Comeback

by Dick Francis

  “No, not now. Later. I simply want to do these notes before the op. I shouldn’t have wasted all this time. Show me the lists later, OK?”

  “OK.” I watched him scribble for a bit and asked if I could use the telephone, if he didn’t mind. He pointed to it for acquiescence and I got through to the Foreign Office, reversing the charges.

  It took a while to reach the right desk. I was reporting my presence in England, I said. When did they want me to darken the Whitehall doorway?

  “Ah.” Papers were audibly shuffled. “Here we are. Darwin. Four years in Tokyo. Accrued and terminal leave, eight weeks.” A throat was cleared. “Where does that put you?”

  “Three weeks today.”

  “Fine.” Relief at the precision. “Let’s say . . . er . . . three weeks today, then. Splendid. I’m making a note.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Not at all.”

  Smiling, I put down the receiver. They’d given me a fortnight longer than I expected, which meant I could go to Cheltenham races, held during the last of those weeks, without dereliction of duty.

  Ken had finished his notes.

  “One more quick one?” I asked, lifting the phone.

  “Sure. Then we’ll get started.”

  I asked Enquiries for the Jockey Club and I asked the Jockey Club for Annabel.

  “Annabel?”

  “In public relations.”

  “Hold on.”

  Remarkably, she was there.

  “It’s Peter,” I said. “How are the Japanese?”

  “They leave today.”

  “How about dinner tomorrow in London?”

  “Can’t do tomorrow. How about tonight?”

  “Where will I find you?”

  She sounded amused. “Daphne’s restaurant, Draycott Avenue.”

  “Eight o’clock?”

  “See you,” she said. “Got to rush.” The phone disconnected before I could even say goodbye.

  Ken looked at my expression. “Two bits of good news in one morning! Like a cat that’s tipped over the goldfish.” With awakening alarm he went on, “You’re not leaving, though, are you?”

  “Not yet.” His alarm remained, so I added, “Not if there’s anything I can do.”

  “I rely on you,” he said.

  I could have said that to me what I was doing was like walking through a fog of confetti looking for one scarlet dot, but it would have increased his worries. I thought he wouldn’t have minded much if his patient hadn’t turned up that morning because in spite of his success with the broodmare he was again looking pale and apprehensive.

  The operation however went smoothly from start to finish. Carey watched intently. I watched and took notes. Scott and Belinda moved expertly as Ken’s satellites and the prancing horse, fast asleep, got its larynx firmed and widened to improve its breathing.

  From behind the safe section of wall, we watched him wake in the recovery room, Scott holding the rope-through-the-ring to steady him. He staggered to his feet looking miserable but most decisively alive.

  “Good,” Carey said, going off to the office. “I promised to phone the owner.”

  Ken gave me a glance of rueful relief, and he and I stripped off our gowns and left Scott and Belinda to clear the theater again ready for the afternoon stint, while also checking on the patient continually.

  “You all work hard,” I commented.

  “We’re understaffed. We need a couple of dogsbodies. Would you like a permanent job?”

  He didn’t expect an answer. We went into the office where Carey was giving his thumbs-up report and after Carey had gone he finally said it was time for my list.

  I brought it, much creased from folding, out of my trousers pocket, smoothed it down on the desk and added to it one more line. We sat in the chairs side by side and I explained what he was seeing.

  “The list on the left of the page,” I said, “is of the owners and trainers whose horses have died with question marks, to say the least. The middle column is the various ways they may or may not have died. The list on the right is ... well . . .”

  Ken looked at the list on the right and protested immediately, as it named all his partners plus Belinda and Scott.

  “They’re not involved,” he insisted.

  “All right. Look at the first and second columns, then, OK?”

  “OK.”

  I’d written in table form:

  “Whew,” Ken said thoughtfully, reading to the end.

  “Are there any others?”

  “Not that I can think of.” He paused. “We had one that broke its leg thrashing around when it came out of the anesthetic after a successful colic operation. You’ve seen two satisfactory awakenings. They’re not always so peaceful. We had to put that horse down.”

  “All the horses that died on the table,” I pointed out, “could have been there by appointment.” I forestalled his objection. “If two were given atropine, their time was chosen. They weren’t random emergencies.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “The respiratory job had been booked in well in advance,” I said, “and that cannon bone was fractured three days before you screwed it”

  “How do you know?” he asked, surprised. “I thought he’d done it the day before.”

  “It was a stress fracture in a race last Monday.”

  “How do you know?” he repeated, mystified.

  “I . . . er ... drifted up to Eaglewood’s stable yesterday afternoon and asked.”

  “You did what? Didn’t old Eaglewood throw you out?”

  “I didn’t see him. Someone in the stable yard told me.”

  “Great God.”

  “So all the deaths on the table very likely had a common premeditated cause, and it’s up to you to work out what.”

  “But I don’t know.” His despair surfaced again. “If I knew I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “I think you probably do know in some dark recess or other. I’ve great faith that one of these days a blinding light will switch on in your brain and make sense of everything.”

  “But I’ve thought and thought.”

  “Mm. That’s where the third list comes in.”

  “No.”

  “It has to,” I said reasonably. “Do any of Lees, Eaglewood, Mackintosh, Fitzwalter or Nagrebb have the knowledge to accomplish all this? Has any of them had the opportunity?”

  He silently shook his head.

  “The knowledge,” I said, “is veterinary.”

  “Let’s stop this right away.”

  “It’s for your own sake,” I said.

  “But they’re my friends. My partners.”

  Partners weren’t always friends, I thought. He was still raising barriers against belief: a common enough mechanism encountered perennially in embassies.

  I didn’t want to antagonize him or force him into destructive self-analysis. He would come to things in time. Understanding, as I’d grown to see it, was often a matter of small steps, small realizations, small sudden visitations of “Oh, yes.” As far as Ken’s problems were concerned I was still a long way from the “Oh, yes” stage. I hoped that perhaps we might reach it together.

  “Incidentally,” I said, “you know the pharmacy list the police want?”

  He nodded.

  “Carey agrees it would be a good idea to ask your suppliers for copies of their invoices for six months back or maybe more. He asked me to ask if you would do it.”

  He predictably groaned. “One of the secretaries can do it.”

  “I just thought,” I said diffidently, “that if you did it yourself, you could get the invoices sent back to you personally.”

  “What for?”

  “Um ... just suppose, for instance . . .” I came to it slowly. “Just suppose someone here had ordered something like ... collagenase.”

  The pale eyes stared as if they would never blink. After a long pause he said, “That wouldn’t come from our regular wholesale suppliers.
It would have to come from a chemical company dealing with research reagents for laboratory use only.”

  “Do you deal with any of those companies for the laboratory here?”

  “Well, yes, we do.”

  A silence settled.

  He sighed heavily. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll write to them. I’ll write to all I can think of. I hope they all come back negative. I’m sure they will.”

  “Quite likely,” I agreed, and hoped not.

  THE AFTERNOON’S OPERATION, with Carey coming in tired but vigilant and myself taking notes, passed off without crisis. The more accustomed I became to the general theater routine, the more impressed I was by Ken in action: his long-fingered hands were steady and deft, his whole oddly articulated height taking on an economical grace where one might have expected gangling clumsiness. His self-doubts seemed to evaporate every time once he had a scalpel in his hand and I supposed that that really was to be expected, because the doubts were thrust upon him from outside, not generated within.

  He closed the incision with a neat row of staples and the hoist once again lifted the big inert body by its feet to transport it to the padded recovery room. Everyone followed and waited in safety behind the breast-high partition while the patient staggered and lunged back to consciousness, to stand in dumb and no doubt sore bewilderment.

  “Good. Good,” Carey said again, sighing nevertheless. “Nothing wrong with that.”

  He still looked overtired, I thought, still gray. He seemed to be functioning in irregular spurts of energy, not, like Scott, with inexhaustible stamina.

  As if to confirm my impression, he rubbed a hand over his face and round his neck, easing out stiffness, and said, “I’ve asked Lucy to be on call instead of me. That makes Lucy and Jay tonight. Let’s hope it’s a quiet one. I’m going home.”

  Ken and I went with him along to the office, where he phoned the referring vets to tell them their horse was recovering normally. In his voice there was only a taking-it-for-granted tone; no hint of excessive relief. Oliver Quincy, who’d been writing notes all afternoon while monitoring the closed-circuit television to check continually on the well-being of the morning’s patient, said grumpily it was about time he was relieved.

  “Jay’s been spelling me,” he protested, “but this isn’t my job. It’s Scott’s or Belinda’s.”

  “We must all muck in,” Carey said, seeing no difficulty. “Where’s Jay now?”

  “Taking what he wants of the new drugs. Yvonne and Lucy have been in doing that as well. I got them to write down what they took.”

  “Good. Good,” Carey said.

  Oliver gave him an unfriendly glance, which he didn’t notice, and said that as he had two calls to make on his way home, he’d better be going. Jay put his head in briefly with much the same message, and they left together, thick as thieves.

  Ken began writing his own professional notes to supplement those I’d taken and through the window I watched Carey go out to his car and drive away. I borrowed the phone again and got through to Vicky, telling her I was going to London and not to be scared if she heard me coming back in the early hours, or even later. Thank you, dear, she said. She sounded bored, I thought.

  Ken looked up from his task. “All right for some,” he said.

  “You’ve got yours on the doorstep.”

  He grinned. “Is Annabel the girl at Stratford?”

  “She is.”

  “You don’t waste time.”

  “This is just a reconnaissance.”

  “You know,” he said unexpectedly, “I can’t imagine you getting drunk.”

  “Try harder.”

  He shook his head in friendly evaluation. “You wouldn’t want to lose that much control.”

  He surprised me, and not just because he was right.

  “You’ve only known me since Thursday,” I said, repeating his own reservations.

  “I basically knew you in half an hom.” He hesitated. “Funny, that. Vicky told me the same.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “An open book.” I smiled and prepared to go. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you.”

  I left the hospital and walked across the car park to the car. I would be early for the planned meeting: I’d have time for buying newspapers with accommodation ads. I’d get to know how difficult it would be to find somewhere to live, and how expensive.

  Belinda came out of the hospital and went into the intensive-care box briefly to get it ready for the new incumbent. Leaving the first door wide open, she then took a look in the next box, where the morning’s patient stood, and after that went along for a routine peek at the mare. I watched her trim capable figure and wondered if time and motherhood would soften or harden her caring instincts. Some nurses grew gentle, some unsympathetic. A tossup, I thought.

  She unbolted the mare’s door and went in, and came tearing out at high speed yelling, “Ken. Ken.” She ran into the hospital and I thought, Oh, God, no, and went over to the end box to see.

  The big mare lay on her side.

  There were no heaving breaths, no agitation in the limbs. The head lay floppily. The liquid eye looked gray, opaque, unseeing.

  The mare was dead.

  Ken came at a run, stricken. He fell on his knees beside her and put his ear to her brown body behind the shoulder, but one could see from his face that there was nothing to hear.

  He sat back on his heels as moved and devastated as if she’d been a child, and I saw and understood his dedicated love of horses and the solicitude he unstintingly lavished on them without any thought or possibility of thanks.

  I thought of the courage he’d dredged up to operate on that mare. Thought of the extreme skill he’d summoned to save her life while believing he was risking his own future. Felt impotently angry that so much holy nerve, so much artistry had gone to waste. In a way missing before, when I’d only heard about murdered horses but hadn’t seen one, I felt personally engaged in avenging them. It was no longer just for Ken and to please my mother that I’d do my utmost to pierce the fog, but now too for the horses themselves, the silent splendid victims with no defense against predatory man.

  “She shouldn’t have died,” Ken said numbly. “She was out of danger.”

  It was a fraction too soon, I judged, to say I disagreed. Danger, in that place, wore many faces.

  He smoothed his hand over the brown flank, then rose and knelt again, this time by her head, lifting the drooping eyelid, opening the mouth, peering down her throat.

  “She’s been dead for some time,” he said. He stood up wearily and trembled as of old. “We’ll never survive this. It’s the absolute end.”

  “It’s not your fault”

  “How do I know? How does anyone know?”

  Belinda, in the doorway, said defensively, “She was all right at lunchtime. When we brought the wind-op gelding out here I came along and checked, and she was eating hay, quite all right.”

  Ken was only half listening. “We’ll have to have a postmortem,” he said dully. “I’ll see if I can get any blood.” He walked away disjointedly towards his car and after a while returned with a case containing syringes, bottles and a supply of rubber gloves from the well-stocked trunk.

  “I phoned the knackers on the car phone,” he said. “They’re coming to fetch her. I told them we’d need to do a postmortem at their place, and I’ll have to get Carey and any number of outside vets to be there, and I don’t think I’m going to do the postmortem myself. I mean . . . I can’t. And as for what Wynn Lees will say . . .”

  His voice stopped; the shakes didn’t.

  “He was here this morning,” I said.

  “Dear God.”

  I described what I’d seen of Wynn Lees’s visit. “The mare was all right when he left. Scott moved her along to the end box afterwards and she was fine. You ask Carey.”

  Ken looked down at the corpse. “God knows what Carey will say about this.”

  “If he’s got any sense
he’ll start thinking about poison.”

  It was Belinda who protested that I was being melodramatic, not Ken.

  “But last time,” he said, taking the idea in his stride, “when the Fitzwalter horse dropped dead out here, all the tests we could think of were negative. No poison. It cost us a lot in specialist lab fees, and all for nothing.”

  “Try again.”

  Without answering, he pulled on a pair of gloves and tried with several syringes to draw blood from various areas in the mare’s anatomy.

  “How did you say you would give a horse atropine?” I asked.

  “Inject it or scatter it on its feed. But this isn’t atropine.”

  “No, but test its feed anyway.”

  He nodded. “Makes sense. Water, too. Belinda, see if you can find two glass jars with tight lids. There ought to be some specimen jars in the cupboard under the drugs cupboard.”

  Belinda went off without question, accustomed to being given orders in the line of duty. Ken shook his head over his task and muttered about the speed with which blood started decomposing after death.

  “And the foal,” he said with a deep sigh. “Such a waste.”

  I said, “What are we going to do with that needle you cut out of her gut?”

  “God knows. What do you think? Does it matter anymore?”

  “It does if Wynn Lees ever mentions it”

  “But he hasn’t”

  “No,” I agreed, “but if he shoved it down her throat he must be wondering . . . He might just ask, one day.”

  “All it would prove would be that he did want the mare dead and did his best to kill her, and he might be prosecuted for cruelty, but I wouldn’t put any bets on a conviction. Every vet in the kingdom would testify that cats and dogs swallow sewing needles and stitch their guts into knots.”

  He began to label the phials containing the pathetic samples of blood.

  “I’ll divide each sample into two and send them to two different labs,” he said. “Double check.”

  I nodded.

  “Also we’ll take umpteen sections of tissue from her organs at the postmortem, and I tell you, there will be no results, like before, because we don’t know what to look for.”

  “You’re such a pessimist.”