“Hold the fort,” I said to Betsy. “I need a pee.”

“Will do,” she said.

I walked across to the man.

“What exactly do you want?” I demanded.

“Nothing,” he said defensively. “I was just watching.”

“Why?” I demanded again.

“No reason,” he said.

“Then why don’t you go and watch someone else instead?” I said forcefully.

“I’m not doing any harm,” he almost wailed.

“Maybe not, but I don’t like it,” I said. “So go away. Now.”

I walked past him and into the grandstand in search of the Gents’.

When I returned, he’d gone.

“Thanks,” I said to Betsy as I again stood up on the platform.

“Come on,” I shouted at the small crowd in front of me. “Who wants a wager?” I glanced up at the board. “Eleven-to-four the field.”

There were a few takers but business was slow. As every race seemed to be a losing one from our point of view, it was probably just as well. At this rate, the more business we did, the more we lost.

However, there was some respite when the last race of the day was won by a twenty-to-one outsider, the favorite having been boxed in against the rails until it was too late.

“That saved our bacon,” said Luca with a broad grin.

“Saved your job, you mean,” I said, smiling back at him.

“In your dreams,” he replied.

In my nightmares, more like.

“So what’s the total?” I asked him.

In the good old days, it was easy to tell how we had done simply by the size of the wad of banknotes in my pocket, but these days we also had to consider our credit card balance with the Internet exchanges.

“Down fifteen hundred and sixty-two,” he said with certainty, consulting his machine.

“Could be worse,” I said, but I couldn’t actually remember a previous first-day Tuesday at Royal Ascot when we had lost money.

“Sure could,” he said. “If the favorite had won the last, we would have been off another grand more at least.”