Under Orders by Dick Francis

things than he could get away with. It was usually the poor who were more spendthrift with their money, one of the reasons they remained poor.
    ‘Shall we go through to lunch?’ he said, closing the matter.
    There are two dining rooms. One for peers alone, to discuss in private the affairs of state, and one for peers and their guests where such discussion was frowned upon, if not exactly forbidden.
    Needless to say, we were in the second one, an L-shaped room with heavy oak panelling covered with stern-looking portraits of past lords of the realm. The upright dining chairs were covered in red leather and the carpet was predominantly red, and sowere the curtains. Everything in the Lords’ end of the Palace of Westminster was red. The commoners’ end was green.
    Jonny Enstone worked the room, stopping and speaking to almost every group as we made our way to what was obviously his ‘usual’ table at the far end. Why did I wonder that he liked this table for that very reason?
    It was like walking into the pages of
Who’s Who
. Faces that I was familiar with only from the television and newspapers smiled and said ‘Hello’. Lord Enstone almost purred, he was so enjoying being part of ‘the club’, all the more so for having me in tow.
    I decided on the soup and the mushroom risotto for one-handed eating while Lord Enstone chose the pâté and the rack of lamb. I rarely ate much for lunch and two large meals within twenty hours were not going to be good for my waistline.
    We talked racing for a while and I asked what hopes he had for his horses.
    ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll need to talk with Woodward but I hope that Extra Point might be ready for the big handicap at Sandown next month. He’s still entered for the National but he’s not fully fit, at least that’s what Burton told me last week. I’ll reserve judgement until Woodward has seen what he can do.’
    ‘When did you start to question what Bill Burton told you?’
    ‘I didn’t really, not until last week.’
    ‘What happened last week specifically?’ I asked.
    ‘It was something I heard – I can’t remember exactly when, Tuesday or Wednesday, I think.’ He paused. ‘No, it was definitely Tuesday, after the Champion Hurdle. I was in the Royal Box having a drink with Larry – you know, Larry Wallingford.’
    Larry Wallingford, or rather Lawrence, Duke of Wallingford was a regular on racecourses, a major owner of racehorses onboth the flat and over the jumps, and a stalwart of the Jockey Club. I wondered when a boy from the wrong end of Newcastle had taken to calling dukes by their nicknames and most others by their surnames. Tomorrow, no doubt, Lord Enstone would tell someone that he had lunched with ‘Halley, you know, Halley the crippled jockey’.
    ‘Did the Duke tell you something specific?’
    ‘No, no. It was a lady who was sitting with him. I didn’t get her name. She said something about having been told by a friend that Burton’s horses didn’t seem to be always doing their best.’
    ‘That doesn’t sound much like evidence to me.’
    ‘No, nor to me. But it was enough to make me ask around and to look at the results of my horses.’ He stopped to take a sip of an excellent Merlot, the ‘House’ red.
    ‘I have seven horses at present. I keep a detailed account of all their races and on Tuesday evening I went right through my records for the past two years. I had ninety-two runners over that time. Fourteen winners but not one of them won when they started with odds of less than 5 to 1. Sixteen started favourite and only one of those won, and that was when the leading pair both fell at the last.’ He took another drink. ‘So I began to be suspicious and asked your father-in-law to get you to my box last week. I didn’t want to go to the Jockey Club. Discreet enquiries were what I wanted.’
    What he meant, I thought, was that he didn’t want everyone to know that he had been a mug.
    ‘Well, now I’ve moved the horses so