‘Oh. You didn’t mean it then.’
‘I did ask you to marry me, on Thursday night,’ I said. ‘But you didn’t answer.’
‘That’s not fair. I was unconscious.’
‘Excuses. Excuses.’
‘If you really meant it, then ask me again.’
I looked deeply into her eyes. Did I want to spend the rest of my life with this person, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part? Yes, I did, but I worried that, unless I found the gunman soon, death might us part rather more quickly than we would like.
‘Do you want me to kneel?’ I asked her.
‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Get down to my level.’
I knelt on one knee beside the bed and took her left hand in my right.
‘Marina van der Meer,’ I said smiling at her, ‘will you marry me?’
She looked away from my face.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
I spent all of Saturday evening researching the running of horses from Bill Burton’s yard.
How did we manage before computers?
I was able to find out more in one evening using digital technology than I would have done in a week using the old-fashioned small-printed pages of the form books.
The
I was not so much looking for a needle in a haystack, as looking for a piece of hay in a haystack that was slightly shorter than it should have been. Even if I found it, I might still not be sure it was what I was looking for.
The classic tell-tale signs of race fixing have always been short-priced losers followed by long-priced winners. A horse is prevented from winning until the betting price lengthens, and then a big gamble is landed at long odds when the horse is really trying. But the ability to use the exchanges to bet on a horse to lose has changed all that. The classic signs no longer exist. Indeed, I asked myself, what signs might exist?
Tipsters and professional gamblers use patterns in performance as tools to select where a horse will tend to run well, and where less so. A course may be close by to the home stables and many horses do better when they don’t have to travel long distances to the races. Trainers who use uphill training gallops may have more success with uphill finishes such as at Towcester or Cheltenham.
There are many other reasons why horses run better or worse at different venues. Some racecourses are flat and others are undulating, some have gentle curves while others have sharp ones. In America all tracks are left- handed, so the horses run anticlockwise, but in England some are left-handed and others right-handed, and at Windsor and Fontwell the horses have to run both right-and left-handed in the same race as the tracks are shaped like figures of eight.
The serious gambler needs to know where a trainer, or even a particular horse, does well and where not. And Raceform Interactive allows the user to look for hitherto unseen patterns in performance, to ask his own questions and use the huge data available to answer them. Could the system, I wondered, be used to look for dodgy dealing in the Burton yard? Could it show me that Huw Walker had been developing a pattern of fixing races?
I tried my best by asking what I thought were the right questions but my computer refused to serve up the hoped-for answers. Either there was no pattern to find or else the pattern was so long established that variations to it didn’t show up over the past five years. And there had been no convenient, dramatic change to Bill Burton’s results when Juliet Burns had arrived in his yard three years ago.
Another dead end.
I went into the kitchen to make myself some coffee.
So what
I knew that Jonny Enstone believed his horses had been running to someone else’s orders. He had told me so himself over lunch at the House of Lords. And the police had shown a list to Bill when they’d arrested him, which they said showed that the horses had not been running true to form.
I went back to my computer. Now I asked it to look only at the running of Lord Enstone’s horses. I spent ages giving every Enstone runner a user rating depending on whether it had run better or worse than its official rating would suggest. I then asked my machine if there was anything suspicious? Give me your answer do! Sadly, it was not into suspicion. Hard facts were its currency, not speculation.
However, the
I was so used to getting negative results that I nearly missed it. According to the data, Enstone’s horses tended to run fractionally above their form at the northern tracks, say north of Haydock Park or Doncaster.
I brought Huw Walker into the equation. I thought that Huw might not have ridden them in the north, but the machine told me that that wasn’t the case. There was no north/south divide by jockey. Every time in the past year that an Enstone horse had run north of Haydock Park, it had been ridden by Huw Walker.
Which is more than could be said for races run further south. Huw had been sidelined with injury for five weeks the previous September and eight of Lord Enstone’s horses had run in the south during that time. They didn’t appear to have run appreciably better for having had a different pilot.
What made running in the north so special? And was the improvement in their running really significant?
My eyes were growing tired from staring at on-screen figures. I looked at my watch. It was past midnight. Time for bed.
Early on Sunday morning, I called Neil Pedder, another trainer in Lambourn. His yard was down the road from Bill’s.
‘What’s special about the racecourses north of Doncaster or Haydock?’ I asked him.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said unhelpfully. ‘I hardly ever send runners up there.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. There are eighteen racecourses north of Haydock and Doncaster out of a total of fifty-nine in Great Britain. That was nearly a third of tracks that Neil didn’t send runners to.
‘Because it means the horses having to be away overnight,’ he said. ‘Haydock or Doncaster is as far from Lambourn as you can realistically send a horse on the morning of the race and still expect it to perform. So I won’t send my horses north of there unless the owner will pay for the extra costs of an overnight stay, and most of them won’t.’
Why, I wondered, did Jonny Enstone’s horses run slightly better whenever they had to stay away overnight?
‘Who goes away with the horses when they have to stay away?’ I asked.
‘It varies,’ said Neil. ‘If I absolutely have to send a horse away overnight, I will usually send at least two, sometimes three of my staff with it. Especially if it goes in my horsebox. There will be the lad who does the horse, then a travelling head lad and my box driver, though the driver often doubles up as the travelling head lad.’
‘Don’t you go as well, on the race day?’ I asked.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’ I asked
‘On whether the owner will be there, or if the race is televised, or if I have other runners somewhere else. I won’t go if I can help it. It’s a bloody long way up there, you know.’
‘How about your assistant trainer, would he go?’
‘Maybe, but it’s doubtful.’
‘But there doesn’t seem to be any standard practice?’ I said.
‘No, everyone does things differently. I know one trainer, who will remain nameless, who enters lots of horses up north. And he always goes. He doesn’t like what he calls “interfering owners” coming to the races so he sends their horses where he thinks they won’t be able to come and watch them, and also it gets him away from his wife for a night or two each week.’
And into the arms of his mistress. I had investigated the same nameless trainer for one of his owners who had thought that his trainer was up to no good because he could never get to see his horses run. He’d been convinced that the trainer had been swapping the animals around and running them as ringers. The truth had
