Field of 13

Blind Chance

In 1979 Julian Symons, Eminence of The Detection Club, hit on a wheeze to earn money to swell the Club’s depleted coffers. As Editor, he invited a fistful of crime writers to contribute a short story towards a volume whose title was to be Verdict of Thirteen: a Detection Club Anthology.

Not being skilled at court scenes, I wrote a racecourse tale called Twenty-one Good Men and True, and under that banner it was published by Faber in Britain and Harper in the US, both in 1979. In England the story was also run by the weekly magazine, Women’s Own, who gave it the title adopted here, Blind Chance.

Arnold Roper whistled breathily while he boiled his kettle and spooned instant own-brand economy-pack coffee into the old blue souvenir from Brixham. Unmelodic and without rhythm, the whistling was none the less an expression of content — both with things in general and the immediate prospect ahead. Arnold Roper, as usual, was going to the races: and, as usual, if he had a bet, he would win. Neat, methodical, professional, he would operate his unbeatable system and grow richer, the one following the other as surely as chickens and eggs.

Arnold Roper at forty-five was one of nature’s bachelors, a lean-bodied man accustomed to looking after himself, a man who found the chatter of companionship a nuisance. Like a sailor — though he had never been to sea — he kept his surroundings polished and shipshape, ordering his life in plastic dustbin-liners and reheated take-away food.

The one mild problem on Arnold Roper’s horizon was his wealth. The getting of the money was his most intense enjoyment. The spending of it was something he postponed to a remote and dreamlike future, when he would exchange his sterile flat for a warm unending idyll under tropical palms. It was the interim storage of the money which was currently causing him, if not positive worry, at least occasional frowns of doubt. He might, he thought, as he stirred dried milk grains into a brownish brew, have to find space for yet another wardrobe in his already crowded bedroom.

If anyone had told Arnold Roper he was a miser, he would have denied it indignantly. True, he lived frugally, but by habit rather than obsession: and he never took out his wealth just to look at it, and count, and gloat. He would not have admitted as miserliness the warm feeling that stole over him every night as he lay down to sleep, smiling from the knowledge that all round him, filling two oak-veneered sale-bargain bedroom suites, was a ton or two of negotiable paper.

It was not that Arnold Roper distrusted banks. He knew, too, that money won by betting could not be lost by tax. He would not have kept his growing gains physically around him were it not that his unbeatable system was also a splendid fraud.

The best frauds are only ever discovered by accident, and Arnold could not envisage any such accident happening to him.

Jamie Finland woke to his usual darkness and thought three disconnected thoughts within seconds of consciousness. ‘The sun is shining. It is Wednesday. They are racing today here at Ascot.’ He stretched out a hand and put his ringers delicately down on the top of his bedside tape-recorder. There was a cassette lying there. Jamie smiled, slid the cassette into the recorder, and switched on.

His mother’s voice spoke to him. ‘Jamie, don’t forget the man is coming to mend the television at ten-thirty and please put the washing into the machine, there’s a dear, as I am so pushed this morning, and would you mind having yesterday’s soup again for lunch. I’ve left it in a saucepan ready. Don’t lose all that money this afternoon or I’ll cut the plug off your stereo. Home soon after eight, love.’

Jamie Finland’s thirty-eight-year-old mother supported them both on her earnings as an agency nurse, and she had made a fair job, her son considered, of bringing up a child who could not see. He was fifteen. He studied in Braille at home and passed exams with credit.

He rose gracefully from bed and put on his clothes: blue shirt, blue jeans. ‘Blue is Jamie’s favourite colour,’ his mother would say. and her friends would say, ‘Oh yes?’ and she could see them thinking: how could he possibly know? But Jamie could identify blue as surely as his mother’s voice, and red, and yellow and every colour in the spectrum, as long as it was daylight.

‘I can’t see in the dark,’ he had said when he was six, and only his mother, from watching his sureness by day and his stumbling by night, had understood what he meant. Walking rad.ir, she called him. Like many young blind people he could sense easily the wavelength of light, and distinguish the infinitesimal changes of frequency reflected from coloured things close to him. Strangers thought him uncanny. Jamie believed everyone could see that way if they wanted to, and could not clearly understand what was meant by sight.

He made and ate some toast and thankfully opened the door to the television-fixer. ‘In my room,’ he said, leading the way. ‘We’ve got sound but no picture.’

The television-fixer looked at the blind eyes and shrugged. If the boy wanted a picture he was entitled to it, same as everyone else who paid their rental. ‘Have to take it back to the workshop,’ he said, judicially pressing buttons.

‘The races are on,’ Jamie said. ‘Can you fix it by then?’

‘Races? Oh yeah. Well, tell you what, I’ll lend you another set. Got one in the van...’ He staggered off with the invalid set and returned with the replacement. ‘Not short of radios, are you?’ he said, looking around. ‘What do you want six for?’

‘I leave them tuned to different things,’ Jamie said. ‘That one’ — he pointed accurately ndash; ‘listens to aircraft, that one to the police, those three over there are on ordinary radio stations, and this one... local broadcasts.’

‘What you need is a transmitter. Put you in touch with all the world.’

‘I’m working on it,’ Jamie said. ‘Starting today.’ He closed the door after the man and wondered whether betting on a certainty was in itself a crime.

Greg Simpson had no such qualms. He paid his way into the Ascot paddock, and ambled off to add a beer and sandwich to a comfortable paunch. Two years now, he thought, munching, since he had first set foot on the Turf: two years since he had exchanged his principles for prosperity and been released from paralysing depression.

They seemed a distant memory, now, those fifteen months in the wilderness; the awful humiliating collapse of his seemingly secure and pensionable world. There was no comfort in knowing that mergers and cutbacks had thrown countless near-top managers like himself straight on to the redundancy heap.

At fifty-two, with long success-strewn experience and genuine administrative skill, he had expected that he at least would find another suitable post easily, but door after closed door, and a regretful chorus of ‘Sorry, Greg’, ‘Sorry, old chap’, ‘Sorry, Mr Simpson, we need someone younger’, had finally thrust him into agonised despair. And it was just when, in spite of all their anxious economies, his wife had had to deny their two children even the money to go swimming, that he had seen the curious advertisement:

Part of his mind told him he was being invited to commit a crime, but he had gone none the less to the subsequently arranged interview in a London pub, and he had been relieved, after all, to meet the very ordinary man holding out salvation — a man like himself, middle-aged, middle-educated, wearing a suit and tie and indoor skin.

‘Do you go to the races?’ Arnold Roper asked him bluntly, fixing a penetrating gaze on him. ‘Do you gamble on anything at all? Do you follow the horses? Play to win?’

‘No,’ Greg Simpson said, prudishly, seeing the job prospect disappear but feeling all the same superior. ‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Do you bet on dogs? Go to bingo? Do the pools? Play bridge? Feel attracted by roulette?’ the man persisted.

Greg Simpson silently but emphatically shook his head and prepared to leave.

‘Good,’ said Arnold Roper, cheerfully. ‘Gamblers are no good to me, not for this job.’

Greg Simpson relaxed into a glow of self-congratulation on his own virtue. ‘What job, then?’ he asked.

Arnold Roper wiped out Simpson’s complacent smugness. ‘Going to the races,’ he said bluntly. ‘Betting when I say bet, and never at any other time. You would have to go to race meetings most days, like any other job. You would be betting on certainties, and after every win I would expect you to send me my reward.’ Ht named a very reasonable sum. ‘Anything you made above that would be yours. It is foolproof, and safe. If you go about it in a businesslike way, and don’t get tempted into the mug’s game of backing your own fancy, you’ll do very well. Think it over. If you’re interested, meet me here again tomorrow.’

Betting on certainties... every one a winner: Arnold Roper had been as good as his word, and Greg Simpson’s lifestyle had returned to normal. His qualms had evaporated once he learned that even if the fraud were discovered, he himself would not be involved. He did not know how his employer acquired his infallible information and, if he speculated, he didn’t ask.

He knew him only as Bob Smith, and had never met him since those first two days; but he heeded his warning that if he failed to attend the specified race meetings or failed to send his agreed payment, the bounty would stop dead.

He finished his sandwich and went down to mingle with the bookmakers as the horses cantered down to the post for the start of the first race.

From high on the stands Arnold Roper looked down through powerful binoculars, spotting his men one by one. The perfect workforce he thought: no absenteeism, no union troubles, no complaints.

There were twenty-one of them at present on his register, all contentedly receiving his information, all dutifully returning their moderate levies, and none of them knowing of the existence of the others. In an average week, after expenses, he easily added a thousand or more in readies to his bedroom hoard.

In the five years since he had begun in a small way to put his scheme into operation, he had never picked a defaulter. The thinking-it-over time gave the timid and the honest an easy way out; and if Arnold himself had doubts, he simply failed to return on day two.

The rest, added gradually one by one to the fold, lived comfortably with quiet minds and prayed that their benefactor would never be rumbled.

Arnold himself couldn’t see why he ever should be. He put down the binoculars and began in his methodical fashion to get on with his day’s work. There was always a good deal to see to in the way of filling in forms, testing equipment, and checking that the nearby telephone was working. Arnold never left anything to chance.

Down at the starting gate, sixteen two-year-olds bucked and skittered as they were fed by the handlers into the stalls. Two-year-old colts, thought the starter resignedly, looking at his watch, could behave like a pack of prima donnas in a heatwave in Milan. If they didn’t hurry with that chestnut at present squealing and backing away, he would let the other runners off without him.

He was all too aware of the television cameras pointing his way. mercilessly awaiting his smallest error. Starters who got the races off minutes late were unpopular. Starters who got the races off early were asking for official reprimands and universal curses, because of the fiddles that had been worked in the past on premature departures.

The starter ruled the chestnut out of the race and pulled his lever at time plus three minutes twenty seconds, entering the figure meticulously in his records. The gates crashed open, the fifteen remaining colts roared out of the stalls, and along on the stands the serried ranks of race glasses followed their progress over the five furlongs.

Alone in his special box, the judge watched intently. A big pack of two-year-olds over five furlongs was a problem, presenting occasionally even to his practised eyes a multiple dead heat.

He had learned all the horses by name and all the colours by heart, a chore he shared every day with the race-reading commentators, and from long acquaintance he could recognise most of the jockeys by their riding style alone, but still the ignominy of making a mistake flitted uneasily through his dreams.

Up in his eyrie the television commentator looked through his high-magnification binoculars, which were mounted rock-steady like a telescope, and spoke unhurriedly into his microphone.

‘Among the early leaders are Breakaway and Middle Park, followed closely by Pickup, Jetset, Darling Boy and Gumshoe... Coming to the furlong marker the leaders are bunched, with Jetset, Darling Boy, Breakaway all showing... One furlong out, there is nothing to choose between Darling Boy, Jetset, Gumshoe, Pickup... In the last hundred yards... Jetset, Darling Boy...’

The colts stretched their necks, the jockeys swung their whips, the crowd rose on tiptoes and yelled in a roar which drowned the commentary, and in his box the judge’s eyes ached with effort. Darling Boy, Jetset, Gumshoe and Pickup swept past the winning post in line abreast, and an impersonal voice over the widespread loudspeakers announced: ‘Photograph. Photograph.’

Half a mile away in his own room, Jamie Finland listened to the race on television and tried to imagine the pictures on the screen. Racing was misty to him. He knew the shape of horses from handling toys and riding a rocker, but their size and speed were mysterious; he had no conception at all of a broad sweep of a railed racecourse, or of the size or appearance of trees.

As he grew older, Jamie was increasingly aware that he had drawn lucky in the maternal stakes and he had become in his teens protective rather than rebellious, which sometimes touched his hard-pressed mother to tears. It was for her sake that he had welcomed the television-fixer, knowing that, for her, sound without pictures was almost as bad as pictures without sound were for himself.

Despite a lot of trying, he could pick up little from the screen through his ultra-sensitive fingertips. Electronically-produced colours gave him none of the vibrations of natural light.

He sat hunched with tension at his table, the telephone beside his right hand and one of his radios at his left. There was no telling, he thought, whether the bizarre thing would happen again; but if it did, he would be ready.

‘One furlong out, nothing to choose...’ said the television commentator, his voice rising in excitement-inducing crescendo. ‘In the last hundred yards, Jetset, Darling Boy, Pickup and Gumshoe... At the post, all in a line... perhaps Pickup got there in the last stride but we’ll have to wait for the photograph. Meanwhile, let’s see the closing stages of the race again...’

The television went back on its tracks, and Jamie waited intently with his fingers over the quick easy numbers of the push-button telephone.

Down the road at the racecourse the crowds buzzed like agitated bees round the bookmakers, who were transacting deals as fast as they could. Photo-finishes were always popular with serious gamblers, who bet with fervour on the outcome.

Some punters really believed in the evidence of their own quick eyes; others found it a chance to hedge their main bet or even recoup a positive loss. A photo was the second chance, the lifebelt to the drowning, the temporary reprieve from torn-up tickets and anti-climax.

‘Six-to-four on Pickup,’ shouted young Billy Hitchins hoarsely, from his prime bookmaking pitch in the front row facing the stands. ‘Six-to-four on Pickup.’ A rush of customers descending from the crowded steps enveloped him.

‘A tenner, Pickup, right, sir. Five on Gumshoe, right, sir. Twenty, Pickup, you’re on, sir. A hundred? Yeah, if you like. A hundred at evens, Jetset, why not...’ Billy Hitchins, in whose opinion Darling Boy had taken the race by a nostril, was happy to t ike the money.

Greg Simpson accepted Billy Hitchins’ ticket for an even hundred on Jetset and hurried to repeat his bet with as many bookmakers as he could reach. There was never much time between the arrival of the knowledge and the announcement of the winner. Never much, but always enough. Two minutes at least. Sometimes as much as five. A determined punter could strike five or six bets in that time, given a thick skin and a ruthless use of the elbows.

Greg reckoned he could burrow to the front of the closest throng after all those years of rush-hour commuting on the Underground, and he managed, that day at Ascot, to lay out all the cash he had brought with him; all at evens, all on Jetset.

Neither Billy Hitchins, nor any of his colleagues, felt the slightest twinge of suspicion. Sure, there was a lot of support for Jetset; but so there was for the three other horses, and in a multiple finish like this one a good deal of money always changed hands. Billy Hitchins welcomed it himself, because it gave him, too, a chance of making a second profit on the race.

Greg noticed one or two others scurrying with wads to Jetset and wondered, not for the first time, if they, too, were working for Mr Smith. He was sure he’d seen them often at other meetings, but he felt no inclination at all to accost one of them and ask. Safety lay in anonymity — for him, for them and, of course, for Bob Smith himself.

The judge in his box pored earnestly over the black-and-white print, sorting out which nose belonged to Darling Boy, and which to Pickup. He could discern the winner easily enough, and had murmured its number aloud as he wrote it on the pad lying beside him.

The microphone linked to the public announcement system waited mutely at his elbow for him to make his decision on second and third places, a task seemingly increasingly difficult. Number two, or number eight. But which was which? The seconds ticked by.

It was quiet in his box, the scurrying and shouting among the bookmakers’ stands below hardly reaching him through the thick window-glass.

At his shoulder a racecourse official waited patiently, his job only to make the actual announcement, once the decision was made. With a bright light and a magnifying glass the judge studied the noses. If he got them wrong, a thousand knowledgeable photo-readers would let him know it.

He wondered if he should see about a new prescription for his glasses. Photographs never seemed so sharp in outline to him these days.

Greg Simpson thought regretfully that the judge was overdoing the delay. If he had known he would have had so much time, he would have brought with him more cash. Still, the clear profit he would shortly make was a fine afternoon’s work, and he would send Mr Smith his meagre share with a grateful heart.

Greg Simpson smiled contentedly, and briefly, as if touching a lucky talisman, he fingered the tiny transistorised hearing aid he wore unobtrusively under hair and trilby behind his left ear.

Jamie Finland listened intently, head bent, his curling dark hair falling onto the radio with which he eavesdropped on aircraft. The faint hiss of the carrier wave reached him unchanged, but he waited with quickening pulse and a fluttering feeling of excitement. If it didn’t happen, he thought briefly, it would be very boring indeed.

Although he was nerve-strainingly prepared, he almost missed it. The radio spoke one single word, distantly, faintly, without emphasis: ‘Eleven.’ The carrier wave hissed on, as if never disturbed, and it took Jamie’s brain two whole seconds to light up with a laugh of joy.

He pressed the telephone buttons and connected himself to the local bookmaking firm. ‘Hello? This is Jamie Finland. I have some credit arranged with you for this afternoon. Well, please will you put it all on the photo-finish of this race they’ve just run at Ascot? On number eleven, please.’

‘Eleven?’ echoed a matter-of-fact voice at the other end.’ Jetset?’

‘That’s right,’ Jamie said patiently.

‘Eleven. Jetset. All at evens, right?’

‘Right,’ Jamie said. ‘I was watching it on the box.’

‘Don’t we all, chum,’ said the voice in farewell, clicking off.

Jamie sat back with a tingling feeling of mischief. If eleven really had won, he was surely plain robbing the bookie. But who could know? How could anyone ever know? He wouldn’t tell his mother, because she would disapprove and might make him give the winnings back.

He imagined her voice if she came home and found he had doubled her money. He also imagined it if she found he had lost it all on the first race, betting on the result of a photo-finish that he couldn’t even see.

He hadn’t told her that it was because of the numbers on the radio he had wanted to bet at all. He’d said that he knew people often bet from home while they were watching racing on television. He’d said it would give him a marvellous new interest, if he could do that while she was at work.

He had persuaded her without much trouble to lend him a stake and arrange things with the bookmaker’s, and he wouldn’t have done it at all if the certainty factor had been missing.

When he’d first been given the radio which received aircraft frequencies, he had spent hours and days listening to the calls of the jetliners overhead on their way in and out of Heathrow; but the fascination had worn off, and gradually he tuned in less and less.

By accident one day, having twiddled the tuning knob aimlessly without finding an interesting channel, he forgot to switch the set off. In the afternoon, while he was listening to the Ascot televised races, the radio suddenly emitted a number: ‘Twenty-three.’

Jamie switched the set off but took little real notice until the television commentator, announcing the result of the photo-finish, spoke almost as if in echo. ‘Twenty-three... Swan Lake, number twenty-three, is the winner.’

‘How odd,’ Jamie thought. He left the tuning knob undisturbed, and switched the aircraft radio on again the following Saturday, along with Kempton Park races on television. There were two photo-finishes, but no voice-of-God on the ether. Ditto nil results from Doncaster, Chepstow and Epsom persuaded him, shrugging, to put it down to coincidence but, two weeks later with the re-arrival of a meeting at Ascot, he decided to give it one more try.

Five’, said the radio quietly; and later ‘Ten’. And, duly, numbers five and ten were given the verdict by the judge.

The judge, now shaking his head over Darling Boy and Pickup and deciding he could put off the moment no longer, handed his written-down result to the waiting official, who leaned forward and drew the microphone to his mouth.

‘First, number eleven,’ he said. ‘A dead heat for second place between numbers two and eight. First Jetset. Dead heat for second, Darling Boy and Pickup. The distance between first and second a short head. The fourth horse was number twelve.’

The judge leaned back in his chair and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Another photo-finish safely past... but there was no doubt they were testing to his nerves.

Arnold Roper picked up his binoculars the better to see the winning punters collect from the bookmakers. His twenty-one trusty men had certainly had time today for a thorough killing. Greg Simpson, in particular, was sucking honey all along the line; but then Greg Simpson, with his outstanding managerial skills, was always, in Arnold’s view, the one most likely to do best. Greg’s success was as pleasing to Arnold as his own.

Billy Hitchins handed Greg his winnings without a second glance, and paid out, too, to five others whose transistor hearing aids were safely hidden by hair. He reckoned he had lost, altogether, on the photo betting; but his book for the race itself had been robustly healthy. Billy Hitchins, not displeased, switched his mind to the next event.

Jamie Finland laughed aloud and banged his table with an ecstatic fist. Someone, somewhere, was talking through an open microphone, and if Jamie had had the luck to pick up the transmission, why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he? He thought of the information as an accident, not a fraud, and he waited with uncomplicated pleasure for another bunch of horses to finish nose to nose.

Betting on certainties, he decided, quietening his voice of conscience, was not a crime if you came by the information innocently.

After the fourth race he telephoned to bet on number fifteen, increasing his winnings geometrically.

Greg Simpson went home at the end of the afternoon with a personal storage problem almost as pressing as Arnold’s. There was a limit, he discovered, to the amount of ready cash one could stow away in an ordinary suit, and he finally had to wrap the stuff in a newspaper and carry it home under his arm, like fish and chips.

‘Two in one day,’ he thought warmly. ‘A real clean-up. A day to remember.’ And there was always tomorrow, back here at Ascot, and Saturday at Sandown, and next week, according to the list which had arrived anonymously on the usual postcard, Newbury and Windsor. With a bit of luck he could soon afford a new car, and Joan could book up for the skiing holiday with the children.

Billy Hitchins packed away his stand and equipment, and with the help of his clerk carried them the half-mile along the road to his betting shop in Ascot High Street. Billy at eighteen had horrified his teachers by ducking university and apprenticing his bright mathematical brain to his local bookie. Billy at twenty-four had taken over the business, and now, three years later, was poised for expansion.

He had had a good day on the whole and, after totting up the total and locking the safe, he took his betting-shop manager along to the pub.

‘Funny thing,’ said the manager over the second beer. ‘That new account — you know, the one you fixed up yesterday, with that nurse.’

‘Oh yes... the nurse. Gave me money in advance. They don’t often do that.’ He drank his scotch and water.

‘Yeah... Well, this Finland, while he was watching the telly, he phoned in two bets, both on the results of the photos, and he got it right both times.’

‘Can’t have that,’ said Billy, with mock severity.

‘He didn’t place other bets, see? Unusual, that.’

‘What did you say his name was?’ Billy asked

‘Jamie Finland.’

The barmaid leaned towards them over the bar, her friendly face smiling and the pink sweater leaving little to the imagination. ‘Jamie Finland?’ she said. ‘Ever such a nice boy, isn’t he? Shame about him being blind.’

‘What?’ said Billy.

The barmaid nodded. ‘Him and his mother, they live just down the road in those new flats, next door to my sister. He stays home most of the time, studying and listening to his radios. And you’d never believe it, but he can tell colours; he can really. My sister says it’s really weird, but he told her she was wearing a green coat and she was.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true as God’s my judge,’ said the barmaid, offended.

‘No,’ Billy said. ‘I don’t believe that even if he can tell a green coat from a red that he could distinguish colours on a television screen with three or four horses crossing the line abreast. You can’t do it often even if you can see.’ He sat and thought. ‘On the other hand, I lost a lot today on those photos.’

He thought longer. ‘We all took a caning over those photos. I heard several of the other bookies complaining about the run on Jetset.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t see how it could be rigged, though.’

Billy put down his glass with a crash which startled the whole bar. ‘Did you say Jamie Finland listens to radios? What radios?’

‘How should I know?’ said the barmaid, bridling.

‘He lives near the course,’ Billy said, thinking feverishly. ‘So just suppose he somehow overheard the photo result before it was given on the loudspeakers. But that doesn’t explain the delay... how there was time for him, and probably quite a lot of others who heard the same thing, to get their money on.’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ said the barmaid.

‘I think I’ll pop along and see Jamie Finland,’ said Billy Hitchins. ‘And ask who or what he heard... if he heard anything at all.’

‘Bit far-fetched,’ said the manager judiciously. ‘The only person who could delay things long enough would be the judge.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Billy, awe-struck by the thought. ‘What about the judge?’

Arnold Roper did not know about the long fuse being lit in the pub. To Arnold, Billy Hitchins was a name on a bookmaker’s stand. He could not suppose that brainy Billy Hitchins would drink in a pub where the barmaid had a sister who lived next door to a blind boy who had picked up his discreet transmission on a carelessly left-on radio which was capable of receiving one-ten to one-forty megahertz on VHF.

Arnold Roper travelled serenely homeward with his walkie-talkie type transmitter hidden as usual inside his inner jacket pocket, its short aerial retracted now safely out of sight.

The line-of-sight low-powered frequency he used was in his opinion completely safe, as only a passing aircraft was likely to receive it, and no pilot on earth would connect a simple number spoken on the air with the winner of the photo-finish down at Ascot, or Epsom, or Newmarket, or York.

Back on the racecourse Arnold had carefully packed away and securely locked up the extremely delicate and expensive apparatus which belonged to the firm which employed him. Arnold Roper was not the judge. Arnold Roper’s job lay in operating the photo-finish camera. It was he who watched the print develop; he who could take his time delivering it to the judge; he who always knew the winner first.