Even Money - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,55

seemed I really was being eased out of my own business. But I suppose it was better than losing Luca and Betsy to a new outfit.

“You mean it, don’t you?” I said seriously.

“Absolutely,” he replied. “We need to be more ambitious, more proactive, more ruthless.”

I wasn’t sure whether the “we” included me or not.

“In what way do you want to be more ruthless?” I asked him.

“All that stuff at Ascot last week has shown me that the big boys are not invincible,” he said. “Someone gave them a bloody nose, and good luck to them. Bookmaking should be all about what happens here.” He spread his arms wide. “Well, not exactly here today, but you know what I mean. Bookmaking is about standing at a pitch on the course, not being stuck in some anonymous betting shop watching a computer screen.”

I was amazed. I thought it was the computer gambling that made Luca tick.

“But you love the Internet,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “But only as a tool for what happens here. The on-course bookies need to set the prices, and they should not be driven by the exchanges. By rights, it should be the other way round. We should be prepared to alter our prices for our advantage, not for those of anyone else.”

“You sound like you’re at war,” I said with a laugh.

“We are,” he said seriously. “And if we don’t fight, we’ll go under.”

I remembered back to the time when I had been assisting my grandfather for a couple of years or so. I’d had the same sort of discussion with him then. Bookmaking was an evolving science, and new blood, like Luca, needed to be ever pushing the boundaries. As he had said, without it, we’d go under.

As is so often the case with small fields, the four horses in the race finished in extended line astern, the favorite winning it at a canter by at least ten lengths. There was hardly a cheer from the measly crowd, and the winner returned to an almost deserted unsaddling enclosure.

As Luca had said, it wasn’t much fun.

A man in a suit came striding across from beneath the grandstand just as the rain began to fall in a torrent. He was holding an umbrella, but it didn’t appear to be keeping him very dry. Too much water was bouncing back from the ground. His feet must have been soaked by the time he stopped in front of me.

“What the bloody hell’s going on?” he demanded.

“What do you mean?” I asked him in all innocence.

“With the bloody prices?” he said loudly.

“What about the prices?” I asked him.

“How come that winner was returned at two-to-one when everyone knows it should have been odds-on?”

“Nothing to do with me,” I said, spreading my hands out wide.

“Don’t get bloody clever with us,” the man said with menace, pointing his finger at me.

“And who is us, exactly?” I demanded, trying to disregard the implied threat.

He ignored me and went over to remonstrate with Larry Porter, who told him to go away and procreate, or words to that effect.

The man was far from pleased. “I’m warning you two,” he said, pointing at both Larry and me. “We won’t stand for that.”

Larry shouted at him again to go away, using some pretty colorful language that made even me wince.

“What was all that about?” I said to Luca.

“Just trying to rustle up a bit more business,” he said.

“How?” I asked.

“I thought we might tempt a few more punters over here if we offered a better price on the favorite,” he said, grinning at me. “That’s all.”

I stood there looking at him.

“You silly bugger. We don’t play games with these guys,” I said seriously. “Their bite is far worse than their bark.”

“Don’t be so boring,” he said.

“I mean it. They are powerful people, and they stamp on irritations.”

Was this what he meant by “being at war”?

The starting price was not set by a single bookmaker’s prices. It was a sort of average, but was actually the mode of the offered prices rather than a true average. A mode is that value that occurs most frequently in a sample.

At Ascot the previous week the number of bookmakers was very high, so a representative sample of, say, twelve bookmakers’ prices was used. The twelve were chosen not quite randomly, as they always included those bookies at the highest-traffic end of the betting ring. If, in the sample of twelve, five of the bookmakers had the price of a certain horse