“So this so-called microcoder is to do with Australian racing?”
“It’s to do with all racing, everywhere.”
“But is there much racing in Australia?” I asked. “I’ve heard of the Melbourne Cup, of course, but not much else.”
“There’s a lot more racing in Australia than that,” he said. “There are six times as many racetracks in Australia than here in Great Britain, and twice as many horses in training. It’s big business.”
“Do they have licensed bookmakers?” I asked.
“Yes, plenty of them,” he said. “But all off-track betting is through the TAB, their equivalent of the tote.”
“Well, you live and learn.”
“And you must have heard of Phar Lap?” he said. “Most famous racehorse that ever lived.”
“The name rings a bell.”
“Well, he was an Australian horse,” John said. “Back in the thirties. He won fourteen group races in a row one year, including the Melbourne Cup.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, but he was poisoned with arsenic during a visit to the United States. Some said the horse was killed on the orders of the Chicago mob to prevent him winning again and costing them a packet in illegal bets.”
“Why are bookies always cast as the villains?” I asked.
“That’s because you are,” he said, smiling at me. “Now, where’s my microcoder?”
“So it’s yours, is it?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“How can I be so sure? And why is it so important?”
“It just is,” he said. “And I know you have it.”
“How?”
“I had a description of the man who collected your father’s luggage from the hotel in Paddington, though I didn’t know it was you, not until I saw you at the inquest.”
“Lots of people look like me,” I said.
“Stop playing games with me, Mr. Talbot,” he said seriously. “The lady at the Royal Sovereign Hotel described you absolutely perfectly, including your black eye, though why she didn’t question your name being Dick Van Dyke I’ll never know.”
I couldn’t help smiling, and he noticed.
“What on earth made you come up with that?” he said.
Perhaps he was unaware that my father had used the name Willem Van Buren when he’d checked in. The hotel lady had said he was called Van-something, and Dick Van Dyke had been all I could come up with at the time.
“If you know so much, how come you took so long to find him-so long, in fact, that I found his luggage before you did?”
“Because he wasn’t using his real name,” he said.
“And what is his real name?” I asked.
“You tell me,” he said. “You formally identified him at the inquest two days ago. So it’s now officially recorded by the coroner as Peter James Talbot. But is that right? Who, then, is Alan Charles Grady?”
And who, I also thought, was Willem Van Buren, of South Africa?
“Tell me what you know about my father,” I said to John.
“Why should I?” he said.
“Do you want your microcoder back or not?” I asked.
“You probably won’t like it.”
I was sure of that, if what I knew already was any indication.
“Well, for a start, I knew him only as Alan Grady. The first time I heard the name Talbot was after he was dead. I had been keeping a tight eye on Mr. Grady for some time. He was followed from Melbourne, but I lost him at Heathrow. I now think that he never came through immigration but took another international flight straight out. But I don’t know where to.”
I thought about the e-ticket receipt I had found tucked into the Alan Grady passport in my father’s rucksack. There had been no other flights listed there, other than his return to Australia.
“Was he using the name Grady?” I asked.
“I don’t know that either,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have access to airline passenger lists.”
“An unofficial tail, then?” I said.
“Absolutely,” he said. “As I told you, officially I don’t exist.”
I wished.
“For how long, exactly, have you been keeping a close eye on my father?” I asked him.
“For years,” he said. “Must be twenty at least. As far as I know, he’s always been known to the racing authorities. He used to run an illegal backstreet bookmaking business in Melbourne.”
“But I thought you said that bookmaking was legal in Australia?”
“Only on-course bookmakers are legal,” he said. “Needless to say, our friend Mr. Grady was not one of those.”
“But I am, remember,” I said to him.
“Oh yes, so you are.” He looked like he had stepped in something nasty.
“You’re showing your prejudices. We’re not all bad, you know.”
“Aren’t you?” he said, laughing. “Well, Alan Grady had been hovering around the edges of racing in Australia for as long as I’ve been working there. He mostly was very good at keeping one step ahead of the security service, doing just enough to keep himself out of court.”
I was surprisingly quite pleased that he was good at something. “Only ‘mostly’?” I asked.
“He did get convicted a couple of times,” he said. “Small stuff, really. He did one short stretch inside for obtaining money with menaces. Unpaid gambling debts. Then he got himself turned over by another illegal outfit and ended up bankrupt.”
At least that bit of my father’s story had been true, I thought.
“How come a man can go to prison and also be bankrupted and still no one realizes that he’s not using his real name?”
“But Alan Grady was his real name,” he said. “Passport, driver’s license, bank accounts, even a genuine birth certificate, all in the name of Grady. He was Alan Grady. As I said, I didn’t hear the name Talbot until the day after he died and that was only by chance from someone I had lunch with at Ascot last Wednesday. He told me about the murder in the parking lot.”
“But how did he get a genuine birth certificate in a false name?” I asked.
“There must have once been a real Alan Grady,” he said.“Perhaps your father stole his identity. Perhaps the real Alan Grady died.”
Or he was murdered, I thought. Should I tell him, I wondered, about the Willem Van Buren passport? On balance, I thought not. Not yet.
“So tell me about this microcoder,” I said.
“Seems you know already.”
“I know it can be used to write numbers onto RFIDs,” I said. “But so what? Why was it worth chasing my father halfway round the world to get it back?”
“Fraud,” he said.
“Yeah, I assumed that, but what sort of fraud?”
“Making one horse appear to be another,” he said.
“But so what?” I said again. “Everyone knows that running a ringer in a race needs a conspiracy. Too many people would surely recognize the animal, and someone will spill the beans.”
“Ah yes,” he said. “But you could easily sell a foal or a yearling as another, with no risk then of anyone recognizing it as the wrong horse. Especially if you sell it to England from Australia or vice versa.”
“But surely horses are DNA tested for their parentage,” I said.
“They are,” he agreed. “But they are only retested if they eventually go to stud. And the DNA testing takes a long time. Not like using a handheld scanner on the ID chip, which is instant.”
“But even if you switch a bad horse for a good one and then sell it,” I said, “what would you do with the good one you’ve kept? You can’t sell the same horse twice.”
“No, but you could put it into training under its new identity. It would still be a good horse and could make a packet on the track. And if it’s so much better than people think it should be, it would win at long odds, at least to start with. Just make sure you don’t breed it. Geld it, even, to be safe.”