Murder at the Racetrack: Original Tales of Mystery and Mayhem Down the Final Stretch From Today's Great Writers by Otto Penzler (ed)

Author:Otto Penzler (ed) [Penzler, Otto]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780446565172
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2006-01-01T11:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT. THE GOOD AND

THE NOT-SO-GOOD

H.R.F. Keating

Goodwood racecourse, set amid the Sussex Downs, which are of course gently rolling hills, Ups rather than Downs, has been in existence since 1801. It was then that the Duke of Richmond, one of the Great of the land, offered the use of his huge park surrounding Goodwood House to the officers of the Sussex Regiment, of which he happened to be colonel, when they needed somewhere to race their horses. As the years went by, successive Dukes improved and improved the course until Glorious Goodwood, as they call it, rose to be one of the most delightful of all England’s race meetings. Perhaps, however, jockeys and trainers may secretly think of it as Would-it-were-good because the course, running as it does not on the ideal level but over a distinctly undulating track with some sharp bends in it, can put even the most fancied runner into an ignominious last place.

But back in 1952 the then holder of the dukedom permitted the first public-address race commentary anywhere in Britain to boom out across his private park. And it was at that time—if the following account is true—that the Not-so-good came on to the scene. Luckily, however, 1952 can also be called the Year of the Seven Old Ladies, who, although they had their faults like all of us, could reasonably be called, too, the Seven Good Old Ladies.

They all lived in a village at some little distance from the racecourse, a flourishing place with its green large enough for games of cricket, two pubs and even, modern miracle tucked away behind the ancient village church, a bright and shiny red telephone box. Whenever the weather was fine enough it was their custom to come out and sit in a row on two benches that were set side by side at the edge of the green almost in the shadow of the church and opposite the pub called the Fox Goes Free, which—if that indeed is the pub in question—was decidedly appropriate because it was thanks to these old ladies that one cunning fox, of the two-legged variety, failed in the end to go free.

Every day that it didn’t rain, and sometimes even when it did, well wrapped in macintoshes, the seven of them would sit, morning and afternoon, chattering away, ignoring, when there was a cricket match on the green, any of the red leather balls that occasionally whizzed over their heads and equally ignoring, as they were on this day, the streams of motor cars clattering past in clouds of exhaust fumes on their way to the start of the five-day race meeting in the grounds of their distant ducal neighbor. Nothing disturbed them as they talked and talked.

Three of them, Mrs. Alford, Mrs. Beastock and little Mrs. Capper, had something of the characteristics of those three brass or plastic monkeys you sometimes see perched up on a mantelpiece: one with two little paws blocking its ears, Hear-No-Evil; one with paws blocking its eyes, See-No-Evil; and the third with paws crossed carefully over its mouth, Speak-No-Evil.

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