The four remaining runners appeared on the course and went down to the two-mile start while a few hardy punters made a dash across the ring towards us to place bets, before hurrying back to the shelter of the grandstand.
“It’s not much fun today,” said Luca in my ear.
“It was your idea,” I said, turning to him. “I’d have been happy staying in bed on a day like this.”
After my disturbed night, staying in bed had sounded like an excellent plan, but Luca had called me twice during the morning to see if I was coming to Stratford that afternoon.
“You don’t have to come,” he’d said in the second call. “Betsy and I can cope on our own, if you want. We had a good night at Newbury without you.”
I had begun to feel I was being eased out of my own business, and that made me even more determined to be here. But now, as another rivulet of rainwater cascaded off the umbrella and down my neck, I wasn’t at all sure that it had been the right decision.
“We must be mad,” shouted Larry Porter, again our neighboring bookie.
“Bonkers,” I agreed.
I thought it was funny how we use certain words. Here were Larry and I, in full control of our mental capacities, using terms like “mad” and “bonkers” to describe each other, while the likes of Sophie, and worse, institutionalized in mental health facilities, were never any longer referred to in such terms even in private. And the terms “lunatic asylum” and “loony bin” were now as archaic and taboo as “spastic” and “cripple.”
The betting business was so slow that Betsy had complained about the rain and taken herself off to the drier conditions of the bar, and I was beginning to wish I could join her.
“Whose stupid idea was it to come to Stratford?” I said to Luca.
“Would you have preferred Carlisle?” he said.
Kenilworth to Carlisle was more than two hundred miles, while the distance from my house to Stratford-upon- Avon racetrack was less than twenty.
“No,” I said.
“Well, shut up, then,” said Luca with a grin. “You’ve got a waterproof skin, so what are you worrying about? As least it’s not cold.”
“It’s hardly hot,” I replied.
“No pleasing some people,” he said to the world in general.
“Why don’t you just go home and leave Betsy and me to make you a living.”
“But Betsy’s gone off in a strop,” I said.
“She’s only in a strop because she wants to do your job and she can’t because you’re doing it,” he said.
He said it with a smile, but he meant it nevertheless.
It seemed I really was being eased out of my own business. But I suppose it was better than losing Luca and Betsy to a new outfit.
“You mean it, don’t you?” I said seriously.
“Absolutely,” he replied. “We need to be more ambitious, more proactive, more ruthless.”
I wasn’t sure whether the “we” included me or not.
“In what way do you want to be more ruthless?” I asked him.
“All that stuff at Ascot last week has shown me that the big boys are not invincible,” he said. “Someone gave them a bloody nose, and good luck to them. Bookmaking should be all about what happens here.” He spread his arms wide. “Well, not exactly here today, but you know what I mean. Bookmaking is about standing at a pitch on the course, not being stuck in some anonymous betting shop watching a computer screen.”
I was amazed. I thought it was the computer gambling that made Luca tick.
“But you love the Internet,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “But only as a tool for what happens here. The on-course bookies need to set the prices, and they should not be driven by the exchanges. By rights, it should be the other way round. We should be prepared to alter our prices for our advantage, not for those of anyone else.”
“You sound like you’re at war,” I said with a laugh.
“We are,” he said seriously. “And if we don’t fight, we’ll go under.”
I remembered back to the time when I had been assisting my grandfather for a couple of years or so. I’d had the same sort of discussion with him then. Bookmaking was an evolving science, and new blood, like Luca, needed to be ever pushing the boundaries. As he had said, without it, we’d go under.
As is so often the case with small fields, the four horses in the race finished in extended line astern, the favorite winning it at a canter by at least ten lengths. There was hardly a cheer from the measly crowd, and the winner returned to an almost deserted unsaddling enclosure.
As Luca had said, it wasn’t much fun.
A man in a suit came striding across from beneath the grandstand just as the rain began to fall in a torrent. He was holding an umbrella, but it didn’t appear to be keeping him very dry. Too much water was bouncing back from the ground. His feet must have been soaked by the time he stopped in front of me.
“What the bloody hell’s going on?” he demanded.
“What do you mean?” I asked him in all innocence.
“With the bloody prices?” he said loudly.
“What about the prices?” I asked him.
“How come that winner was returned at two-to-one when everyone knows it should have been odds-on?”
“Nothing to do with me,” I said, spreading my hands out wide.
“Don’t get bloody clever with us,” the man said with menace, pointing his finger at me.
“And who is us, exactly?” I demanded, trying to disregard the implied threat.
He ignored me and went over to remonstrate with Larry Porter, who told him to go away and procreate, or words to that effect.
The man was far from pleased. “I’m warning you two,” he said, pointing at both Larry and me. “We won’t stand for that.”
Larry shouted at him again to go away, using some pretty colorful language that made even me wince.
“What was all that about?” I said to Luca.
“Just trying to rustle up a bit more business,” he said.
“How?” I asked.
“I thought we might tempt a few more punters over here if we offered a better price on the favorite,” he said, grinning at me. “That’s all.”
I stood there looking at him.
“You silly bugger. We don’t play games with these guys,” I said seriously. “Their bite is far worse than their bark.”
“Don’t be so boring,” he said.
“I mean it. They are powerful people, and they stamp on irritations.”
Was this what he meant by “being at war”?
The starting price was not set by a single bookmaker’s prices. It was a sort of average, but was actually the mode of the offered prices rather than a true average. A mode is that value that occurs most frequently in a sample.
At Ascot the previous week the number of bookmakers was very high, so a representative sample of, say, twelve bookmakers’ prices was used. The twelve were chosen not quite randomly, as they always included those bookies at the highest-traffic end of the betting ring. If, in the sample of twelve, five of the bookmakers had the price of a certain horse as the race started at, say, three-to-one, then its starting price would be three-to-one, even if four of them had the price at seven-to-two and the other three at four-to-one. Three-to-one was the mode because it was the price that occurred most frequently.
If there were two modes because, say in the above example, five bookies had the price at three-to-one, and five of them had it at seven-to-two, then the starting price was always taken as the higher of the two odds. So in that case it would have been seven-to-two.
At Stratford on this particular wet Wednesday in June, there were only four ring bookmakers, so the sample included all of them, but it was still only four. Only two of them needed to offer higher prices than was “true” for the starting price to be recorded as “too high.”
