BLINDFOLD

by Lyndon Stacey

  picked up a four-pack from the off-licence and came home to watch a football match. He walked right in on us.'

  `So, what happened?'

  `Well, the stallion had got himself pretty worked up and when Winters came over to see what was upsetting him, Slade coshed him with a shovel before he saw anything.' Rosetti grimaced at the memory. `We weren't at all happy about that, Tom and I. 1 mean, he could have killed him! It was never part of the deal for anyone to get hurt, but Slade just brushed it aside. It was like it was an everyday thing for him. I think that's when we finally realised just what kind of man we were dealing with. It was frightening.'

  `He's a real bastard,' Gideon agreed. `I don't think he'd stop at much. So then you took Wings to the farm with the barn?' `Yeah. We backed the horsebox up to the barn door but before we could get a proper hold on him, Slade let the ramp down and the horse was away. He broke through the safety gates on the lorry and hit the ground running.' Rosetti shook his head in wonder at the memory of it. `I've seen a good few stallions in my time but never anything like that! He was fighting mad! There was no way any of us was going to get near him, even Slade could see that. We toyed with the idea of bringing the mare in to entice him over but we couldn't risk him mounting her before we were ready. As you can imagine, timing is everything. Then Tom suggested you.'

  `That was nice of him!' Gideon observed dryly. `Most of my work comes by word of mouth but there are times ...'

  `I think he said it without thinking,' Rosetti said in his defence. `He mentioned to me that you'd performed miracles with Sox after his accident and Slade, who was losing his temper by this time, said, "Well, where is he? Let's get him." Just like that! I think then Tom realised what he might be getting you into, because he said, "You can't. What would you tell him?" and Slade just said, "We won't tell him anything." Tom pleaded with him not to hurt you. He said you were a friend, but he told them

  where you lived, nevertheless; he didn't have much choice. Slade sent his two thugs and, well, you know the rest.'

  `Yes, I remember it well. And I have the scars to prove it.' `Tom was horrified,' Rosetti told him. `I think he'd begun to regard the whole business as almost acceptable until that night. Then it was all brought home to him. I could see how his mind was working. After all, we were doing no one actual harm. It was just a little deception. Whitewings' get may well have been every bit as good as his brother's, for all we knew, and it's possible that some of the foals were actually Sox's; he was still carrying out his stud duties, as normal.'

  `It's fraud,' Gideon stated, uncompromisingly.

  Rosetti nodded sadly. `This season I was going to be able to start work on a covered hydrotherapy pool,' he said. `I'm ashamed to say that even in the circumstances, I couldn't help looking forward to that.'

  Gideon said nothing. There didn't seem to be anything appropriate. In spite of his principles, he understood the dilemma Rosetti had found himself in and couldn't condemn him completely. It would be arrogant to assume that he wouldn't have been tempted to do the same, faced with losing everything and driven into a corner.

  `Something I wondered,' Rosetti said then. `When Slade told you what you had to do, when he said the horse had already kicked someone, weren't you afraid?'

  `For a moment, a little,' Gideon admitted. `But, as you yourself know, you can't let it show. With animals, confidence is everything, especially when they're frightened themselves. Once you make contact, you're too busy for fear.'

  `I was watching you. There wasn't a flicker.'

  `My phlegmatic English temperament again. Comes in useful sometimes.'

  `I didn't think you could do it,' Rosetti said frankly. `I didn't think anyone could. I know a bit about join-up techniques, but this was something different. When Slade suggested the blindfold, I told him he was mad. I thought the horse would kill you.'

  `I didn't think I could do it, at first,' Gideon said. `But I didn't have a lot of choice, did I? Tell me, how did you get the horse back unseen?'

  `We set him loose in the grounds of the Wainman estate. It's quite likely that he made his way back to the yard and the other horses. When I saw Mick Winters a few days later, he told me the stallion had knocked him out when it barged out of its stable.' `You've been bloody lucky!'

  `I know we have,' Rosetti said. `And in a way it's made me feel guiltier than ever, as daft as that may sound. I've been almost willing something to go wrong, and yet, at the same time, terrified in case it did. It's been . . .' He cut the sentence short, as though remembering he had no business to ask for sympathy.

  There was silence for a moment. A silence that hung heavily in the air, punctuated only by a ticking noise from the vending machine and the monotonous buzz of the striplight overhead.

  Gideon was aware that it was, metaphorically, his move; that Rosetti was waiting for him to say what he intended to do with the information he had. The devil of it was that Gideon didn't know. He had thought that confronting the vet with what he'd discovered would force the issue one way or another, but he found himself still unsure.

  `Tell me how you do it - this freezing process?' he asked, playing for time but nevertheless genuinely interested. `Is it legal for you to carry it out here, freelance, so to speak? Or is that against the law, too?'

  Rosetti flinched at the roughness of Gideon's tone, much as one might when a dentist drilled too deeply.

  `No, it's not against the law. You couldn't do it on a large scale though. There are too many regulations attached. For instance, any semen for export can only be collected from horses certified disease-free, and for countries outside the EC they need to be kept in quarantine conditions for anything up to a month. Also they must not have covered a mare for at least thirty days leading up to collection. You really have to have the right set-up to do it properly. There are four or five licensed collection centres in this country. I used to work at one myself. This, being a hospital, is in no way an ideal place to do it.'

  `So, you're telling me you can collect enough semen in one night to cover mares for a whole season? Forty mares, did you say?'

  `Normally that would be pushing it,' Rosetti admitted. `But, as I said, Wings is extremely suitable for the process. Both the quantity and the quality of his output are exceptional. Ideally you would want to leave forty-eight hours between collections for maximum yield but obviously that wasn't an option for us.'

  `So, you divide it up into smaller amounts . . .' `Doses.'

  `Doses. And then you freeze it. How? Surely not in a normal deep-freeze? There must be more to it.'

  Rosetti smiled faintly. `There is.' He paused. `Are you really interested?'

  `Very,' Gideon assured him.

  `Well, you need the services of a teaser mare and at the point of mating you intercept, so to speak, collecting the semen in an AV. Artificial vagina,' he added, seeing the question forming on Gideon's lips. `It's a tube, about eighteen inches long filled with warm water and with an inner tube for the semen. It's important not to let the semen cool too quickly. The contents are checked under a microscope for any signs of poor health, mixed with a milky fluid - an extender, we call it - and then spun. The centrifugal force makes it easier to divide the sperm into individual doses,' he explained, looking at Gideon to see if he still understood. `Then the semen is re-extended using a mixture of egg yolk and glycerine, and packed in half-mil acetate straws for freezing. The straws are, in turn, packed in tubes and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Taken down to minus one hundred and ninety-six degrees centigrade over about forty-five minutes.'

  `And that's all there is to it?' Gideon said wryly.

  `Well, no, actually,' Rosetti said. `Even when a stallion's semen appears to freeze well - that is, it survives the thawing process - it can sometimes still give a poor conception rate, for reasons we don't yet fully understand. Research is ongoing. Also, the health and fertility of the mare is of paramount importance. Only about twenty-five to thirty percent of stallion semen freezes well, and even when it does, the co
nception rate for a first covering is lowered significantly against that of fresh or chilled semen. Interestingly though, over subsequent seasons it evens itself out pretty much. A lot can ride on the skill of the vet handling the insemination process. The mare has to be scanned several times during her cycle to ensure that insemination takes place as close as possible to the point of ovulation. Between us, Tom and I got it down to a fine art. Oh, we had failures, of course, but that's to be expected with any form of covering. A lot of it is down to the mare. Sox's success rate seemed to the outside world to be average, if not above.'

  `No wonder Roly French had to go,' Gideon said thoughtfully. `You must have been constantly at the stud. There would be no way you could use AI without his knowing and he's not the kind of man who would lend himself to any sort of dishonesty. The same goes for Anthony, I suppose, poor kid. No wonder Tom was trying to keep him away.'

  `It wasn't so bad at first, when he was younger and mostly at school, but lately he's wanted to be more and more involved in the stud work and he was starting to question what he saw as our obsession with the scientific side of it. Gerald, Roly's replacement, lives in the village so we could work round him but Anthony was becoming a problem. Tom was being more or less forced to drive him away and it was breaking him up.'

  `I can imagine. He always used to be so full of pride that Anthony wanted to follow in his footsteps. The boy was totally bewildered by his turnabout.'

  `I know. It was tearing the whole family apart. About three months ago Tom told me that he wished he'd owned up to Mary about the money from the start. I can't believe we were both so bloody naive as to think Slade would let it go after one season. Of course, by the time we realised, it was too late. I don't know what'll happen now,' he said wearily. `I haven't heard from Slade since I left him a message about Tom's accident.'

  Gideon gave a short laugh. `Oh, I don't think Slade needed to be told about that!' he said bitterly. `I think you'll find our mutual friend knows more about it than any of us.'

  That clearly shocked Rosetti to the core. The colour drained from his face as he stared at Gideon. `I thought - I was told - it was a gas explosion. Wasn't it?'

  `Gas explosions can be arranged.'

  Rosetti put a shaking hand to his face. `Oh, my God! Slade? But why? Without Tom the whole thing falls apart.'

  `I don't think he was the intended victim,' Gideon said quietly. `I'd arranged to meet him at the cottage that night, but I was late. I haven't any proof but I think Slade set it up. Tom told him I'd been asking questions about Sox and he wanted_ shot of me. Tom was never even supposed to be there.'

  `But Tom liked you!' Rosetti protested. `I can't believe he'd do something like that. In spite of everything he was a good man. He would never have hurt anyone.'

  Gideon shook his head. `I don't think Tom stopped to think what he was doing when he contacted Slade. Mary had asked me to do a portrait for their anniversary so I visited the stud two or three times when he was out. All Tom knew was that suddenly, soon after the abduction, I turned up out of the blue a couple of times and then started asking questions about Sox. Looking back on it now I can see that, unknowingly, I asked the one thing that was guaranteed to set the alarm bells ringing. I asked how his stud work was going.'

  'Ah,' Rosetti said.

  `Yes,' Gideon said wryly. `The worst thing I could have asked. And Tom panicked. To be fair to him, I think it was because he began to have misgivings about Slade's intentions that he got caught in the trap that had been set for me. It was all a horrible mix up.'

  `My God' the vet said again. `What have we done? Oh, dear, dear God'

  FIFTEEN

  GIDEON'S VISIT TO ROSETTI left him with no clearer idea of what he should do about the Sox affair than he'd had before.

  Before they'd spoken he was a fair way towards convincing himself that he'd been mistaken in his first instinctive liking and respect for the vet. If Rosetti had been belligerent or had tried to excuse his actions when faced with the knowledge that he'd been found out, it would only have served to reinforce that conviction, but he hadn't. Not once in his interview with Gideon did the vet try to shift the blame or plead his case in any way. Gideon could not help but like him for it and was surprised at the degree of sympathy he felt.

  None of it helped when trying to decide what should be done with the knowledge he possessed. Useless to wish he'd never discovered the conspiracy. Life wasn't like that. The real sticking point was that he hated to let Slade get away Scot-free, but in bringing him down - even if it could be done - he would drag Sean Rosetti's and Tom Collins' good names down with him. The people who would suffer the most would be Mary and Anthony, Daisy, Cathy and her unborn child. Rightly or wrongly, he couldn't believe there was justice in ruining so many innocent lives.

  He said as much to Rosetti before he left, admitting that he'd not yet told anyone the whole story and warning him to say nothing for a day or two. Also, he arranged with the vet for Wings to be booked into the hospital for an X-ray the following week.

  As Gideon was on the point of leaving, Rosetti had said quite quietly, `That horse has a huge jump on him, you know. I saw him being loose-schooled over fences one day when I called to see one of Stephanie's other horses. He was only three then, but he jumped like a stag.'

  The fact had obviously been a small sop to his troubled conscience, and Gideon felt it was as this that Rosetti offered it rather than as any kind of justification for his actions.

  After the internal moral wrangling that followed his meeting with the vet, Gideon wouldn't have been surprised to have found sleep elusive but mental exhaustion cut in and he slept long and soundly, to wake to the sound of drumming rain and the telephone ringing.

  `Hi, Bro. How are you?' It was Naomi, sounding more bright and breezy than anyone had a right to on a dark, wet, late-winter's morning.

  `Hi, Sis. What can I do for you?'

  `Um, well, I was wondering if you were by any chance thinking of visiting us today?'

  `And if I was ... ?'

  'Well, Giles was kind enough to offer us a couple of tarpaulins the other day, and what with this foul weather, we could really do with them now. Someone has brought in an injured badger and there's nowhere dry to put him.'

  `And you thought, if Bro wasn't doing anything ... '

  `We'd love to see you anyway, of course,' Naomi put in earnestly. `But I just thought, if you were coming over, it would be a shame for you to come all this way without them.'

  `It would be, wouldn't it?' Gideon agreed. `Okay. I'll be an hour or more, though.'

  `You're not still in bed?' Naomi exclaimed with sisterly scorn. `It's nearly half-past nine!'

  `It is Sunday,' Gideon protested. `What happened to the good old traditional lie-in? Everybody seems to leap out of bed at the crack of dawn these days, if they even bother to go there in the first place,' he added, remembering Logan's visit. `I'm sure it's not good for you.'

  `Early to bed, early to rise,' she suggested primly.

  `Yeah, well, I wasn't early to bed. Look, do you want me to bring these bloody tarpaulins over?'

  In spite of what he'd said to Naomi, Gideon couldn't truthfully have said that his lie-in had done him much good. Prolonged sleep had left him heavy-eyed and with a muzzy headache that paracetamol made no impression on at all. Nevertheless, barely half an hour later he was at the Priory, rooting three grubby green tarpaulins out of the tractor shed. Pippa had loaned him her car, yet again, though not without protest. She and Rachel had planned to spend the morning exploring a new shopping centre together and only Rachel's offer to take Pippa in her Mini saved the day.

  `If I find any more rabbit droppings in it, though, I shall have it professionally valeted and send you the bill,' she warned. Gideon could not be completely happy about the two of them setting out in a car which Duke Shelley would so easily recognise, but, on the other hand, the man was so thorough, he probably knew all the Priory vehicles anyway. He didn't believe Duke wished Rachel an
y actual harm, it was more a case of extreme possessiveness. Surely not even he would consider abduction from such a public place as a busy shopping centre? Gideon took Pippa aside to remind her of the danger, and beyond that had to trust to her resourcefulness.

  `Brother dear, you look awful,' was Naomi's greeting. `What was it? A night on the town? You're getting too old for that, by the look of it!'

  `And you're getting too old for me to give you a brotherly kickup-the-pants, but I won't let it stop me!' Gideon told her. `The tarpaulins are in the back of the car. Where do you want them?'

  Naomi took an armful of green canvas and led the way to what was left of the old stables. Two bays of the old brick buildings had been roughly shored up, their roofs patched with sheets of corrugated plastic that appeared, in the main, to be tied on with baling twine. The next two bays were completely roofless. Only the main central joists remained, blackened but surprisingly stout. It was to these two that Naomi led Gideon, skirting the muddy puddles and piles of roof tiles that littered the way.

  Following her, looking at her mud-caked boots and mudspattered jeans, and listening to her cheerfully cataloguing what they had so far done and what remained to be done before rebuilding could start, Gideon found it hard to see in her the neat, well-groomed, ultra-feminine dancer of days past. Of course, dancing was not a soft option as a career. It was hard, often painful, slog, but it was just so different.

  As though she was reading his mind, Naomi paused in her detailing of the plans for the Sanctuary to say, `Jack's found me some work in Bournemouth, isn't that great? It's a three-month run in a musical. Three months at least - maybe more.'

  `And that's what you want?'

  She glanced over her shoulder at him. `Sure, why wouldn't I? I'd always want to dance. It'll be nice to wear pretty clothes again, something that's not caked in dirt and, well - you know what! Besides, the money will come in really useful here.'

  She turned into the doorway beside her and dumped her armful of tarpaulin on to a sodden straw bale. The rain had almost stopped for the moment, only a light, misty drizzle disturbing the pool of water on the concrete floor.