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time.’
    I met him first on a day when old Clement Cornborough asked me again to lunch to discuss in detail, as he said, the winding up of the Trust he’d administered on my behalf for twenty years. A small celebration, he said. At his club.
    His club turned out to be the Hobbs Sandwich Club, near the Oval cricket ground, a Victorian mini-mansion with a darkly opulent bar and club rooms, their oak panelled walls decorated with endless pictures of gentlemen in small cricket caps, large white flannels and (quite often) side-whiskers.
    The Hobbs Sandwich, he said, leading the way through stained glass panelled doors, was named for two great Surrey cricketers from between the wars, Sir Jack Hobbs, one of the few cricketers ever knighted, and Andrew Sandham, who had scored one hundred and seven centuries in first class cricket. Long before I was born, he said.
    I hadn’t played cricket since distant days at school, nor liked it particularly even then: Clement Cornborough proved to be a lifelong fanatic.
    He introduced me in the bar to an equal fanatic, his friend Val Catto who then joined us for lunch. Not a word about my Trust was spoken. The two of them talked cricket solidly for fifteen minutes and then the friend Catto began asking questions about my life. It dawned on me uneasily after a while that I was being interviewed, though I didn’t know for what; and I learned afterwards that in conversation one day during the tea interval of a cricket match Catto had lamented to Cornborough that what he really needed was someone who knewthe racing scene intimately, but whom the racing scene didn’t know in return. An eyes and ears man. A silent, unknown investigator. A fly on racing’s wall that no one would notice. Such a person, they had sighed together, was unlikely to be found. And that when a few weeks later I walked into Cornborough’s office (or at least by the time I left it) the lawyer had suffered a brainwave which he passed on to his friend Val.
    The Hobbs Sandwich lunch (of anything but sandwiches) had lasted through a good chunk of the afternoon, and by the end of it I had a job. I hadn’t taken a lot of persuading, as it seemed interesting to me from the start. A month’s trial on both sides, Brigadier Catto said, and mentioned a salary that had Cornborough smiling broadly.
    ‘What’s so funny?’ the Brigadier asked. ‘That’s normal. We pay most of our men that at the start.’
    ‘I forgot to mention it. Tor here is … um …’ He paused, perhaps wondering whether finishing the sentence came under the heading of breaking a client’s right to confidentiality, because after a short while he went on, ‘He’d better tell you himself.’
    ‘I accept the salary,’ I said.
    ‘What have you not told me?’ Catto asked, suddenly very much the boss, his eyes not exactly suspicious but unsmiling: and I saw that I was not binding myself to some slightly eccentric friendly cricket nut, but to the purposeful, powerful man who had commanded a brigade and was currently keeping horseracing honest. I was not going to be playing a game, he was meaning, and if I thought so we would go no further.
    I said wryly, ‘I have a private income after tax of about twenty times the salary you’re offering, but I’ll take your money all the same, sir, and I’ll work for it.’
    He listened to the underlying declaration of commitment and good faith, and after a long pause he smiled briefly and nodded.
    ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘When can you start?’
    I had started the next day at Epsom races, relearning the characters, reawakening sleeping memories, hearing Aunt Viv’s bright voice in my ear about as clearly as if she were alive. ‘There’s Paddy Fredericks. Did I tell you he used to be married to Betsy who’s now Mrs Glove-binder? Brad Glovebinder used to have horses with Paddy Fredericks but when he pinched Betsy, he took his horses away too … no justice in the world. Hello Paddy, how are things? This is my