by Dick Francis
“Do you know where the horses came from?” I asked.
“Now that you mention it, I think they did all come from Argentina. But that’s nothing special. Lots of racehorses trained here are bred in Argentina. What makes you think Komarov’s responsible?”
“A number of things,” I said. “The most important one being that when I mentioned his name and showed someone one of these balls, I got my arm broken for my trouble. Also, Komarov and his wife were invited to the lunch at Newmarket when the bomb exploded, but they unexpectedly didn’t turn up.”
“That’s not very conclusive,” said Bernard.
“I know,” I replied. “But his name keeps popping up. And he seems somehow connected with lots of what’s been going on.” I paused. “If I was dead certain that it was him, then I’d be telling this to the police. But, I have to admit, I’m slightly afraid they might just laugh at me. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to try it out on you first.” I looked at Toby, Sally and Bernard, but I couldn’t read their minds. I knew that Caroline believed me.
“It does all seem a bit far-fetched to me,” Sally said. She turned to Caroline. “What do you think?”
“I know it’s true,” said Caroline with certainty. “You might ask how I can be sure, so I’ll tell you.” She looked up at me and smiled lopsidedly. “I have been badly frightened by what has happened to Max over the past ten days. I was at the poisoned dinner and was dreadfully ill that night, and we have all seen the photos of the bombing and have heard Max’s description of what it was like after the explosion. There can be no doubting that those things did happen.”
“No,” said Bernard. “No doubt whatsoever.”
“And Max’s car did collide with a bus, and his house did burn down.”
“Yes,” said Bernard. “We don’t doubt those things happened either. The question is whether they were genuine attempts to murder him.”
“I presume,” she said, “that there’s no question that Max did have his arm broken by someone wielding a polo mallet just for mentioning this man Komarov’s name. I saw the mallet.”
Bernard looked around at Toby and Sally. “I think we can agree that Max had his arm broken, but was it because he mentioned Komarov’s name or because he had one of these balls?”
“Both,” I said. “But I was definitely threatened with the mallet before I even showed them the ball. The Komarov name was the key.”
“And,” said Caroline, “someone went into my flat when I was in America.”
“What do you mean?” said Bernard.
“Two men told my neighbor a pack of lies and managed to convince her to let them into my flat. I don’t know why, but we think they must have planted something there that would let them know when we got back.”
“But how did they know where you live?” said Bernard.
“Whoever it was must have followed me there,” I said.
“But why?” said Bernard.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “If someone could fix the brakes on my car the night I had dinner with Caroline, then they only had to follow me to the restaurant to know who I was seeing.”
“But that doesn’t mean they know where she lives,” said Bernard.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “If they saw me with her, they could have found out where she lives. Perhaps they followed her home.”
“That’s surely very unlikely,” said Bernard.
“It was surely unlikely that someone would bomb Newmarket races,” I said, “but they did.” I stared at Bernard. “And you were able to find out where Caroline lives.”
“That’s different,” he said.
“How exactly did you do that?” asked Caroline accusingly. “And you got my telephone number as well. How was that?”
Bernard went bright red, but he refused to say how he did it. He mumbled a bit about databases and so on, and about the data-protection act. As I had suspected, what he had done wasn’t entirely legal.
“But you are sure someone was in your flat,” he said, trying to get us back on track.
“Absolutely positive,” she said. She told them briefly about things being moved in her medicine cabinet. Sally nodded. It must be a girl thing, I thought.
They all sat silently, digesting what Caroline and I had just told them. But were we getting anywhere? I wondered. There were so many questions, and I was far too short of answers.
“Sally,” I said, “do you think we could have some tea?”
“Of course,” she said. She seemed relieved to be able to get up and move. She went out to the kitchen. It somehow broke up the formality of the gathering. Bernard started apologizing to Caroline. Now, that had me worried.
Toby sat and turned the ball over and over in his hands. “I suppose…” he said, almost to himself. “No, that’s ridiculous.”
“What’s ridiculous?” I asked him.
He looked up at my face. “I was just thinking aloud,” he said.
“So tell me your thoughts,” I urged him. Caroline and Bernard stopped talking and looked expectantly across at Toby.
“No, it was nothing,” he said.
“Tell us anyway,” I said.
“I was just wondering if it could be used for marbling.”
There was a brief silence as we thought about what he had said.
“And what the hell is ‘marbling’?” asked Bernard in his best lawyer voice.
“It’s not the proper name, but it’s what I call it,” Toby said.
“Call what?” asked Sally, coming back into the room with a silver tray, with teapot, cups and so on, plus some chocolate biscuits that clearly caught Bernard’s eye.
“Toby was just saying that this ball could be used for marbling,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked, setting the tray down on a table.
“Yes, what is this marbling?” implored Bernard.
Toby looked at Caroline and he seemed a bit embarrassed. “It’s placing a large glass marble in the uterus of a mare to simulate a pregnancy.”
“But why would anyone do that?” asked Caroline.
“To stop her coming into season,” said Toby.
“Sorry,” said Bernard. “You’ve lost me.”
“Suppose you don’t want a filly or a mare coming into season at a certain time,” said Toby. “You place a large marble or two through her cervix and into the uterus. The fact that there is something in the uterus already seems somehow to fool the animal into thinking that she is pregnant, so she doesn’t ovulate, come into season or go into heat.”
“Why would that be a problem anyway?” I asked.
“Well, sometimes it may be that you want the mare in season at an exact moment-say, for breeding on a specific day to a stallion-so you could marble the mare for a few weeks, then remove the marbles and-hey, presto-the mare comes into heat almost immediately. I don’t know it all; you’d have to ask a vet. But I do know it’s done a lot. Some show jumpers are kept off heat for major competitions. Otherwise, they can go all moody and don’t behave properly. Just like a woman.” He laughed, and Sally playfully smacked his knee.
“Or a polo pony,” I said. “I doubt you would want a female polo pony to be in season during a match, especially if there were some male ponies playing as well.”
“Certainly not if any of them were full horses,” said Toby.
“Full horses?” asked Bernard, munching on a biscuit.
“Stallions,” said Toby. “As opposed to geldings.”
Bernard seemed to wince a little, and he put his knees tightly together.
“So you think this ball could be used instead of a glass marble?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re about the same size. But it would have to be sterilized. At least on the outside.”
“How many did you say could be inserted?” I asked.
“One or two is normal, I think,” he said. “But I do know that at least three have been used. Maybe more. You would have to ask a vet.”
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br /> “Wouldn’t they just fall out?” asked Caroline, amused.
“No,” said Toby. “You need to give the mare an injection to open the cervix to get them in. The marbles are placed in the uterus through a tube that looks like a short piece of plastic drain-pipe. When the injection wears off, the cervix closes and keeps them in. Easy. I’ve seen it done.”
“But how do you get them out again?” I asked.
“I’ve never actually seen them come out,” he said, “but I think you just give the mare the cervix-opening injection and the marbles are pushed out naturally.”
“But surely this ball wouldn’t be big enough to smuggle drugs,” said Bernard. “In horses or otherwise.”
“I was told that Peter Komarov imports horses by the jumbo jetful,” I said. “How many horses could you get on a jumbo?”
“I’ll try and find out,” said Toby, and he went out of the drawing room.
“We shall assume that each horse would have a minimum of three balls placed in it,” I said.
“Only the female horses,” said Caroline.
“True,” I said. “But wouldn’t they all be females if that is what he wanted?”
“Wouldn’t it depend on which horses were due to be imported?” said Sally.
“Not if Komarov owned the horses as well,” I said.
Toby came back. “According to LRT, the transport people who take and collect horses from Gatwick and Luton, there can be up to eighty horses on a jumbo.”
“Phew,” I said. “That’s a lot of horseflesh.”
“Eighty horses times three balls each,” said Caroline. “Two hundred and forty balls’ worth. How much is that?”
I remembered from school that the formula for the volume of a sphere was. The balls were about four centimeters across. I did a quick mental calculation. The volume of a ball was about thirty cubic centimeters. 30cc per ball × 240 balls = 7,200cc.
“Just over seven liters,” I said.
“And just how much is that?” asked Bernard. “I don’t work in liters.”
I did another rough calculation. “It would fill a bit more than twelve pint beer glasses.”
“And how much would that volume of cocaine be worth?” he asked.
“I’ve no idea of the price of cocaine,” I said.
“I expect it will say on the Internet,” said Toby. “I’ll go ask Google.” He disappeared again.
We sat and waited for him. I drank my tea, and Bernard sneaked his fourth chocolate biscuit.
Toby came back. “According to the Internet, cocaine is worth about forty pounds per gram at a sort of wholesale price,” he said.
“And how many grams are there in a pint mug?” asked Bernard, holding out his chubby hands with the palms up.
I laughed. “My brain hurts. If it was water, there would be a thousand grams in each liter. So there would be seven thousand grams in all. I don’t know whether cocaine powder is more or less dense than water. Does it float?”
“It can’t be much different,” said Bernard. “Say seven thousand grams at forty pounds at a time is”-he paused-“two hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Not bad. But not that much for all the risks involved.”
“But that’s not the half of it,” said Caroline. “For a start, you probably import cocaine at one hundred percent purity, and then you ‘cut’ it-that is, you add baking soda or vitamin C powder, or even sugar. At least a third, and sometimes as much as two-thirds to three-quarters, of what is sold on the street is the cut.”
I looked at her in shocked surprise. She smiled. “I once had a crackhead as a boyfriend. It lasted for a week or two, until I found out about his habit. But we stayed friends for a while longer, and he told me all about buying coke, as he called it. Users mostly buy it as a twist of powder or a rock of crack. That’s just enough for a single dose. A twist of cocaine powder may only contain fifty milligrams of pure cocaine. So you can get at least twenty twists from a single gram. That puts the potential street value of each gram hugely higher. In all, a jumbo jetload would be worth millions, and how many jumbo jetfuls are there?
“Plus, of course, the profit from the sale of the horses,” I said.
“If there is any,” said Toby. “He would have to buy them in South America and pay for the transportation. I don’t suppose there would be that much profit. Unless horses are very cheap in Argentina.”
“How would we find out?” I asked.
Toby went out again, and I thought he was going to somehow find out the answer to my question. But he didn’t. He came back with a book. It was like a large, thick paperback. “This is a catalog from the Horses in Training sale at Newmarket last October, when I bought a horse from Komarov. I thought I’d look it up.” He flicked through the pages. “Here it is.” He studied it. “It says here that it was sent to the sale by a company called Horse Imports Ltd. But I know it was Komarov’s horse. He was there. He congratulated me afterwards on my purchase.”
“You mean you spoke to this man?” said Sally, disturbed. “Does he know who you are?”
“Not really,” said Toby.
“I hope not,” she said to him. “Not if he’s trying to kill your brother.” She looked at me. “You shouldn’t have come here.” I could see that for the first time she really did believe I was in danger, and, consequently, so was she, and so was her family.
Toby was actually my half brother. We shared the same mother, but my father had been her second husband. Toby was the son of a newly qualified accountant who had died of kidney failure when Toby had been two. Toby’s surname wasn’t Moreton. It was Chambers.
“Komarov won’t know that Toby is my brother,” I said.
“I hope you’re right,” Sally said.
So did I.
19
T oby spent much of the evening going through the sale catalog page by page. He came up with the fact that sixty-eight of the fifteen hundred or so horses sold at that sale were from Horse Imports Ltd. And every single one of them was female, either a mare or a filly. And that couldn’t be a coincidence.
That sale was just one of eleven similar sales held each year at Newmarket. There were also many major bloodstock auctions at Doncaster, and at Fairyhouse and Kill in Ireland, not to mention many others around the world. Then there were the horses sold privately. The horse-selling business worldwide was enormous. Lots and lots of jumbo jetfuls, each producing millions.
As Toby had studied the catalog, Caroline and I had sat in front of his computer screen and run searches on Horse Imports Ltd on the Internet. It was a British subsidiary of a Dutch company. It had an annual turnover that ran into tens of millions, but it seemed to have liabilities to its parent company equal to its gross profit and so it showed no net profit and hence paid no UK tax. I didn’t know how many horses it sold each year, but if they were all as reasonably priced as Toby had said there must have been thousands of them. I wondered if they all had a uterus, and whether they had all arrived in the UK with it containing drug-filled metal balls. And those were just the British-bound horses. I knew he also sold horses in the United States, and I suspected he did too in his native Russia, if only to his polo club. Where else? I wondered. Would there be enough female horses in the whole of South America?
I tried to use the computer to trace the parent company into the Dutch system, but without any success. I was fairly confident that the Dutch company would, itself, prove to have a parent company, and so on. I suspected that the overall parent, the matriarch company at the top of the tree, would prove to have a Dutch Antilles base, to be an offshore entity where such considerations as corporate taxes were not a worry.
Bernard had made an interesting little speech before he had taken himself back to London. “One of the major problems for drug dealers,” he had said, “is what to do with the vast amounts of cash generated by the trade. Nowadays, governments have wised up and put anti-money-laundering measures in place. You know how difficult it is now to open a bank account? Well, that’s because the
banks are required to prove not only who you are but that funds in your accounts are come by in a legal and tax-reported fashion. These days, you can’t buy things with cash, not really expensive things like cars and houses. Even bookmakers won’t take a large bet in cash anymore, and they certainly won’t pay you out in cash if you win. It has to be by bank transfer or credit card. So cash is a problem. It’s all right if it’s only a few hundred or even a few thousand. That’s easy to spend. But millions, in cash? You can’t just buy your luxury Mediterranean yacht with suitcases full of cash. The yacht broker won’t take it, because then he has the same problem.”
“Can’t you take the suitcases of cash into the Cayman Islands or somewhere and put it in a bank?” I had asked.
“No chance,” he’d replied. “It’s now more difficult to open a bank account in the Cayman Islands than it is here. They are subject to all sorts of regulations laid down by both the United States and the European Union.”
“But I thought they were an offshore center for saving tax. What have the U.S. and Europe got to do with it?”
“If the offshore centers don’t comply with the rules, the U.S. won’t allow its citizens to go there. It would be like Cuba,” he had gone on. “And the Cayman Islands rely on the tourism industry to survive, and nearly all their tourists come from the United States, mostly on cruise ships.”
I sat playing with the computer and thinking about how I would deal with millions of pounds in cash if I had been Mr. Komarov.
“Suppose,” I said to Caroline, “he sends the cash back to South America along with the empty balls. The customs don’t care about cash leaving. They’re too busy looking out for drugs arriving.”
“So,” she said, “what good would that do? Bernard said you can’t transfer large amounts from South America to banks over here without having to prove first it’s not drug money.”
“I know,” I said. “But how about if you don’t transfer it back. How about if you use the cash to buy horses as well as drugs.”
She sat there looking at me with her mouth open.
“No one,” I went on, “is going to worry about being paid in cash for a moderately priced horse or two in Argentina, Uruguay or Colombia. I bet that Komarov has hundreds of small horse breeders who regularly provide him with the horses for cash in hand. You simply send the profit generated from the drug smuggling back to South America as cash to buy more female horses to continue the trade in a never-ending cycle. It’s self-perpetuating. Remember, Toby said he doubted that the sale of the horses would make much profit. It doesn’t have to. It’s not there to make a profit. It’s there to launder the cash. In the end, you have legitimate money from the legitimate sale of the horses at the prestigious Newmarket Bloodstock Sales, where Mr. Komarov is seen as a pillar of society, and is, no doubt, welcomed with open arms and a glass of champagne because he brings sixty-eight horses to every sale.”