Banker

by Dick Francis

  ‘It did say “Shake Well” on the bottle.’

  ‘Mm, but that might be for the soap content, not for the selenium.’

  I thought. ‘Well, could you get the soap out, then? It must be the soap the horses wouldn’t like.’

  ‘I’ll try my hardest,’ she promised. ‘I’ll ask a few friends.’ She paused. ‘There isn’t much of the shampoo left. Only what I kept after sending the samples off to America and the British lab.’

  ‘How much?’ I said anxiously.

  ‘Half an egg-cupful. Maybe less.’

  ‘Is that enough?’

  ‘If we work in test-tubes… perhaps.’

  ‘And Pen… Could you or your friends make a guess, as well, as to how much shampoo you’d need to provide enough selenium to give a teratogenic dose to a mare?’

  ‘You sure do come up with some difficult questions, dearest Tim, but we’ll certainly try.’

  Three days later she sent a message with Gordon, saying that by that evening she might have some answers, if I would care to go down to her house after work.

  I cared and went, and with a smiling face she opened her front door to let me in.

  ‘Like a drink?’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes, but…’

  ‘First things first.’ She poured whisky carefully for me and Cinzano for herself. ‘Hungry?’

  ‘Pen…’

  ‘It’s only rolls with ham and lettuce in. I never cook much, as you know.’ She disappeared to her seldom-used kitchen and returned with the offerings, which turned out to be nicely squelchy and much what I would have made for myself.

  ‘All right,’ she said finally, pushing away the empty plates, ‘Now I’ll tell you what we’ve managed.’

  ‘At last.’

  She grinned. ‘Yes. Well then, we started from the premise that if someone had to use shampoo as the source of selenium then that someone didn’t have direct or easy access to poisonous chemicals, which being so he also wouldn’t have sophisticated machinery available for separating one ingredient from another – a centrifuge, for instance. OK so far?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So what we needed, as we saw it, was a simple method that involved only everyday equipment. Something anyone could co anywhere. So the first thing we did was to let the shampoo crip through a paper filter, and we think you could use almost anything for that purpose, like a paper towel, a folded tissue or tnin blotting paper. We actually got the best and fastest results from a coffee filter, which is after all specially designed to retain very fine solids while letting liquids through easily.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Highly logical.’

  Pen smiled. ‘So there we were with some filter-papers in which, we hoped, the microscopic particles of selenium were trapped. The filters were stained bright green by the shampoo. I brought one here to show you… I’ll get it.’ She whisked off to the kitchen taking the empty supper plates with her, and returned carrying a small tray with two glasses on it.

  One glass contained cut pieces of green-stained coffee filter lying in what looked like oil, and the second glass contained only an upright test-tube, closed at the top with a cork and showing a dark half-inch of solution at the bottom.

  ‘One of my friends in the lab knows a lot about horses,’ Pen said, ‘and he reckoned that all race horses are used to the taste of linseed oil, which is given them in their feed quite often as a laxative. So we got some linseed oil and cut up the filter and soaked it.’ She pointed to the glass. ‘The selenium particles floated out of the paper into the oil.’

  ‘Neat.’ I said.

  ‘Yes. So then we poured the result into the test-tube and just waited twenty-four hours or so, and the selenium particles slowly gravitated through the oil to the bottom.’ She looked at my face to make sure I understood. ‘We transferred the selenium from the wax-soap base in which it would remain suspended into an oil base, in which it wouldn’t remain suspended.’

  ‘I do understand,’ I assured her.

  ‘So here in the test-tube,’ she said with a conjuror’s flourish, ‘we have concentrated selenium with the surplus oil poured off.’ She picked the tube out of the glass, keeping it upright, and showed me the brownish shadowy liquid lying there, darkest at the bottom, almost clear amber at the top. ‘We had such a small sample to start with that this is all we managed to collect. But that dark stuff is definitely selenium sulphide. We checked it on a sort of scanner called a gas chromatograph.’ She grinned. ‘No point in not using the sophisticated apparatus when it’s there right beside you – and we were in a research lab of a teaching hospital, incidentally.’

  ‘You’re marvellous.’

  ‘Quite brilliant,’ she agreed with comic modesty. ‘We also calculated that that particular shampoo was almost ten per cent selenium, which is a very much higher proportion than you’d find in shampoos for humans. We all agree that this much, in the test-tube, is enough to cause deformity in a foal – or in any other species, for that matter. We found many more references in other books – lambs born with deformed feet, for instance, where the sheep had browsed off plants growing on selenium-rich soil. We all agree that it’s the time when the mare ingests the selenium that’s most crucial, and we think that to be sure of getting the desired result you’d have to give selenium every day for three or four days, starting two or three days after conception.’

  I slowly nodded. ‘That’s the same sort of time-scale that Oliver said.’

  ‘And if you gave too much,’ she said, ‘Too large a dose, you’d be more likely to get abortions than really gross deformities. The embryo would only go on growing at all, that is, if the damage done to it by the selenium was relatively minor.’

  ‘There were a lot of different deformities,’ I said.

  ‘Oh sure. It could have affected any developing cell, regardless.’

  I picked up the test-tube and peered closely at its murky contents. ‘I suppose all you’d have to do would be stir this into a cupful of oats.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Or… could you enclose it in a capsule?’

  ‘Yes, if you had the makings. We could have done it quite easily in the lab. You’d need to get rid of as much oil as possible, of course, in that case, and just scrape concentrated selenium into the capsules.’

  ‘Mm. Calder could do it, I suppose?’

  ‘Calder Jackson? Why yes, I guess he could if you wanted him to. He had everything there that you’d need.’ She lifted her head, remembering something. ‘He’s on the television tomorrow night, incidentally.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Yes. They were advertising it tonight just after the news, before you came. He’s going to be a guest on that chat show… Mickey Bonwith’s show… Do you ever see it?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘It’s transmitted live, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ She looked at me with slight puzzlement. ‘What’s going on in that computer brain?’

  ‘A slight calculation of risk,’ I said slowly, ‘and of grasping unrepeatable opportunities. And tell me, dearest Pen, if I found myself again in Calder’s surgery, what should I look for, to bring out?’

  She stared at me literally with her mouth open. Then, recovering, she said, ‘You can’t mean… Calder?’

  ‘Well,’ I said soberly. ‘What I’d really like to do is to make sure one way or another. Because it does seem to me, sad though it is to admit it, that if you tie in Dissdale’s offer for Sandcastle with someone deliberately poisoning the mares, and then add Calder’s expertise with herbs – in which selenium-soaked plants might be included – you do at least get a question mark. You do want to know for sure, don’t you think, whether or not Calder and Dissdale set out deliberately to debase Sandcastle’s worth so that they could buy him for peanuts.… So that Calder could perform a well publicised “miracle cure” of some sort on Sandcastle, who would thereafter always sire perfect foals, and gradually climb back into favour. Whose fees might never r
eturn to forty thousand pounds, but would over the years add up to a fortune.’

  ‘But they couldn’t,’ Pen said, aghast. ‘I mean… Calder and Dissdale… we know them.’

  ‘And you in your trade, as I in mine, must have met presentable, confidence-inspiring crooks.’

  She fell silent, staring at me in a troubled way, until finally I said, ‘There’s one other thing. Again nothing I could swear to – but the first time I went to Calder’s place he had a lad there who reminded me sharply of the boy with the knife at Ascot.’

  ‘Ricky Barnet,’ Pen said, nodding.

  ‘Yes. I can’t remember Calder’s lad’s name, and I couldn’t identify him at all now after all this time, but at Oliver’s I saw another lad, called Shane, who also reminded me of Ricky Barnet. I’ve no idea whether Shane and Calder’s lad are one and the same person, though maybe not, because I don’t think Calder’s lad was called Shane, or I would have remembered, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘Got you,’ she said.

  ‘But if – and it’s a big if – if Shane did once work for Calder, he might still be working for him… feeding selenium to mares.’

  Pen took her time with gravity in the experienced eyes, and at last said, ‘Someone would have had to be there on the spot to do the feeding, and it certainly couldn’t have been Calder or Dissdale. But couldn’t it have been that manager, Nigel? It would have been easy for him. Suppose Dissdale and Calder paid him…? Suppose they promised to employ him, or even give him a share in Sandcastle, once they’d got hold of the horse.’

  I shook my head. ‘I did wonder. I did think of Nigel. There’s one good reason why it probably isn’t him, though, and that’s because he and only he besides Oliver knew that one of the mares down for Diarist was covered by Sandcastle.’ I explained about Oliver’s impulse mating. ‘The foal is perfect, but might very likely not have been if it was Nigel who was doing the feeding.’

  ‘Not conclusive,’ Pen said, slowly.

  ‘No.’

  She stirred. ‘Did you tell the police all this?’

  ‘I meant to,’ I said, ‘But when I was there with Wyfold on Monday it seemed impossible. It was all so insubstantial. Such a lot of guesses. Maybe wrong conclusions. Dissdale’s offer could be genuine. And a lad I’d seen for half a minute eighteen months ago… it’s difficult to remember a strange face for half an hour, let alone all that time. I have only an impression of blankness and of sunglasses… and I don’t have the same impression of Oliver’s lad Shane. Wyfold isn’t the sort of man to be vague to. I thought I’d better come up with something more definite before I went back to him.’

  She bit her thumb. ‘Can’t you take another good look at this Shane?’

  I shook my head. ‘Oliver’s gradually letting lads go, as he does every year at this time, and Shane is one who has already left. Oliver doesn’t know where he went and has no other address for him, which he doesn’t think very unusual. It seems rhat lads can drift from stable to stable for ever with their papers always showing only the address of their last or current employer. But I think we might find Shane, if we’re lucky.

  ‘How?’

  ‘By photographing Ricky Barnet, side view, and asking around on racetracks.’

  She smiled. ‘It might work. It just might.’

  ‘Worth a try.’

  My mind drifted back to something else worth a try, and it seemed that hers followed.

  ‘You don’t really mean to break into Calder’s surgery, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Pick the lock,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘Time’s running out, and Oliver’s future and the bank’s money with it, and yes, sure, I’ll do what I can.’

  She curiously looked into my face. ‘You have no real conception of danger, do you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean… I saw you, that day at Ascot, simply hurl yourself at that boy, at that knife. You could have been badly stabbed, very easily. And Ginnie told us that you frightened her to tears jumping at Sandcastle the way you did, to catch him. She said it was suicidal… and yet you yourself seemed to think nothing of it. And at Ascot, that evening, I remember you being bored with the police questions, not stirred up high by a brush with death…’

  Her words petered away. I considered them and found in myself a reason and an answer.

  ‘Nothing that has happened so far in my life,’ I said seriously, ‘has made me fear I might die. I think… I know it sounds silly… I am unconvinced of my own mortality.’

  JUNE

  On the following day, Friday, June 1st, I took up a long-offered invitation and went to lunch with the board of a security firm to whom we had lent money for launching a new burglar alarm on the market. Not greatly to their surprise I was there to ask a favour, and after a repast of five times the calories of Ekaterin’s they gave me with some amusement three keys which would unlock almost anything but the crown jewels, and also a concentrated course on how to use them.

  ‘Those pickers are strictly for opening doors in emergencies,’ the locksmiths said, smiling. ‘If you end up in jail, we don’t know you.’

  ‘If I end up in jail, send me another set in a fruit cake.’

  I thanked them and left, and practised discreetly on the office doors in the bank, with remarkable results. Going home I let myself in through my own front door with them, and locked and unlocked every cupboard and drawer which had a keyhole. Then I put on a dark roll-neck jersey over my shirt and tie and with scant trepidation drove to Newmarket.

  I left my car at the side of the road some distance from Calder’s house and finished the journey on foot, walking quietly into his yard in the last of the lingering summer dusk, checking against my watch that it was almost ten o’clock, the hour when Micky Bonwith led his guests to peacock chairs and dug publicly into their psyches.

  Calder would give a great performance, I thought: and the regrets I felt about my suspicions of him redoubled as I looked at the outline of his house against the sky and remembered his uncomplicated hospitality.

  The reserve which had always at bottom lain between us I now acknowledged as my own instinctive and stifled doubt. Wanting to see worth, I had seen it: and the process of now trying to prove myself wrong gave me more sadness than satisfaction.

  His yard was dark and peaceful, all lads long gone. Within the hall of the house a single light burned, a dim point of yellow glimpsed through the bushes fluttering in a gentle breeze. Behind the closed doors of the boxes the patients would be snoozing, those patients with festering sores and bleeding guts and all manner of woes awaiting the touch.

  Sandcastle, if I was right, had been destined to stand there, while Calder performed his ‘miracle’ without having to explain how he’d done it. He never had explained: he’d always broadcast publicly that he didn’t know how his power worked, he just knew it did. Thousands, perhaps millions, believed in his power. Perhaps even breeders, those dreamers of dreams, would have believed, in the end.

  I came to the surgery, a greyish block in the advancing night, and fitted one of the lock-pickers into the keyhole. The internal tumblers turned without protest, much oiled and used, and I pushed the door open and went in.

  There were no windows to worry about. I closed the door behind me and switched on the light, and immediately began the search for which I’d come: to find selenium in home-made capsules, or in a filtering device, or in bottles of shampoo.

  Pen had had doubts that anyone would have risked giving selenium a second year if the first year’s work had proved so effective, but I’d reminded her that Sandcastle had already covered many new mares that year before the deformed foals had been reported.

  ‘Whoever did it couldn’t have known at that point that he’d been successful. So to make sure, I’d guess he’d go on, and maybe with an increased dose… and if no selenium was being given this year, why did Ginnie have it?’

  Pen had reluctantly given in. ‘I suppose I’m just tr
ying to find reasons for you not to go to Calder’s.’

  ‘If I find anything, Chief Inspector Wyfold can go there later with a search warrant. Don’t worry so.’

  ‘No,’ she’d said, and gone straight on looking anxious.

  The locked cabinets at both ends of Calder’s surgery proved a doddle for the picks, but the contents were a puzzle, as so few of the jars and boxes were properly labelled. Some indeed had come from commercial suppliers, but these seemed mostly to be the herbs Calder had talked of: hydrastis, comfrey, fo-ti-tieng, myrrh, sarsaparilla, liquorice, passiflora, papaya, garlic; a good quantity of each.

  Nothing was obligingly labelled selenium.

  I had taken with me a thickish polythene bag which had a zip across one end and had formerly enclosed a silk tie and handkerchief, a present from my mother at Christmas. Into that I systematically put two or three capsules from each bottle, and two or three pills of each sort, and small sachets of herbs: and Pen, I thought, was going to have a fine old time sorting them all out.

  With the bag almost half full of samples I carefully locked the cabinets again and turned to the refrigerator, which was of an ordinary domestic make with only a magnetic door fastening.

  Inside there were no bottles of shampoo. No coffee filters. No linseed oil. There were simply the large plastic containers of Calder’s cure-all tonic.

  I thought I might as well take some to satisfy Pen’s curiosity, and rooted around for a small container, finding some empty medicine bottles in a cupboard below the work bench. Over the sink I poured some of the tonic into a medicine bottle, screwed on the cap, and returned the plastic container carefully to its place in the ’fridge. I stood the medicine bottle on the workbench ready to take away, and turned finally to the drawers where Calder kept things like hops and also his antique pill-making equipment.

  Everything was clean and tidy, as before. If he had made capsules containing selenium there, I could see no trace.

  With mounting disappointment I went briefly through every drawer. Bags of seeds: sesame, pumpkin, sunflower. Bags of dried herbs, raspberry leaves, alfalfa. Boxes of the empty halves of gelatine capsules, waiting for contents. Empty unused pill bottles. All as before: nothing I hadn’t already seen.