Angela returned slowly to his bedside.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll believe me,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been thinking about that race at Stratford... and I’ve a feeling Magic may not be so useless after all.’
‘No,’ Angela said. ‘No more lies. I’ve had enough.’
‘I’m not... This isn’t a lie. Not this.’
She shook her head.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Magic made no show at Stratford because nobody asked him to — except right at the end, when I shook him up. And then he fell because I’d done it so close to the fence, and because when I gave him the signal he just shot forward as if he’d been galvanised.’
Angela listened, disbelieving.
‘Some horses,’ he said, ‘won’t gallop at home. Magic won’t and so we thought... I thought... that he couldn’t race either. But I’m not so sure now.’
Angela shrugged. ‘It doesn’t change anything. But I’ll find out when he runs in the Whitbread.’
‘No.’ He squirmed. ‘We never meant to run him in the Whitbread.’
‘But he’s entered,’ she said.
‘Yes, but... well, Mr Scott will tell you, a day or two before the race, that Magic has a temperature, or has bruised his foot, or something, and can’t run. He... we... planned it. We reckoned you wouldn’t quibble about the price if you thought Magic was Whitbread class...’
Angela let out an ‘Oh’ like a deep sigh. She looked down at the young man who was pleating his sheets aimlessly in his fingers and not meeting her eyes. She saw the shame and the tiredness and the echo of pain from his leg, and she thought that what she had felt for him had been as destructive to him as to herself.
At home, Angela phoned Clement. ‘Dear Clement, how is Magic?’
‘None the worse, Angela, I’m glad to say.’
‘How splendid,’ she said warmly. ‘And now there’s the Whitbread to look forward to, isn’t there?’
‘Yes, indeed.’ He chuckled. ‘Better buy a new hat, my dear.’
‘Clement,’ Angela said sweetly, ‘I am counting on you to keep Magic fit and well-fed and uninjured in every way. I’m counting on his turning up to start in the Whitbread, and on his showing us just exactly how bad he is.’
‘What?’
‘Because if he doesn’t, Clement dear, I might just find myself chattering to one or two people... you know, press men and even the tax man, and people like that... about your buying Magic for five thousand one day and selling him to me for nineteen thousand the next.’
Angela listened to the silence travelling thunderously down the wire, and she smiled with healthy mischief. ‘And Clement dear, we’ll both give his new jockey instructions to win if he can, won’t we? Because it’s got to be a fair test, don’t you think? And just to encourage you, I’ll promise you that if I’m satisfied that Magic has done his very best, win or lose, I won’t mention to anyone what I paid for him. And that’s a bargain, Clement dear, that you can trust.’
Clement put the receiver down with a crash and swore aloud. ‘Bloody old bag. She must have checked up.’ He telephoned to Yorkshire and found that indeed she had. Damn and blast her, he thought. He was going to look a proper fool in the eyes of the racing world, running rubbish like Magic in one of the top races. It would do his reputation no damn good at all.
Clement Scott felt not the slightest twinge of guilt. He had, after all, cheated a whole succession of foolish ladies in the same way. But if Angela talked — and she could talk for hours when she liked — he would find that the gullible widowed darlings were all suddenly suspicious and buying their horses from someone else. Magic, he saw furiously, would have to be trained as thoroughly as possible, and ridden by the best jockey free.
In the parade ring before the Whitbread, Angela was entirely her old self again: kind and gushing and bright-eyed.
She spoke to her new jockey, who was unlike Derek Roberts to a comfortable degree. ‘I expect you’ve talked it over with darling Clement,’ she said gaily, ‘but I think it would be best, don’t you, if you keep Magic back a bit among all the other runners for most of the way, and then about a mile from the winning post tell him to start winning, if you see what I mean, and, of course, after that it’s up to both of you just to do what you can. I have my money on you, you know.’
The jockey glanced uncertainly at the stony face of Clement Scott. ‘Do what the lady wants,’ Clement said.
The jockey, who knew his business, carried out the instructions to the letter. A mile from home he dug Magic sharply in the ribs and was astonished at the response. Magic — young, lightly raced, and carrying bottom weight — surged past several older, tireder contenders, and came towards the last fence lying fifth.
Clement could hardly believe his eyes. Angela could hardly breathe. Magic floated over the last fence and charged up the straight and finished third.
‘There,’ she said, ‘isn’t that lovely.’
Since almost no one else had backed her horse, Angela collected a fortune in place money from the Tote; and a few days later, for exactly what she’d paid, she sold Magic to a scrap-metal merchant from Kent.
Angela sent Derek Roberts a get-well card. A week later she sent him an impersonal case of champagne and a simple message: ‘Thanks’.
‘I’ve learnt a lot,’ she thought, ‘because of him. A lot about greed and gullibility, about facades and consequences and the transience of love. And about racing... too much.’
She sold Billyboy and Hamlet and went on her cruise.
Blind Chance
In 1979 Julian Symons, Eminence of The Detection Club, hit on a wheeze to earn money to swell the Club’s depleted coffers. As Editor, he invited a fistful of crime writers to contribute a short story towards a volume whose title was to be Verdict of Thirteen: a Detection Club Anthology.
Not being skilled at court scenes, I wrote a racecourse tale called Twenty-one Good Men and True, and under that banner it was published by Faber in Britain and Harper in the US, both in 1979. In England the story was also run by the weekly magazine, Women’s Own, who gave it the title adopted here, Blind Chance.
Arnold Roper whistled breathily while he boiled his kettle and spooned instant own-brand economy-pack coffee into the old blue souvenir from Brixham. Unmelodic and without rhythm, the whistling was none the less an expression of content — both with things in general and the immediate prospect ahead. Arnold Roper, as usual, was going to the races: and, as usual, if he had a bet, he would win. Neat, methodical, professional, he would operate his unbeatable system and grow richer, the one following the other as surely as chickens and eggs.
Arnold Roper at forty-five was one of nature’s bachelors, a lean-bodied man accustomed to looking after himself, a man who found the chatter of companionship a nuisance. Like a sailor — though he had never been to sea — he kept his surroundings polished and shipshape, ordering his life in plastic dustbin-liners and reheated take-away food.
The one mild problem on Arnold Roper’s horizon was his wealth. The getting of the money was his most intense enjoyment. The spending of it was something he postponed to a remote and dreamlike future, when he would exchange his sterile flat for a warm unending idyll under tropical palms. It was the interim storage of the money which was currently causing him, if not positive worry, at least occasional frowns of doubt. He might, he thought, as he stirred dried milk grains into a brownish brew, have to find space for yet another wardrobe in his already crowded bedroom.