'To beat the odds?' The words sounded wrong for her appearance. It was true, I thought, what she'd said about categories. Old women weren't expected to talk gambling; but this one did. 'In the old days it was perfectly possible to make a good living. Dozens did it. You worked on a profit expectation of ten per cent on turnover, and if you had any judgement at all, you achieved it. Then they introduced the Betting Tax. It took a slice off all the winnings, reduced the profit margin to almost nil, killed off all the old pros in no time. Your ten per cent was all going into the Revenue, do you see?'
'Yes,' I said.
'Liam had always made more than ten per cent. He took a pride in it. He reckoned he could win one race out of three. That means that every third bet, on average, would win. That's a very high percentage, day after day, year after year. And he did beat the tax. He tried new ways, added new factors. With his statistics, he said, you could always win in the long run. None of the bookies would take his bets.'
'Er, what?' I said.
'Didn't you know?' She sounded surprised. 'Bookmakers won't take bets from people who repeatedly win.'
'But I thought that's what they were in business for. I mean, to take people's bets.'
'To take bets from ordinary mug punters, yes,' she said. 'The sort who may win occasionally but never do in the end. But if you have an account with almost any bookie and you keep winning, he'll close your account.'
'Good grief,' I said weakly.
'At the races,' she said, 'all the bookies knew Liam. If they didn't know him to talk to, they knew him by sight. They'd only let him bet in cash at starting price, and then as soon as he'd got his money on they'd tic-tac it round the ring and they'd all reduce the price of that horse to ridiculously small odds, making the starting price very low, so that he wouldn't win much himself, and so that the other racegoers would be put off backing that horse, and stake their money on something else.'
There was a longish pause while I sorted out and digested what she'd said.
'And what,' I said, 'about the Tote?'
'The Tote is unpredictable. Liam didn't like that. Also the Tote in general pays worse odds than the bookies. No, Liam liked betting with the bookies. It was a sort of war. Liam always won, though most times the bookies didn't know it.'
'Er,' I said, 'how do you mean?'
She sighed. 'It was a lot of work. We had a gardener. A friend, really. He lived here in the house. Down that passage where we came in just now, those were his rooms. He used to like driving round the country, so he'd take Liam's cash and drive off to some town or other, and put it all on in the local betting shops, bit by bit, and if the horse won, which it usually did, he'd go round and collect, and come home. He and Liam would count it all out. So much for Dan – that was our friend – and so much for the working funds, and the rest for us. No more tax to pay, of course. No income tax. We went on for years like that. Years. We all got on so well together, you see.'
She fell silent, looking into the gentle past with those incongruously wild eyes.
'And Liam died?' I said.
'Dan died. Eighteen months ago, just before Christmas. He was ill for only a month. It was so quick.' A pause. 'And Liam and I, we didn't realise until after- We didn't know how much we depended on Dan, until he wasn't there. He was so strong. He could lift things… and the garden… Liam was eighty-six, you see, and I'm eighty-eight, but Dan was younger, not over seventy. He was a blacksmith from Wexford, way back. Full of jokes, too. We missed him so much.'
The golden glow of sunlight outside had faded from the peonies, the great vibrant colours fading to greys in the approaching dusk. I listened to the young voice of the old woman telling the darker parts of her life, clearing the fog from my own.
'We thought we'd have to find someone else to put the bets on,' she said. 'But who could we trust? Some of the time last year Liam tried to do it himself, going round betting shops in places like Ipswich and Colchester, places where they wouldn't know him, but he was too old, he got dreadfully exhausted. He had to stop it, it was too much.
We had quite a bit saved, you see, and we decided we'd have to live on that. And then this year a man we'd heard of, but never met, came to see us, and he offered to buy Liam's methods. He said to Liam to write down how he won so consistently, and he would buy what he'd written.'
'And those notes,' I said, enlightened, 'were what Chris Norwood stole?'
'Not exactly,' she said, sighing. 'You see there was no need for Liam to write down his method. He'd written it down years ago. All based on statistics. Quite complicated. He used to update it when necessary. And, of course, add new races. After so many years, he could bet with a thirty-three per cent chance of success in nearly a thousand particular races every year.'
She coughed suddenly, her white thin face vibrating with the muscular spasm. A fragile hand stretched out to the glass on the table, and she took a few tiny sips of yellowish liquid,
'I'm so sorry,' I said contritely. 'Making you talk.'
She shook her head mutely, taking more sips, then put down the glass carefully and said, 'It's great to talk. I'm glad you're here, to give me the opportunity. I have so few people to talk to. Some days I don't talk at all. I do miss Liam, you know. We chattered all the time. He was a terrible man to live with. Obsessive, do you see? When he had something in his mind he'd go on and on and on with it. All these sea pictures, it drove me mad when he kept buying them, but now he's gone, well, they seem to bring him close again, and I won't move them, not now.'
'It wasn't so very long ago, was it, that he died?' I said.
'On March 1st,' she said. She paused, but there were no tears, no welling distress. 'Only a few days after Mr Gilbert came. Liam was sitting there…' She pointed to one of the blue armchairs, the only one which showed rubbed dark patches on the arms and a shadow on its high back.'… and I went to make us some tea. Just a cup. We were thirsty. And when I came back he was asleep.' She paused again. 'I thought he was asleep.'
'I'm sorry,' I said.
She shook her head. 'It was the best way to go. I'm glad for him. We'd both loathed the thought of dying in hospital stuck full of tubes. If I'm lucky and if I can manage it I'll die here too, like that, one of these days. I'll be glad to. It is comforting, do you see?'
I did see, in a way, though I had never before thought of death as a welcome guest to be patiently awaited, hoping that he would come quietly when one was asleep.
'If you'd like a drink,' she said in exactly the same matter-of-fact tone, 'there's a bottle and some glasses in the cupboard.'
'I have to drive home…'
She didn't press it. She said, 'Do you want to hear about Mr Gilbert? Mr Harry Gilbert?'
'Yes, please. If I'm not tiring you.'
'I told you. Talking's a pleasure.' She considered, her head to one side, the white hair standing like a fluffy halo round the small wrinkled face. 'He owns bingo halls,' she said, and there was for the first time in her voice the faintest hint of contempt.
'You don't approve of bingo?'
'It's a mug's game.' She shrugged. 'No skill in it.'
'But a lot of people enjoy it.'
'And pay for it. Like mug punters. The wins keep them hooked but they lose in the end.'
The same the world over, I thought with amusement: the professional's dim view of the amateur. There was nothing amateur, however, about Mr Gilbert.
'Bingo made him rich,' the old woman said. 'He came here one day to see Liam, just drove up one day in a Rolls and said he was buying a chain of betting shops. He wanted to buy Liam's system so he'd always be six jumps ahead of the mugs.'
I said curiously, 'Do you always think of a gambler as a mug?'
'Mr Gilbert does. He's a cold man. Liam said it depends what they want. If they want excitement, OK, they're mugs but they're getting their money's worth. If they want profit and they still bet on instinct, they're just mugs.'
She coughed again, and sipped again, and after a while gave me the faint smile, and continued.
