Comeback (33 page)

“What about a broodmare?” I asked.

“In foal?”

“In foal to a top stallion.”

“Mm. We’d write a policy as long as the pregnancy was definitely established and proceeding normally. It isn’t usual, but it could be done, especially if the stallion fee has to be paid whether there’s a live foal or not. No foal, no fee is customary. How old a mare?”

“I don’t know.”

“It would depend on her age and her breeding record.”

“I can tell you,” Brose said. “She was nine and had been barren one year but had borne two healthy foals, one colt, one filly.”

Higgins raised his eyebrows until they rose above the gold rims of his glasses. I could feel my own eyebrows going up in unison.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Peter, really. I’m a detective by trade.”

“Sorry.”

“I obtained the list of mares covered by Rainbow Quest last season and checked them. People with sires like Rainbow Quest are choosy about what mares they’ll accept because they need foals of good quality to maintain the stallion’s worth, so that the stud fees stay high.”

“It makes sense,” I agreed.

“So,” Brose said, “I phoned the former owner of that mare you were supposed to have in the hospital and asked him how come he had sold her to Wynn Lees. He said his business was going bad and he needed to sell things. He’d sold his mare at the first decent offer. He’d never heard of Wynn Lees before that, he said, and he couldn’t remember his name without being prompted. Utterly unbusinesslike, no wonder he was in trouble.”

“Was the mare in foal when he sold her?” I asked.

“He says so. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. Maybe he believed she was or maybe he was selling an asset he knew had vanished. Either way, he sold her to Wynn Lees.” He paused. “Did you get tissue samples from the foal?”

I nodded. “Hair. Also the mare’s hair. They’ve been sent off to be matched. They need some of Rainbow Quest’s too.”

“I’ll get that for you,” Brose said. “Which lab’s doing the matching?”

“I’ll have to ask Ken McClure.”

“Ask, and let me know.”

I thanked him profoundly. He didn’t like fraud, he said.

Higgins nodded, saying, “The temptation to kill an insured horse is one reason for the high premiums. Fraud is a major problem. Some of it is absolutely blatant but if we insure a horse and he breaks a leg, we have to pay, even if we think someone’s come along with an iron bar and taken a swipe.”

“Did your company,” I asked, “insure any horses that died during or after surgical operations?”

“Not recently,” he said. “They don’t often die during operations. I can’t swear we haven’t insured one in the past, but I can’t recall that we’ve ever had to pay out for that. Mind you, I’m not saying other companies haven’t. Do you want me to ask around?”

“Would you?”

“For Brose, sure.”

Brose said, “Thanks, Higgs.”

I asked, “Would you ever insure a horse specifically against dying during an operation?”

Higgins pursed his lips. “I would if it was already insured. I would charge an extra one percent premium and pay up if the horse died.”

“It’s all wicked,” Annabel said.

Brose and Higgins, tall and short, lean and fat, easy together like double-act comics, smilingly agreed with her. Higgins after a while said his goodbyes and left, but Brose stayed, saying at once, “Go on about the murder.”

I glanced at Annabel.

“Tell the girl,” Brose said robustly, correctly reading my hesitation. “She’s not a drooping lily.”

“It’s fairly horrific,” I said.

“If it’s too gory, I’ll stop you,” she said.

“There wasn’t any blood.”

I explained about the hoist for lifting unconscious horses. Brose nodded. Annabel listened. I told them Scott had been lifted onto the operating table and left with his arms and legs in the air.

Brose narrowed his eyes. Annabel blinked several times. “There’s more,” Brose asserted, watching me.

I explained about vets stapling skin together after cuts and operations. I described the little staples. “Not like staples for paper, exactly, though the same idea. Surgical staples are about an eighth of an inch wide, not narrow like ordinary staples. When you put the stapler against skin and squeeze, the staples go fairly deep before they fold round. It’s hard to explain.” I paused. “The staple ends up like a small squared ring. Only the top surface is visible. The rest is under the skin, drawing the two cut sides together.”

“Clear,” Brose said, though Annabel wasn’t so sure.

“The staples are like unpolished silver in color,” I said.

“Why all this about staples?” Annabel wanted to know.

I sighed. “Scott’s mouth was fastened shut by a row of staples.”

Her eyes went dark. Brose said, “Now there’s a thing,” and looked thoughtful.

“Before or after death?” he asked.

“After. No blood.”

He nodded. “How was he killed?”

“Don’t know. Nothing to be seen.”

“Like the horses?”

“Like the mare, perhaps.”

“You be careful,” Brose said.

“Mm.”

“He couldn’t be in danger,” Annabel protested, looking alarmed.

“Couldn’t he? What about all this fact-finding he’s been doing?”

“Then stop it,” she told me adamantly.

Brose regarded her with quizzical eyes and she very faintly blushed. All the difficult words popped back into my mind unbidden. It’s too quick, too soon, insisted common sense.

Brose stood up to his full height, patted Annabel’s hair and told me he’d keep in touch. When he’d gone Annabel and I sat on, constantly talking though with many things unspoken.

She asked about my future in the service and I thought I heard a distant echo of an inquisition designed and desired by her father.

“Did you tell your parents about me?” I asked curiously.

“Well, yes. Just in passing. I was telling them about the Japanese.” She paused. “So where will you go from this job in England?”

“Anywhere I’m sent.”

“And end up an ambassador?”

“Can’t tell yet.”

“Isn’t promotion to ambassador just a matter of Buggins’s turn?” She didn’t sound antagonistic but I reckoned that that question came straight from the bishop.

“Buggins,” I said, “are very competent people.”

Her eyes laughed. “Not a bad answer.”

“In Japan,” I said, “all the men carry things around in bright carrier bags rather than in pockets or briefcases.”

“What on earth has that got to do with anything?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I thought you might like to know.”

“Yes, my life is illuminated. It’s overpowering.”

“In Japan,” I said, “wherever Westerners don’t go, the loos are often holes in the floor.”

“Riveting. Continue.”

“In Japan, every native person has straight black hair. All the women’s names end in ko. Yuriko, Mitsuko, Yoko.”

“And did you sleep on the floor and eat raw fish?”

“Routine,” I agreed. “But I never ate fugu.”

“What on earth is fugu?”

“It’s the fish that’s the chief cause of death from food poisoning in Japan. Fugu restaurants prepare it with enormous precautions but people still die....” My voice stopped as if of its own accord. I sat like stone.

“What is it?” Annabel asked. “What have you thought of?”

“Fugu,” I said, unclamping my throat, “is one of the deadliest of poisonous fish. It kills fast because it paralyzes the neuromuscular system and stops a person breathing. Its more common name is the puffer fish. I think someone told me it takes so little to be lethal that it’s virtually undetectable in a postmortem.”

She sat with the pink mouth open.

“The problem is,” I said, “you can’t exactly go out and buy a puffer fish in Cheltenham.”

 

 

 

 

T
he evening with Annabel, full of laughter despite the grisly scene I’d transferred to her mind, ended like the earlier one, not with a bang but a kiss.

A brief kiss, but on the lips. She stood a pace away after it and looked at me doubtfully. I could still feel the soft touch of her mouth: a closed pink mouth, self-controlled.

“How about Friday?” I said.

“You must be tired of driving.”

“Soon it’ll be two miles, not a hundred.”

If she hadn’t wanted me two miles away she wouldn’t have arranged it. I wondered if she felt as I did, a shade light-headed but half afraid of a bush fire.

“Friday,” she agreed, nodding. “Same time, same place.”

Wishing I didn’t have to go, I drove back to Thetford Cottage and there slept fitfully with unhappy, disconcerting dreams. I awoke thinking there was something in the dreams that I should remember, but the phantom movies slid quickly away. I’d never been good at remembering dreams. Couldn’t imagine how anyone woke with total recall of them. I bathed and dressed and breakfasted with Vicky and Greg.

“You look tired,” Vicky said apologetically. “If we hadn’t been mugged in Miami you wouldn’t have got into this.”

And I wouldn’t have gone to Stratford races, I thought, and I would never have met Annabel.

“I’ve no regrets,” I said. “Are you happier now in this house?”

“Bored to death,” she said cheerfully. “That wedding seems a long way off. I can’t wait to go home.”

I hung around impatiently for the postman but he brought only one of the reply envelopes and that not the one from Parkway Chemicals. The only envelope to travel out and back in two days contained a whole bunch of invoices for things I’d never heard of. I put them back in the envelope and tried Ken’s portable phone number.

He took his time answering. He yawned. “I’m knackered,” he said. “I was out at a racing stable half the night with a colic.”

“I thought the partnership was defunct.”

“So it might be,” he said, “but I’m still a vet and horses still get sick, and if I’m the only one available at three in the morning, well, I go.”

“You didn’t have to operate, did you?”

“No, no. Managed to unknot him with painkillers and walking. He didn’t leave home.”

“What trainer?”

“Not one you know. I promise you, this was a regular bona fide uncomplicated colic.”

“Great.” I told him one reply had come from a pharmaceutical company and, as far as I was concerned, it needed an interpreter. He said to give him half an hour and he would come to Thetford Cottage. Ask Vicky to feed him, he said.

When he arrived I ate a second breakfast with him in the uncozy kitchen, sitting on hard chairs round a white Formica-topped table. Vicky made toast as on a production line.

“You two have the appetite of goats,” she said. “It’s not fair that you don’t get fat.”

“You’re an angel,” Ken said. Vicky sniffed, but she liked it.

Replete, Ken took the invoices out of the envelope and looked through them.

“They’ve sent a whole year’s,” he observed. “Let’s see ... sodium, potassium, calcium, chlorine ... mm, these are the ingredients of Ringer’s solution.”

“What’s Ringer’s solution?”

“An all-purpose maintenance fluid. The stuff in the drips.”

“Oh.”

“I use commercially prepared, ready-made sterile bags of fluid for operations,” he said, “but we make our own in-house fluid for the drips out in the stable as it’s much cheaper. In the pharmacy, Scott weighs out . . .” He sighed. “Scott weighed out these ingredients, which are white crystalline powders, and stored them ready in plastic bags. When we need some fluid, we add distilled water.”

He went on looking through the invoices and slowly began frowning.

“We’ve certainly used a lot of potassium,” he said.

“In the fluids?”

He nodded. “It’s customary to add extra potassium for diarrhea cases because they get dehydrated and low in potassium. You can also inject it into ready-made drip bags.”

He sat staring into space, hit much as I had been by fugu.

I waited. He swallowed and slowly flushed, the exact opposite of his habit of going pale.

“I should have seen it,” he said.

“Seen what?”

“Potassium chloride. Oh God.” He transferred his unfocused gaze from the direction of the stove and looked at me with horror. “I should have seen it. Four times! I’m a disgrace.”

I couldn’t tell whether his sense of shame was justified or not, because I hadn’t the knowledge. Knowing Ken, he’d be blaming himself excessively for any error and would take a long time to get over it.

I said, “I always told you that you’d come face-to-face with realization. I told you that somewhere or other, you knew.”

“Yes, you did. Well, I think now that I do. I think the four that died on the table died of excess potassium, which is called hyperkalemia, and I should have seen it at the time.”

“You weren’t expecting the fluids to be wrong.”

“Even so . . .” He frowned. “The serum samples from the last one that died were in the laboratory when it burned down. There’s no way now of proving it, but the more I see . . .”

“Go on,” I said, as he stopped.

“The waves on the ECG, that I told you about, that looked different? There are P waves from the atria of the heart, and they had decreased in amplitude. The heart was slowing down.”

“Wasn’t it Scott’s job to tell you?”

“The captain’s responsible for the ship. I always glance at the ECG, even when he’s monitoring it. I simply never gave a thought that the slowing was due to excess potassium. I hadn’t given them extra potassium.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Who fetched the bags of drip, and who changed them when they were empty in all those four operations?” He knew I knew the probable answer, but I asked anyway.

After a moment he said, “Scott.”