It was quiet in his box, the scurrying and shouting among the bookmakers’ stands below hardly reaching him through the thick window-glass.
At his shoulder a racecourse official waited patiently, his job only to make the actual announcement, once the decision was made. With a bright light and a magnifying glass the judge studied the noses. If he got them wrong, a thousand knowledgeable photo-readers would let him know it.
He wondered if he should see about a new prescription for his glasses. Photographs never seemed so sharp in outline to him these days.
Greg Simpson thought regretfully that the judge was overdoing the delay. If he had known he would have had so much time, he would have brought with him more cash. Still, the clear profit he would shortly make was a fine afternoon’s work, and he would send Mr Smith his meagre share with a grateful heart.
Greg Simpson smiled contentedly, and briefly, as if touching a lucky talisman, he fingered the tiny transistorised hearing aid he wore unobtrusively under hair and trilby behind his left ear.
Jamie Finland listened intently, head bent, his curling dark hair falling onto the radio with which he eavesdropped on aircraft. The faint hiss of the carrier wave reached him unchanged, but he waited with quickening pulse and a fluttering feeling of excitement. If it didn’t happen, he thought briefly, it would be very boring indeed.
Although he was nerve-strainingly prepared, he almost missed it. The radio spoke one single word, distantly, faintly, without emphasis: ‘Eleven.’ The carrier wave hissed on, as if never disturbed, and it took Jamie’s brain two whole seconds to light up with a laugh of joy.
He pressed the telephone buttons and connected himself to the local bookmaking firm. ‘Hello? This is Jamie Finland. I have some credit arranged with you for this afternoon. Well, please will you put it all on the photo-finish of this race they’ve just run at Ascot? On number eleven, please.’
‘Eleven?’ echoed a matter-of-fact voice at the other end.’ Jetset?’
‘That’s right,’ Jamie said patiently.
‘Eleven. Jetset. All at evens, right?’
‘Right,’ Jamie said. ‘I was watching it on the box.’
‘Don’t we all, chum,’ said the voice in farewell, clicking off.
Jamie sat back with a tingling feeling of mischief. If eleven really had won, he was surely plain robbing the bookie. But who could know? How could anyone ever know? He wouldn’t tell his mother, because she would disapprove and might make him give the winnings back.
He imagined her voice if she came home and found he had doubled her money. He also imagined it if she found he had lost it all on the first race, betting on the result of a photo-finish that he couldn’t even see.
He hadn’t told her that it was because of the numbers on the radio he had wanted to bet at all. He’d said that he knew people often bet from home while they were watching racing on television. He’d said it would give him a marvellous new interest, if he could do that while she was at work.
He had persuaded her without much trouble to lend him a stake and arrange things with the bookmaker’s, and he wouldn’t have done it at all if the certainty factor had been missing.
When he’d first been given the radio which received aircraft frequencies, he had spent hours and days listening to the calls of the jetliners overhead on their way in and out of Heathrow; but the fascination had worn off, and gradually he tuned in less and less.
By accident one day, having twiddled the tuning knob aimlessly without finding an interesting channel, he forgot to switch the set off. In the afternoon, while he was listening to the Ascot televised races, the radio suddenly emitted a number: ‘Twenty-three.’
Jamie switched the set off but took little real notice until the television commentator, announcing the result of the photo-finish, spoke almost as if in echo. ‘Twenty-three... Swan Lake, number twenty-three, is the winner.’
‘How odd,’ Jamie thought. He left the tuning knob undisturbed, and switched the aircraft radio on again the following Saturday, along with Kempton Park races on television. There were two photo-finishes, but no voice-of-God on the ether. Ditto nil results from Doncaster, Chepstow and Epsom persuaded him, shrugging, to put it down to coincidence but, two weeks later with the re-arrival of a meeting at Ascot, he decided to give it one more try.
Five’, said the radio quietly; and later ‘Ten’. And, duly, numbers five and ten were given the verdict by the judge.
The judge, now shaking his head over Darling Boy and Pickup and deciding he could put off the moment no longer, handed his written-down result to the waiting official, who leaned forward and drew the microphone to his mouth.
‘First, number eleven,’ he said. ‘A dead heat for second place between numbers two and eight. First Jetset. Dead heat for second, Darling Boy and Pickup. The distance between first and second a short head. The fourth horse was number twelve.’
The judge leaned back in his chair and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Another photo-finish safely past... but there was no doubt they were testing to his nerves.
Arnold Roper picked up his binoculars the better to see the winning punters collect from the bookmakers. His twenty-one trusty men had certainly had time today for a thorough killing. Greg Simpson, in particular, was sucking honey all along the line; but then Greg Simpson, with his outstanding managerial skills, was always, in Arnold’s view, the one most likely to do best. Greg’s success was as pleasing to Arnold as his own.
Billy Hitchins handed Greg his winnings without a second glance, and paid out, too, to five others whose transistor hearing aids were safely hidden by hair. He reckoned he had lost, altogether, on the photo betting; but his book for the race itself had been robustly healthy. Billy Hitchins, not displeased, switched his mind to the next event.
Jamie Finland laughed aloud and banged his table with an ecstatic fist. Someone, somewhere, was talking through an open microphone, and if Jamie had had the luck to pick up the transmission, why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he? He thought of the information as an accident, not a fraud, and he waited with uncomplicated pleasure for another bunch of horses to finish nose to nose.
Betting on certainties, he decided, quietening his voice of conscience, was not a crime if you came by the information innocently.
After the fourth race he telephoned to bet on number fifteen, increasing his winnings geometrically.
Greg Simpson went home at the end of the afternoon with a personal storage problem almost as pressing as Arnold’s. There was a limit, he discovered, to the amount of ready cash one could stow away in an ordinary suit, and he finally had to wrap the stuff in a newspaper and carry it home under his arm, like fish and chips.
‘Two in one day,’ he thought warmly. ‘A real clean-up. A day to remember.’ And there was always tomorrow, back here at Ascot, and Saturday at Sandown, and next week, according to the list which had arrived anonymously on the usual postcard, Newbury and Windsor. With a bit of luck he could soon afford a new car, and Joan could book up for the skiing holiday with the children.
Billy Hitchins packed away his stand and equipment, and with the help of his clerk carried them the half-mile along the road to his betting shop in Ascot High Street. Billy at eighteen had horrified his teachers by ducking university and apprenticing his bright mathematical brain to his local bookie. Billy at twenty-four had taken over the business, and now, three years later, was poised for expansion.