“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 long shot, should not have raised too many suspicions at each separate betting shop. If the head office had managed in time to notice that six thousand pounds had swiftly gone onto such a rank outsider, they would have been powerless to do anything about the starting price. Larry’s mobile phone jammer and Luca’s Internet server virus had seen to that, helped along by Duggie’s little expertise with the telephone landlines.

“They may not pay out,” Luca said. Bookmakers, particularly the big chains, had a nasty habit of not paying out on bets if they thought someone had been up to a fiddle. Not that we had, of course. We had simply piggybacked on someone else’s fiddle.

“Maybe not immediately,” I said. “But I think they will in the end. It really wouldn’t be sensible for them to upset so many of High Wycombe’s finest juvenile delinquents, now would it?”

He laughed.

And I knew something that he didn’t.

The owner of Oriental Suite, the same owner who had been quoted in the Racing Post as being distraught over the death of his horse and the man who had pocketed the large insurance payout, was none other than a Mr. Henry Richard Feldman, director and shareholder of Tony Bateman (Turf Accountants) Ltd and sole shareholder of HRF Holdings Ltd. The very same man who had sent his bullyboys to give me a “message” at Kempton Park racetrack with their fists and steel toe caps.

Getting even had, indeed, required considerable cunning.

And almost the best part of the whole scheme was that Larry Porter and Norman Joyner firmly believed that it hadn’t worked. They went on grumbling about it for the rest of the day.

I was certain that Mr. Feldman would eventually see sense and pay out on all the bets, just as I was sure that he would in the end decide not to pursue his plans to take over my business. Both would be the price for my silence. And he would know that a letter had been lodged with my solicitors to be handed to the British Horseracing Authority in the event of my sudden or suspicious death.

Just to be on the safe side.