Whip Hand

by Dick Francis

  ‘Here it is,’ Ken exclaimed, flattening a paper open. ‘Shall I read you the relevant bits?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Swine erysipelas – in 1938 – occurred in a horse, with vegetative endocarditis – the chronic form of the illness in pigs.’ He looked up. ‘That’s those cauliflower growths. Right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He read again from the paper. ‘During 1944 a mutant strain of erysipelas rhusiopathiae appeared suddenly in a laboratory specializing in antisera production and produced acute endocarditis in the serum horses.’

  ‘Translate,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘They used to use horses for producing vaccines. You inject the horse with pig disease, wait until it develops antibodies, draw off blood, and extract the serum. The serum, injected into healthy pigs, prevents them getting the disease. Same process as for all human vaccinations, smallpox and so on. Standard procedure.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘What happened was that instead of growing antibodies as usual, the horses themselves got the disease.’

  ‘How could that happen?’

  ‘It doesn’t say, here. You’d have to ask the pharmaceutical firm concerned, which I see is the Tierson vaccine lab along at Cambridge. They’d tell you, I should think, if you asked. I know someone there, if you want an introduction.’

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ I said.

  ‘My dear fellow, germs don’t die. They can live like time-bombs, waiting for some fool to take stupid liberties. Some of these labs keep virulent strains around for decades. You’d be surprised.’

  He looked down again at the paper, and said, ‘You’d better read these next paragraphs yourself. They look pretty straightforward.’ He pushed the journal across to me, and I read the page where he pointed.

  24–48 hours after intra-muscular injection of the pure culture, inflammation of one or more of the heart valves commences. At this time, apart from a slight rise in temperature and occasional palpitations, no other symptoms are seen unless the horse is subjected to severe exertion, when auricular fibrillation or interference with the blood supply to the lungs occurs; both occasion severe distress which only resolves after 2–3 hours’ rest.

  Between the second and the sixth day pyrexia (temperature rise) increases and white cell count of the blood increases and the horse is listless and off food. This could easily be loosely diagnosed as ‘the virus’. However, examination by stethoscope reveals a progressively increasing heart murmur. After about ten days the temperature returns to normal and, unless subjected to more than walk or trot, the horse may appear to have recovered. The murmur is still present and it then becomes necessary to retire the horse from fast work since this induces respiratory distress.

  Over the next few months vegetations grow on the heart valves, and arthritis in some joints, particularly of the limbs, may or may not appear. The condition is permanent and progressive and death may occur suddenly following exertion or during very hot weather, sometimes years after the original infection.

  I looked up. ‘That’s it, exactly, isn’t it,’ I said.

  ‘Bang on the nose.’

  I said slowly, ‘Intra-muscular injection of the pure culture could absolutely not have occurred accidentally.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he agreed.

  I said, ‘George Caspar had his yard sewn up so tight this year with alarm bells and guards and dogs that no one could have got within screaming distance of Tri-Nitro with a syringeful of live germs.’

  He smiled, ‘You wouldn’t need a syringeful. Come into the lab, and I’ll show you.’

  I followed him, and we fetched up beside one of the cupboards with sliding doors that lined the whole of the wall. He opened the cupboard and pulled out a box, which proved to contain a large number of smallish plastic envelopes.”

  He tore open one of the envelopes and tipped the contents on to his hand: a hypodermic needle attached to a plastic capsule only the size of a pea. The whole thing looked like a tiny dart with a small round balloon at one end, about as long, altogether, as one’s little finger.

  He picked up the capsule and squeezed it. ‘Dip that into liquid, you draw up half a teaspoonful. You don’t need that much pure culture to produce a disease.’

  ‘You could hold that in your hand, out of sight,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Just slap the horse with it. Done in a flash. I use these sometimes for horses that shy away from a syringe.’ He showed me how, holding the capsule between thumb and index finger, so that the sharp end pointed down from his palm. ‘Shove the needle in and squeeze,’ he said.

  ‘Could you spare one of these?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, giving me an envelope. ‘Anything you like.’

  I put it in my pocket. Dear God in heaven.

  Ken said slowly, ‘You know, we might just be able to do something about Tri-Nitro.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He pondered looking at the large bottle of Zingaloo’s blood, which stood on the draining board beside the sink.

  ‘We might find an antibiotic which would cure the disease.’

  ‘Isn’t it too late?’ I said.

  ‘Too late for Zingaloo. But I don’t think those vegetations would start growing at once. If Tri-Nitro was infected … say …’

  ‘Say two weeks ago today, after his final working gallop.’

  He looked at me with amusement. ‘Say two weeks ago, then. His heart will be in trouble, but the vegetation won’t have started. If he gets the right antibiotic soon, he might make a full recovery.’

  ‘Do you mean … back to normal?’

  ‘Don’t see why not.’

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ I said.

  15

  I spent most of Sunday beside the sea, driving north-east from Newmarket to the wide deserted coast of Norfolk. Just for somewhere to go. something to do. to pass the time.

  Even though the sun shone, the wind off the North Sea was keeping the beaches almost empty; small groups were huddled into the shelter of flimsy canvas screens, and a few intrepid children built castles.

  I sat in the sun in a hollow in a sand dune which was covered with coarse tufts of grass, and watched the waves come and go. I walked along the shore, kicking the worm casts. I stood looking out to sea. holding up my left upper arm for support, aware of the weight of the machinery lower down, which was not so very heavy, but always there.

  I had often felt released and restored by lonely places, but not on that day. The demons came with me. The cost of pride … the price of safety. If you didn’t expect so much of yourself. Charles had said once, you’d give yourself an easier time. It hadn’t really made sense. One was as one was. Or at least, one was as one was until someone came along and broke you all up.

  If you sneezed on the Limekilns, they said in Newmarket, it was heard two miles away on the racecourse. The news of my attendance at Gleaner’s post-mortem would be given to George Caspar within a day. Trevor Deansgate would hear of it: he was sure to.

  I could still go away. I thought. It wasn’t too late. Travel. Wander by other seas, under other skies. I could go away and keep very quiet. I could still escape from the terror he induced in me. I could still … run away.

  I left the coast and drove numbly to Cambridge. Stayed in the University Arms Hotel and, in the morning, went along to Tierson Pharmaceuticals Vaccine Laboratories. I asked for, and got, a Mr Livingston, who was maybe sixty and greyishly thin. He made small nibbling movements with his mouth when he spoke. He looks a dried-up old cuss, Ken Armadale had said, but he’s got a mind like a monkey.

  ‘Mr Halley, is it?’ Livingston said, shaking hands in the entrance hall. ‘Mr Armadale has been on the phone to me, explaining what you want. I think I can help you, yes I do indeed. Come along, come along, this way.’

  He walked in small steps before me, looking back frequently to make sure I was following. It seemed to be a precaution born of losing people, because the place was a labyrinth
of glass-walled passages with laboratories and gardens apparently intermixed at random.

  The place just grew,’ he said, when I remarked on it ‘But here we are.’ He led the way into a large laboratory which looked through glass walls into the passage on one side, and a garden on another, and straight into another lab on the third.

  ‘This is the experimental section,’ he said, his gesture embracing both rooms. ‘Most of the laboratories just manufacture the vaccines commercially, but in here we potter about inventing new ones.’

  ‘And resurrecting old ones?’ I said.

  He looked at me sharply. ‘Certainly not. I believe you came for information, not to accuse us of carelessness.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said placatingly. ‘That’s quite right.’

  ‘Well then. Ask your question.’

  ‘Er, yes. How did the serum horses you were using in the nineteen forties get swine erysipelas?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Pertinent Brief. To the point. We published a paper about it, didn’t we? Before my time, of course. But I’ve heard about it Yes. Well, it’s possible. It’s possible. It happened. But it shouldn’t have done. Sheer carelessness, do you see? I hate carelessness. Hate it.’

  Just as well, I thought In his line of business, carelessness might be fatal.

  ‘Do you know anything about the production of erysipelas antiserum?’ he said.

  ‘You could write it on a thumbnail.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll explain as to a child. Will that do?’

  ‘Nicely,’ I said.

  He gave me another sharp glance in which there was this time amusement.

  ‘You inject live erysipelas germs into a horse. Are you with me? I am talking about the past, now, when they did use horses. We haven’t used horses since the early 1950s, and nor have Burroughs Wellcome, and Bayer in Germany. The past, do you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The horse’s blood produces antibodies to fight the germ, but the horse does not develop the disease, because it is a disease pigs get and horses don’t.’

  ‘A child,’ I assured him, ‘would understand.’

  ‘Very well. Now sometimes the standard strain of erysipelas becomes weakened, and in order to make it virulent again we pass it through pigeons.’

  ‘Pigeons?’ I said, very politely.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Customary practice. Pass a weak strain through pigeons to recover virulence.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I said.

  He pounced on the satire in my voice. ‘Mr Halley,’ he said severely. ‘Do you want to know all this or don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said meekly.

  ‘Very well, then. The virulent strain was removed from the pigeons and subcultured on to blood agar plates.’ He broke off, looking at the blankness of my ignorance. ‘Let me put it this way. The live virulent germs were transferred from the pigeons on to dishes containing blood, where they then multiplied, thus producing a useful quantity for injecting into the serum horses.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I do understand.’

  ‘All right.’ He nodded. ‘Now the blood on the dishes was bull’s blood. Bovine blood.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘But owing to someone’s stupid carelessness, the blood agar plates were prepared one day with horse blood. This produced a mutant strain of the disease.’ He paused. ‘Mutants are changes which occur suddenly and for no apparent reason throughout nature.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again.

  ‘No one realized what had happened,’ he said. ‘Until the mutant strain was injected into the serum horses and they all got erysipelas. The mutant strain proved remarkably constant. The incubation period was always 24–48 hours after inoculation, and endocarditis … that is, inflammation of the heart valves … was always the result.’

  A youngish man in a white coat, unbuttoned down the front, came into the room next door, and I watched him vaguely as he began pottering about.

  ‘What became of this mutant strain?’ I said.

  Livingston nibbled a good deal with the lips, but finally said, ‘We would have kept some, I dare say, as a curiosity. But of course it would be weakened by now, and to restore it to full virulence, one would have to …’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Pass it through pigeons.’

  He didn’t think it was funny. ‘Quite so,’ he said.

  ‘And all this passing through pigeons and subculture on agar plates, how much skill does this take?’

  He blinked. ‘I could do it, of course.’

  I couldn’t. Any injections I’d handled had come in neat little ampoules, packed in boxes.

  The man in the next room was opening cupboards, looking for something.

  I said, ‘Would there be any of this mutant strain anywhere else in the world, besides here? I mean, did this laboratory send any of it out to anywhere else?’

  The lips pursed and the eyebrows went up. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. He looked through the glass and gestured towards the man in the next room. ‘You could ask Barry Shummuck. He would know. Mutant strains are his speciality.’

  He pronounced ‘Shummuck’ to rhyme with ‘hummock’. I know the name, I thought. I … oh my God.

  The shock of it fizzed through my brain and left me half breathless. I knew someone too well whose real name was Shummuck.

  I swallowed and felt shivery. ‘Tell me more about your Mr Shummuck,’ I said.

  Livingston was a natural chatterer and saw no harm in it. He shrugged. ‘He came up the hard way. Still talks like it. ‘He used to have a terrible chip on his shoulder. The world owed him a living, that sort of thing. Shades of student demos. He’s settled down recently. He’s good at his job.’

  ‘You don’t care for him?’ I said.

  Livingston was startled. ‘I didn’t say that.’

  He had, plainly, in his face and in his voice. I said only, ‘What sort of accent?’

  ‘Northern. I don’t know exactly. What does it matter?’

  Barry Shummuck looked like no one I knew. I said slowly, hesitantly, ‘Do you know if he has … a brother?’

  Livingston’s face showed surprise. ‘Yes, he has. Funny thing, he’s a bookmaker.’ He pondered. ‘Some name like Terry. Not Terry … Trevor, that’s it. They come here together sometimes, the two of them … thick as thieves.’

  Barry Shummuck gave up his search and moved towards the door.

  ‘Would you like to meet him?’ Mr Livingston said.

  Speechlessly, I shook my head. The last thing I wanted, in a building full of virulent germs which he knew how to handle and I didn’t, was to be introduced to the brother of Trevor Deansgate.

  Shummuck went through the door and into the glass-walled corridor, and turned in our direction.

  Oh no, I thought.

  He walked purposefully along and pushed open the door of the lab we were in. Head and shoulders leaned forward.

  ‘Morning, Mr Livingston,’ he said. ‘Have you seen my box of transparencies, anywhere?’

  The basic voice was the same, self-confident and slightly abrasive. Manchester accent, much stronger. I held my left arm out of sight half behind my back and willed him to go away.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Livingston, with just a shade of pleasure. ‘But Barry, can you spare …’

  Livingston and I were standing in front of a work bench which held various empty glass jars and a row of clamps. I turned leftwards, with my arm still hidden, and clumsily, with my right hand, knocked over a clamp and two glass jars.

  More clatter than breakage. Livingston gave a quick nibble of surprised annoyance, and righted the rolling jars. I gripped the clamp, which was metal and heavy, and would have to do.

  I turned back towards the door.

  The door was shutting. The backview of Barry Shummuck was striding away along the corridor, the front edges of his white coat flapping.

  I let, a shuddering breath out through my nose and carefully put the clamp back at the en
d of the row.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Mr Livingston said. ‘What a pity.’

  I drove back to Newmarket, to the Equine Research Establishment and Ken Armadale.

  I wondered how long it would take chatty Mr Livingston to tell Barry Shummuck of the visit of a man called Halley who wanted to know about a pig disease in horses.

  I felt faintly, and continuously, sick.

  ‘It’s been made resistant to all ordinary antibiotics,’ Ken said.

  ‘A real neat little job.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If any old antibiotic would kill it, you couldn’t be sure the horse wouldn’t be given a shot as soon as he had a temperature, and never develop the disease.’

  I sighed. ‘So how do they make it resistant?’

  ‘Feed it tiny doses of antibiotic until it becomes immune.’

  ‘All this is technically difficult, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, fairly.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of Barry Shummuck?’

  He frowned. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  The craven inner voice told me urgently to shut up, to escape, to fly to safety … to Australia … to a desert.

  ‘Do you have a cassette recorder here?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I use it for making notes while I’m operating.’ He went out and fetched it and set it up for me on his desk, loaded with a new tape. ‘Just talk,’ he said. ‘It has a built-in microphone.’

  ‘Stay and listen,’ I said. ‘I want … a witness.’

  He regarded me slowly. ‘You look so strained … It’s no gentle game, is it, what you do?’

  ‘Not always.’

  I switched on the recorder, and for introduction spoke my name, the place, and the date. Then I switched off again and sat looking at the fingers I needed for pressing the buttons.

  ‘What is it, Sid?’ Ken said.

  I glanced at him and down again. ‘Nothing.’

  I had got to do it, I thought. I had absolutely got to. I was never in any way going to be whole again if I didn’t.