Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [115]
We watched on the television as the horses jumped off very slowly from the start, which was at the far end of the finishing straight. With more than two complete circuits in the three-and-a-half-mile race, and in the heavy ground, no one was really prepared to make the running, and the fifteen horses had hardly broken into a gallop by the time they reached the first fence.
“Come on, you bugger,” said Martin, next to me. “I could really do with this one winning. Perhaps then the bloody owner will pay me some of his training fees.”
I turned my head towards him slightly. Maybe Martin could be useful after all.
“Slow payer, is he?” I asked.
“Bloody right,” said Martin without taking his eyes from the screen. “But not so much slow, more like dead stop. I’ve even threatened to apply to Weatherbys to have the ownership of his horses transferred to me. He owes me a bloody fortune.”
Weatherbys was the company that administered all of British racing and through which all racehorse registrations were held.
“How many horses does he have?” I asked.
“Too many,” he said. “Twelve all together, I think, but only six are with me, thank God, including one he used to jointly own with his brother. He hasn’t paid me anything now for months. I tell you, I’m getting desperate.”
“But you’ll get your money in the end, surely.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Shenington claims he hasn’t got it. Says he’s nearly bankrupt.”
How interesting, I thought. The Roberts Family Trust, it seems, could happily lose five million pounds on an investment in Bulgaria, but the senior trustee couldn’t pay his training fees because he was broke.
And how about hiring a private box for this meeting? It wasn’t the sort of behavior I would have expected from someone flirting with the bankruptcy courts. Not unless, of course, he had wanted to maintain a façade of affluence and respectability. Maybe the other guests were his creditors. Perhaps it was not so surprising that Martin hadn’t been invited up there to watch the race.
“But Lord Shenington must have pots of money,” I said.
“Apparently, that’s not so,” said Martin. “Seems his father, the old Earl, still keeps his fingers very tightly on the family purse strings. And what money Shenington did have of his own, he’s lost.”
“Lost?” I said.
“Gambling,” Martin said. “On the horses and at the casino tables. Addicted to it, evidently.”
“And how do you know this?” I asked with a degree of skepticism.
“Shenington told me so himself. Even used it as his excuse for not paying my bills.”
“So why are you still running his horses?” I asked. “Did he pay the entry fee for this race?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “I paid it.”
“You’re mad,” I said.
“He has promised me all the prize money if it wins.”
We both watched on the screen as the horses swung past the grandstands for the first time. The daylight was now so dismal that, in spite of the different silks, it wasn’t easy to spot which horse was which, but they were all racing closely packed, and there was still a long way to go. All of them remained in with a chance at the prize money, but that wouldn’t be much, I thought, just a few thousand pounds at most. I looked at the race conditions in the race program. The prize to the winner was just over four thousand, and a month’s training fees for six horses would be at least double that. The win would hardly pay off much of what Martin was owed, even if Shenington kept his promise, which somehow I doubted.
By the time the runners passed the grandstand for the second time, their number had been reduced by fallers from fifteen to twelve, and those twelve were no longer closely bunched together but spread out over more than a furlong. And if it had been difficult to tell them apart last time around, it was almost impossible to do so now as they raced towards the television camera, each with a uniform mud-splattered brown frontage. Only when the horses swung away onto their final circuit was