Twice Shy

'Any more, sir?' the auctioneer said.

I again shook my head. Donavan kicked my leg. The auctioneer looked around the silent sale ring. 'All done, then?' he said: and after a lifetime's pause his gavel came down sharply, the clap of opportunity gone for ever. 'Sold to Mr O'Flaherty. Next lot, please.'

Under the buzz of comment that followed the super-colt out of the ring, Donavan thrust a furious purple face towards mine and yelled uninhibitedly, 'You buggering bastard. Do you know who bought that colt?'

'Yes I do.'

'I'll kill you, so I will.'

Shades of Angelo…

'There's no reason,' I said, 'why Luke should pay for your feud with Mick O'Flaherty.'

'That colt will win the Derby.'

I shook my head. 'You're afraid it will.'

'I'll write to Luke, so I will. I'll tell him it's you who's afraid. Bloody English. I'd kill the lot of you.'

He stalked away with rage pouring visibly from every pore, and I watched him with regret because I would indeed have liked to buy him his little fellow and seen him croon over him to make him a champion.

'Why did you stop?' Cassie asked, taking my arm.

'Does it worry you?'

She blinked. 'You know what they're saying?'

'That I didn't have the nerve to go on?'

'It was just that I heard…'

I smiled lop-sidedly. 'My first big battle, and I retreated. Something like that?'

'Something.'

'O'Flaherty and Donavan hate each other so much it curdles their judgment. I meant to go as far as seven hundred and fifty thousand guineas and I thought I'd get the colt, I really did, because that's an extremely high price for any yearling. I went one bid higher still, but it wasn't enough. O'Flaherty was standing behind his agent prodding him in the back to make him carry on. I could see him. O'Flaherty was absolutely determined to buy the colt. To spite Donavan, I think. It isn't sense to go on bidding against someone compelled by raw emotion, so I stopped.'

'But what if he does win the Derby?'

'About ten thousand thoroughbred colts were born last year in the British Isles alone. Then there's France and America too. One colt from that huge crop will win the Derby the year after next, when he's three. The odds are against it being this one.'

'You're so cool.'

'No,' I said truthfully. 'Bruised and disgruntled.'

We drove home and I sent the telex to Luke. 'Regret underbidder at eight hundred and forty thousand pounds excluding tax for Hansel colt. Donavan's deadly rival Mick O'Flaherty successful at eight hundred and sixty-six thousand two fifty. Donavan furious. Sack me if you like. Regards, William.'

The return message came within an hour. 'If the colt wins the Derby you owe me ten million pounds otherwise you are still employed. Best to Cassie.'

'Thank God for that,' she said. 'Let's go to bed.'

Two busy days later I dropped her at work and drove on south-westwards to Berkshire to visit Luke's other trainers during the morning and to go on to see three of their horses race atNewbury in the afternoon; and there again on the racecourse was Angelo.

This time he saw me immediately before I had time to dodge: came charging across a patch of grass, took roughly hold of my lapel, and told me the betting system didn't work.

'You sold me a pup. You'll be sorry.' He looked quickly around as if hoping to find us both on deserted moorland, but as there was only concrete well populated, he smothered his obvious wish to slaughter me there and then. He was physically tougher, I thought. Less pale, less puffy; the effects of long imprisonment giving way to a healthy tan and tighter muscles, the bull-like quality of the body intensifying. The black eyes… cold as ever. I looked at his re-emerging malevolence and didn't like it a bit.

I pulled his hand off my lapel and dropped it. 'There's nothing wrong with the system,' I said. 'It's not my fault you've been trampling all over it like a herd of elephants.'

His voice came back in the familiar bass register, 'If I'm still losing by five tomorrow, I'll know you've conned me. And I'll come after you. That's a promise.'

He turned away abruptly and strode off towards the stands, and in a while I went in search of Taff among the bookmakers.

'The latest on Angelo Gilbert?' He looked down at me from his raised position on an inverted beer crate. 'He's nuts.'

'Are you still offering him rotten odds?'

'Look you, Mr Derry, I'm too busy to talk now.' He was indeed surrounded by eager customers holding out cash. 'If you want to know, buy me a pint after the last race.'

'Right,' I said, 'it's a deal.' And at the end of the afternoon he came with me into the crowded bar and shouted the unexpected news into my attentive ear.

'That man Angelo's gone haywire. He won big money at York, like I told you, and a fair amount at Doncaster, but before York it seems he lost a packet at Epsom and last Monday he kissed goodbye to a fortune at Goodwood, and today he's plunged on two horses who finished out of sight. So we're all back to giving him regular odds. Old Lancer – he works for Joe Glickstein, Honest Joe, you must have seen his stands at all the tracks?' I nodded. 'Well, Old Lancer, he took a thousand in readies this afternoon off that Angelo on Pocket Handbook, what couldn't win if it started yesterday. I mean, the man's a screwball. He's no more playing Liam O'Rorke's system than I'm a bleeding fairy.'

I watched him drink his beer, feeling great dismay that Angelo couldn't manage the system even to the extent of letting it find him the right horses. He had to be guessing some of the answers to the multifarious questions instead of looking them up accurately in the form books: skipping the hard work out of laziness and still trusting the scores which the computer returned. But a computer couldn't advise him, couldn't tell him that omitting an answer here and an answer there would upset all those delicately balanced weightings and inevitably distort the all-important win factors.

Angelo was dumb, dim, stupid.

Angelo would think it was my fault.

'They say his father's getting tired of it,' Taff said.

'Who?'

'That Angelo person's father. Old Harry Gilbert. Made a packet out of bingo halls, they say, before he got struck.'

'Er, struck?'

Taff brought a lined brown outdoor face out of the beer mug. 'Struck down with arthritis, I think it is. He can't hardly walk, anyway. Comes to the races sometimes in a wheel chair, and it's him what has the cash.'

Enlightened, I thought back to the previous week at Doncaster, seeing in memory Angelo giving a racecard to an elderly chairbound man. Angelo's father, still indulgent, still supportive, still paying for his deadly middle-aged son.

I thanked Taff for his information. 'What's this Angelo to you?' he said.

'A long-time no friend of my brother's.'

He made an accepting motion with his head, looked at his watch and finished his beer at a gulp, saying he'd left his clerk looking after the day's takings and he'd be happier having his mitts on them himself. 'We've all had a good day,' he said cheerfully, 'with those two odds-on favourites getting stuffed.'

I drove homewards and collected Cassie who was waiting at the hospital after a what they had called a progress assessment.

'Plaster off next week,' she complained. 'I wanted it off this afternoon, but they wouldn't.'

The plaster was by then itching badly, the 'REMEMBER TIGERS' was fading, Cassie was insisting that her arm felt mended and impatience had definitely set in.

We again went to the sales: I seemed to have spent half a lifetime round that sale ring, and Luke now owned twenty-eight yearlings he had not yet seen. I had signed cheques on his behalf for nearly two million pounds and was tending to dream about it at night. There was only the Saturday morning left now, an undistinguished programme according to the catalogue, the winding-down after the long excitements of the week. I went early by habit and with only short premeditation bought very cheaply the first lot of the day, an undistinguished-looking liver chestnut colt whose blood lines were sounder to the inspection than his spindly legs. One couldn't have foretold on that misty autumn morning that this was the prince who would sire a dynasty, but that in the end was what happened. My mind, as I signed for him and arranged for him to be sent along the road to Mort's stable, was more immediately on the conversation I'd had with Jonathan on the telephone the evening before.