‘Can you remember rather too many short-priced losers?’ I asked. It was the classic sign of malpractice.
‘No,’ she replied almost too quickly. ‘Lots of favourites don’t win, you know that. If they all did then the bookies would be out of business. Have you ever met a poor bookmaker?’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Not just short-priced losers but horses which occasionally didn’t run as well as expected and lost when they should have won.’
‘That happens all the time. Doesn’t mean the race was fixed. Horses aren’t machines, you know. They have off days, too.’ She was getting quite stirred up. ‘Look, what do you want me to say: “Bill and I worked out which horse would win and which would lose”? Don’t be bloody daft. Bill’s as straight as an arrow.’
I wondered if she believed it. I didn’t.
It was past six by the time I left Juliet still arguing with Chief Inspector Carlisle.
‘How am I to know which horse is running where tomorrow if you’ve taken the computers and the entries record?’ she had demanded at full volume.
‘That’s not my problem, miss,’ Carlisle had replied.
I left them to it. Carlisle looked likely to lose the battle and I thought he would find the situation easier to handle without me there. By then the police had removed so much material from Bill’s house and office that they were running out of space in their cars.
I drove up the M4 towards London against the rush-hour traffic, the never-ending stream of headlamps giving me a headache.
So what next?
Jonny Enstone had asked me to investigate the running of his horses. The obvious place to start was to interview his jockey and trainer. But now one of them had been murdered and the other had been locked up on suspicion of having done it, and all before I could ask them the relevant questions.
I decided to go and see Lord Enstone himself.
‘Delighted, Sid,’ he said, when I called him using my natty new voice recognition dialling system in the car. With only one hand, it was prudent to keep it firmly on the steering wheel. In an emergency I could steer quite well with my knee but it wasn’t to be recommended at high speeds on the motorway.
‘Come to lunch tomorrow,’ Enstone said. ‘Meet me at the Peers’ Entrance at one.’
‘The peers’ entrance?’ I asked.
‘At the House,’ he replied.
Ah, I realised, at the ‘House’ meant the House of Lords.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow, one o’clock.’ I disconnected, again by voice command.
Marina was busy in the kitchen when I got home and I was firmly told to ‘go away’ when I tried to nibble her ear.
‘I’m experimenting,’ she said, slapping my hand as I tried to steal a slice of avocado from her salad. ‘Go and get me a glass of wine.’
I chose a Chateauneuf-du-Pape and opened it with my favourite cork remover. It consisted of a sharp spike that one drove through the cork. Then a pump forced air down the spike and the increased pressure forced the cork out of the bottle. Easy.
I had been severely chastised by a wine-loving friend for using it.
‘You’re pressurising the wine!’ he had cried in horror. ‘I’ll buy you a Screwpull for Christmas.’
And so he had, and very fancy and expensive it was too, with multiple levers and cogs. I am sure it worked very well providing, of course, that one had two hands to operate it. I stuck to my tried and tested pump although I had to be careful to buy a bottle that had a ‘cork’ rather than a ‘plastic’. It was impossible to push the spike through a ‘plastic’.
I poured two generous glasses of my favourite Rhone red and handed one to Marina in the kitchen.
‘It’s not going well,’ she said. ‘Do you fancy beans on toast?’
‘I just want you,’ I said, kissing her on the neck.
‘Not now,’ she screamed. ‘Can’t you see that my souffle needs folding. Go away. Dinner will be ready in about half an hour, if you’re lucky. Otherwise we’re going to the pub.’
‘I’ll be in my office,’ I said, pinching another slice of avocado.
The flat had three bedrooms but I had turned one end of the smallest into an office the previous year. I sat at my desk and switched on my computer. Over the years I had become quite good at typing one-handed. I used my left thumb simply to depress the ‘shift’ key by rotating the arm at the elbow. I would never have made a typing-pool typist but I could still churn out client reports at a reasonable pace.
The computer slowly came to life and I checked my e-mails. Most were the usual trash trying to sell me stuff I didn’t want or need. It never ceased to amaze me why anyone could think that this type of direct marketing sells anything. I deleted all of them without reading them. In amongst the masses of junk and spam, however, were three messages actually meant for me personally. Two were from clients thanking me for reports delivered and the third was from Chris Beecher.
It read: ‘Lovely photo, shame he missed the gun.’
Not as far as I was concerned.
I declined to reply and deleted it instead.
I one-handedly typed www.make-a-wager.com into the machine and entered an alien world.
I had witnessed, as a child, the daily struggle of my widowed mother to earn enough to buy something to eat. Often she herself would go hungry to keep me fed. To gamble away such meagre resources would have been unthinkable. As I became successful and financially buoyant, even well-off, I had never felt the need to wager my hard-earned cash on the horses or on anything else. The rules of racing were meant to prohibit professional jockeys from having a bet but it wasn’t the rules that stopped me, it was the lack of desire.
However, in races, I had gambled every day, with my life as the stake. I had enjoyed a long winning streak and, when it ran out, I had paid a heavy price but at least I hadn’t broken my neck.
I entered the make-a-wager.com website like a child let loose in a toyshop. I was truly amazed at how many different ways there were to lose one’s money. Without moving from my seat I could back horses racing in South Africa or Hong Kong, in Australia or America; I could have a flutter on football matches in Argentina or Japan, and I could bet that a single snowflake, or more, would fall on the London Weather Centre on Christmas Day. I could wager that the Miami Dolphins would win the next Super Bowl or that the number of finishers in the Grand National would be greater than twenty or any other number I might choose. I could gamble that the London Stock Market index would go up, or down, and by how much. I could put my money on Tipperary to win the ‘All-Ireland’ hurling in the Gaelic Games, or on the Swedish team Vetlanda to win at bandy, whatever that might be.
The choice was almost overwhelming and that didn’t include the on-line bingo and poker that was readily available at just a further click of my mouse. I could bet to win or I could bet to lose. I could be both the punter and the bookmaker.
Was my computer the door to Aladdin’s Cave or to Pandora’s Box?
The website was an ‘exchange’. Rather than simply being a method of placing a bet with a bookmaker, as was the case with those sites run by the high-street betting shop companies, an exchange was a site that matched people who wanted to have a wager between themselves. Like a couple of mates in a pub discussing a football match where one might say, ‘I’ll bet you a fiver that United win.’ If the other thinks they won’t then they have a wager between them. The barman might hold the stake, a fiver from each, and give both fivers to the winner after the game.
The make-a-wager.com website was like a very big pub where you could usually find two people with opposite opinions to make a bet between them, provided the odds were right. And find them they did. The site showed the amount of money actually matched in wagers and it ran into millions. The company that ran the site, George Lochs’s company, acted like the barman and held the stakes until the event was over and the result known. George Lochs made his money by simply creaming off a 5 % commission from the winner of each wager. It made no difference to him if all the favourites won: in fact, it was to his advantage as there would be more winners so more commissions. He couldn’t lose, no matter what the result.
A nice little earner, I thought. No wonder such websites were, to use Archie’s words, ‘breaking out like a rash’.
