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after an early-morning session in the workshop making new little items for stock, I went to Cheltenham races again (by taxi) to talk to Martin’s valet, Eddie Payne.
    Ed or Eddie (he answered to both) was ready to help, he said, but he couldn’t. He’d spent all weekend thinking it over and he said, his gaze darting over my shoulder and back again to my face, he couldn‘t—however hard he tried—remember any more than he’d told me on Friday. I thought back to the moment of empathy between us, when we had each realized what we’d lost. That moment of genuine emptiness had gone.
    The difference between Friday and Monday was a fierce-eyed woman approaching forty, now standing a pace or two behind me, a woman Ed referred to as his daughter. He slid a second glance at her expressionlessly and like a ventriloquist not moving his lips, said to me almost too quietly for me to hear, “She knows the man who gave Martin the tape.”
    The woman said sharply, “What did you say, Dad? Do speak up.”
    â€œI said we’d miss Martin badly,” Eddie said, “and I’m due back in the changing room. Tell Gerard—Mr. Logan—what he wants to know, why don’t you?”
    He walked away with a worried shuffle, apologetically saying to me as he went, “Her name’s Rose; she’s a good girl really.”
    Rose, the good girl, gave me such a bitter flash of hate that I wondered what I’d ever done to annoy her, as I hadn’t known of her existence until moments earlier. She was angularly bony and had mid-brown hair with frizzy sticking-out curls. Her skin was dry and freckled, and although her clothes looked too big for the thin body inside, there was about her an extraordinary air of magnetism.
    â€œEr ... Rose ... ,” I started.
    â€œMrs. Robins,” she interrupted abruptly.
    I cleared my throat and tried again.
    â€œMrs. Robins, then, could I buy you some coffee, or a drink in the bar?”
    She said, “No, you could not.” She bit the words off with emphasis. She said, “You’d do better to mind your own business.”
    â€œMrs. Robins, did you see who gave a brown paper-wrapped parcel to Martin Stukely at Cheltenham races last Friday?”
    Such a simple question. She primped her lips together tightly, swiveled on her heel, and walked away with an air of not intending to come back.
    After a short pause, I followed her. Looking down from time to time at my racecard as any prospective punter would, I trickled along in her wake as she made for the ranks of bookmakers’ pitches in front of the open-to-the-public Tattersalls stands. She stopped at a board announcing ARTHUR ROBINS, PRESTWICK, ESTABLISHED 1894, and talked to an Elvis Presley lookalike with heavy black side whiskers, who was standing on a box, leaning down to take money from the public and dictating his transactions to a clerk, who was punching the bets into a computer.
    Rose Robins, established long after 1894, had a fair amount to say. The Elvis lookalike frowned, listening, and I retreated: I might have strength and reasonable agility but Rose’s contact made my muscle power look the stuff of kindergartens. Whichever Robins filled the shoes of Arthur nowadays, if he were the Elvis lookalike, he weighed in with grandfather-gorilla shoulders.
    Patiently I climbed the stands and waited while the Arthur Robins, Est. 1894, bookmakers—three of them—took bets on the final two races of the afternoon, and then I watched their chief, the Elvis lookalike, pack up the board and take charge of the money bag and walk towards the exit with Rose and his two helpers beside him. I watched them go out of sight. As far as I could tell, they all left the racetrack. As a group, they equaled an armored tank.
    From experience with Martin, I knew that jockeys’ valets finished their work after most of the crowds had gone home. A valet was the man who helped the