scant impression. He hated sharing a room with three other boys. He was always having the mickey ripped out of him, and hadn’t yet learned how to rip it back. In bed at night he lay under the sheets wishing he could be back at the stud coaxing Red.
Tipper’s loneliness was all the more intense because he’d begun thinking about girls. His were hopeless fantasies, alternating between the sexual and the impossibly romantic. None of the girls in the village would ever talk to Tipper, let alone dream of going out with him. He earned a pittance in wages, and for a year he looked like a tramp, not being possessed of a single good garment to wear. He spent the first twelve months saving for just one thing—a cheap suit to go to the races in, or the pub, or maybe even a club. Until then he had only the clobber he worked in, and that stank because, when it rained, the wet muck-sacks he carried across the yard leaked all over him. No girl would let him near, even if he’d had the courage to go up and ask for a date.
Tipper had been slaving at Doyle’s for two years when, during the winter off-season, word got around the yard that an interesting new two-year-old filly with a pedigree like royalty was coming to them. She’d had a disastrous start to her career on the oval US dirt-tracks and been picked up cheap in New York by Rupert Robinson, a pal of Doyle’s. Robinson, the youngest son of a hereditary English peer, thought of himself as a society playboy. Though he liked a gamble, he usually lost; a trend which his more astute friends thought unlikely to be reversed by this new acquisition.
‘She’s got the temper of an alley-cat,’ said her handler to Doyle when the fractious filly arrived in the yard. ‘She doesn’t like you anywhere close and she’d scratch your face to ribbons if she had claws.’
Watching from a distance, Tipper said nothing. But at lunchtime, as soon as the yard was quiet, he went to her stable, stood in front of the halfdoor and whispered her name: not the name chalked on the board by the door, Stella Maris, but his name for her. For Tipper had known her from the moment she’d jinked and propped her way down the ramp of the transporter.
‘Red!’ he whispered. ‘It’s me. Remember me?’
The filly’s first reaction was to lay her ears flat and try to bite his head. He dodged the attempt and, sliding the bolt open, slipped inside the stable. At once Red turned her back on him and let fly with one of her hind legs. She was anticipating a smack. So that was the trouble, Tipper thought. Some twat had been thrashing her, thinking it would bring her to hand. Naturally, it had had the opposite effect.
Quietly reciting her name over and over, he stooped and lowered himself until he was kneeling. Slowly, very slowly, he began inching towards Red, uttering calming words in a light singsong. Praying that she wouldn’t lash out again. If she did, and caught him on the head, she could kill him. But because he had crouched down he didn’t pose a threat to her. By the time he was a couple of yards from her he saw, maybe, a glimmer of recognition in her eyes. He slowly turned away and moved towards the door of the box. The straw behind him rustled. Then he felt the filly’s nose gently exploring his back, and he knew it had happened. She’d remembered him.
Five minutes later Tipper was standing at her head, rubbing her ears; for the first time since he’d arrived at Doyle’s, he began to feel hope. In fact it was stronger than that. He felt a tinge of excitement.
Tipper was straight onto the phone to Sam at lunchtime.
‘Sam. You’re not going to believe this. You won’t guess who walked into the yard this morning. You won’t believe it!’
‘Okay I’ll go for Lester Piggott. Or maybe Shergar. I know. Lester Piggott riding Shergar.’
‘Fock off Sam. It was Red. You remember Red?’
‘No. Can’t say I do. Some mare we met in the pub?’
‘Sam, stop messing with me. Red. You know the filly that we had on the stud. Who cut her leg. She’s here at Doyle’s. She’s called Stella Maris now.’
‘No way. That can’t be right. She went to America for Christ sake.’
‘Well she’s back Sam, and she hasn’t changed. She’s not easy, but by Christ is she a good sort.’
‘Please, Mr Kerly,’ he said a couple of days later to the Head Lad. ‘Let me ride the new filly’s work. I know her. I looked after her when she was a foal at Fethard. She was always a bit nervous, like, but we got on famously. Ask my uncle. You seen that scar on her leg? I was there when she got that, see?’
In his anxiety to get through to Kerly he was gabbling. He took a breath and went on more slowly.
‘I saved her life, the vet said, with a tourniquet. She’s a bit difficult all right, but I can quieten her. I can handle her.’
Stella Maris may have exasperated her American owners, but her genes wore diamond tiaras, and Doyle and her new owner, the Hon. Rupert Robinson, hoped that, by returning to the wide galloping turf tracks of home, and with the correct handling, she might soon be worth her weight in jewellery. So Kerly’s eyes widened in disbelief at Tipper’s request to take responsibility for this potential turf princess. He fired a gob of spit at the ground and told him straight.
‘Give it up, Tipper. Jesus this is a valuable filly. She’s got a hell of a pedigree. Now don’t be bothering me.’
Kerly soon learned how wrong he was. The new filly was so unbiddable she wouldn’t even walk out into the yard. When a lad went into her stable she’d sulk in the back of it and then lash out at him in self-defence. For a week Tipper looked on in mounting frustration, until he could bear it no longer. One morning, without dwelling on the consequences, he skipped breakfast and went down to the stable block. He let himself into Red’s box, hurriedly tacked her up and took her out for a hack.
Half an hour later they came trotting in again under perfect control. Joe Kerly was at the gate waiting. Tipper got the bollocking of his life, but he’d proved the point. Red became his ride every day.
Nico began his research in London. England was the cradle of the thoroughbred horse, and English racing retained just the right mixture of glamour, snobbery, chicanery and big money to satisfy a man like Shalakov. He stepped from a cab in Wardour Street and strolled through to Berwick Street market. Pushing his way through the throng of shoppers and market traders, Nico selected a number on his phone and, when it was answered, spoke briefly. It was only a short walk from here to his destination, a large basement club with a thick carpet and a dozen different ways of losing money, ranging from one-arm bandits to roulette and blackjack. Flitting between the tables were leggy hostesses in smart burgundy uniforms. The place was pretty empty bar a few excitable Chinese swarming round a roulette table like bees round a hive. A sallow-faced Arab sat expressionless near the roulette wheel, looking glumly at the table.
This dive was called the Piranha Club.
Nico was greeted at the bar by a figure known to his circle as the Duke. Aged somewhere in his fifties, the Duke looked innocuous enough. He had the slack, tapering body of a taxi driver, with fish-like hands, slightly grey skin and thinning straw coloured hair. A pair of large gold-framed bi-focals lived on the tip of his nose giving him a slightly studious look. But the benign appearance, as Nico knew, was seriously deceptive. Not only did the Duke own the Piranha Club, he was one of the largest private bookmakers in London.
‘All right, Nico my son? It’s been a while.’
‘Delighted to see you again, Duke.’
It was pretty well five years since Nico had first met the Duke. He’d needed to buy some marching powder for a client and had been sent in the Duke’s direction.
‘Vodka’s your tipple isn’t it?’
Nico rather wanted a champagne cocktail but that would have upset the Duke’s sense of what was proper. Nico was a Russian, and Russians drank vodka. Turning to the barman he ordered a bottle of Uluvka and a