Comeback

by Dick Francis

  “With reason.”

  He produced from the bag a large rectal thermometer and took the internal temperature, explaining it helped to indicate the time of death. Horses, because of their body mass, retained heat for hours and the result could be approximate only.

  Belinda returned with two suitable jars into which she put and labeled samples of water from the half-empty bucket and hay from the half-empty net. There was no doubt that the mare had drunk and eaten from those sources.

  Scott came fast on Belinda’s heels and couldn’t contain his feelings, a mixture of disbelief, rage and fear of being held responsible, as far as I could see.

  “I put her in the box. I even gave her new water and fresh hay and she was right as rain. Peter will tell you. There’s just no way she could be dead.”

  No one bothered to say that, one way or another, she was.

  Ken stripped off his gloves, finished packing the samples, snapped the case shut and stood up to his six foot four.

  “Who’s looking after this afternoon’s patient?” he said. “Scott, go and check at once. Belinda, set up the drip in the intensive-care box. We can move him out here soon, then Scott can oversee him all evening. He’s not to be left alone, even if I have to sit on a chair all night outside his door.” He gave me a wild look, still shattered for all his surface decisiveness. “I’ll have to tell Carey.”

  I went with him into the office and listened to the fateful phone call. Carey on the other end received the news not with screeching fury but with silence.

  “Carey?” Ken said anxiously. “Did you hear what I said?”

  It appeared that he had heard and was speechless.

  Ken told him he’d talked to the knackers; told him he wanted an outside vet to do the postmortem; told him Peter suggested they look for poison.

  That last sentence produced a sharp reaction that I couldn’t quite hear but which surprised and embarrassed Ken. He skipped on hurriedly to his opinion that the mare had been dead at least two hours when Belinda found her. Two hours, he said, clearly having done some thinking, meant a possible or probable period when he (Ken) and Carey and Belinda and Scott and Peter had all been together in the theater, engaged in a long operation. Who knew, he said, what had been going on outside?

  There was a lengthy issue of scratchy noises of disapproval from the telephone until finally Ken said, “Yes. Yes, OK,” and slowly put down the receiver.

  “He won’t believe anyone deliberately killed the mare. He says you’re panicking.” Ken looked at me apologetically. “I suppose I shouldn’t have told him what you think.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Is he coming here?”

  He shook his head. “He’s going to fix the postmortem for tomorrow morning and he’s going to tell Wynn Lees, which is one chore I’m very relieved to get out of.”

  “Wynn Lees might know already.”

  “Jeez,” Ken said.

  I SCORCHED THE tires to London not even in time for my appointment and with no chance of newspapers. I solved the problem of my sketchy if not nonexistent knowledge of most of London by stopping at a multistory car park as soon as I was off the M.40 motorway and letting a taxi find Draycott Avenue and Daphne’s restaurant, which it achieved irritatingly slowly.

  Annabel efficiently had arrived on time. I was seventeen minutes late. She was sitting primly at at table for two, a single glass of wine before her.

  “Sorry,” I said, taking the opposite chair.

  “Excuses?”

  “A dead horse. A hundred miles. Dearth of taxis. Traffic.”

  “I suppose that will do.” The small mouth curved. “What dead horse?”

  I told her in some detail and no doubt with heat.

  “You care,” she said when I’d finished.

  “Yes, I do. Anyway ...” I shook my head, dismissing it, “did the Oriental chums get off all right?”

  She said they had. We consulted menus and chose, and I took stock of the surroundings and of herself.

  She’d come dressed again in black and white: black skirt, loose harlequin black-and-white top with big black pompoms for buttons down the front. The cropped frizzy hair looked fluffy from recent washing and she wore gentle eye makeup and pale pink lipstick. I didn’t know how much was normal to her or how much she’d done for the evening’s benefit, but I definitely liked the result.

  As at Stratford, she effortlessly established a neutral zone around herself, across which she would be friendly to a point. The amusement in her big eyes was like a moat, I thought, dug for the deterrence of over-the-top attentions.

  The narrow restaurant was packed and noisy, the waiters hurrying precariously holding big trays head high.

  “Lucky to get a table,” I commented, looking round.

  “I booked.”

  I smiled. Effective public relations. “I’ve no idea where I am,” I said. “In terms of London, I mean.”

  “Just off the Fulham Road, less than a mile from Harrods.” She considered me, her head on one side. “Are you really looking for somewhere to live?”

  “Three weeks today,” I said, nodding, “I start work in Whitehall. What should I do if it’s not to be a grating?”

  “Are you rolling?”

  I laughed. “I’ve got a huge promotion in career terms at half the income I had before.”

  “Impossible.”

  I shook my head. “In Tokyo I had more than my salary again in cost-of-living supplements, entertainment allowances, free food and the use of a car. Over here, zilch. Severe drop in living standards, one might say. Over there I had diplomatic immunity if I got a parking ticket. Here, too bad, no immunity from anything, pay the fine. Britain, incidentally, is the only country in the world that doesn’t give its diplomats diplomatic passports. There’s a whole lot of no featherbedding.”

  “Poor dears.”

  “Mm. So I need somewhere to lay my head, but not too many frills.”

  “Will you share?”

  “Anything, for a start.”

  “I could put out a few feelers.”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  She ate snails, adept with the tongs. I, still uncertain of my way in my own country, had settled for safe old pate and toast.

  “Do you have a last name?” I asked, eating.

  “Nutbourne. Do you?”

  “Darwin. As in, but not descended.”

  “You must always be asked.”

  “Pretty often.”

  “And, um, is your father, say, a bus driver?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s just interesting.”

  “He’s another diplomat, then. And yours?”

  She chewed the last snail and put the tongs and fork down neatly.

  “A clergyman,” she said. She looked at me carefully, waiting for a response. I guessed that was why she’d brought up occupations in the first place, to tell me that fact, not to worry about my own background.

  I said judicially, “Some perfectly good people are clergymen’s daughters.”

  She smiled, the eyes crinkling, the pink mouth an upturning arc. “He wears gaiters,” she said.

  “Ah. That’s more serious.” And so it was. One trod softly around a bishop if one were a sensible little private secretary with good prospects in the Foreign Office, and especially around one who thought the Foreign Office did more harm than good. One didn’t take any bishop’s daughter lightly. It explained everything, I thought, about the touch-me-not aura: she was vulnerable to gossip and wouldn’t incur it needlessly.

  “My father’s an ambassador,” I said, “to be fair.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “It doesn’t mean we can’t turn cartwheels naked in Hyde Park.”

  “It does,” she said. “The virtues of the fathers are visited on the children, just like sins. Millstones aren’t in it”

  “They don’t always deter.”

  “They deter me,” she said flatly, “for my own sake, as
well as Dad’s.”

  “Why did you choose the Jockey Club?” I asked.

  She smiled vividly. “The old boy network heard of my existence and proposed it. They blinked a bit when they saw my clothes and still gulp politely. Otherwise we get on OK because I know what I’m doing.”

  We progressed to Dover soles and I asked her if there was anyone in the Jockey Club who was a specialist in fraudulent insurance claims on dead horses.

  She looked at me soberly. “You think that’s what’s been happening?”

  “Almost certainly, unless we have a fixated psychopath on the loose.”

  She thought it over. “I’m pretty good friends with the deputy director of the security service,” she said. “I could ask him to meet you.”

  “Could you? When?”

  “If you’ll just wait until I’ve finished my dinner, I’ll phone him.”

  Sleuthing took a step back while Annabel Nutbourne carefully cleared every particle from the fish bones and left a skeleton as bare as an anatomy lesson.

  “Do you have suitors in droves?” I asked.

  She flicked me an amused glance. “Only one at a time.”

  “How about now?”

  “Don’t they teach you diplomacy in the Foreign Office?”

  The gibe was earned, I supposed. Where was the oblique approach that I’d practiced so often? A cool honeypot could make an instant fool of a healthy drone.

  “Heard any good sermons lately?” I asked.

  “It’s better to be a buffoon than a lout, I suppose.”

  “Do I say thanks?”

  “If you have any sense.” She laughed at me, malice absent. There were fewer insecurities, I thought, beneath that confident exterior, than one met normally. I was more accustomed to drying eyes than being teased by them.

  I thought of Russet Eaglewood, whose insecurities couldn’t be guessed at and whose reputation had passed into legend. A selfish, generous, passionate, passive, devouring, laughing lover she’d been by turns, and Annabel might be all of those things if the time were right, but I didn’t think I would loll back in my chair that evening and say, “How about a bonk, then?” to Miss Nutbourne.

  She chose cappuccino coffee with nutmeg on top for us both and after that, while I paid the bill, she made the phone call.

  “He says,” she reported, “no time like the present.”

  “Really?” I was as surprised as pleased. “How lucky he’s in.”

  “In?” She laughed. “He’s never in. He just has a telephone growing out of his ear. I’ve ordered a taxi.”

  Efficient transport, she said, was part of her job.

  The deputy director of the security service of the Jockey Club met us in the entrance hall of a gaming club, and signed us in as guests. He was big in a useful way, broad shouldered, heavy topped, flat bellied, with long legs. The watchful eyes of his trade made me speculate on a police past, upper ranks.

  “Brose,” Annabel said, rubbing his arm in greeting, “this is Peter Darwin. Don’t ask him, he isn’t.” To me she said in introduction, “John Ambrose. Call him Brose.”

  He shook my hand; nothing indecisive about that, either.

  “Do you understand blackjack?” he asked me.

  “Twenty-one? More or less.”

  “Annabel?”

  “The same.”

  Brose nodded and led us through swing doors into a wide stretch of gaming room where life was lived on green baize under bright, low-slung lights. Slightly to my surprise it was noisy, and the stakes, I was relieved to find, weren’t immediately ruinous. Brose steered us to a deserted blackjack table without a croupier and told us everything comes to him who waits.

  “Order lemonade,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He set off into the busy throng of punters who were determinedly putting little pieces of plastic where they believed their luck was, and we could see him from time to time leaning over people’s shoulders and speaking into their ears.

  “You wouldn’t believe it,” Annabel said, “but what he’s doing is putting the fear of God into a lot of seamy characters from the racecourse. He goes round the clubs keeping tabs on them and they hate it. He says anyone sweating over losing is ripe for trouble, and besides that he gets told things on the quiet that put crooks out of business and keep racing at least halfway honest.”

  “Did he literally mean lemonade?”

  “Oh, I expect so. He doesn’t drink alcohol and he has to account for everything he spends here. We wouldn’t rate champagne.”

  We settled for fizzy water instead and in time a few more people came to sit at our table where eventually a croupier appeared, broke open new packs, shufHed forever, pushed the cards to a wheezy fat man to cut and then fed them into a shoe.

  Most of the newcomers had brought chips with them. Annabel and I each bought twenty and played conservatively and in short order she’d doubled hers and I was down to two.

  “You’ll never win taking a card on fifteen,” Brose said in my ear. “The odds are against it. Unless the dealer turns up a ten or facecard, stick on twelve and bet the house will go bust”

  “That’s not exciting,” I said.

  “Nor is losing.”

  I took his advice and the house went bust three times in a row.

  “I’ve time for a drink,” he said. “Want to talk?”

  He led us to a railed-off corner section where at small tables hollow-eyed unfortunates sat drowning their mortgage money. A waitress without being asked brought Brose a glass of citron pressé, which he dispatched in a long smooth swallow.

  “The air’s kept dry here,” he said. “Have you noticed? It makes everyone thirsty. Very good for trade. What is it exactly you want to know?”

  I explained about Hewett and Partners’ troubles with horses, though not in great detail except for the mare.

  “She was carrying a foal by Rainbow Quest,” I said. “Her owner’s a weird man. . . .”

  “Name?” Brose interrupted.

  “The owner? Wynn Lees.”

  Brose grunted and his attention sharpened. “There can’t be two of them.”

  “It’s the same man,” I assured him.

  “What’s weird about him?” Annabel asked.

  Brose said, “He’s a pervert. Not sexual, I don’t mean. Cruel. He should never be allowed near horses. He got chucked out of Australia, our bad luck.”

  I explained about the colic operation and told him about the needle, and I described the circumstance of the mare’s death that afternoon.

  “And these vets don’t know what she died of?”

  “Not yet, no. But why kill her? The foal was valuable, so was she.”

  He looked at me with disillusion. “You think Wynn Lees did it?”

  “He was there in the morning, but she was alive when he left.”

  He summoned a refill lemon with a raised finger and an unexpectedly sweet smile. The waitress brought his drink, purring.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said at length. “I’d lay you odds the foal was not by Rainbow Quest”

  “Vernonside Stud said it was.”

  “Vernonside Stud would believe what they were told. They’re sent a broodmare with her name on her head collar, right? So that’s what they call her. She doubtless has papers with her, all in order. In foal to Rainbow Quest. Why doubt it?”

  “OK then,” Annabel repeated. “Why doubt it?”

  “Because she’s died the way she has.” He paused. “Look, you own a decent broodmare, you send her to Rainbow Quest. She seems to be in foal and you take her home and put her in a field, very pleased, but somewhere along the line she slips it. It’s often difficult to detect when that happens, but at some point you realize that all you have now is a barren year. But suppose an idea pops in your brain and you go out and buy some other unknown mare in foal to some obscure stallion. Well, now you have a mare in foal at about the right stage of gestation and you insure it as if it’s your mare in foal to Rainbow Quest. If anyon
e checks, then yes, the visit to Rainbow Quest is fully documented. She goes to Vernonside Stud to have the foal because she’s down for one of their stallions next. You have to act as a normal owner would. At that point she’s ready for the chop, poor beast, which is what she’s got.” He paused to drink. “These days paternity can be proved without doubt. If I were the insurance company, I’d make sure. Pity your vets didn’t take tissue from the foal. Even though it’s dead, they might still have got results.”

  “They still could,” I said. “The postmortem’s tomorrow morning. I’ll tell them.”

  “What do you do with the real decent mare?” Annabel asked, fascinated.

  “Ship it to some of your shady mates down under.”

  I said, “How do we find out which company carried the insurance? If, of course, you’re right”

  Brose wasn’t hopeful. “You’ve got a problem there. There aren’t exactly thousands of underwriters who’ll take on horses, but any of them could. The non-marine syndicates at Lloyd’s will insure anything from a kidnap ransom to a wet church fête. You ask them, they’ll name you a price.”

  “Perhaps one could send them all a cautionary letter.”

  “You’ll get yourself in trouble doing that.” Brose shook his head. “What’s your priority in all of this?”

  “Um ... to stitch Ken McClure’s reputation together again and prove the horses’ deaths weren’t his doing.”

  “Difficult,” he said.

  “Is it impossible?” Annabel asked.

  “Never say anything’s impossible. Unlikely’s better.”

  “We also,” I said, “have the vets’ main building destroyed by arson with an unknown body in it.”

  Brose listened impassively, Annabel open-mouthed, to the extent of Hewett and Partners’ problems.

  “Carey Hewett, the senior partner, looks older by the hour. All the partners are tied together in a common mortgage on the burned building, but falling apart in loyalties. All their records were burned, including the backup disks for the computer. Their chief remaining asset, the hospital, is gradually being boycotted by clients frightened by Ken operating on their horses. After today’s disaster, that will accelerate. There isn’t much time left for putting things right.”

  Brose pursed his lips. “I take it back. Impossible is the right word.”