The Price of Blood by Declan Hughes Page A

stopped, the trainer is covered."
    "So the entire game is corrupt."
    "Of course it is, darling. Not all the time—there are the glamour races everyone wants to win fair and square—but quite a lot of the time. And that’s just the day-to-day; we haven’t even mentioned doping, or when big gamblers or bookies bribe jockeys to throw races."
    "And that’s what Patrick Hutton and F. X. Tyrrell did with By Your Leave? They deliberately set out to lose the race?"
    "Of course. It was evens at Thurles, and the Christmas meeting at Leopardstown was looming, so they wanted to get the price up before then. Unfortunately, By Your Leave was such a great goer, and Patrick ended up being way too obvious. So the whole thing got a little sour. And Patrick got the blame."
    "Not from the Turf Club."
    "No, from the punters. The footage of it was pretty clear, you could see Patrick checking his placing and holding the horse back when the two front-runners had bolted. A furlong from home and he’s still at it, as if By Your Leave could have made up the ground."
    "Sounds like he was deliberately drawing attention to what he was doing."
    "That’s what some people said. That the row was between him and F.X., that Patrick wanted to give the horse a decent ride, that he wasn’t happy to be instructed otherwise. And the Turf Club would have caused too much scandal if they’d found anyone at fault. And of course, punters forgive and forget, they know this kind of thing goes on, Patrick would have lost the ride for Leopardstown, but he would have been back on winners soon enough, and everyone would have been happy."
    "And how did By Your Leave fare at Leopardstown that Christmas?"
    Miranda Hart shook her head and looked at me gravely.
    "By Your Leave never made it out of Tipperary—fell at the last fence. The going was unseasonably firm, and the horse broke her right ankle. Which might have been okay, but having unseated her rider, she took off at the gallop she’d been straining after all day. By the time the Tyrrellscourt lads caught her up, she’d broken the leg in thirty-four places. There was nothing anyone could do."
    I thought I saw tears in her eyes; the death of the horse seemed to matter more to her than the fate of her husband.
    "So what happened after that? Did Tyrrell and Hutton fall out? What did Patrick tell you?"
    "Do you know racing people, Mr. Loy? They’re not exactly what you’d call chatty. They’re certainly not introspective. I wasn’t looking for a blabbermouth. I have gob enough for two. Patrick never talked about work in any detail. He’d say, ’Not a bad horse,’ or ’Lucky today’—that’s what he talked about most often, when he talked: luck."
    "It sounds like he ran out of it at the last."
    "Maybe. He walked out on F.X. before he had the chance to be sacked. Refused to talk about that either. Said there were a few trainers in England who’d made inquiries, he’d take Christmas off, talk to them in the New Year."
    "Refused to talk about that. To his wife?"
    She shrugged again, flicking her hair back and pouting as she did so. It was very much her habit, but it had also been a tic of my ex-wife’s; I remembered now how incredibly irritating I used to find it in her; I found it weirdly alluring in Miranda Hart. She moved to stub her cigarette into her chewing gum and overturned her drink onto the crotch of her jeans. She climbed out of the chair amid a fusillade of
fucks
and
shits,
then stalked into the kitchen and returned with a few tea towels. She wiped the gin off the chair and the floor, and began to dab between her legs with a cloth, then thought better of it.
    "Clumsy fucking cow. I’m sorry, Mr. Loy, I’m soaked here, I’m going to have to get changed, have a shower. And I’m going out, so…"
    She looked toward the door, and I nodded and stood up.
    "Well, thanks for your time," I said. I gestured at the mud and straw on her boots. "I take it you’re a racing person yourself."
    She grinned