Comeback

by Dick Francis

  “Let’s go back to the office,” I said abruptly. “I’ll phone Ramsey’s number and see how long before he gets here.”

  “OK.”

  I turned and led the way back through the padded room, heading for the passage. I went through into the theater with all its lifesaving and businesslike equipment and spoke over my shoulder.

  “Have you ever been really ill in hospital?”

  Annabel didn’t answer.

  I looked back and was flooded with horror, feeling adrenaline pour hot through my blood like a drench. She was down on her knees, her arms making uncoordinated movements, her head hanging low. Even as I sprinted back to her, she fell forward unconscious onto the spongy floor.

  “Annabel!” I was agonized, bending over her, kneeling beside her, turning her, not knowing what was wrong with her, not knowing what help to get her, frenzied with worry.

  I heard only at the last minute the rustle of clothes behind me and turned my head too late, too late.

  A figure advanced from a bare yard away, a figure in surgical gown, surgical gloves, surgical cap and mask. He carried a syringe, which he jabbed like a dagger at my neck.

  I felt the deep sting of the needle. I grabbed towards his clothes and he skipped back a pace, the eyes like gray pebbles over the mask.

  I knew too late that he’d been hiding behind the bullring wall, that he’d darted out to inject Annabel, that he’d hidden again and come out of the other end to creep up behind me as I bent over her.

  I knew, while clouds swiftly gathered in my brain, I knew as I went to inexorable sleep, that I’d been right. Small comfort. I’d been foolish as well.

  The man in surgeon’s clothes had murdered Scott.

  An old gray man with all the veterinary knowledge in the world.

  Carey Hewett.

  I WAS LYING on the floor, my nose pressed to the padding, smelling a mixture of antiseptic and horse. Awareness was partial. My eyelids weighed tons. My limbs wouldn’t work, nor my voice.

  The fact of being alive was in itself amazing. I felt as if awakening from ether, not death. I wanted to sink back into sleep.

  Annabel!

  The thought of her stormed through my half-consciousness and quickened my sluggish wits towards order. With an enormous effort I tried to move, seeming to myself to fail.

  I must have stirred. There was a fast exclamation above me, more breath than words. I realized that someone was touching me, moving my hands, hastening roughly.

  Instinctive fear swamped me. Logical fear immediately followed. There was clank of chains, and I knew that sound. The chains of the hoist.

  No, I protested numbly. Not that. Not like Scott.

  The physical effects of terror were at first an increase of the paralysis already plaguing me, but after that came a rush of useful bloody-mindedness that raced along like fire and set me fighting.

  Flight was impossible. My limbs still had no strength. Equine padded cuffs had been strapped round my wrists. He clipped the chains onto the cuffs.

  No, I thought.

  My brain was one huge silent scream.

  My eyes came open.

  Annabel lay on the floor a few feet away, fast asleep. At least she looked asleep. Peaceful. I couldn’t bear it. I’d brought her into appalling danger. I’d taken the message to meet Ramsey to be genuine. I should have been more careful, knowing that Ken had told Carey how much we’d discovered. Regrets and remorse thudded like piledrivers, relentlessly punishing.

  Muscles recovered faster. I stretched the fingers of one hand towards the buckles on the other wrist. The chains clinked from the movement.

  Another exclamation from across the room and an impression of haste.

  The hoist whined, reeling in the chains.

  I couldn’t get the buckles undone. Undid one, but there were two on each cuff.

  The shortening chains tugged my wrists upwards, lifted my arms, pulled up my body, pulled me to my feet, pulled me higher until I dangled in the air. I shook my head desperately as if that itself would undo the frightful leadenness in my mind and clear away the remaining mists.

  Carey stood inside the theater and pressed the hoist’s buttons. Raging and helpless I began to travel along the rails towards the sliding door, through that towards the huge operating table. I lunged towards Carey with my feet, but he was out of range of my futile swings and grayly intent on what he was doing.

  His mercilessness and lack of emotion were unnerving. He wasn’t gloating or cursing or telling me I shouldn’t have meddled. He seemed to be approaching just another job.

  “Carey,” I said, pleading. “For God’s sake.”

  He might as well not have heard.

  “I’ve told Ramsey it was you who murdered Scott!” I yelled it, all at once without control, petrified, pathetic, in shattering fear, believing I was lost.

  He paid no attention. He was concentrating on the matter at hand.

  He stopped the hoist when I was still short of the table and put his head on one side, considering. It was almost, I thought, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.

  I understood as if in a revelation that he hadn’t intended or expected me to be awake at that point, that Scott hadn’t been watching him and shouting at him, that things weren’t going entirely to plan.

  The syringeful of what I hoped against hope had been simple anesthetic had been at least half used on Annabel and he hadn’t been able to put me out for as long as he’d meant.

  He must have been disturbed to find me not alone. I guessed that perhaps he’d intended to lure me into the theater by some noise or other and plump his needle in by surprise. Perhaps he’d thought I wouldn’t be alarmed by a surgeon, if I’d seen him. Perhaps anything.

  He made a decision and crossed to one of the wall tables upon which lay a kidney dish. He picked up a syringe that had been lying there, held it up to the light and squirted it gently until drops oozed out of the needle.

  I didn’t need telling that I was meeting the puffer fish.

  Time really had come to an end if I just went on hanging there helplessly. He had to reach me with that needle to do any harm. All I had to do was stop him.

  Imminent extinction gave me powers I would have said were impossible. As he started towards me, I bent my arms to raise myself and jackknife my body, bringing my knees to my chin, trying by straightening fiercely to get my feet onto the operating table to my left and behind me. The maneuver didn’t really succeed but I did get my feet as far as the edge of the table, which gave me purchase to swing out towards Carey and try to knock away the syringe with my shoes.

  He skipped backwards, carefully holding the syringe high. I swung futilely in the air, feeling wrenched and furious.

  After a moment’s thought he pressed a hoist button and moved me a yard farther from the table, towards him, towards the sliding door. Instantly, I repeated the jackknife, aiming this time straight at him. He retreated rapidly. My feet hit the wall where he had been and I pushed off from it violently, turning in the air, scything with my legs at the syringe.

  I missed the high-held death but connected with Carey’s head, by some chance with one foot each side of it. I tried to grip his head tight but the pendulum effect swung me away again. All that happened was that his surgical cap and mask were pulled off. The mask hung round his neck but the soft cap fell to the ground.

  In an extraordinary way it seemed to fluster him. He put the hand holding the syringe to his head and drew it hastily away again. He was confused, his expression not venomous or evil, but showing double the exhaustion of recent days. Not plain tiredness, but psychic disintegration from too much stress.

  Still as if nonplussed at things not going to plan, he bent down with his back to me to retrieve the fallen cap, and I, still futilely swinging, drew up my arms and knees and launched my feet with total desperation at Carey’s backside.

  The force of the connection was only slightly dissipated in the cloth of the surgical gown—no gloriously
accurate success like Vicky’s kick at the mugger—but it was hard enough to overbalance him, hard enough to send him staggering forward, and hard enough for him to crash his forehead against the sharp metal corner of one of the cabinets before he could straighten up.

  He collapsed in a heap, stunned.

  Feverishly I fought to undo the buckles of the constricting cuffs. I undid the left cuff first without thinking it out, as it was the one I’d tried to undo earlier. That wasn’t too difficult, but it left me swinging from my right wrist alone, and undoing those buckles left-handed and up high cost enormous muscular effort. Sheer extreme panic gave me a strength beyond knowledge, a brute force like madness.

  I sweated. Groaned. Struggled. Made my fingers overcome the opposing force of my weight.

  My hands slid free at last and I fell, landing awkwardly, off balance, staggering, thinking immediately of a weapon, looking around for something to hit Carey’s head with if he should stir, something to tie him with if he didn’t.

  Hurry. Hurry.

  The solution was fitting and blindingly simple. I pushed the hoist buttons in my turn, lengthening the chains, still clipped to the cuffs, to their full extent. Then, very carefully, because of tetrodotoxin still a pinprick away, I pulled Carey’s arms out from beneath him and bent them behind his back and fastened the cuffs to his wrists, but cross-buckled them so that they were held together, harder than ever to undo. He had a pulse. It throbbed in the wrists. Better, I thought, if he’d died.

  I went to the controls and by degrees shortened the chains until they were just tight enough to lift Carey’s latex glove-covered hands two or three inches clear of his back. When he woke in that position, he’d scarcely be able to pick his head off the floor.

  Satisfied for the moment, but suffocating with anxiety, I ran into the padded room and over to Annabel.

  She slept. I felt her pulse too. Strong enough. Alive. “Oh Annabel.” I smoothed her hair, overwhelmed with feeling.

  I felt like crying. Heroes who took six punches in the solar plexus and came up smiling never felt like crying.

  I stumbled unsteadily back to the office and sent a telephoned SOS to Ramsey to arrive with reinforcements. Went back to Annabel, sitting down beside her weakly with my back against the bullring wall, watching Carey through the sliding door for signs of murderous consciousness.

  I held Annabel’s hand, seeking comfort for myself as much as to give it.

  She was alive. She would awake, as I had.

  She had to.

  I loved her intensely.

  No trap I could have devised would have revealed Carey as conclusively as the one he’d set for me.

  Between intuition and probability I’d come to see that it had had to be Carey I was looking for, but until he’d attacked me I’d had no way of persuading anyone else to believe me. Carey was the grand old man, the father of the practice, the authority figure, the one respected and trusted above all others by the clients.

  All those old men. His generation. All knowing each other for half a lifetime. All knowing the secrets.

  Long ago, Ronnie Upjohn’s father and Theo Travers’s grandfather had been insurance agents who’d made a fortune, not the average state of affairs.

  Long ago, Kenny McClure had ordered tetrodotoxin in order to pass it to the iniquitous Mackintosh, who everlastingly played cards with Carey. It was Carey, I judged, who’d persuaded Kenny, a vet but not his partner, to acquire the poison, and Kenny, balking at what he’d done, had got shot for his pains.

  Long ago, Wynn Lees had stapled an enemy’s pants to his privates; had done his time and had gone to Australia.

  The present troubles had begun after Wynn Lees’s return, and perhaps he’d been the trigger that restarted the engine.

  Carey had to have needed money. Not impossible that in the Porphyry crash he’d lost the savings that were to see him through old age. Not impossible to suppose he’d tried to get them back by using his professional knowledge.

  Not impossible to guess that he’d somehow persuaded the third-generation insurance man Travers to join him in growing rich, nor that Travers had wanted out like Kenny, and found that out meant dead.

  Carey, I thought, had burned the building not just to postpone or avoid identification of Travers, but also to cover all his own tracks. Orders, invoices, all the telltale paperwork had conveniently gone up in smoke, and particularly—I saw with awe—the blood samples taken that day when the cannon-bone horse was dying on the table. Those samples would have shown excessive potassium. The unexplained deaths in the operating room would suddenly have been explained. The hunt for the culprit would be on.

  No one would ever have questioned Carey’s going in and out of the storeroom where the intravenous drip fluids were kept. No one would ever question what chemicals Carey ordered. No one would think it odd if he went to see old friends and their horses, no one would worry if he were seen at Eaglewood’s one night, checking on his patients while surreptitiously taking insulin with him.

  Carey could go where he liked, do what he liked, unquestioned and unchallenged, unsuspected. After all, no senior veterinarian in his right mind would set out to destroy his chief surgeon’s reputation, nor kill off a practice he’d spent a lifetime building. But Carey, I thought, had meant to make his money and go. Events had hurried him: Travers had precipitated the fire. Ken had saved the colicky mare from what should have been curtains. It had been necessary, from Carey’s point of view, only to finish off the mare and close the mouth of the man who’d carried the poison. After that there was nothing to keep him and he’d smartly announced the end of the partnership. If Ken hadn’t told him how much we’d found out, he would quite likely have been peacefully packing at the moment, rich again and ready to emigrate, not lying flat, facedown in ultimate disaster.

  Annabel stirred.

  I felt enormous, heart-swelling thankful relief. I squeezed her hand and though she didn’t squeeze back I thought that by then she could probably hear.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m right here beside you. You’re going to be all right very soon. Some bloody madman popped a bit of anesthetic into you but you’re coming out of it and everything’s fine. Don’t hurry. Things will improve very soon, I promise you.”

  I went on trying to reassure her and in the end she opened her eyes and used them for smiling.

  By the time Ramsey arrived, she was sitting snuggled in my arms but shivering with apprehension that the still prostrate figure in the surgical gown would come to life, jump up and still do us harm. He had jumped out at her from behind the wall, she said. She’d caught a horrified glimpse of him before he’d jabbed the needle into her neck.

  “If he comes to life,” I said, “I’ll shorten the chains to pull his arms higher behind his back. I’ll bend him double.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  Nor did I. It seemed an age before the burly Superintendent appeared inquiringly through the door from the passage and stared in astonishment at the man on the floor.

  I stood and went to meet him.

  “What exactly gives?” he asked.

  “I think,” I said, “that that’s your murderer. And be careful, because under him or nearby there’s a hypodermic syringe oozing something that may be very detrimental to your health.”

  A WEEK LATER, I phoned my mother and told her most of what had happened. Not Russet Eaglewood, not too much about Scott, not my frantic fight for life.

  At the end she exclaimed, “I can’t believe a vet would kill horses!”

  “Vets put down horses all the time.”

  “That’s different.”

  “Not so very.”

  “He must have been warped!”

  “Oh, yes,” I said.

  I thought of Carey as I’d briefly seen him last, lying securely strapped to a stretcher with a big swelling on his forehead. Eyes closed. Harmless-looking. I heard later that he’d woken up concussed and been bewilderingly calm ever since. “He’s reli
eved, I reckon,” Ramsey said in a burst of unusual chattiness. “They’re often relieved when it’s all over. Funny that.”

  A syringe bearing traces of anesthetic had been found on the floor behind the half-wall in the padded room.

  The syringe, whose needle Carey had tried to stick into me in the theater, had rolled under a nearby table. Wary analysis proved the contents of that one to be indubitably tetrodotoxin. The empty ampoule, bearing the Parkway company’s name and batch number in black letters and “Extremely Hazardous” in red, lay in the kidney dish that had held the syringe.

  “Smoking gun,” Ramsey said with satisfaction.

  His search of Carey’s house revealed a book on dangerous marine animals, among which puffer fish took a medal.

  “Circumstantial,” Ramsey said.

  Ramsey’s list obtained from Porphyry Place showed Carey to have lost a sum that made me wince.

  Higgins’s insurance friends came up with every dead horse on our list: agent each time, Theodore Travers; recipients mostly fictitious, but also Wynn Lees, Fitzwalter and Nagrebb.

  The expedited report on the DNA matching of the mare and foal with Rainbow Quest came back negative: nowhere near a match, he wasn’t the sire, positively not. Wynn Lees, certain to be charged with fraud, had cannily skipped the country.

  My mother said, “What about Ken?”

  “I had to tell him I’d lived here as a boy. He’s wondered all the time how I knew so much.”

  “You didn’t tell him about me and his father?” she asked anxiously.

  “No, not a word. It’s better not known.”

  “Ever the diplomat,” she said, teasing but relieved.

  Ken and Belinda’s wedding, I told her, was going ahead as planned. “And that’s just the word for it—planned. They’re both so practical about it. No spark. But no doubts either, it seems.”

  “Don’t you give it much chance then?” she asked, sounding disappointed.

  “Fifty-fifty, I’d say. But Belinda’s started calling her mother Vicky, not Mother. That might make all the difference.”

  My own mother chuckled. “You said I would like Vicky.”