Comeback (17 page)

“I authorize him,” Ken said persuasively. “I work here and I need him.”

The policeman wavered, took a quick look around, saw no senior officers or disapproval, and let me pass as if not quite noticing I’d taken the crucial step. I went across with Ken to join the group round Carey Hewett, who looked at me unseeingly and didn’t question my being there.

He wore Sunday-morning casual clothes of checked shirt and maroon sweater, not his usual neat collar and tie under a white lab coat. Some of his air of authority was lost in consequence, and on top of that he looked a bewildered and worried man. He hadn’t had time to shave, I guessed, seeing the dusting of gray beard, nor probably to have had breakfast, as he looked peaked and hungry. This last shock on top of what he had lost had noticeably aged him.

“I don’t understand how anyone could have been in the building so late on Thursday,” he was saying. “Everything was locked as usual when we left. And everyone has been accounted for. If anyone was in the building it wasn’t one of our people.”

“Could have been the arsonist,” one of the men in the group said. “It’s been known for people to be trapped in their own fires.”

He was a plainclothes policeman, I gradually discovered, though no one made clear introductions after my arrival and I never heard his name. Carey’s tolerance of my presence gave me credence and in fact he mentioned later that he was quite glad Ken had a friend to support him, wishing ruefully that he had someone to lean on himself.

It appeared that a police pathologist was at that moment inside the burnt-out shell, but extreme care was having to be taken with shoring up all outer and inner walls as parts of the structure could be pushed over by the palm of a hand. I gathered gradually that the body had been found in the general area of what had previously been the pharmacy and had been burned beyond any chance of easy recognition. Even its sex hadn’t yet been determined.

“They apparently found the body last night,” Ken told me as an aside, “but the light was fading and as the place is so unsafe they decided to leave things alone until they could see what they were doing by daylight. So they posted police guards and came back this morning not long before I got here. What a bloody
mess!”

“It could be worse,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“It might have been one of you in there. One of you might have disturbed the arsonist and been bumped off for your pains.”

“I suppose so.” The thought didn’t especially alarm him. “There’s often one of us around here at night when we’ve got patients in the boxes. Scott was in and out all day yesterday looking after the mare, and I came three times to check on her. Belinda and I both came by when we got back from Stratford and again last thing before bedtime. We saw the police here both times but I thought it was just because the building is dangerous.” He paused briefly. “Scott should be back here at any minute.”

“So the mare’s doing all right?”

“Fingers crossed.”

We left the group and went over to look at the two patients. They both seemed half asleep, standing quietly, alive and recovering.

“What’s wrong with this one?” I asked of the one next door to the mare.

“He had wind troubles. Couldn’t get air down to his lungs under pressure because one side of his larynx is paralyzed. Quite common in big horses. I put in a suture to hold that side of his larynx permanently open so he can breathe better when he’s blowing hard. He could have gone home yesterday but his trainer’s shorthanded and wanted him to stay in our care until tomorrow. He’s been no problem, thank God.”

“You operated on him here in the hospital?”

“Sure.”

“Full anesthetic?”

“Yes. It’s a fairly long procedure, fifty minutes or so. I did him on Wednesday morning. He’d been scheduled for the op for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t an emergency.”

“Have the horses that died all been emergencies?”

He thought briefly and shook his head. “One died out here of heart failure after a successful operation to remove a knee chip. Simple routine thirty-minute arthroscopy. I took out a chipped-off piece of bone from his knee.”

“He died out here?”

Ken nodded. “It was a valuable colt. We took extra-special care. Scott stayed here all night after the op checking him regularly and watching the monitor. One minute he was all right. Next minute, dead.”

“That couldn’t have been your fault.”

“Tell that to the owner. The horse was
here.
That was the trouble.”

“Did Scott actually see him fall?”

“No, I don’t think so. To be honest, I think Scott went to sleep, though he swore blind he didn’t. But it’s hard to stay awake here all night when there’s nothing happening. And he’d been working all day, too. He was awake when I left him, which was when I checked the horse at about eleven. Scott phoned me in a panic about five, but I reckon the colt had been dead an hour or so by then. We did an autopsy, but,” he shrugged, “we found nothing amiss. His heart had just stopped.”

“Is that common?”

“Not really. More common after a hard race. They sometimes die in the racecourse stables afterwards.”

“Did you make out that list?”

“Haven’t had a minute.” He withdrew his attention from the patient that hadn’t died and seemed as ambivalent as ever about the ones that had.

“What did you do wrong?” I said.

He opened his mouth with shock and closed it again.

“Nothing,” he said unconvincingly.

“Something
must have been wrong.”

He made a movement of his head like the beginning of a nod, and then thought better of it.

I said, “Why don’t you just tell me?”

He gave me a lengthy unhappy look and shrugged his shoulders.

“The first one,” he began tentatively, his long face miserable, his mind still not totally committed, “I thought afterwards ... maybe I’d missed ... but it seemed so illogical ... and anyway, it wouldn’t have been that that killed him, it would have worn off anyway in the end . . .”

“What, Ken? What would have worn off?”

“Atropine,” he said.

I could see why Belinda was so sure I wouldn’t be able to sort out the veterinary puzzle. Atropine, to me, was merely a word I’d heard before and never bothered to look up.

“Is that a poison?” I asked.

His doubt of me echoed my own. He said patiently, “It’s poisonous. It’s belladonna. But it has its uses. It relaxes things. Stops spasms.”

“Stops the heart?”

He shook his head. “Enough of it in a horse could cause ileus.”

I looked at him.

“Sorry. It could stop movement in the gut. That’s what ileus means. So with enough atropine, the gut would stop working and become distended with fluid and gas and cause unrelenting pain, and you’d have no option but to take the horse to surgery. But you wouldn’t find any obstructions or kinks or twists. You could get rid of a lot of the gas ... empty the colon like I did with the mare, and so on ... and close up, and the gut would start working again normally when the atropine wore off. Only that’s not what happened. They both died under anesthesia.”

“I can’t be sure....”

Irritatingly at that point, Scott yelled across to Ken from the gateway to come and tell the policemen to let him in past the barrier. Ken obligingly went over and returned not only with Scott but with two others of the vets, Oliver Quincy and Lucy Amhurst, living proof that bad news traveled like lightning even before breakfast on Sundays.

“You know Peter, don’t you?” Ken asked his two colleagues, bringing them across to the boxes, and they nodded to me uninterestedly and focused only on who it was who had died in the fire.

Oliver Quincy had been tipped off to the body’s existence by a friend of his in the police. He had immediately phoned everyone else in the practice and, sure enough, almost before he’d finished saying so, another two arrived, Jay Jardine and Yvonne Floyd; they were followed closely by Belinda, alerted by Yvonne, not Ken, to her annoyance.

Once I’d sorted out who was who, I had no difficulty: the vets were easily distinguishable from each other, in contrast to the anonymity of Ronnie Upjohn the day before.

They moved by consensus in through the main door, Scott, Belinda and I following, and came to form a conference in the office, fetching along the chairs from the entrance hall to accommodate the behinds. Carey Hewett alone remained outside with officialdom: his partners said it couldn’t be helped and held their palaver without him.

Lucy Amhurst demanded to know what was going on, which no one, of course, could tell her. “We’ve enough dead horses for a glue factory, we’ve arson and we’ve a body. It’s not bloody funny.”

She was a positive, middle-aged, no-nonsense person with strong clean nails, a stocky countrywoman’s body and years of goodwill to pony clubs in her eyes.

She sat in the desk chair as if by right and seemed to be accepted by the others as having seniority of tenure if not of age. She fixed a rather headmistressy gaze on me and said, “Excuse me, we know you’re a friend of Ken’s and have been helping him, and I know Carey accepts you, but I think you might explain a bit more who you are. We don’t know you, do you see? We don’t necessarily want strangers overhearing what we have to say among ourselves.”

“I absolutely understand,” I said neutrally. “I’ll certainly leave if you would prefer it. But, um, I could perhaps help you in some way to find some answers.”

“Are you a private detective?” She frowned, not liking the idea.

“No. But detective work is what I do, more or less, all the time. I’m employed to find things out.”

“He’s a civil servant,” Belinda said flatly. “Some sort of secretary.”

As usual, the British had no idea of civil service ranks. Someone had once asked the commissioner, the austere top-of-the-heap mandarin who himself appointed other mandarins to top jobs, at what hotel he worked and how could he be sure of hailing a taxi. The vets didn’t exactly ask my speed in shorthand and typing but pigeonholed me in that capacity.

“A snoop,” Jay Jardine said disapprovingly.

Lucy Amhurst gave me a judicial inspection. “We can’t afford anything extra at this point.”

“This would be a freebie for Ken and Belinda.”

A twitch of a smile moved her mouth. She looked round at the others with authority. “Well, if he’s a good snoop, why don’t we accept his offer? We do need some answers, God knows. If he doesn’t come up with anything, we’ll be no worse off.”

There were shrugs. No one had passionate views. I quietly stayed and no one raised the subject again.

Jay Jardine, the cattle man, was thin, short, self-assertive and a fairly recent graduate from veterinary college. His conversation bristled with futuristic technology to the point where some of his colleagues asked for enlightenment. He was the youngest of the group and, it seemed to me, the least liked.

“Carey’s dragging his feet,” he complained. “We have to have lab space. You know we do. I phoned him yesterday evening again but he’s still done nothing. I said I would do it myself but he says to leave it to him.”

“He has a lot on his mind,” Lucy Amhurst said.

“There are three or four facilities I can think of that would be willing to rent us space. If I don’t get lab space we’ll lose clients, can’t he see that? I’ve already got to repeat a lot of tests and no one’s pleased at the delay. Carey’s too old to cope with all this, that’s obvious.”

The others protested up and down the scale from outrage (Lucy) to anxiety (Yvonne Floyd).

“He’s sixty, isn’t he?” Yvonne said worriedly.

She was young enough, as I was, to think sixty unimaginably ancient, but my father at fifty-six was only four years off the compulsory retiring age for the Foreign Office, and he, as I knew well, was still at the top of his exceptional mental powers. It wasn’t so much simple age that was at the bottom of Carey’s possible indecisiveness, I thought, but emotional fatigue at having lost so much. More people in my admittedly limited experience had become ill or rudderless under extreme loss-stress than had bounced all the way back with a curse at fate.

Yvonne Floyd, thirtyish, wore a wedding ring and emphasized her femininity with a luxuriant mass of almost black hair from which artful tendrils curved forward onto her cheeks and neck. Even so early, even in spite of the disturbing reason for the summons, she wore lipstick and eyeliner and a skirt with a black lace-edged underslip that showed when she crossed her legs.

Oliver Quincy hardly took his eyes off the legs, though whether from lust or absentmindedness I wasn’t quite sure. Of all in the room, his response to calamity was the most relaxed. Though he, as the other vet occupied with horses, might have been most expected to share Ken’s intense worries, he was the only one to try a joke.

“What four animals do women like most?”

“Shut up, Oliver,” Lucy said. “We’re not in the mood.”

“It’s funny,” he insisted. “It will cheer us all up.”

He was a brown-haired roly-poly sort of man in early middle age with a more comforting aura than the others: a better bedside manner, one might say, which must have encouraged the owners of his patients.

“A woman’s favorite animals,” he said carefully, “are a mink in the closet, a jaguar in the garage, a tiger in the bed—and a jackass to pay for it all.”

I thought it hilarious, but no one laughed.

“I heard it last week,” Lucy said.

Belinda said crossly, “How can you joke with some poor person lying dead over there?”

“That poor person probably scored an own-goal.”

Belinda and Oliver didn’t get on, I saw, and reckoned it was because of her habitual jealousy of anyone sharing Ken’s time.

Yvonne said anxiously, “What will happen if the whole partnership falls to pieces?”