Triple Crown

by Felix Francis

  In fondest memory of my dearest friend

  Diana Patin

  so much missed

  With thanks to my neighbour

  Andrew Higgins, MA, VetMB, MSc

  for his veterinary help and advice,

  and, as always, to Debbie

  The Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency, FACSA, as depicted in this novel, is fictitious. But it could exist. Perhaps it should.

  To capture the Triple Crown of American racing, a horse has to win the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes and the Belmont Stakes.

  The races are for three-year-olds only, so a horse gets only one chance.

  Three championship races in a period of just five weeks.

  In more than 140 years since the first running of all three races, only twelve horses have managed the feat.

  Between the Triple Crown being won in 1978 and 2015, thirteen horses won the first two legs but then failed in their attempt to capture the most elusive prize in world sport.

  PROLOGUE

  United Kingdom

  April

  1

  ‘Where are those goddamn cops?’ Tony Andretti said it under his breath, quiet as a whisper, but it was full of frustration nonetheless.

  ‘Calm down,’ I murmured back. ‘They’ll be here soon enough.’

  Tony and I were lying side by side, out of sight in the bushes, next to a lay-by off the A34 trunk road north of Oxford. We’d been in position for several hours, getting ever wetter thanks to the persistent rain.

  ‘Call them in now, Jeff,’ Tony hissed at me angrily. ‘Or we’ll lose them.’

  I ignored him and went on watching through my binoculars.

  Two men were standing in the lay-by, between the cars in which they had recently arrived, their heads bent close together as if they didn’t want to be over-heard. Not that there was much chance of that, I thought, not with a line of heavy lorries thundering past noisily on the dual carriageway only a dozen or so yards away.

  One of the men, the shorter of the two, removed a white envelope from his trouser pocket and handed it to the other, who then turned away from the road, conveniently facing directly towards me, as he counted the banknotes it contained.

  I used the camera built into my binoculars to take a couple of still shots as the man thumbed through the wad, then I switched to video mode and zoomed in, first on the money in the man’s hands and then up to his face. The light wasn’t perfect but my top-of-the-range digital system would be well able to cope.

  Obviously satisfied with its contents, the taller man stuffed the white envelope into his anorak and then handed over a small flat package. I filmed it all.

  ‘Now, Nigel,’ I said quietly but distinctly into the microphone taped to my left wrist.

  I went on filming as the two men briefly shook hands and then started to return to their respective cars.

  ‘We’re losing them,’ Tony said to me in an irritated tone.

  I was beginning to think that he might be right, that I’d left it too late, when a couple of police squad cars arrived at speed, screeching to a halt and blocking in the vehicles in the lay-by. Even before they had come to a complete stop, the doors were flung open and four uniformed officers spilled out.

  The shorter of the two men stood stock still, openmouthed in disbelief, but the taller one turned and ran – away from the police, and straight at me, at the same time removing a long-bladed knife from his coat pocket.

  ‘Knife!’ Tony shouted loudly from beside me, as he struggled to stand up.

  The man changed from looking back at the police to looking forward to where Tony and I had been hiding. He saw Tony, who was now on his feet, and turned slightly to go directly for him, the blade facing upwards in his left hand in a manner that suggested to me that he knew exactly how to use it.

  I rolled over, grabbed Tony by the ankles and pulled hard.

  He came down on top of me, his considerable bulk sprawling over my legs.

  ‘Let go of me,’ Tony shouted angrily, trying to kick out towards my face.

  I hung on tight.

  The man with the knife hurdled the two of us and ran off into the trees behind, pursued by a pair of the policemen.

  They’re welcome to him, I thought, even with their anti-stab vests. I’d been on the wrong end of a carving knife once before and had no wish to repeat the experience.

  I released Tony’s legs and we clambered to our feet.

  ‘What the hell were you doing?’ Tony shouted at me, his face puce with rage. ‘I could have had him.’

  ‘He’d have had you, more like,’ I said. ‘Better to live to fight another day.’

  Tony stood staring at me, his hands bunched into fists, adrenalin still coursing through his veins. I stared back at him.

  Slowly he relaxed and his fingers uncurled.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘Thanks. But I’d have taken him down if I’d had a piece.’

  ‘Tony, you’re no longer with the NYPD.’

  As a younger man, Tony had been a cop, one of ‘New York’s Finest’.

  ‘I can’t get my head round you Brits and guns. Not even your cops carry them. You’re just asking to get yourselves killed.’

  I resisted pointing out to him that, in the previous ten years, only a handful of British police officers had been killed on duty, whereas hundreds of American cops had died in the same period.

  The remaining two police officers had arrested the shorter of the men and were applying handcuffs to his wrists while relieving him of the package, which was then carefully enclosed in a plastic evidence bag.

  Nigel had followed the police in his own car and was now standing to one side watching. Tony and I went over to join him.

  ‘Well done,’ I said, slapping Nigel gently on the back.

  ‘You’re certainly a cool one, and no mistake,’ Nigel said, smiling at me. ‘It was as much as I could do to stop the boys in blue turning up as soon as they knew the men had arrived.’

  I smiled back at him. Nigel Green was a colleague of mine in the integrity service of the BHA, the British Horseracing Authority, and we had together spent several weeks setting up this operation after a tip-off. We had been surprised that the police had been so cooperative, agreeing to wait in a farm lane with Nigel until I called them in. Word of our past successes, when they alone had previously failed, had clearly filtered up to the powers that be.

  ‘Damn right he’s cool,’ Tony said. ‘Nerves of steel. I’d have called the cops in far sooner.’

  ‘I’m not cool,’ I said jokily. ‘At least, not in that sense.’ In temperature terms, I was extremely cool, and very wet. I shivered. ‘If the posse had turned up before the package was handed over we wouldn’t have been able to implicate both men. That’s all.’

  ‘Do you think those guys will get their man?’ Tony asked in his rich New York accent, looking over his shoulder towards the woods.

  ‘Eventually,’ I said. ‘If not today then sometime soon. I have all the evidence we need on disc.’ I tapped the binocular-camera round my neck.

  The arrested man was frogmarched past us towards the police cars by two tall officers who made him look even smaller than he actually was.

  He stared at me with hatred in his eyes.

  ‘Hinkley, you’re a bastard.’ He said it with feeling.

  ‘You shouldn’t get mixed up with drugs, Jimmy,’ I said.

  The man was placed in the back of the police car.

  ‘He knows you, then?’ Tony said to me.

  ‘Indeed he does,’ I said. ‘Jimmy and I have crossed swords before.’

  Jimmy Robinson was a jockey, quite a good jockey, who had previously tested positive for cocaine and been banned from riding for six months as a result. That
had been two years ago but he had clearly not learned his lesson.

  ‘I thought you always worked undercover.’

  ‘I used to, but things change.’

  It was a consequence of being a long time in the job. When I’d first started as an investigator at the BHA, fresh out of the army, I worked my entire time incognito, often using false beards and glasses to ensure that, even if I were seen, no one would recognise me again. But gradually, over time, my name and face were slowly put together by the racing fraternity and my covert work was now limited, although I could still occasionally get away with it provided I employed some of my more elaborate disguises.

  It was a situation I was not happy with. I had enjoyed living in the shadows, rather than in the spotlight.

  For some time I had even considered leaving the BHA altogether, packing up and moving abroad, possibly to Australia, to start again where my face was unknown.

  The two policemen returned from the woods empty-handed, which didn’t please Tony.

  ‘They should have caught him,’ he said to me. ‘Your cops need to be fitter.’

  I thought that was rather rich coming from him. Tony could hardly run fast enough to catch a cold. He had clearly put on far more than the odd pound since his days on the force.

  ‘We’ll have to call the dogs out,’ one of the policemen said. ‘They’ll soon find him.’

  ‘Get a helicopter up,’ Tony said, almost as an order. The policeman shook his head. ‘No point. Even their heat-seeking cameras can’t see through that lot.’

  I looked past him into the trees. It was, in fact, more of a plantation than a natural wood, with evergreen firs standing cheek by jowl for as far as I could see, which wasn’t very far at all due to a lack of illumination beneath the trees. If visible light couldn’t penetrate the cover, it was no surprise that infrared would be unable to do so either.

  ‘Do you need us any more?’ I asked.

  ‘Not here,’ said the senior officer. ‘But you will each need to give a statement concerning this operation. Can you do that on a Section 9 Form?’

  ‘No problem,’ I said. ‘I have one on my laptop.’

  Section 9 of the UK Criminal Justice Act 1967 allowed written statements to be accepted by a court as evidence, provided they obeyed certain conditions. The Section 9 Form wasn’t absolutely essential but it contained the necessary declarations of truthfulness and I was happy to oblige. The police had been uncharacteristically helpful so far and I had no wish to upset them.

  ‘Come on, Tony,’ I said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  Tony was my shadow, as he had been for the past two and a half weeks. His official title was Deputy Director at the Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) based in Washington, DC, and he was on a fact-finding mission to the UK to learn how the integrity service operated at the BHA.

  He and I had instantly liked each other and I had enjoyed having him around, while he, in turn, had developed a love for British steeplechasing, and especially for the Grand National.

  Ten days previously, Tony and I had travelled north by train from London to Liverpool for the big race.

  He couldn’t get over the excitement that a single jumping race could generate in the population as a whole, with everyone discussing the relative merits of the forty runners, and every workplace running its own sweepstake.

  ‘At home in the States, steeplechase racing is mostly a small-town affair, run by farmers out in the boondocks. You’d be lucky to have more than a couple of tents in a field somewhere with some temporary bleachers. Nothing like this.’ He had waved his hand expansively at Aintree’s towering grandstands and the impressive media centre.

  ‘Over seventy thousand will be here today,’ I’d said, as Tony had shaken his head in disbelief, ‘with tens of millions more watching live on television.’

  And the Grand National itself had certainly lived up to all the hype with the eight-to-one favourite catching the long-time leader on the line to win by a nose in a photo finish.

  ‘Amazing,’ Tony had said repeatedly, as the victor was loudly cheered all the way to the winner’s circle, flanked by two police horses. ‘Is all your jump racing like this?’

  ‘No,’ I’d said, laughing. ‘You should try a wet winter Wednesday at Hexham. Two men and a dog if you’re lucky.’

  I had gone to the National not for any specific reason but simply to watch and listen, to gather intelligence and, maybe, to defuse any trouble before it started. At least that’s what I’d told myself, although I had mostly wanted to show off one of the great showpieces of British racing to my American guest.

  He had not been disappointed.

  Back in the lay-by, a police van arrived with a pair of vicious-looking German shepherds barking loudly through the rear windows.

  Nigel, Tony and I stood watching as the excited, snarling dogs were removed from the vehicle by their handler, a mountain of a man with hands as large as any I had ever seen. He crouched down to cuddle each dog in turn, allowing them to nuzzle their snouts into his neck, sharp teeth and all.

  Rather him than me, I thought.

  After this moment of tenderness, it was time for work.

  The dogs were first taken over to the car that belonged to the fugitive and given a few moments to register his scent. Then they were off into the woods, the strain on their leads almost pulling over the handler. A smaller man would have had no chance.

  ‘I’m glad I’m not the one they’re chasing,’ Nigel said. ‘Did you see those bloody fangs?’

  We all laughed but with a slight nervousness – it was really not a joking matter.

  ‘I’ll miss all this excitement,’ Tony said to us with a smile as we climbed into Nigel’s car. ‘I’m back to being stuck at my boring desk from next Monday.’

  ‘Don’t you get out into the field at all?’ I asked.

  ‘Not much any more. I’m getting too old. And too fat.’ He guffawed loudly and clasped his hands round his substantial midriff. ‘Nowadays I have a team of young pups like you to do all my legwork.’

  He remained unusually quiet and pensive all the way back to London, a smile never leaving his face. He didn’t elaborate on what was occupying his mind and I didn’t press him. He would tell me if he wanted to.

  He didn’t. Not then, anyhow.

  2

  ‘Diuretics!’

  ‘Yup. Mostly diuretics together with a few laxatives.’

  ‘No cocaine?’

  ‘Not even a dusting.’

  ‘Amphetamines? Or ecstasy?’

  ‘Nope. Nothing.’

  ‘Bugger!’

  It was the following morning in my office at BHA headquarters in Central London. Nigel was giving Tony and me the bad news about the contents of the handed-over package.

  ‘The cops aren’t very happy about it either, I can tell you,’ Nigel said. ‘My contact says they’ve dropped the investigation and released Jimmy Robinson with no charges and an abject apology. The chief superintendent is really angry and intends to call Paul Maldini to give him what for.’ Paul Maldini was Head of Operations at the BHA – our boss. ‘He claims we’ve made them look like foolish amateurs.’

  To be fair, I suppose we had. But we had also made fools out of ourselves.

  Nigel had received a tip-off from one of his regular cluster of covert informants that Jimmy Robinson was again dealing in drugs. Perhaps I had been naïve or careless in assuming that the drugs in question were unlawful, but Jimmy had previous form in that respect. I had called in the police and, with much pushing on my part, the matter had eventually gone right to the top with the Director General of the National Crime Agency applying to the Home Secretary for a communication intercept warrant on Robinson’s mobile telephone. That’s how we knew where and when to wait for the hand-over.

  ‘Couldn’t they indict Robinson for anything?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Purchasing medicines without a prescription?’ Nigel raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s hardly grand theft auto. You or
I could do the same on the Internet.’

  ‘Then why all the cloak-and-dagger stuff in some deserted lay-by?’ I asked. But I already knew the answer. Whereas the drugs purchased may have not been illegal according to the Misuse of Drugs Act, both diuretics and laxatives were banned substances for jockeys under the Rules of Racing.

  ‘Does Jimmy Robinson have trouble with his weight?’ I asked.

  ‘Doesn’t every jockey?’ Nigel replied.

  It was true.

  Rises in racing weights had never kept up with the increasing height and bulk of the population as a whole. Before diuretics were added to the list of banned substances in 1999, their use had been widespread by jockeys of all abilities to control their weight.

  One former champion jockey once joked to me about taking a handful of pee-pills every day as his only breakfast. ‘The trouble was,’ he said, ‘they made me so dehydrated I got dreadful cramps. On one occasion I remember being given a leg-up in the paddock and being unable to get my left foot into the iron because of it. Had to bump-trot the horse all the way to the start before it eased.’

  Another told me he regularly used laxatives, taking them by the packet-full. ‘Explosive decompression,’ he’d said with a laugh. ‘I’d pebbledash the ceiling if I wasn’t careful.’

  I’d asked him what the jockeys did now that those drugs had all been banned. ‘Fingers down the throat, mate,’ he’d said. ‘Eat to ease the hunger pain then throw it all back up again so as not to put on any weight. Not clever really.’

  ‘Can’t do much for their teeth.’

  ‘Teeth?’ He’d laughed again. ‘Bugger the teeth. Most of those get knocked out in falls anyway.’

  I dragged my mind back to the matter in hand.

  ‘Surely Jimmy would know we would test him for diuretics,’ I said.

  ‘The police lab says this is something new. Still a thiazide, whatever that means, but a synthetic version. Perhaps Jimmy thought it wouldn’t show up in a test. And maybe he’s right.’

  ‘Why do these bloody drug firms keep muddying the water with new compounds?’ I sighed. ‘Don’t they realise we’re trying to stop the cheats?’