Punters turf, p.1
Punter's Turf, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Author
Peter Klein writes with a rare passion and knowledge about the turf. That’s not surprising, as he’s spent a lifetime in horseracing, working for some of Australia’s top trainers such as TJ Smith and Bart Cummings, and was a one-time strapper of champion galloper Kingston Town. He now works in the media as Racing Manager of Australian Associated Press. Klein’s racing autobiography, A Strapper’s Tale, sold out in three months. Punter’s Turf is his second novel.
PETER KLEIN
PUNTER’S
TURF
First published 2009 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney
Copyright © Peter Klein 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Klein, Peter.
Punter’s turf.
ISBN 978 1 4050 3904 8.
I. Title.
A823.4
Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.
Punter’s Turf
Peter Klein
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For Karl and Fay
1
I sat alongside Big Oakie White as he hunched over his kitchen table, sobbing. There was a half-empty bottle of Grouse on the table and he gripped a tumbler of the stuff in his cigar-like fingers. He’d been hitting it pretty hard. Can’t say I blamed him. In front of him he had a photograph of his daughter Michelle graduating from Swinburne University four years ago. Michelle, his only child, and an attractive-looking girl too. One of Michelle’s gold earrings was laid out in front of him. It was sitting atop the courier’s express envelope it had been delivered in. The earring wasn’t hard to recognise. Big Oakie had given them to her on her graduation. He stifled another sob and picked it up tenderly in his huge hands.
The earring was packed in several layers of soggy, discoloured tissue paper. He seemed oblivious to the mess it made as it stained his hands a blood-plum red. Then a single teardrop fell from his face. I watched it splash onto Michelle’s earring then trickle down onto the ear that it was still attached to.
So much blood for such a small and delicate piece of flesh. The big fella turned a deathly shade of white and I thought he was going to faint. I quickly put an arm around his shoulder to steady him and he seemed to rally.
‘No, I’m all right. Really.’
I made him sit down anyway, on the couch and away from that grotesque sight. Neither of us spoke for a good while. What do you say to a man whose daughter has just had her ear sliced off by a kidnapper? I felt his tightening grip on my forearm. It was like a tourniquet, strangling my artery from its supply of blood. I don’t think he was aware he was hurting me or even knew what he was doing. He talked quietly, almost to himself, his eyes staring straight ahead at the wall.
‘Find them for me, Punter. Promise me you’ll find the bastards who did this to my daughter.’
A motorcycle courier had delivered the parcel to Big Oakie’s house earlier that afternoon. I doubt he would have whistled so cheerfully as he knocked at the door if he’d known what was inside. The package came about two hours after Big Oakie had last spoken to them on the phone. There had been no inkling of what would happen. As far as Oakie was concerned, he wasn’t out to fiddle them. He’d just pay them off and get his daughter back alive. He wasn’t stuck for a quid, after all, he’d been a successful rails bookmaker for nearly twenty years and they don’t go short of a feed. But most of his money was tied up in assets, and the cash that he had fell well short of the three hundred thousand they were asking. He’d done his best to raise the ransom by the stipulated time, but by four on Thursday afternoon, the best he could put his hands on was two hundred and thirty large. He had a friend coming around in the morning good for twenty-five thousand, and he’d snipped one of his clients for another twenty. I’d even thrown in ten of my own. The rest he was going to withdraw on his Amex card first thing in the morning.
When the guy had rung back, I was with Big Oakie and heard it all on his speaker-phone. Oakie told him what the situation was and he was far from happy.
The man went silent for a moment, then he said, ‘That’s not what I fucking well asked for.’ Then he hung up. End of call. Oakie was dumbfounded. He looked at the telephone, then to me, before fixing his eyes back on the phone again. ‘Some negotiator I am. Can you believe that? He hung up on me. Just like that.’
I looked at Oakie. One hundred and forty kilos of walruslike fat encircled his massive girth. His big paws were opening and shutting like huge oyster shells in nervous anticipation. Sweat ringed his brow like a headband and cast little droplets onto his suit jacket. Big Oakie always wore a suit. Expensive, hand-tailored jobs from Andre Brothers, measured to fit his ample frame. But after living in it for the best part of two days, it was looking like a hand-me-down from St Vinnies.
‘He can’t just hang up on you,’ I said.
‘You heard the call, that’s all he said. I can’t believe it. Whatta we supposed to do now?’
I shrugged. I didn’t know. I hadn’t played this kind of game before. None of us had.
‘I guess we just wait for his next call.’
‘What if he doesn’t call?’
‘He’ll call, Oakie.’
There were five of us who stayed over at Big Oakie’s place that night. Aside from myself, there was Oakie’s wife Veronica, plus he’d brought in some extra muscle who he knew he could trust. He was all for sending Veronica down to his place on the peninsula. She was as distraught as Oakie was, but, like him, understood they couldn’t go to the police if they wanted to see their daughter alive again. But there was no way Veronica was going to be left out of anything.
Shortly before six, Big Oakie’s two minders arrived. They were as different as chocolates and boiled lollies. I knew the first one, had met him at the track. He was a happy, smiling giant who looked like he could snap you in half between his fingers. He went by the name of Tiny and he came from the logging country up in Gippsland. He used to swing an axe for the timber mills until he found out that he could put his big frame to more profitable use. Big Oakie used him occasionally for some of his slow payers. Usually they wrote a cheque on the spot when they answered their door and saw his hulking frame outside. In between collecting, he bounced at a couple of nightclubs in King Street to pay the rent.
‘Hello, Punter,’ he said happily. Tiny was always in good spirits. Took a lot to put him off his game.
‘G’day, Tiny.’ I nodded up at him.
The other guy I hadn’t met before. He was solid, about forty centimetres shorter than Tiny, but very muscular and silent. He had a certain presence about him. Hard face. Stare-you-down eyes. Don’t-want-to-fuck-with-this-man sort of look. Oakie introduced him to me as Kevin, ex-army. Which army he didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I smiled and nodded at him, offering my hand. He met my smile with an unreadable Mona Lisa face and a handshake which threatened to crush the chalk from my bones.
‘Punter,’ I said, trying to dislodge my hand from the human vice.
‘Pleasure,’ said Kevin, slowly releasing his grip.
Oakie gestured to me. ‘Guys, I asked Punter along on account of him being able to find out certain things at the track.’
Kevin looked questioningly at me with those impassive eyes. Wanting to know w hat I brought to the party, presumably. ‘What are you, a private investigator?’
I’m not an investigator. Not even close. I bet; make a living playing the horses. I don’t go out of my way to tell people; they think it’s a glamorous lifestyle and that you must be raking it in. Couldn’t be further from the truth. I make a small percentage on my turnover – five, ten per cent in a good year. You do the maths; you gotta turn over a lot of money to even pull in a basic wage. And it’s not a glamorous business. You have losing runs. You get beaten in a photo finish or, worse, a protest. You get days when the track gets washed out and the meeting is cancelled. You ever heard of a rebate being paid to a punter who can’t bet? No, nor will you. You’ll get a jockey who won’t see an opening. You’ll get a horse who’s too slow to take the opening. Sometimes there just is no opening. That’s racing. You’ll shake your head in disbelief at how a horse can get caught five wide in a six-horse race. Must be four thousand ways a horse can get beat. I know, I’ve sampled most of them.
Glamorous? Try standing around Sandown in winter freezing your arse off in a cold betting ring, only to find those weak-hearted bookmakers won’t give you better than evens for a horse that should be three to one. Or do the form for half the night and then next day drive to some far-flung bush meeting to discover your main horse was a late scratching. Or, worse, your horse breaks out in a muck lather after you’ve backed it. Four thousand ways, I’m not kidding.
Of course, I have my good days. It’s not all bad. After all, I do have to win to survive, and I win on average seventy per cent or more of the races I play each year. I’ve learnt over the years where to avoid the pitfalls. I’m cautious, I pick my races carefully and steer away from anything where I see more than three or four chances. I make a careful book, and I never take under the odds for any horse I’ve priced. Take unders, go under. You want racing maxims? I’ve got a book of ’em I can throw at you. Punting? Yeah, it’s been good to me, and it beats the nine to five.
As a punter I get to meet a lot of people at the track. The mug gamblers, the battling jockeys, the pickpockets, the desperate down-and-outers who’ll bet the rent money on a tip from a barman. At the other end of the scale you’ve got millionaire trainers and wealthy owners and businessmen and all sorts of ‘colourful’ racing identities in between. I don’t know why the racecourse attracts such a mix. It must be the lure of fast money and action. But if you want to know what’s going down at the track, chances are I’m your man. Because if I don’t know what’s going on, then it’s a fair bet no one else does either.
I don’t go looking to solve other people’s troubles. I’ve got enough on my plate trying to back a winner. But it’s true I’ve had some success in finding out about certain ‘unexplained’ occurrences at the track. People want me to look around, ask some questions, see what I can find out. Before you know it, you’re in it up to your neck. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, there’s even an earn there for you. There was the drug syndicate thing I’d got involved with a year ago. Jesus, it cost me a mate’s life and nearly my own with it. But my evidence did manage to nail the kingpin behind it and they didn’t muck around. Carvill-Smyth got twelve years when they put him away. Then there was the insurance scam that dodgy New Zealand trainer was running. Can’t even remember his name now, but it was a bit of fun. Wish I had one of those fall in my lap every month or so. I didn’t expect the thank-you cheque from the brokers when I showed them how they’d been fleeced. And believe me, there’s lots of ways of getting fleeced on a racecourse. There’d been other cases here and there. Sometimes the stewards would have an unofficial chat to me between races. See if I’d heard any rumours about this or that. And Jim Beering, the racecourse detective, was always pumping me for information on some case or other he was working on. So people ask me to look into things as a favour. And sometimes I do, and other times I’m like, sorry, I’m kinda busy.
Big Oakie was my main bookie. He knew my form, knew what I did and the things I’d been involved with. After all, I’d been betting with him for a decade or more.
But more than that, he’d grown into a close friend. When I first started on the punt, I went through a bad run of outs. It was mostly my fault, I was over-confident and still hadn’t learned to play the percentages. My carefully managed betting bank had dwindled and shrunk to the point where it contained less than a Wimmera dam in a drought. I’d always bet in cash up until that point, but if Oakie hadn’t let me on for credit during that bad trot, I would have ended up working back at my father’s stables as a strapper again. I’ve always been indebted to Oakie, which is why I’d asked no questions when he’d come to me for help when Michelle had got snatched.
I met Kevin’s steely gaze and shook my head. ‘No, I’m not an investigator. But I know my way around a racecourse.’
‘That gonna help us here?’
Oakie put in a good word for me. ‘Trust me, Kev, Punter’s got form for this sorta thing. It’s right up his alley.’
Introductions made, Oakie fetched us all a drink. I was sticking with orange juice in case things started to move. Kevin and Tiny were both sipping VB tinnies. Veronica had her hands clasped around a gin and tonic. When he’d passed around the drinks, Oakie joined us at the table. He brought his bottle of Grouse with him and placed it solemnly in the middle of the table next to his glass. We stared awkwardly at the bottle, all wanting to be somewhere else.
‘Well, I dunno, guys,’ he said gloomily, ‘maybe we should just go to the police and let them take care of the whole thing. Especially after . . .’
Oakie left off mentioning Michelle’s ear. He’d wrapped it back up in the gauze and put it in the freezer where it was out of sight, if not out of mind. I opened my mouth to say something, but Veronica got in first.
‘No! We’re not going to go to the police. Not if we want to see Michelle alive again. You all know what happened to Keegan’s wife?’ she said, eyeballing us. No one answered her.
I knew what had happened to Jackie Keegan’s wife; I’d been at the track the day he’d first got the news. Jackie ‘the mouth’ Keegan was also a bookmaker, just like Big Oakie. Keegan earned his nickname on account of his incessant yapping; he was a chatterbox you couldn’t shut up. But that afternoon when I sidled up to him to place a bet, you would have thought he’d lost his tongue. He was ashen-faced and looked straight through me as if I was a stranger. Then he did something I’d never seen a bookmaker do. He abandoned his stand ten minutes before the start of the next race and walked off through the betting ring, leaving his staff and punters flabbergasted. We found out why a couple of days later.
‘When Keegan’s wife got taken,’ I said, ‘they called him at the track where he was fielding. He went straight to the racecourse detective and told him what had happened. Naturally, it got passed over to the cops, who got involved. They took over his house, tapped the phones and put in a special-branch negotiator to handle the situation. Only thing was, the first time the kidnappers rang was the last. They broke off all communication after that and his poor wife was found in a dumpster two days later.’
I’d left out some parts. Like how she was found naked and badly cut up. Her throat cut and her breasts mutilated. Most of us agreed that not going to the police was probably a good thing, except Tiny. He wasn’t so convinced it was in our favour.
‘I don’t wanna be the one that says this,’ he said, ‘but do you think she might already be . . .’
He left the last bit unfinished. It was a question we’d all been asking ourselves. After all, they say most kidnappers wind up killing their captives straight off. They’re less trouble that way. Can’t identify you and you don’t have the hassle of hiding them at a safe location. We’d just got an ear sent to us, and there was no way we could tell if it had been taken from a live or a dead body.
‘No! Don’t say that,’ said Veronica. ‘Don’t even think that. We’ve got to remain positive she’s still alive. I’ll not give up on her. Ever!’ she spat out.
