also know that when the favorite then won, they all got hit badly because all the bets in the High Street betting shops were paid out on the starting price, and that had been artificially made too high.
Consequently, the big-firm boys, those with the cash in their pockets, now took it upon themselves, in the absence of orders from their head offices, to back the favorite heavily, to bring its price down again to six-to- four.
There was almost panic to get their money on with the ring bookies before the start. I took a number of big bets, and, reluctantly, we brought the price of Pool House down from seven-to-four, first to thirteen-to-eight, then to six-to-four and finally to eleven-to-eight, before the off. The horse had actually started at shorter odds than it would have if we had done nothing.
The race began, and Larry switched off his phone-jamming device while Luca cured the Internet server of his virus.
“That didn’t bloody work, did it?” said Larry angrily. “Now, if the favorite goes on and wins, I stand to lose a packet.”
But the favorite didn’t win.
A complete rank outsider called Cricket Hero beat it by two lengths and was returned at the surprisingly long starting price of a hundred-to-one and without a single cheer from the watching crowd. We hadn’t taken a single bet on the horse, so, from the paying-out point of view, it was a very satisfactory result and went some way to make up for our lack of business in the previous races.
“Hold the fort a minute,” I said to Luca.
I went over to watch Cricket Hero being led into the winner’s unsaddling enclosure. There was a distinct lack of enthusiastic applause from those who had turned up to see the horses come in, but there would have been very few amongst them, if any, who would have backed it. The horse’s connections, however, were absolutely delighted and beaming from ear to ear as their horse circled around and around, steaming gently from under its blanket. I looked in the race card to see what they had down as the name of the trainer. Miles Carpenter, it said, from Ireland.
I leaned on the rail close by to the person I assumed was Mr. Carpenter. He was smiling like the cat that got the cream.
“Well done, Mr. Carpenter,” I called to him.
He turned and took a stride towards me. “Thanks,” he said in a thick Irish accent.
“Nice horse,” I said, nodding at the bay, but the truth was it didn’t look that good. Compared to the other horses, whose well-groomed rumps had shone in the summer sunshine, the winner’s coat had been allowed to grow rather long and, in places, was matted and dull. His tail was a jumble of knots and his hooves were not nicely blackened like most racehorses’ when they run. In fact, the horse looked like an old nag. That’s partly why his price had been so high. No one wants to bet on a horse that doesn’t look good in the parade ring. Generally speaking, horses that don’t look very well don’t run very well either.
But appearances can be deceptive.
“Yes,” he replied with a big smile, coming a step closer. “I think he’s going to be a champion.”
I spoke directly to him, quietly but quite clearly. “Oriental Suite, I assume.”
The smile instantly disappeared from his face.
“And you,” I went on, “must be Paddy Murphy.”
“And who the fuck are you?” he said explosively, coming right up to me and thrusting his face into mine.
“Just a friend,” I said, backing away and smiling.
“What do you want?” he snarled.
“Nothing,” I said. I turned away, leaving him dumbstruck behind me.
He had already given me what I wanted. Confirmation that Oriental Suite was indeed now called Cricket Hero. Not that I had really needed it.
I assumed that the real Cricket Hero was dead. Switched with Oriental Suite using the Australian fake RFIDs and then killed for a large insurance payout.
To be honest, Cricket Hero’s death had not been a great loss to racing. I had looked him up on the Racing Post website. He had run a total of eight times, always in bad company, and had finished last or second to last on every occasion. His official rating had been so low as to be almost off the bottom of the scale. But that would all change now.
The horse now running as Cricket Hero was actually Oriental Suite, and one thing was absolutely certain. Oriental Suite should never have started any race at odds of a hundred-to-one, let alone a low-quality maiden hurdle at Bangor-on-Dee on a quiet Monday afternoon in July.
I thought about the two photocopied horse passports I had found in the secret compartment of my father’s rucksack. One of them had been in the name of Oriental Suite. But the other had belonged to a horse called Cricket Hero, and I had been struck by the similarities in the markings and hair whorls of the two horses as recorded on the diagrams.
And I had been looking out for the name Cricket Hero to appear in race entries ever since.
You call that getting even?” Larry Porter said loudly to me as I made my way back to our pitch.
“Keep your voice down, you fool,” I said to him.
“But it didn’t bloody work, did it?” he said at only slightly lower volume.
“I can’t make the favorite win every time, now can I?” I said.
“Bloody good job it didn’t,” he said. “Norman and I took so much money on it in those last minutes we would have been well out of pocket, I can tell you.”
Norman Joyner stood next to Larry, nodding vigorously.
“But you aren’t,” I said, smiling. “So what are you worried about? You both ended up in profit on the race, didn’t you?”
“No thanks to you,” Larry said, still grumbling.
“I reckon we’d better not try it again,” said Norman.
“Fine,” I said. That would suit me very well.
“Those big firms must be laughing all the way to the bank,” he went on.
“But they lost the money they piled on with us near the off,” I said.
“Peanuts, mate, peanuts. They will still keep all the money the mugs put on that favorite in their betting shops.”
True, I thought. But I knew of one firm that wouldn’t be laughing.
Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd, the High Street betting shop subsidiary of HRF Holdings Ltd, employers of the two bullyboys, with their steel toe caps, would be far from laughing all the way to the bank.
There were more than fi fty Tony Bateman betting shops in the chain, scattered throughout London and the southeast of England. I had looked up all their addresses on the Internet.
If all had gone according to plan, at precisely five minutes before the due time of the race, and therefore exactly one minute after we had isolated the racetrack, thirty members of Duggie and Luca’s electronics club, the juvenile delinquents from High Wycombe, had each gone into a different Tony Bateman betting shop and placed a two-hundred-pound bet to win. The bets had not been placed on the hot favorite but on the outsider Cricket Hero, payable at the starting price.
Even now, I hoped, each of the thirty would be collecting twenty thousand pounds in winnings, which was six hundred thousand pounds in total. And all the bets had been financed by the six thousand pounds’ worth of cash that shifty-eyed Kipper would have found he was short from the blue-plastic-wrapped packages hidden beneath the lining in my father’s black-and-red rucksack.
The deal with the juvenile delinquents had been easy. Luca and Duggie had handed over two hundred pounds in cash to each of them together with an address of one of the Tony Bateman betting shops. They were given strict instructions. Go to the shop whose address they had been given and make the bet at exactly four twenty-five, two hundred pounds to win on Cricket Hero. If the horse lost, then they were simply to walk away, curse their luck and otherwise keep quiet. If it won, then they were to try to collect the winnings, and a quarter of it would be theirs to keep. Luca and Duggie would take the other three-quarters from them that night. I hoped that all thirty of them had kept to the bargain, even though I was pretty sure that a few might have simply pocketed the two hundred quid and hoped that the horse lost.
But enough of them would have placed the bets and a single two-hundred-pound bet, even on a hundred-to-one
