Free The Price of Murder by Bruce Alexander Page B

at Mr. Patley and snarled some quite incomprehensible malediction at him.
    “And right back at you, sir,” responded Mr. Patley to him. And then, to me, he said: “Come along, Jeremy. We’ve got us a good place to watch from.”
    And he then guided me along the course to one of the horse carts placed there as a marker on the way. He was right. The cart provided an excellent view of the race course, and the two Bow Street Runners, my companions, were incomparably well-informed guides to the sport. Nor was I surprised by their knowledge, for Mr. Baker was well known in Bow Street for his love of the turf; and it did but stand to reason that Mr. Patley, who had done army service in the King’s Carabineers, a mounted regiment, would bring with him his equine interests into civilian life. The two men carried on long-running debates on the virtues of this horse or that, or one jockey or another. In sum, I could not have found two better teachers in all of London.
    My education began with a question.
    “Tell me, Jeremy,” said Mr. Baker, “is this your first time out to a race?”
    I admitted that it was so, and, in my defense, offered about the same excuses I’d given to Mr. Hogg when he asked me if I had ever seen Deuteronomy Plummer race. All that I had said was true, of course, yet what was also true was that I simply had not had the right sort of occasion to do so.
    “Well, you come to the right place to start,” said Mr. Patley.
    “Why? Is this one expected to be a specially good one?”
    “Oh, it’ll be good enough,” he assured me. “There’s a lot of good horses and a lot of good riders. But that ain’t really what I had in mind.”
    “What then?”
    “Well, this right here—the Shepherd’s Bush Common—is about the best, and cert’ny the longest course round London.”
    “Just look at it,” put in Mr. Baker as he gestured toward the large expanse before us. “There’s a full eight acres here the way it’s laid out. And when horses make it four times round carrying their riders, that’s quite a stretch for them.”
    “I can see that,” I assured him.
    “Only thing wrong with it,” said Patley, “is that it’s laid out kind of peculiar.”
    “Peculiar in what way?”
    “Take a look at it. See? It goes from the start, to there, to up here where we are, and then back to the start again. In other words, it’s a triangular course.”
    “They laid it out that way to make it long as they could,” said Mr. Baker, “but it makes for an awful big scramble and pileup here.”
    “Where?” I asked, not quite understanding.
    “Right here, where we are in this horse cart. See, Jeremy, this cart where we’ve taken our places to watch all, this serves as the ‘Distance Post.’ They’ve all got to go round it and sometimes it gets kind of crowded. If they fail to circle it, or haven’t circled it by the time the leader has made one full tour of the course, then they must drop out of all the following heats. You understand now, don’t you?”
    “Oh, well, yes—yes, of course.” Or so I said. In truth, I had understood only a portion of it. Yet, it seemed to me that I should understand quite all after I had watched a heat of the race run.
    “Good lad,” said both together in what seemed a single voice.
    I hung over the side of the cart and studied the final preparations for the race at some distance. Two drummer boys beat a rat-tat-tat upon their drums, signaling that the horses were to come forward to the starting line.
    As they came up, I asked, “Which of the riders is Deuteronomy Plummer?”
    “Aw, I heard you met him and came to watch him particular,” said Mr. Patley. “Well, that’s the man, third along the line. See?”
    Yes, I did see. There was little to distinguish him from the rest of the jockeys—only the colors that he wore, which were green and white. They were indeed a colorful lot. Every color of the rainbow and all mixtures thereof were there at the starting line.