Comeback (34 page)

“Always Scott?”

He searched his memory. “Oliver assisted once. He wanted to be there for the tieback operation. He took Scott’s place. It can’t have been Scott that killed them.”

“Mm . . .” I pondered. “How much potassium would you need?”

“It’s a bit complicated. You’d have to bring the serum concentration to about eight to ten milliequivalents per liter . . .”

“Ken!”

“Um ... well, the serum potassium would normally be four milliequivalents per liter or thereabouts, so you’d have to more than double it. To raise the four to six in a horse weighing one thousand pounds you’d need ... er ... Let’s see . . .” He brought out a pocket calculator and did sums. “Twenty-three point six eight grams of potassium in powder form. Dissolve that in water and add it to the fluid. When that bag’s empty, repeat the process, as the serum concentration is now up to eight. A third similar bag would do the trick. The operation would be well advanced by now so it would seem as if it was prolonged anesthesia that had contributed to the collapse.”

He stood up compulsively and walked round and round the table.

“I should have realized,” he repeated. “If we’d been using our in-house mixture I’d have tested it for errors, but what I used had come straight from the suppliers and they would never make such a gross mistake.”

I thought of all the bags of commercially prepared drips stacked in boxes in the hospital storeroom, one-liter and five-liter bags. For the operation on the mare, Ken had used at least four of the five-liter bags: horses in shock and pain, horses with complicated colic, all had to be given extra quantities of fluid, he’d told me, to combat dehydration and maintain the volume of blood. I’d watched Scott methodically change the empty bags for full ones.

“You gave the mare a lot of extra fluids, which were obviously the right stuff as she survived the operation,” I said. “How many bags do you usually use?”

He pursed his lips, still walking, and gave me another not-so-simple answer. Perhaps there weren’t any simple answers in veterinary medicine.

“In a routine operation on a healthy racehorse—like the screwed cannon bone—the rate of fluid administration would be three to five millimeters per pound of horse per hour, say about four liters an hour. The mare got fifteen an hour.”

“So you would use the five-liter bags for emergency colic operations and the single-liter bags for cannon bones?”

“More or less.” He thought. “Mind you,” he said, “you could also probably kill a horse by giving it too little fluid, or too much. Forty liters an hour of the normal commercial fluid would probably be lethal.”

The deadly opportunities were endless, it seemed.

“Well, all right,” I said. “You think there was too much potassium in the bags of fluid. How did it get there? How did it get there for those four specific horses and for no others?”

He looked blank. “It can’t have been Scott. I won’t believe it.”

“On the night of the mare’s operation,” I said, “Scott came to the hospital while you were still on the way and I saw him collect the bags of fluid from the storeroom and I helped him carry them along into the pharmacy room. He stacked them on the shelf there that can be reached from inside the theater by opening the glass door.”

“Yes.”

“Did he have any routine for which bags he took?”

“Yes. Always in the order in which they arrived. Always the nearest or uppermost.”

“So if you wanted to add potassium you could do it in the storeroom, knowing which bags would be used next.”

Ken said with relief, “Then it could have been anybody. It didn’t have to be Scott.”

It could have been anyone, I reflected, who could go in and out of the storeroom, without anyone thinking it inappropriate. That included all the partners, Scott, Belinda, the nurse who’d left in a huff and quite likely the secretaries and the cleaners. In the storeroom there would have been no need to trouble with gowns and shoe-covers and sterile procedures. The clear fluid inside the stiff plastic bags was itself sterile, and that was enough.

“I think we ought to talk to Superintendent Ramsey,” I said.

Ken made a face but no demur while I got busy on the phone and ended with an invitation to meet the policeman in the hospital office later that morning.

Ramsey, the farmer-type, listened patiently to the horse-death theory and how it affected Scott. He came with us into the storeroom to see how the bags of fluid were kept, the nearest to hand being always the next one used. He read the information printed on the plastic; contents and manufacturer.

He followed us along to the small pharmacy section where the bags were stacked on the shelf and he came into the operating room and saw how they could be reached when needed by opening the glass door.

No one actually mentioned the possibility that Scott had discovered who had doctored the bags; it hardly needed to be said.

“The horses are long gone,” Ramsey said ruminatively, back in the office. “The last batch of tests was burned before investigation. The empty fluid bags were disposed of. There’s no way of proving your theory.” He looked thoughtfully at each of us in turn. “What else do you know that you don’t know you know?”

“The riddle of the sphinx,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry. It sounded like a riddle.”

“A riddle in a conundrum in a maze,” he said unexpectedly. “A good deal of police work is like that.” He picked up the envelope containing the invoices. “This wasn’t a bad idea. Let me have the other answers when they come.”

We said we would, and I asked him if he knew yet what had killed Scott. And if he yet knew who had been burned in the fire.

“We’re proceeding,” he said, “with our enquiries.”

 

 

I WENT TO see Nagrebb.

Ken wouldn’t come with me, but I wanted, out of curiosity if nothing else, to see the man who’d almost certainly cruelly killed two horses, one with laminitis, the other with a dissolved tendon. He and Wynn Lees hadn’t cared if their horses died in agony. I’d seen Wynn Lees’s mare suffering as I hadn’t known horses could, and I’d felt bitterness and grief when she died. I couldn’t prove her owner had fed her a carpet needle. I couldn’t prove he’d injected his Eaglewood horse with insulin. I
believed
he had, with a revulsion so strong that I wanted never to be near him again.

Nagrebb instantly gave me the same feeling. I’d imagined him large, bullish and unintelligent like Wynn Lees, so his physical appearance was a surprise. He was out in a paddock behind his house when, following Ken’s reluctant instructions, I located his woodsy half-hidden gateposts and turned between them up a stretch of drive that curled round the house until it was out of sight of the road.

The paddock then revealed was fenced with once-white horizontal railings, a tempting path of escape, I would have thought, for any ill-used self-respecting show-jumper. Inside the paddock on well-worn grass a man and an auburn haired woman stood beside a bright red and white show-jump like a length of imitation brick wall exhorting another man on a dark muscly horse to launch himself over it. The horse ran out sideways to avoid jumping and received a couple of vicious slashes of a whip to remind him not to do it again.

At that point, all three noticed my arrival and offered only scowls as greeting, an arrangement of features that seemed as normal to them as walking about.

The man on the horse and the woman were young, I saw. The older man, noticeably top-heavy with legs too short for the depth of torso, strode grimly towards the paddock railings. Bald, sharp-eyed, pugnacious; a rottweiler of a man. I got out of the car and went close to the fence to meet him.

“Mr. Nagrebb?” I asked.

“What do you want?” He stopped a few feet short of the fence, raising his voice.

“Just a few words.”

“Who are you? I’m busy.”

“I’m writing an article on causes of equine deaths. I thought you might help me.”

“You thought wrong.”

“You’re so knowledgeable,” I said.

“What I know I keep to myself. Clear off.”

“I heard you might tell me about acute overnight laminitis,” I said.

His reaction in its way was proof enough. The sudden stillness, the involuntary contraction of muscles round the eyes, I’d watched them often when I’d asked seemingly innocuous questions in diplomatic circles about illicit, hidden sex lives. I knew alarm bells when I saw them.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“Excessive carbohydrates.”

He didn’t answer.

There must have been something about him that transmitted anxiety to the other two, as the young woman came running over and the man trotted across on the horse. She was fierce-eyed, a harpy; he as dark and well-muscled as his horse.

“What is it, Dad?” he asked.

“Man wants to know about sudden acute laminitis.”

“Does he, indeed.” His voice was like his father’s; local Gloucestershire accent and aggressive. He knew, too, what I was talking about. I wasn’t sure about the girl.

“I need firsthand accounts,” I said. “It’s for general public readership, not for veterinary specialists. Just your own words describing how you felt when you found your horse fatally crippled.”

“Tripe,” the son said.

“Last September, wasn’t it?” I asked. “Was he insured?”

“Fuck off,” the son said, bringing the horse right up to the fence and warningly raising his effective whip.

I thought it might be time to take his advice. I’d evaluated Nagrebb, which had been the point of the excursion, making my picture gallery of the old men complete. Ken’s opinion of the son I would endorse any day. If the young woman were the daughter, she was the product of the family ethos but not, I thought, its powerhouse.

“Who sent you to us?” Nagrebb demanded.

“Hearsay,” I said. “Fascinating stuff.”

“What’s your name?”

“Blake Pasteur.” I said the first name that came into my head; the name of a colleague first secretary back in Tokyo. I didn’t think Nagrebb would be checking the Foreign Office lists. “Freelance journalist,” I said. “Sorry you can’t help me.”

“Piss off,” Nagrebb said.

I began to make a placatory retreat and that would have been the end of it except that at that moment another car swept round the house and came to a halt beside mine.

The driver climbed out. Oliver Quincy, to my dismay.

“Hello,” he said to me in surprise. “What the hell are you doing here?” His displeasure was evident.

“Hoping for information for an article on equine deaths.”

“Do you know him?” Nagrebb demanded.

“Of course. Friend of Ken McClure’s. Has his nose into everything in the hospital.”

The atmosphere took a chilly turn for the worse.

“I’m writing an article about the hospital,” I said.

“Who for?” Oliver said suspiciously.

“Anyone who’ll buy it. And they will.”

“Does Ken know this?” Oliver exclaimed.

“It’ll be a nice surprise for him. What are you doing here yourself?”

“None of your bloody business,” Nagrebb said, and Oliver answered simultaneously, “Usual thing. Strained tendon.”

I tried to see into Oliver’s mind, but failed. I guessed I was allied in his thoughts with Ken and Lucy Amhurst, the faithful upholders of Carey Hewett and Partners, the opponents of change. He was eyeing me with antagonism.

“Are you still in the partnership?” I asked.

“The partnership may dissolve,” Oliver replied, “but horses still need attention.”

“That’s what Ken says.”

Nagrebb’s son, who’d been watching me more than listening, suddenly slid from his horse, handed the reins to his father, then bent down and ducked under the paddock railings to join Oliver and myself outside. At close quarters, the aggression poured out of him, almost tangible. His father twice over, I thought.

“You’re trouble,” he said to me.

He held his whip in his left hand. I wondered fleetingly if he were left-handed. He more or less proved that he wasn’t by hitting me very fast and hard with his fist, righthandedly, in the stomach.

I might as well have been kicked by a horse. I lost, it seemed to me, the power to breathe. I went down on one knee, doubled over, in virtual paralysis. It didn’t much improve things when Nagrebb’s son put his booted foot on my bent shoulder and toppled me over.

No one protested. I looked some dusty old grass in the eye. No succor there either.

Breath slowly returned to ease the suffocation and with it came impotent rage, some of it directed at myself for having precipitated the fracas. There was no point in trying to attack Nagrebb junior in my turn; I would be simply knocked down again. Words were my weapons, not arms. I’d never punched anyone in anger.

I got to my knees and to my feet. Nagrebb looked watchful and his son insufferably superior. Oliver was impassive. The girl was smiling.

I found enough breath to speak. Fought to keep my temper.

“Illuminating,” I said.

Not the wisest of remarks, on reflection, but the only sword I had. The son made another stab at me but I was ready for that one and parried his punch on my wrist. Even that was hard enough to numb my fingers. The only thing on the plus side, I thought, was that I hadn’t disclosed knowledge of collagen-dissolving enzymes and wasn’t faced with collagenase-loaded syringes.

“Look,” I said, “I’m a writer. If you don’t want to be written about, well, I’ve got the message.”

I turned my back on them and walked the few steps to my car, trying not to totter.

“Don’t come back,” Nagrebb said.

Not on your life, I thought. Not for my own life, either.

I opened the car door and eased painfully into the driver’s seat. At the moment of impact, I’d felt as if my lungs had collapsed but with passing time the problem was soreness. Somewhere at the lower end of my sternum was an area of maximum wince.