by Dick Francis
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘separately they do nothing but good, but together they can cause crystalluria.’
I stared at her.
‘Calder had made those capsules expressly to cause the horse’s illness in the first place, so that he could “cure” it afterwards. And then the only miracle he’d have to work would be to stop giving the capsules.’
‘My God,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘We could hardly believe it. It meant, you see, that Ian Pargetter almost certainly knew. Because it was he, you see, who could have given the horse’s trainer or owner or lad or whatever a bottle of capsules labelled “antibiotic” to dole out every day. And those capsules were precisely what was making the horse ill.’
‘Pen!’
‘I’d better explain just a little, if you can bear it,’ she said. ‘If you give sulpha drugs to anyone – horse or person – who doesn’t need them, you won’t do much harm because urine is normally slightly alkaline or only slightly acid and you’ll get rid of the sulpha safely. But vitamin C is ascorbic acid and makes the urine more acid, and the acid works with sulpha drugs to form crystals, and the crystals cause pain and bleeding… like powdered glass.’
There was a fairly long silence, and then I said, ‘It’s diabolical.’
She nodded. ‘Once Calder had the horse in his yard he could speed up the cure by giving him bicarbonate of soda, which will make the urine alkaline again and also dissolve the crystals, and with plenty of water to drink the horse would be well in no time. Miraculously fast, in fact.’ She paused and smiled, and went on, ‘We tested a few more things which were perfectly harmless herbal remedies and then we came to three more homemade capsules, with pale green ends this time, and we reckon that they were your a+w.’
‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘What’s a, and what’s w?’
‘A is antibiotic, and w is warfarin. And before you ask, warfarin is a drug used in humans for reducing the clotting ability of the blood.’
‘That pink pill you found on the surgery floor,’ I said. ‘That’s what you said.’
‘Oh yes.’ She looked surprised. ‘So I did. I’d forgotten. Well… if you give certain antibiotics with warfarin you increase the effect of the warfarin to the extent that blood will hardly clot at all… and you get severe bleeding from the stomach, from the mouth, from anywhere where a small blood-vessel breaks… when normally it would clot and mend at once.’
I let out a held breath. ‘Every time I went, there was a bleeder.’
She nodded. ‘Warfarin acts by drastically reducing the effect of vitamin K, which is needed for normal clotting, so all Calder had to do to reverse things was feed lots of vitamin K… which is found in large quantities in alfalfa.’
‘And b+w?’ I asked numbly.
‘Barbiturate and warfarin. Different mechanism, but if you used them together and then stopped just the barbiturate, you could cause a sort of delayed bleeding about three weeks later.’ She paused. ‘We’ve all been looking up our pharmacology textbooks, and there are warnings there, plain to see if you’re looking for them, about prescribing antibiotics or barbiturates or indeed phenylbutazone or anabolic steroids for people on warfarin without carefully adjusting the warfarin dosage. And you see,’ she went on, ‘putting two drugs together in one capsule was really brilliant, because no one would think they were giving a horse two drugs, but just one… and we reckon Ian Pargetter could have put Calder’s capsules into any regular bottle, and the horse’s owner would think that he was giving the horse what it said on the label.’
I blinked. ‘It’s incredible.’
‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘And it gets easier as it goes on.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Sure there’s more.’ She grinned. ‘How about all those poor animals with extreme debility who were so weak they could hardly walk?’
I swallowed. ‘How about them?’
‘You said you found a large bottle in Ian Pargetter’s case with only a few pills in it? A bottle labelled “diuretic”, or in other words, pills designed to increase the passing of urine?’
I nodded.
‘Well, we identified the ones you took, and if you simply gave those particular thiazide diuretic pills over a long period to a horse you would cause exactly the sort of general progressive debility shown by those horses.’
I was past speech.
‘And to cure the debility,’ she said, ‘you just stop the diuretics and provide good food and water. And hey presto!’ She smiled blissfully. ‘Chemically, it’s so elegant. The debility is caused by constant excessive excretion of potassium which the body needs for strength, and the cure is to restore potassium as fast as safely possible… with potassium salts, which you can buy anywhere.’
I gazed at her with awe.
She was enjoying her revelations. ‘We come now to the horses with non-healing ulcers and sores.’
Always those, too, in the yard, I thought.
‘Ulcers and sores are usually cleared up fairly quickly by applications of antibiotic cream. Well… by this time we were absolutely bristling with suspicions, so last of all we took that little tube of antibiotic cream you found in Ian Pargetter’s case, and we tested it. And lo and behold, it didn’t contain antibiotic; cream at all.’
‘What then?’
‘Cortisone cream.’
She looked at my non-comprehension and smiled. ‘Cortisone cream is fine for eczema and allergies, but not for general healing. In fact, if you scratched a horse and smeared some dirt into the wound to infect it and then religiously applied cortisone cream twice a day you would get a nice little ulcer which would never heal. Until, of course, you sent your horse to Calder, who would lay his hands upon your precious… and apply antibiotics at once, to let normal healing begin.’
‘Dear God in heaven.’
‘Never put cortisone cream on a cut,’ she said. ‘A lot of people do. It’s stupid.’
‘I never will,’ I said fervently.
Pen grinned. ‘They always fill toothpaste from the blunt end. We looked very closely and found that the end of the tube had been unwound and then re-sealed. Very neat.’
She seemed to have stopped, so I asked ‘Is that the lot?’
‘That’s the lot.’
We sat for a while and pondered.
‘It does answer an awful lot of questions,’ I said finally.
‘Such as?’
‘Such as why Calder killed Ian Pargetter,’ I said. ‘Ian Pargetter wanted to stop something… which must have been this illness caper. Said he’d had enough. Said also that he would stop Calder too, which must have been his death warrant.’
Pen said, ‘Is that what Calder actually told you?’
‘Yes, that’s what he said, but at the time I didn’t understand what he meant.’
‘I wonder,’ Pen said, ‘why Ian Pargetter wanted to stop altogether? They must have had a nice steady income going between the two of them. Calder must have recruited him years ago.’
‘Selenium,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Selenium was different. Making horses ill in order to cure them wasn’t risking much permanent damage, if any at all. But selenium would be forever. The foals would be deformed. I’d guess when Calder suggested it the idea sickened Ian Pargetter. Revolted him, probably, because he was after all a vet.’
‘And Calder wanted to go on with it all… enough to kill.’
I nodded. ‘Calder would have had his sights on a fortune as well as an income. And but for Ginnie somehow getting hold of that shampoo, he would very likely have achieved it.’
‘I wonder how she did,’ Pen said.
‘Mm.’ I shifted uncomfortably on the bed. ‘I’ve remembered the name of the lad Calder had who looked like Ricky Barnet. It was Jason. I remembered it the other night… in that yard… funny the way the mind works.’
‘What about him?’ Pen said sympathetically.
‘I remembered Calder saying he gave the pills to Jaso
n for Jason to give to the horses. The herb pills, he meant. But with Ian Pargetter gone, Calder would have needed someone else to give those double-edged capsules to horses… because he still had horses in his yard with those same troubles long after Ian Pargetter was dead.’
‘So he did,’ she said blankly. ‘Except.…’
‘Except what?’
‘Only that when we got to the yard last Saturday, before I heard you calling, we looked into several other boxes, and there weren’t many horses there. The place wasn’t full, like it had been.’
‘I should think,’ I said slowly, ‘that it was because Jason had been busy working for three months or more at Oliver’s farm, feeding selenium in apples.’
A visual memory flashed in my brain. Apples… Shane, the stable lad, walking across the yard, swinging a bucket and eating an apple. Shane, Jason: one and the same.
‘What is it?’ Pen said.
‘Photos of Ricky Barnet.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘They say I can leave here tomorrow,’ I said, ‘if I insist.’
She looked at me with mock despair. ‘What exactly did you break?’
‘They said this top lot was scapula, clavicle, humerus, sternum and ribs. Down there,’ I pointed, ‘they lost me. I didn’t know there were so many bones in one ankle.’
‘Did they pin it?’
‘God knows.’
‘How will you look after yourself?’
‘In my usual clumsy fashion.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘Stay until it stops hurting.’
‘That might be weeks… there’s some problem with ligaments or tendons or something.’
‘What problem?’
‘I didn’t really listen.’
‘Tim.’ She was exasperated.
‘Well… it’s so boring,’ I said.
She gave an eyes-to-heaven laugh. ‘I brought you a present from my shop.’ She dug into her handbag. ‘Here you are, with my love.’
I took the small white box she offered, and looked at the label on its side.
Comfrey, it said.
She grinned. ‘You might as well try it,’ she said. ‘Comfrey does contain allantoin, which helps to knit bones. And you never know… Calder really was an absolute expert with all sorts of drugs.’
On Tuesday, June 5th, Oliver Knowles collected me from the hospital to drive me on some errands and then take me to his home, not primarily as an act of compassion but mostly to talk business. I had expected him to accept my temporary disabilities in a straightforward and unemotional manner, and so he did, although he did say dryly when he saw me that when I had invited myself over the telephone I had referred to a ‘crack or two’ and not to half an acre of plaster with clothes strung on in patches.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘I can hop and I can sit and my right arm is fine.’
‘Yes. So I see.’
The nurse who had wheeled me in a chair to his car said however, ‘He can’t hop, it jars him,’ and handed Oliver a slip of paper. ‘There’s a place along that road…’ she pointed, ‘… where you can hire wheel-chairs.’ To me she said, ‘Get a comfortable one. And one which lets your leg lie straight out, like this one. You’ll ache less. All right?’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Hm. Well… take care.’
She helped me into the car with friendly competence and went away with the hospital transport, and Oliver and I did as she advised, storing the resulting cushioned and chromium comfort into the boot of his car.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Then the next thing to do is buy a good instant camera and a stack of films.’
Oliver found a shop and bought the camera while I sat in the front passenger seat as patiently as possible.
‘Where next?’ he said, coming back with parcels.
‘Cambridge. An engineering works. Here’s the address.’ I handed him the piece of paper on which I’d written Ricky Barnet’s personal directions. ‘We’re meeting him when he comes out of work.’
‘Who?’ Oliver said. ‘Who are we meeting?’
‘You’ll see.’
We parked across the road from the firm’s gate and waited, and at four-thirty on the dot the exodus occurred.
Ricky Barnet came out and looked this way and that in searching for us, and beside me I heard Oliver stir and say, ‘But that’s Shane’ in surprise, and then relax and add doubtfully, ‘No it isn’t.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ I leaned out of the open window and called to him ‘Ricky… over here.’
He crossed the road and stopped beside the car.
‘Hop in,’ I said.
‘You been in an accident?’ he said disbelievingly.
‘Sort of.’
He climbed into the back of the car. He hadn’t been too keen to have his photograph taken for the purpose I’d outlined, but he was in no great position to refuse; and I’d made my blackmailing pressure sound like honey, which I wasn’t too bad at, in my way. He still wasn’t pleased however, which had its own virtues, as the last thing I wanted was forty prints of him grinning.
Oliver drove off and stopped where I asked at a suitably neutral background – a grey-painted factory wall – and he said he would take the photographs if I explained what I wanted.
‘Ricky looks like Shane,’ I said. ‘So take pictures of Ricky in the way he most looks like Shane. Get him to turn his head slowly like he did when he came out of work, and tell him to hold it where it’s best.’
‘All right.’
Ricky got out of the car and stood in front of the wall, with Oliver focussing at head-and-shoulder distance. He took the first picture and we waited for it to develop.
Oliver looked at it, grunted, adjusted the light meter, and tried again.
‘This one’s all right,’ he said, watching the colours emerge. ‘Looks like Shane. Quite amazing.’
With a faint shade of sullenness Ricky held his pose for as long as it took to shoot four boxes of film. Oliver passed each print to me as it came out of the camera, and I laid them in rows along the seat beside me while they developed.
‘That’s fine,’ I said, when the films were finished. ‘Thank you, Ricky.’
He came over to the car window and I asked him without any great emphasis, ‘Do you remember, when Indian Silk got so ill with debility, which vet was treating him?’
‘Yeah, sure, that fellow that was murdered. Him and his partners. The best, Dad said.’
I nodded non-committally. ‘Do you want a ride to Newmarket?’
‘Got my motor-bike, thanks.’
We took him back to his engineering works where I finally cheered him up with payment for his time and trouble, and watched while he roared off with a flourish of self-conscious bravado.
‘What’s now?’ Oliver said. ‘Did you say Newmarket?’
I nodded. ‘I’ve arranged to meet Ursula Young.’
He gave me a glance of bewilderment and drove without protest, pulling duly into the mid-town car park where Ursula had said to come.
We arrived there first, the photography not having taken as long as I’d expected, and Oliver finally gave voice to a long testrained question.
‘Just what,’ he said. ‘Are the photographs for?
‘For finding Shane.’
‘But why?’
‘Don’t explode.’
‘No.’
‘Because I think he gave the selenium to your mares.’
Oliver sat very still. ‘You asked about him before,’ he said. ‘I did wonder… if you thought… he killed Ginnie.’
It was my own turn for quiet. ‘I don’t know if he did,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know.’
Ursula arrived in her car with a rush, checking her watch and apologising all the same, although she was on time. She, like Oliver and Ricky, looked taken aback at my unorthodox attire, but rallied in her usual no-nonsense fashion and shuffled into the back seat of Oliver’s car, leaning forward to bring her face on a level with ours.
&
nbsp; I passed her thirty of the forty pictures of Ricky Barnet, who of course she knew immediately.
‘Yes, but,’ I explained, ‘Ricky looks like a lad who worked for Oliver, and it’s that lad we want to find.
‘Well, all right. How important is it?’
Oliver answered her before I could. ‘Ursula, if you find him, we might be able to prove there’s nothing wrong with Sand-castle. And don’t ask me how, just believe it.’
Her mouth had opened.
‘And Ursula,’ Oliver said, ‘if you find him – Shane, that lad – I’ll put business your way for the rest of my life.’
I could see that to her, a middle-rank bloodstock agent, it was no mean promise.
‘All right,’ she said briskly. ‘You’re on. I’ll start spreading the pictures about at once, tonight, and call you with results.’
‘Ursula,’ I said. ‘If you find where he is now, make sure he isn’t frightened off. We don’t want to lose him.’
She looked at me shrewdly. ‘This is roughly police work?’
I nodded. ‘Also, if you find anyone who employed him in the past, ask if by any chance a horse he looked after fell ill. Or any horse in the yard, for that matter. And don’t give him a name… he isn’t always called Shane.’
‘Is he dangerous?’ she said straightly.
‘We don’t want him challenged,’ I said. ‘Just found.’
‘All right. I trust you both, so I’ll do my best. And I suppose one day you’ll explain what it’s all about?’
‘If he’s done what we think,’ I said, ‘we’ll make sure the whole world knows. You can count on it.’
She smiled briefly and patted my unplastered shoulder. ‘You look grey,’ she said, and to Oliver, ‘Tim told me a horse kicked him and broke his arm. Is that right?’
‘He told me that, too.’
‘And what else?’ she asked me astringently. ‘How did you get in this state?’
‘The horse didn’t know its own strength.’ I smiled at her. ‘Clumsy brute.’
She knew I was dodging in some way, but she lived in a world where the danger of horse kicks was ever present and always to be avoided, and she made no more demur. Stowing the photographs in her capacious handbag she wriggled her way out of the car, and with assurances of action drove off in her own.