Comeback

by Dick Francis

  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.”

  11

  The 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. Wh
en 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.”

  “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 w
ould, 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.