by Dick Francis
Lucy and Yvonne were coming out of the washroom together, both looking sick and shaky, as if Lucy’s imagination had been as strong an emetic as Yvonne’s actual experience. They sat unhappily on two of the chairs, each with a tissue to wipe her face, each sighing, both staring into space.
“The police have come,” I said.
“I left Belinda coping with the whole Portakabin,” Lucy said, sniffing and swallowing. “I’ll have to go back.” She stood up slowly as if suddenly older. “We’ll finish there as fast as we can.” She went out to the car park with little of the brave determination of four days ago.
“I ought to help her,” Yvonne said with difficulty, “but I can’t.”
“Much better to sit here for a bit.”
“You saw him, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“How could anyone do that?”
A question without answer.
“However will I sleep?” she said. “I can’t get him out of my mind. I think of him water-skiing, so expert and strong, so alive. And now like this . . .”
Jay Jardine in his self-assertive way strode positively into the entrance hall from up the central corridor and came to a halt at the sight of us.
“What the heck’s going on?” he demanded. “There’s dog sick all over the passage and that bloody rude policeman in the office told me to come along here and wait. Why is he here again? Have they finally pinned a name on our corpse in the ashes?”
Yvonne groaned quietly and closed her eyes.
“For Christ’s sake”—he was irritated—“what’s the matter?”
I told him.
He stared. Then he sat down, leaving a chair between himself and Yvonne. He said only, “Too bad.”
The understatement of the day, I thought.
Jay said, “The coffee machine’s still buggered, I suppose.”
We all looked at it across the hall. The first words I’d heard Scott say, I remembered, were “the coffee machine’s buggered.” Poor Scott. There was still no coffee, nor likely to be any.
For a while, as we sat in limbo, there was little commotion, as if the stillness in the theater had spread through the whole hospital. We could hear no voices from the office. We couldn’t ourselves find much to say. Time passed.
Eventually two more plainclothes police cars came to a halt outside the entrance door, the first spilling out its human contents, the second remaining closed. A thickset man with the broken-veined complexion of a farmer ambled without great speed into the entrance hall, followed by an elderly man with a too-big suit, heavy black-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose, and the black top-opening bag of old-fashioned doctors.
The farmer type asked briefly, “The office?”
“Down the passage, first on the right,” Jay told him.
He nodded and went down there, and things began to happen, though none of them joyful. The second police car contained a photographer and other specialists who after a while followed their master under Jay’s direction.
Ken came the other way, jerky, disjointed. “They’ve gone into the operating room,” he said. “Come outside, Peter. I need air.”
I went with him, looking at my watch. Nine-fifty. The morning had seemed a week long already. The air was brisk and cold.
“Did you remember the postmortem?” I asked.
“Carey did. He phoned them to go ahead without us.” He took a deep breath as if sucking life from the air, as if empty.
I said, “Did you, um, ask him to get some foal tissue?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I forgot it. Does it matter now?”
“Maybe more than before. You never know.”
“Oh God.” He pulled his radiophone off his belt, looked up the number in a small pocket address book and got through to the knackers. He told someone who seemed to have no problem understanding that he wanted properly labeled tissue samples and, as if struck by a thought, he added that he also wanted one of the foal’s ears and the tail and some of the mare’s mane.
“Why on earth the ear and tail?” I asked as he put the phone away.
“Hair,” he said succinctly. “You can get perfect DNA identification from hair, and of course hair doesn’t decompose. To prove the foal’s paternity you’d need its own hair, its dam’s hair and its sire’s hair. Or any tissue, really. You get the mare’s DNA pattern, then you subtract that from the foal’s pattern. What’s left in the foal’s DNA will be a match with the sire. It’s a long, expensive process but a genetic match is absolute proof.”
I looked up at the gray sky. “Suppose whoever killed Scott left a hair on him?”
“Better if Scott fought and scratched. Murderers and rapists can be convicted by their scratched-off skin under their victim’s fingernails. It’s an exact science now.”
“Mm.” I half smiled. “That works if you have a suspect.”
We watched the cat and dog brigade come and go.
“Will the police close us down?” Ken asked.
“God knows.”
“The second-wave policeman who came,” Ken said, “he’s a detective superintendent. The first lot wouldn’t do anything until he’d got here, not when I described the state Scott was in. A blatant piece of buck-passing, it looked to me.”
“Prudent and proper, more like.”
“You’re used to a hierarchy,” he said. “I’m not”
The Hewett and Partners setup was a sort of mini-hierarchy in itself, I thought, but didn’t press it. Instead I asked Ken if he owned a typewriter of any sort.
“Whatever for?”
“The letters. The envelopes. I can’t use the office, it’s full of police.”
“Oh, yes. Are we still going on with the letters?”
“We are indeed.”
He thought briefly. “I’ve an old battered portable at home. Would that do?”
“Sooner the better,” I said, nodding. “Where do you live?”
“We can’t go now, though,” he protested. “The police told me to wait.”
“They haven’t told me to wait,” I said. “Give me directions and keys and I’ll pick up the typewriter and come back. Then I can get on with the letters as soon as possible.”
“But what will I say ...?”
“If anyone complains, say I was hungry. I’ll bring back some croissants or something.”
“There’s actually a decent bakery two doors from where I live.”
“Fine.”
He gave me his house keys and told me where to find the typewriter, and as the dog and cat cars were still on the move I had no problem driving with them out of the car park. I’d have had more difficulty in getting in again without a sick animal as passenger if Ken, looking out for me, hadn’t hurried across and told the policemen on gate duty that I belonged.
Ken’s typewriter was by then locked in the trunk, along with a packet of large envelopes and a sheet of stamps. I carried several big pâtisserie bags into the hospital and scattered sustenance all round, which everyone ate hungrily while protesting they had no appetite. Carbohydrates, as ever, were the easiest of sedatives. I ate two Danish pastries myself and even Yvonne gratefully chewed and said she felt better. Ken sat beside her and fell on my offerings ravenously.
“You weren’t supposed to leave the premises, sir,” the familiar constable said reprovingly as I went along to the office.
“Sorry. Have a doughnut?”
He eyed the sugar-coated temptation with obvious longing but said he was on duty. No one else made any comment on my excursion. All the same if I’d been disposing of vital evidence, I thought.
Carey ate a piece of sticky almond ring distractedly as if his brain wasn’t quite aware of what his mouth was doing. He was still sitting in the same chair, still looking near collapse. Oliver eyed him like a predatory lion but meanwhile made do with double the cake. Jay Jardine, now in the office, stuffed down two doughnuts in quick succession and sucked the sugar off his fingers.
The door to the theater v
estibule, I’d noticed, was shut and still bore my don’t enter sign. I didn’t want to think about what was going on behind it. I was just glad that I didn’t have to deal with it.
Carey, Oliver and Jay were taciturn, each busy with their own thoughts. I returned to the more congenial company of Yvonne and Ken and time inched by as through the glass entrance doors we watched the flow of dogs diminish and finally dry. Lucy and Belinda, locking the door behind them, came down from the Portakabin and walked towards us across the tarmac.
Halfway, they stopped, their heads turning towards the gate. They stood unmoving, watching, then finally completed the traverse.
Lucy had tears in her eyes, coming into the entrance hall.
“They’ve taken him away,” she said. “They backed an ambulance right up to the large-animal reception door. We couldn’t see anything, thank God.”
Oliver and Jay came along the passage with messages. Carey had gone into the operating room at the police’s request to tell them if anything struck him as being out of its ordinary place. Yvonne would please wait in the office for the police to ask her questions. They, Oliver and Jay, and also Lucy, could go out on their scheduled calls. Belinda—Oliver shrugged—could presumably do what she liked, they’d had no instructions about her one way or the other. Ken and Ken’s friend should stay in the entrance hall. No one could enter or use the theater until future notice. Someone, Oliver said finally, should take a mop to the muck on the floor.
It was Lucy, predictably, who cleaned the passage, sweeping aside Yvonne’s objections and Ken’s and my half-hearted offers.
The crowd in the entrance hall broke up and scattered about its business until only I remained. Ken and Belinda were alone at the stables checking on their horse patients. Yvonne was in the office with the door closed, reliving what she longed to forget. She came out crying, awkwardly accompanied by the constable.
“They want to see you next,” she said, gulping and wiping her eyes. “They say I can go home but I’m due to attend some damned dog-lovers’ lunch and lecture on the care of puppies. How can I?”
“Best if you do, perhaps. Make this morning seem unreal.”
“Sir . . .” the constable said, gesturing towards the office.
“Yes.” I gave Yvonne a hug. “Go to the lunch.”
I left her trying to achieve a wan rain-washed smile and went where required, faithfully followed by the no-doughnut policeman.
The farmer-lookalike was standing by the window, head back, inspecting the cloud cover. He turned at my arrival and announced himself as Detective Superintendent Ramsey of the Gloucestershire police. His voice matched his appearance; an outdoor country intonation, a canny poacher on the side of the gamekeepers.
He checked a list. “You are Peter Darwin, employed here as a general assistant?”
“Not employed,” I said. “Unpaid helper.”
He raised his eyebrows, clicked open a pen and made a note.
“Are you employed elsewhere, sir?” The pen was poised.
“I’m on leave from the Foreign Office.”
He gave me a brief reassessing glance without pleasure, then wrote down the information and asked me what sort of unpaid help I’d been giving.
I told him that several horses had died in the hospital, that Ken McClure, my friend, was worried about it and that I was trying to help him find out why they’d died.
“And, sir, have you succeeded?”
I said regretfully, “No.”
“How long have you been trying?”
“Since last Thursday.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head slightly, forgiving me, it seemed, for not having achieved results in five days. He made another note, then looked up and began again.
“Do you think the deaths of the horses and the death of the anesthetist are connected?”
I frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Do you think the deaths of the horses and the burning of the main building are connected?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you discussed any theories with anyone, sir?”
“I think it may not be safe to discuss theories round here.”
His eyes narrowed sharply. “You saw Sylvester’s body, I understand.”
“Yes.” I swallowed. “How did he die?”
“All in good time,” he said blandly. “When you were in the theater, did you touch anything?”
“No.”
“Are you positive, sir?”
“Absolutely positive.”
“Did you see anything of note? Except Sylvester, of course.”
“There was a surgical stapler on the floor near the operating table.”
“Ah ... you know surgical staplers by sight?”
“I’ve seen Ken use one.”
He made another note.
“Also,” I said, “I think all the doors were unlocked, which isn’t usual. I went round outside to check the outer reception door, which is where the sick animals enter, and it was unlocked. I put the key in the hole and locked it to prevent anyone just walking in there and seeing Scott. . . .” I paused. “And when Ken and I went into the theater, the door to the padded room was open, and so was the one from there to the corridor and the reception room.”
He made a note. “And was it you who put up the notices and locked the door between the passage here and the theater?”
I nodded.
“So after you locked the doors, no one went in there?”
“I don’t know for sure,” I said slowly. “Everyone has keys.”
“Do you have keys?”
“No. I used Ken McClure’s.”
“Where were you, sir, between nine last night and nine this morning?”
I almost smiled, the inquiry being classic. I said calmly, “I went to London, to a private dinner. I was in the company of the Jockey Club’s deputy director of security from eleven until two, then I drove back here to Cheltenham and went to bed. I’m staying with Ken McClure’s fiancée’s parents about a mile from here.”
He made short notes. “Thank you, sir.”
“When did he die?” I asked.
“You don’t expect me to answer that.”
I sighed. It had to have been after three, when Ken had left Scott in charge. Everyone’s alibi would be the same and as hazy as mine: home in bed.
Superintendent Ramsey asked how long I would be staying with Ken McClure’s fiancée’s parents.
“It’s in the air,” I said. “Several more days, I should think.”
“We may need to speak to you again, sir.”
“Ken will know where I am, if I leave.”
He nodded, made one more note, thanked me in general and asked the constable to invite Ken to the office. As I went out into the passage, Carey and the policeman from Sunday, whose name I still didn’t know, were coming out of the theater vestibule. Carey walked heavily, gray head bowed, deep in distress.
He walked towards me unseeingly and turned into the office.
“There’s nothing out of place,” he said leadenly to Ramsey.
The Sunday policeman followed Carey into the office and closed the door, and I and the constable left the hospital by the rear and found Ken and Belinda doing nothing much but leaning on the closed lower halves of the stable doors, aimlessly watching their patients recover.
“Your turn with the top brass,” I said to Ken.
He looked depressed.
“I’m going back to Thetford Cottage,” I said. “I’ll be there if you want me.”
Belinda said, “I’m staying here with Ken.”
I smiled at her and after a second she smiled back, the wattage not blinding but an advance nevertheless.
VICKY AND GREG were out when I reached the house. They had solved the boredom factor to some extent by making an arrangement to be driven on demand by a taxi firm, neither of them feeling confident enough to rent and drive a car themselves. “The taxi drivers know where to go,” Vicky had said. “They
tell us what to do and see.”
I let myself in, took Ken’s typewriter and the folder of letters up to my bedroom, and set to work.
Ken’s letters, each made on the partnership writing paper and personally signed with his own sprawling signature, explained the police’s need-to-know request for the pharmacy’s burned contents and asked for the firm’s cooperation. The letter was all right as far as it went, I thought, but as a candidate for the “sometime or other” tray it got full marks. I slotted the first copy into the machine, typed in the first name on the address list at the top and rolled down to the bottom, below Ken’s signature, to add an extra paragraph.
“This matter is of extreme urgency,” I wrote, “as the police are concerned that certain dangerous, unusual and/or illegal substances may have been stolen prior to the arson, and may have passed into the general community. Please would you treat this request with the utmost urgency and send copies of all relevant invoices back by return of post in the stamped addressed envelope provided. Hewett and Partners expresses its profound appreciation of your kind and rapid participation.”
In Japan I’d have scattered a few “respectfuls” around, but respect didn’t seem to go down well with British commerce, as various mystified Japanese businessmen had told me. Bowing, too, for instance, produced not a contract but a squirm. In Japan it was the host who gave a gift to his guest, not the other way round. The opportunities for mutual embarrassment were endless.
I lavishly stamped a page-size envelope for the return information, addressing it to Hewett and Partners at Thetford Cottage (temporary office). The resulting missive looked official and commanding enough, I hoped, to get results.
Then I folded the letter and return envelope together, enclosing them in a business envelope addressed to the pharmaceutical firms. Without a copier or even carbons (which I hadn’t thought of) it took me a fair while to type the extra paragraph on every letter and complete the task, but when they were all done I drove to the post office in the long shopping street and sent the whole inquiring bunch on its way.
Back in Thetford Cottage I made up on an hour’s sleep and then on the off chance phoned Ken’s portable number.
