Instead, I used my handheld vacuum cleaner to clear up the mess.
The phone handset in the kitchen was off the hook. I picked it up and listened. Nothing. I replaced it on the cradle, then lifted it again and pressed REDIAL. The LED readout just showed 0. A female computer-generated voice stated that “The number you have called has not been recognized, please check and try again,” and that phrase was repeated about six times, and then it shut off completely, leaving the line dead.
Apart from the mud on the living-room floor, my nocturnal visitor, the fourth stranger, had been meticulously tidy in his search. The kitchen cabinets were all open but hardly disturbed, as were the sideboard cupboards in the dining room. He had been trying to be quiet.
However, far from answering any of the questions surrounding my father, my intruder had simply created new ones, and, in particular, was he working together with Shifty-eyes or did they represent different interests?
After all, he had only asked for the microcoder. There had been no mention of the considerable cache of money that had been hidden with it.
But if the fourth stranger knew where I lived, as he clearly did, then surely so could anyone else. I had, perhaps carelessly, freely given out my home address at the inquest, where the fourth stranger would have heard it. It now also would be in the official record. It wasn’t much of a leap to realize that the information could be obtained by any member of the public who really wanted it. Perhaps I should be on the lookout for another unwelcome nighttime guest, one with shifty eyes, in search of bundles of blue-plastic-wrapped cash.
11
On Wednesday I went to Stratford Races. Whoever thought that jump racing in June was a good idea hadn’t envisaged racing at Stratford after a prolonged drought, when the river Avon was so low that the racetrack watering system hadn’t been able to keep up with the evaporation from the sunbaked earth. The ground for weeks had been as hard as concrete, and very few trainers were willing to run their steeplechasers in such conditions.
The overnight declared runners for Stratford had been so few that it was hardly worth the journey, even though Stratford was the second-nearest course to my home, Warwick being a few miles closer.
Add the fact that Mother Nature had decided that, on this day, the six-week drought would break with numerous thunderstorms moving north from France, and one could understand why the midweek race-day crowd was not really worthy of the name.
Only four bookmakers had bothered to turn up to try to wring a few pounds out of the miserable, rain-soaked gathering. Even Norman Joyner, who almost always came to Stratford, hadn’t bothered. And most of the public who had come had the good sense to stay dry in the tote-betting hall under the grandstand, leaving us four bookies to huddle under our large umbrellas with the raindrops bouncing back off the tarmac. Royal Ascot in the sunshine, it was not.
The first race was a two-mile novice hurdle. According to the morning papers, there were five declared runners, but one of them had been withdrawn. The reason given by the horse’s trainer was that the rain had affected the going, but that was a joke. The ground was so dry, it would have needed rain akin to the Noachian Deluge to make any noticeable difference.
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.