What was he up to now?
I moved as close as I dared, silently padding over the grass in bare feet and keeping as low as I could behind the post-and-rail fence that ran along parallel to the side of the barn, and about five yards from it.
George stopped at one of the stalls near the far end. The torch went out.
I crouched down, looking through the fence, straining my eyes to try and see what he was doing.
There came a noise, a hissing sound like that made when a pump blows air into a bicycle tyre. There it was again.
Then silence.
I waited, listening hard, but there was nothing more.
George then retraced his steps along the barn towards his own three horses, turning the torch back on as he did so.
Maybe the sound had been one of the horses having a snort, or perhaps it had been the security guard blowing his nose, but the noise hadn’t been right for either of them.
I tiptoed back to the end of the barn and was about to creep closer when George appeared right in front of me, coming out of the barn into the bright glare of the security lights.
I immediately stepped back into the deep shadow of the bushes so he wouldn’t spot me.
‘Good night,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘Good night, Mr Raworth,’ replied the guard, who I still couldn’t see.
George then walked back to his Jeep and threw something onto the back seat, before climbing in and driving off into the night.
I returned slowly to my blanket and went to sleep wondering what all that had been about.
I was none the wiser in the morning.
I woke at three o’clock, slightly chilled, and went back up the stairs to my bed. Diego and Keith were both giving the snoring a rest so I lay down and returned to sleep for another hour.
I didn’t mention my nocturnal excursion to the others and especially not to George Raworth when he arrived to watch his horses at exercise.
I prepared Ladybird for Victor Gomez to ride a steady breeze over five furlongs. She would be racing on Friday afternoon in the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes, a graded race over nine furlongs for three-year-old fillies that was named in honour of the yellow perennial daisy with a black centre that is the state flower of Maryland. So all Ladybird needed today was a gentle pipe-opener to maintain her condition, nothing that would overtire.
Just to confuse people, in 1940, the Maryland Jockey Club decided that, in addition to the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes for fillies, the Preakness Stakes itself would henceforth be designated as the ‘Run for the Black-Eyed Susans’ and a garland of the yellow-and-black flowers would be draped over the winner, to rival the garland of red roses that was draped over the victor of the Kentucky Derby.
However, there was one slight problem. The Preakness is run in May, some two months earlier than black-eyed Susans come into bloom.
Not that such a trivial matter would be allowed to deter the gentlemen directors of the oldest sporting organisation of North America, one that could boast two US presidents among its former members. They decreed that the garland would be made using early-flowering, but all-yellow, Viking daisies, with their centres hand-painted black in order to resemble black-eyed Susans.
Nowadays, yellow-and-black flowers of the chrysanthemum family are used but, in all its 140-plus years of existence, the Run for the Black-Eyed Susans has never once seen an actual black-eyed Susan.
Victor Gomez came back on Ladybird to swap his saddle onto Debenture.
‘Ladybird good,’ he said to me. ‘She win tomorrow, yes?’ He gave me a thumbs up and grinned, not that it was a pretty sight with several of his teeth missing.
‘Yes,’ I replied, raising my thumb back at him. ‘Hope so.’
I walked the horse around for ten minutes for her to cool off before giving her a washdown with soap and water. Next I dried her using a large towel and then brushed her coat until it shone.
I wanted Ladybird to look her best in the paddock, not least because Tony Andretti had told me the previous evening that he would be coming to Pimlico for both Friday and Saturday and I didn’t want him giving me any grief about poor standards of grooming, even in jest.
‘How about the tests on the semen?’ I had asked him.
‘Still waiting,’ he’d replied. ‘Full results should be in tomorrow. All I can tell you at the moment is that it is definitely horse semen but not from a Thoroughbred. My professor is still doing DNA similarity tests for other equine breeds.’
So, if it wasn’t from a Thoroughbred, there was no point in me taking hair samples from the colts in Raworth’s barn for comparison. None of them could have been the donor.
I continued grooming Ladybird, brushing out her tail and then trimming a straight edge at the bottom.
As I worked, I thought about the next two days.
It was not only Tony Andretti who would be coming to Pimlico, other members of the FACSA racing section would also be in attendance, and I didn’t want them spotting me as a ringer.
It would be twelve days since I had left them at Andrews Base and, in spite of the fairly vigorous hair growth on my chin and upper lip since then, I was concerned that federal special agents should be well enough trained in recognition techniques to identify me easily, not least because my beard had not grown dark and concealing as I had hoped, but rather blond and wispy like my hair.
Since first arriving at Belmont, I had taken to always wearing my LA Dodgers baseball cap, with the peak pulled down low. Here at Pimlico, there were too many press and TV cameras around to avoid completely, so it was better to be as incognito as possible at all times. So tomorrow, I decided, I would also wear my cheap dark sunglasses to cover my eyes. With luck, the sun would shine so I wouldn’t look too out of place.
I finished with Ladybird as Victor Gomez returned on Debenture. With two days before his race, he had been given a far sterner workout and Maria walked him round the shedrow for a good twenty-five minutes to cool.
While she did so, I went over to the Preakness Barn to fetch some more straw.
George Raworth’s white Jeep Cherokee was again parked close by. The man himself was out at the track so, having swivelled round on my heel to check no one else was watching, I went to the far side of the vehicle and tried the door handle.
It opened.
The cryogenic flask was still there but it was now lying on its side behind the driver’s seat with the cap off. I tipped it up. It was completely empty both of liquid nitrogen and of the semen.
I had a quick look around the rest of the Jeep. On the back seat sat an electric torch and a small cup, along with what looked like a miniature red rubber rugby ball. The ball was about three inches long, with a short blue plastic pipe extending from one end, and it had ‘Polaroid’ stamped into the rubber on one side.
I knew exactly what it was. I’d once owned something very similar.
It was an air duster, designed to blow a stream of air to remove dust from the lens or the inside of a camera. I squeezed the ball and was rewarded by the same hissing pump sound that I had heard the previous night.
I was sorely tempted to put the air duster into my pocket but I could see George Raworth in the far distance, coming back towards me from the track with Victor Gomez, and it wouldn’t do to be caught with it.
I left things as they were, closed the Jeep door as quietly as I could, and moved quickly away. Thankfully, George had been too busy talking to Victor to notice me.
‘ID?’ said the guard at the barn entrance.
I showed him my groom’s pass and he let me through.
The place was a hive of activity, with veterinary staff from the Maryland Racing Commission taking blood samples from each of the Preakness runners for pre-race drug testing.