Twice Shy

The time passed and Angelo, who had been so ubiquitous when I had been trying to avoid him, was nowhere to be seen. I walked among the bookmakers and asked others besides Taff, but none of them had seen Angelo at all that afternoon, and there was still no sign of him during the run-up to the Midlands Cup. If he had gone to Bath after all, I thought, I was wasting my time – but the only race that day on the O'Rorke tapes was the Midlands Cup; its only designated horse, Terrybow.

With less than five minutes to go, when the horses were already cantering down to the start, a tremendous burst of tic-tac activity galvanised the men with white gloves high on the stands who semaphored changes of odds. With no direct link like telephones or radio the bookmakers relied on tic-tac to tell them if large sums had been placed with their firms on any particular horse, so that they could bring down the offered price. Taff, watching his man signalling frenziedly, rubbed out the 20 written against Terrybow on his blackboard and with his piece of chalk wrote in 14. Along the row all the other bookies were similarly engaged. Terrybow fell again to 12.

'What's happening?' I said to Taff urgently.

He cast an abstracted eye in my direction. 'Someone down in the cheap ring is piling a stack on Terrybow.'

'Damn,' I said bitterly. I hadn't thought of looking for Angelo anywhere but round his usual haunts: certainly not in the comfortless far enclosure away down the course where the entrance fee was small, the view of the races moderate, and the expectation of the few-bookmakers trading there modest to the point of not being worth standing in the cold all afternoon. And even if I'd thought of it I wouldn't have gone there, because it would have meant risking missing Angelo in the paddock. Damn and blast, I thought. Damn Angelo today and all days and for the whole of his life.

'You knew something about this Terrybow,' Taff said to me accusingly.

'I didn't back it,' I said.

'Yeah, that's right, so you didn't. So what's going on?'

'Angelo Gilbert,' I said. 'He's betting where he isn't known in case you wouldn't give him a good price up here.'

'What? Really?' He laughed, rubbed out the 12 against Terrybow and replaced it with 20. A small rush of punters resulted and he took their money with relish.

I went up on the stands and watched in a fury while Terrybow ran true to his form and drifted in twelfth of fifteen. Ted Pitts, I thought bleakly, might as well have shoved me under the wheels of a truck.

I did see Angelo that afternoon, and so did practically everyone else who hadn't gone home before the sixth race.

Angelo was the angrily shouting epicentre of a fracas going on near the weighing-room; a row involving several bookmakers, a host of racegoers and some worried looking officials. Disputes between bookmakers and clients were traditionally dealt with on that spot by one particular Jockey Club official, the Ring Inspector. Angelo appeared to have punched him in the face.

The milling crowd parted a little and shifted and I found myself standing near the front of the onlookers with a clear view of the performance. The Ring Inspector was holding his jaw and trying to argue round his winces, six bookmakers were declaring passionately that money once wagered was lost for ever, and Angelo, waving his hard bunched fist, was insisting they gave it back.

'You tricked me,' he shouted. 'The whole bloody lot of you, you stole my cash.'

'You bet it fair and square,' yelled a bookmaker, wagging a finger forcefully in Angelo's face.

Angelo bit the finger. The bookmaker yelled all the harder.

A man standing next to me laughed but most of the onlookers had less objectively taken sides and it seemed that a general brawl needed only a flashpoint. Into the ugliness and among the angrily gesturing hands and violent voices walked two uniformed policemen, both very young, both slight, both looking poor opponents in size and in forcefulness for the prison-taught Angelo. The Ring Inspector said something to one of them which was inaudible to me in the hubbub and to his immense and visible surprise Angelo suddenly found himself wearing, on the wrist he happened not to be waving in the air at that moment, a handcuff.

His bellow of rage fluttered the pigeons off the weighing room roof. He tugged with his whole weight and the boy-policeman whose own wrist protruded from the other cuff was jerked off his feet onto his knees. It looked not impossible that Angelo could pick him up bodily and simply run off with him, but the second constable came to his rescue, saying something boldly to Angelo and pulling his radio-communicator out of the front of his uniform jacket to bring up reinforcements.

Angelo looked at the ring of spectators through which he had little real hope of pushing and at his unexpectedly adroit captor, now rising from his knees, and at the seething bookmakers who were showing signs of satisfaction, and finally straight at me.