Under Orders (3 page)

I felt foolish as I flashed my out-of-date jockey’s badge his way.

‘Sorry, sir,’ he sounded even less sorry and more determined. ‘That doesn’t get you through here.’

I was reprieved at that moment by the managing director of the racecourse, who I assumed was hurrying as usual from one minor crisis to another.

‘Sid,’ he said with genuine warmth, ‘how are you?’

‘Fine, Edward,’ I replied, shaking his hand. ‘But having a little difficulty getting up to Lord Enstone’s box.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, winking at the young man. ‘Be a sad day for all of us when Sid Halley can’t get everywhere on this racecourse.’

He put his arm round my shoulder and guided me into the lift.

‘How’s the investigation business?’ he asked as we rose to the fifth floor.

‘Busy,’ I said. ‘These days I seem to be working more and more away from the racecourse, but not this week, obviously.’

‘Done a lot of good for racing, you have. If you need any help, just ask. I’ll send you a pass that’ll get you everywhere on this racecourse, even into my office.’

‘How about the jockeys’ changing room?’

‘Ah.’ He knew as well as I did that the jockeys’ changing room was off limits to everyone except the jockeys riding that day and their valets, the men who prepared their equipment and clothes. Even Edward wasn’t technically allowed in there on race days.

‘Almost everywhere,’ he laughed.

‘Thanks.’

The doors opened and he rushed off.

Lord Enstone’s box was bursting at the seams. Surely all these people don’t have badges for this box, I thought, as I forced my
way in. They could obviously talk their way past the spiky-haired young man better than I.

Those lucky few with boxes at Cheltenham on Gold Cup day invariably found that they had all sorts of dear friends who wanted to come and visit. That these ‘dear friends’ turned up only once a year didn’t seem to embarrass them at all.

A waitress offered me a glass of champagne. As a general rule, I held drinks in my real right hand but it made shaking hands so complicated, and I felt that I should use my left more to justify the large amount of money I had spent to acquire it. So I very carefully sent the correct impulses and the thumb of my left hand closed just enough around the stem of the glass. I had often shattered even the best crystal by not knowing how hard to grip with my unfeeling digits to prevent a glass from falling out. It could be humiliating.

Charles had spotted me across the throng and made his way to my side.

‘Got a drink, good,’ he said. ‘Come and see Jonny.’

We squeezed our way out on to the balcony that ran the length of the grandstand in front of the glass-fronted boxes. The view from here across the racecourse and beyond to the hills was magnificent, even on a dull day.

Three men were standing close together at the far end of the balcony, their heads bowed as they talked. One of them was Jonny. Jonny was our host, Lord Enstone. Another was Jonny’s son, Peter. The third I knew only by reputation. I had never actually met George Lochs. He was in his thirties and already a big player in the internet gambling business. His company, make-a-wager.com, while not being the market leader, was expanding rapidly and, with it, so was young George’s fortune.

I had once been commissioned by the Jockey Club to do
a background check on him, a routine procedure for those applying for bookmaking licences. He was the second son of a bookie’s runner from north London. He’d won a free scholarship to Harrow where, apparently, the other boys had laughed at his funny accent and the way he held his knife. But the young George had learned fast, conformed and flourished. Except that he hadn’t been called George then. He had been born Clarence Lochstein, named by his mother after the Duke of Clarence. Not Albert, Duke of Clarence, elder son of Edward VII, who supposedly died of pneumonia in 1892 although the rumours persist that he was poisoned to prevent his being arrested for being Jack the Ripper. Nor even after George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Richard III, who was convicted of treason and drowned in a vat of malmsey wine at the Tower of London in 1478. Clarence Lochstein had been named by his mother after the Duke of Clarence pub at the end of her road in Islington.

There were rumours that Clarence/George had been asked to leave Harrow for taking bets on the horses from the other boys and, it was said, from some of the staff. However, he still won a place at the London School of Economics. Clarence Lochstein/George Lochs was a bright chap.

‘Can I introduce Sid Halley?’ said Charles, oblivious to the private nature of the men’s conversation.

George Lochs jumped. Whilst his reputation had reached me, mine had also clearly reached him.

It was a reaction I was quite used to. It’s a bit like when a police car stops behind you at traffic lights. A strange feeling of guilt inevitably comes over you even when you’ve done nothing wrong. Do they know that I was speeding five minutes ago? Are my tyres legal? Should I have had that second glass of wine? Only when the police car turns off or passes by does the
heartbeat begin to return to normal, the palms of the hands stop sweating.

‘Sid. Good. Glad you could come.’ Lord Enstone smiled broadly. ‘Have you met George Lochs? George, Sid.’

We shook hands and looked into each other’s eyes. His palm was not noticeably damp and his face gave nothing away.

‘And you know my son, Peter,’ he said.

I had met him once or twice on racecourses. We nodded in recognition. Peter was an averagely competent amateur jockey in his early thirties who had for some years enjoyed limited success, mostly in races reserved for amateur riders.

‘Do you have a ride in the Foxhunters later?’ I asked him.

‘I wish,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t convince an owner to put me up.’

‘What about your father’s horses?’ I asked, giving his father a wink.

‘No bloody chance,’ said Peter with a half-hearted smile. ‘Mean old bastard won’t let me ride them.’

‘If the boy wants to break his neck riding in races, that’s his business, but I don’t want to aid and abet him,’ said Jonny, ruffling his son’s blond hair. ‘I’d never forgive myself.’

Peter pulled his head away from his father’s hand with irritation and stomped off through the doorway. It was clearly a topic much discussed in the past.

‘Charles, take young George here inside and find him a glass of fizz,’ said Lord Enstone. ‘I want to have a word with Sid in private.’

It was clear that young George didn’t actually want to be taken off for a glass of fizz or anything else.

‘Promise I won’t listen,’ he said with a smile, standing his ground.

‘Dead right, you won’t.’ Enstone was losing his cool and
with it his cultured RP accent. ‘Jist gan’ in there with Charlie, bonnie lad, I’m askin’, OK?’ Pure Geordie.

A few years previously, I’d also done a check on him for a horse-owning syndicate that he had wanted to join. Jonny Enstone was a builder. He had left school in Newcastle aged sixteen to become an apprentice bricklayer with J. W. Best Ltd, a small local general building company owned by the father of a school friend. Within two years he was running the business and, soon after, he bought out the friend’s father. Expansion was rapid and, under the banner ‘The J. W. Best built house you’ll ever buy’, Best Houses marched north, south and west covering the country with smart little three- and four-bedroomed boxes from Glasgow to Plymouth and beyond. Jonny Enstone had become Sir John, then Lord Enstone but he still had his hands on his business. He was famous for arriving very early one dark morning at a building site some two hundred miles from his home, and personally sacking anyone who was even a minute late at seven o’clock. He then removed the jacket of his pinstripe suit, rolled up the sleeves of his starched white shirt and worked the whole day in place of his fired bricklayer.

‘Now, Sid,’ RP fully restored, ‘I need you to find out something for me.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

‘I’ll pay you proper rates. I want you to find out why my horses aren’t winning when they should be.’

It was something I was regularly asked to do. I inwardly sighed. Most owners think their horses should be winning more often than they do. It’s a matter of ‘I paid good brass for the damn thing so why doesn’t it start repaying?’

‘I think,’ he went on, ‘my jockey and trainer are stopping them.’

That was what they all thought.

‘Move them to another trainer.’ I was doing myself out of a commission.

‘It’s not as simple as that, young man. I tell you, my horses are not just not winning when they should, they’re running to orders that aren’t mine. I feel I’m being used and I don’t like it.’ I could suddenly see the real Jonny Enstone beneath the Savile Row exterior: powerful, determined, even dangerous.

‘I’m in racing because I like to
win
,’ he emphasised the word. ‘It’s not the money that’s important, it’s the
winning
.’

Why was it, I thought, that it was always those with plenty of it who believed that money was not important. To the hard-up punter, a place bet on a long-priced runner-up was much better than an ultra short-priced winner.

Peter returned with a fresh glass of champagne for his father as a peace offering, their earlier little spat obviously forgiven.

‘Thanks, Peter,’ said Lord Enstone. He took a sip of the golden fluid.

‘Who trains your horses?’ I asked. ‘And who rides them?’

‘Bill Burton and Huw Walker.’

I stayed to watch the Gold Cup from Lord Enstone’s box. The balcony was heaving with bodies pressed up against the front rail as everyone strove to get a view of the supreme challenge for a steeplechaser, three and a quarter miles over 22 fences, all horses carrying the same weight. The winner of the Cheltenham Gold Cup was a true champion.

I had ridden eight times in this race and I knew all too well the nervous anticipation being experienced by the jockeys as they paraded in front of the packed grandstands. This was one
of only two or three really big jump races in the year that put the winning horse and jockey into the history books. For a horse to win this race more than once was the stuff of dreams. Winning it three times put the animal into the legend category.

Oven Cleaner, in spite of his name, was aiming to join the legends.

He was a big grey horse and I watched him canter down to the start with the others. I wondered if I would ever stop being envious of those doing what I still longed to do. I had not been born to the saddle and had never sat on a horse until I was sixteen when my widowed mother, dying herself of kidney cancer, had taken me to be apprenticed to a Newmarket trainer simply because I was very small for my age and I would soon be an orphan. But I had taken to riding like the proverbial duck to water. I found the bond between horse and rider exhilarating, especially when I realised that I could read their minds. When I discovered that they could also read mine, I knew I was part of a winning combination.

And so it had been until it all fell apart. A jockey feels a horse not through his feet in the stirrups nor through his arse on the saddle but through his hands on the reins connecting like power cables to the horse’s mouth, transmitting commands and data in both directions. With only one hand, it was like a battery with only one end. Useless – no circuit, no transmission, no data, no go. At least, no go fast, which is what racehorses and jockeys are supposed to do.

I watched the field of the best steeplechasers in the world gallop past the stands on the first circuit and positively ached to be amongst them. It had been ten years but it felt like only yesterday that I had been.

Oven Cleaner cleaned up. In his trademark manner, he looked
to all to have left his run too late but, to a deafening roar from his tens of thousands of faithful supporters, he charged up the hill to win by a whisker.

The crowd went wild, cheering and shouting and even throwing their soggy hats into the air. The big grey nodded his head in approval as he took the applause on the walk to the winner’s unsaddling enclosure. He was a hero and he knew it. Grown men cried with joy and hugged their neighbours whether they knew them or not. The only unhappy faces were the bookies who would lose a fortune. Oven Cleaner was a national icon, and housewives had bet the housekeeping and children had loaded their pocket money on his nose. ‘The Cleaner’, as he was affectionately known, was a god amongst racehorses.

The cheering rose to a new height as the legend was led into the unsaddling enclosure by his euphoric lady owner.

Then the legend died.

Tears of joy turned to tears of despair as the much loved champion suddenly stumbled and collapsed onto the grass, pulling down his owner and pinning her leg under his half-ton bulk. The crowd fell silent, save for a group of celebrating punters at the back still unaware of the unfolding tragedy. The screams of the horse’s owner, her ankle trapped and crushed, eventually cut through to them too, and they were hushed.

Oven Cleaner had given his all. His heart, so strong in carrying him up the Cheltenham hill to victory, had failed him in his moment of triumph.

Willing hands managed to free the poor owner but she refused to leave for medical treatment on her broken ankle, cradling
the horse’s head in her lap and crying the inconsolable tears of the bereaved.

I watched a vet examine the animal. He placed a stethoscope to the grey-haired chest and listened for a few seconds. He stood up, pursed his lips and shook his head. No paramedics, no mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, no defibrillator pads, no cardiac massage, just a shake of the head.

A team of men hurried in with green canvas screens that they set up around the still steaming bulk. No screens, I thought, for the poor human victim who had died on the same spot not three hours before. But the screens were not really necessary. Whereas, earlier, the crowd had grown to watch the human drama, now they turned away, not wanting to witness the sad end of such a dear friend.

Deep gloom descended on the racecourse. It was not helped by an objection from the clerk of the scales because Oven Cleaner’s jockey had failed to weigh in.