‘His Royal Highness has decreed that today is a good day to die. So let the mayhem commence!’

And mayhem it was. The first few races were simple sprints along the straight in front of the grandstand, with two riders from each camp in every heat. They careered down the track, frantically whipping their horses and each other. There didn’t appear to be any rules. The riders were allowed to do whatever they wanted to win the race.

Some of the horses collided with each other, with the riders trying to knock their rivals out of their saddles. There was lots of shouting and laughter coming from the grandstand mixed in with hurled insults and obscenities. The biggest cheers of all came when riders fell off their horses, and often a race would end with a group of riders dismounting to punch and kick each other at the finish line. Sometimes they wouldn’t even get that far and would sit in their saddles, halfway down the track, trying to smash each other to pieces.

The crowd loved every minute of it, cheering, jeering, laughing, winning bets, losing bets. And Ed cheered just as loudly as anyone else for the Ascot runners. He needed Ascot to do well if his plan was going to work.

There were ten races in the morning, with some riders racing more than once. Maidenhead won four, Windsor, Ascot and Bracknell won two each. Slough and Sandhurst had so far won nothing. Ed wasn’t sure that horse racing was their thing. So Ascot were comfortably in the middle, but until they moved on from the horse racing there wasn’t anything much Ed and his team could do to help out.

The main horse race of the morning was the Big Kahuna, a complete circuit of the track. Arno had told Ed it was about a mile and a half long, and it was in the shape of a giant triangle.

There were mostly different riders out for this one, three per camp, and these ones looked to be more confident and in control. Ed saw that the Golden Girl was racing for Windsor, and he was interested to see if she was as good on a horse as she wanted everyone to think. He also recognized one of Josa’s boys riding for the Slough team.

As before, the riders lined up behind a rope that was stretched across the course by two kids. The King had his arm raised and the two kids holding the rope were watching him intently. He wailed something. It could have been ‘On you marks, get set, go!’, it was hard to tell, but when he dropped his hand the kids dropped the rope and the runners were off, thundering down the straight, their hooves throwing up clods of earth behind them.