Even Money

8

Phones as well?” I asked.

Luca was busy pushing buttons on his mobile.

He nodded. “Same as before.”

The effect was startling. Suddenly there were men running everywhere with walkie-talkies in their hands and curly wires visible over their collars and leading, I presumed, to earpieces in their ears. They scanned the bookmakers’ boards, on the lookout for sudden changes to the odds.

“Twenty pounds to win on Burton Bank,” repeated the young man in front of me, slightly irritated at the delay.

“Sorry,” I said to him. “Twenty to win number two at sevens,” I repeated, turning to Luca. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders, then pressed the keys, and out popped the ticket from the printer. I held it out to the young man, who snatched it away.

“A tenner each way number four,” said the next punter, a large man in a blue-striped shirt and red tie.

I glanced up at our prices board.

“Ten pounds each way number four at fifteen-to-one,” I said, and the ticket duly appeared.

Ten pounds each way wasn’t going to be enough to significantly change the odds, I thought, not even on a relative outsider.

There was not much going on, although I could see some of the men with the earpieces moving down the line of bookies making bets and keeping a close eye on the prices.

But no one tried to make any odds-changing bets with me, and our board hardly altered in the five minutes or so before the race. But that didn’t stop the chaps with the earpieces running up and down in front of me, shouting at one another both directly and through their walkie-talkies.

“What do you mean it’s busy?” one of them shouted into his two-way radio.

I couldn’t hear the reply, as obviously it played straight into his ear via the earpiece.

“Well, get her out now,” he shouted. He turned to one of the others. “There’s a damn woman in the pay phone making a call.”

It was almost funny.

Larry Porter clearly thought it was, and he stood full square, laughing loudly.

“It’s back,” said Luca just as the starting stalls opened and the cavalry charge began.

“What a surprise,” I said.

I watched the race unfold on one of the big-screen TVs. As was usually the case in the Wokingham, the thirty runners divided into two packs, running close to the rails on either side of the course, in the traditional commentator’s nightmare.

The handicapper didn’t quite get his dream of a multiple dead heat, but still there was a pretty close blanket finish, with those running on the stand rail having a slight advantage.

“First, number four,” announced the public-address system. “Second, number eleven. Third, number twenty-six. The fourth horse was number two.”

So Burton Bank, horse number two, had finished fourth. He had once again been made clear favorite, with a starting price of five-to-one, so some of those bets made by the earpieces must have been to try to shorten his price. On Thursday, in the Gold Cup, Brent Crude, the favorite, had drifted badly when the Internet went down, so, I thought, the big boys’ first instinct today must have been to back the favorite and drive down the price. It hadn’t done them much good.

The winner had been returned at a starting price of fifteen-to-one. But there was nothing suspicious about that. The starting price of the winner of the Wokingham Stakes had regularly been at twenty-to-one or higher.

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

“Dunno,” he said. “Nothing much seemed to happen.”

“No,” I said. “But it was fun while it lasted.”

“Where did all those blokes come from?” he said. “They must have been hiding in the stands somewhere.”

“It was a bit of overkill, if you ask me,” I said.

“They must have lost a packet last time.”

“I’ll bet they didn’t do so well this time either,” I said with a grin. “And they don’t like it.” I laughed.

“Serves them bloody right,” Luca said, laughing back at me.

It really did serve them right, I thought. The big boys had no sympathy for independent bookies as they tried to squeeze the lifeblood out of us, so they couldn’t expect much compassion in return when they got rolled over. In fact, the truth was, we absolutely loved it.

“Weighed in,” announced the public address.

The first in line to be paid out was the gorgeous young woman in black and white.

“Well done,” I said cheerfully, giving her fifty pounds for her ten-pound place bet on number eleven.

“Thank you,” she replied, blushing slightly again. “My first win of the day.”

“Would you like to use it to make another bet?” I asked, pointing at the cash in her hand.

“Oh no,” she said in mock shock. “My boyfriend says I should always keep my winnings.”

“Very wise,” I said through gritted teeth.

Damn boyfriend!

The last two races on Royal Ascot Saturday have a distinct “end of term” feel about them. The very last race of the day, the Queen Alexandra Stakes, is the longest flat race in the United Kingdom, at more than two and a half miles, often attracting horses that normally run over the jumps. After the excitement of the Golden Jubilee and the Wokingham Stakes, which were both frantic six-furlong sprints, I always felt that the more sedate pace of the longer events was a slightly disappointing end to the meeting.

Betting was also light as punters drifted away either to beat the race traffic, to have some tea and scones or to sup a last glass of champagne in the bars. The betting ring was not exactly deserted, but the men with the earpieces were now a fairly large proportion of those remaining. They wandered around aimlessly, waiting for something untoward to happen.

It didn’t.

The day fizzled out. The Queen went home to Windsor Castle, and Royal Ascot was over for another year.

Perhaps I wouldn’t come back next year. Or maybe I would.

I spent most of Sunday with Sophie.

It was a lovely summer’s day, and we went for a walk in the hospital grounds. She had improved so much over the past five or six weeks, and I was really hopeful that she would be able to come home very soon.

“Another couple of weeks,” the doctor had said to me when I arrived.

They were always saying “another couple of weeks.” It was as if they were afraid to make the decision to send her home just in case she had a relapse and then they would be blamed for discharging her too soon.

We walked around a small pond set beneath the overhanging branches of a great oak tree. The mental hospital had been created by transforming a minor stately home that had been bequeathed to the nation by someone in lieu of inheritance tax. The building had been greatly changed from its former glory, but the grounds somehow remained rather grand even though the formal flower beds had long ago been converted into simple lawn, more easily cut by tractor mower. The calm tranquillity of the gardens was meant to do the patients good, and the high, supposedly escapeproof wire perimeter fence was out of sight, well screened behind trees. To be fair, the fence was there more to give the local residents a sense of security than to imprison the patients. Those cared for at this facility were placed in secure accommodation for their own safety, not because they posed a risk to others.

Broadmoor, it was not.

“Did you have a good week at Ascot?” Sophie asked as we sat on a bench by the pond.

“Yes,” I said. “A very good week.”

I still hadn’t said anything to her about the events of the previous Tuesday, and maybe I never would.

“There was all sorts of excitement yesterday,” I said. “Someone managed to turn both the Internet and the mobile phones off. The big companies were having a fit.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said, smiling warmly at the thought. Sophie knew all about bookmaking. She had stood next to my grandfather and me as our assistant throughout our courtship and well into our marriage.

When Sophie smiled, the sun still came out in my heart.

I took her hand in mine.

“Oh, Ned,” she sighed. “I hate this existence. I hate being here. The other residents are all bonkers, and I feel I don’t fit in.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “When can I come home?”

“Soon, my love, I promise,” I said. “The doctors say just another couple of weeks.”

“They always say that,” she said with resignation.

“You don’t want to go home too soon and then have to come back, now do you?” I said, squeezing her hand in mine.

“I never want to come back here,” she said bluntly. “I’m absolutely determined this time not to become ill again.”

She had said it before, many times before. If being well was simply a matter of want and willpower, she would be fine forever. Free choice had about as much chance of curing manic depression as a sheet of rice paper had at stopping a runaway train.

“I know,” I said calmly. “I don’t want you to have to come back here either.”

It was a major step forward in her recovery that she even recognized that she had been ill in the first place. For me, one of the most distressing things about her condition was that when she was manically high or depressively deep, she couldn’t appreciate that her bizarre, occasionally outlandish behavior was in any way unusual.

“Come on,” I said, breaking the morbidity of the moment, “let’s go and have some lunch.”

We walked hand in hand back up the expansive lawn towards the house.

“I love you,” Sophie said.

“Good,” I said, slightly embarrassed.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “Most husbands would have run away by now.”

Wow, I thought, she really is nearly better. For the time being anyway.

“I haven’t been much of a wife, have I?” she said.

“Nonsense,” I said. “You’ve been the best wife I’ve ever had.”

She laughed. We laughed together.

“I will really try this time,” she said.

I knew she would. She really tried every time. But chemical imbalance in the brain couldn’t be cured by trying alone.

“They have some new drugs now,” I said. “We’ll just have to see how they do.”

“I hate them,” she said. “They make me feel sick.”

“I know, my love. But feeling sick for a bit is surely better than having to come back here.”

We walked in silence up across the terrace, the sound of our shoes on the gravel unnaturally loud in the still air.

“And they make me fat,” she said.

We made our way back into the building through the French doors of the patients’ dayroom. What must have once been a spectacular salon, with great works of art and crystal chandeliers, was now a rather dull blue-vinyl-floored utilitarian open space. It was filled with functional but uninspiring National Heath Service furniture and lit by rows of fluorescent tubes hanging down on dusty chains from a superb ornamental-plastered ceiling far above. Such sacrilege.

Sophie and I sat down at one of the small square tables, on chairs that were so uncomfortable they must have been designed by a retired torturer.

Overall, the staff were very good with the patients’ families, encouraging us to spend as much time as possible at the hospital. There was even a guest suite for relatives to stay overnight, and Sophie and I were not the only family group sitting down to a Sunday lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in the dayroom. More comfortable chairs, I thought, would have helped.

“Please, can I come home for next weekend?” she asked me.

“Darling, you know it’s up to the doctors,” I said. “I promise you I’ll ask them later.”

We ate our meal mostly in silence.

The only topic Sophie wanted to talk about was going home, and I had just put the stoppers on that. But it was up to the doctors and not up to me. Patients in secure mental health accommodation could be released back into the community only on the say-so of a consultant psychiatrist and by agreement of a relevant “Care Programme Approach Review,” involving someone called the “Responsible Medical Officer,” as well as the appropriate “Mental Health Care Coordinator.” If they thought she needed two more weeks in the secure unit, then two more weeks it would be, however much I might want her home right now.

It was the drugs that were the problem.

Over the years, the doctors had tried electroshock treatment, but, if anything, that had made things worse, so Sophie’s only option was to take a daily cocktail of brightly colored pills. Some of them were antipsychotic and others antidepressant, but they were all referred to as “mood stabilizers.” Whereas together they could usually prevent and treat Sophie’s symptoms, they all had side effects of one sort or another. Not only did they make her feel nauseous, they also tended to reduce the activity of her thyroid gland while increasing her craving for carbohydrates. Hence, Sophie was right, they were inclined to make her fat, and that, in turn, was bad for her state of mind, especially for her depression.

But the most problematic thing about her condition was that when the drugs made her feel free of any form of psychosis, she started to believe, wrongly, that she didn’t need them anymore. The pills, and their side effects, were then thought of as the problem rather than the solution, and hence she stopped taking them, I think more by neglect than design, and then the whole wretched cycle started once more.

For some sufferers, they miss the manic “highs,” and so they purposely stop taking their medication. The high time for some can be very creative. There is a prevalent theory that Vincent van Gogh was a manic-depressive and that during his manias he produced some of the greatest art that man has ever seen while during his depressions he first cut off his own ear and then ultimately shot himself to death.

Many great writers and artists of the past have been referred to as “troubled souls” long before their condition was seen as being mental illness. Manic depression may have given the world more than it realizes. Nowadays, it has been relabeled as “bipolar disorder,” and appears to be almost fashionable amongst the young literati.

“Would you like some fruit salad and ice cream?” said one of the staff, taking our main-course plates.

“Yes, please,” I said. “How about you, my love?”

“Yes,” she replied rather quietly. “Lovely.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, but her eyes were distant.

The doctors were right, I thought. She might need at least another two weeks of their care to get the drug doses sorted out properly.

We finished our lunch and went up to her room. She regularly took a nap in the afternoons, and I was hopeful that it had just been tiredness that had caused her to be somewhat vacant downstairs and not the start of another inward-looking depressive episode.

The two of us sat down in armchairs in front of an old black-and-white war film on the television. Sophie drifted off to sleep while I read her newspaper, mostly the racing pages. Regular domesticity.

The inquest into the death of my father was opened and then adjourned on Monday morning at the Coroner’s Court in Maidenhead.

The proceedings took precisely fourteen minutes.

Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn was called first, and he informed the coroner that a violent assault had occurred in the parking lot at Ascot racetrack on the sixteenth of June, the previous Tuesday, during the evening at approximately eighteen-twenty hours, which had resulted in the subsequent death of a man at Wexham Park Hospital, Slough. The time of death had been recorded as nineteen-thirty hours on the same day.

A written report from the post-mortem pathologist was read out, stating that the primary cause of death was hypoxemic hypoxia, a lack of adequate oxygen supply to the organs of the body. The hypoxia had been brought on by pooling of blood in the lungs as a result of punctures to each side of the deceased’s abdomen caused by a sharply pointed, bladed instrument approximately twelve centimeters, or five inches, in length and a little more than two centimeters in width. The blade had been angled upwards during each strike and had, on both occasions, penetrated the diaphragm and ruptured a lung. The hypoxia had further resulted in acidosis of the blood plasma, which in turn had led to cardiac arrest, cerebral ischemia and, ultimately, death.

Or, in laymen’s terms, my father had died from being stabbed twice in his stomach with a knife. The wounds had caused his lungs to be full of blood rather than air, so he had suffocated to death.

My father had, in fact, died due to a lack of oxygenated blood to his brain.

Just as my mother had. But for different reasons.

I was called by the coroner to give evidence of identification. The letter of summons had indeed been in the pile of mail I had opened on Saturday evening. Amongst other things, it spelt out the dire consequences of my failure to attend the court proceedings.

I was asked by the court usher to state my full name and address, and then to hold a Bible in my right hand. I read the Coroner’s Court oath from a card. “I swear by Almighty God, that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth and nothing but the truth.”

“You are the deceased’s son?” asked the coroner. He was a small, balding man, the meager amount of hair that he did retain being combed right over the top of his head. Throughout the proceedings, he had been writing copious notes in a spiral-bound notebook, and he now looked expectantly at me over a pair of half-moon glasses.

“Yes,” I said. I was standing in the witness-box of the court.

“What was your father’s full name?” he asked.

“Peter James Talbot,” I said.

“And his date of birth?”

I gave it. I knew every detail of my father’s birth certificate as well as I knew my own. The coroner wrote it down in his notebook.

“And his last permanent address?” he asked, not looking up.

I pulled the photocopy of the driver’s license from my pocket and consulted it. “He lived at 312 Macpherson Street, Carlton North, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia,” I said.

“And when did you last see your father alive?” he asked.

“As he was lifted into the ambulance at Ascot racetrack,” I said.

He wrote furiously in his notebook.

“So you were present at the time of the assault?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He wrote it down.

“Was that when your eye was injured?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said again.

The coroner seemed to glance over at Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn, who was sitting on a bench to his right.

“Are the police aware of your presence at the time of the assault?” the coroner asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded, as if he had done his bit for the investigation, and wrote something down in his notebook.

“Did you observe the body of the deceased after death at Wexham Park Hospital?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said once more.

“Can you swear to the court-and I remind you, Mr. Talbot, that you are under oath-that the body you observed at that time was that of your father?”

“I believe it was my father, yes,” I said.

The coroner stopped writing his notes and looked up at me.

“That doesn’t sound very convincing, Mr. Talbot,” he said.

“Until the day of his death,” I said, “I hadn’t seen my father, or even known of his existence, for the past thirty-six years.”

The coroner put down his pen.

“And how old are you, Mr. Talbot?” he asked.

“Thirty-seven,” I said.

“Then how can you believe that the deceased was your father if you haven’t seen him since you were one year old?”

“He told me so,” I said.

The coroner appeared amazed.

“And you took his word for it?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I replied, “I did. We had been speaking about family matters for some time before the attack on us in the Ascot parking lot, and I became convinced that, indeed, he was my father as he had claimed. In addition, I was informed by the police last Thursday that DNA analysis had confirmed the fact.”

“Ah,” he said. He turned towards Chief Inspector Llewellyn. “Is this so, Chief Inspector?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, standing up. “The DNA indicated that Mr. Talbot here and the deceased were very closely related. Almost certainly father and son.”

I briefly wondered why the police had not informed the coroner’s office of the DNA results beforehand. It might have saved me from even attending.

The coroner wrote furiously for about a minute in his notebook before looking up at me. “Thank you, Mr. Talbot, that will be all.”

Nothing about Alan Charles Grady, and, less surprisingly, nothing about Willem Van Buren. Identification of the deceased had been formally established as Peter James Talbot.

“May I arrange a funeral?” I asked the coroner.

He again turned towards the chief inspector. “Do the police have any objection to an order being issued?”

Chief Inspector Llewellyn stood up. “At this time, sir,” he said, “we would prefer it if the body would remain available for further post-mortem inspection.”

“And why is that?” the coroner asked him.

“We have reason to believe, sir, that the deceased may have been connected with other past crimes, and we may wish to perform further DNA testing.”

“Do the necessary samples not already exist?” the coroner asked him.

“We may have the need to gather more,” said the detective chief inspector.

“Very well,” said the coroner. He turned back to me. “Sorry, Mr. Talbot, I will not issue a burial order at this time. You may reapply to my office in one week’s time.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

I looked at the detective chief inspector with renewed loathing. I was sure he had objected to me organizing a funeral only to irritate me.

“This inquest is adjourned,” said the coroner. “Next case, please.”

Those of us only concerned with the death of the now formally identified Peter James Talbot stood up and filed out of the court. In addition to Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn and myself, there was Detective Sergeant Murray, three other men and a young woman who all made their way ahead of me from the courtroom into the lobby. I was pleased to note that I couldn’t see the shifty-eyed man from the parking lot and Sussex Gardens amongst them, not that I really expected him to be. It would surely have been far too dangerous for him to appear as I might have recognized him and told the police.

However, I was rather concerned that one of these four strangers might have been sent by him to gather information, so I rushed out to get a better look at them, and to see what they were doing.

One of the men and the young woman were standing with Chief Inspector Llewellyn and appeared to be asking him some questions, one with a notebook, the other with a handheld recorder. Reporters, I thought. One of the other two men was chatting with Sergeant Murray, but I couldn’t see the fourth anywhere in the lobby. I rushed out of the building, but he had seemingly disappeared completely. I stood in the street, turning around and around looking for him, but he’d gone.

I went back up the steps and into the building.

Both the reporters saw me at the same instant and hurried across.

“Do you know why your father was killed?” asked the young woman, beating the man to it by a short head.

“No,” I said. “Do you?”

She ignored my question. “Did you see the person who was responsible for his death?” she asked, thrusting her recording device into my face.

“No,” I said.

“Would you recognize the killer again?” asked the man, forcing his way in front of me and elbowing the woman to the side.

“No,” I said, hoping that he would print the answer so the killer would read it.

“Did he do that to your eye?” the young woman asked, trying to push her way back in front of me.

“Yes,” I said. “He kicked me. That’s why I was unable to see the person responsible, or indeed anything else that happened.”

“But why was he killed?” implored the man.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I hadn’t seen my father for thirty-six years until the day he died.”

“Why not?” the young woman asked almost accusingly.

“He emigrated to Australia when I was one,” I said, “and my mother and I didn’t go with him.”

They suddenly seemed to lose interest in me. Maybe they could tell that I wasn’t going to be much help to them.

What they really should have asked me was why my mother hadn’t immigrated to Australia with my father. The answer was because she’d been murdered by him. Not that I’d have told them.