Dick Francis's Refusal Read Free

surely never tire of being called
Daddy
.
    â€œHello, darling,” I shouted back.
    Mrs. Squire allowed her through the gate, and she rushed over to me and took my hand, my right hand, my real hand, rather than the plastic-and-steel doppelgänger that existed on my left.
    In due course, Mrs. Squire also released Annabel, and she joined us.
    â€œTake Saskia’s other hand,” I told her, and we crossed the road safely in a line, continually looking both ways. There were almost no cars moving in the village other than those collecting the children from the school, but one could never be too careful.
    Saskia was my pride and joy, arriving exactly nine months to the day after my marriage to Marina.
    â€œWedding-night baby,” a friend had once said to me with a wink. “Good job she wasn’t early.”
    I had smiled back at him, knowing that, in fact, it had been a good job she’d been late. Marina had definitely said “I do” with a bun already cooking nicely in the oven.
    It had all seemed so easy. We had ceased the birth-control precautions, and—hey presto!—Marina had become pregnant instantly. It made it all the more frustrating that she had been unable to conceive again since Saskia’s birth.
    We had seen every fertility doctor worth his salt, and they all said there was no medical reason why. Just relax, they said, and it will happen. Well, we had relaxed, but it hadn’t happened in six years, and we were beginning to be resigned to the fact that Sassy would be our only child.
    However, Marina was still young enough, so we went on trying most nights with enthusiasm.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    M ARINA TOOK the two girls off for a walk around the village with the dogs while I went into my study and looked at the videos of each of the nine races on the
Racing Post
website.
    Something that I hadn’t appreciated from the bare written details was that none of the races had been close contests. On each occasion, the winner had come home well in front, largely unchallenged by the others.
    Not that this made them unusual. Many steeplechases are won by good jumping around the whole track rather than by a sprint over the last furlong.
    So was Sir Richard suspicious because he thought the other runners hadn’t been trying?
    I looked up the jockeys who had ridden in the races.
    Many of the same jockeys had ridden in more than one. But there was no general pattern with, for example, the same jockey winning each time.
    I looked again at the typed list. At the end of the factual information about each race someone, presumably Sir Richard, had added a few comments and observations.
    After one particular race at Sandown he had written, “Starting price 8/1, Tote paid only £5.60 for the win.” After another, at Newbury, he had put, “Winner at 10/1, Tote paid only £7.20.”
    Many of the others had the same sort of comments. The only thing that seemed to be consistent about each race was that the Tote win payout was much lower than might have been expected compared to the starting price.
    The Tote doesn’t use odds as a bookmaker would.
    If a bookmaker offers you a price of eight-to-one, then if the horse wins, the bookmaker will pay you out eight for every one that you staked, irrespective of how many people made the same bet. And the official starting price is an average of the bookmakers’ prices at the time the race starts.
    The Tote, however, is short for Totalizator and is a pari-mutuel system, meaning that the total of all the money staked on all the horses in the race is simply divided by the number of winning tickets to determine the payout, or return. Consequently, the Tote return odds are rarely exactly the same as the starting price, sometimes being greater and sometimes less, but it is very unusual for it to be so much smaller than the starting price, as it had been for all the races on the list.
    The only explanation for