Dead Heat

by Dick Francis

  “I want to explain everything to you because I need your help,” I said. “I need your knowledge of horses. I know I grew up in this house and some of it rubbed off on me, but you have forgotten more about horses than I ever knew and I believe I need that knowledge now. That’s why I’ve come here.”

  “Explain away,” he said, putting his hands behind his neck and testing the tilt mechanism on his office chair to the limit.

  “Not yet. I want Caroline there too. And, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve asked a lawyer to come down here later this afternoon to listen to it as well.”

  “A lawyer?” he said slowly. “This is serious, then?”

  “Very,” I said. “I’ve never been more serious in my life.” And Toby knew that in my life, especially since the death of my father, I had always been serious. It had often strangely annoyed him.

  “OK,” he said, looking carefully at my face. “What time is this lawyer arriving?”

  “He said he’d try to be here by four,” I said. “He’s coming down from London.” I was suddenly not sure if it had been such a good idea. A lawyer might make Toby rather wary. He had fought long and hard with them over the terms of my father’s will. Lawyers were not Toby’s favorite people. But, then again, he’d never met a lawyer like Bernard Sims. In truth, I hadn’t met him either. It was a pleasure yet to be enjoyed by us all.

  BERNARD PROVED to be everything I had expected him to be. He was large, jovial, with a mop of wavy black hair and a huge, double-breasted pin-striped suit doing its best to hold it all together.

  “Max,” he said expansively when I greeted him in the driveway. He advanced towards me with a hand outstretched that seemed to me to have far more than its fair share of fingers. Perhaps it was just because each finger was twice the width of my own. I held up my cast and declined the handshake.

  “How did you do that?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Come on in.”

  “But is she here?” he asked in a half whisper, almost conspiratorially.

  “Who?” I said innocently. I too could play his little game.

  “The viola player, of course.”

  “She might be,” I said, not able to resist smiling.

  “Oh good,” he said, rubbing his hands together. But then he stopped. “And bad.”

  “Why bad?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure I should be meeting her socially,” he said. “It might produce a conflict of interests in the poisoning case.”

  “Bugger the poisoning case,” I said. “And, anyway, this is definitely not a social visit.”

  “No,” he said. “But I don’t know that, do I? You didn’t actually tell me why you were so insistent that I came down here this afternoon.”

  “I will. I will,” I said. “All in good time.”

  “A matter of life and death, you said.”

  “It is,” I replied seriously. “My life, and my death.”

  18

  W e all convened in Toby and Sally’s drawing room at four-thirty like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, with me playing the part of Hercule Poirot, except that unlike him I didn’t know all the answers, I wasn’t at all sure who done it and, for the most part, I didn’t have a clue of what it was they had done in the first place.

  There were five of us in the room. I had thought that Sally would be busy caring for the children, but, after school, all three of them had gone to have tea with her sister, their aunt. So Sally sat on the settee with Toby, while Caroline and Bernard sat in armchairs on either side of them. I stood by the fireplace. All I needed, I thought, was a little mustache and a Belgian accent to complete the illusion.

  I had previously threatened Bernard with excommunication from the Law Society if he misbehaved, and, to be fair, so far he had been propriety personified. He hadn’t even made any snide remarks to me when I had introduced him to Caroline. In fact, quite the reverse. He had been unusually effusive in his comments, with not a single mention of dropping the lawsuit in time with her knickers.

  So now the four of them sat with expectant faces, waiting for every one of the facts to be revealed in front of them. They were going to be disappointed.

  “Thank you all for being here,” I said by way of introduction. “And thank you, Toby and Sally, for allowing Caroline and me to stay here. And also, thank you, Bernard, for coming all the way from London.”

  “Just get on with it,” said Toby a little impatiently. And he was right. I was procrastinating because I really didn’t know how or where to begin. Everyone laughed, and it lightened the mood.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t quite know where to start.”

  “Try at the beginning,” said Caroline helpfully.

  “OK,” I said, and took a deep breath. “The night before the 2,000 Guineas, I was engaged by the Newmarket racetrack caterers to be the guest chef at a gala dinner. They also engaged all my restaurant staff to be there as well, so the restaurant was closed that night. There were other staff too from a catering agency, but I was in charge of both the ordering of the food and the cooking of it.”

  I smiled at Caroline. “Caroline was also at the dinner, as part of a string quartet.” She smiled back at me. “Well,” I went on, “nearly everyone who was at that dinner suffered from food poisoning during the night. I did, Caroline did and most of my staff did. One even ended up in hospital. Tests have since shown that the cause of the poisoning was undercooked kidney beans in the dinner.” I paused. “Now, everyone involved in food knows that undercooked kidney beans are very nasty, even though I didn’t realize that just one bean per person can be enough to cause terrible vomiting, and that’s what we all had. But there shouldn’t have been any kidney beans in that dinner. I made it from raw ingredients, and there were no kidney beans included. But the tests were conclusive, so someone else had to have put them there.”

  “Are you saying that it was done on purpose?” asked Bernard.

  “Yes,” I said. “You can’t accidentally add enough kidney beans to a dinner to make over two hundred people ill. And the beans had to be ground or finely chopped, otherwise they would have been visible in the sauce, which is where I think they must have been put.”

  “But why would anyone do that?” said Toby.

  “Good question,” I said. “And one that I spent days and days trying to find an answer to, and I still haven’t.” I looked around at the faces in front of me, and no one came up with any answer. I hadn’t expected one. “Let’s move on. The following day, I was again a guest chef, this time in the sponsor’s box at the races. We all know what happened there, and I was extremely lucky not to be killed along with the nineteen others who were, one of whom was a young waitress from my restaurant.” I paused again, thinking about Louisa’s funeral, remembering the pain of loss for her parents and friends, recalling the awful ache in my jaw. I took a couple of deep breaths and went on to describe just a little of what I had seen in the box that day without delving too deeply into the worst of the gory details. I could have left it all out, but I suppose I wanted to shock them a bit. They needed to be fully aware of what some people can do to others. They would later need to believe that my life, and maybe theirs, were truly in danger.

  “I never realized you were so close to it,” said Toby. “Mum had said something about you being at the races, but nothing about…” He petered out. I decided that I must have successfully created the mental image I was after.

  “It’s horrible,” said Sally, shivering. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “And I don’t want to wake up in a cold sweat having had another nightmare about it either,” I said quite forcibly. “But I know I will. And I will because it was real, it happened and it happened before my eyes to people I knew.” Sally looked quite shocked.

  “The papers have all been saying that the bomb was aimed at an Arab prince,” said Bernard, bringing us all back from the brink. “So what has it got to do with the dinner?” He was one step ahead of th
e others.

  “What if the bomb was not aimed at the prince but at those people it really hit?” I said. “And suppose the poisoning of the dinner was done to stop someone being at the races the following day so they wouldn’t get blown up.”

  “But if someone knew there was going to be a bomb, then surely they could just have not turned up to the lunch,” said Bernard. “Why would they have to poison everyone the night before?”

  “I don’t know,” I said almost angrily. I wasn’t angry with him, I was angry with myself for not knowing. I couldn’t be angry with Bernard. After all, that’s why I had asked him to come. I knew he would be skeptical and would argue. It’s what I wanted.

  “But,” I said, “I do know that when I started saying this out loud and asking around about who was meant to be at the lunch but didn’t actually show up, someone tried to kill me.”

  “How?” asked Bernard in the sudden silence.

  “They caused the brakes to fail in my car and I hit a bus.”

  “It’s a bit hit-and-miss, if you’ll excuse the pun,” he said. “Not the best way to kill someone.”

  “It was designed to look like an accident,” I said.

  “Are you absolutely sure it wasn’t?” he asked.

  “No, I’m not,” I confessed. “For a while, I thought I was just being paranoid. I couldn’t think why anyone would want to do me harm. But then someone burned my house down with me in it. And I am certain that was another attempt on my life.”

  “Have the fire brigade confirmed that it was arson?” Bernard asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” I said, “but I know it was.”

  “How?” he asked again.

  “Because someone went into my house and removed the battery from my smoke alarm before they set the house on fire and I know for sure that there had been a battery in there. And I’m also sure that the fire was started at the bottom of the old wooden stairs to prevent me getting out.” In my mind, I could still see the flames roaring up the stairwell, cutting off my escape route. “It is only due to luck, and a few hefty blows on my bedroom window frame with a bedside table, that I am here now. And I wasn’t sure how much longer my luck would last, so I ran away to America.”

  “Unlike you to run away,” said Toby. I was surprised, and pleased. It was indeed unlike me to run away, but I hadn’t expected him to know it, let alone to say it.

  “No,” I said, “but I was frightened. I still am. And with good reason, if what happened in America is anything to go by.”

  “What did happen?” asked Sally.

  “Someone broke my arm with a polo mallet,” I said.

  “What, surely not on purpose?” said Sally.

  “I think you could say that,” I said. I told them about the maniac with the mallet and about the damage he did to the rental car.

  “But why?” said Bernard.

  Instead of answering, I removed the shiny metal ball from my pocket and tossed it to Toby.

  “What is that?” asked Sally.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping one of you might be able to tell me. I know it’s significant. Having one probably contributed to my broken arm, and it might have cost me a lot more if I hadn’t managed to escape.”

  Bernard looked me in the face.

  “Life and death,” he said slowly, half under his breath.

  They passed the ball back and forth between them, and I gave them a couple of minutes to examine it in silence.

  “OK,” said Toby. “I give up. What is it?”

  “Hey,” exclaimed Sally, “it unscrews. It comes apart.” She triumphantly held up the two pieces. She leaned over and showed Toby what she had done…She then put the ball back together and tossed it to Bernard. He struggled with his pudgy fingers, but finally he too was able to open the ball.

  “But what is it for?” asked Toby again.

  “I really don’t know,” I said. “But I feel it must be part of the key to all this.”

  “Max and I think it must have been made to hold something,” Caroline said. “It fits so tightly together that we wondered if the contents mustn’t leak out.”

  “And it might have something to do with polo ponies,” I added, as if another clue might help solve the riddle.

  “Polo ponies?” said Bernard.

  “Yes,” I said. “It may be to do with the importation of polo ponies.”

  “From where?” asked Toby.

  “South America, mostly,” I said, remembering what Dorothy Schumann had said. “Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia.”

  “Drugs?” said Sally. “There’s an awful lot of cocaine in Colombia. Could this be used to hold drugs?”

  They all examined the ball again, as if it would give up the answer.

  “Like condoms,” I said.

  “What?” said Bernard.

  “Condoms,” I said again. “You must have heard of people who are paid to carry drugs in condoms through customs. They tie the end up and swallow condoms with drugs inside them. Then they fly to England, or somewhere, wait for nature to take its course and-hey, presto-you have condoms full of drugs.”

  “Mules,” said Caroline. “They’re called mules. Lots of women do it from Jamaica or Nigeria. For the money.”

  “Sounds rather dangerous to me,” said Toby. “Don’t the condoms burst?”

  “Apparently not,” Caroline said. “I saw a television program about it. Some of them get caught by customs, using X-rays, but most of them don’t. And they’re desperate for money.”

  “Are you suggesting,” said Bernard, “that metal balls like this could be somehow filled with drugs and swallowed to smuggle the stuff here from South America?” He held the ball up to his open mouth. It might have just about gone in, but his expression said that swallowing the ball would be another matter altogether.

  “Not in humans, you fool,” I said, laughing at him. “In horses.”

  “Could a horse really swallow something this big?” he asked, serious again.

  “Easily,” said Toby. “They can swallow an apple whole. I’ve seen it. You twitch the top lip, hold the head up and throw the apple down the throat. It used to be done quite often to give pills. You hollow out an apple, fill it with the medicine and chuck it down. No problem.”

  “What do you mean you twitch the top lip?” asked Caroline.

  “A twitch is a stick with a loop of strong twine on the end,” he explained. “You put the loop round the animal’s top lip and twist the stick until the loop gets tight.”

  “It sounds dreadful,” said Caroline, holding her own top lip.

  “Well, it is,” said Toby. “But it works, I can tell you. It will control even the wildest of horses. They usually just stand very still. We sometimes have to use a twitch on one of ours for shoeing. Otherwise, the farrier gets kicked to hell.”

  “So you could get a horse to swallow one of those,” I said to him, pointing at the ball.

  “Oh yes, no problem. But I don’t think it would ever come out the other end.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Horses eat grass, we don’t,” he said.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Bernard asked.

  “Grass is very indigestible,” said Toby. “Humans can’t live on it because everything goes through us so fast, the cellulose fibers of grass coming out much the same as they went in, so we wouldn’t get much nutrition from it. Horses have a system for slowing the process down, so there’s time for their system to break the cellulose down.”

  “Like cows?” said Bernard.

  “Well, not exactly,” Toby went on. “Cows have multiple stomachs, and they chew their cud, which means they constantly regurgitate their food and rechew it. Horses have only one, fairly small stomach, and once food is down there it won’t come back up due to a strong valve at the stomach opening. This valve also means that horses can’t vomit. So they have another method of breaking down the grass. It’s called the cecum, and it’s like a great big sack nearly fo
ur feet long and a foot wide that acts as a fermenter. But both the entry point and exit of this sack are near the top, and I think this ball would simply drop to the bottom of the sack and stay there.”

  “What would happen then?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Unless you can be sure the ball would float in the cecum, I don’t think it would ever come out. God knows what would happen. I suspect the horse would eventually get seriously ill with colic. You would have to ask a vet. All I know is that surprisingly little actually comes out the back of a horse compared to the amount you put in it at the front, and I really think the ball would be most unlikely to ever be emitted with a horse’s dung. And it would certainly be far too chancy to try it.”

  “That puts the kibosh on that theory, then,” I said. “I somehow don’t think that Mr. Komarov leaves anything to chance.”

  “Komarov?” said Toby. “Not Peter Komarov?”

  “Yes,” I said, surprised. “Do you know him?”

  “I know of him,” said Toby. “He sells horses.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Polo ponies.”

  “Not just polo ponies,” he said. “He also sells lots of racehorses at the bloodstock sales. I’ve bought a few of them myself. For my owners, of course. Is it him you think is trying to kill you?” He sounded somewhat skeptical.

  “I think he has something to do with it, yes.”

  “Blimey,” he said. “I always thought of him as a pillar of racing society.”

  “Why exactly?” I asked him.

  “I don’t really know,” he said. “I suppose it’s because he seems to have given a bit of a boost to racing. At least, he’s given a bit of a boost to me!”

  “How?”

  “I’ve bought some reasonably priced horses from him,” said Toby. “Some of my one-horse owners have been talked into buying a second. Good for training fees.” He smiled.