by Dick Francis
“You’re scared of her!”
“You haven’t met her.”
“What were the horses’ names?”
“What a question! I’m always told their names but I can’t remember them after I’ve finished treating them. Well, seldom. Only if they’re in the top rank. I attend hundreds of horses in a year. They’re filed under their names in the computer—well, they were—but to jog my own memory I write them down as, say, ”Three-year-old filly, white socks, herring-gutted,’ then I know at once which horse I’m referring to.”
“Describe the atropine horses.”
“The first one, a bay four-year-old gelding, large white blaze down its nose. The second one, a five-year-old gelding, chestnut, two white socks in front, white face.”
“OK.” I wrote down the descriptions. “How did they die?”
“Colic cases, both times the same. We had the colon out on the table, like you saw, and I was palpating—that’s feeling—the smaller intestines for obstructions, and not finding any, and without warning their hearts started to fail and their blood pressure dropped disastrously. The alarm signal went off and we’d lost them. Hopeless. But, like I told you, it does sometimes happen, so I didn’t think much about the first one.”
“How many have died like that now?”
“Four in eight weeks.” He swallowed. “It should be impossible.”
“Exactly the same way?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“How do you mean, more or less?”
“They weren’t all colic operations. Like I told you, the last one was putting screws in a split cannon bone, and before that there was the respiratory tract, a tieback like the one here now. Those two were both Eaglewood’, as I told you at Stratford.”
“Um,” I said, looking at my increasingly chaotic notes.
“Do you remember in which order they happened?”
“Well ...” He thought. “Put the insulin colt first, even though he didn’t die here in the hospital.”
“OK.”
“Then Zoe Mackintosh’s four-year-old.”
“Right.”
“Then ... Eaglewood’s respiratory tieback.”
“OK,” I said. “Do you ever do tubing? I remember being fascinated as a child that you could put a tube through into a horse’s trachea so that it could breathe better, with a plug like a bath plug that you can put in and out of its neck—in for rest, out for galloping!”
“Not often. It’s still done here sometimes, but you can’t run tubed horses in America, and it will end here soon.”
“And here, once upon a time, a tubed horse with the plug out galloped into a canal and drowned?”
“Ages ago.” He nodded, smiling. “In the Grand National. It forgot to turn at the Canal Turn and made a proper balls of it.”
“Derby Day II in 1930,” I said, from the depths.
He was startled. “How the hell do you know that?”
“I’ve an endless memory for trivia.” I said it as a joke, but realized it was more or less true. “And trivia,” I said apologetically, “means ‘three roads’ in Latin. Wherever three roads met, the Romans put up notice boards with the news on. Little bits of information.”
“Jeez,” Ken said.
I laughed. “Well, after the respiratory tieback, what next?”
He thought for a good while. “I suppose the next one was Nagrebb’s show-jumper. The horse that staked itself, that I told you about. It splintered one of the jumps while they were schooling it at home, and when I went there it was still in the field with a sharp piece of wood a foot long driven into its near hind above the hock. There was blood pouring down its leg, and it was fearfully agitated and trying to wrench itself away from the two people holding its head collar. One of them was a groom and the other was the girl who rode it and she was in tears the whole time, which didn’t help the horse. Horses react to fear with fear. I think they can smell it. They’re very receptive. Anyway, she was afraid he would have to be put down, and her father was jumping around yelling at me to do something, which upset the horse too. Between them, they’d wound it up into such a state that the first thing I had to do was tranquilize it and wait until it calmed down and that wasn’t popular either. In the end I got old man Nagrebb to take his daughter into the house as I could manage well with just the groom. So after that I pulled the stake out of the leg and inspected the damage, which was considerable but mainly muscular, with a few severed blood vessels but not the main artery or vein. Well, I did a clean-and-repair job and closed the skin with strong sutures. Staples, like you saw me use on the mare, aren’t adequate for that sort of wound. It looked neat enough. I told the Nagrebbs the leg would be swollen and hot for a bit but with antibiotics it should heal satisfactorily, and I would take the sutures out after a week. They wanted me to promise the leg would be as good as new but how could I? I didn’t know. I rather doubted it myself but I didn’t tell them that. I said to give it time.”
He paused, thinking back. “Well, then, as I told you, the leg was healing OK. I went out there several times. I took out the sutures. End of case. Then a day or two later, I got a panic call and went and found its lower leg and fetlock up like a balloon and the horse unable to put his foot to the ground. So we brought him here and I opened the leg because I was worried that infection had got into the tendon sheath and, like I told you, the tendon had literally disintegrated. There was nothing to repair. I’d never seen anything so bad. I got Carey to come and look at it because I thought Nagrebb would take his word for it better than mine, because of course we had to put the horse down and it was this famous show-jumper. Nagrebb had insured it, so we told the insurers the horse couldn’t be saved. They agreed to the lethal injection, which I gave. Then shortly after that, old man Nagrebb started complaining that I must have somehow damaged the fetlock and tendon myself when I repaired the stake wound but I know for certain I hadn’t”
He stopped again and looked at me earnestly. “I’ m going to tell you something because I promised I’d tell you everything, but you’re not to think me raving mad.”
“You’re not raving mad,” I said.
“All right. Well, you might say I brooded about that horse, about why its tendon disintegrated and, well, there is something that would make that happen.”
“What?” I asked.
“Some stuff called collagenase.” He swallowed. “If you injected, say, two cc’s of collagenase into a tendon you would get that result.”
“How, exactly?”
“It’s an enzyme that dissolves collagen, which is what tendons and ligaments are made of.”
I stared at him. He stared apprehensively back.
“You are not raving mad,” I repeated.
“But you can’t just go out and buy collagenase,” he said. “It’s supplied by chemical companies but it’s only used in research laboratories. It’s pretty dicey stuff. I mean, it would dissolve human tendons too. You wouldn’t want to ram a needleful into your wrist.”
I felt like saying Jeez myself.
“You can buy it freeze-dried, in small bottles,” Ken said. “I looked it up. You reconstitute it with one cc of water. You’d only need a small needle.”
Jeez again, I thought.
“What do you think?” he asked.
I thought he might possibly be in great danger, but all I said was, “Go on to the next one.”
“Don’t forget,” he said, “that in between all those I saw dozens of other horses, racehorses, hunters and so on, that were quite all right. For every horse that died here, I operated on many others without incident. We get quite a few referrals from other veterinary practices, and none of them died. Telling the dead ones all at once makes it sound as if they were one after the other without interval.”
“I’ll remember.”
“OK. Then the next one that died was the one out in the intensive-care box, which I told you about this morning.”
I nodded. He seemed to have finished with t
hat one, but I asked, “Who owned it?”
“Chap called Fitzwalter. Decent sort of man. Took it philosophically and didn’t blame me.”
“And do you have reservations, or do you think that that one did die of natural causes?”
He sighed heavily. “I took some of the colt’s blood for testing, though he’d been dead too long really. The results came back negative for any unexplained substance.”
I studied his pale worried face.
“Even if the tests were negative, do you have even a faint suspicion?”
“I suspect it because it happened.”
That seemed reasonable enough for the circumstances. “And straight after that, the second Mackintosh horse came in, and it died on the table exactly like the first one.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t until after that second one that I thought of atropine. Because the pupils were dilated, you see. I thought I might have missed that the first time, or not seen the significance, anyway, because at that point there wasn’t any reason to be suspicious.”
“No.” I sighed.
“Then last Thursday, the day you came, we lost the Eaglewood horse with the cannon bone. Just the same. Failing heart and diving blood pressure. I took blood samples before we began that operation and Oliver took more when the horse was beyond saving, but we’ll never know the results of those as they were in the fridge in the path lab. I was going to send them to a professional lab for analysis.”
“Was there anything—anything at all—different in the two Mackintosh operations from the one I saw you do on the mare? Apart from not finding any physical obstructions, I mean?”
“Nothing, except naturally that it was Scott and Belinda who were with me, not you. Belinda runs the room, Scott does the anesthetic. We always work that way.”
“Just the three of you?”
“Not always. Any of the others might come in. Lucy assists with ponies, sometimes. Oliver’s often helping. I’ve assisted Jay with cows and bulls. Carey keeps an eye on things generally. He can turn his hand to anything if he has to, though nowadays he does small animals only. Yvonne, for all her glamour, is a neat, delicate surgeon, a pleasure to watch. I’ve seen her put car-struck dogs and cats back together like jigsaw puzzles. Even a pet rabbit, for one little boy. She microstitched its half-severed leg back on. It was hopping around later.” He paused. “The hospital has been our pride and joy, you see. Not many vets’ practices have such good facilities. It’s brought us a lot of outside work.”
“Go back to last Thursday morning,” I said. “By then all of you were apprehensive over almost every operation, right?”
He nodded mutely.
“So you checked everything twice. You had Oliver there. You were operating on a leg, not an abdomen. Go through it all in your mind, right from when the horse arrived. Don’t skip anything. Go slowly. I’ll just wait. Take your time.”
He raised no objections. I watched him think, watched the small movements in his facial muscles as he passed from procedure to procedure. Watched him shake his head and frown and finally move his whole body in distress.
“Absolutely nothing,” he burst out. “Nothing, except—” He stopped indecisively, as if unconvinced by what he was thinking.
“Except what?” I asked.
“Well, Oliver was watching the screen, like you were. I glanced over a couple of times. I can’t swear to it but I think now that the trace on the electrocardiograph—the line that shows the heartbeat—had changed slightly. I didn’t stand and watch it. Perhaps I should have done, considering. But then of course the trace did change anyway because the heart wasn’t working properly.” He frowned heavily, thinking it over. “I’ll have to look a few things up.”
“Here?” I asked, looking round the bare office.
“No, at home. All my books are at home. And thank God they are. Carey kept all his in his office so that we could all use them for reference if something cropped up we weren’t sure of. What the fire didn’t ruin, the water will have done.” He shook his head. “Some of those books are irreplaceable.”
“Very bad luck,” I said.
“There’s no saying the troubles are over, either.”
“Particularly not with an unknown body lying around.”
He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. “Let’s go along to Thetford Cottage.”
“OK. But Ken . . .”
“What?”
“Until they find out whose body it is, well, don’t go down any dark alleys.”
He stared. He didn’t seem to have worried in the least about the body or seen it as any warning to be careful.
“It was the arsonist,” he protested.
“Maybe. But why was he setting fire to the place?”
“I’ve no idea. No one has.”
“It sounds to me as if the arsonist himself didn’t know he was going to start a fire until just before he did it”
“Why do you think that?”
“Cleaning fluid. Paint. They happened to be there. If you intended to set fire to a building would you rely on breaking into it and finding inflammable liquids just lying around?”
He said slowly, “No, I wouldn’t”
“So just take care.”
“You scare me, you know.”
“Good.”
He studied my face. “I didn’t expect you to be like this.”
“Like what?”
“So . . . so penetrating.”
I smiled lopsidedly. “Like a carpet needle! But no one remembers everything all the time. No one sees the significance of things all at once. Understanding what you’ve seen comes in fits and starts and sometimes when you don’t expect it. So if you remember anything else that you haven’t told me about the dead horses, well, tell me.”
“Yes,” he said soberly, “I will.”
VICKY DID HER best to charm Ken’s mother—Josephine—but in truth they were incompatible spirits. Vicky, spontaneous, rounded, generous, essentially young despite the white hair, was having to break through to a defensive, plainly dressed angular woman in whom disapproval was a habit.
Belinda, taking refuge in the kitchen, was knocking back a huge Bloody Mary (to settle her nerves and stop her screaming, Ken said, mixing it for her) and in consequence seemed more human.
Greg and I batted some conversation around without saying anything worth remembering and eventually we all sat down to roast lamb with potatoes, peas, carrots and gravy, the sort of meal I’d almost forgotten existed.
It wasn’t very difficult, once everyone had passed, poured and helped the food and was safely munching, to introduce the subject of Ken’s brilliant work on the colicky mare being met with suspicion and ingratitude from its owner.
“A most extraordinary man,” I said. “Wynn Lees, his name is. I didn’t like him at all.”
Josephine McClure, sitting next to me, raised her head from the forkful she’d been about to eat and paid attention.
I went on. “He showed no fondness for his mare. He didn’t seem to care about her. It almost seemed as if he wanted her dead.”
“No one could be so heartless,” Vicky exclaimed.
Josephine McClure ate her forkful.
“Some people are born heartless,” I said.
Ken recounted the story of his having got permission to operate from Wynn Lees’s wife. He chuckled. “He said she couldn’t have spoken to me in the middle of the night because she always took sleeping pills.”
Josephine McClure said tartly, “Anyone married to Wynn Lees would take sleeping pills as a matter of course.”
God bless you, dear lady, I thought, and in an amused chorus with the others, begged her to enlarge.
“Ken,” she said severely, “you didn’t tell me you’d done any work for Wynn Lees. That name! Unforgettable. I thought he’d gone to live abroad. Stay away from him.”
Ken said, bemused, “I didn’t know you knew him.”
“I don’t know him. I know of him. That’s not the same.”
; “What do you know of him?” I asked in my most persuasive voice. “Do tell us.”
She sniffed. “He tortured some horses and went to jail.”
Vicky exclaimed in horror, and I asked, “When?”
“Years ago. Probably forty years ago. It was a frightful scandal because his father was a magistrate.”
Ken looked at her open-mouthed. “You never told me any of that”
“There’s never been any reason to. I haven’t heard his name for years. I’ve never given him a thought. He’d gone away. But if your man was heartless to his mare, it must be the same person come back again. There can’t be hundreds of people called Wynn Lees.”
“You have a good memory,” I said.
“I pride myself on it.”
“Ken’s also been having a spot of trouble with Ronnie Upjohn,” I said. “Do you know any scandal about him?”
“Ronnie Upjohn?” She frowned slightly. “He used to know my husband. It’s very stupid of him to complain about Ken winning with that horse. Ken told me about it.”
I said tentatively, “Is he in business? Does he have a partner?”
“Oh, you mean old Mr. Travers? No, that was Ronnie’s father’s partner.”
I held my breath.
Josephine cut up some meat and fed herself a mouthful.
“I’ve lost you,” Ken said. “What are you talking about?”
“Old Mr. Travers,” his mother said acidly, “was a frightful lecher.”
Vicky looked captivated by the contrast between Josephine’s censorious manner and the pithiness of her words. Vicky would have given “lecher” a laugh. Josephine was serious. Greg, smiling, was maybe thinking that dried-up old Josephine needn’t fear the attentions of lechers: yet she had been a happy wife once and there were still vestiges of that young woman, though her mouth might be pursed now and bitter.
“Upjohn and Travers,” I said.
“That’s right.” She went on eating unemotionally.
“What sort of business was it?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Something to do with finance.” Her voice said that finance to her was a closed book. “Ronnie Upjohn’s never done a day’s work in his life, as far as I know. His father and old Mr. Travers were rolling.”