Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,20
it matches your father exactly.” He had said it in a very deadpan manner, unaware of the torment such knowledge was creating in my head.
In less than a single twenty-four-hour period, I had first met my father and realized that I was not the orphan I thought I had been for the past thirty-seven years, watched helplessly while my newfound parent was fatally stabbed, and, finally, discovered that he had been nothing more than a callous murderer, the killer of my mother. It wasn’t my father’s life that was the soap opera, it was mine.
“Do they have any idea who did it?” asked Betsy, suddenly bringing me back from my daydreaming.
“Did what?” I asked.
“The mugging, stupid.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. They didn’t say so anyway.”
“Probably some kids,” she said. She was little more than a kid herself. “Larking about.”
I didn’t think that murder was exactly larking about, but I decided not to say so. Family secrets were best kept that way—secret.
The afternoon seemed to slip by without me really noticing. Luca had to keep reminding me to pay attention to our customers.
“For God’s sake, Ned,” he shouted in my ear, “get the bloody things right.” He exchanged yet another inaccurate ticket. “What’s wrong with you today?”
“Nothing,” I replied. But I felt lousy, and my mind was elsewhere.
“Could have fooled me,” he said. “You never normally make mistakes.”
I did, but I was usually more expert at covering them up. “Sophie’s not good,” I said. It was the easy excuse. Luca knew all about Sophie’s condition. I may have wanted to keep it a secret, even from him, but that had been impossible over the years. Too often I had been forced to take days off work in order to be with her. Luca Mandini was a licensed bookmaker in his own right, and he’d often covered for me, first with a friend and, more recently, with Betsy, who could hardly conceal her excitement when she knew I would be away.
“Sorry,” Luca said. He never asked for details. He seemed almost embarrassed. “Bloody hell,” he suddenly shouted.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
“Internet’s gone down again,” he said, stabbing his keyboard with his finger.
I looked at my watch. A little less than five minutes to go before the Gold Cup was due to start.
“How about the phones?” I asked him, turning around.
He was already pushing the buttons on his mobile.
“Nothing,” he said, looking up at me. “No signal. Same as before.”
I turned and looked around the betting ring at the other bookmakers, especially those to my right along the Royal Enclosure rail. Outwardly, there appeared to be no sense of alarm. Business was being carried on as usual. I could see a few of the boys from the big outfits pushing buttons on their phones with no success. One or two of them dashed away to seek other forms of communication with their head offices, and the man from the Press Association who was responsible for setting the starting prices had come down from his place in the stands to look at the bookies’ boards. No Internet connection also meant he didn’t get the necessary information directly to his computer screen.
“Two monkeys, six horse,” said a punter in front of me.
A “monkey” was betting slang for five hundred pounds, two monkeys was a thousand, or a grand. It was a fair-sized bet, and bigger than most, but, over the year, we took lots of bets of a thousand pounds or more, so it was not that unusual. However, I took a careful look at my customer. Was it a coincidence, I wondered, that our biggest bet of the day was laid just seconds after the Internet and the phones went off ?
There was nothing about the man that made me think that he was up to no good. He was a regular racegoer, with a white shirt open at the neck and fawn chinos. I didn’t recognize him as one of the regular boys from the big outfits, but I would know him again, I made sure of that.
I glanced up at our board as I relieved him of the bundle of fifty-pound notes he held out to me. Horse number six, Lifejacket, was quoted at four-to-one.
“Four thousand-to-one thousand on horse six,” I said over my shoulder. “OK with you, Luca?”
There was a pause while Luca consulted with his digital mate.
“We’ll take it at seven-to-two,” he said slowly.
“Seven-to-two,” I said to the man in the white shirt and chinos.