Comeback

by Dick Francis

  I thought it hilarious, but no one laughed.

  “I heard it last week,” Lucy said.

  Belinda said crossly, “How can you joke with some poor person lying dead over there?”

  “That poor person probably scored an own-goal.”

  Belinda and Oliver didn’t get on, I saw, and reckoned it was because of her habitual jealousy of anyone sharing Ken’s time.

  Yvonne said anxiously, “What will happen if the whole partnership falls to pieces?”

  Everyone glanced at her and away, as if they’d all had the thought and hadn’t wanted to express it.

  Lucy after a pause said sturdily, “We’ve got the Portakabin. We can buy new supplies. The building’s insured. We’re all still alive. We’ve still got the hospital. Carey said all that himself. Of course the partnership won’t fall to pieces.”

  “If it does,” Oliver said easily, “I’m hiring.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked.

  “I’m talking Quincy and Partners,” he said. “I’m the oldest of us here. We all need our jobs. We know all our clients. If Carey bows out, we go on as before, but without him. With me, instead, as senior partner.”

  “He won’t bow out,” Lucy said, upset.

  Smart Jay Jardine said, “We can bow him out. Tell him he’s too old, he’s lost our confidence. It’s a great idea.”

  “It’s a lousy idea,” Ken protested. “Carey built up this practice. It’s his.”

  “It’s normal,” Oliver said. “The young herd always gets rid of the old bull.”

  “The old man won’t stand for it,” Scott said forcefully. “You’ll see.”

  “You’re a good nurse,” Oliver told him. “You’ll have to choose to stay, or go.”

  “We’re all staying with Carey,” Scott asserted.

  Oliver’s mild-seeming gaze moved from Scott’s face to Ken’s. “Quincy and Partners,” he said, “can’t be doing with a discredited surgeon. Sorry, and all that.”

  There was a blank silence, then Lucy said with nervousness, “Is this another of your jokes?”

  Oliver might have laughed uproariously and told them he’d had them all on the hop, but he didn’t.

  “Who owns the hospital?” I asked.

  The heads all turned my way, surprised at my speaking as much as by my question.

  “Who owns the burned building?” I added. “Who gets the insurance money?”

  “The bank,” Lucy said doubtfully. “Mostly.”

  “The bank,” agreed Ken. “They advanced the money to build both blocks. They hold the mortgage. All of us vets pay towards it every month out of our salaries.”

  “Carey organized it all years ago,” Lucy said. “I was the only one of us with him then. When I first joined, he ran the practice out of his own house but then his wife died and he wanted to move.... Why do you ask?”

  “I just wondered if anyone benefited especially if the whole place burned down.”

  They thought about it, but one could see that it was basically caring for sick animals they were interested in, not finance. Even Oliver Quincy had an air of not having planned his insurrection in terms of cash.

  Lucy took heart from his silence. “We’ll have to ask Carey,” she said with satisfaction. “He’s still in charge.”

  The seeds of doubt had been sown though: one could see the eventual end of Carey’s road writ plain on Quincy and Jardine, writ tentatively on Yvonne Floyd, writ unbelievingly on Lucy Amhurst and wretchedly on Ken. The words had been spoken and couldn’t be retracted, and might work on them like dry rot, disintegrating their partnership from within.

  Ken’s prospects looked appalling. I understood clearly what he had seen all along. Carey’s loyalty to him couldn’t last forever, and the others of necessity would ditch him. With such an ignominious departure hanging over him, no one at all reputable would take him on.

  I thought of the Foreign Office “in” joke of defining total unacceptability as “turned down by Lagos.” Every country had the right to turn down a diplomat’s posting to it. Absolutely no one ever chose to go to Lagos, as Lagos ran Ulan Bator close in career nonadvancement. Lagos had to take what it could get. To be offered to Lagos and turned down meant the ultimate in rejection and loss of face. Job prospects thereafter, nil.

  Into the silence in which his five partners variously reviewed their futures, Carey himself put his gray head.

  “Oh, there you all are,” he said, unreceptive to the atmosphere. “The police want to see you over in the Portakabin. They’ve set up some sort of incident room in it although I told them we’d need that space for clinics tomorrow morning.”

  His voice sounded tired. His manner looked defeated. I wondered how he would have acted if he’d known of the disaffection among his ranks: wondered if it would have stiffened him or caused complete collapse. No sensible way of finding out.

  He, his partners and his nurses traipsed across the tarmac, Ken last. I walked beside Ken, slowing him down.

  “The police will probably chuck me out,” I said. “I’ll wait for you back in the office if they do. This is all getting serious. You must tell me things without reservation.”

  “It was always serious,” he objected.

  “Terminal then.”

  He swallowed, his sharp Adam’s apple making an up-and-down journey in his long pale neck.

  “All right,” he said.

  Belinda looked back to us, waited and tucked her arm through Ken’s. To do her justice, she was still unfalteringly linking her star to his, believing in him absolutely.

  We went into the Portakabin, where a constable was taking names and asking everyone to sit on the flip-up chairs lining the walls. I gave my name and sat down like everyone else and stayed quiet for as long as possible.

  The senior policeman in charge, middle-aged, local accent, air of sober reliability, still without a name as far as I was concerned, said he was interested in knowing who had left the main veterinary building last on Thursday, before the fire.

  Yvonne Floyd said that when she left at seven only Carey, working in his office, had remained.

  “Seven?” asked the law. “Was that your normal time?”

  “We hold small-animal clinics on Mondays and Thursdays from five to seven. I do Thursdays.”

  The policeman looked at the lace-edged slip and the long crossed legs and quite likely decided to buy a dog. He slid his eyes away reluctantly and sought confirmation from Carey.

  Yes, Carey agreed wearily. Thursday had been a long, bothersome day. The painters had been underfoot. A horse had died during an operation. He’d helped Yvonne with the clinic because they were short of a nurse, and then he’d had a good deal of telephoning and paperwork to see to. He hadn’t left until after eight. At that time he’d checked into every room to make sure he was the last, then he’d let himself out and locked the front door from the outside. He’d then walked back to the hospital, which was locked but had a light on in the office, and had gone on along to the stable boxes, where he’d found Scott checking on the three inmates there. He’d said goodnight to Scott and driven home.

  “And after that, sir?”

  Carey looked nonplussed. “Do you mean, what did I have for dinner? Things like that?”

  “No, sir, not exactly. I meant, when did you find out that your place was on fire?”

  “Oh, I see. The people who live over the shoe shop across the road, they phoned me. They said they’d already called the fire brigade.”

  The policeman nodded as if he’d heard that already and asked which of us was Scott.

  Scott identified himself, broad-shouldered, lean, the power machine.

  “Scott Sylvester, qualified veterinary nurse.”

  “Large animals,” Carey supplemented.

  “Did you see anyone around the place, sir, after Mr. Hewett left?”

  Scott said it had all been quiet. He’d settled his charges for the night and gone to the Red Lion just along the road for a few beers.
It had been a rotten day, with the horse dying. Around closing time, someone had come into the pub and said the vets’ place was on fire, so he’d belted back to help and found the fire department had got there first.

  The policeman asked how many people had keys to the burned building.

  “We all do,” Carey said. “Also the senior secretary has some, and so do the cleaners, of course.”

  The policeman took a patient breath. “When do the cleaners come in?”

  “Eight o’clock every weekday.”

  “And er ... had they arrived when you left?”

  “What?” Carey said, briefly puzzled. “Oh no. They come at eight in the morning, not at night.”

  The policeman made a note, which I speculated might be a memo to ask the cleaners if any of their number was missing. Vets’ pharmacies held salable drugs: a thieving cleaner might even have been issued with a shopping list. But a thief after drugs didn’t necessarily explain the fire.

  Carey said, “I suppose it’s impossible to tell if someone broke in through a window?”

  The policeman nodded. “Can you tell me if the internal doors were locked, sir?”

  “Just the pharmacy and the path lab,” Carey said, shaking his head. “We might close the other internal doors, but we very seldom locked them. When I left on Thursday, only the pharmacy and path-lab doors were locked.”

  “Would they be spring locks, sir, or mortise?”

  Carey looked blank. “Mortise, I think.”

  “Would you have keys with you now, sir?”

  Carey nodded and produced a bunch as substantial as Ken’s, if not even larger. Carey’s too were labeled, and on request he identified the right keys to the policeman.

  “Mortise locks,” the policeman said, nodding.

  “What difference does it make?” Carey asked.

  “You see, sir,” came the patient explanation, “when wooden doors and frames burn away, the lock itself often doesn’t. It falls to the floor and the heat may not melt it, you understand?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “The investigators now in your building have found a lock they think is lying in the position of the pharmacy door. It’s a mortise lock, and it is in the open position.”

  The significance of this information landed like lead in the communal consciousness, though no one said anything.

  “We’d like to borrow your keys, sir, to find out if they have the right lock.”

  Carey silently handed over the keys. The senior policeman handed them to his constable, showing him the key in question and telling him to take it over to the investigators, to wait there, and finally bring the keys back. The constable took the bunch and went away and the senior policeman then asked how many people had a key to the pharmacy.

  “We all do,” Carey said, sighing.

  “Including the senior secretary, sir?”

  Carey nodded.

  “And the cleaners?”

  Carey said defensively, “We have to keep the place spotless. And each cabinet has its own lock, of course. The secretary and cleaners don’t have keys to those.”

  “Glass-fronted cabinets, sir?”

  Carey nodded.

  “The investigators say there was a great deal of melted glass in that area. The room was totally gutted. The roof obliterated anything remaining, when it fell. The firemen have been pumping tons of water out of the ruins. There seems to be no chance of identifying anything in the pharmacy, which means we can’t identify what’s missing, if anything is. We just ask you, all of you, to make a list of what you know was in the pharmacy, so that if any of it turns up in other hands, we can proceed further with our enquiries.”

  “It’s hopeless,” Lucy protested.

  “Please try.”

  I thought of a quick way to get at least some of the answers, but decided I would tell Carey later. If I drew attention to myself at that point, I thought, I could be turned out pretty fast, and it was definitely more interesting to be present.

  Lucy asked, “Is it true this body was in the pharmacy?”

  “In that area,” the policeman confirmed.

  “What do you mean, area?”

  The policeman seemed to add up the pros and cons of answering but finally said that some of the internal walls had crumbled under the weight of the roof. The pharmacy, as a four-sided room, no longer existed.

  “Oh God,” Lucy said.

  Jay Jardine asked, “How badly was the body burned?”

  “An examination is still proceeding, sir.”

  “How long will it take you to find out who he is?” Jay Jardine again.

  “We can’t tell, sir.” A brief pause. “Some bodies are never identified.”

  “But what about missing people?” Lucy asked.

  “Vagrants, the homeless, runaways, migrant workers, madam, people like that never turn up on lists of missing people.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’d like to ask all of you,” the policeman said, “whether you know of anyone who holds a grudge against any or all of you. Have you dismissed anyone recently? Have you received any hate mail? Has anyone threatened you? Have you been engaged in any litigation? Have you in the course of your work come across anyone who holds you responsible for a pet’s death? Do you know anyone you might think of as unbalanced or obsessed?”

  “Wow,” Yvonne said. “That covers half the human race.”

  Oliver Quincy looked at Ken and said to the policeman, “We’ve had several horses die in the hospital recently and the owners are screaming.”

  “Details, sir?”

  Carey took over, explaining the difficulties of equine anesthesia. The policeman wrote notes.

  “Have any of those owners threatened you, sir?”

  Carey shook his head.

  Ken said forcefully, “If it had been those owners, it would have been the hospital they would have burned, and the body in it would have been mine.”

  No one laughed.

  “Did they threaten you, sir?” The policeman consulted his list. “Kenneth McClure, equine surgeon?”

  “Right. And I’ve received no threats. Not that sort of threat, anyway.”

  “What sort, sir?”

  “Oh, just that they’ll never send a horse into my care again, that sort of thing.”

  The policeman seemed to think that sort of threat more violent than Ken did, but then Ken was no doubt right: if he had been the target, it would have been he and the hospital under the torch.

  The policeman flicked through his notes and after a pause asked Carey, “When you left the premises, sir, and checked the pharmacy door, was it already locked?”

  “Yes,” Carey said. “I told you.”

  “So you did, sir. But what I mean is, who actually locked it? Was it you yourself who locked it earlier?”

  Carey shook his head.

  “I locked it,” Yvonne said. “I locked it as usual after the clinic.”

  The policeman glanced at the legs and suffered a spasm of regret, then pulled himself together, sighed and rubbed his fingers down his nose.

  “And who locked the laboratory?”

  “Probably I did,” Jay Jardine said. “I had some tests in there that I didn’t want to be disturbed.” He laughed without mirth. “I suppose there’s nothing left of those, either?”

  “Very unlikely, sir.” The policeman cleared his throat. “At what time were you last on the premises?”

  Jay Jardine stared and took offense. “Are you suggesting that I set fire to the place?”

  “I’m trying to establish a pattern, sir.”

  “Oh.” Jardine still looked annoyed. “I locked up when I left at about four. I was called out to a sick cow. Anything else?”

  “I’d like to make a list of where you all were during the evening.” The policeman turned to a fresh page in his spiral-bound notebook. “Starting with Mr. Hewett, please sir.”

  “I told you, I left after eight and went home.”

  “How far away is
home, sir?”

  “Are all these questions necessary?” Carey protested. “You surely can’t think one of us started the fire?”

  “We can’t tell who started it, sir, but we’d like to eliminate as many people as possible.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, I live five minutes away.”

  “By car?”

  “Of course by car.”

  “And you spent the evening with your wife?”

  The policeman, not insensitive, observed the mental wince of everyone there and was ready for Carey’s reply.

  “My wife’s dead.”

  “Very sorry, sir. You were alone, then, sir?”

  “I suppose so. I got some supper, played some music, read the newspaper. I don’t think of it as being alone, but if you mean was anyone else there, no, they weren’t.”

  The policeman nodded, made a note and continued to the next name on his list.

  “Mrs. Amhurst?”

  “Miss,” Lucy said.

  The policeman gave her a slow reconnoitering look as if establishing a base against which to test her answers. A good detective, I thought, and very experienced.

  “Thursday evening, madam?” he asked economically.

  She answered straightforwardly, without Jardine’s umbrage. “I left here soon after lunch as I had about four calls to make in the afternoon. The last was to some sheep up on a hill above Birdlip. I suppose I left there at dusk, say before seven, and then called on a basset hound I’d had in surgery in the morning. He was all right. I had a drink with the owners and went home. Didn’t look at the time.”

  “Do you live alone, madam?”

  “My sister lives with me, but she’s away on a cruise.”

  “So that evening ... ?”

  “Same as Carey. I suppose, though, in my case instead of music I watched some television.” She forestalled his next question humorously. “Don’t ask me what program I watched, I’ve no idea. I’m afraid I’ve a habit of falling asleep in my chair after a long day.”

  “How far away from here do you live, madam?”

  “A mile and a quarter. In Riddlescombe.”

  I looked at her with interest. Riddlescombe was the village where I’d lived with my mother, where the Eaglewoods still held sway. I hadn’t realized it was quite so near to the outskirts of Cheltenham. Distances seemed greater, I supposed, to children.