Comeback (24 page)

“No, that’s fine.” Carey nodded. “I agree.” To me he said, “Go ahead. Do what you can. An amateur detective!”

“He’s a civil servant,” Lucy said.

“A snoop,” Scott added, using Jay Jardine’s word.

Carey raised an eyebrow at me in amusement, said he hoped the drains were up to snuff and went back to his dogs and cats, telling Ken to let him know when he was ready to operate.

“Drains?” Scott asked, mystified, after he’d gone.

“Red tape,” I said.

“Oh.”

Lucy, the wise woman, suggested Ken and Scott store the drugs somewhere safe, then took what she herself needed and followed Carey.

“Do you keep a list of who takes what?” I asked.

“We do normally,” Ken said. “We have a book. Had.” He sighed. “We all keep a stack of things in our cars, as you know. I’d never be sure at any given moment what I had.”

He decided to put everything on the shelves in one of the storerooms as the drugs cupboard wouldn’t hold everything, and I helped him and Scott carry the boxes across and arrange them in logical order.

I wanted Ken’s undivided attention for an hour, but didn’t get it. He sat in the padded chair and insisted on writing his notes on the steeplechaser with laminitis that he’d just visited.

“Funny thing,” he said, pausing and looking up at me, “they say the horse was quite all right yesterday.”

“What about it?” I asked.

“It reminded me . . .” He stopped, frowning, and went on slowly. “You’re making me see things different.”

Do get on with it, I thought, but prodded him more gently. “What have you thought of?”

“Another of Nagrebb’s show-jumpers.”

“Ken.” Some of my impatience must have shown because he gave his shoulders a shake and said what was in his mind.

“One of Nagrebb’s show-jumpers had laminitis . . . that’s an inflammation of the lamina, which is a layer of tissue between the hoof wall and the bone of the foot. Sometimes it flares up and the sufferers hobble around, other times they seem perfectly all right. The condition makes them stiff. If you get the animal moving, exercising, the stiffness wears off, but it always comes back. So, anyway, one of Nagrebb’s horses developed it and Nagrebb was annoyed I couldn’t cure it. Then one day last autumn he called me out, and there was this same jumper in the field literally unable to move. Nagrebb said he’d left the horse out all night as it was warm enough, and in the morning he’d found him in this extreme stage of laminitis. It wasn’t just in his two forefeet, as it had been, but in all four. Like I said, the poor animal simply couldn’t move. I’d told Nagrebb not to give him too much grass as that always makes it worse, but he’d put him in the field anyway. I said we could try to save the horse, though frankly his feet were literally falling apart and it was a very poor prognosis. Nagrebb decided to put him out of his misery and called the knackers at once. But now, thanks to you, I wonder ... but even Nagrebb wouldn’t do that . . . but then there’s that tendon . . .”

“Ken!”
I said.

“Oh, yes. Well, you see, you could
give
a horse laminitis pretty easily.”

“How?”

“All you’d need to do is put a tube down into its esophagus and pour a gallon or so of sugar solution into its stomach.”

“What?”

He anticipated the question. “Several pounds of sugar dissolved in water to make a syrup. A huge amount of sugar or any carbohydrate all at once would result in very severe laminitis not many hours later.”

God, I thought. No end to the villainous possibilities.

“The opposite of insulin,” I said.

“What? Yes, I suppose so. But the insulin colt was Wynn Lees’s at Eaglewood’s.”

“You said it would be pretty easy to put a tube down into a horse’s esophagus,” I remarked. “Not for me, it wouldn’t.”

“Child’s play for Nagrebb. He could do it with a twitch. A twitch is . . .”

Yes, I nodded, I knew. A twitch was a tight short loop of rope attached to a short length of pole and twisted round the soft end of a horse’s nose and upper lip. Held by that, any horse would stand still because it was painful to move.

“If he did it,” I said, “there’s no way of finding out.”

Ken nodded gloomily. “And what would be the point?”

“Insurance,” I said.

“You keep on about insurance.”

I brought a couple of folded sheets of paper out of my pocket and said I wanted to show him some lists.

“No, not now. Later. I simply want to do these notes before the op. I shouldn’t have wasted all this time. Show me the lists later, OK?”

“OK.” I watched him scribble for a bit and asked if I could use the telephone, if he didn’t mind. He pointed to it for acquiescence and I got through to the Foreign Office, reversing the charges.

It took a while to reach the right desk. I was reporting my presence in England, I said. When did they want me to darken the Whitehall doorway?

“Ah.” Papers were audibly shuffled. “Here we are. Darwin. Four years in Tokyo. Accrued and terminal leave, eight weeks.” A throat was cleared. “Where does that put you?”

“Three weeks today.”

“Fine.” Relief at the precision. “Let’s say . . . er . . . three weeks today, then. Splendid. I’m making a note.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Not at all.”

Smiling, I put down the receiver. They’d given me a fortnight longer than I expected, which meant I could go to Cheltenham races, held during the last of those weeks, without dereliction of duty.

Ken had finished his notes.

“One more quick one?” I asked, lifting the phone.

“Sure. Then we’ll get started.”

I asked Enquiries for the Jockey Club and I asked the Jockey Club for Annabel.

“Annabel?”

“In public relations.”

“Hold on.”

Remarkably, she was there.

“It’s Peter,” I said. “How are the Japanese?”

“They leave today.”

“How about dinner tomorrow in London?”

“Can’t do tomorrow. How about tonight?”

“Where will I find you?”

She sounded amused. “Daphne’s restaurant, Draycott Avenue.”

“Eight o’clock?”

“See you,” she said. “Got to rush.” The phone disconnected before I could even say goodbye.

Ken looked at my expression. “Two bits of good news in one morning! Like a cat that’s tipped over the goldfish.” With awakening alarm he went on, “You’re not leaving, though, are you?”

“Not yet.” His alarm remained, so I added, “Not if there’s anything I can do.”

“I rely on you,” he said.

I could have said that to me what I was doing was like walking through a fog of confetti looking for one scarlet dot, but it would have increased his worries. I thought he wouldn’t have minded much if his patient hadn’t turned up that morning because in spite of his success with the broodmare he was again looking pale and apprehensive.

The operation however went smoothly from start to finish. Carey watched intently. I watched and took notes. Scott and Belinda moved expertly as Ken’s satellites and the prancing horse, fast asleep, got its larynx firmed and widened to improve its breathing.

From behind the safe section of wall, we watched him wake in the recovery room, Scott holding the rope-through-the-ring to steady him. He staggered to his feet looking miserable but most decisively alive.

“Good,” Carey said, going off to the office. “I promised to phone the owner.”

Ken gave me a glance of rueful relief, and he and I stripped off our gowns and left Scott and Belinda to clear the theater again ready for the afternoon stint, while also checking on the patient continually.

“You all work hard,” I commented.

“We’re understaffed. We need a couple of dogsbodies. Would you like a permanent job?”

He didn’t expect an answer. We went into the office where Carey was giving his thumbs-up report and after Carey had gone he finally said it was time for my list.

I brought it, much creased from folding, out of my trousers pocket, smoothed it down on the desk and added to it one more line. We sat in the chairs side by side and I explained what he was seeing.

“The list on the left of the page,” I said, “is of the owners and trainers whose horses have died with question marks, to say the least. The middle column is the various ways they may or may not have died. The list on the right is ... well . . .”

Ken looked at the list on the right and protested immediately, as it named all his partners plus Belinda and Scott.

“They’re not involved,” he insisted.

“All right. Look at the first and second columns, then, OK?”

“OK.”

I’d written in table form:

“Whew,” Ken said thoughtfully, reading to the end.

“Are there any others?”

“Not that I can think of.” He paused. “We had one that broke its leg thrashing around when it came out of the anesthetic after a successful colic operation. You’ve seen two satisfactory awakenings. They’re not always so peaceful. We had to put that horse down.”

“All the horses that died on the table,” I pointed out, “could have been there by appointment.” I forestalled his objection. “If two were given atropine, their time was chosen. They weren’t random emergencies.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“The respiratory job had been booked in well in advance,” I said, “and that cannon bone was fractured three days before you screwed it”

“How do you know?” he asked, surprised. “I thought he’d done it the day before.”

“It was a stress fracture in a race last Monday.”

“How do you know?” he repeated, mystified.

“I . . . er ... drifted up to Eaglewood’s stable yesterday afternoon and asked.”

“You did
what?
Didn’t old Eaglewood throw you out?”

“I didn’t see him. Someone in the stable yard told me.”

“Great God.”

“So all the deaths on the table very likely had a common premeditated cause, and it’s up to you to work out what.”

“But I don’t know.” His despair surfaced again. “If I knew I wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“I think you probably do know in some dark recess or other. I’ve great faith that one of these days a blinding light will switch on in your brain and make sense of everything.”

“But I’ve thought and thought.”

“Mm. That’s where the third list comes in.”

“No.”

“It has to,” I said reasonably. “Do any of Lees, Eaglewood, Mackintosh, Fitzwalter or Nagrebb have the knowledge to accomplish all this? Has any of them had the opportunity?”

He silently shook his head.

“The knowledge,” I said, “is veterinary.”

“Let’s stop this right away.”

“It’s for your own sake,” I said.

“But they’re my friends. My partners.”

Partners weren’t always friends, I thought. He was still raising barriers against belief: a common enough mechanism encountered perennially in embassies.

I didn’t want to antagonize him or force him into destructive self-analysis. He would come to things in time. Understanding, as I’d grown to see it, was often a matter of small steps, small realizations, small sudden visitations of “Oh, yes.” As far as Ken’s problems were concerned I was still a long way from the “Oh, yes” stage. I hoped that perhaps we might reach it together.

“Incidentally,” I said, “you know the pharmacy list the police want?”

He nodded.

“Carey agrees it would be a good idea to ask your suppliers for copies of their invoices for six months back or maybe more. He asked me to ask if you would do it.”

He predictably groaned. “One of the secretaries can do it.”

“I just thought,” I said diffidently, “that if you did it yourself, you could get the invoices sent back to you personally.”

“What for?”

“Um ... just suppose, for instance . . .” I came to it slowly. “Just suppose someone here had ordered something like ... collagenase.”

The pale eyes stared as if they would never blink. After a long pause he said, “That wouldn’t come from our regular wholesale suppliers. It would have to come from a chemical company dealing with research reagents for laboratory use only.”

“Do you deal with any of those companies for the laboratory here?”

“Well, yes, we do.”

A silence settled.

He sighed heavily. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll write to them. I’ll write to all I can think of. I hope they all come back negative. I’m sure they will.”

“Quite likely,” I agreed, and hoped not.

 

 

THE AFTERNOON’S OPERATION, with Carey coming in tired but vigilant and myself taking notes, passed off without crisis. The more accustomed I became to the general theater routine, the more impressed I was by Ken in action: his long-fingered hands were steady and deft, his whole oddly articulated height taking on an economical grace where one might have expected gangling clumsiness. His self-doubts seemed to evaporate every time once he had a scalpel in his hand and I supposed that that really was to be expected, because the doubts were thrust upon him from outside, not generated within.