Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,15

with a waist that a sumo wrestler would have been proud of. I, meanwhile, was a lean, mean fighting machine in comparison, though, truthfully, I was somewhat scrawny. I never seemed to have any time to eat, or the inclination to cook, in my married but mostly solitary lifestyle.

Thankfully, neither Luca, Betsy, Larry nor anyone else seemed to connect the murder in the parking lot with my black eye, and the novelty of it slowly wore off as the afternoon’s sport progressed.

“Was it just us or was the Internet down for everyone?” I asked Luca during a lull after the third race.

“What?” he said, busy with his keyboard.

“Yesterday. For the last,” I said. “Was it just us or everyone?”

“Oh,” he said. “It seems the whole system was down for nearly five minutes. And you know what else was funny?”

“What?” I asked.

“The phones were off too.”

“Which phones?” I asked.

“Mobiles,” he said. “All of them. Every network. Nothing.”

“But that’s impossible,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “But it happened. Everyone I spoke to said their phones wouldn’t work for about five minutes. No signal, they said. The boys from the big outfits were going nuts.”

By “the big outfits,” Luca meant the four or five large companies that ran strings of betting shops across the country. Each company had a man or two at the races who would bet for them with the on-course bookmakers to affect the starting prices.

The odds offered by the racetrack bookmakers often change before the race starts. If a horse is heavily backed, they will shorten its odds and offer better prices on the other horses to compensate. The official “Starting Price” was an approximate average of the prices offered on the bookmakers’ boards on the racetrack just as the race starts.

Big winning bets in High Street betting shops are nearly always paid on the official starting price, so, if someone loads money on a horse in their local betting shop, the company arranges for money to be bet on that horse with the racetrack bookmakers so that the odds on their boards drop and consequently the official starting price will be shorter.

For example, if a betting shop has taken a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of bets on a horse priced at ten-to-one, they stand to lose a million pounds if it wins. So the company will simply have its staff at the racetrack bet cash on that horse with the bookmakers, who will then shorten its odds. If the starting price drops to, say, five-to-one and it wins, the betting shop will only have to pay out half what it would otherwise have done.

If both the Internet and the telephones were not working for the five minutes before the race, then the betting shop companies would have had no way of getting the message to their staff to make the bets and change the starting prices.

“Any word on anyone being caught out?” I asked Luca.

“No, nothing,” he said. “Quiet as a whisper.”

A customer thrust a twenty-pound note at me, and I gratefully relieved him of it in exchange for a slip from the printer.

“Either someone doesn’t want to admit it,” I said, “or it was just a simple, accidental glitch in the systems.”

Word usually went around pretty quickly if a big company believed they had been “done.” They typically moaned about it ad nauseam and refused to pay out. Gambling wins, as well as losses, were notoriously difficult to pursue through the courts. The big boys believed that it was their God-given right to control the starting prices, and if someone managed to get one over on them, it was unfair. Most others believed that what was really unfair was how the major bookmaking chains could change the on-course prices so easily, often with only a very few of the many thousands of pounds that were bet across the counters in their High Street shops.

I shrugged my shoulders and took a bet off another customer. Luca pushed the keys on his computer, and out popped the ticket from the printer.

“At least our computer and printer didn’t go off as well,” I said to him over my shoulder.

“Well, they wouldn’t,” he said confidently. “Unless the battery went flat.”

Our system, like every other bookmaker’s, was powered by a twelve-volt car battery hidden away under the platforms we stood on. The batteries were provided freshly charged each day by the racetrack’s technology company, which also provided the Internet access—for a fee, of course. The same battery also powered the red-light-emitting diodes