by Dick Francis
Without waste of time he sat down again, wrote a number on a piece of memo paper and handed it to me, saying it would get him at any time.
“The postman comes at about ten,” I said. “I’ll have to get Ken there to interpret the chemical names into words I understand. After that I could call you.”
“Do it.” He nodded.
“Tell me about Travers,” I said persuasively. “There was a financial firm of some sort long ago called Upjohn and Travers. The present Upjohn, Ronnie, he’s about sixty. He acts as a steward at Stratford-upon-Avon races. He had an injured horse that he wanted Ken to put down a year or so ago. Ken said he could save the horse, and personally bought it from Upjohn, at not much more than a dead-meat price. The horse, since Ken’s expert surgery, has won a race, and Upjohn is far from pleased. Illogical, but people are like that. Anyway, Ronnie Upjohn’s father had a partner called Travers. All I know about him is hearsay from Ken’s mother, Josephine, who described old man Travers as ‘rolling’ and ‘a frightful lecher.’ He would be at least ninety now, I should think, if he’s still alive.”
Ramsey closed his eyes as if to prevent my inspecting his thoughts. “Anything else?” he said.
“Um ... Porphyry Place.”
“That red monstrosity on the way to Tewkesbury? What about it?”
“Old Mackintosh lost money in it. So did Ronnie Upjohn and a lot of other people round here.”
He nodded a shade grimly, his eyes still shut, and I wondered fleetingly if he’d been among the unfortunates.
I went on conversationally, “You don’t have to be the owner of a horse to insure it. It can be insured without the owner knowing. The payout, sent in good faith by the company, never reaches the owner, who remains in ignorance from start to finish.”
His eyes opened. I saw that he well understood the implication.
“It’s a big maybe,” I said, “but maybe someone came up with a way of recovering their losses in Porphyry Place.”
He put a cupped hand over his mouth.
“Could you?” I asked, “get from anywhere a list of the people who lost money guaranteeing those loans?”
“Don’t tell me,” he said, ironic despite his training, “that you haven’t managed that yourself?”
“I don’t know who to ask and I wouldn’t have much chance of being told.”
“True.” A smile glimmered briefly. He didn’t say whether or not he would obtain a list, nor whether he would show it to me if he did. Police the world over weren’t renowned for sharing their information.
He rose to his feet again and came with me out to the car park, carefully locking doors behind him. He seemed avuncular more than forbidding, but then bears could look cuddly. He might listen to me and reckon that Ken had killed the horses himself. Ken had at first been reluctant, if not afraid, to tell me how horses could be killed on the grounds that knowledge could be twisted into a presumption of guilt.
“I’ll hear from you tomorrow,” Ramsey said, nodding and getting into his car.
“Right.”
He waited until I had started my own car and driven to the exit, almost as if shepherding me out. He needn’t have worried that I’d go back: there was barely time to scorch the miles to the Fulham Road by six o’clock.
ANNABEL, RELATIVELY CONSERVATIVE in the silver cowboy boots below a straight black dress, opened her door and looked at her watch, laughing.
“Ten seconds late.”
“Abject apologies,” I said.
“Accepted. Where are we going?”
“You’re the Londoner. You choose.”
She chose an adventure film and dinner in a bistro. The hero in the film got punched six times in the solar plexus and came up smiling.
The bistro had candles in chianti bottles, red-checked tablecloths and a male gypsy singer with a flower behind his ear. I told Annabel about Vicky and Greg’s singing. Old-fashioned but great voices. She would like to hear them, she said.
“Come down on Sunday,” I said on impulse.
“Sunday I see the bishop and his wife.”
“Oh.”
She looked down at her pasta, candlelight on her bouncy chopped-off hair, her eyes in shadow, considering.
“I only miss Sundays with them if it’s important,” she said.
“This is important.”
She raised her eyes. I could see candle flames in them.
“Don’t say it lightly,” she said.
“It’s important,” I repeated.
She smiled briefly. “I’ll come on the train.”
“For country pub lunch?”
She nodded.
“And stay for the evening and I’ll drive you home.”
“I can go back on the train.”
“No. Not alone.”
“You’re as bad as my father. I can look after myself, you know.”
“All the same, I’ll drive you.”
She smiled at her pasta. “The bishop will have to approve of you in spite of your job.”
“I tremble to meet him.”
She nodded as if trembling were expected and asked how things were going in the practice. “I can’t get that poor man Scott out of my mind.”
I told her about the results from the pharmaceutical companies, which fascinated and alarmed her by turns. I told her that since Carey had dissolved the partnership, all the vets were rushing around like chickens without heads, looking after sick animals but with no central organization.
“But can anyone dissolve a partnership like that?”
“Heaven knows. The legal problems look knotty. Carey’s exhausted and wants out. Half the others want him out. They jointly pay the mortgage on the hospital, which is currently shut. God help Ken if there’s a middle-of-the-night emergency.”
“What a mess.”
“Yup. It’s a long way from here or now, though.”
“Mm.”
“So ... er ... does the bishop have any other daughters or sons?”
“Two of each.”
“Wow.”
“I’d guess,” she said, “that you’re an only child.”
“How do you know?”
“You don’t need roots.”
I’d never thought of my nomadic life in that way, but perhaps it was solitariness that made the go-where-you’re-sent discipline easy.
“How strong are yours?” I asked.
“I’ve never tried to pull them up.”
We looked at each other.
“I’ll be in England for four years,” I said. “After that, a month or so every two years. If I reach sixty, I can stay here always. Most diplomats buy a house here somewhere along the line. My parents have one but I can’t live there now because it’s leased to a company. When my father retires in four years’ time and the lease runs out, they’ll come back here to stay.”
She listened carefully.
“The Foreign Office pays for children to come home from foreign postings and go to boarding schools,” I said.
“Did you do that?”
“Only for my last two years.” I explained about learning the languages in one’s teens. “Also I wanted to stay with my parents. I like them and it’s a multi-everything life.”
A job description, I thought, was an odd sort of way to tell her I was more than ordinarily interested in her future. She seemed to have no trouble understanding. It was also plain that this was to be no lusty rush into uncontrollable sexual attraction and damn the consequences. Annabel wanted to be sure of her footing.
I drove her home and kissed her goodbye as before. This time the kiss lasted longer and was a tingling matter that made uncontrollable sex look totally desirable. I smiled at myself and at her, and she said she would take whichever train on Sunday reached Cheltenham nearest to noon.
ON SATURDAY MORNING the letter from Parkway Chemicals finally arrived, and to me looked like gobbledegook. While I waited for Ken I read the few intelligible pieces of information supplied with the invoices.
>
The Parkway Chemical Company was in the business of selling biochemical organic compounds for research, and also diagnostic reagents. The company that had sent insulin and collagenase had had similar headings. Parkway Chemicals could be ordered by fax and by Freefone.
I read the few ordinary invoices but the only substance ordered that I recognized was fibrinogen, used to help blood clot.
The delivery note given to Scott had warnings stamped all over it.
“Extremely hazardous material.” “For the use of qualified personnel.” “Laboratory only.” “Hand delivered.”
Scott had signed his name in acceptance.
The fuss, it seemed, was over three small ampoules of something called tetrodotoxin.
When Ken saw it he said immediately, “Anything with the suffix toxin is poisonous.” He frowned over the details and read them aloud. “‘Three ampoules one mg tetrodotoxin with sodium citrate buffer. Soluble in water. Read safety sheet.’”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’ll have to look it up.”
Although the owners of Thetford Cottage weren’t book people, they did have a row of reference books and a small encyclopedia. Ken and I searched in vain for tetrodotoxin. The nearest the dictionary came to it was tetrode, a vacuum tube containing four electrodes, which hardly seemed to fit the case.
“I’d better go home for my books on poisons,” Ken said.
“OK.”
As I had the dictionary in my hands, and on the off chance, I looked up puffer fish. The entry read:Puffer, also called blowfish or globefish, capable of inflating the body with water or air until it resembles a globe, the spines in the skin becoming erected,
So far, so good. It was the sting in the tail that had me gasping.
of the fish family Tetraodontidae.
Puffer fish.
It was my old friend fugu after all.
12
Puffer fish?” Ramsey said.
The Superintendent had met us alone again in the empty hospital. It was rather as if he wanted to keep his sessions with Ken and me separate from whatever other inquiries he was making.
Ken had been home for his book on poisons.
“Tetrodotoxin,” he read aloud, “is one of the most potent poisons known. It comes from the puffer fish and causes respiratory and cardiovascular failure through paralysis of the neuromuscular system. A fatal dose is extremely small; only micrograms per kilogram of body weight. It is very unlikely to be detected by forensic examination.”
“Let me read that,” Ramsey said.
Ken gave him the book and we waited while he digested the bad news. Then he picked up the delivery note and read through it for the second or third time.
“You’re telling me,” he said, “that one milligram of this powder will kill a horse? One thousandth of a gram?”
“Yes, easily,” Ken said. “A racehorse weighs approximately 450 kilograms. A microgram is one-millionth of a gram. One of the ampoules would be enough to kill four horses, at a rough guess. So far, we’ve two dead, Fitzwalter’s chipped knee and the broodmare.”
There was a dismayed pause while we each worked out that there might still be a good deal of the stuff lying around.
“Would you sprinkle the powder on the horse’s food?” Ramsey asked.
“I suppose you could,” Ken said doubtfully, “but it would be more usual to reconstitute it in water and inject it, preferably into a vein.”
“And wear surgical gloves while you do it,” I suggested.
“My God, yes.”
“Scott,” I said, “must have known who had asked him to travel that distance to fetch the package. Must have known who he gave it to. He didn’t necessarily know what was in it.” I paused and added, “I guess he found out the hard way.”
“Jeez,” Ken said under his breath.
“Tell us,” I begged Ramsey. “Just say yes or no. Did you find any needle puncture mark on Scott?”
He pursed his mouth. Looked at the question from north round to south. Consulted a mental rule book.
“You’ve been of considerable assistance,” he said finally. “The answer is yes.” He checked some more with his inner self and squeezed out a few more sentences. “Four days of tests have revealed the presence of treble a normal dose of soporific, taken in coffee. No other toxic material of any sort has so far been found. The needle puncture was into a vein on the back of the hand.”
At least, I thought, Scott had been asleep when he died. I reckoned he would have had to have been. All that explosive muscle power would have presented a daunting prospect to anyone wishing to creep up on him holding a death-laden syringe. Too much possibility of the tables being turned.
The symbolic closing of Scott’s mouth, I thought, had been itself an unconscious declaration of motive. I’d never been involved with a murder before and understood little of the overpowering impulse to kill, but in the macabre state of Scott’s body a compulsion of extreme magnitude was unmistakably visible. It hadn’t been enough just to stop him talking: the raw statement must have sprung from subterranean urges too powerful to combat. In the depths of the psyche, logic foundered, caution dissolved, obsession swept all decency away.
Scott might have been an accomplice who finally objected. He might have discovered irregularities and threatened to reveal them. He might have tried a little dangerous blackmail. The brutality of the staples had been the violent response.
Ramsey, having once begun to divulge, continued. “I see no harm in telling you what will be released to the press later today. We’ve identified the person burned in your fire.”
“You have?” Ken exclaimed. “Who was it?”
Maddeningly, Ramsey answered the question crabwise. “Usually if someone goes missing it’s reported. In this case, the person was not reported missing as his family believed he was away for a few days’ fishing and at a trade conference. When he didn’t return this Thursday evening at the expected time, the family discovered he hadn’t been to the conference at all. They were alarmed and informed us at once. Owing partly to your information and your innuendos, sir,” he said to me, “we speculated that the missing man and the unidentified body were one and the same. Dental records have now proved this to be the case.”
He stopped. Ken, disgusted, said, “Come on man, who was it?”
Ramsey savored his disclosures. “A man, thirty-two years old, not on very good terms with his wife, who hadn’t expected him to phone her from the conference. He was an insurance agent.” He paused. “His name,” he said finally, “was Travers. Theodore Travers.”
I knew my mouth fell open.
Theo, I thought. The Travers I’d played with, the Travers of the millhouse, his name was Theo.
Dear God, I thought. Perhaps one should never go back to the scenery of one’s childhood, perhaps never learn the fates of one’s friends. To come back as a stranger into the future of one’s past life, an adventure that had at first pleased and captivated me, now seemed like a danger best left alone.
It was too late to wish I’d never returned. Since I had, in the most fortuitous unrolling of events, all I could do was try to leave the present state of Kenny’s son in better shape than if I’d stayed away.
“Upjohn and Travers,” I said.
Ramsey nodded. “We looked them up after you spoke of them yesterday. The firm no longer exists, and hasn’t for many years, but in the days of old lecherous Travers it was an insurance agency. It broke up when both Travers and Upjohn died.” He looked at me straightly. “How did you hear, sir, of Upjohn and Travers?”
I said weakly, “I don’t know.”
Ken gave me a sharp-eyed look, trusting still, but ever more puzzled.
I must have heard the old firm’s name at Theo’s house, I supposed. I simply didn’t know why it had stuck in my mind.
“Why,” I said, “should an insurance agent be present in the veterinary building late in the evening?”
“Well, why?” Ramsey asked,
as if knowing the answer.
“Someone let him in to discuss insurance schemes,” I said. “Maybe illicit insurance of horses. Maybe they had an argument that ended either in the accidental or intentional death of Travers. Maybe the place was set on fire to cover it up.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” Ramsey observed, “though I’m not saying you’re wrong.”
Toss up the pieces, I thought, and they all came down in a jumble.
Ramsey ushered us out again and locked the doors, although presumably Ken had his own bunch in his pocket and could let us straight in again if he wanted. Ken seemed, however, to find the hospital oppressive and was happy to leave. We stood together by our cars in the car park and Ken said, “What next?”
What happened next was one of those extraordinary flashes of ancient memory, tantalizingly incomplete most of the time but sometimes blindingly clear. Perhaps many different threads had to converge before the right synapse detonated. I remembered my threatening dream and knew I’d once heard my mother say more than she’d told me on the phone.
“Um,” I said breathlessly, “how about if we go to see Josephine?”
“Whatever for?”
“To talk about your father.”
“No,” he protested, “you can’t.”
“I think we must,” I said, and told him in part what I wanted.
He looked upset, but drove to Josephine’s home while I followed.
She lived on the top two floors of a fine big Edwardian house situated in a graceful semicircular terrace in Cheltenham. Her drawing room windows opened onto an iron-work balcony overlooking the wintry public garden in front. It could have been a delight, but Josephine’s furnishings were stilted and unimaginative, as if not changed for decades.
Ken having forewarned her by telephone, she was pleased enough to see us. We had bought a bottle of sweet sherry on the way, Ken saying his mother liked it very much but wouldn’t buy it for herself, repressed woman that she was. The gift, grudgingly accepted, was nevertheless immediately opened. Ken poured his mother a large glassful and two less exuberant slugs for himself and me. He made a face over his, but I could drink or eat anything by that time without showing dislike.