Driving Force

by Dick Francis

  I listened to three full minutes of silence, then Professor Quipp said, “Are you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve a friend who’s a tick expert. He says can you bring him some specimens?”

  “Do you mean . . . put the horse in a horse van and drive it to Edinburgh?”

  “That’s one way, I suppose.”

  “The horse is terribly old and shaky. Lizzie knows, she saw him. He might not last the journey.”

  “I’ll phone you back,” he said.

  I waited. My Jaguar and Lizzie’s helicopter sat uselessly on the tarmac. Lovely fast transport at a standstill.

  Quipp came back quite soon.

  “Lizzie says if you say this is urgent, it’s urgent.”

  “It’s urgent,” I said.

  “Right. In that case, fly up here on the shuttle. We’ll meet you at Edinburgh Airport. Say . . . one o’clock? Soon after?”

  “Er . . .” I began.

  “Of course you can’t bring the horse with you,” Quipp said, “just bring some ticks.”

  “But I can’t actually see them.”

  “Quite normal. They’re very small. Use soap.”

  Surreal.

  “Wet a bar of soap until it’s sticky,” he said. “Rub it over the horse. If you find any round brown specks on the soap, you’ve got ticks.”

  “But won’t they die?”

  “My friend says perhaps not, if you don’t waste time on the way here, and anyway, it might not matter. Oh yes, bring a blood sample from the horse.”

  I opened my mouth to say it would take an hour or more to get the veterinarian, but Lizzie’s voice in my ear forestalled me.

  “There’s a hypodermic needle and a syringe in my bathroom cupboard,” she said. “Left over from my wasp allergy days when I lived at home. I saw it the other day. Use that.”

  “But, Lizzie . . .”

  “Get on and do it,” she commanded, and Quipp’s voice said, “See you on the lunchtime shuttle. Phone if you’re going to be later.”

  “Yes,” I said, dazed, and heard the disconnecting click at the other end. A far from absentminded don, I reflected. A good match for my sister.

  What Peterman himself would think about my sticking needles into him I dreaded to think. I went upstairs to the little pink and gold bathroom off Lizzie’s bedroom and found the syringe, as she’d said, in the mirror-fronted cabinet there. The syringe, disposable, instructions “for single use only,” was inside an opaque white plastic envelope and looked much too small for anything equine. Still, Lizzie had said to use it, so I took it downstairs along with her cake of soap, moistened to stickiness, and approached the old fellow in the garden.

  His apathy seemed complete. I merely held his forelock while I traced the visible vein running along his lower jaw, sticking the fine needle into it gently. His head remained still, as if he’d felt nothing. I found I needed two hands, in my inexperience, to pull back the plunger in order to draw blood into the syringe, and even then he remained unmoving, as if half asleep. The little syringe filled easily with the red stuff. I pulled the needle out again, laid the syringe aside, picked up the bar of soap and wiped it around Peterman’s head and down his neck. Despite my doubts and disbelief there were, after three or four passes, a few discernible dark brown pinhead dots on the soft white surface.

  Peterman went on paying no attention as I packed my trophies into a nest of scrumpled tissues inside a plastic food container from the kitchen and firmly closed the lid. Automatically I raised a hand to pat the old fellow, to say thanks, and in midgesture stopped dead. What if, I thought, in patting him, I transferred his ticks to myself? What if I’d already done it? Would it matter? I hadn’t even thought of wearing protective gloves.

  Shrugging, I left my old friend unpatted, washed my hands in the kitchen, and within five minutes I was spinning along the road in the direction of Heathrow Airport.

  I phoned Isobel on the way.

  “You’re going where?” she said.

  “Edinburgh. Be a dear and keep all the phone lines switched to you until I get back. Bonus, of course.”

  “OK. How long will you be gone?”

  “A day or two. I’ll keep phoning you, to stay in touch.” By luck I had a clear run to the airport, parked in the short-stay car park and caught the last seat on the noon shuttle at nothing faster than a flat-out sprint. My only luggage was the kitchen food container and the envelope of money from the safe. My clothes were the jeans and sweatshirt I’d worn to work. Everyone else on the aircraft seemed to be sporting huge scarlet and white scarves and loudly singing bawdy songs. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” with the obscenest of gestures. Life grew steadily weirder. I held the container on my lap and slept away the hour in the air.

  Lizzie was waiting at the other end beside a man who looked more like a ski instructor than a professor of organic chemistry, the impact of his dark beardless good looks heightened by a rainbow jacket straight off the slopes.

  “Quipp,” he introduced himself, extending a hand. “I suppose you’re Freddie.”

  As I’d just kissed Lizzie, this seemed a reasonable assumption.

  “I told him you’d get here,” she said. “He worked out that you couldn’t do it in the time. I told him your jockey instincts made you faster across country than a hurricane.”

  “Hurricanes are slow across country,” I said, “actually.” Quipp laughed. “So they are. Forward speed, not much more than twenty-five miles an hour. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Come on, then.” He eyed the kitchen container. “You’ve brought the goods? We’re going straight to the lab. No time to waste.”

  Quipp drove a Renault with a verve to match his jacket. We pulled up at what looked like a tradesmen’s back entrance of a private hospital and entered a light, featureless corridor that led round a corner to a pair of swing doors with MCPHERSON FOUNDATION painted in black letters on non-see-through glass.

  Quipp pushed familiarly through the doors, Lizzie and I following, and we entered first a vestibule, and then a room windowed solely by skylights.

  From pegs in the vestibule, Quipp issued to each of us a white lab overall-coat which buttoned at the neck and needed to be tied round the waist with tapes. Inside the lab itself we met a man similarly dressed who turned from a microscope on our arrival and said to Quipp, “This had better be good, you son of a bitch. I’m supposed to be at the International rugby football match at Murrayfield.”

  Quipp, unabashed, introduced him to me as Guggenheim, the resident nutter.

  Guggenheim, who seemed, like Quipp, to prefer to be identified solely by his last name, was audibly American and visibly about as young as the computer wizard.

  “Disregard his youth,” Quipp advised. “Remember that Isaac Newton was twenty-four when he discovered the binomial theorem in 1666.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said dryly.

  “I’m twenty-five,” Guggenheim said. “Let’s see what you’ve brought.”

  He took the plastic container from me and retreated to one of the workbenches that lined two of the walls. With time to look around, it seemed to me that except for the microscope there wasn’t a single piece of equipment there that I could identify. Guggenheim moved in this mysterious territory with the certainty of a Rubik round his cube.

  He was slight in build with light brown crinkly hair and the well-disciplined eyes of habitual concentration. He transferred one of the brown dots from the soap to a slide and took a quick look at it under the microscope.

  “Well, well, well, we have a tick. Now what do you suppose he’s carrying?”

  “Er,” I said, but it appeared that Guggenheim’s question was rhetorical.

  “If it came from a horse,” he said cheerfully, “perhaps we should be looking for Ehrlichia risticii. What do you think? Does Ehrlichia risticii spring to mind?”

  “It does not,” I said.

  Guggenheim looked up from his microscope
in good humor. “Is the horse ill?” he asked.

  “The horse is standing still looking depressed, if that doesn’t sound fanciful.”

  “Depression is clinical,” he said. “Anything else? Fever?”

  “I didn’t take his temperature.” I thought back to Peterman’s behavior that morning. “He wouldn’t eat,” I said.

  Guggenheim looked happy. “Depression, anorexia and fever,” he said, “classic symptoms.” He looked at Lizzie, Quipp and myself. “Why don’t you three go away for a bit? Give me an hour. I might find you some answers. I’m not promising. We’ve some powerful microscopes here and we’re dealing with organisms on the edge of visibility. Anyway . . . an hour.”

  We retreated as instructed, leaving our lab coats in the vestibule. Quipp drove us to his lodgings, which were masculine and bookish but bore unmistakable signs of Lizzie’s occupation, though her expression forbade me to comment. She made coffee. Quipp took his cup with the murmured thanks of familiarity.

  “How’s my little Robinson?” Lizzie asked me. “Still in the same place?”

  “A low-loader’s coming on Monday to bring it up here.”

  “Tell them to be careful!”

  “It’ll reach you in cotton balls.”

  “They’ll have to disassemble the rotor linkage . . .”

  We drank coffee, strong and black.

  I telephoned Isobel. All going well, she reported.

  “What exactly is the McPherson Foundation?” I asked Quipp.

  “Scottish philanthropist,” Quipp said succinctly. “Also a tiny university grant. Small public funding. It has state-of-the-art electron microscopes and at present two resident geniuses, one of whom you met. It pushes out the frontiers of knowledge, and people in obscure places cease dying of obscure illnesses.” He drank some coffee. “Guggenheim’s specialty is the identification of the vectors of Ehrlichiae.”

  “I don’t speak that language,” I said.

  “Ah. Then you won’t understand that when I asked him about ticks on horses he was, for him, riveted. It’s remotely possible that you’ve solved a mystery for him. Nothing less would have torn him away from Murrayfield.”

  “Well . . . what are erlic . . . whatever you said?”

  “Ehrlichiae? They are,” he said with a touch of mischief, “pleomorphic organisms symbiotic in and transmitted by arthropod vectors. In general, that is.”

  “Quipp!” Lizzie protested.

  He relented. “They’re parasitic organisms spread by ticks. The best-known make dogs and cattle ill. Guggenheim did some work on Ehrlichiae in horses back in America. He’ll have to tell you about it himself. All I’m sure of is that he’s talking about a new disease that arose only in the mid-nineteen eighties.”

  “A new disease?” I exclaimed.

  “Nature’s always evolving,” Quipp said. “Life never stands still. Diseases come and go. AIDS is new. Something even more destructive may be just round the corner.”

  “How fearful,” Lizzie protested, frowning.

  “Dear Liz, you know it’s possible.” He looked at me. “Guggenheim has a theory that the dinosaurs died not of cataclysmic weather upheavals but of tick-borne rickettsiallike pathogens—and those, before you ask, are parasitic microorganisms that cause fevers like typhus. Guggenheim thinks the ticks and their parasites died with their hosts, leaving no trace.”

  I pondered. “Could you transport these er—pathogens—in viral transport medium? The stuff in those small glass tubes?”

  He looked momentarily startled but decisively shook his head. “No, Not possible. Ehrlichiae aren’t viruses. As far as I know, they won’t live at all in any sort of medium or on a culture dish, which makes the research difficult. No. Whatever was in your viral transport medium, it definitely did not come from ticks.”

  “That doesn’t,” I said ruefully, “make anything any clearer.”

  “Lizzie is an astrophysicist,” he said, “listening to the cosmic ripple from the beginning of the universe, and Guggenheim looks inward into parasitic elementary bodies detectable only by magnifying them a million times in a beam of electrons instead of light. Outer deeps and inner deeps, with our puny intellects here and now trying to see and understand incredible mysteries.” He smiled selfdeprecatingly. “The humbling truth is that with all our discoveries we’re only on the fringe of knowledge.”

  “But from the practical point of view,” I said, “all we need to know is that arsenic can cure syphilis.”

  “You’re no scientist!” he accused me. “You need Guggenheim look-alikes to find out that arsenic can cure syphilis.”

  The ultimate squelch, I acknowledged. Lizzie patted my shoulder kindly.

  “I suppose you didn’t know,” Quipp said, “that it was Ehrlich himself, after whom Ehrlichiae are named, who first showed synthetic arsenic to be active against syphilis?”

  “No,” I said, astonished. “I’ve never heard of Ehrlich.”

  “German scientist. Nobel Prize winner. A founder of immunology, pioneer of chemotherapy. Died, 1915. You’ll never forget him.”

  In 1915, I thought, Pommern won the wartime Derby. The quirks of life were endless.

  After an hour Quipp drove us back to the McPherson Foundation to find Guggenheim pale and trembling, apparently from excitement.

  “Where did these ticks come from?” he demanded, as soon as we appeared in our white gear. “Did they come from America?”

  “I think they came from France.”

  “When?”

  “Last Monday. On a rabbit.”

  He peered at me, assessing things. “Yes. Yes. They could have traveled on a rabbit. They wouldn’t live long on soap. But transfer them from a horse to a rabbit by soap . . . there’s no reason why they couldn’t live on a rabbit . . . The rabbit wouldn’t be receptive to the horse Ehrlichiae . . . the rabbit could carry the live ticks with impunity.”

  “And then one could transfer the ticks to a different horse?” I asked.

  “It’s possible. Yes, yes, I can’t see why not.”

  “I can’t see why,” Lizzie said. “Why would anyone do that?”

  “Research,” Guggenheim said with certainty.

  Lizzie looked at me doubtfully but didn’t pursue it.

  “See,” he said to me, “equine ehrlichiosis is known in America. I’ve seen it in Maryland, and Pennsylvania, though it’s a very new disease. Not ten years old yet. Rare. When it’s caused by Ehrlichia risticii it’s been called Potomac horse fever. That’s because it’s been found mostly near big rivers like the Potomac. How did these ticks get to France?”

  “France imports racehorses bred in America. So does Britain, come to that.”

  “Then why the rabbits?”

  “Suppose,” I said, “that you know where to find the ticks in France but not in England.”

  “Yes. Yes.” His excitement, though internalized, was catching. “You realize that the ticks you’ve brought me have no name? No one has so far identified the vector of E. risticii. Do you realize that if . . . if these ticks are the vector—a vector is a carrier of a disease—then we’re on the verge of a breakthrough in identifying the path of Potomac horse fever?” He stopped, overcome.

  “Practically,” I said. “Could you answer some questions?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Well . . . what happens to a horse if it gets Potomac horse fever? Does it die?”

  “Not usually. Eighty percent live. Mind you, if it’s a thoroughbred racehorse, which presumably you’re most interested in, it will probably never win another race. What I’ve seen of the disease, it’s very debilitating.”

  “How, exactly?”

  “It’s an enteric infection. That’s to do with the intestines.

  Apart from the anorexia and so on, there is usually fierce diarrhea and colic. The horse is much weakened by the fever.”

  “How long does the fever last?”

  “Four or five days.”

  “So short!”

&nb
sp; “The horse develops antibodies, so the Ehrlichiae don’t affect it anymore. If the vector is a tick, the tick would go right on living. Ticks, I may say, are themselves not much understood. For instance, only the mature ones are brown. Your soap was crowded with nymphets, young ticks, which are almost transparent.” He paused very briefly. “Do you mind if I come to see what you’ve got there, down in Pixhill? Can I see, for example, your rabbit?”

  “I’m afraid I deduced the rabbit.”

  “Oh.” He looked disappointed.

  “But come,” I invited him. “Stay in my house.”

  “Soon? I mean, I don’t want to upset you, but you said your horse was old, and it’s typically old retired horses out at pasture that get this illness, and the older they are, the more likely to die. Sorry. Sorry.”

  “Can younger horses be affected?”

  “If it’s racehorses in a stable that you mean, then yes, they can, but they’re groomed, aren’t they? The grooming might get rid of the tick. Yes, that’s a theory. In America it is mostly horses out at pasture that get ill.”

  “Um,” I said, “is there a cure for it?”

  “Tetracycline,” he said promptly. “I’ll bring some for your old boy. It may be in time. It depends.”

  “And . . . er . . .” I said, “can humans catch this disease?” He nodded. “Yes. They can. It’s usually not properly diagnosed as there are so many confusing symptoms. It gets mistaken for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but it’s different. It’s rare. And tetracycline does the trick there too.”

  “How could it be diagnosed?”

  “Blood test,” he said promptly. “The amount you brought wasn’t really enough.”

  12

  I traveled back on the last Edinburgh-to-Heathrow flight of the day again surrounded by shoals of red and white scarves belting out bawdier-than-ever verses. Bass and baritone voices, tuneful, reverberating. The red and white scarves, it was clear, had won the International match at Murrayfield. Beer disappeared at a Jogger-like pace. A naked flame would have exploded the alcohol fumes in the cabin. The flight attendants got their bottoms pinched. The ecstasy level rose, if anything, during the hour in the air.

  I sat with my head whirling from different stimuli, hearing in flashbacks the facts that had poured out of Guggenheim.