Tip Off

by John Francome

  ‘There have been one or two hiccups.’

  ‘Even you couldn’t predict horses being carried out or brought down. Your strike rate’s still miles over the odds. How do you do it?’

  ‘Pure luck,’ he ventured, unconvincingly.

  ‘Oh, come on. Luck doesn’t last that long.’

  ‘Well, I’m putting a lot of effort into it, too. The harder I work, the luckier I get.’

  ‘Toby, just tell me what your secret is. What are you doing that you weren’t doing before?’

  He sighed and looked at me silently for a moment. ‘Now, that would be telling.’

  ‘Unless I’ve missed something, I can’t see what your system is. All different courses, different jockeys and trainers, jumping and flat, anything from six furlongs to three and a half miles.’

  ‘Goodness,’ Toby said with more of his normal acerbity, ‘you have been following me closely.’

  ‘My friend Matt James has. He’s won a small fortune following your tips – almost fifteen hundred quid on Monday.’

  ‘Monday was exceptional. I knew that horse had been saved for a gamble.’ Toby grinned. ‘A few million punters must have got on to it, as far as I can tell. I’ve got twenty lines coming into my service now, busy the whole time. Of course, the big bookies all closed my accounts when I started backing some of my own naps, but the tipping lines are bringing great money, so who cares? And this Saturday, things will really take off. Just make sure you’re watching television on Friday night.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, intrigued. ‘Maybe we could meet up for a drink on Saturday evening, after racing.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Toby became suddenly awkward. ‘No can do. I’ve organised a small party later.’

  Chapter Four

  I left Toby taking declarations for the next day’s meeting and half an hour later I was sitting with Matt in our office. We were having what he called a debriefing.

  ‘Okay,’ Matt said, ‘I accept that there’s no pattern to these winning naps of Toby’s – or at least, you and I haven’t found one yet – but it’s still possible to stimulate a horse in order to enhance its performance dramatically, isn’t it? At least, enough to give it a substantial edge over its rivals for as long as it takes to run a race?’

  ‘You mean, did Toby dope them?’

  Matt nodded.

  ‘Out of the question,’ I said, more brusquely than I’d meant to. ‘Of course I’d thought of that, but to get at all those horses – from different yards and different parts of the country? It’s not possible. And even if he had, something would have shown up in the dope test. If they were consistently coming up positive for anything, Toby would have had his collar felt weeks ago.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ Matt held up a pacifying hand. ‘I was just looking at all the possibilities. I’m sure he could have had them doped if he was running a concerted campaign with a number of trainers, but I accept that the tests kick that option into touch.’

  ‘Matt, it just wouldn’t be possible to get deals together with dozens of different trainers anyway. For a start, not many of them are that bent, and several who have had winners napped by Toby, I’d stake my mother’s life wouldn’t dope a horse.’

  ‘Your mother’s dead,’ Matt observed drily. ‘So what’s your explanation?’

  I sighed. ‘Frankly, I haven’t a clue yet.’

  ‘In which case we’d better send in an interim report to the Jockey Club, telling them that investigations are progressing and we’ll keep them posted.’

  ‘Sure.’ I nodded. ‘And I’ll ask them to let us have the results of the dope tests carried out on all Toby’s winners, just to eliminate that option.’

  ‘But we’re going to have to look harder and see if we can find anything at all to link them.’

  I shrugged a shoulder. ‘We can try, but I don’t think that’s the way. I have one other faint lead to follow up.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘In about twenty minutes.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Matt asked.

  ‘I’ll let you know if it gets anywhere.’

  ‘Okay, but be back here by six. I’ve arranged for us to go and interview a man for Wessex Biotech tonight. And I think, as it’s the first contact, we should both be there.’

  Regretfully, I abandoned any ideas of a candle-lit dinner with Emma, and tried to calm the apprehension that always ran through me before a night of information gathering with Matt. It wasn’t what the other party might do under questioning that worried me; it was just how insistent my partner’s questioning might become.

  With a sharp twinge of guilt, I left the office and raced west down the motorway to meet Emma for lunch at the pub near Lambourn. I had managed to kid myself that there was some justification for this lunch as research on the grounds that I needed to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of Toby Brown. He had worked for Lord Tintern once, and I’d just learned from Jane how close her family and his had been for many years.

  But despite the guilt I was looking forward to spending a few hours with Emma, to make up for the months she’d been away.

  As I drove into the pub car-park, Emma slipped out of a black convertible BMW and walked towards me. I tried to view her dispassionately, and failed. She was looking stunning.

  ‘Great timing, us turning up together,’ I said.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she replied. ‘You’re late. I’ve been sitting in my car waiting for twenty minutes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you wait in the pub?’

  ‘I haven’t been in there for fifteen months – I didn’t feel like walking in on my own.’

  We managed to find a table that gave us some privacy among the eager gossip-merchants in the busy pub.

  We ordered some wine and lunch.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘you must tell me everything you’ve been up to.’

  ‘Everything?’

  I nodded.

  ‘That’s greedy,’ she said. ‘I’ll stick to censored highlights.’

  I wasn’t surprised to hear that Emma had been widely entertained in Florida, New York and California, with a few spells in the snow at Aspen and a month on Mustique in the Grenadines.

  I already knew some of this from the sporadic postcards she’d sent, and the half-knowledge had been tantalising. Now that she was here in front of me, confiding her impressions, it already felt as if she hadn’t been away at all.

  ‘Okay,’ I said after a while. ‘You were right. If you tell me everything now I’ll get information overload. Save a few of the more sensational details until next time.’

  ‘Fine,’ she laughed. ‘Tell me what you’ve been up to. How’s Laura, for instance?’

  I tried a blank, puzzled look.

  Emma raised both eyebrows. ‘Your sister’s friend, Laura Trevelyan,’ she said. ‘The girl you were going out with before I went away.’

  ‘Oh, that Laura,’ I said. ‘She’s fine; she took over Catherine’s job on the magazine. They say she’s doing very well.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘I’ve hardly seen her at all since you went to the States. It fizzled out just after you left.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I’ll live.’

  Emma appeared to think about that for a moment, then, with a change of tone, she went on, ‘Where did you disappear to this morning in such a hurry?’

  ‘I went over to Toby’s house. I wanted to catch him before he’d gone for the day.’

  ‘Don’t tell me – you were looking for a sure thing to back?’

  ‘You’ve heard, then?’

  ‘About Toby’s winning run? Of course. My father was ranting on about it last night. I gather the bookies are furious. Though why that should worry him, God knows; he’s always moaning that the bookies are taking all their profits out of racing.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a popular theme among the upper echelons of racing.’

  ‘And I know he’s not particularly fond of bookies generally. My grandfather lost the family bus
iness betting on horses.’

  ‘Did he? I thought your father inherited the business from him.’

  ‘So do most people, but he didn’t. My great-grandfather, Arthur Birt, made the original family fortune. He started with a small pub near Stevenage and built up a chain of hotels – he was almost on a par with the Astors. He gave Lloyd George fifty thousand quid to be made first Baron Tintern. As soon as his son, my grandfather, got the title and the money, he went on a thirty-year gambling spree and lost the lot.’

  ‘But if the business was gone, why on earth did your father go into hotels?’

  ‘To prove how useless his own father was, probably. I think he despised Granddad – I can remember he was pretty rude to him. Anyway, he was determined to make the King George Hotel Group a success, and worked like a maniac to get there. I hardly saw him for the first ten years of my life.’

  ‘He certainly seems to know how to get what he wants,’ I agreed, ‘even when it comes to someone as strong-minded as Jane.’

  ‘Jane wouldn’t have agreed to lose Nester just to protect her own interests. She has too much integrity for that,’ Emma said. ‘I should think she doesn’t want to fall out with Dad for her brother Frank’s sake.’

  ‘She mentioned him this morning. I knew nothing about him before.’

  ‘He’s lived in Menton for years but they’re very close. And he owns a chunk of my dad’s company.’

  ‘So I gathered. And presumably you’ve known Jane since you were in nappies?’

  ‘She is my godmother. I’ve always been very fond of her, and of Frank – he’s a lovely man. Apparently her husband Gervaise was the same.’

  ‘How well do you know Toby?’ I asked.

  ‘Well enough, but we’ve never been that close; he was often around when I was a kid. I can remember going with my mother to take him out to tea from Eton. I was about seven, and he must have been in his last year. He was in Pop and thought he was very grand. And a few years after that, just before Mum died, she took me to the South of France to stay at Frank’s villa. Toby was there too, full of himself, claiming he’d worked out a system for beating the casinos.’

  ‘He’s told me about that. I think they all barred him in the end.’

  ‘Do you know what it is he’s doing this time?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, as if I had no particular interest. ‘But Matt’s been doing well out of it.’

  ‘How is that steely-eyed partner of yours? Still aching for action in a black balaclava?’

  ‘Yes, no change there, I’m afraid. Mind you, we get a little excitement now and again.’ I couldn’t suppress a quick stab of anxiety at the thought of this evening’s undertaking.

  ‘That’s just what I need. Maybe I should help you out some time?’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘I mean it,’ Emma protested. ‘I’ve got to do something.’

  ‘What’s wrong with shopping and lunch?’ I asked.

  She made a face and narrowed her eyes to glittering slits of turquoise; but she knew I was joking.

  ‘Look,’ I went on, ‘getting back to Toby, what do you think he’s up to?’

  ‘Toby’s a clever guy and he’d do anything for money, provided he wasn’t going to get caught.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  Emma flashed me a quizzical glance. ‘Like helping the winner he’s napped, stopping all the others, bribing all the jockeys . . . Who knows?’

  ‘Matt and I have already been down that alley,’ I said quickly, not admitting we hadn’t thought of the stopping option. I considered for a moment whether it would be fair or rash to tell her that we’d been instructed by the Jockey Club to investigate Toby. I decided there wouldn’t be any harm in it and began to tell her, but halfway through my explanation of what Matt and I had been doing, she interrupted me.

  ‘What about the other option?’

  ‘You mean, having all the other runners stopped?’

  Emma nodded.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked doubtfully.

  She sighed. ‘Yes, all right, it just wouldn’t be possible – unless they were all very small fields.’ ‘No. We looked at that. Some of the fields had twenty plus runners.’

  Emma nodded. ‘I don’t think Toby would have done that anyway. He’s too clever. What do you think?’

  I shrugged. ‘I couldn’t honestly say. He wasn’t giving much away this morning.’

  Emma didn’t speak for a moment then asked, ‘Did my father tell you why he’d chosen your firm to do this job?’

  ‘Not specifically, but he suggested that Toby already knew most of the Jockey Club investigators too well for them to be effective.’

  ‘What you’ll soon discover about my father is that he doesn’t do anything without a damn’ good reason,’ Emma told me in a voice that had suddenly grown unusually serious for her.

  A few hours later, Matt and I left the car-park outside our office, heading for a small hamlet near Bath and a house which a client had asked us to ‘attend’.

  Matt was looking forward to the job. It was fairly straight-forward and promised him the chance to use his well-practised techniques in field work.

  On the journey down in his car, I told him about my lunch with Emma.

  ‘For God’s sake, Simon, are you telling me you spent all afternoon with her and it was purely research?’

  ‘Not all of it,’ I admitted.

  ‘Well, while you’ve been sniffing around the Honourable Emma Birt, I’ve arranged for us to see one of the bookies tomorrow. That may give us a new perspective.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked, annoyed that he’d stolen a march.

  ‘Salmon Leisure. We’re seeing the chief executive, Harry Chapman.’

  We were only twenty minutes from our destination by the time I got round to asking Matt for more details of the job we were on. He had fielded the enquiry when it came into the office and had handled all the briefings so far.

  ‘Basically, the company’s developed a piece of equipment that they call Powderjet; it’s an alternative to the old-fashioned hypodermic syringe.’

  ‘That sounds like a useful product. I loathe jabs.’

  ‘You and most of the population,’ Matt observed unsympathetically.

  ‘I suppose you don’t even notice them?’

  ‘An injection is a classic case of a psychologically induced trauma. The degree of pain is very small. It’s the anticipation that causes the grief, not the needle.’

  ‘I know that, of course, but I still hate them. Anyway, how does this new method work?’

  ‘They place a small disc on the surface of the skin; the agent to be introduced is released through thousands of tiny holes under very high pressure so that it’s propelled straight through the epidermis and into the patient’s bloodstream.’

  ‘And that doesn’t hurt?’

  ‘Not a bit.’

  ‘Like those nicotine patches that people stick on themselves to stop smoking?’

  ‘In that the drug is absorbed through the skin, yes.’

  ‘Sounds a winner,’ I said. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Wessex Biotech’s main research lab is out in the sticks down here, and kept heavily secure given the money they’ll earn from royalties on the product once it comes on stream.’

  ‘What’ll that be worth to them?’ I asked to get an idea of the scale of the problem.

  ‘If the system goes into use world-wide, it will run into hundreds of millions of dollars. Think of it – needles will become a thing of the past. But they can’t get a cast-iron world patent on the thing until all the tests are complete. They’re nearly there but if any competitors got their hands on the technology now, they could still be pipped.’

  ‘So, what’s happened?’

  ‘Two complete prototype systems with specially adapted drugs have gone missing. This guy we’re going to visit is one of their research scientists. David Dysart, who’s his boss and the guy I’ve been dealing
with, thinks our man may have helped himself to them to sell to the opposition.’

  ‘And we’re looking for these samples?’

  ‘Possibly, but more likely anything that will show the subject’s been in contact with rival companies or,’ Matt paused significantly, ‘been getting large amounts of cash from other sources.’

  ‘Will he be on his own?’

  ‘I hope so, or we’ll be wasting our time.’

  ‘Does he have a wife or family?’

  ‘Not married.’

  ‘You like all this, don’t you?’ I said, seeing that hard profile crease into a grin. ‘But what you seem to forget is that when you were doing it in the army, you were usually dealing with other professionals.’

  He laughed. ‘You’ve led such a sheltered life!’

  ‘Not any more,’ I muttered. ‘Anyway, how did we get this job?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you’re responsible. Apparently you met Dysart somewhere, told him what you were doing and gave him a card. He’s in his early forties, I’d say, very entrepreneurial and full of himself. Ring any bells?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not off-hand. I’ve given away hundreds of cards and I do the sales spiel wherever I go.’ In the first few months of establishing the business, and ever since it had got off the ground, I’d networked conscientiously, though not always methodically, using all my old insurance contacts as well as any social ones that were offered. ‘Did he say where we’d met?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We must ask him,’ I said. ‘Now I suppose I’d better apply myself to the map and talk you to the target.’

  The target was a chocolate-box cottage of thatch and stone, nestling in a deep cleft in the eastern slopes of the Mendip Hills.

  ‘That’s a very des. little res.,’ I remarked. ‘So our chum is already doing reasonably well for himself. How old is he?’

  ‘It’s all in the profile. He’s twenty-nine, and on thirty grand a year.’

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Brian Griffiths.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, trying to sound positive, ‘let’s go and talk to him.’