obviously.’
‘Done a lot of good for racing, you have. If you need any help, just ask. I’ll send you a pass that’ll get you everywhere on this racecourse, even into my office.’
‘How about the jockeys’ changing room?’
‘Ah.’ He knew as well as I did that the jockeys’ changing room was off limits to everyone except the jockeys riding that day and their valets, the men who prepared their equipment and clothes. Even Edward wasn’t technically allowed in there on race days.
‘Almost everywhere,’ he laughed.
‘Thanks.’
The doors opened and he rushed off.
Lord Enstone’s box was bursting at the seams. Surely all these people don’t have badges for this box, I thought, as I forced my way in. They could obviously talk their way past the spiky-haired young man better than I.
Those lucky few with boxes at Cheltenham on Gold Cup day invariably found that they had all sorts of dear friends who wanted to come and visit. That these ‘dear friends’ turned up only once a year didn’t seem to embarrass them at all.
A waitress offered me a glass of champagne. As a general rule, I held drinks in my real right hand but it made shaking hands so complicated, and I felt that I should use my left more to justify the large amount of money I had spent to acquire it. So I very carefully sent the correct impulses and the thumb of my left hand closed just enough around the stem of the glass. I had often shattered even the best crystal by not knowing how hard to grip with my unfeeling digits to prevent a glass from falling out. It could be humiliating.
Charles had spotted me across the throng and made his way to my side.
‘Got a drink, good,’ he said. ‘Come and see Jonny.’
We squeezed our way out on to the balcony that ran the length of the grandstand in front of the glass-fronted boxes. The view from here across the racecourse and beyond to the hills was magnificent, even on a dull day.
Three men were standing close together at the far end of the balcony, their heads bowed as they talked. One of them was Jonny. Jonny was our host, Lord Enstone. Another was Jonny’s son, Peter. The third I knew only by reputation. I had never actually met George Lochs. He was in his thirties and already a big player in the internet gambling business. His company, make-a-wager.com, while not being the market leader, was expanding rapidly and, with it, so was young George’s fortune.
I had once been commissioned by the Jockey Club to do a background check on him, a routine procedure for those applying for bookmaking licences. He was the second son of a bookie’s runner from north London. He’d won a free scholarship to Harrow where, apparently, the other boys had laughed at his funny accent and the way he held his knife. But the young George had learned fast, conformed and flourished. Except that he hadn’t been called George then. He had been born Clarence Lochstein, named by his mother after the Duke of Clarence. Not Albert, Duke of Clarence, elder son of Edward VII, who supposedly died of pneumonia in 1892 although the rumours persist that he was poisoned to prevent his being arrested for being Jack the Ripper. Nor even after George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Richard III, who was convicted of treason and drowned in a vat of malmsey wine at the Tower of London in 1478. Clarence Lochstein had been named by his mother after the Duke of Clarence pub at the end of her road in Islington.
There were rumours that Clarence/George had been asked to leave Harrow for taking bets on the horses from the other boys and, it was said, from some of the staff. However, he still won a place at the London School of Economics. Clarence Lochstein/George Lochs was a bright chap.
‘Can I introduce Sid Halley?’ said Charles, oblivious to the private nature of the men’s conversation.
George Lochs jumped. Whilst his reputation had reached me, mine had also clearly reached him.
It was a reaction I was quite used to. It’s a bit like when a police car stops behind you at traffic lights. A strange feeling of guilt inevitably comes over you even when you’ve done nothing wrong. Do they know that I was speeding five minutes ago? Are my tyres legal? Should I have had that second glass of wine? Only when the police car turns off or passes by does the heartbeat begin to return to normal, the palms of the hands stop sweating.
‘Sid. Good. Glad you could come.’ Lord Enstone smiled broadly. ‘Have you met George Lochs? George, Sid.’
We shook hands and looked into each other’s eyes. His palm was not noticeably damp and his face gave nothing away.
‘And you know my son, Peter,’ he said.
I had met him once or twice on racecourses. We nodded in recognition. Peter was an averagely competent amateur jockey in his early thirties who had for some years enjoyed limited success, mostly in races reserved for amateur riders.
‘Do you have a ride in the Foxhunters later?’ I asked him.
‘I wish,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t convince an owner to put me up.’
‘What about your father’s horses?’ I asked, giving his father a wink.
‘No bloody chance,’ said Peter with a half-hearted smile. ‘Mean old bastard won’t let me ride them.’
‘If the boy wants to break his neck riding in races, that’s his business, but I don’t want to aid and abet him,’ said Jonny, ruffling his son’s blond hair. ‘I’d never forgive myself.’
Peter pulled his head away from his father’s hand with irritation and stomped off through the doorway. It was clearly a topic much discussed in the past.
‘Charles, take young George here inside and find him a glass of fizz,’ said Lord Enstone. ‘I want to have a word with Sid in private.’
It was clear that young George didn’t actually want to be taken off for a glass of fizz or anything else.
‘Promise I won’t listen,’ he said with a smile, standing his ground.
‘Dead right, you won’t.’ Enstone was losing his cool and with it his cultured RP accent. ‘Jist gan’ in there with Charlie, bonnie lad, I’m askin’, OK?’ Pure Geordie.
A few years previously, I’d also done a check on him for a horse-owning syndicate that he had wanted to join. Jonny Enstone was a builder. He had left school in Newcastle aged sixteen to become an apprentice bricklayer with J. W. Best Ltd, a small local general building company owned by the father of a school friend. Within two years he was running the business and, soon after, he bought out the friend’s father. Expansion was rapid and, under the banner ‘The J. W. Best built house you’ll ever buy’, Best Houses marched north, south and west covering the country with smart little three-and four-bedroomed boxes from Glasgow to Plymouth and beyond. Jonny Enstone had become Sir John, then Lord Enstone but he still had his hands on his business. He was famous for arriving very early one dark morning at a building site some two hundred miles from his home, and personally sacking anyone who was even a minute late at seven o’clock. He then removed the jacket of his pinstripe suit, rolled up the sleeves of his starched white shirt and worked the whole day in place of his fired bricklayer.
‘Now, Sid,’ RP fully restored, ‘I need you to find out something for me.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said.
‘I’ll pay you proper rates. I want you to find out why my horses aren’t winning when they should be.’
It was something I was regularly asked to do. I inwardly sighed. Most owners think their horses should be winning more often than they do. It’s a matter of ‘I paid good brass for the damn thing so why doesn’t it start repaying?’
‘I think,’ he went on, ‘my jockey and trainer are stopping them.’
That was what they all thought.
‘Move them to another trainer.’ I was doing myself out of a commission.
‘It’s not as simple as that, young man. I tell you, my horses are not just not winning when they should, they’re running to orders that aren’t mine. I feel I’m being used and I don’t like it.’ I could suddenly see the real Jonny Enstone beneath the Savile Row exterior: powerful, determined, even dangerous.
‘I’m in racing because I like to
Why was it, I thought, that it was always those with plenty of it who believed that money was not important. To the hard-up punter, a place bet on a long-priced runner-up was much better than an ultra short-priced winner.
