‘How’s Potassium today?’ I asked Owen, the last trainer on my list. ‘Did he get home all right?’
‘No problem, but he’s clearly tired. He was a bit unsteady coming off the box last night, and he didn’t eat up very well. He’s just going in the walker for half an hour to dispel any stiffness in his legs. Other than that he’ll have a quiet day today and only a gentle canter tomorrow.’
‘How about you?’ I asked. ‘Did you have a good evening?’
‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘I had a beer with a few friends in the trainers’ car park after racing, then came straight home. I was in bed before nine.’
I wished I had been as well, but there again, I hadn’t had to get up this morning at sunrise.
‘Are you back at Ascot again today?’ I asked.
‘I suppose so, but I’m not looking forward to it much in this heat. And I won’t be getting there very early. I have only one runner, Silvia’s Choice in the Royal Hunt Cup, and that’s not off until five o’clock. There are thirty declared runners, so I suspect it will be the usual cavalry charge.’
The Royal Hunt Cup was a handicap, run over the straight mile. It was one of the biggest gambling races of the whole week, and the bookies usually had a field day, with plenty of long-odds winners in the past.
‘Does yours have a chance?’ I asked.
‘They all have. The race is a bloody lottery. Silvia’s Choice is drawn right in the middle, and that’s not normally good.’
‘Well, good luck anyway. I’ll look out for you later.’
We disconnected and I went back into the house to get ready to depart.
‘Was it something I said?’
I turned around.
Today, Toni Beckett was in blue — blue dress and blue hat.
‘Did you bring a trunk load of hats?’ I asked, smiling.
‘Only two. I’m back in the yellow again tomorrow. So what happened to you? I was all ready to party in the car park last night, but you weren’t there.’
‘I had to go home. How was tea with the ambassador?’
‘Boring. There was another man there with him, who leered at me all the time. It was creepy.’
‘I’ll try and remember not to leer.’
‘You can leer at me as much as you like,’ she said, looking me straight in the eyes.
‘So where are you today?’ I asked, trying to change the subject.
‘Where would you like me to be?’
We were standing on the parade-ring concourse, just outside the entrance to the grandstand, and I instinctively turned and looked around me, to make sure that no one I knew had seen or overheard this overtly flirtatious encounter between us, occurring in the most public place on Ascot racecourse.
I turned back to face her.
‘I meant, which box are you in today?’
She looked down at the triangular badge pinned to her dress, above the Royal Enclosure one.
‘Box 522,’ she said.
‘That’ll be nice. The views from the private boxes are spectacular, especially from up on the fifth level.’
‘I’d rather be having a spectacular view of the rest of you,’ she said.
I blushed. ‘Stop it.’
‘Why? It’s only a bit of fun. Although I mean it. Come on — let’s go and have some champagne. I don’t have to be at the box until twelve-thirty.’
I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to midday, and I had made no appointments until after the first race.
‘Okay,’ I said.
I led her away from the Royal Enclosure, down some steps to the Moët & Chandon Champagne Bar, situated near the bandstand. Maybe because I felt there would be less likelihood of running into anyone I knew down there.
‘Get a bottle,’ Toni said as I surveyed the prices.
‘I have to drive later,’ I said.
‘Boring!’
I bought a bottle of Brut Imperial for over a hundred quid, but it did come ready opened, and in a see-through acrylic Moët & Chandon ice bucket — but that had to go back to redeem the twenty-pound deposit.
We found a couple of spare seats under a sun umbrella.
‘Who are your hosts today?’ I asked after I had poured two glasses.
‘I don’t know. Some rich cronies of the Farquhars.’
‘And they don’t mind that you tag along?’
‘Don’t seem to. Mr and Mrs Farquhar have sorted out this whole trip for me. It’s really kind of them. But I do lots for them back home. They regularly need clubhouse hospitality for their guests at Keeneland, and I fix it for them, at a price of course. They have a reserved box in the grandstand, but our boxes aren’t like the ones here. We call those suites. For us, a box is just a small railed-off area with six or eight chairs in it. There’s no privacy. And the Farquhars always want a private suite with food and wines when they have visitors.’
‘You’re clearly a useful person to know.’
‘You can bet on it,’ she said with a laugh. ‘And they will expect more of the same from me in the future after this little jaunt.’
She took another sip of champagne.
‘You should come over for our Fall Meet in October,’ she said. ‘I’ll sort you out properly.’
I was quite certain she would.
‘And we also have the Breeders’ Cup World Championship weekend at Keeneland this year.’
‘Do you, indeed?’
Running Potassium in the International Stakes at York in August suddenly seemed much more attractive. It was one of their ‘win and you’re in’ qualifiers for the Breeders’ Cup Classic. So a win there would secure him a guaranteed berth in the race.
‘Tell me more about you,’ she said.
‘Not much to tell, really,’ I replied. ‘I’m a workaholic who never seems to take a day off. Horseracing in this country is a seven-day-a-week activity. Apart from Christmas Day and the two days beforehand, there are at least two race meetings in this country every single day of the year. On most days, there are four or five, and on some, as many as eight or nine. There are over fourteen hundred different fixtures over the whole year.’
She stared at me in amazement.
‘Not that they’re all like this,’ I said, waving my hands around at the grandeur of Royal Ascot. ‘There’ll be over sixty thousand people here tomorrow for the Gold Cup, but there may be fewer than a hundred at a wet January evening meeting at Wolverhampton.’
‘So why do they bother to hold it?’ she asked.
‘For the betting shops and the online bookmaking sites. Racing is kept afloat by people gambling on it, and most of them don’t go anywhere near the actual racecourses. The government collects a portion of all bookmakers’ profits through something called the Horserace Betting Levy. And that money is used to keep racing going.’
‘But you must do something to relax,’ she said. ‘Do you have any hobbies?’
Did I? Not really. Horseracing was my hobby as well as my work. I didn’t actually need to be here at Ascot today, but I had chosen to be so.
‘Sorry,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘It’s official. I am totally boring.’
‘I could change that,’ she said. ‘How about another drink later? Maybe in the car park or ... back at my hotel?’
‘You’re very forward,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘I have to be. I’m only here for six nights, and three of them have gone already.’
‘What about the Farquhars?’
‘They’re out to the theatre in London this evening, and I wasn’t invited.’
How convenient, I thought.
‘So are they leaving here early?’ I asked.
‘They have a driver collecting them at quarter of six.’
The last race was not until ten past six, so they should avoid the worst of the traffic, but it would still be tight if their show started at seven-thirty.