He had been an impressionable nineteen-year-old when he had first signed up with Anton Valance and The Jockeys Stable. Sadly, unlike for Peter Minter, the jockey I had spoken to at Catterick, Marcus’s father, for all his obsession with tidiness, hadn’t told him that if something sounded too good to be true, it probably was.

To start with, it appeared that his decision to join The Jockeys Stable agency had been a wise one, with plenty of rides on good horses for various trainers coming his way, but the events of that afternoon at Sedgefield, when he had failed to appear, had given him a reputation for being unreliable, and most of the extra rides had quickly dried up.

Not, it seemed, that Valance had cared much. Clearly, his determination to extract a premium from the trainers was more important than the good name of the jockeys he represented.

Marcus told me that Noel Kline had been furious about it and had almost terminated his employment as a result. He’d had to promise that it would never happen again in order to keep his job.

‘And has it?’ I asked.

‘No. Never. Although Valance tried it on again with me just before Christmas. He told me not to turn up for a ride at Doncaster.’

‘But you did nevertheless?’

‘I would have but the meeting was abandoned early in the morning due to snow. Bloody marvellous, it was.’ He laughed.

‘And he’s never asked you again?’

‘Not to miss a ride, no. I told him straight up after that that I wouldn’t be doing it again.’

‘And what did he say to that?’

‘He said I should learn to do as I’m bloody well told. And it’s two weeks later that he stitched me up with his damn recording.’

He paused and I encouraged him to go on, but it was clearly hugely embarrassing for him.

‘I’m not really bad,’ he said, perhaps trying to convince himself as much as me. ‘It was just after Christmas and I was really short of cash, desperate even, and he turns up and offers me two hundred quid to make sure I don’t win a certain race. But I was riding a total no-hoper in it anyway, so I thought he was crazy. So I take his cash to pay my overdue rent. What harm can it do?’ He raises his eyes to the ceiling. ‘How stupid am I?’

He paused while we watched the third race from Wetherby, a two-mile Class 4 handicap chase.

‘I should be riding in this,’ Marcus said forlornly, as the starter dropped his flag.

‘How come?’

‘I won on Mackerel Fisher at Haydock last September.’

Mackerel Fisher was the short-priced favourite in this race, and he was being ridden by a jockey called Danny Fletcher.