The Old Contemptibles Read Online Free PDF Page A

good—three-to-one. It’s your horse, lad. Fortune’s Son.” He laughed.
    “I like it.” The boy smiled through the tracery of narrow limbs already coming into leaf. March had been warm. He picked off a leaf, looked at it, shoved it in his pocket. “All right. Let’s do five hundred. No, a little more. Seven. To win. That’s real money.”
    “If he takes it.”
    “And if you’re right.” The boy laughed. He took out a cigarette, fired up a match, and sat there on the cool branch-bench, letting the next race go by. Then he snapped up his binoculars, watched the horses readying at the post for the eighth. He slewed the Zeiss along the line to number eight. She was on the outside. Still. Eighth horse in the eighth race. And he loved the silks, gold and blue. Fortune’s Son.
    They broke away and for a minute and a quarter the boy held his breath as he watched them leap hedges and ditches as if he’d actually put seven hundred quid on the line.
    Fortune’s Son came in first. “Call,” the boy yelled into his phone.
    His friend in the car hit the digits.
    The boy in the tree waited, binoculars still on the jockey’s silks, the smashing bay horse looking as if he knew he’d won. He bet they did, the horses. He bet they knew.
    The phone crackled. He held it to his ear.
    A chuckle. “Laddie, the damned fool fell for it. Couldn’t resist that seven hundred. That’s twenty-one-hundred quid!” He let out a gleeful yell.
    “Go collect. And meet me here tomorrow. Say, during games. Three o’clock. And don’t scarper.” The boy laughed.
    “Not a chance, lad, not a chance.”
     • • • 
    He shoved the phone in the belt at his back where his school jacket would cover it with hardly a bulge. The binoculars he didn’t have to worry about. He was also studying bird migration.
    He came down the tree most of the way before he dropped with a thud. Looking up as he brushed off his trousers, he saw his science master.
    “Sir,” he said calmly and confidently.
    “Hullo!”
    The boy held up the new green leaf. “If you look close, you’ll see the striations are different.”
    The master squinted. “I don’t, really. But apparently you do. Interesting theory.”
    “Thank you, sir. I’m finished now. I need to write up my findings.”
    “I’ll be interested to read them.”
    “Sir.” He watched the science master walk off, hands clasped behind his back, musing. Nice man. Bit dim, but nice.
    He looked at the leaf, tossed it aside.
    One leaf looked just like any other to him.
2
    The boy sat at a round table in one of the rear rooms at the Rose and Crown. There were six of them playing straight poker. Ned Rice was one.
    The other four were taking it as a lark that this lad apparently thought himself a first-rate player. He wasn’t bad; he wasn’t good. During the eight months he’d been playing regularly (except for school holidays) he’d won maybe a dozen pots, all small.
    He was brash; he liked to brag about the visits he’d made to the States, always to Las Vegas (which he called “Vegas”), where he had a rich uncle who was a “high roller” in some club there called the Mirage.
    And he played with U.S. dollars, never sterling.
    Now, that had made them really wonder.
    Allan Blythe, a National Health doctor who took private patients on the side and shoved the money in a drawer, had asked him why the bloody hell he didn’t take the currency to the bank and exchange it for pounds sterling.
    “Because the local banks here don’t do currency. I’m supposed to go up to London just to exchange money? Don’t make me laugh. I’m giving you a better rate of exchange than a bank, anyway.”
    The first time he’d come round with his dollars and Ned Rice, the other four had nearly laughed themselves sick. Frankie Fletcher knew a small-time counterfeiter and wouldn’t let the kid play untilhe’d checked out a sampling of the bills. Frankie took the bills in his own winnings once or twice every month