Four Months Later
ON WEDNESDAY, I checked in early at Heathrow Terminal 5 for my British Airways flight, and made my way through airport security.
I was so excited that I could hardly stop myself from skipping along the terminal concourse towards the business-class lounge.
Much had happened over the preceding four months.
Gary Shipman had pleaded guilty at his first opportunity in the Magistrates Court, to unlawful wounding with an offensive weapon, occasioning grievous bodily harm, and also to threatening an individual with a knife such that the said individual was in fear for their life.
He was full of remorse and regret, and the Crown Prosecution Service accepted his plea that he had not intended to injure anyone. He claimed the stabbing had simply been a defensive reflex action when Darren had leapt towards him.
Three weeks later he was sent to the Crown Court, where a judge handed down a sentence of two years in custody for each offence, but to run concurrently rather than consecutively, for which Patrick Hogg thought he was a very lucky boy.
But that was only the start of his problems.
Following the seizure of Patrick’s video by the police, both Gary and James had been arrested on suspicion of fraud, and over the following month the whole sorry business of the Bristol University Gambling Society had been fully exposed, and it was a much bigger mess than I had expected.
Basically, it had developed into a Ponzi scheme.
Initially, with only the cash from a small handful of their closest friends, Gary and James had used the free bets and other promotions provided by the bookmakers to make a healthy return using the matched-betting technique.
They had distributed the winnings to their “investors,” which in turn had encouraged them to invest more, and by word of mouth, more and more students had then joined, such that Gary and James suddenly found they had thousands of pounds each week to bet with.
And that number soon became even bigger as the apparent returns kept coming and word spread throughout the university student population. But in reality, the boys had resorted to paying out “winnings” that didn’t actually exist, in order to further increase the number of members joining.
By now, most of the local Bristol and online bookmakers had gubbed their accounts, which meant they had excluded the society from receiving any more free bets and other promotions, and some had limited the amount they could stake. A few bookmakers had even closed their accounts altogether.
So the “payouts” were in fact now being made straight from the money new society members were bringing in, rather than from any actual winnings.
At one point, they’d had more than two thousand members, some “investing” a hundred pounds or more at a time, and all was fine for a while, as long as the flow of new members kept bringing in more cash to fund everything.
However, it all started to go wrong when the ex–University of Bristol student Mike Mercer had gone to the local newspaper, claiming it was all a con. Suddenly, the supply of new members joining began to slow, and even to dry up, and those already in wanted to cash out from their accounts.
But the society didn’t have enough money to pay them what they’d been promised.
So, in a last-ditch effort to turn around their fortunes, Gary hatched the plan to kidnap Amanda in order to force me to make Victrix horses lose races so he and James could lay them for huge amounts on the exchanges.
Although James claimed he was reluctant to do it, he had gone along with the plan because they were desperate, and he had set up the filming of Darren selling cocaine to force Amanda into agreeing.
When Dream Filler has been disqualified at Lingfield, and Hameed had then been beaten at Newbury, they had managed to recoup some of their losses. But Potassium’s win at Ascot had cost them dearly, so they had decided to give me a “reminder” that they could kidnap Amanda anytime they liked, and I’d better do what they told me.
It had also been James who had suggested calling his mother’s phone several times before hanging up without speaking. He reckoned, correctly, that she would tell me about the calls, and that would add further pressure for me to do what they wanted.
In all, it was estimated that in excess of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds had “disappeared,” although a substantial proportion of that had been erroneously paid out to society members as “winnings” to which they weren’t legally entitled. Much of the rest had been lost to bookmakers or to other gamblers on the betting exchanges.
Certainly Gary and James hadn’t pocketed very much from the scheme, maybe less than ten thousand pounds between them.
Bad as it was, at least it wasn’t even close to being in the Bernie Madoff league. His asset-management Ponzi scheme in the United States had involved the embezzlement of an estimated sixty-five billion—yes, billion—U.S. dollars.
However, it was still bad enough for the University of Bristol to abruptly boot both Gary and James out of their courses and to ban them for life from ever again setting foot on the University premises.
All that effort to secure the tenancy of a new Bristol flat had been in vain, and it had been my searching for James’s passport, needed by the letting agency, that had been the catalyst for me to start working everything out.
In court, at Patrick Hogg’s urging, they both pleaded guilty to profiting illegally by knowingly making false representations, contrary to the 2006 Fraud Act, and they were both jailed for eighteen months. This time, Gary’s term was to run consecutively to his other sentences.
Now, the only accommodation the two of them would have for the coming year and beyond, rather than being their much hoped-for flat, would have no door handles on the inside, and bars across the windows.
As to the other business, the “kidnap Amanda” plan and the threats made to harm her if I didn’t do as I was told to fix races, no action was taken by the police, mostly because I did not wish to make any complaints against my own children.
That may have been seen by some as just generous parenting, but I also didn’t want to be asked any difficult questions about any missing lead weights.
However, one of the burner phones in Gary Shipman’s bag had contained details of calls and texts made to my mobile number. There had also been an electronic voice changer found in the bag, confirming him as Squeaky Voice.
While Amanda had not been arrested or charged with anything, she had been issued with a ninety-pound Fixed Penalty Notice for wasting police time, which, of course, I had paid.
Darren spent four nights in the Royal Berkshire Hospital, recovering from the stabbing and his abdominal surgery.
Amanda collected him on Saturday afternoon in her battered Fiesta, and the first stop they made was to the scene of the attack.
They were in the sitting room when I arrived back from watching a Victrix horse run at Newmarket.
“I’ve come to thank you,” Darren said, standing up nervously in front of me. “I’ve been told that without your prompt application of pressure to the wound, I would have surely died. Even with it, it was a close-run thing.”
He held out his hand to me, and I shook it.
“I also want to apologise for being such a bloody idiot. Amanda and I have been talking a lot over these past few days, and I’d like me and you to make a fresh start.”
I shook his hand again.
“Then no more drug dealing,” I said, holding firmly onto his hand.
“No more drug dealing,” he agreed, although I had my severe doubts that he’d stick to that.
Thanks and apologies over, he and Amanda had departed in the Fiesta, back to their love nest above the Raj Tandoori.
Georgina’s father died at the end of July, his heart having finally given up the futile struggle to pump a limited oxygen supply around his failing body. There had been no fuss. He had simply slipped away in his sleep, only discovered the following morning when his wife brought him in a cup of tea.
On hearing the news, Georgina and I had immediately driven north to Harrogate, but there was not much we could do other than to help with undertakers and funeral arrangements.
After two days I returned south, leaving Georgina behind to continue supporting her mother. It wasn’t planned as such, but looking back, I think it was at that precise moment that our marriage finally ended.
I kissed Georgina goodbye, standing in her mother’s driveway, with the now-customary peck on the cheek.
“I’ll call you,” I said.
“Fine,” she replied.
And that was that. I had driven away, and Georgina had not.
Ten days later, I returned to Harrogate for my father-in-law’s funeral but came back home again the same night, and here we were, eleven weeks later, still living apart and speaking only occasionally on the telephone, mostly about the plight of our errant children.
While we hadn’t yet discussed a formal separation, or a divorce, the state of our independent lives seemed to be more than satisfactory for both of us. Maybe there would be legal proceedings in the future, but neither of us seemed in any hurry to precipitate them—not yet, anyway.
Meanwhile, while everything else going on, Potassium had continued to excel, proving himself to be the champion British racehorse of the year.
Owen and I had decided to give the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot a miss, as had always been our intention, but in early July, Potassium had won the Eclipse at Sandown over a mile and a quarter.
A month later he captured the mile-long Sussex Stakes at Goodwood, by two lengths, from the winner of the Prix du Jockey Club, the French Derby, in what was headlined in the following day’s Racing Post as the “Battle of Agincourt of the Derby Winners”—another overwhelming victory for the English, with a cartoon of Potassium holding up a two-finger salute towards the French—even though horses don’t actually have any fingers.
Two and a half weeks after that, I had gone north again, this time on the train to York, and I was in confident mood.
Horse races were first held at York some eighteen hundred years ago, to mark the visit to the city of the then Roman emperor Septimius Severus, but the modern racecourse opened for its first meeting in 1731, on open marshy land just a mile south of the city centre, known as the Knavesmire.
The current one-mile six-furlong start is close to the place that had been used for public executions since the fourteenth century, the most notable being that of the highwayman Dick Turpin, who was hanged at that very spot some eight years after the racecourse was established.
Nowadays, the four-day Ebor Festival—from Eboracum, the Roman name for York—is the highlight of the northern racing calendar, with three Group 1 races plus the Ebor Handicap, the most valuable flat-racing handicap in Europe.
Yorkshire folk certainly know how to have a good time, and they flock to York races in huge numbers to do just that, especially during the Ebor meeting.
It had always been one of my favourite events. But this year was extra special, with Potassium being the main attraction on the first day, as a runner in the million-pound International Stakes over a mile and a quarter.
Such was Potassium’s reputation that he had frightened off most of the other good horses, so there were only four others in the race, and he lived up to his star billing, winning easily by three lengths.
He had now won five of his six runs this year, all of them at Group 1, and so it was an easy decision for Owen and me to accept the invitation from America to run in the US$7 million Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland, rather than the £1.3 million Champion Stakes at Ascot.
Potassium had nothing more to prove at home, and now was his chance to take on the best of the international horses, to try to emulate Raven’s Pass, the only other English-trained winner of the Breeders’ Cup Classic, way back in 2008.
So, here I was at Heathrow, waiting for my flight to Cincinnati.
The autumn was always the busiest time of my year anyway. Not just because of the ongoing racing, but mostly on account of the bloodstock sales.
It was when the annual fresh crop of yearlings go under the hammer in either the U.K. or Ireland, and it’s only then that I find out if my many months of talking and visiting the breeders has paid off.
By the time the sales started, I had compiled a long list of possible targets, so I spent many days inspecting and vetting each one, and then either I sat on my hands, or I raised them to bid in the auctions, hoping that I could secure the purchase within my budget.
All too often, the bidding went beyond what I was prepared to pay, leaving me rueing the outcome, but there were other times when I believed I had bought a future winner, and at reasonable cost.
At the end of the sales, I had fulfilled my aim of buying sixteen quality yearlings at a fair price, all of which I believed were excellent prospects, and now all I had to do was find the syndicate members to share their ownership.
They were the new blood—next year’s Victrix two-year-old racers.
At the other end of the line, most of the company’s current three-year-olds would shortly be going to the horses-in-training sales, to be moved on to new owners for further racing or to become broodmares or whatever.
It was like a constant conveyor belt of new blood in, old blood out, and it was the part of my job that I found most exciting, Derby winning excepted.
The previous week, I had held my annual yearling parade, and it had gone as well as I could have possibly wished. There was nothing like having had the Derby winner to bring in the clientele, and my books were filled to overflowing such that, for the first time ever, I had a waiting list of prospective members who all wanted to buy into the lifestyle and to chase the ultimate dream.
And I was delighted that Patrick Hogg, KC, was now a Victrix syndicate member, securing a share in one of my favourite purchases. I just hoped that I could repay his kindness by providing him with a future winner or two.
My flight was called over the airline-lounge public address system, so I started to make my way to the gate.
The previous day I had finally plucked up the courage to phone Toni Beckett, to tell her that I would be coming to Keeneland for the Breeders’ Cup races and that I hoped to be able see her there.
Far from receiving the brushoff that I had feared, she had been hugely excited.
“Is your wife coming with you?” she had asked warily.
“No,” I’d said. “In fact, she and I are now living apart.”
“Yee-haw! So you’ll be staying at my place?”
I’d been booked into a suite at the Hilton Hotel, in downtown Lexington, all courtesy of the Breeders’ Cup organisation.
Bugger that.
“I’d absolutely love to stay at your place.”
My flight touched down at Cincinnati airport at a seven o’clock, local time, on Wednesday evening, after an eight-and-a-half-hour hop over from London.
The long journey across the Atlantic gave me the time to relax, to unwind my mind from the stresses of the past months. There were no phone calls to worry about, no emails or texts demanding an answer, just a few glasses of an excellent Bordeaux to consume, along with some decent food and a chance to catch up on some sleep in my business-class flat bed.
Toni had offered to pick me up from the airport, but I already had a car arranged for me by Breeders’ Cup, so I told her not to bother.
The car took me to the Hilton, where I checked in to my suite and dropped off some of my luggage before exiting through a side door and climbing into Toni’s white Jeep Cherokee SUV.
Her two beds and a bath upstairs, and a kitchen and living room downstairs was part of a modern development on the western side of the city, just off Versailles Road, convenient for Keeneland Racetrack.
And we only needed the one bed, not two.
The Breeders’ Cup races are widely advertised as the annual end-of-year world championship of horseracing, and consists of fourteen different top-rated races over two days in early November, crowning fourteen different “world champions.”
Race distances range from just over five furlongs to a mile and a half. Five are for female horses only, two for males only, whereas the rest are for both sexes competing together.
There are five races scheduled for Friday, all for two-year-old “juveniles,” three on the grassy turf track and two on “dirt,” which at Keeneland is a blend of sand, silt, and Kentucky clay. And then nine more races on Saturday, all for horses aged three and older, five on dirt and four on turf.
All are designed to be truly “international,” but in truth, most of the American horses run on the dirt, while the Europeans all prefer the turf. Potassium, however, was bucking that trend as a starter on the dirt in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, the most prestigious and the most valuable of all the fourteen.
He had made his own trip across the Atlantic almost three weeks ago, to give him time to recover from the journey and the time change, but more importantly, to get used to running on the dirt surface, something he appeared to enjoy according to the reports I had received.
Owen Reynolds had sent two of his stable staff over with the horse, and all three seemed to have settled in well in Keeneland’s own training centre, which was adjacent to the racetrack. Owen and our Derby-winning jockey, Jimmy Ketch, were also making the trip over, to maximize our chances of success.
Thursday was mostly taken up with media interviews and press photo shoots, culminating in a reception and gala dinner at the Kentucky Horse Park for all the international and out-of-town guests. All of them, that is, except the main stars of the show, the horses, who remained in their stables at the racetrack, totally unaware of all the fuss that was going on around them.
But Owen Reynolds was there, along with his wife, Eleanor.
“Hi, Owen,” I said, going over to him at the reception. “Good journey?”
“Yes, thank you,” he said. “We arrived this morning from New York. Eleanor wanted to go there for a couple of nights on the way. To go shopping.”
He rolled his eyes and I laughed.
“Is Georgina with you?” Eleanor asked, ignoring her husband.
“No. Her father died, and she’s in Harrogate looking after her mother.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you,” I said.
A waiter came and refilled our glasses.
“Have you been to see Potassium?” I asked Owen.
“Sure have. I went straight to the stables, even before checking in to the hotel. He looks in great form. Raring to go.”
“Good.”
As so often in the United States, dinner was served early at six, so the whole event was over before nine, which was just as well as I was having difficulty keeping my eyes open during the final speeches because of the jet lag.
Toni picked me up, and I was asleep before we arrived at her place.
But she woke me up again.
Potassium’s race was the very last one on the Saturday afternoon, the climax, with all the other races acting as appetizers for the main event.
The organizers had invited everyone connected to runners on Saturday to attend Friday’s racing if they wanted to, but Toni had somehow wangled some time off—she said that all the ticketing was now complete—so we spent a while seeing some of the local sights and then went back to bed at her place, which was much more fun.
On Saturday morning, she had to go in to work early to make up the hours she had taken off on Friday, so she dropped me at the Hilton, and I arranged for one of the official cars to get me to the track by noon.
Arriving at Keeneland Racecourse was an experience to savour.
The long avenues of maple trees leading in from the main road were in full red and orange autumn colour, and they were truly spectacular in the sunshine.
Add valet parking and a grand entrance hall, complete with high-backed armchairs and a roaring open fire in the grate, made it feel like I was entering a very fancy private members’ club rather than a major international sporting venue.
Toni was waiting for me in the entrance hall, and she led me through to the open area between the impressive ivy-clad clubhouse and the new paddock building, both with their grand arched windows.
“I’ve found you a place in a private suite,” she said, obviously rather pleased with herself. “You’re having lunch with Herb and Harriet Farquhar.”
Now I was worried that I wasn’t sufficiently smartly dressed.
Before I’d left home, I had packed a warm suit plus a thick overcoat, expecting that it would be cold at the races, as it would be at Newbury in November. But I had not bargained with Keeneland being so much further south than Newbury. Indeed, Lexington is on the same line of latitude as Athens, and on top of that, central Kentucky was currently experiencing an unseasonably warm spell.
Hence, today I had left my heavy woollen suit and overcoat in the Hilton and had opted instead for my lightweight, blue-checked sports coat plus some navy chinos, both of which I had thankfully thrown into my suitcase at the very last moment. Together with a tie, of course. But was it smart enough for the Farquhars’ private suite?
Toni assured me that I looked “just fine and dandy,” and she took me up in a lift to the fourth level and along the corridor to the suite, where I was relieved to find our host wearing a seersucker jacket not dissimilar to my own.
“Well, look who it is,” said a loud familiar British voice.
Nick Spencer, Potassium syndicate member, was also a lunch guest, together with his wife, Claire. I had known they were coming over, even though I hadn’t seen them at the gala dinner on Thursday evening.
“When did you get in?” I asked Nick.
“Late last night. And we’re only here until tomorrow. We have to fly home overnight because I have to be back in my office first thing Monday morning. I’m in the middle of a huge deal on a residential block near Tower Bridge. It’s worth millions. But I wouldn’t miss this for anything.” He smiled. “Do you think we’ll win?”
“Only if Potassium is fast enough,” I said. “But I have absolutely no idea how good the opposition really are.”
The eleven other runners in the Classic were all American bred, owned, and trained—the best of their best. And most were older horses—four, five, or six. Only two were three-year-olds, like Potassium.
I had tried to look up their relative form, but many of them raced in different states, and some had never competed against one another before.
We were venturing into the unknown, and in their own backyard.
We would just have to wait and see whether our horse was good enough to beat them all. But it wouldn’t be from any lack of trying on our part.
I think I enjoyed my lunch, but if you’d asked me afterwards what I’d eaten, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. I was that nervous.
Our race wasn’t due off until twenty minutes to five, and the afternoon seemed to drag by, but eventually it was time for me to go down to the saddling area.
Potassium was already there, as was Owen Reynolds plus his two stable staff, who’d been looking after the horse.
With the three of them, I wasn’t really needed, so I stood to one side and watched as Owen went about saddling the horse. At one point, I saw Owen looking across at me, and I smiled and waved at him.
When all was complete, Potassium was led across into the paddock where Jimmy Ketch, wearing the Victrix silks, was given a leg up onto the horse’s back.
As the runners made their way out to the track, I went back up to the Farquhars’ suite to watch the race.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Harriet as we stood side by side looking out across the immaculately manicured infield with its neat hedging, some of it even topiaried into the word “KEENELAND.”
The racecourse was a mile and one furlong round, so the ten-furlong start was right in front of the stand, the horses in this race having to negotiate just over one complete circuit.
The twelve runners were expertly loaded into the starting stalls, and then, accompanied by a ringing bell, the gates flew open, and they were off.
As usual, Jimmy Ketch took Potassium straight to the front, and they hugged the inside rail around the first turn. Down the back stretch, he opened up a lead of five lengths, which soon became eight.
Around the final turn, he didn’t show any signs of slowing, and if anything, he extended his lead as they straightened up for the final run home.
Potassium totally annihilated the best the Americans had to offer, reaching the wire first, and with a winning margin of almost ten lengths in a new track record time.
Herb Farquhar grabbed my shoulders from behind in excitement.
“Absolutely unbelievable,” he shouted with tears in his eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I simply must have that horse as a stallion at my farm. Name your price. Any price.”
The most expensive stallion ever sold was Fusaichi Pegasus, winner of the Kentucky Derby. He was bought by the Irish breeding powerhouse, Coolmore, for seventy million U.S. dollars.
Should I ask Herb for the same? Or for more?
But now was not the time for that.
I rushed down to the winner’s circle. Like at Epsom, it was in front of the grandstand, and it was already pretty full of people by the time I got there.
Owen had beaten me to it.
I joined him and we leaned against the rail, side by side, waiting for the horse to finish its victory parades up and down the track in front of the adoring crowd.
“By the way,” he said casually, without turning his head towards me, “I know it was you who removed the weights from Dream Filler’s weight cloth at Lingfield. I’ve worked it out.”
In spite of the warmth of the day, I went cold.
I realised that I shouldn’t have worn my blue-checked sports coat here today. That is what Owen had obviously been looking at earlier, in the saddling area. It must have sparked a memory.
I turned and stared at him, but he didn’t look back at me. Instead, he continued facing forward.
“You did it while I fetched the parade-ring vet,” he said. “All that fuss you made about Dream Filler being lame was only to give you the opportunity.” He paused, and finally turned to face me. “I don’t know why you did it. And I don’t want to know. But I reckon you must have had a good reason.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked, realising that it was far too late to start denying anything.
“Nothing,” he said. “This year has been the greatest of my life, and that is largely down to you for choosing me to train Potassium. So I’m not going to ruin it now.”
I smiled at him.
“But,” he added, “you do owe me seven hundred and fifty pounds to cover the fine.”
“Will you take cash?”
THE END