Bloodline

I was up in my commentary position well before the first race. I liked commentating at Stratford not least because it was one of the minority of racecourses with the parade ring in front of the grandstands. That gave me more opportunity to study the colours.

I used my binoculars to scrutinize the horses as they walked round and round. I habitually used the race cards as printed in the Racing Post, with their reproduced colour diagrams of the jockeys’ silks. Now I made notes in black felt-tip pen of which horses had white marks on their faces, or had sheepskin nosebands, or blinkers, or visors, or white bridles, or breast girths, or anything else that might help me recognize them if I couldn’t distinguish the colours, something that was not unknown if the track was very muddy.

Not that that would be an issue today, I thought, not on a fine September afternoon when the problem for the racecourse had been too little water, not too much. Indeed, the dry conditions and the firmness of the track meant that the number of declared runners in each race was small. It made my life easy but it wasn’t good for racing in general.

I watched as the jockeys came out of the weighing room and into the paddock. I couldn’t help but think back to the last time I’d seen Clare doing the same thing at Lingfield. If only, I thought for the umpteenth time, if only I had known then what would happen later. I could surely have prevented it.

Suddenly the horses were coming out onto the racecourse and I had been daydreaming instead of learning the colours. Get a grip, I told myself.

Fortunately there were only eight runners in the novice hurdle and many of them I knew well from having seen them run before. It would be an easy reintroduction to commentary for me. It seemed like longer than just the eleven days since I’d last done it at Lingfield.

I switched on my microphone and described the horses as they made their way to the two-mile start on the far side of the course.

‘Hi, Mark,’ said Derek’s voice into my ears through the headphones. ‘Coming to you in one minute.’

Derek, sitting in the blacked-out RacingTV scanner truck, was at Chepstow racecourse, some seventy miles away to the south-west in Wales. He would be watching the same pictures that I had on the monitor in front of me, pictures that showed the eight runners here at Stratford circling while they had their girths tightened by the starter’s assistant.

‘Ten seconds,’

said his voice into my ears. ‘Five, four, three...’ He fell silent.

‘The starter is moving to his rostrum,’ I said into the live microphone. ‘They’re under starters orders. They’re off.’

The race was uneventful with the eight horses well strung out even by the time they passed the stands for the first time. On the second circuit three of them pulled up and the other five finished in an extended line astern with not a moment’s excitement between them.

I tried my best to sound upbeat about the winner as he strode away after the last hurdle to win by twenty lengths, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. He’d been a well-backed favourite and most of the punters were happy.

‘Thanks, Mark,’ said Derek into my ears.

‘Back with you for the next.’

I sighed. The fun suddenly seemed to have gone out of my job.

I stayed in the commentary box between the first two races and thought about what Toby Woodley had written in the Gazette. Was he just trying to get even for being humiliated by my father, or was there more to his story? Did he really have his sources and knowledge of a betting syndicate, or had he made up the whole thing?

If so, he was a bit too close to the mark for my liking.

I decided that perhaps I shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about it. The last thing I wanted was to attract any unwelcome scrutiny of Clare’s recent riding. I just hoped that the story was a one-day wonder that would quickly fade away to nothing, and that everybody would soon forget about it.

Fat chance of that.

Thankfully, the second race was more exciting than the first, this time with seven runners battling it out over fences in a two-and-half-mile Beginners’ Steeplechase.

‘Beginners’ were horses that had never won a steeplechase before, either on a racecourse proper, or at a recognized point-to-point meeting, and it showed, with two of the seven falling at the first fence. However, the remaining five put up more of a contest, with three of them still in with a chance at the last and fighting out a tight finish to the line.

That was more like it, I thought, smiling as I clicked off my microphone.

‘First number one, Ed Online,’ Terence the judge called over the public address from his box next door, ‘second number three, third number six, the fourth horse was number two. Distances were a neck, and half a length.’