by Dick Francis
“So does flour explode,” I said.
Vicky gave me a strange look in which I only just got the benefit of the doubt as to my sanity, but indeed air filled with flour would flash into explosion if ignited. Many substances diffused in a mist in air would combust. Old buddies, oxygen, fuel and fire.
“Why don’t you go back to the car,” I suggested to Vicky and Greg. “I’ll find the other two. I’ll tell them I’m driving you back to the house.”
They both looked relieved and went away slowly with the dispersing throng. I ducked a few officials, saw no immediate sign of Belinda and Ken but found on the right of the burnt building an extension of the parking area that led back into a widening space at the rear. Down there, movement, lights and more people.
Seeing Ken briefly and distantly as he hurried in and out of a patch of light, I set off to go down there despite warning shouts from behind. The heat radiating from the brick wall on my left proved to be of roasting capacity, which accounted for the shouts, and I did hope as I sped past that the whole edifice wouldn’t collapse outwards and cook me where I fell.
Ken saw me as I hurried towards him and stood still briefly with his mouth open, looking back where I’d come.
“Good God,” he said, “did you come along there? It isn’t safe. There’s a back way in.” He gestured behind him and I saw that indeed there was access from another road, as evidenced by a fire engine standing there that had been dealing with the flames from the rear.
“Can I do anything?” I said.
“The horses are all right,” Ken said. “But I need ... I need—” He stopped suddenly and began shaking, as if the enormity of the disaster had abruptly overwhelmed him once the need for urgent action had diminished. His mouth twisted and his whole face quivered.
“God help me,” he said.
It sounded like a genuinely desperate prayer, applying to much more than the loss of a building. I was no great substitute for the deity, but one way or another I’d helped deal with a lot of calamities. Crashed busloads of British tourists for instance, ended up, figuratively speaking, on embassy doorsteps, and I’d mopped up a lot of personal tragedies.
“I’ll take Vicky and Greg back to the house, and then come back,” I said.
“Will you?” He looked pathetically grateful even for the goodwill. He went on shaking, disintegration not far ahead.
“Just hold on,” I said, and, without wasting time, left by the rear gate, hurrying along the narrow road there and getting back to the main road via an alley, finding that by luck I’d come out only a few steps from the car. Vicky and Greg made no objections to being taken home and left. They hoped Belinda would forgive them, but they were going to bed to sleep for a week, and please would I ask her not to wake them.
I glanced at them affectionately as they stood drooping in the polished hall of Thetford Cottage. They’d had a rough time, and when I thought of it, looking back, they hadn’t seriously complained once. I said I’d see them in the morning and took the front door key with me at their request, leaving them to shut the door behind me.
Finding a way round to the back road, I returned to the vets’ place from the rear and smelled freshly again the pervading ashy smoke that stung in the throat like tonsillitis. The rear fire engine had wound in its hoses and departed, leaving one man in yellow oilskins and helmet trudging around to guard against the ruins heating up to renewed spontaneous life.
I took brief stock of what lay in the unburnt area: a new-looking one-story building with electric lights shining from every window, a row of stable boxes set back under an overhanging roof, all empty, with their doors open, and a glass-walled thirty-yard passage connecting the burnt and unburnt buildings. That last was, extraordinarily, mostly untouched, only the big panes nearest the heat having shattered.
A good many people were still hurrying about, as if walking slowly would have been inappropriate. The first urgency, however, was over: what was left was the usual travail of getting rid of the debris. No bodies to go into bags this time, though, it seemed. Look on the bloody bright side.
As Ken was nowhere to be seen and a door to the new building stood open, I went inside to look for him and found myself in an entrance hall furnished as a waiting room with about six flip-up chairs and minimum creature comfort.
Everything, including the tiled floor and a coffee machine in a corner, was soaking wet. A man trying to get sustenance from that machine gave it a smart kick of frustration as if its demise after all else was insupportable.
“Where’s Ken?” I asked him.
He pointed through an open door and attacked the machine again, and I went where directed, which proved to be into a wide passage with doors down each side, one of them open with light spilling out. I found Ken in a smallish office along there, a functional room already occupied by more people than the architect had intended.
Ken was standing by the uncurtained window, still trembling as if with cold. A gray-haired man sat gloomily behind a metal desk. A woman with a dirt-smudged face stood beside him, stroking his shoulder. Two more men and another woman perched on office furniture or leaned against walls. The room smelled of the smoke trapped in their clothes and it was chilly enough to make Ken’s shivers reasonably physical in origin.
The heads all turned my way when I appeared in the doorway, all except Ken’s own. I said his name, and he turned and saw me, taking a second or two to focus.
“Come in,” he said, and to the others added, “He’s a helper.”
They nodded, not querying it. They all looked exhausted and had been silent when I got there as if sandwiched in shock between hectic crisis activity and facing the resumption of life. I’d seen a lot of people in that suspended state, starting from when I was twenty-three, in my first posting, and in a far-flung consulate with the consul away I had had to deal alone with a British-chartered airplane that had clipped a woody hillside after dark and had scattered broken bodies among splintered trees. Among other things I’d been out there at dawn trying to stop looters. Relatives then came to the city to identify what they could and to cling to me numbly for comfort. Talk about growing up fast. Nothing, since that, had been worse.
The man who had been kicking the coffee machine came into the office, passed me and slid down to sit on the floor with his spine against the wall.
“Who are you?” he asked, looking up.
“Friend of Ken’s.”
“Peter,” Ken said.
The man shrugged, not caring. “Coffee machine’s buggered,” he announced.
His eyes were red-rimmed, his hands and face dirty, his age anywhere from thirty to fifty. His news was received with apathy.
The gray-haired man behind the desk seemed to be the senior in rank as well as years. He looked round at the others and wearily said, “Suggestions?”
“We go to bed,” the coffee machine man said.
“Buy a better computer,” one of the other men offered.
“When the records are saved on backup disks, in future store them in a vault.”
“A bit late for that,” said one of the women, “since all the records are burnt.”
“The new records, then.”
“If we have a practice,” Ken said with violence.
That thought had occurred to the others, who went on looking gloomy.
“How did the fire start?” I asked.
The gray-haired man answered with deep tiredness. “We were having the place painted. We ourselves have a no-smoking rule, but workmen with cigarettes ...” He left the sentence unfinished, the scenario too common for comment.
“Not arson, then,” I said.
“Are you a journalist?” one of the women demanded.
“No, definitely not.”
Ken shook his head. “He’s a diplomat. He fixes things.”
None of them looked impressed. The women said that a diplomat was the last thing they needed, but the gray-haired man said that if I had any practical suggestions, to give.
I said with hesitation, “I would leave someone here all night with all the lights on.”
“Well ... why?”
“Just in case it was arson.”
“It couldn’t have been arson,” the gray man said. “Why would anyone want to burn our building?”
One of the other men said, “They wouldn’t get far trying to burn this hospital. We had it all built of flame-retardant materials. It’s supposed to be fireproof.”
“And it didn’t burn,” the woman said. “The fire doors held in the passage. The firemen poured tons of water on all that end...”
“And buggered the coffee machine,” the man on the floor said.
There were a few wan smiles.
“So we still have our hospital,” the gray-haired man told me, “but we’ve lost the pharmacy, the lab, the small-animal surgeries and, as you heard, every record we possessed. The tax situation alone ...” He stopped, shaking his head hopelessly. “I think the going to bed suggestion was a good one, and I propose we adopt it. Also if anyone will stay here all night, please volunteer.”
They’d all had too much, and no one spoke.
After an appreciable pause, Ken said jerkily, “I’ll stay if Peter will.”
I’d let myself right in for it, I thought. Oh well. “OK,” I said.
“Who’s on call?” the gray-haired man asked.
“I am,” Ken said.
“And I am,” a dark-haired young woman added.
The gray hair nodded. “Right. Ken stays. Everyone else, sleep.” He rose to his feet, pushing himself up tiredly with hands flat on the desk. “Council of war here at nine in the morning.” He came round the desk and paused in front of me. “Whoever you are, thanks.” He briefly shook my hand. “Carey Hewett,” he said, introducing himself.
“Peter Darwin.”
“Oh. Any relation to ... ?”
I shook my head.
“No. Of course not. It’s late. Home, everyone.” He led the way out of the office and the rest drifted after him, yawning and nodding to me briefly but not giving their names. None of them expressed any curiosity, let alone reservations, about the stranger they were so easily leaving on their property. They trusted Ken, I supposed, and by extension, any friend of Ken’s.
“Where’s Belinda?” I asked as the last of them disappeared.
“Belinda?” Ken looked temporarily lost. “Belinda ... went with the horses.” He paused, then explained. “We had three horses out in the boxes. Patients. Needing nursing care. We’ve sent them to a trainer who had room in his yard. Belinda went to look after them.” Another pause. “They were upset, you see. They could smell the smoke. And we didn’t know ... I mean, the hospital might have burnt too, and the boxes.”
“Yes.”
He was still faintly trembling.
I said, “It’s pretty cold in here.”
“What? I suppose it is. The firemen said not to turn the central heating on until we’d had it checked. It’s gas-fired.”
“Gas-fired in the office building too?”
“Yes, but it was all switched off. It always is at night. The firemen asked.” He stared at me. “They made a point of shutting off the mains.” The shakes came back strongly. “It’s all a nightmare. It’s ... it’s ...”
“Yes,” I said, “sit down.” I pointed to the gray-haired man’s padded chair behind the desk, the only remotely comfortable perch in sight.
Ken groped his way onto it and sat as if his legs had given way. He had the sort of long loose-jointed limbs that seem always on the point of disconnecting from the hipbone, the thighbone, the anklebone—the skeleton coming apart. The longish Norwegian head accentuated it, and the thin big-knuckled fingers were an anatomy lesson in themselves.
“Apart from the fire,” I said, “what’s the problem?”
He put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands and didn’t answer for at least a minute. When he finally spoke his voice was low and painfully controlled.
“I operate on horses about five times a week. Normally you’ll lose less than one out of every two hundred on the table. For me, that means maybe one or at most two deaths a year. You can’t help it, horses are difficult under anesthetic. Anyway,” he swallowed, “I’ve had four die that way in the last two months.”
It seemed more like bad luck to me than utter tragedy, but I said, “Is that excessive?”
“You don’t understand!” The pressure rose briefly in his voice and he stifled it with an effort. “The word goes round like wildfire in the profession. People begin to snigger. Then any minute the public hears it and no one’s sending horses to you anymore. They ask for a different vet. It takes years to build a reputation. You can lose it like that.” He snapped the long fingers. “I know I’m a good surgeon. Carey knows it, they all know it, or I’d be out already. But they’ve got themselves to consider. We’re all in it together.”
I swept a hand round the empty office.
“The people who were here...?”
Ken nodded. “Six vets in partnership, including me, and also Scott, the anesthetist. And before you ask, no, I can’t blame him. He’s a good technician and a trained veterinary nurse, like Belinda.”
“What happened this morning?” I asked.
“Same thing,” Ken said miserably. “I was putting some screws in a split cannon bone. Routine. But the horse’s heart slowed and his blood pressure dropped like a stone and we couldn’t get it back.”
“We?”
“Usually it would have been just Scott, Belinda and me, but today we had Oliver Quincy assisting as well. And that was because the owner insisted, because he’d heard the rumors. And still the horse died, and I can’t ... I don’t ... it’s my whole life.”
After an interval I said, “I suppose you’ve checked all the equipment and the drugs you use.”
“Of course we have. Over and over. This morning we double-checked everything before we used it. Triple-checked. I checked, Scott checked, Oliver checked. We each did it separately.”
“Who checked last?”
“I did.” He said it automatically, then understood the significance of what I was asking. He said again, more slowly, “I checked last. I see that maybe I shouldn’t have. But I wanted to be sure.”
The remark and action, I thought, of an innocent man.
I said, “Mightn’t it have been more prudent, in the circumstances, to let one of the other vets see to the cannon bone?”
“What?” He looked at me blankly, then understood my ignorance, and explained. “We’re partners in a big general practice but we all have our own specialities. Carey and the two women are small-animal vets, though Lucy Amhurst does sheep and ponies as well. Jay Jardine does cattle. I do horses. Oliver Quincy is a general large-animal man working with both Jay and me, though he does mostly medical work and only minor surgery, almost never here in the hospital. Castrations, things like that. They’re done on-site.”
He had almost stopped shaking, as if the unburdening and explanations themselves had released the worst of the pressure.
“We’re all interchangeable to some extent,” he said. “I mean, we can all stitch up a gash whether it is a ferret or a carthorse. We know all the usual animal diseases and remedies. But after all that, we specialize.” He paused. “There aren’t all that number of surgeons like me in the whole country, actually. I get sent cases from other vets. This hospital has earned a reputation we can’t afford to lose.”
I reflected a bit and asked, “Have there been any over-the-top calamities in the dog and cat departments?”
Ken shook his head in depression. “Only horses.”
“Racehorses?”
“Mostly. But a couple of weeks ago there was an Olympic-standard show-jumper—and that didn’t die during an operation. I had to put it down.” He looked into tormented space. “I’d done a big repair job on its near hind a week earlier where it had staked itself breaking a jump, and it was healing fine back at home, and then t
hey asked me out to it as the whole leg had swelled like a balloon, and the tendon was shot to hell. The poor thing couldn’t put its foot to the ground. I gave it painkillers and brought it here and opened the leg up, but it was hopeless ... the tendon had disintegrated. There wasn’t anything to repair.”
“Does that happen often?” I asked.
“No, it damn well doesn’t. The owner was furious, his daughter was in tears, there was a hullabaloo all over the place. They’d insured the horse, thank God, otherwise we would have had another lawsuit on our hands. We’ve had to insure ourselves against malpractice suits just like American doctors. You get some very belligerent people these days in the horse world. They demand perfection a hundred percent of the time, and it’s impossible.”
I had a vague feeling that he’d glossed over some fact or other, but decided it was probably to do with a technicality he knew I wouldn’t understand. I wasn’t in a position, anyway, to demand that he tell me his every thought.
The night grew colder. Ken seemed to have retreated into introspection. I felt a great desire to make up for some of the sleep I’d missed. No one would come to set fire to the hospital. It had been a stupid idea of mine to suggest it.
I shook myself mentally awake and went out into the passage. All quiet, all brightly lit. I walked back to the entrance hall and checked that the departing vets had locked the front door when they left.
All secure.
Although wet, the entrance hall was distinctly warmer than the passage and the office. I put my hand on the wall nearest the burned building and felt the heat in it, which was of a comforting level rather than dangerous. The solid door to the glass-walled connecting passage was fastened with bolts and bore an engraved strip of plastic with the instruction “Keep This Fire Door Shut” The door’s surface was warmer than the wall, but nowhere near to frying eggs.
A third door led from the entrance hall into a Spartan roomy washroom and a fourth opened onto cleaning materials. No arsonists crouching anywhere.
Passing the defunct coffee machine, I went back to the office and asked Ken to show me round the rest of the hospital. Lethargically he rose and told me that the office we were in was used by whoever was operating in the theater for writing notes of the procedures used, together with drugs prescribed. The notes, he added with a despairing shake of the head, were then taken to the secretarial section and stored in files.