Taking the Fall Read Free

kidneys, and the diuretic pills meant he was going to have to stop pretty soon. He wished he’d stopped at the last services, but time was short if he was going to make the race. He looked at his watch and gave the accelerator a little more toe. The motor spat in response.
    He wished he could pile up enough money to give his old dad one of these things. Not that his father was at all interested in cars. There was only one kind of horsepower for Charlie, and that was the kind where you pumped oats in one end and shovelled shit from the other. But when he made it, he would give his dad one of these anyway.
    He looked at his watch. He was going to have to floor it to make the race in time.
    School had come and gone and had barely touched Duncan. It wasn’t that he didn’t get along with his teachers – though the old lippy problem had got him into a couple of scrapes with teachers and older boys alike – it was just that all that geography and maths and other stuff didn’t seem to stick.
    ‘Don’t you worry,’ his dad had told him. ‘You’re too sharp for ’em, that’s the problem. You’ve got brains enough. It’s just a different kind of brains.’
    And his dad was right: Duncan did have a brain. What kind of brain that was became clear one day when he was just nine years old and Charlie took him along to a race meeting in Leicester in the East Midlands, not far from the stables. It was a day of sunshine and the jockeys’ bright silks were shimmering and flying like flags at a gala. Duncan was mesmerised by the tic-tac men and the antics of the bookies’ runners. His dad gave him a brief explanation of what the signs meant, explaining that some of the gestures were secret. Duncan went over and stood by the white-painted rail dividing Tattersalls from the Silver Ring. He watched the signs and observed the runners, and then he studied the bookies’ chalkboards as the odds tumbled or went way out. Pretty soon he had it all worked out.
    His dad was sceptical at first. ‘You can’t know that,’ he said. ‘Not for sure you can’t.’
    ‘Yes I can. It’s a pattern.’
    ‘I know it’s a pattern, but—’
    ‘I can tell when this one in Tattersalls is talking to his mate in the Silver Ring. He’s telling him too many people are backing one of the horses.’
    His dad, who always wore a sporting trilby and a moth-eaten sheepskin coat, tipped his hat back on his head and thought for a moment. He studied the form in his folded newspaper. A minute later he said, ‘You little beauty! You sodding little beauty!’ and gave him a tenner.
    Duncan, small for his years, had approached a bookie with the terrific name of Billy B. Bonsor. Billy B. Bonsor had a beautifully painted fairground-style board with the slogan ‘Payment as a Matter of Honour’. Mr Bonsor (so Duncan took the man to be) stood on an upturned wooden crate and announced as if to the entire racetrack, ‘Very young fellow says ten on Midnight at sevens and who knows it?’ Another man standing behind the crate recorded the bet in a ledger and Duncan was handed a betting slip. Before he released the slip, Billy B. Bonsor gave Duncan a weird look. Then he ran a finger under his nose and wiped the board, dropping Midnight Rambler from 7–1 to 5–1. Then he wiped the board again and changed it to 9–2.
    Duncan ran back to his dad and gave him the betting slip. ‘Why did he drop the odds?’ he asked.
    ‘He thinks someone sent you with the bet.’
    ‘But you did!’
    ‘Yes.’
    His dad told him that there was good money and mug’s money in gambling and that theirs was mug’s money, even though they were in the business. Mug’s money it might have been, but Midnight Rambler strolled home, and after deducting the stake, his dad let Duncan split the take. Thirty-five pounds was an inconceivable amount of money for a nine-year-old boy.
    But what mesmerised Duncan even more than the tic-tac men and the painted boards was the racing itself. There was