If anyone had told Arnold Roper he was a miser, he would have denied it indignantly. True, he lived frugally, but by habit rather than obsession: and he never took out his wealth just to look at it, and count, and gloat. He would not have admitted as miserliness the warm feeling that stole over him every night as he lay down to sleep, smiling from the knowledge that all round him, filling two oak-veneered sale-bargain bedroom suites, was a ton or two of negotiable paper.
It was not that Arnold Roper distrusted banks. He knew, too, that money won by betting could not be lost by tax. He would not have kept his growing gains physically around him were it not that his unbeatable system was also a splendid fraud.
The best frauds are only ever discovered by accident, and Arnold could not envisage any such accident happening to him.
Jamie Finland woke to his usual darkness and thought three disconnected thoughts within seconds of consciousness. ‘The sun is shining. It is Wednesday. They are racing today here at Ascot.’ He stretched out a hand and put his ringers delicately down on the top of his bedside tape-recorder. There was a cassette lying there. Jamie smiled, slid the cassette into the recorder, and switched on.
His mother’s voice spoke to him. ‘Jamie, don’t forget the man is coming to mend the television at ten-thirty and please put the washing into the machine, there’s a dear, as I am so pushed this morning, and would you mind having yesterday’s soup again for lunch. I’ve left it in a saucepan ready. Don’t lose all that money this afternoon or I’ll cut the plug off your stereo. Home soon after eight, love.’
Jamie Finland’s thirty-eight-year-old mother supported them both on her earnings as an agency nurse, and she had made a fair job, her son considered, of bringing up a child who could not see. He was fifteen. He studied in Braille at home and passed exams with credit.
He rose gracefully from bed and put on his clothes: blue shirt, blue jeans. ‘Blue is Jamie’s favourite colour,’ his mother would say. and her friends would say, ‘Oh yes?’ and she could see them thinking: how could he possibly know? But Jamie could identify blue as surely as his mother’s voice, and red, and yellow and every colour in the spectrum, as long as it was daylight.
‘I can’t see in the dark,’ he had said when he was six, and only his mother, from watching his sureness by day and his stumbling by night, had understood what he meant. Walking rad.ir, she called him. Like many young blind people he could sense easily the wavelength of light, and distinguish the infinitesimal changes of frequency reflected from coloured things close to him. Strangers thought him uncanny. Jamie believed everyone could see that way if they wanted to, and could not clearly understand what was meant by sight.
He made and ate some toast and thankfully opened the door to the television-fixer. ‘In my room,’ he said, leading the way. ‘We’ve got sound but no picture.’
The television-fixer looked at the blind eyes and shrugged. If the boy wanted a picture he was entitled to it, same as everyone else who paid their rental. ‘Have to take it back to the workshop,’ he said, judicially pressing buttons.
‘The races are on,’ Jamie said. ‘Can you fix it by then?’
‘Races? Oh yeah. Well, tell you what, I’ll lend you another set. Got one in the van...’ He staggered off with the invalid set and returned with the replacement. ‘Not short of radios, are you?’ he said, looking around. ‘What do you want six for?’
‘I leave them tuned to different things,’ Jamie said. ‘That one’ — he pointed accurately ndash; ‘listens to aircraft, that one to the police, those three over there are on ordinary radio stations, and this one... local broadcasts.’
‘What you need is a transmitter. Put you in touch with all the world.’
‘I’m working on it,’ Jamie said. ‘Starting today.’ He closed the door after the man and wondered whether betting on a certainty was in itself a crime.
Greg Simpson had no such qualms. He paid his way into the Ascot paddock, and ambled off to add a beer and sandwich to a comfortable paunch. Two years now, he thought, munching, since he had first set foot on the Turf: two years since he had exchanged his principles for prosperity and been released from paralysing depression.
They seemed a distant memory, now, those fifteen months in the wilderness; the awful humiliating collapse of his seemingly secure and pensionable world. There was no comfort in knowing that mergers and cutbacks had thrown countless near-top managers like himself straight on to the redundancy heap.
At fifty-two, with long success-strewn experience and genuine administrative skill, he had expected that he at least would find another suitable post easily, but door after closed door, and a regretful chorus of ‘Sorry, Greg’, ‘Sorry, old chap’, ‘Sorry, Mr Simpson, we need someone younger’, had finally thrust him into agonised despair. And it was just when, in spite of all their anxious economies, his wife had had to deny their two children even the money to go swimming, that he had seen the curious advertisement:
‘Jobs offered to mature respectable persons who must have been unwillingly unemployed for at least twelve months.’
Part of his mind told him he was being invited to commit a crime, but he had gone none the less to the subsequently arranged interview in a London pub, and he had been relieved, after all, to meet the very ordinary man holding out salvation — a man like himself, middle-aged, middle-educated, wearing a suit and tie and indoor skin.
‘Do you go to the races?’ Arnold Roper asked him bluntly, fixing a penetrating gaze on him. ‘Do you gamble on anything at all? Do you follow the horses? Play to win?’
‘No,’ Greg Simpson said, prudishly, seeing the job prospect disappear but feeling all the same superior. ‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Do you bet on dogs? Go to bingo? Do the pools? Play bridge? Feel attracted by roulette?’ the man persisted.
Greg Simpson silently but emphatically shook his head and prepared to leave.
‘Good,’ said Arnold Roper, cheerfully. ‘Gamblers are no good to me, not for this job.’
Greg Simpson relaxed into a glow of self-congratulation on his own virtue. ‘What job, then?’ he asked.
Arnold Roper wiped out Simpson’s complacent smugness. ‘Going to the races,’ he said bluntly. ‘Betting when I say bet, and never at any other time. You would have to go to race meetings most days, like any other job. You would be betting on certainties, and after every win I would expect you to send me my reward.’ Ht named a very reasonable sum. ‘Anything you made above that would be yours. It is foolproof, and safe. If you go about it in a businesslike way, and don’t get tempted into the mug’s game of backing your own fancy, you’ll do very well. Think it over. If you’re interested, meet me here again tomorrow.’
Betting on certainties... every one a winner: Arnold Roper had been as good as his word, and Greg Simpson’s lifestyle had returned to normal. His qualms had evaporated once he learned that even if the fraud were discovered, he himself would not be involved. He did not know how his employer acquired his infallible information and, if he speculated, he didn’t ask.
He knew him only as Bob Smith, and had never met him since those first two days; but he heeded his warning that if he failed to attend the specified race meetings or failed to send his agreed payment, the bounty would stop dead.
He finished his sandwich and went down to mingle with the bookmakers as the horses cantered down to the post for the start of the first race.
From high on the stands Arnold Roper looked down through powerful binoculars, spotting his men one by one. The perfect workforce he thought: no absenteeism, no union troubles, no complaints.