‘It’s all a load of old hogwash. Banks knows it, the solicitor knows it, and I know it. But it does mean that Banks has confirmed his association with Lawrence and that was crucial for your case. What the solicitor doesn’t know is that we are now going to arrest Banks for the attempted murder of you, twice over. We’ll see what he has to say about that.’
‘Ask him if he knows a man called Leslie Morris,’ I said.
‘Why?’
I told him briefly about my inquiries into the fixed races and how Morris had placed the suspect bets at Sandown.
‘The attempts on my life may have been to stop me investigating.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I’ll try it.’
‘Will Banks be remanded in custody?’ I asked. That was far more important to me than anything else at the moment.
‘Sure to be.’
‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Please keep me informed.’
‘Will do.’
He hung up.
With Lawrence dead and Banks in jail, I suddenly felt a lot safer.
Part of the reason I’d come to Ascot was because I thought I’d detected a pattern in the races that had been lost on purpose.
Dave Swinton had ridden Garrick Party at Haydock Park in a lesser race on the day of the Grade 1 Betfair Chase. The same had been true for Bill McKenzie’s ride on Pool Table, on the same card as the Paddy Power Gold Cup. True, Wisden Wonder’s race at Sandown had been on a Friday, not a Saturday, but it had been the first day of the Tingle Creek Festival and a sizable crowd had attended, plus there had been a large number of bookmakers in the betting ring.
Someone trying to bet seventeen thousand pounds in cash would have stuck out like a sore thumb at, say, Newton Abbot on a Wednesday, when the seagulls would have outnumbered the genuine punters, and there would be only a half-dozen or so bookies to bet with. But amongst a big crowd, and with some serious money about, no one would raise an eyebrow.
Were there more races than just the three I had spotted? Were more jockeys involved than just Dave Swinton and Bill McKenzie?
I had spent most of Thursday afternoon researching race results and watching video recordings. I was looking for favourites that hadn’t won on days when large crowds would have been present.
Somewhat surprisingly, it was quite common for even very short-priced favourites not to win. Looking back for the past four months, I found seventeen horses that had started at odds shorter than two-to-one that had failed to win a race on the same card as the week’s main feature.
My list included two at Newbury on the same day that Dave Swinton had won the Hennessy Gold Cup on Integrated. One of those, Global Expedition, had started the Grade 2, Long Distance Hurdle at the incredibly short price of seven-to-four-on and had then finished a bad third of the six runners, well beaten by seven and eighteen lengths.
It was the first time Global Expedition had not won in his seven starts over hurdles and I remember the result being a considerable shock. However, I had been at Newbury that day, had watched the race live, and I hadn’t noticed anything questionable about the horse’s running at the time.
I studied the video of the race over and over again but, however many times I watched it, and from whichever camera position, I couldn’t establish that the horse had been deliberately prevented from winning by its rider. The jockey appeared to have made every effort to stay in touch with the leader, but to no avail.
I concluded that there was nothing suspicious. Global Expedition simply hadn’t performed on that day in the same way as he had done in the past.
Perhaps the horse had been feeling a touch unwell or was merely not in the mood to race. Racehorses were not machines. If they always ran exactly as their ratings suggested, racing would quickly die, as everyone would pick the same horse to back.
It was the healthy dose of unpredictability that made racing so exciting.
But there had been another heavily backed loser that had run on Hennessy day, in the first race, a two-and-a-quarter-mile novice handicap chase.
Electrostatic had started as the six-to-four favourite but, not only did he fail to win the race, he failed to jump even two of the thirteen fences. He’d been pulled up immediately after the first with, as the jockey claimed, a saddle that had slipped to the side.
The racecourse stewards had questioned the trainer about the care that had been taken when saddling the horse. The trainer had blamed the starter’s assistant, who had supposedly tightened the horse’s girth down at the start. He, in turn, was adamant that the girth had been both tight and secure.
The jockey, Willy Mitchell, had told the inquiry that he’d had no alternative but to pull up Electrostatic. He would have fallen off if the saddle had slipped any farther, perhaps causing some of the other runners to be brought down.
No action had been taken by the stewards, other than to warn both the trainer and the starter’s assistant to be more vigilant of the problem in future, and to commend the jockey for his quick reactions in preventing a serious incident.
I watched the video of the race, many times, and from every available angle.
There was no doubt that, in some of the TV images, the saddle was shown having slipped to the left, but they were taken long after the horse had stopped. It was impossible to tell if the slipping had occurred prior to the horse being pulled up. The footage seemed to show that the saddle had been in the right position as the horse had taken off at the first, although I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t moved on landing, as that wasn’t shown.
Was it just my suspicious mind, or had the jockey moved the saddle on purpose, only after he’d pulled up at the most conveniently distant point from both the start and the grandstand? There was no real way of knowing without confronting Willy Mitchell, and hoping for some sort of reaction.
And hence the real reason I had come to Ascot was that Electrostatic was declared to run in the two-mile novice chase, the second race of the day, and Willy Mitchell was again down to ride. All the morning papers had suggested that the horse would start once more as a short-priced favourite, his failure on his last outing having being put down to just bad luck rather than any deficiency on the animal’s part.
Electrostatic lived up to his past form and his high-voltage name, winning the second race at a canter.
I’d wandered around the betting ring beforehand but, as far as I could tell, no one was placing large bets on all the horses other than the favourite. There was certainly no blue fedora visible. No sign at all of Mr Leslie Morris.
Perhaps the summons to the disciplinary panel and my unwelcome visit to his house had frightened him away. Paul Maldini would be pleased.
Willy Mitchell was all smiles as he unsaddled the horse in the space reserved for the winner.
‘No slipped saddle this time, then?’ I said to him as he walked past me into the weighing room to weigh in.
He looked at me and the smile disappeared from his face faster than a bargain TV on Black Friday. Willy Mitchell knew exactly who I was. He’d also been part of my investigation into the misuse of jockeys’ mobile telephones.
‘No,’ he managed to say. ‘Not this time.’
‘Come out and see me,’ I said. ‘After the presentation.’
There was a slight touch of panic in his eyes. Not that it was necessarily an indication of wrongdoing. It was the sort of panic that sweeps over everyone, myself included, when a police car comes up behind you when you’re driving. It was a reaction I was quite used to generating in the innocent, as well as in the guilty.