Banker

by Dick Francis

  He was dying in stages, unconscious, reluctant, the brain finished, the nerve messages still passing to convulsing muscles, turmoil churning without direction in stomach and gut, the head already inert on the straw.

  An age passed before it was done. Then the heavy body fell flaccid, all systems spent, and lay in perpetual astonishing silence, pinning me beneath.

  The relief of finding him dead and myself alive lasted quite a long time, but then, as always happens with the human race, simple gratitude for existence progressed to discontent that things weren’t better.

  He had fallen with his spine towards me, his bulk lying across my legs from my knees down; and getting out from under him was proving an impossibility.

  The left ankle, which felt broken, protested screechingly at any attempted movement. I couldn’t lift my arm for the same reason. There was acute soreness in my chest, making breathing itself painful and coughing frightful; and the only good thing I could think of was that I was lying on my back and not face down in the straw.

  A very long time passed very slowly. The crushing weight of the horse slowly numbed my legs altogether and transferred the chief area of agony to the whole of my left arm, which I might have thought totally mangled if I hadn’t been able to see it dimly lying there looking the same as usual, covered in blue sweater, white cuff slightly showing, hand with clean nails, gold watch on wrist.

  Physical discomfort for a while shut out much in the way of thought, but eventually I began to add up memories and ask questions, and the biggest, most immediate question was what would Calder do when he came back and found me alive.

  He wouldn’t expect it. No one could really expect anyone to survive being locked in with a mad horse, and the fact that I had was a trick of fate.

  I remembered him giving the horse an apple while I’d struggled within the spinning walls to stand up. Giving his apple so routinely, and patting the horse’s neck.

  I remembered Calder saying on my first visit that he gave his remedies to horses in hollowed-out apples. But this time it had been no remedy, this time something opposite, this time a drug to make crazy, to turn a normal steel-shod horse into a killing machine.

  What had he said when he’d first found me conscious? Those bizarre words… ‘I thought you’d be out. I thought you wouldn’t know…’ And something else… ‘I wish I’d hit you harder, but it seemed enough.’

  He had said also that he was sorry, that he wished I hadn’t come… He hadn’t meant, I thought, that I should be aware of it when the horse killed me. At the very least, he hadn’t meant me to see and hear and suffer that death. But also, when he found me awake, it hadn’t prevented him from then giving the apple, although he knew that I would see, would hear, would… suffer.

  The horse hadn’t completed the task. When Calder returned, he would make good the deficit. It was certain.

  I tried, on that thought, again to slide my legs out, though how much it would have helped if I had succeeded was debatable. It was as excruciating as before, since the numbness proved temporary. I concluded somewhat sadly that dragging a broken ankle from beneath a dead horse was no jolly entertainment, and in fact, given the state of the rest of me, couldn’t be done.

  I had never broken any bones before, not even ski-ing. I’d never been injured beyond the transient bumps of childhood. Never been to hospital, never troubled a surgeon, never slept from anaesthetic. For thirty-four years I’d been thoroughly healthy and, apart from chicken-pox and such, never ill. I even had good teeth.

  I was unprepared in any way for the onslaught of so much pain all at once, and also not quite sure how to deal with it. All I knew was that when I tried to pull out my ankle the protests throughout my body brought actual tears into my eyes and no amount of theoretical resolution could give me the power to continue. I wondered if what I felt was cowardice. I didn’t much care if it was. I lay with everything stiffening and getting cold and worse, and I’d have given a good deal to be as oblivious as the horse.

  The oblong of window at length began to lighten towards the new day; Saturday, June 2nd. Calder would come back and finish the job, and no reasonable pathologist would swear the last blow had been delivered hours after the first. Calder would say in bewilderment, ‘But I had no idea Tim was coming to see me… I was in London for the television… I have no idea how he came to shut himself into one of the boxes… because it’s just possible to do that, you know, if you’re not careful.… I’ve no idea why the horse should have kicked him, because he’s a placid old boy, as you can see… the whole thing’s a terrible accident, and I’m shattered… most distressed…’, and anyone would look at the horse from whose bloodstream the crazing drug would have departed and conclude that I’d been pretty unintelligent and also unlucky, and too bad.

  Ian Pargetter’s veterinary case had gone to a securer hiding place or to destruction, and there would be only a slight chance left of proving Calder a murderer. Whichever way one considered it, the outlook was discouraging.

  I couldn’t be bothered to roll my wrist over to see the time. The sun rose and shone slantingly through the bars with the pale brilliance of dawn. It had to be five o’clock, or after.

  Time drifted. The sun moved away. The horse and I lay in intimate silence, dead and half dead; waiting.

  A car drove up fast outside and doors slammed.

  It will be now, I thought. Now. Very soon.

  There were voices in the distance, calling to each other. Female and male. Strangers.

  Not Calder’s distinctive, loud, edgy, public voice. Not his at all.

  Hope thumped back with a tremendous surge and I called out myself, saying ‘Here… Come here,’ but it was at best a croak, inaudible beyond the door.

  Suppose they were looking for Calder, and when they didn’t find him, drove away… I took all possible breath into my lungs and yelled ‘Help… Come here.’

  Nothing happened. My voice ricocheted off the walls and mocked me, and I dragged in another grinding lungful and shouted again… and again… and again.

  The top half of the door swung outward and let in a dazzle of light, and a voice yelled incredulously, ‘He’s here. He’s in here…’

  The bolt on the lower half-door clattered and the daylight grew to an oblong, and against the light three figures appeared, coming forward, concerned, speaking with anxiety and joy and bringing life.

  Judith and Gordon and Pen.

  Judith was gulping and so I think was I.

  ‘Thank God,’ Gordon said. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘You didn’t go home,’ Pen said. ‘We were worried.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Judith said.

  ‘Not really… but everything’s relative. I’ve never been happier, so who cares.’

  ‘If we put our arms under your shoulders,’ Gordon said, surveying the problem, ‘We should be able to pull you out.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘One shoulder feels broken. Get a knacker.’

  ‘My dear Tim,’ he said, puzzled.

  ‘They’ll come with a lorry… and a winch. Their job is dead horses.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘And an ambulance,’ Pen said. ‘I should think.’

  I smiled at them with much love, my fairly incompetent saviours. They asked how I’d got where I was, and to their horror I briefly told them: and I in turn asked why they’d come, and they explained that they’d been worried because Calder’s television programme had been cancelled.

  ‘Micky Bonwith was taken ill,’ Pen said. ‘They just announced it during the evening. There would be no live Micky Bonwith show, just an old recording, very sorry, expect Calder Jackson at a later date.’

  ‘Pen telephoned and told us where you were going, and why,’ Judith said.

  ‘And we were worried,’ Gordon added.

  ‘You didn’t go home… didn’t telephone,’ Pen said.

  ‘We’ve been awake all night,’ Gordon said.
‘The girls were growing more and more anxious… so we came.’

  They’d come a hundred miles. You couldn’t ask for better friends.

  Gordon drove away to find a public telephone and Pen asked if I’d found what I’d come for.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Half the things had no labels.’

  ‘Don’t talk any more, ‘Judith said. ‘Enough is enough.’

  ‘I might as well.’

  ‘Take your mind off it,’ Pen nodded, understanding.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked.

  Judith looked at her watch. ‘Ten to eight.’

  ‘Calder will come back…’ And the lads too, I thought. He’d come when the lads turned up for work. About that time. He’d need witnesses to the way he’d found me.

  ‘Tim,’ Pen said with decision, ‘if he’s coming… Did you take any samples? Did you get a chance?’

  I nodded weakly.

  ‘I suppose you can’t remember what they were…’

  ‘I hid them.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have found them?’ She was gentle and prepared to be disappointed; careful not to blame.

  I smiled at her. ‘He didn’t find them. They’re here.’

  She looked blankly round the box and then at my face. ‘Didn’t he search you?’ She said in surprise. ‘Pockets… of course, he would.’

  ‘I don’t know… but he didn’t find the pills.’

  ‘Then where are they?’

  ‘I learned from Ginnie about keeping your hands free,’ I said. ‘They’re in a plastic bag… below my waistband… inside my pants.’

  They stared incredulously, and then they laughed, and Judith with tears in her eyes said, ‘Do you mean… all the time…?’

  ‘All the time,’ I agreed. ‘And go easy getting them out.’

  Some things would be best forgotten but are impossible to forget, and I reckon one could put the next half hour into that category: at the end of it I lay on a table-like stretcher in the open air, and my dead-weight pal was half up the ramp of the knacker’s van that Gordon with exceptional persuasiveness had conjured out at that hour of the morning.

  The three lads who had at length arrived for work stood around looking helpless, and the two ambulance men, who were not paramedics, were farcically trying to get an answer on a radio with transmission troubles as to where they were supposed to take me.

  Gordon was telling the knacker’s men that I said it was essential to remove a blood sample from the horse and that the carcass was not to be disposed of until that was done. Judith and Pen both looked tired, and were yawning. I wearily watched some birds wheeling high in the fair blue sky and wished I were up there with them, as light as air; and into this rivetting tableau drove Calder.

  Impossible to know what he thought when he saw all the activity, but as he came striding from his car his mouth formed an oval of apprehension and shock.

  He seemed first to fasten his attention on Gordon, and then on the knacker’s man who was saying loudly, ‘If you want a blood sample you’ll have to give us a written authorisation, because of calling in a vet and paying him.’

  Calder looked from him to the dead horse still halfway up the ramp, and from there towards the horse’s normal box, where the door stood wide open.

  From there he turned with bewilderment to Judith, and then with horror saw the bag Pen held tightly, the transparent plastic bag with the capsules, pills and other assorted treasures showing clearly inside.

  Pen remarkably found her voice and in words that must have sounded like doom to Calder said, ‘I didn’t tell you before… I’m a pharmacist.’

  ‘Where did you get that?’ Calder said, staring at the bag as if his eyes would burn it. ‘Where…’

  ‘Tim had it.’

  Her gaze went to me and Calder seemed finally to realise that my undoubted stillness was not that of death. He took two paces toward the stretcher and looked down at my face and saw me alive, awake, aware.

  Neither of us spoke. His eyes seemed to retreat in the sockets and the shape of the upper jaw stood out starkly. He saw in me I dare say the ravages of the night and I saw in him the realisation become certainty that my survival meant his ruin.

  I thought: you certainly should have hit harder; and maybe he thought it too. He looked at me with a searing intensity that defied analysis and then turned abruptly away and walked with jerky steps back to his car.

  Gordon took two or three hesitant steps towards perhaps stopping him, but Calder without looking back started his engine, put his foot on the accelerator and with protesting tyres made a tight semi-circular turn and headed for the gate.

  ‘We should get the police,’ Gordon said, watching him go.

  Judith and Pen showed scant enthusiasm and I none at all. I supposed we would have to bring in the police in the end, but the longer the boring rituals could be postponed, from my point of view, the better. Britain was a small island, and Calder too well-known to go far.

  Pen looked down at the plastic store-house in her hands and i hen without actual comment opened her handbag and put the whole thing inside. She glanced briefly at me and smiled faintly, and I nodded with relief that she and her friends would have the unravelling of the capsules to themselves.

  On that same Saturday, at about two-thirty in the afternoon, a family of picnickers came across a car which had been parked out of sight of any road behind some clumps of gorse bushes. The engine of the car was running and the children of the family, peering through the windows, saw a man slumped on the back seat with a tube in his mouth.

  They knew him because of his curly hair, and his beard.

  The children were reported to be in a state of hysterical shock and the parents were angry, as if some authority, somewhere or other, should prevent suicides spoiling the countryside.

  Tributes to Calder’s miracle-working appeared on television that evening, and I thought it ironic that the master who had known so much about drugs should have chosen to gas his way out.

  He had driven barely thirty miles from his yard. He had left no note. The people who had been working with him on the postponed Micky Bonwith show said they couldn’t understand it, and Dissdale telephoned Oliver to say that in view of Calder’s tragic death he would have to withdraw his offer for Sandcastle.

  I, by the time I heard all this, was half covered in infinitely irritating plaster of paris, there being more grating edges of bone inside me than I cared to hear about, and horse-shoe-shaped crimson bruises besides.

  I had been given rather grudgingly a room to myself, privacy in illness being considered a sinful luxury in the national health service, and on Monday evening Pen came all the way from London again to report on the laboratory findings.

  She frowned after she’d kissed me. ‘You look exhausted,’ she said.

  ‘Tiring place, hospital.’

  ‘I suppose it must be. I’d never thought…’

  She put a bunch of roses in my drinking-water jug and said they were from Gordon and Judith’s garden.

  ‘They send their love,’ she said chattily, ‘and their garden’s looking lovely.’

  ‘Pen…’

  ‘Yes. Well.’ She pulled the visitor’s chair closer to the bed upon which I half sat, half lay in my plaster and borrowed dressing gown on top of the blankets. ‘You have really, as they say, hit the jackpot.’

  ‘Do you mean it?’ I exclaimed.

  She grinned cheerfully. ‘It’s no wonder that Calder killed himself, not after seeing you alive and hearing you were going to get the dead horse tested, and knowing that after all you had taken all those things from his surgery. It was either that or years in jail and total disgrace.’

  ‘A lot of people would prefer disgrace.’

  ‘Not Calder, though.’

  ‘No.’

  She opened a slim black briefcase on her knees and produced several typewritten pages.

  ‘We worked all yesterday and this morning,’ she said, ‘But first I’ll tell you that G
ordon got the dead horse’s blood test done immediately at the Equine Research Establishment, and they told him on the telephone this morning that the horse had been given ethyl isobutrazine, which was contrary to normal veterinary practice.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  Her eyes gleamed. ‘The Research people told Gordon that any horse given ethyl isobutrazine would go utterly berserk and literally try to climb the walls.’

  ‘That’s just what he did,’ I said soberly.

  ‘It’s a drug which is used all the time as a tranquilliser to stop dogs barking or getting car-sick, but it has an absolutely manic effect on horses. One of its brand names is Diquel, in case you’re interested. All the veterinary books warn against giving it to horses.’

  ‘But normally… in a horse… it would wear off?’

  ‘Yes, in six hours or so, with no trace.’

  Six hours, I thought bleakly. Six hours…

  ‘In your bag of goodies,’ Pen said, ‘guess what we found? Three tablets of Diquel.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nodded. ‘Really. And now pin back your ears, dearest Tim, because when we found what Calder had been doing, words simply failed us.’

  They seemed indeed to fail her again, for she sat looking at the pages with a faraway expression.

  ‘You remember,’ she said at last, ‘when we went to Calder’s yard that time at Easter, we saw a horse that had been bleeding in its urine… crystalluria was what he called it… that antibiotics hadn’t been able to cure?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Other times too, he cured horses with that.’

  ‘Mm. And those patients had been previously treated by Ian Pargetter before he died, hadn’t they?’

  I thought back. ‘Some of them, certainly.’

  ‘Well… you know you told me before they carted you off in the ambulance on Saturday that some of the jars of capsules in the cupboards were labelled only with letters like a+w, b+w, and c+s?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Three capsules each with one transparent and one blue end, did contain c and s. Vitamin C, and sulphanilamide.’ She looked at me for a possible reaction, but Vitamin C and sulphanilamide sounded quite harmless, and I said so.