by Joe McNally
‘Who was the owner?’
‘I’m still waiting to find out. My man says he’ll get back to me.’
‘Well, when he does your problem is solved. If the owner knows Rossington well enough to offer him a job, then he’ll be able to tell you if our man’s an imposter.’
‘Question is, how long can we afford to wait?’
Mac drummed on his thick blotting pad with a pen, finishing off with two pings on the edge of his coffee cup. ‘Does this all lead to Kincaid?’
I nodded. ‘And maybe Alex Dunn.’
He stared at me.
‘And William Capshaw,’ I said.
I watched him. When Mac felt matters had reached what he called a ‘delicate’ stage, he preferred to ask no more questions and hear no more theories. This was his boundary line. Beyond it lay formal obligations. His unblinking gaze told me we’d reached it.
‘If you could just do me one favour?’ I asked. ‘I know you’ve got friends in Melbourne. Whoever Rossington really is, he does seem to know about horses and jockeys. Can you get hold of a photo of Rossington and send a few prints to Melbourne, see if anyone recognizes him?’
He made a note. ‘Okay, I’ll deal with it.’ It looked like the potential implications were beginning to sink in. He agreed to do what he could on our usual understanding that if the shit hit the fan, he’d be free to claim he was nowhere in the room. I asked one more favour of him; to contact Ascot Racecourse and ask for a copy of Bob Guterson’s guest list on the day he sponsored that race. He got me that by fax within minutes. It included the table plan for lunch. Kerman’s name was there, seated between Guterson and Simeon Prior. There were nineteen more names on the list and Mac went through it with me, but of the few he knew none gave him any reason for suspicion though he raised the same point Candy had: that Simeon Prior, the chairman of Triplecrown Bloodstock, seemed out of place in that company.
Why then had Prior accepted Guterson’s invitation?
I left and went straight home to wait by the phone. Kerman had to run the story next day, Friday. I sat waiting for her, waiting for the ‘chance to comment’.
But the call never came, and the piece didn’t appear on Friday or on Saturday. Sunday was their biggest circulation day; she had to print it then or risk losing it to a rival. Her informants wouldn’t wait forever. She didn’t, and I began to wonder what Jean Kerman’s role was. Sitting on this must have been killing her.
Had she been invited to Ascot just so someone could plant the story about me in her mind? If so, how had they restrained her from running it? Had they fed her only the small part she’d teased me with? No, that wouldn’t have been acceptable to her.
And why had she taken such a personal line with me? Why not simply ring me up and tell me she knew and that she would have to publish? I recalled that cold hard look in her eyes as she’d left me on the dance floor, that cruel glint almost of revenge.
Was she involved with them? Could Kerman be in on it somehow?
I rang Candy. Although I couldn’t tell him why I wanted it, he agreed to put someone straight to work on finding every destructive racing piece Kerman worked on in the past five years.
‘How many bodies can you spare?’ I asked.
‘How quickly do you want it?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘What’s the big hurry?’
‘I think the key to the next move might be in there among those stories.’
He sighed. ‘Let me make some calls. I’ll ring you back.’
‘Candy…While you’re at it, see what you can find out about Bob Guterson.’
48
I travelled south and went to my parents’ place to wait for Candy’s call next day. I spent a miserable visiting hour at the hospital, my small talk ricocheting off the almost tangible barrier my father had erected round himself and my mother, resenting my presence, glorying in my discomfort, drawing every moment of my mother’s attention toward himself.
I sat there, elbows on the edge of the bed, feeling like a trapped audience of one to a terrible soap opera that would never be turned off. And I took cold-hearted wicked comfort in the fact that when the Kerman story broke he would know some of the suffering I’d endured.
I dropped my mother at her hotel and drove away in a desolate mood. After re-establishing contact with her and moving into the house, I’d held such hopes for the future, such plans for repairing all the hurt. Now I wished earnestly that the pneumonia would kill him before all chance with her was gone.
My contact in Australia came through with the name of the owner who’d got Rossington the valet’s job: Bob Guterson. Surprise, surprise.
Dunn, Capshaw, Rossington, Guterson…the links were steadily joining. Did Kerman fit in somewhere? Candy arrived with the cuttings and I told him about Guterson fixing up Rossington, or whoever he was, with the job. Candy already had some information on the guy. Guterson had sixteen horses in training in Europe and Australia; not a very big string to be so thinly spread, but understandable perhaps when Candy told me Guterson did business on both continents.
He’d been in racing as an owner less than three years, though his company had been supplying the veterinary industry with rubber gloves for quite a bit longer. Not a huge market, but one in which Guterson had a major share with large sales throughout Europe and Australia. The connection with Simeon Prior became clearer too: eighteen months ago, Guterson had bought a twenty percent share in Triplecrown Bloodstock, an investment that had seemed particularly poorly judged, as the company hadn’t been performing well for some time. Nor had profits improved since Guterson bought in.
We kicked things around for a while without coming to any conclusions. I could see Candy was anxious to start going through the cuttings on Kerman’s past victims. I made coffee, and we settled down at the big kitchen table and worked through the night sifting, sorting, discussing. Kerman had already laid bare most of the lives of her victims but we dissected them all at length, including our own memories of them, and Candy showed how sharp an eye for detail he had by recalling small facts and anecdotes.
We found three people of particular interest, all of them speared by Kerman within the last fourteen months. The first was Ben Campbell, who’d been the Sheikh’s Racing Manager before Candy. Campbell had a heavy cocaine habit which was exposed by one of Kerman’s ‘reporters’, who’d set the guy up.
The next to go was a man called James Summerville, a respected bloodstock journalist and agent who was heavily pro-Arab in his writing. Summerville supported Sheikh Ahmad’s attempts to establish his own superior thoroughbred bloodlines, arguing that this was in essence the original intention behind thoroughbred breeding, which went back to the days of the Crusades.
Unfortunately, it was proved that while wearing his agent’s hat he’d accepted bribes to help inflate the prices of horses he’d been entrusted to buy. Again, it looked like he’d been set up by a Kerman stooge.
The last one to go, and maybe the most significant to us, was a top vet who’d been based at the Equine Fertility Unit in Newmarket. His name was Stephen Spenser and he was the best man in his field. Kerman nailed him after discovering he’d conducted experiments on live ex-racehorses, two of which had died as a result of his research. Spenser had been struck off. Candy was certain he’d gone to America. He’d been one of the people Candy had considered trying to recruit when the stallion problem blew up. ‘You think he could have cracked it?’ I asked, sipping tepid coffee.
‘He would have had a better chance than most,’ Candy said, ‘and I’d have used him if I could have traced him in the States.’
‘And if he was that good, our friends might have known it and wanted him out of the picture before they started on those stallions.’
‘Possibly,’ Candy said absent-mindedly as he pulled the Ben Campbell page back under the lamp beam and stared at the picture, frowning. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think Campbell was related somehow to Alex Dunn. Either related or his godson or something
.’
‘That would make sense. Dunn would probably have been very reluctant to damage Campbell’s career. Whoever’s behind this would realize that so he simply took Campbell out of the equation before involving Dunn.’
Candy sighed and shook his head. ‘Shit, you could say all three of these affected our situation, directly or indirectly. You’re talking about some pretty elaborate planning here.’
‘Not to mention three killings. Somehow I think we’re dealing with a slightly stronger motive than a simple dislike of the Sheikh and his empire.’
We still knew neither motive nor method, and were both getting too tired to think sensibly. We sat gazing at Campbell’s smiling picture.
Candy sighed, and stretched and yawned, long and large as a hippo. Within seconds, I followed. We laughed gently then I stood up. ‘You get the coffee. I’ll get the fresh air.’ And I went and opened the kitchen door to let in the cold night, to brace us. I stood on the step looking up at the black-blue sky and diamond-sharp stars.
Candy moved around behind me, fixing more coffee. ‘We’re close to something here, Eddie,’ he said. I listened. ‘Those three pieces point to Kerman doing more than her journalistic duty. She’s working for somebody other than The Examiner.'
I smiled at the sky, knowing I couldn’t tell him about her approach to me at the Dorchester, but feeling more and more certain she was in with these people. Because if she was, and we could bring her down with the rest of them, shame her, then there wouldn’t be any Examiner story about the Malloy family. And maybe, just maybe, things would be all right again.
I turned to Candy as he poured hot water into a mug. ‘I think it’s time we got your personal profile man to work again. Let’s see if the secrets of Jean Kerman’s life can stand the test.’
49
Next morning Candy rang The Gulf Stud to tell them he’d be there later in the afternoon. He came off the phone looking serious. ‘What’s up?’
‘John Snell’s back in hospital.’
‘Who?’
‘Snell, the vet who took over from Simon Nish, remember? He returned to work four days ago, now he’s in hospital again, very ill, showing signs of heart failure.’
‘You shouldn’t have let him come back so soon. I thought they said it was exhaustion?’
‘He wanted to. He seemed okay.’ Candy slumped on a hard kitchen chair and rubbed his tired eyes. ‘Jesus Christ! When are we going to get a break?’
Heart failure. That’s what Dunn ultimately had died of, and so had Simon Nish. Now Snell.
I sat opposite Candy. ‘Was he working on the mares?’
Candy nodded wearily.
I went to the phone and rang my mother at the hotel. She was surprised to hear from me so early in the day. ‘Is anything wrong?’ she asked.
‘No, everything’s all right. How’s Father?’
She sighed quietly. ‘Not much change.’
‘Listen, Mum, did you have many mares abort this year in the early stages of pregnancy?’
She was quiet for a moment. ‘Yes.’
‘How many?’
‘Quite a few.’
‘More than usual?’
‘Possibly three times as many. It was one of the reasons business was so bad.’
‘Who treated all these mares?’
‘Alex Dunn.’
I told her I’d call later and hung up. Candy watched me. ‘What are you on to?’ he asked.
‘Your vets, Snell and the dead man, Simon Nish. Which brand of gloves did they use for examinations?’
He looked bewildered. ‘Whatever we supplied them with at The Gulf, I suppose.’
I carried the phone to the table and handed him the receiver. ‘Find out. Quickly.’
He dialed The Gulf Stud and asked the manager. Covering the mouthpiece, he said, ‘Guterson’s.’
‘Tell him to stop using them immediately.’
He frowned at me.
‘Go on!’
He told the manager to suspend all testing on mares, then slowly put down the phone and waited for an explanation.
‘Just a hunch,’ I said, ‘a wild hunch. What makes mares abort?’
He shrugged. ‘A number of factors.’
‘What do vets use to clear out the uterus?’
‘Prostaglandin.’
‘What killed Alex Dunn?’
‘Prostaglandin.’
‘What would continued exposure of the skin surface to prostaglandin do to a man?’
‘Kill him, I suppose, if he got enough of it. Or make him very ill.’
‘Like John Snell and Simon Nish?’
He looked puzzled. ‘I still don’t get it.’
‘Guterson’s Gloves. What if they were impregnated with prostaglandin? It’s a naturally occurring substance in mares, hence the reason that all the testing in the world wouldn’t show up anything unusual. This way they get the mare and eventually the vet who’s pulling on fifty gloves a day. What sort of prostaglandin dose does that add up to?’
He nodded silently, taking it in, then said, ‘So why aren’t mares aborting all over the country?’
‘Because they’re only impregnating selected batches. Dunn used Guterson’s Gloves and he worked on my father’s mares, which also showed a high abortion rate. I saw boxes of the gloves at his place and couldn’t figure out at the time why they were under lock and key. He must have been trying them out on Father’s mares.’
‘What about the risk to himself?’
‘Insufficient numbers, or more likely he’d have worn skin protection when using them.’
Candy shook his head and a smile slowly warmed his face as he gave me an admiring look. I was chuffed. Candy hurried to The Gulf Stud to arrange analysis of Guterson’s Gloves.
He rang me within the hour, triumphant but angry. ‘We’ve checked more than fifty gloves. Every single one is saturated with prostaglandin. Let’s get that bastard Guterson!’
If I’d learned anything since that day five years ago when I’d been forced into amateur detective work, it was that cat skinning could indeed be done in several ways. I persuaded Candy it was pointless to go waving glove samples at the cops, asking for Guterson to be arrested. Although it seemed likely he was behind everything, we needed more evidence, especially about what we were now convinced were the killings of Kincaid, Dunn, Capshaw and Nish.
Also, it would have been nice to try to establish a motive for this madness. I thought it was time to pull in Jockey Club Security officially, and tried to persuade Candy we were close enough to cracking it to justify involving them. Maybe all I really wanted was an increased sense of personal safety. At the moment, it was Candy and me, and as the killings mounted, it was getting to feel more and more like we were defending the Alamo.
Candy put the blocks on me asking McCarthy. He was fearful things would drag on and that word about the Sheikh’s stallions would get out. One thing we did agree on was that the man calling himself Rossington was the weak link in the chain. Strong circumstantial evidence pointed to him as Kincaid’s killer, and if that was so, there was reason enough to assume he’d been involved in the deaths of Dunn and Capshaw.
I thought of Rossington’s behaviour on the motorway, and concluded he’d known I was following him. The faxed mock-up of the newspaper article and Kerman’s poorly veiled threat had come shortly after that. Rossington must have gone running straight back to tell them I’d been on his tail. I wondered how wise that had been from his viewpoint. Once I’d latched on to Dunn and Capshaw, they’d been killed. If the same policy was in force, then Rossington must be sleeping uneasily in his bed.
But who would they get to hit the hit man?
I called Candy. ‘Have you still got those two heavies working for you, the ones who were using me as a yo-yo at the seaside?’
‘They’re available.’
‘We need to pick up Rossington.’
‘What do you mean, pick up?’
‘For his own protection.’ I explained my
thinking but Candy was nervous. I said, ‘Look, until we can prove Guterson’s involved, and maybe Kerman, we need to keep Rossington alive. The guy is scared. If he’s got any brains, he might welcome the chance of protection.’
Candy finally agreed to try to have Rossington picked up, by which time I was sure we’d know more about his real identity. Before hanging up I said, ‘And, Candy, ask your guys to have a good look around Rossington’s property for a blue vehicle with bull bars.’
50
There were still big gaps to be filled, like motive and Dunn’s method.
The latter intrigued me. Whatever he’d done to the Sheikh’s stallions, he’d done it in the racecourse stables, I was sure of that. It was the only time he’d had access to them. But whatever he’d treated them with had only been activated once they’d retired from racing. What the hell had he done, planted some sort of radio transmitter that could be switched on remotely?
I crossed my ankles, linked my hands behind my head and let everything I knew about Dunn run through my mind again. He’d been keen on experimenting with chemical castration, so we must assume he’d perfected something in that field that was undetectable. Then he’d had to test it, which he did on my father’s stallion and on maybe half a dozen others, including Town Crier, in small studs around England.
But why? Why take that risk, the posing as an RSPCA man, the visits to different places? If the stuff needed road testing, he could easily have used it on my father’s other three stallions. He’d buggered his business, so what difference would it have made to sterilize the other stallions? Whichever way I tilted it, I couldn’t work it out.
I channeled my thoughts into filtering the hard facts. There were two definites: whatever he had used, he’d used it on Town Crier, and when he’d administered it, Fiona had been with him.