by Dick Francis
“Just a few words.”
“Who are you? I’m busy.”
“I’m writing an article on causes of equine deaths. I thought you might help me.”
“You thought wrong.”
“You’re so knowledgeable,” I said.
“What I know I keep to myself. Clear off.”
“I heard you might tell me about acute overnight laminitis,” I said.
His reaction in its way was proof enough. The sudden stillness, the involuntary contraction of muscles round the eyes, I’d watched them often when I’d asked seemingly innocuous questions in diplomatic circles about illicit, hidden sex lives. I knew alarm bells when I saw them.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“Excessive carbohydrates.”
He didn’t answer.
There must have been something about him that transmitted anxiety to the other two, as the young woman came running over and the man trotted across on the horse. She was fierce-eyed, a harpy; he as dark and well-muscled as his horse.
“What is it, Dad?” he asked.
“Man wants to know about sudden acute laminitis.”
“Does he, indeed.” His voice was like his father’s; local Gloucestershire accent and aggressive. He knew, too, what I was talking about. I wasn’t sure about the girl.
“I need firsthand accounts,” I said. “It’s for general public readership, not for veterinary specialists. Just your own words describing how you felt when you found your horse fatally crippled.”
“Tripe,” the son said.
“Last September, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Was he insured?”
“Fuck off,” the son said, bringing the horse right up to the fence and warningly raising his effective whip.
I thought it might be time to take his advice. I’d evaluated Nagrebb, which had been the point of the excursion, making my picture gallery of the old men complete. Ken’s opinion of the son I would endorse any day. If the young woman were the daughter, she was the product of the family ethos but not, I thought, its powerhouse.
“Who sent you to us?” Nagrebb demanded.
“Hearsay,” I said. “Fascinating stuff.”
“What’s your name?”
“Blake Pasteur.” I said the first name that came into my head; the name of a colleague first secretary back in Tokyo. I didn’t think Nagrebb would be checking the Foreign Office lists. “Freelance journalist,” I said. “Sorry you can’t help me.”
“Piss off,” Nagrebb said.
I began to make a placatory retreat and that would have been the end of it except that at that moment another car swept round the house and came to a halt beside mine.
The driver climbed out. Oliver Quincy, to my dismay.
“Hello,” he said to me in surprise. “What the hell are you doing here?” His displeasure was evident.
“Hoping for information for an article on equine deaths.”
“Do you know him?” Nagrebb demanded.
“Of course. Friend of Ken McClure’s. Has his nose into everything in the hospital.”
The atmosphere took a chilly turn for the worse.
“I’m writing an article about the hospital,” I said.
“Who for?” Oliver said suspiciously.
“Anyone who’ll buy it. And they will.”
“Does Ken know this?” Oliver exclaimed.
“It’ll be a nice surprise for him. What are you doing here yourself?”
“None of your bloody business,” Nagrebb said, and Oliver answered simultaneously, “Usual thing. Strained tendon.”
I tried to see into Oliver’s mind, but failed. I guessed I was allied in his thoughts with Ken and Lucy Amhurst, the faithful upholders of Carey Hewett and Partners, the opponents of change. He was eyeing me with antagonism.
“Are you still in the partnership?” I asked.
“The partnership may dissolve,” Oliver replied, “but horses still need attention.”
“That’s what Ken says.”
Nagrebb’s son, who’d been watching me more than listening, suddenly slid from his horse, handed the reins to his father, then bent down and ducked under the paddock railings to join Oliver and myself outside. At close quarters, the aggression poured out of him, almost tangible. His father twice over, I thought.
“You’re trouble,” he said to me.
He held his whip in his left hand. I wondered fleetingly if he were left-handed. He more or less proved that he wasn’t by hitting me very fast and hard with his fist, righthandedly, in the stomach.
I might as well have been kicked by a horse. I lost, it seemed to me, the power to breathe. I went down on one knee, doubled over, in virtual paralysis. It didn’t much improve things when Nagrebb’s son put his booted foot on my bent shoulder and toppled me over.
No one protested. I looked some dusty old grass in the eye. No succor there either.
Breath slowly returned to ease the suffocation and with it came impotent rage, some of it directed at myself for having precipitated the fracas. There was no point in trying to attack Nagrebb junior in my turn; I would be simply knocked down again. Words were my weapons, not arms. I’d never punched anyone in anger.
I got to my knees and to my feet. Nagrebb looked watchful and his son insufferably superior. Oliver was impassive. The girl was smiling.
I found enough breath to speak. Fought to keep my temper.
“Illuminating,” I said.
Not the wisest of remarks, on reflection, but the only sword I had. The son made another stab at me but I was ready for that one and parried his punch on my wrist. Even that was hard enough to numb my fingers. The only thing on the plus side, I thought, was that I hadn’t disclosed knowledge of collagen-dissolving enzymes and wasn’t faced with collagenase-loaded syringes.
“Look,” I said, “I’m a writer. If you don’t want to be written about, well, I’ve got the message.”
I turned my back on them and walked the few steps to my car, trying not to totter.
“Don’t come back,” Nagrebb said.
Not on your life, I thought. Not for my own life, either.
I opened the car door and eased painfully into the driver’s seat. At the moment of impact, I’d felt as if my lungs had collapsed but with passing time the problem was soreness. Somewhere at the lower end of my sternum was an area of maximum wince.
They didn’t try to stop me leaving. I started the car, reversed round Oliver’s and aimed for a straight line down the drive in ignominious defeat. Never engage an enemy, I thought, without buckler and shield.
When I got back to Thetford Cottage I sat for a while in the car, and Ken came out to see why.
He folded his height down to look in through the window, which I opened for him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing much.”
“Something obviously is.”
I sighed. Winced. Smiled lopsidedly. Pointed to my midriff.
“Nagrebb’s son upset my solar plexus,” I said.
He was exasperated. “I told you not to go there.”
“So you did. All my fault.”
“But why? Why did he hit you?”
“I asked about acute overnight laminitis.”
He looked shocked. “That was a damn silly thing to do.” “Mm. But the reaction was informative, don’t you think? And by the way, Oliver was there, looking at strained tendons. Nagrebb had called him in.”
“Was Nagrebb himself there?”
“He was. Also a fierce red-haired girl who found it amusing that Nagrebb’s son had knocked me down. They were all out in the paddock when I arrived.”
Ken nodded. “That was Nagrebb’s daughter. I warned you the son was poison.”
“You were right.”
Poison, I thought. I was on the point of telling Ken about fugu but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed farfetched. Not fugu, then. But if one nontraceable poison existed, then so might others. Wait, I thought, for
the delivery note from Parkway Chemicals.
I inched out of the car and stood gingerly upright. In every film I’d seen where people got punched six times in the stomach they’d shaken it off like a tap from a feather. As I wasn’t accustomed to the treatment, one punch felt like six attentions from a piledriver.
“He really hurt you,” Ken said, concerned.
“Oh well, as you say, I asked for it.”
We went into the house with my asking him not to embarrass me with Greg, Vicky or Belinda and he, now amused, promising not to.
ON FRIDAY MORNING two more reply envelopes arrived but still not the one from Parkway Chemicals. I phoned Parkway, reached the sales manager and asked if all our copies had been sent.
“Why yes,” he confirmed, “they went off to you yesterday.”
“Thanks very much.”
He didn’t understand my urgency and I couldn’t explain. Sending the copies after one extra day must have seemed immaterial to him. More patience required. Terrible.
I reached Ken on his phone and told him that two more pharmaceutical replies had arrived. Be right with you, he said.
When he came, he asked about the punch site.
“Recovering,” I said. “What do we have today?”
He read the bunches of invoices, six months’ worth from each place. He nodded, raised his eyebrows, nodded and lowered them.
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” was his comment on the first lot.
The second stack excited him.
“Jeez,” he said. “Just look at this.”
He pushed the papers across the kitchen table, pointing to one line with a jabbing finger.
“Insulin! We ordered insulin! I can’t believe it.”
“Who exactly ordered it?”
“Heaven knows.” He frowned. “We don’t have a separate pharmacist, the practice isn’t—wasn’t—big enough. We make up various things ourselves in the pharmacy. Scott often did. Any of us did. When we use or take something we write down what it is. There’s a column for identifying the manufacturer if it’s not something like maintenance fluids, painkillers and everyday needs that we get from wholesale suppliers. The secretary records the whole list in the computer and automatically reorders everything again in due time when stocks are low, unless we add a note not to.”
“So anyone,” I said, “could write down insulin as having been used, and the secretary would automatically order it?”
“Christ,” he said, awed.
“When the orders arrive, who handles them?”
“One of the secretaries puts the parcels in the pharmacy. Any one of us opens them and puts the contents on the shelves. Most things have their regular space on the shelves and are often used. That’s things like vaccines and ointments. Anything unusual or risky is in a special section. Was, of course. I keep seeing the pharmacy as it was and forgetting it’s gone.”
“So if anyone unpacked a parcel containing insulin, that’s where it would be put, the special section, available for the person who ordered it to pick up?”
“Dead easy,” he said.
He went on reading the invoices and reached something that stopped his breathing almost as effectively as Nagrebb’s son had stopped mine.
“It’s frightening,” he said hollowly. “We ordered collagenase.”
“Who ordered it?”
“There’s no way of telling.” He shook his head. “After the secretary’s entered the list in the computer, she shreds the paper as a precaution against anyone removing it from our rubbish bins and using the information to order drugs for themselves. We have to be careful about narcotics and amphetamines and the ingredients, for instance, of LSD.”
“Does the secretary know which of you ordered what?”
He nodded. “She knows our signatures. We always initial for what we’ve used. She queries if we don’t.”
“I suppose she wouldn’t remember who initialed insulin and collagenase?”
“We could ask her, but she’d have no reason to remember.” He looked at the lists. “Insulin was ordered six months ago. That figures. Wynn Lees’s horse died last September, just after the order for insulin would have reached here. There was no hanging about.”
“And the collagenase?”
He looked up the date. “Same thing. It was delivered here a few days after Nagrebb’s horse staked itself.” He raised his eyes in puzzlement. “No one could have staked a horse in that way on purpose.”
“How long do orders usually take to arrive?”
“Not long. A couple of days, especially if we send a special separate order marked ‘expedite.’ ”
“I would think,” I said, “that in the week between the staking repair and the disintegration of the tendon, the show-jumper was insured as sound and the collagenase ordered separately at speed.”
Ken rubbed his face.
I said, “What’s to stop anyone getting hold of a sheet of partnership writing paper, ordering insulin and collagenase, and getting the stuff sent to their own private address? Like I got all those envelopes sent here.”
“None of these companies would send any substance anywhere except to the partnership headquarters,” he said, thinking. “They would never do it. There are strict rules.”
I sighed. We weren’t much further forward, except that with every slow step it became more and more certain that someone had been using the partnership’s own methods as a pathway to fraud.
“Do all veterinary partnerships follow your ordering procedure?” I asked.
“Shouldn’t think so. Ours is pretty unusual, probably. But up to now it’s been convenient and no trouble.”
“What about atropine?” I asked.
“We use that all the time after eye surgery to dilate the pupil. It would naturally appear now and then in small quantities on the invoices.”
In a repeat of the day before, I chased around by telephone until I reached Superintendent Ramsey.
“What is it?” he said, a touch impatiently.
“Answers from pharmaceutical companies.”
A short pause, then, “Hospital office, three o’clock this afternoon.”
“Right,” I said.
In the event, I met him alone, as Ken, notwithstanding the rumpus of rumors zigzagging the neighborhood like wasps, had been called out by a regular racehorse-trainer client who wanted to check the blood count of several prospective runners. He and Oliver, Ken said, were continually busy with this procedure.
The Superintendent too seemed to be alone, his car in the car park the only one present. I parked beside his and walked across the lonely tarmac and into the deserted building: no dogs, no cats, no partners. Ramsey was waiting for me in the office, having apparently unlocked the doors with a bunch of keys as big as Ken’s. His thinning hair was wind-blown : he looked more than ever an out-of-doors man.
We sat by the desk and I gave him the invoices and explained the significance of insulin and collagenase, and the way they could be ordered.
He blinked. “Repeat it, please.”
After I had, he looked pensive. For good measure I told him about the carpet needle and mentioned Brose’s theory about the paternity of the dead foal.
He blinked again. “You’ve been busy,” he said.
“I set out to clear Ken’s reputation.”
“Hm. And you’re telling me all this now,” he said in his blunt way, “because if I discover who killed the horses, I’ll know who killed Scott Sylvester?”
“Yes.”
“You said you still have the carpet needle embedded in the piece of gut, and you’ve sent samples of the mare’s and the foal’s and the stallion’s hair to a specialist lab for DNA matching. Is that right? And that mare was owned by Wynn Lees?”
I nodded.
“What else?” he asked.
“Atropine,” I said, and repeated Ken’s convictions.
“Anything else?”
I hesitated. He bade me continue. I said, “I’ve seen or bee
n to visit the owners or trainers of all the suspiciously dead horses. I wanted to get the feel of them, to try to know if they are villains or not. To find out if they themselves were involved with their horses’ deaths.”
“And?”
“Two are villains, one definitely isn’t, one probably is, one may be but doesn’t know it.”
He asked me about the last one, and I told him about old Mackintosh and his fade-in fade-out memory.
“He remembers,” I said, “the order in which racehorses in a far-back time stood in the loose boxes in his stable yard. He recited them for me like an incantation. Six, he said, was Vinderman. Well, one of the horses that was probably given colic through atropine was stabled in box number six. I thought perhaps that if Mackintosh were provided with an apple, say, or a carrot—he gives his horses carrots every day—to feed especially to Vinderman, he would trot down to his stable and give it to the horse in box number six.”
He said doubtfully, “Are you sure he would?”
“Of course I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible. It’s also possible that the head lad knows who visited box six—and box sixteen—bearing gifts. The head lad knows more than he’s saying.” I then added, for no reason except that I had it on my mind, “Mackintosh lives in an old millhouse that used to belong to some people called Travers.”
Even experienced policemen don’t have total control of their muscles. The subtle shift, the involuntary immobility, he could disguise them as little as Nagrebb. I had really surprised him.
“Travers,” I repeated. “What does it mean to you?”
He didn’t answer directly. “Do you know anyone called Travers?” he asked.
I shook my head. The Travers I’d played with as a child was only a name my mother remembered, not anyone I knew.
He thought for a good time but told me nothing. The interview, he indicated by standing up, was over, the one-way flow of information at a temporary end. If any further drug lore should come my way, he said, he would like to have it.
“Where can I reach you tomorrow?” I asked. “As it happens, we found out that Scott went to a chemical company personally to collect something not allowed to be sent through the post. Tomorrow we should know what it was. The company sent the information off yesterday.”