by Dick Francis
Jett said. “You’re ill.”
“Maybe ... But ill or not ... Bell, leave Newmarket now.”
Both she and Jett, puzzled by my vehemence, nevertheless began to waver. I found it impossible to tell her that her father and her employer and Quigley and Robin Darcy were all involved in a conspiracy to supply to many lawless parts of the world and to many a clique and brotherhood the information needed to acquire tiny quantities of the highest-grade fissile material for weapons. Tiny quantities, if enough of them were gathered together, made a threat, an aggregation ... a bomb.
All four men, and surely they knew it, were dealing in death.
One or two of them were themselves personally lethal.
Loricroft. the seeker and collector of the stuff of profitable deals. he certainly, with his conviction of his own superiority, with his wife ever nearer on the trail of his transactions, he most of all was closest to detonation.
I thought him dangerous, as likely to cause heartless damage as any of his cold-blooded customers.
I said to Bell, “If Glenda wants out, take her with you.”
Bell shook her head.
“I’ll come back in an hour,” I said, and asked Jett to drive me in her car through the town.
“To the hospital?” she asked hopefully.
“Sort of,” I said.
10
The hospital I sought cared for horses.
I’d made a telephone call to prepare the way, and was greeted inside the main door of the Equine Research Establishment by a woman whose given name was Zinnia. Although a research veterinarian in general, she introduced herself as a specialist in poisonous plants and on their effect on any horse that ate them.
It had been she who’d been given the task not just of saving if possible the life of Caspar Harvey’s filly but of finding what was wrong with her to begin with.
Zinnia had already attained fifty. I guessed. and wore a professional white coat over a gray Hannel skirt. In spite of her colorful name she had short gray hair. no hint of lipstick, flat-heeled shoes and an air of tiredness, which I discovered to be a permanent mannerism, not a pointer to lack of sleep.
“Dr. Stuart?” She greeted me with a toe-to-head inspection but no enthusiasm, and raised her eyebrows over Jett. who’d declined to be left outside in her car. A recital by me of Jett’s nursing certificates brought the eyebrows down again, and we were invited to follow the flower into a laboratory equipped with a herd of microscopes, centrifuges, measuring devices and a gas chromatograph. We all sat on high laboratory stools, and I went on feeling lousy.
“Mr. Harvey’s filly,” Zinnia said without emotion, “presented with severe symptoms of intestinal distress. By the time I was called in to see her here, late on a Sunday afternoon, she was in a state of collapse ...” She detailed her actions and her thoughts at the time which, as in nature horses had no provision for anti-peristalsis, or in plainer words, couldn’t throw up, had consisted to a great extent of purging and of offering copious amounts of water, which the filly fortunately drank.
“I thought it certain that she’d eaten some form of plant poison that had been ground up into chaff and mixed into her hay, as there were no whole specimen leaves or stems in the haynet that came with her. I expected her to die, when of course I would have analyzed the stomach contents, but as she clung to life I had to make do with the copious droppings ... I thought that she might have ingested ragwort, which is extremely poisonous and often fatal for horses. It attacks the liver and is usually chronic, but it can have acute effects, as with Harvey’s filly.”
She paused, looking from my face to Jett’s and seeing considerable ignorance in both.
“Are you cognizant of Senecio jacobaea?” she asked.
“Er ...” I said. “No.”
“Better known as ragwort.” She smiled thinly. “It mostly lives in wasteland and was designated an injurious weed under the 1959 Weeds Act, so it’s your duty to pull it up if you see any.”
If she’d said that neither Jett nor I had any idea what it looked like on the hoof, so to speak, she would have been absolutely right. We asked, and she described.
“It has yellow flowers and jagged leaves ...” She broke off. “Ragwort has to do with cyclic diesters, the most toxic of pyrrelizidine alkaloids, and it causes the symptoms shown by the filly, the digestive tract upset, the abdominal pain and ataxia, the lack of control of the legs.”
We listened respectfully. I wondered if I’d been eating ragwort myself.
“The leaves can be dried and will keep their poisoning capacity for ages, unfortunately making it all the more suitable for chopping and mixing with other dried fodder, like hay.”
Jett said to Zinnia, “So you found ragwort in the filly’s droppings?”
Zinnia glanced from her to me. “No,” she said without dramatics. “There was no identifiable ragwort in the filly’s droppings. We treated her with a series of antibiotics in case an infection was present, and she gradually recovered. We sent her to George Loricroft, having been given instructions to do that by the owner, Caspar Harvey. The filly had been trained by Oliver Quigley before that, of course, and we made inquiries in that yard from the head groom downwards, but the whole workforce there strongly denied that anyone could possibly have tampered with the filly’s haynet. None of the other horses showed any symptoms like the filly, do you see?”
“What was wrong with her, then?” Jett asked. “Did you ever find out?”
“There are other theories, I believe,” she said, sounding as if any theory advanced by anyone except herself would automatically be wrong. “But the filly isn’t here, of course. If you want to do blood tests for antibodies. Dr. Stuart, we have already suggested that course to Caspar Harvey, but so far he has declined the procedure.”
Zinnia was saying, in her meticulous way, that if a horse—or a human—had had a disorder successfully treated, then that creature’s blood would likely forever contain the antibodies summoned up to defeat the infection. The presence of the antibodies to any disease proved that the individual had been exposed to that disease.
“No, I don’t want to test for antibodies,” I said, “but ... did you keep any of the droppings? Do you still have any of them here in the research lab?”
Zinnia said with starch, “I assure you, Dr. Stuart, we tested the droppings for every infection and every poison in the book and we found nothing.”
My forehead was damp with sweat. I felt more or less on a par with the filly. No cracked bones that I’d heard of gave one such unquiet guts.
Zinnia with surprise agreed grudgingly that the Research Establishment had indeed retained some of the material in question, as the riddle of the filly’s illness hadn’t been solved.
“Caspar Harvey might change his mind,” Zinnia said.
I thought Caspar Harvey most unlikely to want light poured onto the filly’s ailment, but regardless of his feelings, I said to Zinnia, “Does the Equine Research Establishment by any chance have a Geiger counter among its equipment?”
“A Geiger...” Words dried in Zinnia’s throat.
“I believe,” I said without emphasis, “that someone here reckons the filly was suffering from radiation sickness.”
“Oh no,” Zinnia shook her head decisively. “She would have deteriorated and died from that, but she recovered within days when treated with antibiotics. We have a research scientist here who advanced the radiation theory, chiefly I think on the grounds of some of the filly’s hair dropping out; but yes. to answer your inquiry, we do have a Geiger counter somewhere, but the filly showed no abnormal count when she left here.”
There was a pause. I had no intention of annoying or contradicting her, and after a short while she raised an at least semi-friendly smile and said she would go and find the researcher in question. Within five minutes she returned with another white-coated lady, whose knowledge of radioactivity could have done with a dusting off.
Her name, she said, was Vera; she was earne
st. thorough and a cutting genius in bad cases of colic.
“I’m a veterinary surgeon, not a physicist.” she explained. “but since Zinnia found no trace of poison—and believe me, if she couldn’t, then no one could—I began to think of other possibilities, and I just floated the idea of radiation sickness ... and of course it generated an instant atmosphere of fear, but we called in an expert on radiation and he did tests and told us not to worry, neither radiation sickness nor the filly could have been infectious. I wish I could remember everything he said.”
“Dr. Stuart is a physicist,” Zinnia smoothly remarked.
“He reads the weather on the BBC,” the second veterinarian contradicted flatly, unimpressed.
“He’s both,” Jett assured her, “and a lecturer also.”
I looked at her in surprise.
“Your grandmother told me,” she smiled. “She said you lecture on physics in general and radiation in particular. Mostly to young people, like teenagers:”
Vera, the second white coat, showed none of Zinnia’s constant tiredness, but quite the opposite. She woke to see me as a different creature.
She said, “Give me a sample of your lecturing wares and I’ll lend you my records of the filly’s droppings.”
“That’s totally reprehensible,” Zinnia reproved. “Unacceptable.”
Her friend nodded, unabashed.
“Promise?” I said.
“Of course.”
I thought it might take my mind off greenish gills, so I started on a portion of the lecture I’d given so often that I knew it by heart. “This is about uranium,” I said. “It’s from a lecture I give to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds usually.”
The second white coat approved. “Right. Carry on.”
In a conversational voice I did her bidding.
I said from memory, “Just one gram of uranium ore contains more than two thousand million million million atoms; that’s a two with twenty-one zeros after it; too big to imagine. Even though natural uranium is not very radioactive compared to some other really dangerous stuff, a couple of grams of it, less than half a teaspoonful, will emit about thirty thousand alpha particles every second and will go on doing so at almost that rate for millions of years. Thirty thousand alpha particles attacking your guts every second for a couple of days might certainly make you feel sick but I think you would recover eventually.”
I stopped. I certainly did feel sick, but I hadn’t touched uranium that I knew of. Jett looked alarmed, however, and Vera, evidently considering the bargain kept, made a short exit and returned carrying a buff folder that to my eyes looked the exact double of the one that had agitated the Unified Traders.
The contents, alas, were not twenty letters offering for sale or offering to buy any of the enriched version of the ore I’d just been chronicling, but a scholarly account and graph of the amount of radioactive waste expelled by a two-year-old filly over the short number of days she’d spent in recovery.
By the time Vera had thought of radiation sickness the Geiger count was already on the decline. The source of it, I reckoned, had been passed by the filly very early, maybe even in diarrhea during that first Sunday afternoon, while she lay and groaned in her stall in Quigley’s stable.
As a charming gesture Vera also gave me a parcel of shoe-box size which she said not to open in polite company. Zinnia, still disapproving, pointed out that the contents of the box were the property of the Research Establishment, or perhaps of Caspar Harvey, or even, arguably. of the filly, but not, definitely not, mine.
I stood up abruptly and asked for directions to the bathroom, and through the closing door behind me heard Jett thanking the two white coats and saying goodbye, and shortly, still unwell, I was sitting beside her on the way back to Loricroft’s yard.
“Is that what’s wrong with you?” Jett asked anxiously.
“Radiation sickness?”
“You have the symptoms.”
“I simply don’t know.”
She braked to a halt on Loricroft’s gravel. There was no one about.
“Don’t argue:” she said. “I’m coming with you into the house.”
I felt too rough anyway to demur. I slid out of the Honda and with Jett firmly alongside crossed the gravel and, after the briefest of taps on the door knocker. walked into the kitchen.
George Loricroft himself, to my enormous relief, wasn’t there. I’d had visions of having to deal with him physically, and. apart from my persistent and weakening nausea. George was taller and stronger, and had already tried once to see me off.
The only person there was Glenda, who sat beside the big central table shaking with apprehension and looking a light shade of gray. She was clearly relieved that it was we, Jett and I, who had come.
She said, “George isn’t here. He said he was going out with the second string to jump them on the Heath.” Her voice sounded flat, without life.
“And Bell?” I asked.
Glenda sat motionless, her stiff eyelashes unblinking. She still wore the semi-bimbo trappings of a too-tight sweater, high-heeled clattering boots, and the puffed-up glittery blonde hair arrangement, but the Glenda of before Doncaster had vanished. The woman who had enraged and stripped away the shaky facade of Oliver Quigley was now wholly in charge, except that she hadn’t yet settled entirely into the role.
“Bell went to her house to pack a suitcase,” she said at length. “She’s coming back here to take me with her.”
After a pause I asked Glenda if she had discussed with George the list of frosty discrepancies I’d brought for her.
“Discussed!” She almost laughed. “It wasn’t anything to do with girls, you know.” In bitterness it sounded as if she wished it was. “There hasn’t been any racing at Baden-Baden since September.”
I nodded. I’d looked it up.
“George is a traitor to his country,” she declaimed, and I murmured, “That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?”
“He knows I think so. I’m going to London with Bell because I don’t want to be here when he comes back. If you think I’m afraid of him, you’re right, and I’m going to tell you things I never meant to tell anybody.”
She swallowed, paused, screwed up her nerve.
“All those places, where I thought he was with girls, he was buying and selling nuclear secrets.” To do her justice, she sounded scandalized.
“And once”—her disgust intensified—“once he brought home a heavy little package and because I thought it was gold ... a gold present for a girl ... I was so furious ...”
She visibly drew in an outraged gulp of air. “How could he ... we’ve always had good sex ... I took the packet out of his briefcase and opened it, and inside there was only this heavy gray box ... So I opened that too, and right in the middle of some foam packing there was only this tiny twist of a coarse gray powder, but it was wrapped up tight in a tissue and I couldn’t wrap it back again the way it had been before, and then George came in.”
“And he noticed you’d opened his parcel?” I suggested, as she paused to draw breath.
“No. he didn’t, but I was afraid he would, because he stuck around ... and I had this stuff out of its box, so I popped it into my handbag in the tissue paper and it was still there when we went round to Oliver Quigley’s yard on our way to Nottingham races on the day before Caspar Harvey’s lunch. When I was looking for my lipstick ... the tissue fell out of my bag and the powder went into a feed bowl full of oats lying on the ground ready for one of Oliver’s horses. I didn’t do it on purpose and I didn’t know the horse would be sick. But I didn’t tell George as I was frightened of him. I just left it.”
“And,” I asked, completely stunned but also believing her, “did you see which horse got that particular bowl?”
Her eyes were wide, and she said, “No.”
“Glenda!” I protested.
“All right then, you’ve guessed. I saw which stall it went to, but I didn’t know it was Caspar’s filly that was in that
one. I didn’t even think of it until Bell said the filly could have had radiation sickness. and then I really knew what George was probably doing in all those places and lying about it. He was buying stuff to make bombs with, so I asked you to sort out what he’d said about where he’d been. And I do wish Bell would hurry up.”
So did I.
I asked Glenda, “Did George know at Doncaster that I’d said I would look up those weather discrepancies?”
“He sure did. I told him. He wasn’t going to do me any harm as long as he knew someone else could give him away.”
Glenda, the new lesser-varnished edition, was still far too naive. I was less and less inclined to be in George’s house when he returned, but Bell at last arrived, saying she’d packed a suitcase, argued with her father and talked to Kris on the telephone to persuade him to give her bed room.
Without urgency she loaded Glenda into her car while protesting that none of this haste was necessary.
“It will avoid a scene,” I pointed out, and with the equivalent of “wagons roll” we at last set off in two cars towards London.
Jett glanced over at me and said. “How are you feeling?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I didn’t understand everything that Glenda said.”
“You came in halfway through the movie.”
“Was that powder uranium?”
“Judging from its wrapping in tissue paper and lead—that heavy container sounds like lead—I’d guess it might be perhaps ordinary basic uranium ore, but also it might have been some other radioactive stuff giving off alpha particles.”
Jett said, “And is George buying and selling uranium? Is Glenda right?”
“She’s half right. He’s putting in touch with each other people who know where to buy enriched uranium and enriched plutonium with people who want to buy it. The gray powder wasn’t bomb-making stuff, though, since the filly recovered.”
I told Jett about the Unified Traders frightening away the residents of Trox Island, and she said it explained why my grandmother spent her days biting her manicured nails.
“Then don’t make it worse for her ... but about that dipstick ...” I stopped, in hesitation.