Triple Crown (30 page)

To be honest, by doing this, I thought we were moving things along a bit too fast, but my timescale was limited.

‘I need the mole to know that we are chasing his tail.’

‘But surely it would be better if he didn’t,’ Tony replied. ‘Then we could catch him unawares.’

‘Yes, ideally,’ I said, ‘but how would we? We need him to come out into the open and, this way, he knows we know, but he doesn’t know that we know he knows we
know.’

‘Eh? What was that? Can you run it past me again?’

‘By reading your emails, the mole will know that we are aware we have a mole in the first place. But, I’m hopeful that he, or she, doesn’t also know that we are aware that your
private emails have been compromised, so that he is unaware that we are giving him the information that we know about him on purpose.’

‘What if he does know?’

‘Then we will probably never discover who it is. That’s why we need to be very careful about what you should write to your friend. We absolutely must not let on to the mole that we
know he’s reading it. Otherwise we’ll never catch him out.’

Life in Raworth’s barn went on as normal during Monday’s evening stables, except that Diego had decided that his self-imposed truce of the last few days should come
to an end.

I couldn’t understand why. He had clearly so scared Maria that she hadn’t said a word to me in over a week and she had even ignored the other young grooms, choosing to eat her meals
either alone or with Diego and avoiding the recreation hall altogether by returning to her room immediately after.

But that didn’t seem to deter Diego in his vendetta.

Twice he tried to knock feed out of my hands in the shedrow and, when I went to sidestep him, he kicked out at me, causing me to stumble into the dirt.

‘What’s your problem?’ I shouted at him from my knees, but he didn’t reply. He only stared down at me with his cold black eyes.

Things only got worse when I went for my supper. I had hung back in the hope that he would go to eat with the others, and I would come along later and avoid him.

But my plan didn’t quite work out that way.

Diego was waiting for me outside the track kitchen, together with his three Puerto Rican lieutenants, and he had a knife in his right hand. I could see it glinting in the late-afternoon
sunshine.

I’d been stabbed before, badly, and it had so nearly been the end of me. On that occasion there had been two of them, and now there were four. But these didn’t have the element of
surprise that the others had had.

This time I saw my would-be attackers early so I turned and ran for my life, shouting as I did so.

‘Help! Help!’ I screamed at the top of my voice, dispensing for once with the Irish accent.

I could hear their footsteps chasing me as I sprinted down the roadway but people were coming out of the barns to see why someone was disturbing their horses.

The footsteps behind fell away to silence and I chanced a glimpse over my shoulder. My pursuers had disappeared. Too many witnesses, no doubt.

I eased my pace slightly but I didn’t stop. I decided I would forgo my supper tonight and, in future, I would make certain that I was surrounded by Raworth’s other grooms at all
times.

I kept going right down to Belmont Park’s huge grandstand, to where the last few of the Memorial Day holiday race crowd were still making their way back to their cars or to the train
station.

Safety in numbers was my goal and I milled around among those waiting outside the clubhouse entrance for the valet-parking boys to bring their vehicles to them, all the while keeping my eyes
open for a quartet of unwelcome Hispanics.

So intent was I at watching the roadway that I walked straight into the diminutive jockey Jimmy Robinson, almost knocking him over and causing him to drop the bag he’d been carrying.

‘Can’t you watch where you’re going?’ he said angrily, bending down to pick it up.

I’d last seen him five weeks ago in the lay-by north of Oxford, when he’d been mistakenly arrested for drug dealing, but had actually only been buying diuretics and laxatives.

Nigel Green in London had warned me he was coming to ride in New York. I should have been more careful.

I quickly turned so he wouldn’t see into my eyes. I had grown a beard since he had last seen me and I was also wearing my ever-present LA Dodgers baseball cap. Perhaps he wouldn’t
recognise me.

‘Some people,’ I heard him say loudly behind me as I walked briskly away. ‘Not even an apology.’

I ignored him and kept going, against the human traffic, through the doors and into the grandstand.

It was high time I got out of here and went back to England.

Tuesday morning dawned with a dark and menacing sky. The humidity was up in the 90 per cents and the temperature wasn’t far off the same in degrees.

‘We have storm,’ Rafael said as we walked to the barn from the bunkhouse.

I was sure he was right. One could almost feel the electricity in the air.

‘No horse exercise early,’ Rafael said. ‘They go later.’

He was almost right about that too.

‘It’s dark here today,’ Keith said, referring, not to the weather, but to the fact that there was no racing at Belmont Park on Tuesdays. ‘So the horses can go out later.
The track is closed anyway until at least nine, when this storm is forecast to be through.’

The chance of anyone being struck by lightning was always slight but why take the risk? That was obviously the opinion of the Belmont track authorities; or, more likely, they didn’t want
to get sued.

Some years ago, a 22-year-old Australian jockey had been hit when out riding morning exercise on a racecourse near Perth. He’d died instantly, along with the gelding he’d been on.
The fact that the horse had been wearing metal shoes hadn’t helped.

There was a dazzling flash of lightning followed almost instantaneously by a deafening clap of thunder, and the heavens opened, huge drops of rain initially making dents in the dirt outside
before everything was overwhelmed by the huge volume of water falling from above.

For the next three hours, the Raworth grooms, plus Maria, walked the horses in turn round and round the shedrow in order to give them at least some exercise. We did our best to keep the animals
calm but the repeated flashes of electricity and accompanying crashes of thunder put them all on edge, and us too.

By eight o’clock we were hanging around outside the office waiting for the elements to improve. Rafael went up the ladder to the bedding store and tossed down half a dozen bales of straw
for us all to sit on.

Diego sat facing me, watching my every move.

He had made no comment about his attempted attack. Indeed, he made no comment to me about anything, not that communication of any sort was easy due to the incessant hammering of the torrential
downpour on the barn’s metal roof.

The previous evening, I had remained in the grandstand for almost three hours, until the very last possible moment before it was closed up for the night. I had taken the opportunity to have a
good nose around all the hidden nooks and crannies, especially in the four separate kitchens, where I had conducted a fruitless search for some leftover food.

Still hungry, I had eventually made my way back to the bunkhouse using a roundabout route to avoid Diego and his henchmen.

He was a distraction I could have well done without.

The weather forecasters had been rather optimistic. Nine o’clock came and went with the electrical fireworks still in full swing above us.

Keith came out of the office at ten.

‘All track work is cancelled for the day,’ he shouted over the din of the thunderclaps and the endless rain. ‘Even if this blows over soon, the track will be too
wet.’

No one moved. None of us fancied going out into the biblical-style deluge, even for a late breakfast at the track kitchen.

My non-smart phone rang, its piercing shrill ringtone cutting right through the other noise.

Everyone’s eyes swivelled my way. Everyone, that is, except Diego, who hadn’t taken his eyes off me for the past hour anyway.

I took the phone out of my pocket and looked for a number on the screen. There was none, just the single word ‘withheld’.

No one knew this number, I thought. No one other than Tony and I’d given him the strictest of instructions never to call me.

‘Hello,’ I said, answering.

‘Jeff, it’s me,’ Tony said. ‘I have to speak to you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said loudly, ‘you must have the wrong number.’

I hung up and put the phone back in my pocket. Perhaps I should have had it switched to silent but then the alarm wouldn’t sound to wake me in the mornings.

It had to have been really important for Tony to have called but there was no way I could speak to him with all the others listening. And I wasn’t going to get up and go somewhere else to
make a call back. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, we all went on sitting on the bales in the shedrow, waiting for the rain to pass.

But I sat there fearful that the atmospheric high jinks above my head wasn’t going to be the only storm I had to deal with today.

It was not until well after midday that I was able to get any privacy. The rain had pretty much stopped by then and, when all the others went to lunch, I walked round the barn
to the bunkhouse to call Tony.

I went right through the building to make sure everyone else was out, then I shut my bedroom door and placed the back of the wooden chair under the doorknob so I couldn’t be disturbed.
Even so I kept my voice to a minimum.

‘We have a problem,’ Tony said.

Houston? I thought, with a smile.

But our problem was, in fact, nothing to laugh about.

‘Someone called the Maryland Racing Commissioner’s office at eight o’clock this morning saying he was from FACSA, wanting to know the name of the horse that had failed the
post-race cobalt test at Pimlico.’

‘Who?’

‘They don’t know,’ Tony said. ‘The commissioner hadn’t yet arrived at his office, so the man spoke to his PA.’

‘What was he told?’ I asked with trepidation.

There was a slight pause as if Tony was preparing me for bad news. My heart dropped.

‘He was told it was Debenture,’ he said miserably.

‘How could such a thing happen?’ I said angrily, hissing the words down the line. ‘Surely they should have checked who was asking. It could have been a journalist for all they
knew.’

‘Apparently the man used my name and he was very persuasive, telling the PA that he had spoken to the commissioner last week, who had told him the name of the horse but had since mislaid
the piece of paper on which he’d written it down. The PA knew the information was highly confidential. She had even been instructed by the commissioner not to tell anyone else in their own
organisation, not even his deputy. It was partly because of the confidentiality that she assumed it had to be me calling as no one else knew anything about it.’

‘What time did you call Norman Gibson to tell him about the test result?’

There was another pause. More bad news?

‘I didn’t call him,’ Tony said. ‘I sent him an email.’

My heart sank again.

‘From your private account or from the FACSA one?’

‘The FACSA account, obviously,’ he said, somewhat affronted. ‘All FACSA emails are encrypted. They’re meant to be totally secure between sender and recipient. The mole
shouldn’t be able to read them.’

Not unless he had access to your work computer and your password, I thought wryly. Or if the mole was Norman Gibson himself.

‘When did you send it?’

‘Late yesterday afternoon,’ he said, ‘after we spoke.’

‘So how did you find out that someone had called the commissioner?’

‘When he arrived for work at nine this morning, he called me only to make sure I had been given the right name. I knew nothing about it, of course.’

It had been a huge risk for the mole, but it had narrowed our search.

‘At least we now know that our mole is a man,’ I said. ‘That reduces the field somewhat.’

‘What are we going to do?’ Tony asked.

‘How quickly could you arrange a search of Raworth’s barn if you had to?’

‘It would probably take us at FACSA at least twenty-four hours to put everything in place but, if it was really urgent, I could call in the FBI or, better still, the local Nassau County
Police Department. They could be on site almost immediately. Getting a warrant would mean finding a judge but they usually have one of those on standby. I might even make some calls now and get a
warrant issued in case we need it.’

‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Do that. But, for now, we do nothing. We sit tight, while I watch and listen. If things start to happen, I’ll call you straight away.’

‘Just like in England,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘That day back in England,’ Tony said, ‘when we set that trap by the road. You didn’t call in the police until well after I would have done. As I remember saying then,
you have nerves of steel.’

‘Do you want to find your mole or not?’ I asked.

‘I’ll make those calls.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But don’t send any emails.’

Tony didn’t laugh.

I made it to the track kitchen for lunch just as the clock in the dining hall moved on to two minutes past two.

Bert Squab was already closing up.

I hadn’t eaten anything since my lunch the previous day, having missed supper due to Diego and his chums, and then breakfast because of the rain.

My stomach was beginning to think my throat had been cut.

‘I’m shut,’ Bert announced, spreading his considerable bulk as wide as possible and folding him arms in front of him, so that they rested on his protruding belly.
‘You’re too late.’

I could see several steaming dishes of food behind him.

‘Come on, Bert,’ I said imploringly, holding out one of the plastic meal tokens. ‘Give me a break. It’s only two minutes past.’

‘Two o’clock is the cut-off time for the groom meal scheme,’ Bert said adamantly as the clock clicked over to three minutes past. ‘You can still buy some lunch if you
want it – for cash.’