by Joe McNally
I put down the pencil and sat back, trying to focus again, trying to pull away from the global implications and figure out the hows and whys. It was the equivalent of industrial sabotage in a multi-billion pound business. Who was behind it and what was the motive? Why mess around with a few insignificant stallions in tiny studs as well as the cream?
Was someone else involved? Had Dunn concentrated on the small studs? Was an accomplice still operating in the Sheikh’s studs? If so, how? Security there must be tighter than Fort Knox.
I sighed and got to my feet. I had to slow things down, remind myself that all this had stemmed from a couple of assumptions. I was going to have to speak to Candy.
The door opened. Mother came in, still wearing her reading glasses and carrying the list of studs. She seemed quietly pleased. Of the seven calls she’d made, four studs told her that they’d had a visit from the potentially bogus RSPCA man in the previous six months. One couldn’t recall what he looked like. The other three gave a good description of Alex Dunn.
‘Excellent,’ I said. ‘Have you told Father?’
‘He’s asleep. I’ll tell him later.’
I watched her. Outward calm. Inner turmoil. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’ she asked.
I smiled. ‘No, thanks, Mum. You’ve done well.’
That slightly surprised look again then a trace of a smile before she turned to leave. Quietly I moved to the open door and watched her walk wearily along the hall. Her straight shoulders drooped now that she thought no one was watching and her feet dragged as she took a break from constantly bearing up for the sake of others. She seemed old and broken, and when she stopped and almost slumped against the wall, I resisted the urge to hurry toward her.
That decided it. I would contact Candy.
36
I phoned The Gulf Stud, where Candy had a house, which went with the job. He wasn’t there. A secretary gave me his mobile number. It rang seven times then he answered and I concentrated acutely on his reaction as I said, ‘Candy, Eddie Malloy.’
A moment’s hesitation, then, ‘Eddie, nice to hear from you! How are you?’
‘Still full of health-giving ozone after yesterday’s trip to the coast.’
Another moment’s silence then his voice tightened noticeably. ‘You, er, been taking a bit of a holiday?’
‘You might say that. Just hanging around by the sea for a while.’
There was a long pause as we realized the stage we’d reached.
I said, ‘Remember I told you I was working for that small stud on a stallion fertility problem?’
‘Uhuh?’
‘I think I found the answer.’
Another pause then he said, ‘Have you told anyone else?’
‘You’re my first call.’
More silence. ‘I think we should meet,’ he said, ‘but not in Newmarket.’
We met at a garage about fifteen miles from town. I followed Candy for a further three miles, speculating as I watched his head through the rear window whether Dark Hair and his friend were hiding in the back. He pulled off the road and down a slope into a long lay-by concealed by trees. I was relieved to see him get out of the car alone and walk toward me. He got in beside me and managed a grim smile.
I laid everything out.
‘Well,’ I asked, ‘am I right?’
He stared at me, unsure if I was saviour or executioner, then nodded slowly and told me the story. All eight stallions which had retired to the Sheikh’s Newmarket stud in the past eighteen months had completely lost fertility within weeks of taking up stud duties.
‘Was Alex Dunn your vet at the time?’
Candy ran a hand through his thick chestnut hair. ‘Alex Dunn’s never set foot inside the place.’
‘One of his deputies?’
Candy shook his head. ‘We’ve checked every single person who’s crossed the threshold in the past two years. All employees are thoroughly vetted as a matter of course. Every visitor has to go through a security point where a Polaroid is taken and logged on file. We’ve gone back on everyone right down to the newspaper delivery boys, put private investigators on to many of them. The budget for this just topped half a million and climbing.’
‘How much are you paying to keep it out of the papers?’
‘Nothing. That’s one thing we’ve been terrified of. No more than half a dozen people know about the problem.’
‘What about the private investigators?’
He shook his head again, shiny hair swinging. ‘They were given a specific brief on each individual, that’s all.’
‘It was your boys who warned me off at Dunn’s place and took me to the seaside yesterday?’
He made an apologetic face. ‘’Fraid so.’
‘I wondered why they’d been so soft on me.’
‘I told them not to hurt you.’
‘You’re too kind, considering I was on your side.’
He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Eddie, we simply couldn’t risk you stumbling on what had been happening at The Gulf.’
‘Why the strong-arm stuff on Martin Corish, then? Was it just for the pictures?’
‘What?’ He looked baffled.
‘You sent someone else to the Corish Stud yesterday to get those pictures we took at Ascot.’
‘What pictures? I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’
I watched him closely, trying to figure out why he’d lie about it. I couldn’t think of a reason. ‘Do you know Martin Corish?’
‘I know of him.’
I explained about our partnership. Candy said whoever called on Martin wasn’t sent by him. That narrowed the field. Capshaw was in a one-horse race. I didn’t dwell on it with Candy. I wanted time to assemble my thoughts.
He said, ‘Can you keep this quiet, Eddie? It’ll be worth a lot of money to you.’
‘I’d rather find out who killed Brian Kincaid. And Alex Dunn.’
‘I’m sure we can do that, in time.’
‘How much time?’
‘As long as it takes to find a cure for these stallions and mares.’
I sat forward. ‘Mares?’
Candy rubbed his handsome face again, nodding slowly as he did so. ‘Of the mares we’ve managed to get in foal, seventy-three percent have aborted within days of the pregnancy being confirmed.’
‘Seventy-three percent?’
That weary nod again. ‘They’re still losing them. It’s gone on right through the season.’
‘Jesus, no wonder you look like shit!’
He let out a huge sigh. ‘I’ve never felt so under pressure in my life, Eddie. Picked exactly the wrong time to saddle myself with a mortgage that would choke a Clydesdale. Bought a holiday home in Barbados just after New Year. Now the boss is looking around at us and all I can see in his eyes is my P45.’
‘Spelt in Arabic?’
He managed another smile and I admired him for it. I knew I needn’t ask about the quality of the veterinary care in trying to nail this. The Sheikh could afford the best in the world and that was what he’d bought. The horses had been given false names and taken in small groups to expert vets to avoid raising suspicion in the mind of any individual vet. No reason for the infertility had been found, let alone a possible antidote.
If the Arab stallions were suffering the same affliction as Town Crier and the others, I believed the clue to any antidote lay among Dunn’s papers and lab samples, which had to be somewhere. Whoever was behind this wouldn’t want to stop at eight of the Sheikh’s stallions.
We talked about Dunn who, until now, hadn’t entered Candy’s equation. He’d concentrated solely on people who’d had access to The Gulf Stud. He accepted that there had to be a very strong chance that Dunn or his secret serum had to be involved, but the lack of motive troubled him.
‘He had close links with Capshaw, didn’t he?’ I said.
‘So?’
‘Didn’t the Sheikh take all his horses away from Capshaw?’
‘That was three
years ago.’
‘Revenge is a dish best savoured cold, as they say, Candy.’
‘Nah, he’s not the type…Capshaw’s not the type. He knew there was no malice in the horses being taken away.’
‘What was behind it?’
He shrugged. ‘Simple, the Sheikh was experimenting in having some of his horses trained in the Middle East. We’d seen improvement in the best we’d taken there and the Sheikh wanted to see what would happen by taking a full batch of horses of mixed ability at exactly the same time and preferably from the same stable. The idea was that they should, theoretically, show the same level of improvement.’
‘And did they?’
‘A large percentage did, quite a few.’
‘And you don’t believe Capshaw would have held a grudge?’
‘I know him quite well, Eddie, he was philosophical. We never ruled out sending some horses back to him.’
‘And did you?’
‘Not so far.’
I looked at him. ‘Maybe he ran out of patience?’
Candy sighed. ‘Even if we assume he did, do you really think he’d go to all this trouble to stick one up the Sheikh, for the sake of twenty lost training fees? Also, believe me, Alex Dunn has not been near those horses. Thirdly, what about the mares? Was Dunn giving them some sort of serum, too? And if he was, why are ours still aborting after his death?’
I didn’t have any answers. Candy looked even more tired and depressed. His brown eyes duller, as if leaking hope.
‘Do you want my help on this?’ I asked.
‘What I want, what I need more than anything else, Eddie, is for you to keep it quiet. I’m running out of options but I know that the only thing keeping me in a job is the fact that this hasn’t got out yet.’
‘You’ve got my word on it.’
He nodded, almost managed a tired smile.
I said, ‘Come on, the show ain’t over till the fat lady sings.’
He looked at me. ‘I think she’s doing her final warm-up in the dressing room.’
We talked some more and agreed that it would be unwise for me to be seen at The Gulf Stud. We arranged to meet again next morning, and Candy promised to have a full brief with him listing everything they’d done so far.
I expanded on my theory that Dunn hadn’t killed himself then asked Candy, ‘Can you find out exactly what effect a syringeful of prostaglandin would have on a man? I mean, chapter and verse: how it would actually kill him, how long he’d take to die, that sort of stuff.’
‘Okay.’ He noted it in a small leather-bound book. ‘I’ll speak to one of the vets and see you here at noon tomorrow.’ I nodded. As he turned to get out, I asked about his two henchmen and how much they knew.
‘Very little. They don’t ask questions.’ He grinned.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘Their names are Phil and Don. I call them the Heaverly Brothers.’
‘Most amusing. They were a big hit with me.’
‘Sorry, Eddie.’ But the grin grew wider, and when he left, I even managed a smile myself.
37
I drove home at speed, boosted by renewed enthusiasm and relief at no longer having to face cracking this alone. All I needed was the link between Dunn and The Gulf Stud. I also felt considerably easier knowing Phil and Don wouldn’t be paying me another visit.
Discovering Candy wasn’t behind it all brought relief too, and a strong confidence boost. It had to be Capshaw or someone close to him. My only reservation now was Candy’s insistence that Capshaw simply wasn’t the type. Was the trainer being controlled in the same way Dunn had been?
One thing was certain: somebody connected to Capshaw had those blackmail papers. And they had to know I’d been doing the same as Martin at Ascot, so why no threat to publish? Maybe branding Martin was meant to scare me off too. And perhaps I’d be best pretending for the moment that I’d taken fright.
I called Charlie Harris, the racecourse photographer, who agreed to send me copies of all the pictures he’d taken at Ascot the day we’d been there. Then, still convinced that Dunn was a key figure, I spent the rest of the day and long into the night with his betting records. The bets were broken down between those placed ‘live’ on course by Dunn and those placed by phone. By the time I met Candy again next day, I had an extensive chart showing which courses Dunn had attended on which days over the past ten months.
Candy, informal for once in yellow polo shirt and cream trousers, stared at the hand-written columns covering a dozen pages. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked.
‘Those eight stallions. I need to see their racing records.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if you’re convinced that security hasn’t been breached at The Gulf by Dunn or an accomplice, then Dunn must have got at those stallions on the racecourse.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Why? Each of the stallions had to be in the racecourse stables. Dunn would have been one of the few people with legitimate access.’
‘To do what? Every one of those stallions was tested for fertility before retirement and just afterwards. Every single one was satisfactory at the least. If anything was administered to them, it would have to have been after they’d finished racing.’
‘But you’ve already said it was impossible for anyone to get at them once they’d entered the stud. You can’t have it both ways, Candy. Now let me follow this hunch. Get me those racing records.’
He stared at me as though he wasn’t sure he trusted my judgment.
I said, ‘Come on, you’ve been negative for too long.’
His expression softened. ‘Okay. Fair enough. You’ll have them tomorrow.’
‘Today. Ring me with them later.’
‘No, it’s not safe to talk on the phone.’
‘Ring me from a call box.’
‘I’ll think about it. You’d better have a look at this first.’ He opened his black briefcase and pulled out a grey laptop. He entered a password and sat the PC on my lap. ‘When you’re ready to start reading hit that button, but as soon as the text starts scrolling up you have to concentrate hard to take everything in. You can’t return to anything you’ve missed because as each line moves up it’s deleted. No copies can be printed and it’s a real pain setting it up to run again. It’s a complete record of what has happened and what steps we’ve taken.’
I nodded, bemused, then hit the start button and concentrated like a man with a DIY vasectomy kit.
Most of it was unabsorbable: dates, times and results of veterinary tests on horses with annoyingly similar Arab names, employee biographies including some fairly detailed sexual histories and one sudden death, monies paid out to various ‘contractors’, Phil and Don the most recent. And all the time, the words disappeared off the top of the screen as though some invisible harvester was scything them. After God knows how long I was left with a grey void.
Bug-eyed and brain fizzing, I asked Candy who was supposed to benefit from this blizzard of information.
‘I told you, it’s a complete record.’
‘But what use is it?’
‘It logs everything that’s happened, everything we’ve done.’
‘Oh, I must have missed that part, the bit about what you’ve done. If this is it, Candy, you’ve done nothing. You’re no further forward. No wonder the old Sheikh’s spitting sand. If you can’t blind them with science, baffle them with bullshit. Is that the principle?’
He looked miffed. ‘The principle is to keep the whole thing under wraps, and that’s what we’ve achieved.’
I sighed and leaned back in my seat. ‘My old mum found out more yesterday morning than you guys have in all the months this covers. You should have brought someone in ages ago, someone who knew what they were doing.’
‘Eddie, it’s too sensitive and you know it.’
He was getting huffy now, but I was angry that all this money had been spent on vets and tests and badly briefed private investigators. Angry that I was still pr
etty much where I’d been two days ago. I’d expected Candy to have some serious stuff offering good leads. He reached across and snapped the lid closed on the computer, then took it and stuffed it back into the case.
We sat in silence, giving each other time to cool off. Candy’s window was open. I rolled mine down and the car sucked in a breeze that ruffled Candy’s thick hair. He pushed it back into place and stared out at the trees.
One coldly reported fact that had scrolled past my eyes was the death of another vet. It stuck in my mind. I said, ‘The vet who died, did they do a post mortem?’
‘Heart attack so far as we know.’
‘How old was he? What was his name again?’
‘Simon Nish. He was thirty-four.’
‘And he specialized in mares?’
‘Uhuh. He was good.’
‘But he didn’t know what was making them abort?’
‘No. It got him down badly.’
‘Did he have a history of heart trouble?’
‘Not that I know of. Why?’
‘I don’t know. It’s young for a heart attack.’
‘Not these days. I’m due about three myself.’
I looked across and smiled. Candy did too and that eased the tension. We talked some more about Simon Nish, who’d been found dead in bed at home just over two weeks ago. ‘Definitely natural causes? No question of suicide?’
‘Nope. Poor bugger probably died of exhaustion. He tested those mares to distraction, had his arm inside so many of them in was unusual to see him without a mare’s arse attached to his shoulder.’
‘And he had nothing to do with the stallions?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Never went near them?’
‘What difference would it make if he did? He was trusted. He’d been with us for years.’
‘I’m not slagging him off, Candy. I’m just trying to eliminate the possibility of him having been killed off as Dunn was.’
‘He had absolutely no connection with Dunn.’
‘Can you double check that?’
