by Dick Francis
“It would be really helpful,” I said, “if you could give me a list of unidentifiable poisons.”
“If you can’t identify them,” Brose said, “you can’t prove they were administered.”
Annabel raised her eyebrows. “So they do exist?”
“I didn’t say that,” Brose said.
“As good as.”
“Do they exist?” I asked.
“If they did,” Brose answered, “and Annabel, I’m not saying that they do, then that’s the sort of thing I’d not let out into common knowledge. What I will tell you is that all poisons are hard to find and identify if you have no general idea of what to look for.”
“Ken said that too,” I agreed.
“He’s right.” Brose stood up. “I’ll just wish you luck. Keep me posted on Wynn Lees.” He thought briefly and changed his mind. “Suppose I come to Cheltenham one day? It’s not strictly a racing matter as such, but I might be able to suggest a few things.”
“Terrific,” I said, very pleased.
“Check with Annabel,” he said, “and tomorrow I’ll look at my diary.”
He patted Annabel on her rag-doll hair, nodded to me amiably and ambled off to instill fear into a few more unsuspecting wrongdoers.
Annabel held up her fistful of chips and said she felt like multiplying them, so we found a table with spaces and spent a fast hour in which she doubled her stake again and I lost my lot.
“You gamble too much at the wrong time,” she said, taking her half ton of plastic to the cashier to be changed back to spendable currency. “You should have listened to Brose.”
“I had fun for my money.”
She put her head on one side. “That sounds like an epitaph.”
“I’ll settle for it,” I said, smiling.
We went back to the outer world where gambling was real and went in a taxi (Annabel phoned for it) to the house she shared in Fulham. The cab stopped outside and the driver waited resignedly to take me towards the M.40.
She thanked me for the dinner. I thanked her for Brose.
“I’ll phone you,” I said.
“Yes, do that.”
We stood on the pavement for a few moments. I kissed her cheek. I’d got that right, it seemed, from her little nod.
“Good luck with everything,” she said. “It sounds as if you and the vets need a miracle.”
“A miracle would be fine.”
Instead, we got a nightmare.
9
Vicky had left a note on my pillow.
“Ken asks you to go to the hospital at nine A.M.” With a groan, as the night had already half gone, I set my alarm, crawled under the daisy duvet and fell over black cliffs into sleep.
I dreamed of horses dying, their deaths somehow my fault. Awakening, I was relieved to shed the guilt, but a sense of unease remained and it was with a feeling of oppression I returned to the hospital.
At first sight everything seemed relatively normal, even if gloomy under a scurrying cloudy sky. Cats and dogs went on arriving at the Portakabin. Lucy in a white coat gave me a wave as she crossed from the hospital. I went in through the rear door and found Ken in the office, pale and seething.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Three referrals have canceled for later this week. All breathing improvements. We need outside fees to keep the hospital going. They’ve all heard about the mare and they’re now in a full-scale panic. On top of that I sat here until three this morning checking on yesterday’s patients, then Scott took over. He promised blind he wouldn’t go to sleep. So I came back ten minutes ago, and guess what? No Scott. He’s sloped off somewhere for breakfast. It isn’t my fault we haven’t had the coffee machine mended.”
“How are the patients?”
“All right,” he said grudgingly, “but that’s not the point.”
“No,” I agreed. “When’s the postmortem on the mare?”
He looked at his watch. “Carey said at ten. I suppose I’d better be there. Carey’s called in a fellow from Gloucester to do it and he’s more a butcher than a surgeon. The last person I’d have chosen. So I’ll have to be there in case he does something diabolical.” Irritation and stress were plain in his voice. “I wondered if you would mind finishing these letters to the pharmaceutical companies so that they can go out today. I was doing them last night” He picked up a folder and slid out a bunch of papers. “With the computer down I’ve had to get the names and addresses of some of the firms off the bottles and packets, if they’re not supplied by the wholesalers who came yesterday. I’ve sent their letters already. Well, anyway, I wrote a general letter and at least our copier here is working, so I’ve made enough copies for every firm I could think of.”
He pushed them across the desk towards me, along with another sheet of paper with the names and addresses.
“While I’m out, could you type in a company name at the top of each letter, and also do the envelopes? I know it’s a ghastly chore but it was you who suggested it”
“Mm,” I agreed. “All right.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“I’ve got another suggestion,” I said.
He groaned.
“Take a tissue sample from the dead foal to do a test for paternity.”
He stared. I told him Brose’s theory.
“To activate the insurance,” I said, “the mare had to die. You inconveniently saved her life the first time, so someone had another go. If Brose is right, he, she or they couldn’t afford to have the foal born. Death had to occur before that, and as they probably didn’t know exactly when the foal was due, they had to hurry.”
“It gets worse,” Ken said.
“You’d have to get a tissue sample from Rainbow Quest as well,” I said.
“Not difficult. Tissue matching is expensive, though. So is searching for poison, incidentally. Specialist labs cost the earth.”
“So you do think it was poison?”
“Well, it wasn’t electrocution. She wasn’t suffocated by a plastic bag. She didn’t choke. I couldn’t see any stab wounds. She shouldn’t have died . . . something stopped her heart.”
Yvonne Floyd, coming into the office, overheard Ken’s last words.
“Nerve gas?” she suggested ironically.
“So easy to get hold of,” Ken said.
“Smoke inhalation from a smoldering sofa?”
“I bet it wasn’t,” Ken said, actually smiling.
“Only trying to help.”
Her presence lightened things always. She said she had an emergency dog case on its way in and had come over to ready things for the small-animal theater.
“I’ll need both Scott and Belinda, ideally.”
“Yes,” Ken said. “They’re around.”
“Great.”
She looked great herself in her white lab coat: white gleaming teeth, bright eyes, cloud of black hair.
She said, “Belinda’s asked me to be her matron of honor.”
“What?” Ken said, puzzled.
“At your wedding, nitwit. Sort of married bridesmaid.”
“Oh.” He looked as if he’d forgotten the wedding altogether.
“I suppose you’ve got a best man?” she teased.
“Er . . .” Ken said. “I’ve left everything to Belinda. It’s her day.”
“Really, Ken”—she was mildly exasperated—“you have to find your own best man.”
His gaze fell on me. “How about it?”
“You must have other friends,” I said. “Longtime friends.”
“You’ll do fine,” he insisted, “if you will.”
“But Belinda . . .”
“She’s coming round, changing her mind about you,” Ken said. “She’ll be all right. Say you will.”
“OK.”
Yvonne was pleased. “That’s better. Don’t forget your clothes, Ken. Or buttonholes.”
“Oh God,” he said. “At a time like this, who can think of buttonholes?”
Yvonne
smiled affectionately. “Life goes on,” she said. “We’ll all come out of this all right, you’ll see.”
She went out of the office and turned in the direction of the theater.
“Terrific surgeon,” Ken said.
“Terrific legs.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” He was unmoved. After a pause he began to say, “What are we going to do?”
There was a crash of a door slamming back against a wall and a clatter in the corridor and a groan.
“What’s that?” Ken said alarmed, rising to his feet.
I being nearest to the door was first through it, Ken on my heels. Yvonne was coming towards us, weaving and stumbling, her eyes stretched wide, one hand clamped over her mouth. We went towards her to help her and she shook her head violently, tears coming into her eyes and her knees buckling.
“Yvonne,” Ken exclaimed, “for God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
She took her hand away as if going to tell us and instead vomited violently onto the passage floor.
She leaned weakly against the wall, crying, her stomach heaving, looking as if she would pass out at any second. Ken and I moved instantly, one to each side of her, stepping round the vomit, to give her support.
She shook us off and, unable to speak, pointed with a wild sweep of an arm towards the theater. Ken gave me a wide-eyed frightened glance and we went fearfully along there to see what had caused such an extreme reaction. It was the door to the vestibule that had crashed against the wall: it was still open. We went through and into the supply room and tried the door to the small-animal section, but it was locked. We pushed on through the swing doors leading to the big main operating room.
What we saw there brought me perilously near fainting myself.
Scott lay on the long equine operating table, on his back, his arms and legs in the air. Round each ankle and each wrist was buckled a padded cuff. Each cuff was attached to a chain, each chain came down from the hoist. He had been lifted onto the table like a horse.
He was dressed as always in blue jeans and sweater, and he still had shoes and socks on, and his wristwatch.
One might have thought it a joke, but there was about that energetic hard-muscled body an unaccustomed absolute stillness, a silence as lonely as the cosmos.
Ken and I stood one on each side of him, looking down on his face. His head was tipped back, his jaw jutting up. His eyes were unnervingly half-open, as if he were watching and waiting for our help. His mouth was closed. He was white.
“Christ,” Ken said under his breath, very pale.
I swayed. Told myself fainting was out of the question.
Scott’s mouth had been securely fastened shut by a neat row of staples. Small silvery tacks. Nine of them.
The faintness ebbed. I’d seen a great many dead bodies before: it wasn’t the fact of death but the barbarity that disturbed so radically. I swallowed and closed my teeth and breathed shallowly through my nose.
Ken said “Christ” again and turned towards the controls of the hoist.
“Don’t touch it,” I said.
He stopped and turned back. “You’re right, of course. But it’s wrong to leave him like that”
I shook my head. We had to leave him like that, and the one person who wouldn’t care was Scott himself.
“We must get the police,” Ken said dully.
“Yes. And help Yvonne, and make sure no one else comes in here.”
“God.”
A stapler was lying on the floor near my feet. I left it alone. There were no lights on: only daylight through frosted glass skylights. Everything looked clean and tidy, ready for work. It didn’t matter anymore, I thought, that we had gone without shoe-covers into that sterile environment.
We went back into the corridor and along to Yvonne, who was kneeling on the floor, her head against the wall. Ken squatted down beside her. She turned to him and clung, sobbing.
“He was . . . so good . . . to my boys.”
There were worse epitaphs. I went on past them into the office and picked up Ken’s bunch of keys, which were on the desk. The labels were all smudged from much use, but I found “Theater vestibule” and took it along the passage to see what it fitted.
Yvonne and Ken were standing. He was giving her his handkerchief, not especially clean, to wipe her ravaged face. He watched me go by with unseeing eyes, his mind, I guessed, like my own, unable to cast out the sight in the theater.
The vestibule door, I supposed, was covered with everyone’s fingerprints, but all the same I slotted the key into the lock without adding any more and found that the tongue turned easily. Using the key alone I closed and locked the door and then went round the corners, along the passage and out into the welcome fresh air.
The outside door leading to the large-animal reception room was closed. I sorted through the bunch for the key and fed it into the hole. I turned it to unlock the door, but nothing happened. Tried the other way: the bolt clicked audibly across. That made the whole theater area safe from casual eyes, but everyone had keys . . . it was all a disaster.
I turned back to the office, skirting the thin splashy patch of vomit. Ken, his arm round Yvonne, was helping her to the washroom off the entrance hall. I found a large piece of paper, wrote DO NOT ENTER on it, grabbed a roll of sticky tape and returned to the outside door. Even Oliver, I thought, sticking it on firmly, might obey that notice, or obey it at least long enough to come into the office to discover why it was there.
Returning to the office, I wrote a second notice and stuck it to the vestibule door, again without leaving finger marks. Then Ken came back from the entrance hall and together in the office we stood for a silent second simply looking at the telephone.
“It’s going to be terrible,” he said.
“Mm.”
He sat in the chair behind the desk and picked up the receiver. “Yvonne says Carey isn’t here yet. He was calling in before the postmortem. Don’t you think we should wait for him?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“What do I say, then?” he asked numbly. “How can I say it?”
“Just say who you are, where you are, and that there’s a man dead here. Speak slowly, it saves time.”
“You do it.” He gave me the receiver. “I feel sick.”
I did it at dictation speed. Someone would come, they said.
In the pause before the police arrived Carey himself turned up wanting to know why the don’t enter notice was on the outside door.
“I didn’t know there was one,” Ken said wearily.
“I put it there,” I said.
He nodded, understanding.
“Why?” Carey asked.
I found it difficult to tell him. While I did, he went even grayer. Ken gave him the desk chair and asked if he would like some water. Carey put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands and didn’t reply.
The telephone rang and because it was next to my hand I answered it.
“This is Lucy. Who’s that?” a voice said.
“Peter.”
“Oh. Is Yvonne there?”
“Er ... where are you?”
“In the Portakabin, of course.”
I remembered that the old building’s number had been rerouted to a swaying wire connected to the temporary accommodation. The partnership’s slender attachment to the well-organized past was about to be stretched to the limit.
“Yvonne’s here,” I said, “but not feeling well.”
“She was perfectly all right fifteen minutes ago.”
“Lucy, when you can, come over here.”
“I can’t possibly. Belinda and I are knee-deep in distemper jabs. Anyway, will you tell Yvonne her run-over dog has arrived outside our door here, but the poor thing’s already dead. Ask her to come and talk to the owners, they’re very upset”
“She can’t come,” I said.
She finally heard the calamity note in my voice. “What’s the matter?” she asked, her own alarm awakening.
>
“Get rid of the dogs. I’m not telling you on the phone, but it’s catastrophic.”
After a brief silence, she simply replaced her receiver and a moment later I saw her through the window coming down the Portakabin steps and hurrying across to the entrance hall. She appeared in the office doorway prepared to be annoyed with me for frightening her.
One look at Carey’s bent head, at Ken’s extra pallor, at my own signs of strain, convinced her that fear was reasonable.
“What is it?” she asked.
I said, as the other two were mute, “Scott’s dead.”
“Oh no!” She was horrified. “On his motorbike? I always told him he’d do himself in one day on that machine. Oh, poor man.”
“It wasn’t his bike,” I said. “He’s here, in the theater, and it looks . . . well, it looks as if someone’s killed him.”
She sat down abruptly on one of the chairs, her mouth open in protesting shock.
“Yvonne found him,” I said. “She’s in the washroom. She could do with your help.”
Strong, sensible Lucy rose to her feet again and went on the errand.
Through the window, I saw Oliver Quincy arrive in his mud-spattered white car, which he parked next to mine.
“Why don’t the police come?” Ken asked fretfully.
The police, I thought, would take everything over. My glance fell on the folder of letters Ken had pushed my way in a long-ago different time-zone, and on impulse I picked it up and took it out to my car, meeting Oliver as he locked his own.
“I’d better warn you. . . .” I said slowly.
He interrupted brusquely. “Warn me about what?”
“Ken and Carey can tell you,” I said. “They’re in the office.”
“Not another dead horse?”
I shook my head. He shrugged, turned away and went into the office through the rear door, throwing an inquiring look at the don’t enter notice as he passed it. I stowed the folder of letters in the trunk and locked it, and turned to follow Oliver just as a police car drove into the car park.
It stopped outside the entrance hall and the same plainclothes policeman as before emerged from it, followed by the same constable. They looked around briefly and went in through the hospital’s front door, and I decided to go back that way myself.
