Angelo looked at the ring of spectators through which he had little real hope of pushing and at his unexpectedly adroit captor, now rising from his knees, and at the seething bookmakers who were showing signs of satisfaction, and finally straight at me.

He took a step towards me with such strength that the half-risen policeman lost his balance again and fell on his back, his arm twisting awkwardly over his head, stretching in the handcuff. There was about Angelo suddenly such an extraordinary growth of menace, something so different from a mere racecourse argument, that the thronging voices fell away to silence and eyes looked at him with age-old fright. The monstrous recklessness seemed to swell his whole body, and even if his words were banal his gritty voice vibrated with a darkness straight out of myth.

'You,' he said deliberately, 'you and your fucking brother.'

There was an awareness in his face of the attentive crowd of witnesses around us and he didn't say aloud what was in his mind, but I could hear it as clearly as if he'd woken the sleeping hills.

I'll kill you. I'll kill you.

It was a message not so much new as newly intense. More than ever implacable. A promise, not a threat.

I stared back at him as if I hadn't heard, as if it wasn't there looking at me out of his eyes. He nodded however as if savagely satisfied and turned with a contemptuous shrug to the rising policeman, jerking him the last few inches upright; and he went, after that, without fighting, walking away between the two constables towards a police car which was driving in through the gates. The car halted. They put him in the back seat between them and presently rolled away, and the now strangely quiet crowd began to spread open and disperse.

A voice in my ear, the Welsh voice of Taff, said, 'You know what set all that off?'

'What?' I asked.

'The bookies down in the cheap ring told Angelo he was a right mug. They were laughing at him, it seems. Joshing him, but friendly like to start with. They said they'd be happy to keep on taking his money because if he thought he'd bought Liam O'Rorke's old system he'd been robbed, duped, bamboozled, made a fool of and generally conned from here to Christmas.'

Dear God.

'So then this Angelo sort of exploded and started trying to get his stake back.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Well,' Taff said cheerfully. 'It all makes a change, though I reckon those goons in the cheap ring would have done better to keep their mouths shut. That Angelo was a bit of a golden goose and after this he won't lay no more golden eggs.'

I drove home with a feeling that the seas were closing over my head. Whatever I did to try to disentangle myself from Angelo it seemed that I slid further into the coils.

He was never, after this, going to believe that I hadn't tricked him on purpose. Even if I could at last get him the real correct system, he wouldn't forgive me the bets lost, the sneers of the bookmakers, the click of those handcuffs.

The police might hold him overnight, I thought, but not much longer: I doubted if one punch and a few yells would upset his parole. But to the tally in his mind would be added a night in the cells to rankle with those in my cellar – and if he'd come out of prison angry enough to attack me with nothing against me but the fact of my being Jonathan's brother, how much more would he now come swinging.

Cassie had long been home when I finally got there and was buoyantly pleased with the prospect of having the plaster off her arm on the following afternoon. She had arranged a whole day off from work and had thanked the groper for the last time, confident that she would be able to drive more or less at once. She was humming in the kitchen while I cooked some spaghetti for supper and I kissed her abstractedly and thought of Angelo and wished him dead with all my heart.

Before we had finished eating, the telephone rang and, most unexpectedly, it was Ted Pitts calling from Switzerland. His voice, on the whole, was as cool as the Alps.

Thought I'd better apologise,' he said.

'It's kind of you.'

'Jane's disgusted with me. She told me to ring you at once. She said it was urgent. So here I am. Sorry, and all that.'

'I just wondered,' I said hopelessly, 'why you did it.'

'Mashed up the weightings?'

'Yes.'

'You'll think I'm mean. Jane says I'm so mean she's ashamed of me. She's furious. She says all our wealth is due to Jonathan, and I've played the most rotten trick on Jonathan's brother. She's hardly speaking to me she's so cross.'

'Well… why?' I said.

He did at least seem to want me to understand. He spoke earnestly, explaining, excusing, telling me the destructive truth. 'I don't know. It was an impulse. I was making those copies and I suddenly thought I don't want to part with this system. I don't want anyone else to have it. It's mine. Not Jonathan's, just mine. He didn't even want it, and I've had it to myself all these years, and I've added to it and made it my own. It belongs to me. It's mine. And there you were, just asking for it as if I would give it to you as of right, and I suddenly thought why should I? So I just quickly changed a lot of the weightings. I didn't have time to test them. I had to guess. I altered just enough, I thought, but it seems I did too much. Otherwise you wouldn't have checked… I intended that when you used the system, you wouldn't win enough to think it worth all the work, and you'd get tired of it.' He paused. 'I was jealous of you having it, if you really want to know,'

'I wish you'd told me…'

'If I'd said I didn't want to give it to you, Jane would have made me. She says I must now. She's so cross.'

'If you would,' I said, 'you might save me a lot of grief.'

'Make your fortune, you mean.' The apology, it seemed, hadn't come from the heart: he still sounded resentful that I should be learning his secrets.

I thought again about telling him about Angelo but it still seemed to me that he might think it the best reason for not giving me the system that I could devise, so I said merely, 'It could work for two people, couldn't it? If someone else had it, it wouldn't stop you yourself winning as much as ever.'

'I suppose,' he said grudgingly, 'that that's true.'

'So… when do you come home?'

'The week after next.'

I was silent. Appalled. By the week after next heaven knew what Angelo would have done.

Ted Pitts said with half-suppressed annoyance, 'I suppose you've betted heavily on the wrong horses and lost too much, and now you need bailing out a lot sooner than the week after next?'

I didn't dispute it.

'Jane's furious. She's afraid I've cost you more than you can afford. Well, I'm sorry.' He didn't truly sound it.

'Could she find the tapes to give to me?' I said humbly.

'How soon do you need them?'

'More or less at once. Tonight, if possible.'

'Hmph.' He thought for a few moments. 'All right. All right. But you can save yourself the journey, if you like.'

'Er, how?'

'Do you have a tape recorder?'

'Yes.'

'Jane can play the tapes to you over the telephone. They'll sound like a lot of screeching. But if you've a half-way decent recorder the programs will run all right on a computer.'

'Good heavens.'

'A lot of computer programs whiz round the world on telephones every day,' he said. 'And up to the satellites and down again. Nothing extraordinary in it.'

To me it did seem extraordinary, but then I wasn't Ted Pitts. I thanked him with more intensity than he knew for his trouble in ringing me up.

'Thank Jane,' he said.

I did thank her, sincerely, five minutes later.

'You sounded in such trouble,' she said. 'I told Ted I'd sent you to Ruth because you'd wanted to check the tapes, and he groaned, so I asked him why… and when he told me what he'd done I was just furious. To think of you wasting your precious money when everything we have is thanks to Jonathan.'