Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [97]
For four more years, he sweated to repay Mrs Nutbridge.
Punitive damages though, he knew, would have been much worse.
Freed at last from debt, but still dishonest at heart, he moved to another state and sold small-print insurance.
A man he swindled there took a more direct route to justice than Jules Reginald Harlow, and in a dark alley beat Patrick Green to pulp.
THE DAY OF THE LOSERS
People go to the Grand National to win: jockeys, gamblers and, in this case, the police.
In any day of good luck for the losers, those who believe they have lost may have won, and those who win may have lost.
It depends on the stake.
Austin Dartmouth Glenn set off to the Grand National with a thick packet of new bank notes in his pocket and a mixture of guilt and bravado in his mind.
Austin Dartmouth Glenn knew he had promised not to put this particular clutch of bank notes into premature circulation. Not for five years, he had been sternly warned. Five years would see the heat off and the multi-million robbery would be ancient history. The police would be chasing more recent villains and the hot serial numbers would have faded into fly-blown obscurity on out-of-date lists. In five years it would be safe to spend the small fortune he had been paid for his part in springing the bank-robbery boss out of unwelcome jail.
That was all very well, Austin told himself aggrievedly, looking out of the train window. What about inflation? In five years’ time the small fortune might not be worth the paper it was printed on. Or the colour and size of the bank notes might be changed. He’d heard of a frantic safe-blower long ago who’d done twelve years and gone home to a cache full of the old thin white stuff. All that time served for a load of out-of-date, uncashable rubbish. Austin Glenn’s mouth twisted in sympathy at the thought. It wasn’t going to happen to him, not ruddy well likely.
Austin had paid for his train ticket with ordinary currency, and ditto for the cans of beer, packages of Cellophaned sandwiches, and copy of a racing newspaper. The hot new money was stowed safely in an inner pocket, not to be risked before he reached the bustling anonymity of the huge crowd converging on Aintree racecourse. He was no fool, of course, he thought complacently. A neat pack of bank notes, crisp, new and consecutive, might catch the most incurious eye. But no one would look twice now that he had shuffled them and crinkled them with hands dirtied for the purpose.
He wiped beer off his mouth with the back of his hand: a scrawny, fortyish man with neat, thin, grey-black hair, restless eyes and an overall air of self-importance. A life spent on the fringes of crime had given him hundreds of dubious acquaintances, an intricate memory-bank of information and a sound knowledge of how to solicit bribes without actually cupping the palm. No one liked him very much, but Austin was not sensitive enough to notice.
Nearer the front of the same train Jerry Springwood sat and sweated on three counts. For one thing, he was an outdoor man and found the heat excessive, and for another, owing to alcohol and sex, he had no time to spare and would very likely lose his job if he arrived late; but, above all, he sweated from fear.
Jerry Springwood at thirty-two had lost his nerve and was trying to carry on the trade of steeplechase jockey without anyone finding out. The old days when he used to ride with a cool brain and discount intermittent bangs as merely a nuisance were long gone. For months now he had travelled with dread to the meetings, imagining sharp ends of bone protruding from his skin, imagining a smashed face or a severed spine… imagining pain. For months he had been unable to take risks he would once not have seen as risks at all. For months he had been unable to urge his mounts forward into gaps, when only such urging would win; and unable to stop himself steadying his mounts to jump, when only kicking them on would do.
The skill which had taken him to the top was now used to cover the