‘Yes, I do,’ he said at once, ‘only too well. I was up against the brute, trying to pin him down. We never did it. He licked us. It was watertight.’
‘Of course it was.’ Tonker was encouraging. ‘First of all, he nobbled the bloke he wanted to bribe. And then he sold him a horse, cheap.’
‘That was it.’ Luke was leaning on the wheel, his thoughts far away in a dusty fly-blown land. ‘First the chap had to buy the horse. The sale was put on record. Then Soapy Sabah kept it and raced it for him, and told him when to back it. Sometimes it won and sometimes it lost, and it all went down in the books. And then one day, soon after the motor-tyres or back axles or whatever Sabah was trying to get hold of had mysteriously disappeared, the horse won again, and that time the owner happened to have put
