Whip Hand

The afternoon went on. Winetaster got beaten in the big race by a glossy dark filly called Mrs Hillman, and in the race after that Larry Server took Philip Friarly's syndicate horse to the back of the field, and stayed there. Nothing improved internally, and after the fifth I decided it was pointless staying any longer, since I couldn't even effectively think.

Outside the gate there was the usual gaggle of chauffeurs leaning against cars, waiting for their employers; and also, with them, one of the jump jockeys whose licence had been lost through taking bribes from Rammileese.

I nodded to him, as I passed. 'Jacksy.'

'Sid.'

I walked on to the car, and unlocked it, and slung my raceglasses onto the back seat. Got in. Started the engine. Paused for a bit, and reversed all the way back to the gate.

'Jacksy?' I said. 'Get in. I'm buying.'

'Buying what?' He came over and opened the passenger door, and sat in beside me. I fished my wallet out of my rear trouser pocket and tossed it into his lap.

'Take all the money,' I said. I drove forward through the carpark and out through the distant gate onto the public road.

'But you dropped me quite a lot, not long ago,' he said.

I gave him a fleeting sideways smile. 'Yeah. Well… this is for services about to be rendered.'

He counted the notes. 'All of it?' he said doubtfully.

'I want to know about Peter Rammileese.' 'Oh no.' He made as if to open the door, but the car by then was going too fast.

'Jacksy,' I said, 'no one's listening but me, and I'm not telling anyone else. Just say how much he paid you and what for, and anything else you can think of.'

He was silent for a bit. Then he said, 'It's more than my life's worth, Sid. There's a whisper out that he's brought two pros down from Glasgow for a special job and anyone who gets in his way just now is liable to be stamped on.'

'Have you seen these pros?' I said, thinking that I had.

'No. It just come through on the grapevine, like.'

'Does the grapevine know what the special job is?'

He shook his head.

'Anything to do with syndicates?' 'Be your age, Sid. Everything to do with Rammileese is always to do with syndicates. He runs about twenty. Maybe more.'

Twenty, I thought, frowning. I said, 'What's his rate for the job of doing a Larry Server, like today?'

'Sid,' he protested.

'How does he get someone like Larry Server onto a horse he wouldn't normally ride?'

'He asks the trainer nicely, with a fistful of dollars.'

'He bribes the trainers?'

'It doesn't take much, sometimes.' He looked thoughtful for a while. 'Don't you quote me, but there were races run last autumn where Rammileese was behind every horse in the field. He just carved them up as he liked.'

'It's impossible,' I said.

'No. All that dry weather we had, remember? Fields of four, five or six runners, sometimes, because the ground was so hard? I know of three races for sure when all the runners were his. The poor sodding bookies didn't know what had hit them.'

Jacksy counted the money again. 'Do you know how much you've got here?' he said.

'Just about.'

I glanced at him briefly. He was twenty-five, an ex-apprentice grown too heavy for the Flat and known to resent it. Jump jockeys on the whole earned less than the Flat boys, and there were the bruises besides, and it wasn't everyone who like me found steeplechasing double the fun. Jacksy didn't; but he could ride pretty well, and I'd raced alongside him often enough to know he wouldn't put you over the rails for nothing at all. For a consideration, yes, but for nothing, no.

The money was troubling him. For ten or twenty he would have lied to me easily: but we had a host of shared memories of changing rooms and horses and wet days and mud and falls and trudging back over sodden turf in paper-thin racing boots, and it isn't so easy, if you're not a real villain, to rob someone you know as well as that.

'Funny,' he said, 'you taking to this detecting lark.'

'Riotous.'

'No, straight up. I mean, you don't come after the lads for little things.'

'No,' I agreed. Little things like taking bribes. My business, on the whole, was with the people who offered them.

'I kept all the newspapers,' he said. 'After that trial.'

I shook my head resignedly. Too many people in the racing world had kept those papers, and the trial had been a trial for me in more ways than one. Defence counsel had revelled in deeply embarrassing the victim; and the prisoner, charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent, contrary to section 18 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, (or in other words, bopping an ex-jockey's left hand with a poker) had been rewarded by four years in clink. It would be difficult to say who had enjoyed the proceedings less, the one in the witness box or the one in the dock.

Jacksy kept up his disconnected remarks, which I gathered were a form of time-filling while he sorted himself out underneath.

'I'll get my licence back for next season,' he said.

'Great.'

'Seabury's a good track. I'll be riding there in August. All the lads think it's fine the course is still going, even if…' He glanced at my hand. 'Well… you couldn't race with it anyway, could you, as it was?'

'Jacksy,' I said, exasperated. 'Will you or won't you?'

He flipped through the notes again, and folded them, and put them in his pocket.

'Yes. All right. Here's your wallet.'

'Put it in the glove box.'

He did that, and looked out of the window. 'Where are we going?'

he said. 'Anywhere you like.'

'I got a lift to Chester. He'll have gone without me by now. Can you take me south, like, and I'll hitch the rest.'

So I drove towards London, and Jacksy talked.

'Rammileese gave me ten times the regular fee, for riding a loser. Now listen, Sid, you swear this won't get back to him?'

'Not through me.'

'Yeah. Well, I suppose I do trust you.'

'Get on, then.'

'He buys quite good horses. Horses that can win. Then he syndicates them. I reckon sometimes he makes five hundred per cent profit on them, for a start. He bought one I knew of for six thousand and sold ten shares at three thousand each. He's got two pals who are O.K. registered owners, and he puts one of them in each syndicate, and they swing it so some fancy figurehead takes a share, so the whole thing looks right.'

'Who are the two pals?' He gulped a lot, but told me. One name meant nothing, but the other had appeared on all of Philip Friarly's syndicates.

'Right,' I said. 'On you go.'

'The horses get trained by anyone who can turn them out looking nice for double the usual training fees and no questions asked. Then Rammileese works out what races they're going to run in, and they're all running way below their real class, see, so that when he says go, by Christ you're on a flyer.' He grinned. 'Twenty times the riding fee, for a winner.'

It sounded a lot more than it was.

'How often did you ride for him?'

'One or two, most weeks.'

'Will you do it again, when you get your licence back?'

He turned in his seat until his back was against the car's door and spent a long time studying the half he could see of my face. His silence itself was an answer, but when we had travelled fully three miles he sighed deeply and said, finally, 'Yes.'

As an act of trust, that was remarkable.

'Tell me about the horses,' I said, and he did, at some length. The names of some of them were a great surprise, and the careers of all of them as straightforward as Nicholas Ashe.

'Tell me how you got your licence suspended,' I said.

He had been riding for one of the amenable trainers, he said, only the trainer hadn't had an amenable wife. 'She had a bit of a spite on, so she shopped him with the Jockey Club. Wrote to Thomas Ullaston personally, I ask you. Of course, the whole bleeding lot of Stewards believed her, and suspended the lot of us, me, him, and the other jock who rides for him, poor sod, who never got a penny from Rammileese and wouldn't know a backhander if it smacked him in the face.'