At that point I had come close to telling her that my father had been murdered and I couldn’t come to see her because I was being interviewed by the police. But then she may have become convinced that I was a murderer, and that might have sent her back over the edge of the chasm out of which she was slowly climbing. Better to be thought of as a drunk than a killer.
“I’m sorry,” I’d said, admitting nothing. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”
“I may not be here tomorrow,” she had replied more calmly. It was her way of telling me once again that, one day, she intended to commit suicide. Just a little reminder to me that she believed she was in control of the situation. It was a game we had been playing for at least the past ten years. I had no doubts that she had convinced herself it was true. However, after all this time, I was not so certain. The only occasions I thought she might actually do it were during some of her manic phases when she would imagine she had superhuman powers. One day there might be no one around to prevent her leaping from a window when she was convinced she could fly. It wouldn’t be a true suicide, more like an accident or misadventure.
I, meanwhile, was completely fed up with this half existence. In my darker moments, I had sometimes wondered if suicide would be the only means of escape from it for me too.
The second day of Royal Ascot didn’t quite have the excitement of the first. Murder in the parking lot was the talk of the racetrack, with conspiracy theories running full tilt.
“Did you hear that the victim was someone involved in doping?” I heard one man confidently telling another.
“Really?” replied the second. “Well, you never know what’s going on right under your nose, do you?”
For all I knew, they might have been right. There was scant factual information being given out by the police. Probably, I thought, because they couldn’t be sure of the true identity of the victim, let alone the perpetrator.
Luca and Betsy were surprisingly not at all inquisitive about my rapidly darkening eye. However, they were also suitably sympathetic, which was more than could be said for my fellow bookmakers, or even my clients.
“’Morning, Ned,” said Larry Porter, the bookie on the neighboring pitch. “Did yer missus do that?” He was obviously enjoying my discomfort.
“Good morning to you too, Larry,” I replied. “And, no, I walked into a door.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Pull the other one.”
I felt sorry for people who really had walked into a door. No one must ever believe them.
“Actually, I was mugged,” I said.
“We were all mugged yesterday,” he said, laughing expansively at his little joke, “by the bloody punters.”
“Maybe this punter”-I put my hand to my eye-“wanted more.”
The smile disappeared from his face. “Were you robbed, then?” he asked. Robbery of bookmakers was never a laughing matter in our business.
“No,” I said, thinking fast. I didn’t really want to say that it might have been murder on the mugger’s mind, not robbery. “Seems he was frightened off.”
“Not by your physique, surely,” said Larry, laughing again.
I just smiled at him and let it go. He must have weighed a good eighteen stone, with a waist that a sumo wrestler would have been proud of. I, meanwhile, was a lean, mean fighting machine in comparison, though, truthfully, I was somewhat scrawny. I never seemed to have any time to eat, or the inclination to cook, in my married but mostly solitary lifestyle.
Thankfully, neither Luca, Betsy, Larry nor anyone else seemed to connect the murder in the parking lot with my black eye, and the novelty of it slowly wore off as the afternoon’s sport progressed.
“Was it just us or was the Internet down for everyone?” I asked Luca during a lull after the third race.
“What?” he said, busy with his keyboard.
“Yesterday. For the last,” I said. “Was it just us or everyone?”
“Oh,” he said. “It seems the whole system was down for nearly five minutes. And you know what else was funny?”
“What?” I asked.
“The phones were off too.”
“Which phones?” I asked.
“Mobiles,” he said. “All of them. Every network. Nothing.”
“But that’s impossible,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But it happened. Everyone I spoke to said their phones wouldn’t work for about five minutes. No signal, they said. The boys from the big outfits were going nuts.”
By “the big outfits,” Luca meant the four or five large companies that ran strings of betting shops across the country. Each company had a man or two at the races who would bet for them with the on-course bookmakers to affect the starting prices.
The odds offered by the racetrack bookmakers often change before the race starts. If a horse is heavily backed, they will shorten its odds and offer better prices on the other horses to compensate. The official “Starting Price” was an approximate average of the prices offered on the bookmakers’ boards on the racetrack just as the race starts.
Big winning bets in High Street betting shops are nearly always paid on the official starting price, so, if someone loads money on a horse in their local betting shop, the company arranges for money to be bet on that horse with the racetrack bookmakers so that the odds on their boards drop and consequently the official starting price will be shorter.
For example, if a betting shop has taken a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of bets on a horse priced at ten-to-one, they stand to lose a million pounds if it wins. So the company will simply have its staff at the racetrack bet cash on that horse with the bookmakers, who will then shorten its odds. If the starting price drops to, say, five-to-one and it wins, the betting shop will only have to pay out half what it would otherwise have done.
If both the Internet and the telephones were not working for the five minutes before the race, then the betting shop companies would have had no way of getting the message to their staff to make the bets and change the starting prices.
“Any word on anyone being caught out?” I asked Luca.
“No, nothing,” he said. “Quiet as a whisper.”
A customer thrust a twenty-pound note at me, and I gratefully relieved him of it in exchange for a slip from the printer.
“Either someone doesn’t want to admit it,” I said, “or it was just a simple, accidental glitch in the systems.”
Word usually went around pretty quickly if a big company believed they had been “done.” They typically moaned about it ad nauseam and refused to pay out. Gambling wins, as well as losses, were notoriously difficult to pursue through the courts. The big boys believed that it was their God-given right to control the starting prices, and if someone managed to get one over on them, it was unfair. Most others believed that what was really unfair was how the major bookmaking chains could change the on-course prices so easily, often with only a very few of the many thousands of pounds that were bet across the counters in their High Street shops.
I shrugged my shoulders and took a bet off another customer. Luca pushed the keys on his computer, and out popped the ticket from the printer.
“At least our computer and printer didn’t go off as well,” I said to him over my shoulder.
“Well, they wouldn’t,” he said confidently. “Unless the battery went flat.”
Our system, like every other bookmaker’s, was powered by a twelve-volt car battery hidden away under the platforms we stood on. The batteries were provided freshly charged each day by the racetrack’s technology company, which also provided the Internet access-for a fee, of course. The same battery also powered the red-light-emitting diodes that showed the horses’ names and prices on our board. If the battery went flat, we would soon know about it. Our lights would go out first.
The lights stayed on, and we recouped most of our losses from the previous day as favorites were beaten in each of the first five races. I was beginning even to enjoy the day when Detective Chief Inspector Llewellyn pitched up in front of me with DC Walton in tow.