‘And which side, pray, is that?’

He stood close, right in front of me, looking down, but I didn’t move, other than to lean back in the chair.

‘What are you going to do?’ I asked. ‘Physically throw me out?’

We both knew he was in no condition to do that. I suspected he had lived on a diet of mostly beer, wine, frozen pizzas and takeaways since his wife left him, and they had taken their toll on his fitness as well as his waistline.

He stepped back.

‘Speak to me, Simon.’

‘Do you think I’m fucking crazy or something? You’ve seen what they did to Gary Bremner. It’s easier just to pay.’

‘Pay who?’

He stared at me again. ‘Don’t you ever give up?’

‘No,’ I said, staring back. ‘Never. Not when the integrity of racing is at stake. So tell me, who do you pay?’

He sighed. ‘All of them.’

‘All of who? The agents?’

He nodded silently as if by not actually speaking the word he wasn’t really admitting it.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘How what?’

‘How do you pay?’

‘How do you think? They send me invoices with their bank details.’

I was surprised. Such payments would be so easy to trace.

‘What are you actually paying for?’

‘Trainers’ premium, they call it. Bloody stealing if you ask me.’

‘What’s a trainers’ premium?’

‘It’s a ruse the agents have dreamed up to make themselves more money. Like all those clever auctioneers who created what they call the “buyer’s premium”, so they get paid by both the seller and the buyer. It’s daylight bloody robbery but they all do it. And it’s legal.’

He was right. The big auction houses nowadays charge both commission to the vendor and a premium to the purchaser, sometimes as much as 25 per cent on top of the hammer price. And it does feel like daylight bloody robbery.

‘So how does the trainers’ premium work?’ I asked.

‘Agents are meant to be paid only by the jockeys they represent. Most charge 10 per cent of all their jockeys’ earnings. A jockey’s riding fee for a jump race is now about £200, so that’s twenty pounds a ride the jockey has to pay to his agent. Plus the same percentage of any prize money he wins. But some of the agents don’t feel that’s enough, so they are now charging 10 per cent of everything to the trainer as well. They claim they are doing us a service by finding jockeys to ride our horses, so we should pay them for it. Bloody cheek. We do them a service by running horses for their jockeys to ride in the first place.’

The age-old question of who is doing whom the favour—the seller or the buyer?

‘And what if you don’t pay?’