Twice Shy Read online

  Harry Gilbert lay in a big bed facing the window, ill and growing old but still in some indefinable way not defenseless, even in pyjamas.

  “I tried to stop him,” Eddy was saying ineffectually.

  “Take this tray and go away,” Harry Gilbert said to him, and Eddy picked from the bedclothes the half-eaten breakfast which I had interrupted. “Shut the door.” He waited until Eddy had retreated and then frostily to me said, “Well?”

  “I’ve discovered,” I said with urgency, “that Liam O’Rorke’s betting system has the equivalent of smallpox. It should be treated like the plague. It’ll bring trouble to all who touch it. The old system has been through too many hands, been adulterated by the years. It’s gone bad. If you want to save your cash you’ll stop Angelo using it, and it’s pointless getting angry with me on any counts. I got the system for you in good faith and I’m furious to find it’s useless. Bring Angelo in here and let me tell him.”

  Harry Gilbert stared at me with his usual unreadable face, and it was without any visible consternation that he said in his semi-slurred way, “Angelo isn’t here. He is cashing my check at the bank. He is going to Leicester races.”

  “He will lose,” I said. “I didn’t need to warn you, but I am. Your money will be lost.”

  Thoughts must have traversed the brain behind the cold eyes but nothing much showed. Finally, and it must have been with an inner effort, he said, “Can you stop him?”

  “Stop the check,” I said. “Call the bank.”

  He glanced at a clock beside him. “Too late.”

  “I can go to Leicester,” I said. “I’ll try to find him.”

  After a pause he said, “Very well.”

  I nodded briefly and left him, and drove toward Leicester feeling that even if I had managed to convince Harry, which was in itself uncertain, I was facing the impossible with Angelo. The impossible all the same had to be tried: and at least, I thought, he wouldn’t actually attack me on a busy racecourse.

  Leicester races on that cold autumn day turned out to be as busy as a well-smoked beehive, with only a scattering of dark-coated figures trudging about doggedly, head-down in the biting wind. As sometimes happened on city-based tracks on weekdays the crowd was thin to the point of embarrassment, the whole proceedings imbued with the perfunctory and temporary air of a ritual taking place without fervor.

  Taff was stamping about by his beer crate, blowing on his fingers and complaining that he would have done better business if he’d gone to the day’s other meeting at Bath.

  “But there’s the Midlands Cup here,” he said. “It’ll be a good race. I thought it would pull them. And look at them, not enough punters to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ around a teapot.” The Welsh accent was ripe with disgust.

  “What are you making favorite?” I said smiling.

  “Pink Flowers.”

  “And what about Terrybow?”

  “Who?”

  “Runs in the Midlands Cup,” I said patiently. Terrybow, the computer’s choice, top of the win factors. Terrybow with a habit of finishing tenth of twelve, or seventh of eight, or fifteenth of twenty: never actually last but a long way from success.

  “Oh, Terrybow.” He consulted a notebook. “Twenties, if you like.”

  “Twenty to one?”

  “Twenty-fives then. Can’t say fairer than twenty-five. How much do you want?”

  “How much would you take?”

  “Whatever you like,” he said cheerfully. “No limit. Not unless you know something I don’t, like it’s stuffed to the eyeballs with rocket dust.”

  I shook my head and looked along the row of cold disgruntled bookmakers who were doing a fraction of their usual trade. If Angelo had been among them I would have seen him easily, but there was no sign of him. The Midlands Cup was the fourth race on the program and still an hour ahead, and if Angelo was sticking rigidly to the disaster-laden system, Terrybow would be the only horse he would back.

  “Have you seen Angelo Gilbert here today, Taff?” I asked.

  “No.” He took a bet from a furtive-looking man in a raincoat and gave him a ticket. “Ten at threes, Walkie-Talkie,” he told his clerk.

  “How’s Lancer?” I asked. “Can’t see him here.”

  “Cursing muggers and rubbing a lump.” He took another tenner from a purposeful woman in glasses. “Ten at eights, Engineer. Some kids rolled old Lancer on his own doorstep. I ask you, he carries thousands around the racecourse, pays it in to his firm at the end of the day, and then goes and gets himself done for fifty quid.”

  “Did he see who robbed him?”

  “One of Joe Glick’s other boys who’s here says it was a bunch of teenagers.”

  Not Angelo, I thought. Well, it wouldn’t have been. But if only he would . . .

  I looked speculatively at Taff, who worked for himself and did carry his takings home at the end of the day. Pity one couldn’t catch Angelo in the act of trying to retrieve his stake money after Terrybow had lost. Pity one couldn’t arrange for the police to be on hand when Angelo mugged Taff on the way home.

  I’m down to fantasies, I thought: it’s depressing.

  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 galvanized 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 signaling 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 around 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 epicenter 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 p
articular 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 around his winces, six bookmakers were declaring passionately that money once wagered was lost forever, and Angelo, waving his hard bunched fist, was insisting they give 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 the 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.

  He took a step toward me with such strength that the half-risen policeman lost his balance again and fell on his back, his arm twisting awkwardly over his head, stretching in the handcuff. There was about Angelo suddenly such an extraordinary growth of menace, something so different from a mere racecourse argument, that the thronging voices fell away to silence and eyes looked at him with age-old fright. The monstrous recklessness seemed to swell his whole body, and even if his words were banal, his gritty voice vibrated with a darkness straight out of myth.

  “You,” he said deliberately. “You and your fucking brother.”

  There was an awareness in his face of the attentive crowd of witnesses around us and he didn’t say aloud what was in his mind, but I could hear it as clearly as if he’d woken the sleeping hills.

  I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.

  It was a message not so much new as newly intense. More than ever implacable. A promise, not a threat.

  I stared back at him as if I hadn’t heard, as if it wasn’t there looking at me out of his eyes. He nodded however as if savagely satisfied and turned with a contemptuous shrug to the rising policeman, jerking him the last few inches to upright; and he went, after that, without fighting, walking away between the two constables toward a police car which was driving in through the gates. The car halted. They put him in the backseat between them and presently rolled away, and the now strangely quiet crowd began to spread and disperse.

  A voice in my ear, the Welsh voice of Taff, said, “You know what set all that off?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The bookies down in the cheap ring told Angelo he was a right mug. They were laughing at him, it seems. Joshing him, but friendly like to start with. They said they’d be happy to keep on taking his money, because if he thought he’d bought Liam O’Rorke’s old system he’d been robbed, duped, bamboozled, made a fool of and generally conned from here to Christmas.”

  Dear God.

  “So then this Angelo sort of exploded and started trying to get his stake back.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well,” Taff said cheerfully. “It all makes a change, though I reckon those goons in the cheap ring would have done better to keep their mouths shut. That Angelo was a bit of a golden goose and after this he won’t lay no more golden eggs.”

  I drove home with a feeling that the seas were closing over my head. Whatever I did to try to disentangle myself from Angelo it seemed that I slid further into the coils.

  He was never, after this, going to believe that I hadn’t tricked him on purpose. Even if I could at last get him the correct system, he wouldn’t forgive me the bets lost, the sneers of the bookmakers, the click of those handcuffs.

  The police might hold him overnight, I thought, but not much longer: I doubted if one punch and a few yells would upset his parole. But to the tally in his mind would be added a night in the cell to rankle with those in my cellar . . . and if he’d come out of prison angry enough to attack me with nothing against me but the fact of my being Jonathan’s brother, how much more would he now come swinging?

  Cassie had long been home when I finally got there and was buoyantly pleased with the prospect of having the cast off her arm on the following afternoon. She had arranged a whole day off from work and had thanked the groper for the last time, confident that she would be able to drive more or less at once. She was humming in the kitchen while I cooked some spaghetti for supper, and I kissed her abstractedly and thought of Angelo and wished him dead with all my heart.

  Before we had finished eating, the telephone rang and most unexpectedly it was Ted Pitts calling from Switzerland. His voice, on the whole, was as cool as the Alps.

  “Thought I’d better apologize,” he said.

  “It’s kind of you.”

  “Jane’s disgusted with me. She told me to ring you at once. She said it was urgent. So here I am. Sorry, and all that.”

  “I just wondered,” I said hopelessly, “why you did it.”

  “Mashed up the weightings?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll think I’m mean. Jane says I’m so mean she’s ashamed of me. She’s furious. She says all our wealth is due to Jonathan, and I’ve played the most rotten trick on Jonathan’s brother. She’s hardly speaking to me she’s so cross.”

  “Well . . . why?” I said.

  He did at least seem to want me to understand. He spoke earnestly, explaining, excusing, telling me the destructive truth. “I don’t know. It was an impulse. I was making those copies, and I suddenly thought I don’t want to part with this system. I don’t want anyone else to have it. It’s mine. Not Jonathan’s, just mine. He didn’t even want it, and I’ve had it to myself all these years, and I’ve added to it and made it my own. It belongs to me. It’s mine. And there you were, just asking for it as if I would give it to you as of right, and I suddenly thought, why should I? So I just quickly changed a lot of the weightings. I didn’t have time to test them. I had to guess. I altered just enough, I thought, but it seems I did too much. Otherwise you wouldn’t have checked. I intended that when you used the system you wouldn’t win enough to think it worth all the work, and you’d get tired of it.” He paused. “I was jealous of you having it, if you really want to know.”

  “I wish you’d told me—”

  “If I’d said I didn’t want to give it to you, Jane would have made me. She says I must now. She’s so cross.”

  “If you would,” I said, “you might save me a lot of grief.”

  “Make your fortune, you mean.” The apology, it seemed, hadn’t come from the heart: he still sounded resentful that I should be learning his secrets.

  I thought again about telling him about Angelo but it still seemed to me that he might think it the best reason for not giving me the system, so I said merely, “It could work for two people, couldn’t it? If someone else had it, it wouldn’t stop you yourself winning as much as ever.”

  “I suppose,” he said grudgingly, “that that’s true.”r />
  “So . . . when do you come home?”

  “The week after next.”

  I was silent. Appalled. By the week after next heaven knew what Angelo would have done.

  Ted Pitts said with half-suppressed annoyance, “I suppose you’ve betted heavily on the wrong horses and lost too much, and now you need bailing out a lot sooner than the week after next?”

  I didn’t dispute it.

  “Jane’s furious. She’s afraid I’ve cost you more than you can afford. Well . . . I’m sorry.” He didn’t truly sound it.

  “Could she find the tapes to give to me?” I said humbly.

  “How soon do you need them?”

  “More or less at once. Tonight, if possible.”

  “Hmph.” He thought for a few seconds. “All right. All right. But you can save yourself the journey, if you like.”

  “Er, how?”

  “Do you have a tape recorder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jane can play the tapes to you over the telephone. They’ll sound like a lot of screeching. But if you’ve a halfway decent recorder the programs will run all right on a computer.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “A lot of computer programs whiz around the world on telephones every day,” he said. “And up to the satellites and down again. Nothing extraordinary in it.”

  To me it did seem extraordinary, but then I wasn’t Ted Pitts. I thanked him with more intensity than he knew for his trouble in ringing me up.

  “Thank Jane,” he said.

  I did thank her, sincerely, five minutes later.

  “You sounded in such trouble,” she said. “I told Ted I’d sent you to Ruth because you’d wanted to check the tapes, and he groaned, so I asked him why . . . and when he told me what he’d done I was just furious. To think of you wasting your precious money when everything we have is thanks to Jonathan.”

  Her kindness made me feel guilty. I said, “Ted said you could play the real tapes to me over the telephone, if you wouldn’t mind.”