ‘mostly’?” I asked.

“He did get convicted a couple of times,” he said. “Small stuff, really. He did one short stretch inside for obtaining money with menaces. Unpaid gambling debts. Then he got himself turned over by another illegal outfit and ended up bankrupt.”

At least that bit of my father’s story had been true, I thought.

“How come a man can go to prison and also be bankrupted and still no one realizes that he’s not using his real name?”

“But Alan Grady was his real name,” he said. “Passport, driver’s license, bank accounts, even a genuine birth certificate, all in the name of Grady. He was Alan Grady. As I said, I didn’t hear the name Talbot until the day after he died and that was only by chance from someone I had lunch with at Ascot last Wednesday. He told me about the murder in the parking lot.”

“But how did he get a genuine birth certificate in a false name?” I asked.

“There must have once been a real Alan Grady,” he said.“Perhaps your father stole his identity. Perhaps the real Alan Grady died.”

Or he was murdered, I thought. Should I tell him, I wondered, about the Willem Van Buren passport? On balance, I thought not. Not yet.

“So tell me about this microcoder,” I said.

“Seems you know already.”

“I know it can be used to write numbers onto RFIDs,” I said. “But so what? Why was it worth chasing my father halfway round the world to get it back?”

“Fraud,” he said.

“Yeah, I assumed that, but what sort of fraud?”

“Making one horse appear to be another,” he said.

“But so what?” I said again. “Everyone knows that running a ringer in a race needs a conspiracy. Too many people would surely recognize the animal, and someone will spill the beans.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “But you could easily sell a foal or a yearling as another, with no risk then of anyone recognizing it as the wrong horse. Especially if you sell it to England from Australia or vice versa.”

“But surely horses are DNA tested for their parentage,” I said.

“They are,” he agreed. “But they are only retested if they eventually go to stud. And the DNA testing takes a long time. Not like using a handheld scanner on the ID chip, which is instant.”

“But even if you switch a bad horse for a good one and then sell it,” I said, “what would you do with the good one you’ve kept? You can’t sell the same horse twice.”

“No, but you could put it into training under its new identity. It would still be a good horse and could make a packet on the track. And if it’s so much better than people think it should be, it would win at long odds, at least to start with. Just make sure you don’t breed it. Geld it, even, to be safe.”

“And the bad one you sold would just be seen as another expensive failure?” I said. “And there are lots of those about.”

“Exactly,” he said.

Everyone in racing knew about Snaafi Dancer. Bought as a yearling in 1983 for a world’s record price of over ten million dollars, he ran too slow to ever make it to the racetrack, and then turned out to be infertile. And he was just one of a whole string of flops that had been sold for millions and then earned not a cent of it back.

“I grant you, it’s a long-term strategy,” he said. “But one that’s quite likely to be profitable. Obviously, you wouldn’t do it with a really megavaluable yearling, as there would be masses of checks made, but loads of horses go to the sales each year. And even the Horses-in-Training Sales now attract huge prices, and for geldings too.”

“But I thought those ID chips were meant to be secure and unchangeable,” I said.

“So did we,” he said. “But it seems we were wrong. The chip that’s inserted in a horse’s neck contains a number that is unique for that horse, and it is supposed to be read-only and permanent. But someone has discovered that a very intense localized magnetic field can wipe the number from the chip, just the same way those security tags stuck on CDs in shops are wiped over a magnetic pad to clear them.”

“And, don’t tell me,” I said, “the microcoder can write a new number in?”

“Well, not quite,” he said. “The magnetic field has to be so strong that the chip’s electronics are completely destroyed. But the microcoder can write a different number into a new chip, which is then inserted in the horse’s neck and, hey, presto, you instantly have a different horse.”

“But how about the horse’s passport with all its whorls and such?” I said.

“That would be OK if people bothered,” he said. “But too many people believe the technology without question. Like in tennis. All those arguments about whether the ball was in or out have disappeared thanks to the computerized Hawk-Eye system. The players believe it absolutely, as does everyone else. If Hawk-Eye says it was out, then it was out. Same with this. If the ID chip says that the animal is horse A, then it’s horse A, even if it’s got all the whorls for horse B. The authorities try to get people to check both, but they still tend to believe the ID chips. After all, it’s the same authorities that insist on them being inserted, and then they tell people they’re foolproof. Only now they find they’re not.”

“Does everywhere use the same ones?” I said.

“Pretty much,” he said. “Except the United States. They don’t use chips at all, at least not yet, because they tattoo the inside of the horse’s lip. But if a horse comes from the States to race in Australia or Europe, it has to be chipped first.”

“By whom?” I said.

“A vet authorized by the racing board.”

“Seems to me that the system needs changing,” I said.

“We need that microcoder back,” he said in reply.

“What’s to stop someone making another one?” I said.

“Nothing, I suppose,” he said. “But our boffins say it’s not that easy.”

“How about the man who made the first one? He could surely make another.”

“Ah,” he said. “Therein lies a tale.”

“What tale?” I asked.

“A trigger-happy Victoria State policeman shot him as he was trying to resist arrest.”

“Dead?” I asked.

“As good as,” he said. “Got a bullet in his brain. Totally gaga.”

What a waste, I thought. Smarter than the boffins, and now what? A vegetable.

“Someone else will work it out,” I said.“Probably some fourteen-year-old in his school science lab.” Or Luca, I thought.

“It would have to be someone with both the knowledge and the intent,” he said.

“If there are any with the knowledge, then there will be some with the intent. Trust me, I’m a bookmaker.”

He laughed. “You’re probably right. But we have to try and do what we can to stay ahead of them.”

“How about the tattoos the Americans use?”

“They’re tricky to do, and they become difficult to read as the horse gets older,” he said. “And they’re not fraudproof either. It has been known for some unscrupulous souls to try to vary the original tattoo.”

We had been sitting in the rest area for quite a while, and, as we talked, I had been trying to think what to do. Why had he said nothing about the money? Did he, in fact, know that the money had also been in the rucksack? Was I going to give him the microcoder and the cash? Did I have any choice in the matter? If John here had a direct line to the Victoria State Police, then he probably did to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn as well. But why then had he entered my house uninvited through a window in the middle of the night?

“Never mind the horses,” I said. “Do you have any personal ID?”

“What, here?”

“Yes,” I said. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“I told you,” he replied slightly uncomfortably. “The Australian Racing Board would deny all knowledge of my existence.”

“And why is that, exactly?” I said.

“The very nature of my job means I have to work undercover. If I was a normal employee, then my cover would be blown. There are bound to be some people within the organization who would pass on the information to the very people I am trying to investigate.”

“But John who?” I said.

“Smith,” he said with a straight face.

John Smith. Oh yeah, I thought, pull the other one. But John was probably not his real name either.

“So where exactly is my microcoder?” he said.

“I gave it to a friend.”

“You did what?” he exclaimed. “Who?”

“A friend who’s an electronics specialist,” I said. “To try and see what it does.”

He went pale. “Well, get it back now,” he almost shouted.

“I can’t,” I said. “My friend has gone away on holiday for a week. To Greece.”

I didn’t know why I was so reluctant to simply hand it over. I suppose I thought that this John would then just disappear, in which case I would never learn anything more about my father. Maybe it was also because I didn’t really trust him. Not enough to hand over my trump card to him, not just yet anyway.

“Where does this friend live?” John asked.

“Why? Are you thinking of breaking into another house?” There was more than a hint of sarcasm in my tone.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “If I think it’s necessary,” he said.

“It’s somewhere in High Wycombe,” I said. “I don’t know exactly where. There are lots of houses in High Wycombe. Are you going to break into them all?”

“Oh, ha-ha,” he said. “When does this friend get back from holiday?”

“Sunday, I think,” I said.

“And what’s his name?” he demanded.

“Her, actually,” I said. “And what makes you think I would tell you her name anyway? You must be joking. You’d go and break into her house.”

“Mr. Talbot,” he said seriously, “I don’t think you really understand the trouble you might be in. I assure you, I’m not the only person looking for that microcoder. And some of them might not be so…” He stopped, as if thinking.

“Honest?” I said. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“Patient,” he said. “There are some very nasty people out there.”

Be very careful of everyone, my father had said. I certainly intended being very careful of Shifty-eyes and his twelve-centimeter knife. And, as far as I was concerned, that included being very careful of Mr. John Smith here as well.

“You call breaking into people’s houses being patient?” I said.

He sat there in silence for a second or two staring ahead.

“Where can I drop you?” I said. “I have things to do.”

“Here will do fine. A colleague of mine has been following us since we left the racetrack.” He twisted around in the seat.

I looked in the rearview mirror. There was a dark blue Ford in the rest area behind us, but it was some ways off. I couldn’t see the driver due to the reflection of the sky from the windshield.

“Give me a call when your friend comes back from holiday,” he said, turning back and handing me a business card. I looked at it and rotated it in my hands. A mobile phone number was printed across the center of one side. There was no name, no company and no address, just the telephone number. “Call me,” he said. “For your own good.”

He opened the passenger door and eased himself out of my car.

“Go now,” he ordered, closing the door.

He stood there as if waiting for me to depart. I, meanwhile, felt decidedly annoyed to think that someone had been following me. In fact, I was downright angry about it.

I started the engine, but, instead of engaging forward gear, I put the Volvo into reverse and accelerated backwards down the rest area towards the Ford.

I’m sure I would have rammed him if he hadn’t suddenly pulled out into the road and shot away, narrowly avoiding a collision with both a truck and a car towing a caravan. I snatched the Volvo into forward gear and pulled out to give chase, but I had no chance. Both the truck and the caravan were between me and the Ford, and I could see it in the distance speeding away. The twelve-year-old engine under my car’s hood was reliable but well past its prime and, even with its gas-guzzling 2.3 liters plus turbocharger, it was unable to generate enough horses for me to pass the slower vehicles.

Damn it, I thought. That wasn’t very clever. My first-ever undercover, secret-agent, James Bond-style car chase, and I’d got stuck behind a caravan. M would not have been amused.

I turned the car around at the next junction and went back to the rest area.

Naturally, there was no sign of either a dark blue Ford or a certain Mr. John Smith, or whatever his real name was.