‘Okay,’ Mary replied, ‘but when is this all going to happen?’
‘About the middle of March, I think.’
‘Oh, I hope it doesn’t clash with the Cheltenham Festival! I’ve got a couple of Irish chaps coming to stay for the races…’
‘Have you? asked Mavis anxiously. ‘In that case, I think I’d better tell my friend that you don’t want to be involved.’
‘But I do want to be involved!’ Mary insisted. ‘I could really do with that 500 quid!’
‘Tell me about the Irishmen. Are they paying you?’
‘Oh yes, of course they are!’
‘Have they been to stay with you before?’
‘Yes, they’ve been coming for two or three years.’
‘Oh, in that case I should think it will be all right. Just don’t tell them about the phone call you have to make, that’s all.’
‘I won’t see much of them, I don’t suppose. They always go out drinking every evening after the races, and they’re not really interested in anything I do anyway. All they ever talk about is horses and racing…’
‘Well, just keep your mouth shut while they’re there!’
‘Is the phone call something to do with the races then?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve probably told you too much already. Don’t ask me any more questions about it!’
Mary obediently stopped asking questions, although there were many more that she would have liked to ask, for she was feeling increasingly anxious about what she had become involved in.
She did not hear any more about it until the day before the race meeting started, when her two Irish visitors turned up on her doorstep. She opened the door and greeted them. ‘Oh look,’ said one of them, bending down to pick up an envelope which was lying on the doormat, ‘you’ve got some mail.’ He handed the letter to Mary, who glanced at it and put it in her pinafore pocket without further comment.
‘I’ll show you your room,’ Mary said.
‘No, there’s no need, we know where everything is, and we’re going straight out anyway. We probably won’t see you again till breakfast time!’
‘I know you two by now!’ she joked. ‘Just don’t wake me up when you do come home!’
‘Don’t worry! We know the rules of the house by now. We’ll be quiet as church mice!’
Ten minutes later she heard them go out again, whereupon she went into the kitchen, sat down, and retrieved the letter from her pinafore pocket. She opened the envelope and found a single sheet of paper, on which there was a typewritten message. At the top of the sheet she saw a telephone number in large type, which, because of its 01242 area code, she immediately recognised as a Cheltenham number. Below the number appeared the following message:
1. Call the above number between 02.00 and 02.30 on 13 March. The person you are calling will be expecting your call. DO NOT GIVE YOUR NAME.
2. Ask the following question: ‘Are you listening?’ If you do not ask this question, the person you are calling will hang up.
3. When the person you are calling confirms that he/she is listening, give the following message: ‘This is very important. I did not call the police. It was your family who called the police.’ IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU USE THESE EXACT WORDS.
4. Hang up. Do not enter into conversation with the person you are calling.
5. Destroy this paper and do not discuss its contents with anyone.
She read the letter twice, then put it away in a safe place until shortly before she was due to make the call, which would be the following night.
On the night in question she retrieved the letter from its hiding place and, having checked to make sure that her temporary lodgers were not in the house, she rehearsed the delivery of the message. By midnight her visitors had still not come home, nor at one o’clock either; that was not especially strange, because they would normally come home by taxi, and in the three or four hours after midnight in Cheltenham race week, those seeking a taxi were always far in excess of the taxis available. On a number of previous occasions, they had had to walk all the way from the centre of Cheltenham to Bishop’s Cleeve, a distance of three or four miles.
But the nearer the hands of the clock approached the time at which she was due to make her call, the more nervous she felt. At about a quarter to two she heard the front door open, and then two pairs of feet made their way up the stairs. She held her breath until she was sure the visitors were safely upstairs, then took out the letter again. Next she heard a door open and close, and, after that, the sound of a toilet being flushed, and she waited until she heard the same sequence of sounds one more time before she was satisfied that the two men were now safely in their bedrooms and that she would not be disturbed.
She looked at the clock: it was now ten past two. Her pulse was racing, her heart was thumping, and she felt herself breaking out into a cold sweat. But she could not afford to postpone the call a moment longer, she decided, or she would risk forfeiting the £500 on which she was counting so much. She picked up the phone, and prepared to dial the number.
Just as she began dialling, she heard the sound of a door opening, and then footsteps on the upstairs landing. She waited a second until all was quiet again, then, heart still thumping, she dialled the number.
‘Are you listening?’ she said as soon as someone responded, but she heard no reply to her question. She asked the question again, and then a third time, before she received the assurance she required. But her instructions had said that the person she was calling would be expecting her call; surely, she thought, if this man was expecting a call, she would not have had to ask three times if he were listening? Never mind, she told herself, that’s not my problem, I just need to deliver the message. So she continued: ‘This is very important. I did not call the police. It was your family who called the police.’
‘What? What are you talking about? What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about…’
She came very near to answering his question, or making a comment upon his apparent lack of readiness, but then remembered her instruction not to engage in conversation, and hung up.
Then she began to worry about what she had done. The man she had been talking to had evidently not expected her call. How could that be? Perhaps she had misdialled. After all, she recollected, she had been in quite a state when she made the call, partly because of her fear of being overheard by the Irish lodgers, partly because, despite the assurances that Mavis had given her, she was already worried about becoming involved with some kind of shady deal.
She sat down at the kitchen table and thought about the situation, of which two aspects caused her particular anxiety. If somehow she had called the wrong person – even accidentally – did that mean she would forfeit the £500 she was expecting? And, if she had been speaking to the wrong person, what might that man do? What if he were to call her back, what would she say? The more she thought about it, the more anxious she became, because another scenario came into her mind: what if the organiser of the operation which Mavis had persuaded her to join were to call and ask her why she had not made the call, what would she say to him? And, given that her pay-out was to be £500 for doing very little, the operation, whatever it was, must have been worth a good deal more; so what fate might await her if she had unwittingly caused the operation to fail? Should she perhaps pretend that the phone had been out of order, and so she had been unable to make the call as planned? But that could only provide a plausible answer if the phone really were out of order…
Seized by panic, she found a little screwdriver which was always kept in one of the kitchen drawers in case of minor electrical faults, then unscrewed the top of the telephone junction box which was also located in the kitchen, and proceeded to disconnect one of the wires inside, before replacing the junction box’s cover. Having done that, she lifted the handset of the telephone to verify that the line was dead: it was, so she finally went to bed.
Not that she slept, of course, for she was far
too agitated to be able to sleep the sleep of the just. Nor could she afford to have a lie-in, even if, being a cleaner, she did not need to go into the factory until the workers went home at the end of their day, because she needed to cook breakfast for her race-going visitors, who relied on a substantial breakfast ‘to see them through the day’, as they always said. Moreover, when the visitors came down for breakfast she needed to respond amicably to their habitual banter. At last she had the house to herself again, and went back to bed; this time she slept until mid-afternoon. At about six o’clock in the evening the two visitors returned home, and in remarkably good spirits.
‘Mary!’ one of them said, ‘We’ve had a fantastic day, and it’s all thanks to you, so before we go out and spend all our winnings, we’d like to give you this.’ So saying, he presented her with a £50 note.
‘What’s this in aid of?’ she exclaimed.
‘Well,’ one of them replied, ‘it’s all because I went to the loo last night, and I heard you talking to somebody on the phone. I didn’t listen, honest I didn’t, but I did hear you say the words ‘your family’. And then when I was looking through the race card this morning I spotted that there was one of the runners whose name was Your Family. Well, it was too much of a coincidence to ignore, so I backed it.’
‘Truly scientific his betting system is, to be sure!’ his mate commented.
‘Well, at least it won!’ his friend countered. ‘And at 100-1 too! So I won £1000! Anyway, we’re going out on the town now. Don’t bother to wait up for us!’
Within five minutes Mary was on her own again, and, although she was happy with her unexpected gift, the fact that one of them had overheard her phone conversation rekindled her anxiety, a degree of uneasiness which redoubled when it occurred to her eventually that the phone call she was supposed to have made was part of a big racing scam!
If Mary had been aware of the true extent of the operation into which she had been recruited, she would have been even more worried than she was, for, as she had surmised, a pay-out of £500 for making a simple phone call implied a seriously massive operation, which had been over a year in the planning, and which involved at least two trainers, one in England, one in Ireland, two owners, one jockey, one vet, and numerous little people like Mary, who did not know enough about the operation to suspect that it was shady.
The success of the scam depended upon nobody suspecting that Your Family was not all he seemed, for the horse who had won the race in question was a totally different horse, from a totally different yard. The replacement horse, the ‘ringer’, was actually a year older than Your Family, and would have been ineligible anyway because he was no longer a four year old. But even if he had been eligible, he would have been carrying much more weight if he had been entered legitimately, for older horses are regarded by handicappers as being more experienced. What’s more, the ringer had already won two or three races in Ireland under the name of Clontarf Belle; to a layman it would have been difficult to distinguish one from the other, but, thanks to the paperwork signed by a crooked vet, he was able to deceive even the professionals. In addition, Clontarf Belle was able to benefit from Your Family’s abysmal track record because Your Family’s failure to perform creditably in any of the races in which he had previously taken part would in itself have given him a considerable advantage over the rest of the field, but, coupled with the experience of Clontarf Belle, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Fortunately for the perpetrators of the scam, the fact that a price of 100-1 is not especially unusual in National Hunt racing, even at Cheltenham, particularly in the minor races, was not sufficient for the result to have been regarded immediately with suspicion.
However, there was some concern expressed by a number of bookmakers, especially the small-time bookmakers. It began with one or two chatting among themselves about colleagues who had been in deep difficulties or who had actually gone out of business, for a loss of £100,000 would be very difficult for a small-time bookmaker to take. Eventually the police began to take an interest, initially because of the chatter, but when they eventually started to collate their findings, they discovered that some of the big betting firms had also taken several bets of £1,000, so there were very few indeed who had emerged unscathed. As the total sum of client winnings was well in excess of £1 million, with only the biggest firms having taken more than one such bet, a decision was taken by the police that further investigation was required, for such facts as were known implied something much more than coincidence. But the plan had been put together so skilfully, and executed so discreetly, that the police needed a slice of luck of the magnitude of that enjoyed by Mary’s Irish lodgers, so it was some time before their investigative efforts bore any fruit, and, extraordinarily, the breakthrough they were seeking came from Mary herself.
Two or three weeks after the race meeting, Mary had still not received her £500, so one evening, she went to the same pub where she had made the original agreement with Mavis, and confronted her as soon as she saw her.
‘When am I going to get my money?’ she demanded.
‘What money?’
‘The money I earned by making that phone call.’
‘What phone call?’
‘The phone call you asked me to make.’
‘I don’t remember asking you to make a phone call.’
‘You did!’ Mary insisted. ‘You said that all I needed to do was make a simple phone call, and I would be paid £500!’
‘I never did!’
Mary was incandescent, for Mavis persisted in denying her involvement. But Mary continued repeating that Mavis had asked her to make a phone call; moreover, with each repetition, she gave more details of the instructions she had been given and was now speaking so loudly that Mavis began to feel alarmed. At length she felt so desperate that she said to Mary, ‘But you didn’t make the bloody phone call, did you?’
‘How do you know I didn’t?’
‘Because the person you were supposed to be calling said he never received the call, and that’s why you aren’t getting paid!’
‘I thought you said you didn’t remember asking me to make a phone call! So how come you know that I didn’t make the call, tell me that, you scum bag!’
Mary was nonplussed, and reverted to her original profession of ignorance: ‘I haven’t the first idea what you’re talking about!’
‘You’ll find out soon enough!’ shouted Mary, as she stormed out of the pub.
Half an hour later, Mavis was feeling so despondent that she decided to call it a night and go home, so she left the pub and went out into the car park. Just as she was opening the door of her car to get in and drive home, Mary suddenly appeared out of the shadows: she had been lying in wait for Mavis to emerge.
‘I’ll get you, you bitch!’ Mary screamed.
‘Get away from me!’ Mavis yelled in return, taking a swing with her handbag towards Mary’s head.
Immediately Mary retaliated, wielding a knife with which she stabbed Mavis in the shoulder, whereupon Mavis screamed so loudly that a number of people ran out of the pub to find out what was going on in the car park. A couple of men gave Mavis first aid, while two or three more restrained Mary, until finally an ambulance came to take Mavis to the hospital; ultimately the police arrived to take Mary into custody.
Mary appeared at Cheltenham Magistrate’s Court the following day, where she was remanded in custody. Two or three months later she appeared at Gloucester County Court, on a charge of attempted murder: the jury found her not guilty of that charge, but guilty of occasioning Grievous Bodily Harm, and she was sent to prison for five years.
It was some time before the police finally unravelled the details of the betting coup, but unravel it they did. As part of their investigation of Mary, they searched her house, and found the letter giving her the instructions to make the late night phone call; she had been in such a panic that she had forgotten to destroy it as she had been instructed.
The following year two racehorse
trainers, a jockey, a vet, and several businessmen were convicted of conspiring to commit fraud, and were each sent to prison for an even longer period than was Mary. As for Mary’s two Irish guests, nobody came to take their winnings away, and the following year they were completely mystified at getting no answer when they tried to telephone Mary to see if they could stay with her during race week again!
‘Well, I never!’ exclaimed David’s wife once she had finished reading David’s final story. ‘That’s a cracking story, darling! Well done! I never expected it to turn out like that! I was expecting to read the name Theresa Dulson. What happened to her?’
‘Oh, I changed her name, just to be on the safe side! For Theresa Dulson, read Mary Fletcher.’
‘Oh, I see. And did all that really happen?’
More or less,’ replied David. ‘I put in one or two details when I found there was a gap in what I’d been able to find out, but I reckoned I was free to do that, given what you said to me…’
‘Remind me what I said to you,’ said Margaret. ‘I’ve forgotten…’
‘You said the author is God…’
THE END
The Author
Although he will shortly turn 87 years of age, Tony Whelpton is still working.
He has been writing books for forty years, but turned to fiction late in life, and has been so successful that he wishes he had started earlier! He is the author of thirty or so school and college text books – mostly in French – as well as two books on cricket, and a history of the Cheltenham Bach Choir, of which he became Vice-President after retiring from singing at the age of 80.
He was born in Nottingham, England, in January 1933, and was educated at High Pavement Grammar School (where he was taught English by the 1974 Booker Prize winner Stanley Middleton), and at the Universities of London and Lille.
He taught French for many years, first in secondary schools, then at university level. He is also an experienced journalist and broadcaster, and, for more than a quarter of a century, was universally recognised as one of the most influential authorities in the British school examination system.
At Dead of Night Page 19
