Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [84]
The barmaid leaned towards them over the bar, her friendly face smiling and the pink sweater leaving little to the imagination. ‘Jamie Finland?’ she said. ‘Ever such a nice boy, isn’t he? Shame about him being blind.’
‘What?’ said Billy.
The barmaid nodded. ‘Him and his mother, they live just down the road in those new flats, next door to my sister. He stays home most of the time, studying and listening to his radios. And you’d never believe it, but he can tell colours; he can really. My sister says it’s really weird, but he told her she was wearing a green coat and she was.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘It’s true as God’s my judge,’ said the barmaid, offended.
‘No,’ Billy said. ‘I don’t believe that even if he can tell a green coat from a red that he could distinguish colours on a television screen with three or four horses crossing the line abreast. You can’t do it often even if you can see.’ He sat and thought. ‘On the other hand, I lost a lot today on those photos.’
He thought longer. ‘We all took a caning over those photos. I heard several of the other bookies complaining about the run on Jetset.’ He frowned. ‘I don’t see how it could be rigged, though.’
Billy put down his glass with a crash which startled the whole bar. ‘Did you say Jamie Finland listens to radios? What radios?’
‘How should I know?’ said the barmaid, bridling.
‘He lives near the course,’ Billy said, thinking feverishly. ‘So just suppose he somehow overheard the photo result before it was given on the loudspeakers. But that doesn’t explain the delay… how there was time for him, and probably quite a lot of others who heard the same thing, to get their money on.’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ said the barmaid.
‘I think I’ll pop along and see Jamie Finland,’ said Billy Hitchins. ‘And ask who or what he heard… if he heard anything at all.’
‘Bit far-fetched,’ said the manager judiciously. ‘The only person who could delay things long enough would be the judge.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Billy, awe-struck by the thought. ‘What about the judge?’
Arnold Roper did not know about the long fuse being lit in the pub. To Arnold, Billy Hitchins was a name on a bookmaker’s stand. He could not suppose that brainy Billy Hitchins would drink in a pub where the barmaid had a sister who lived next door to a blind boy who had picked up his discreet transmission on a carelessly left-on radio which was capable of receiving one-ten to one-forty megahertz on VHF.
Arnold Roper travelled serenely homeward with his walkie-talkie type transmitter hidden as usual inside his inner jacket pocket, its short aerial retracted now safely out of sight.
The line-of-sight low-powered frequency he used was in his opinion completely safe, as only a passing aircraft was likely to receive it, and no pilot on earth would connect a simple number spoken on the air with the winner of the photo-finish down at Ascot, or Epsom, or Newmarket, or York.
Back on the racecourse Arnold had carefully packed away and securely locked up the extremely delicate and expensive apparatus which belonged to the firm which employed him. Arnold Roper was not the judge. Arnold Roper’s job lay in operating the photo-finish camera. It was he who watched the print develop; he who could take his time delivering it to the judge; he who always knew the winner first.
CORKSCREW
The road to justice is winding, long, expensive and slow, and sometimes never arrives. Corkscrew gets there, more or less, scattering lessons on the way.
First lesson: if you aim to be kind, be careful.
Sandy Nutbridge leaned on the white-painted rails of a private training circuit in the American state of South Carolina and tried to size up the undemonstrative man beside him.
Both were English. Sandy Nutbridge was trying to sell to the other (Jules Reginald Harlow) the two-year-old South Carolina-bred filly presently being fast-cantered round the track by the top-ranking exercise groom employed by Sandy Nutbridge whenever he wanted to make a multi-nought sale.
His spiel and patter about the filly’s breeding and early showing of