I quickly turned so he wouldn’t see into my eyes. I had grown a beard since he had last seen me and I was also wearing my ever-present LA Dodgers baseball cap. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognise me.
‘Some people,’ I heard him say loudly behind me as I walked briskly away. ‘Not even an apology.’
I ignored him and kept going, against the human traffic, through the doors and into the grandstand.
It was high time I got out of here and went back to England.
29
Tuesday morning dawned with a dark and menacing sky. The humidity was up in the 90 per cents and the temperature wasn’t far off the same in degrees.
‘We have storm,’ Rafael said as we walked to the barn from the bunkhouse.
I was sure he was right. One could almost feel the electricity in the air.
‘No horse exercise early,’ Rafael said. ‘They go later.’
He was almost right about that too.
‘It’s dark here today,’ Keith said, referring, not to the weather, but to the fact that there was no racing at Belmont Park on Tuesdays. ‘So the horses can go out later. The track is closed anyway until at least nine, when this storm is forecast to be through.’
The chance of anyone being struck by lightning was always slight but why take the risk? That was obviously the opinion of the Belmont track authorities; or, more likely, they didn’t want to get sued.
Some years ago, a 22-year-old Australian jockey had been hit when out riding morning exercise on a racecourse near Perth. He’d died instantly, along with the gelding he’d been on. The fact that the horse had been wearing metal shoes hadn’t helped.
There was a dazzling flash of lightning followed almost instantaneously by a deafening clap of thunder, and the heavens opened, huge drops of rain initially making dents in the dirt outside before everything was overwhelmed by the huge volume of water falling from above.
For the next three hours, the Raworth grooms, plus Maria, walked the horses in turn round and round the shedrow in order to give them at least some exercise. We did our best to keep the animals calm but the repeated flashes of electricity and accompanying crashes of thunder put them all on edge, and us too.
By eight o’clock we were hanging around outside the office waiting for the elements to improve. Rafael went up the ladder to the bedding store and tossed down half a dozen bales of straw for us all to sit on.
Diego sat facing me, watching my every move.
He had made no comment about his attempted attack. Indeed, he made no comment to me about anything, not that communication of any sort was easy due to the incessant hammering of the torrential downpour on the barn’s metal roof.
The previous evening, I had remained in the grandstand for almost three hours, until the very last possible moment before it was closed up for the night. I had taken the opportunity to have a good nose around all the hidden nooks and crannies, especially in the four separate kitchens, where I had conducted a fruitless search for some leftover food.
Still hungry, I had eventually made my way back to the bunkhouse using a roundabout route to avoid Diego and his henchmen.
He was a distraction I could have well done without.
The weather forecasters had been rather optimistic. Nine o’clock came and went with the electrical fireworks still in full swing above us.
Keith came out of the office at ten.
‘All track work is cancelled for the day,’ he shouted over the din of the thunderclaps and the endless rain. ‘Even if this blows over soon, the track will be too wet.’
No one moved. None of us fancied going out into the biblical-style deluge, even for a late breakfast at the track kitchen.
My non-smart phone rang, its piercing shrill ringtone cutting right through the other noise.
Everyone’s eyes swivelled my way. Everyone, that is, except Diego, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me for the past hour anyway.
I took the phone out of my pocket and looked for a number on the screen. There was none, just the single word ‘withheld’.
No one knew this number, I thought. No one other than Tony and I’d given him the strictest of instructions never to call me.
‘Hello,’ I said, answering.
‘Jeff, it’s me,’ Tony said. ‘I have to speak to you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said loudly, ‘you must have the wrong number.’
I hung up and put the phone back in my pocket. Perhaps I should have had it switched to silent but then the alarm wouldn’t sound to wake me in the mornings.
It had to have been really important for Tony to have called but there was no way I could speak to him with all the others listening. And I wasn’t going to get up and go somewhere else to make a call back. That would have been too obvious.
Instead, we all went on sitting on the bales in the shedrow, waiting for the rain to pass.
But I sat there fearful that the atmospheric high jinks above my head wasn’t going to be the only storm I had to deal with today.
It was not until well after midday that I was able to get any privacy. The rain had pretty much stopped by then and, when all the others went to lunch, I walked round the barn to the bunkhouse to call Tony.
I went right through the building to make sure everyone else was out, then I shut my bedroom door and placed the back of the wooden chair under the doorknob so I couldn’t be disturbed. Even so I kept my voice to a minimum.
‘We have a problem,’ Tony said.
Houston? I thought, with a smile.
But our problem was, in fact, nothing to laugh about.
‘Someone called the Maryland Racing Commissioner’s office at eight o’clock this morning saying he was from FACSA, wanting to know the name of the horse that had failed the post-race cobalt test at Pimlico.’
‘Who?’
‘They don’t know,’ Tony said. ‘The commissioner hadn’t yet arrived at his office, so the man spoke to his PA.’
‘What was he told?’ I asked with trepidation.
There was a slight pause as if Tony was preparing me for bad news. My heart dropped.
‘He was told it was Debenture,’ he said miserably.
‘How could such a thing happen?’ I said angrily, hissing the words down the line. ‘Surely they should have checked who was asking. It could have been a journalist for all they knew.’
‘Apparently the man used my name and he was very persuasive, telling the PA that he had spoken to the commissioner last week, who had told him the name of the horse but had since mislaid the piece of paper on which he’d written it down. The PA knew the information was highly confidential. She had even been instructed by the commissioner not to tell anyone else in their own organisation, not even his deputy. It was partly because of the confidentiality that she assumed it had to be me calling as no one else knew anything about it.’
‘What time did you call Norman Gibson to tell him about the test result?’
There was another pause. More bad news?
‘I didn’t call him,’ Tony said. ‘I sent him an email.’
My heart sank again.
‘From your private account or from the FACSA one?’
‘The FACSA account, obviously,’ he said, somewhat affronted. ‘All FACSA emails are encrypted. They’re meant to be totally secure between sender and recipient. The mole shouldn’t be able to read them.’
Not unless he had access to your work computer and your password, I thought wryly. Or if the mole was Norman Gibson himself.
‘When did you send it?’
‘Late yesterday afternoon,’ he said, ‘after we spoke.’
‘So how did you find out that someone had called the commissioner?’
‘When he arrived for work at nine this morning, he called me only to make sure I had been given the right name. I knew nothing about it, of course.’