Banker

MAY

On and off for the next two weeks I worked on Oliver’s financial chaos at my desk in the bank, and at a special board meeting argued the case for giving him time before we foreclosed and made him sell all he had.
I asked for three months, which was considered scandalously out of the question, but got him two, Gordon chuckling over it quietly as we went down together afterwards in the lift.
‘I suppose two months was what you wanted?’ he said.
‘Er… yes.’
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘They were talking of twenty-one days maximum before the meeting, and some wanted to bring in liquidators at once.’
I telephoned Oliver and told him. ‘For two months you don’t have to pay any interest or capital repayments, but this is only temporary, and it is a special, fairly unusual concession. I’m afraid, though, that if we can’t find a solution to Sand-castle’-S problem or come up with a cast-iron reason for the insurance company to pay out, the prognosis is not good.’
‘I understand,’ he said, his voice sounding calm. ‘I haven’t much hope, but thank you, all the same, for the respite – I will at least be able to finish the programmes for the other stallions, and keep all the foals here until they’re old enough to travel safely.’
‘Have you heard anything about Sandcastle?’
‘He’s been at the Research Establishment for a week, but so far they can’t find anything wrong with him. They don’t hold out much hope, I’d better tell you, of being able to prove anything one way or another about his sperm, even though they’re sending specimens to another laboratory, they say.’
‘They’ll do their best.’
‘Yes, I know. But… I walk around here as if this place no longer belongs to me. As if it isn’t mine. I know, inside, that I’m losing it. Don’t feel too badly, Tim. When it comes, I’ll be prepared.’
I put the receiver down not knowing whether such resignation was good because he would face whatever came without disintegration, or bad because he might be surrendering too soon. A great host of other troubles still lay ahead, mostly in the shape of breeders demanding the return of their stallion fees, and he needed energy to say that in most cases he couldn’t return them. The money had already been lodged with us, and the whole situation would have to be sorted out by lawyers.
The news of Sandcastle’s disgrace was so far only a doubtful murmur here and there, but when it all broke open with a screech it was, I suppose predictably, in What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t.
The bank’s six copies were read to rags before lunch on the day Alec fetched them, eyes lifting from the page with anything from fury to a wry smile.
Three short paragraphs headed ‘House on Sand’, said:
Build not your house on sand. Stake not your banking house on a Sandcastle.
The five million pounds advanced by a certain prestigious merchant bank for the purchase of the stallion Sandcastle now look like being washed away by the tide. Sadly, the investment has produced faulty stock, or in plain language, several deformed foals.
Speculation now abounds as to what the bank can do to minimise its losses, since Sandcastle himself must be considered as half a ton of highly priced dog-meat.
‘That’s done it,’ Gordon said, and I nodded: and the dailies, who always read What’s Going On as a prime news source, came up in the racing columns the next day with a more cautious approach, asking ‘Sandcastle’s Progeny Flawed?’ and saying things like ‘rumours have reached us’ and ‘we are reliably informed.’
Since our own home-grown leaker for once hadn’t mentioned the bank by name, none of the dailies did either, and for them of course the bank itself was unimportant compared with the implications of the news.
Oliver, in the next weekday issues, was reported as having been asked how many, precisely, of Sandcastle’s foals were deformed, and as having answered that he didn’t know. He had heard of some, certainly, yes. He had no further comment.
A day later still the papers began printing reports telephoned into them by the stud farms where Sandcastle’s scattered progeny had been foaled, and the tally of disasters mounted. Oliver was reported this time as having said the horse was at the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket, and everything possible was being done.
‘It’s a mess,’ Henry said gloomily at lunch, and even the dissenting director had run out of insults, beyond saying four times that we were the laughing-stock of the City and it was all my fault.
‘Have they found out who killed Knowles’daughter?’ Val Fisher asked.
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘He says the police no longer come to the house.’
Val looked regretful. ‘Such a sadness for him, on top of the other.’
There were murmurs of sympathy and I didn’t think I’d spoil it by telling them what the police thought of Oliver’s lads.
That man Wyfold,’ Oliver had said on the telephone during one of our almost daily conversations, ‘he more or less said I was asking for trouble, having a young girl on the place with all those lads. What’s more, it seems many of them were half-way drunk that night, and with three pubs in the village they weren’t even all together and have no idea of who was where at what time, so one of Wyfold’s theories is that one of them jumped her and Dave and Sammy interrupted him. Alternatively Nigel did it. Alternatively some stranger walking down the road did it. Wyfold’s manner is downright abrasive but I’m past caring. He despises my discipline. He says I shouldn’t let my lads get drunk – as if anyone could stop them. They’re free men. It’s their business, not mine, what they do with their money and time on Sunday nights. I can only take action if they don’t turn up on Monday morning. And as for Nigel being paralytic!’ Words momentarily failed him. ‘How can Nigel possibly expect the lads to stay more or less sober if he gets like that? And he says he can’t remember anything that happened the night Ginnie died. Nothing at all. Total alcoholic black-out. He’s been very subdued since.’
The directors, I felt, would not be any more impressed than the Detective Chief Inspector with the general level of insobriety, and I wondered whether Nigel’s slackness with the lads in general had always stemmed from a knowledge of his own occasional weakness.
The police had found no weapon, Oliver said on another day. Wyfold had told him that there was no way of knowing what had been used to cause the depressed fracture at the base of her brain. Her hair over the fracture bore no traces of anything unexpected. The forensic surgeon was of the opinion that there had been a single very heavy blow. She would have been knocked unconscious instantly. She wouldn’t even have known. The period of apparent semi-consciousness had been illusory: parts of her brain would have functioned but she would not have been aware of anything at all.
‘I suppose it’s a mercy,’ Oliver said. ‘With some girls you hear of… how do their parents bear it?’
His wife, he said, had gone back to Canada. Ginnie’s death seemed not to have brought mother and father together, but to have made the separation complete.
‘The dog shampoo?’ Oliver repeated, when I asked. ‘Wyfold says that’s just what it was, they checked it. He asked Nigel and all the lads if it was theirs, if they’d used it for washing Squibs, but none of them had. He seems to think Ginnie may have seen it lying in the road and picked it up, or that she got into conversation over the gate with a man who gave her the shampoo for Squibs as a come-on and then killed her afterwards.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’d have taken the shampoo away again with him.’
‘Wyfold says not if he couldn’t find it, because of its being dark and her having hidden it to all intents and purposes under her skirt and two jumpers, and not if Dave and Sammy arrived at that point.’
‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I said doubtfully.
‘Wyfold says that particular shampoo isn’t on sale at all in England, it’s American, and there’s absolutely no way at all of tracing how it got here. There weren’t any fingerprints of any use; all a blur except a few of yours and mine.’
Another day he said, ‘Wyfold told me the hardest murders to solve were single blows on the head. He said the case would remain open, but they are busy again with another girl who was killed walking home from a dance, and this time she definitely is one of that dreadful series, poor child… I was lucky, Tim, you know, that Dave and Sammy came back when they did.’
There came a fine May day in the office when Alec, deciding we needed some fresh air, opened one of the windows which looked down to the fountain. The fresh air duly entered but like a lion, not a lamb, and blew papers off all the desks.
‘That’s a hurricane,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake shut it.’
Alec closed off the gale and turned round with a grin. ‘Sorry and all that,’ he said.
We all left our chairs and bent down like gleaners to retrieve our scattered work, and during my search for page 3 of a long assessment of a proposed sports complex I came across a severe and unwelcome shock in the shape of a small pale blue sheet off a memo pad.
There were words pencilled on it and crossed out with a wavy line, with other words underneath.
Build your castle not on Sand was crossed out, and so was Sandcastle gone with the tide, and underneath was written Build not your house on Sand. Build not your banking house on a Sandcastle.
‘What’s that?’ Alec said quickly, seeing it in my hand and stretching out his own. ‘Let’s see.’
I shook my head and kept it in my own hand while I finished picking up the sportsdrome, and when order was restored throughout the office I said, ‘Come along to the interview room.’
‘Right now?’
‘Right now.’
We went into the only room on our floor where any real privacy was possible and I said without shilly-shallying, ‘This is your handwriting. Did you write the article in What’s Going On?’
He gave me a theatrical sigh and a tentative smile and a large shrug of the shoulders.
‘That’s just doodling,’ he said. ‘It means nothing.’
‘It means, for a start,’ I said, ‘that you shouldn’t have left it round the office.’
‘Didn’t know I had.’
‘Did you write the article?’
The blue eyes unrepentantly gleamed at me from behind the gold rims. ‘It’s a fair cop, I suppose.’
‘But Alec…’ I protested.
‘Yeah.’
‘And the others,’ I said, ‘Those other leaks, was that you?’
He sighed again, his mouth twisting.
‘Was it?’ I repeated, wanting above all things to hear him deny it.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘What harm did it do? Yes, all right, the stories did come from me. I wrote them myself, actually, like that one.’ He pointed to the memo paper in my hand. ‘And don’t give me any lectures on disloyalty because none of them did us any harm. Did us good, if anything.’
‘Alec…’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but just think, Tim, what did those pieces really do? They stirred everyone up, sure, and it was a laugh a minute to see all their faces, but what else? I’ve been thinking about it, I assure you. It wasn’t why I did it in the first place, that was just wanting to stir things, I’ll admit, but because of what I wrote we’ve now got much better security checks than we had before.’
I listened to him open-mouthed.
‘All that work you did with the computer, making us safer against frauds, that was because of what I wrote. And the Corporate Finance boys, they now go around with their mouths zipped up like suitcases so as not to spill the beans to the investment managers. I did good, do you see, not harm.’
I stood and looked at him, at the tight tow-coloured curls, the cream coloured freckled skin, the eyes that had laughed with me for eight years. I don’t want to lose you, I thought: I wish you hadn’t done it.
‘And what about this piece about Sandcastle? What good has that done?’ I said.
He half grinned. ‘Too soon to say.’
I looked at the damaging scrap in my hands and almost automatically shook my head.
‘You’re going to say,’ Alec said, ‘that I’ll have to leave.’
I looked up. His face was wholly calm.
‘I knew I’d have to leave if any of you ever found out.’
‘But don’t you care?’ I said frustratedly.
He smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ll miss you, and that’s a fact. But as for the job… well, I told you, it’s not my whole life, like it is yours. I loved it, I grant you, when I came here. All I wanted was to be a merchant banker, it sounded great. But to be honest it was the glamour I suppose I wanted, and glamour never lasts once you’ve got used to something. I’m not a dedicated money-man at heart… and there’s honesty for you, I never thought I’d admit that, even to myself.’
‘But you do it well.’
‘Up to a point. We discussed all that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said helplessly.
‘Yeah, well, so am I in a way, and in a way I’m not. I’ve been dithering for ages, and now that it isn’t my choice I’m as much relieved as anything.’
‘But… what will you do?’
He gave a full cherubic smile. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll approve.’
‘What, then?’
‘What’s Going On,’ he said, ‘have offered me a whole-time job.’ He looked at my shattered expression. ‘I’ve written quite a bit for them, actually. About other things, of course, not us. But in most editions there’s something of mine, a paragraph or two or a whole column. They’ve asked me several times to go, so now I will.’
I thought back to all those days when Alec had bounded out for the six copies and spent his next hour chuckling. Alec, the gatherer of news, who knew all the gossip.
‘They get masses of information in,’ Alec said, ‘but they need someone to evaluate it all properly, and there aren’t so many merchant bankers looking for that sort of job.’
‘No,’ I said dryly. ‘I can imagine. For a start, won’t your salary be much less?’
‘A bit,’ he admitted, cheerfully. ‘But my iconoclastic spirit will survive.’
I moved restlessly, wishing things had been different.
‘I’ll resign from here,’ he said. ‘Make it easier.’
Rather gloomily I nodded. ‘And will you say why?’
He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘If you really want me to, yes,’ he said finally. ‘Otherwise not. You can tell them yourself, though, after I’ve gone, if you want to.’
‘You’re a damned fool,’ I said explosively, feeling the loss of him acutely. ‘The office will be bloody dull without you.’
He grinned, my long-time colleague, and pointed to the piece of memo paper. ‘I’ll send you pin-pricks now and then. You won’t forget me. Not a chance.’
Gordon, three days later, said to me in surprise, ‘Alec’s leaving, did you know?’
‘I knew he was thinking of it.’
‘But why? He’s good at his job, and he always seemed happy here.’
I explained that Alec had been unsettled for some time and felt he needed to change direction.
‘Amazing,’ Gordon said. ‘I tried to dissuade him, but he’s adamant. He’s going in four weeks.’
Alec, indeed, addressed his normal work with the bounce and zealousness of one about to be liberated, and for the rest of his stay in the office was better company than ever. Chains visibly dropped from his spirits, and I caught him several times scribbling speculatively on his memo pad with an anything but angelic grin.
Oliver had sent me at my request a list of all the breeders who had sent their mares to Sandcastle the previous year, and I spent two or three evenings on the telephone asking after those foals we didn’t know about. Oliver himself, when I’d asked him, said he frankly couldn’t face the task, and I didn’t in the least blame him: my enquiries brought forth an ear-burning amount of blasphemy.
The final count came to:
Five foals born outwardly perfect but dead within two weeks because of internal abnormalities.
One foal born with one eye. (Put down.)
Five foals born with deformed legs, deformation varying from a malformed hoof to the absent half-leg of Plus Factor’s colt. (All put down.)
Three foals born with part of one or both ears missing. (All still living.)
One foal born with no tail. (Still living.)
Two foals born with malformed mouths, the equivalent of human hare lip. (Both put down.)
One foal born with a grossly deformed head. (Foaled with heart-beat but couldn’t breathe; died at once.)
Apart from this horrifying tally, four mares who had been sent home as in foal had subsequently ‘slipped’ and were barren: one mare had failed to conceive at all; three mares had not yet foaled (breeders’ comments incendiary); and fourteen mares had produced live healthy foals with no defects of any sort.
I showed the list to Gordon and Henry, who went shockedly silent for a while as if in mourning for the superb racer they had so admired.’
‘There may be more to come,’ I said, not liking it. ‘Oliver says thirty mares covered by Sandcastle this year are definitely in foal. Some of those will be all right… and some may not.’
‘Isn’t there a test you can do to see if a baby is abnormal?’ Henry said. ‘Can’t they do that with the mares, and abort the deformed foals now, before they grow?’
I shook my head, ‘I asked Oliver that. He says amniocentesis – that’s what that process is called – isn’t possible with mares. Something to do with not being able to reach the target with a sterile needle because of all the intestines in the way.’
Henry listened with the distaste of the non-medical to these clinical realities. ‘What it means, I suppose,’ he said, ‘is that the owners of all of those thirty-one mares will have the foals aborted and demand their money back.’
‘I’d think so, yes.’
He shook his head regretfully. ‘So sad, isn’t it. Such a shame. Quite apart from the financial loss, a tragedy in racing terms.’
Oliver said on the telephone one morning, ‘Tim, I need to talk to you. Something’s happened.’
‘What?’ I said, with misgivings.
‘Someone has offered to buy Sandcastle.’
I sat in a mild state of shock, looking at Alec across the room sucking his pencil while he wrote his future.
‘Are you there?’ Oliver said.
‘Yes. What for and for how much?’
‘Well, he says to put back into training. I suppose it’s possible. Sandcastle’s only five. I suppose he could be got fit to race by August or September, and he might still win next year at six.’
‘Good heavens.’
‘He’s offering twenty-five thousand pounds.’
‘Um,’ I said. ‘Is that good or bad?’
‘Realistically, it’s as much as he’s worth.’
‘I’ll consult with my seniors here,’ I said. ‘It’s too soon, this minute, to say yes or no.’
‘I did tell him that my bankers would have to agree, but he wants an answer fairly soon, because the longer the delay the less time there is for training and racing this season.’
‘Yes,’ I said, understanding. ‘Where is he? Sandcastle, I mean.’
‘Still in Newmarket. But it’s pointless him staying there any longer. They haven’t found any answers. They say they just don’t know what’s wrong with him, and I think they want me to take him away.’
‘Well,’ I pondered briefly. ‘You may as well fetch him, I should think.’
‘I’ll arrange it,’ he said.
‘Before we go any further,’ I said. ‘Are you sure it’s a bona-fide offer and not just some crank?’
‘I had a letter from him and I’ve talked to him on the telephone, and to me he sounds genuine,’ Oliver answered. ‘Would you like to meet him?’
‘Perhaps, yes.’
We fixed a provisional date for the following Saturday morning, and almost as an afterthought I asked the potential buyer’s name.
‘Smith,’ Oliver said. ‘A Mr Dissdale Smith.’
I went to Hertfordshire on that Saturday with a whole host of question marks raising their eyebrows in my mind, but it was Dissdale, as it so happened, who had the deeper astonishment.
He drove up while I was still outside Oliver’s house, still clasping hands in greeting and talking of Ginnie. Dissdale had come without Bettina, and the first thing he said, emerging from his car, was ‘Hello, Tim, what a surprise, didn’t know you knew Oliver Knowles.’
He walked across, announced himself, shook hands with Oliver, and patted me chubbily on the shoulder. ‘How’s things, then? How are you doing, Tim?’
Fine,’ I said mildly.
Oliver looked from one of us to the other. ‘You know each other already?’
Dissdale said, ‘How do you mean, already?’
‘Tim’s my banker,’ Oliver said in puzzlement. ‘It was his bank, Ekaterin’s, which put up the money for Sandcastle.’
Dissdale stared at me in stunned amazement and looked bereft of speech.
‘Didn’t you know?’ Oliver said. ‘Didn’t I mention it?’
Dissdale blankly shook his head and finally found his voice. ‘You just said your banker was coming.… I never for a moment thought…’
‘It doesn’t make much odds,’ Oliver said. ‘If you know each other it may simply save some time. Let’s go indoors. There’s some coffee ready.’ He led the way through his immaculate house to the sitting room-office, where a tray stood on the desk with coffee hot in a pot.
Oliver himself had had four weeks by then in that house without Ginnie, but to me, on my first visit back, she seemed still most sharply alive. It was I, this time, who kept expecting her to walk into the room; to give me a hug, to say hello with her eyes crinkling with welcome. I felt her presence vividly, to an extent that to start with I listened to Dissdale with only surface attention.
‘It might be better to geld him,’ he was saying. ‘There are some good prizes, particularly overseas, for geldings.’
Oliver’s instinctive response of horror subsided droopingly to defeat.
‘It’s too soon,’ I said, ‘to talk of that.’
‘Tim, face facts,’ Dissdale said expansively. ‘At this moment in time that horse is a walking bomb. I’m making an offer for him because I’m a bit of a gambler, you know that, and I’ve a soft spot for him, whatever his faults, because of him winning so much for me that day the year before last, when we were all in my box at Ascot. You remember that, don’t you?’
‘I do indeed.’
‘He saved my life, Sandcastle did.’
‘It was partly because of that day,’ I said, nodding, ‘That Ekaterin’s lent the money for him. When the request came in from Oliver, it was because Henry Shipton – our chairman, if you remember – and Gordon and I had all seen the horse in action that we seriously considered the proposition.’
Dissdale nodded his comprehension. ‘A great surprise, though,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it’s you and Gordon. Sorry it’s your bank, I mean, that’s been hit so hard. I read about the deformed foals in the papers, of course, and that’s what gave me the idea of buying Sandcastle in the first place, but it didn’t say which bank.…’
I wondered fleetingly if Alec could claim that omission as a virtue along with everything else.
Oliver offered Dissdale more coffee which he accepted with cream and sugar, drinking almost absentmindedly while he worked through the possible alterations he would need in approach now he’d found he was dealing with semi-friends.
Having had time myself over several days to do it, I could guess at the speed he was needing for reassessment.
‘Dissdale,’ I said neutrally, deciding to disrupt him, ‘Did the idea of buying Sandcastle come from your profitable caper with Indian Silk?’
His rounded features fell again into shock. ‘How… er… did you know about that?’
I said vaguely, ‘Heard it on the racecourse, I suppose. But didn’t you buy Indian Silk for a pittance because he seemed to be dying, and then sent him to Calder?’
‘Well…’
‘And didn’t Calder cure him? And then you sold him again, but well this time, no doubt needing the money, as don’t we all, since when Indian Silk’s won the Cheltenham Gold Cup? Isn’t that right?’
Dissdale raised a plump hand palm upwards in a gesture of mock defeat. ‘Don’t know where you heard it, but yes, there’s no secret, that’s what happened.’
‘Mm.’ I smiled at him benignly. ‘Calder said on television, didn’t he, that buying Indian Silk was his idea originally, so I wondered… I’m wondering if this is his idea too. I mean, did he by any chance suggest a repeat of the gamble that came off so happily last time?’
Dissdale looked at me doubtfully.
‘There’s nothing wrong in it,’ I said. ‘Is it Calder’s idea?’
‘Well, yes,’ he said, deciding to confide. ‘But it’s my money, of course.’
‘And, um, if you do buy Sandcastle, will you send him too along to Calder, like Indian Silk?’
Dissdale seemed not to know whether to answer or not, but appearing to be reassured by my friendly interest said finally, ‘Calder said he could give him a quick pepping-up to get him fit quickly for racing, yes.’
Oliver, having listened restlessly up to this point, said, ‘Calder Jackson can’t do anything for Sandcastle that I can’t.’
Both Dissdale and I looked at Oliver in the same way, hearing the orthodox view ringing out with conviction and knowing that it was very likely untrue.
‘I’ve been thinking these past few days,’ I said to Dissdale, ‘First about Indian Silk. Didn’t you tell Fred Barnet, when you offered him a rock-bottom price, that all you were doing was providing a dying horse with a nice quiet end in some gentle field?’
‘Well, Tim,’ he said knowingly. ‘You know how it is. You buy for the best price you can. Fred Barnet, I know he goes round grousing that I cheated him, but I didn’t, he could have sent his horse to Calder the same as I did.’
I nodded. ‘So now, be honest, Dissdale, are you planning again to buy for the best price you can? I mean, does twenty-five thousand pounds for Sandcastle represent the same sort of bargain?’
‘Tim,’ Dissdale said, half affronted, half in sorrow, ‘What a naughty suspicious mind. That’s not friendly, not at all.’
I smiled. ‘I don’t think I’d be wise, though, do you, to recommend to my board of directors that we should accept your offer without thinking it over very carefully?’
For the first time there was a shade of dismay in the chubby face. ‘Tim, it’s a fair offer, anyone will tell you.’
‘I think my board may invite other bids,’ I said. ‘If Sandcastle is to be sold, we must recoup the most we can.’
The dismay faded: man-of-the-world returned. ‘That’s fair,’ he said. ‘As long as you’ll come back to me, if anyone tops me.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘An auction, by telephone. When we’re ready, I’ll let you know.’
With a touch of anxiety he said, ‘Don’t wait too long. Time’s money, you know.’
‘I’ll put your offer to the board tomorrow.’
He made a show of bluff contentment, but the anxiety was still there underneath. Oliver took the empty coffee cup which Dissdale still held and asked if he would like to see the horse he wanted to buy.
‘But isn’t he in Newmarket?’ Dissdale said, again looking disconcerted.
‘No, he’s here. Came back yesterday.’
‘Oh. Then yes, of course, yes, I’d like to see him.’
He’s out of his depth, I thought abruptly: for some reason Dissdale is very very unsettled.
We went on the old familiar walk through the yards, with Oliver explaining the lay-out to the new visitor. To me there was now a visible thinning out of numbers, and Oliver, with hardly a quiver in his voice, said that he was sending the mares home with their foals in an orderly progression as usual, with in consequence lower feed bills, fewer lads to pay wages to, smaller expenses all round: he would play fair with the bank, he said, matter-of-factly, making sure to charge what he could and also to conserve what he could towards his debt. Dissdale gave him a glance of amused incredulity as if such a sense of honour belonged to a bygone age, and we came in the end to the stallion yard, where the four heads appeared in curiosity.
The stay in Newmarket hadn’t done Sandcastle much good, I thought. He looked tired and dull, barely arching his neck to lift his nose over the half-door, and it was he, of the four, who turned away first and retreated into the gloom of his box.
‘Is that Sandcastle?’ Dissdale said, sounding disappointed. ‘I expected something more, somehow.’
‘He’s had a taxing three weeks,’ Oliver said. ‘All he needs is some good food and fresh air.’
‘And Calder’s touch,’ Dissdale said with conviction. ‘That magic touch most of all.’
When Dissdale had driven away Oliver asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘If Dissdale’s offering twenty-five thousand he’s certainly reckoning to make much more than that. He’s right, he is a gambler, and I’ll bet he has some scheme in mind. What we need to do is guess what the scheme is, and decide what we’ll do on that basis, such as doubling or trebling the ante.’
Oliver was perplexed. ‘How can we possibly guess?’
‘Hm,’ I said. ‘Did you know about Indian Silk?’
‘Not before today.’
‘Well, suppose Dissdale acts to a pattern, which people so often do. He told Fred Barnet he was putting Indian Silk out to grass, which was diametrically untrue; he intended to send him to Calder and with luck put him back in training. He told you he was planning to put Sandcastle back into training, so suppose that’s just what he doesn’t plan to do. And he suggested gelding, didn’t he?’
Oliver nodded.
‘Then I’d expect gelding to be furthest from his mind,’ I said. ‘He just wants us to believe that’s his intention.’ I reflected ‘Do you know what I might do if I wanted to have a real gamble with Sandcastle?’
‘What?’
‘It sounds pretty crazy,’ I said. ‘But with Calder’s reputation it might just work.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Oliver said in some bewilderment. ‘What gamble?’
‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘that you could buy for a pittance a stallion whose perfect foals would be likely to win races.’
‘But no one would risk…’
‘Suppose,’ I interrupted. ‘There was nearly a fifty per cent chance, going on this year’s figures, that you’d get a perfect foal. Suppose Dissdale offered Sandcastle as a sire at say a thousand pounds, the fee only payable if the foal was born perfect and lived a month.’
Oliver simply stared.
‘Say Sandcastle’s perfect progeny do win, as indeed they should. There are fourteen of them so far this year, don’t forget. Say that in the passage of time his good foals proved to be worth the fifty per cent risk. Say Sandcastle stands in Calder’s yard, with Calder’s skill on the line. Isn’t there a chance that over the years Dissdale’s twenty-five thousand pound investment would provide a nice steady return for them both?’
‘It’s impossible,’ he said weakly.
‘No, not impossible. A gamble.’ I paused. ‘You wouldn’t get people sending the top mares, of course, but you might get enough dreamers among the breeders who’d chance it.’
‘Tim…’
‘Just think of it,’ I said. ‘A perfect foal by Sandcastle for peanuts. And if you got a malformed foal, well, some years your mare might slip or be barren anyway.’
He looked at his feet for a while, and then into the middle distance, and then he said, ‘Come with me. I’ve something to show you. Something you’d better know.’
He set off towards the Watcherleys’, and would say nothing more on the way. I walked beside him down the familiar paths and thought about Ginnie because I couldn’t help it, and we arrived in the next-door yard that was now of a neatness to be compared with all the others.
‘Over here,’ Oliver said, going across to one of the boxes. ‘Look at that.’
I looked where directed: at a mare with a colt foal suckling, not unexpected in that place.
‘He was born three days ago,’ Oliver said. ‘I do so wish Ginnie had seen him.’
‘Why that one, especially?’
‘The mare is one of my own,’ he said. ‘And that foal is Sandcastle’s.’
It was my turn to stare. I looked from Oliver to the foal and back again. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘But…’
Oliver smiled twistedly. ‘I was going to breed her to Diarist. She was along here at the Watcherleys’ because the foal she had then was always ailing, but she herself was all right. I was along here looking at her one day when she’d been in season a while, and on impulse I led her along to the breeding pen and told Nigel to fetch Sandcastle, and we mated them there and then. That foal’s the result.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘He’ll be sold, of course, with everything else. I wish I could have kept him, but there it is.’
‘He should be worth quite a bit,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so,’ Oliver said. ‘And that’s the flaw in your gamble. It’s not just the racing potential that raises prices at auction, it’s the chance of breeding. And no one could be sure, breeding from Sandcastle’s stock, that the genetic trouble wouldn’t crop up for eveimore. It’s not on, I’m afraid. No serious breeder would send him mares, however great the bargain.’
We stood for a while in silence.
‘It was a good idea,’ I said, ‘while it lasted.’
‘My dear Tim… we’re clutching at straws.’
‘Yes.’ I looked at his calm strong face; the captain whose ship was sinking. ‘I’d try anything, you know, to save you,’ I said.
‘And to save the bank’s money?’
‘That too.’
He smiled faintly. ‘I wish you could, but time’s running out.’
The date for bringing in the receivers had been set, the insurance company had finally ducked, the lawyers were closing in and the respite I’d gained for him was trickling away with no tender plant of hope growing in the ruins.
We walked back towards the house, Oliver patting the mares as usual as they came to the fences.
‘I suppose this may all be here next year,’ he said, ‘looking much the same. Someone will buy it… it’s just I who’ll be gone.’
He lifted his head, looking away over his white painted rails to the long line of the roofs of his yards. The enormity of the loss of his life’s work settled like a weight on his shoulders and there was a haggard set to his jaw.
‘I try not to mind,’ he said levelly. ‘But I don’t quite know how to bear it.’
When I reached home that evening my telephone was ringing. I went across the sitting room expecting it to stop the moment I reached it, but the summons continued, and on the other end was Judith.
‘I just came in,’ I said.
‘We knew you were out. We’ve tried once or twice.’
I went to see Oliver.’
‘The poor, poor man.’ Judith had been very distressed over Ginnie and still felt that Oliver needed more sympathy because of his daughter than because of his bankruptcy, which I wasn’t sure was any longer the case. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Pen asked me to call you as she’s tied up in her shop all day and you were out when she tried… She says she’s had the reply from America about the shampoo and are you still interested?’
‘Yes, certainly.’
‘Then… if you’re not doinganything else… Gordon and I wondered if you’d care to come here for the day tomorrow, and Pen will bring the letter to show you.’
‘I’ll be there,’ I said fervently, and she laughed.
‘Good, then. See you.’
I was at Clapham with alacrity before noon, and Pen, over coffee, produced the letter from the drug company.
‘I sent them a sample of what you gave me in that little glass jar,’ she said. ‘And, as you asked, I had some of the rest of it analysed here, but honestly, Tim, don’t hope too much from it for finding out who killed Ginnie, it’s just shampoo, as it says.’
I took the official-looking letter which was of two pages clipped together, with impressive headings.
Dear Madam,
We have received the enquiry from your pharmacy and also the sample you sent us, and we now reply with this report, which is a copy of that which we recently sent to the Hertfordshire police force on the same subject.
The shampoo in question is our ‘Bannitch’ which is formulated especially for dogs suffering from various skin troubles, including eczema. It is distributed to shops selling goods to dog owners and offering cosmetic canine services, but would not normally be used except on the advice of a veterinarian.
We enclose the list of active ingredients and excipients, as requested.
‘What are excipients?’ I asked, looking up.
‘The things you put in with the active drug for various reasons,’ she said. ‘Like for instance chalk for bulk in pills.’
I turned the top page over and read the list on the second.
BANNITCH
EXCIPIENTS
Bentonite
Ethylene glycol monostearate
Citric acid
Sodium phosphate
Glyceryl monoricinoleate
Perfume
ACTIVE INGREDIENTS
Captan
Amphoteric
Selenium

‘Terrific,’ I said blankly. ‘What do they all mean?’
Pen, sitting beside me on the sofa, explained.
‘From the top… Bentonite is a thickening agent so that everything stays together and doesn’t separate out. Ethylene glycol monostearate is a sort of wax, probably there to add bulk. Citric acid is to make the whole mixture acid, not alkaline, and the next one, sodium phosphate, is to keep the acidity level more or less constant. Glyceryl monoricinoleate is a soap, to make lather, and perfume is there so that the dog smells nice to the owner when she’s washing him.’
‘How do you know so much?’ Gordon asked, marvelling.
‘I looked some of them up,’ said Pen frankly, with a smile. She turned back to me and pointed to the short lower column of active ingredients. ‘Captan and Amphoteric are both drugs for killing fungi on the skin, and Selenium is also anti-fungal and is used in shampoos to cure dandruff.’ She stopped and looked at me doubtfully. ‘I did tell you not to hope too much. There’s nothing there of any consequence.’
‘And nothing in the sample that isn’t on the manufacturer’s list?’
She shook her head. ‘The analysis from the British lab came yesterday, and the shampoo in Ginnie’s bottle contained exactly what it should.’
‘What did you expect, Tim?’ Gordon asked.
‘It wasn’t so much expect, as hope,’ I said regretfully. ‘Hardly hope, really. Just a faint outside chance.’
‘Of what?’
‘Well… the police thought – think – that the purpose of killing Ginnie was sexual assault, because of those other poor girls in the neighbourhood.’
They all nodded.
‘But it doesn’t feel right, does it? Not when you know she wasn’t walking home from anywhere, like the others, and not when she wasn’t actually, well, interfered with. And then she had the shampoo… and the farm was in such trouble, and it seemed to me possible, just slightly possible, that she had somehow discovered that something in that bottle was significant…’ I paused, and then said slowly to Pen, ‘I suppose what I was looking for was something that could have been put into Sandcastle’s food or water that affected his reproductive organs. I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t know anything about drugs… I just wondered.’
They sat in silence with round eyes, and then Gordon, stirring, said with an inflection of hope, ‘Is that possible, Pen? Could it be something like that?’
‘Could it possibly?’ Judith said.
‘My loves,’ Pen said. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked also as if whatever she said would disappoint us. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like that, I simply haven’t.’
‘That’s why I took the shampoo and gave it to you,’ I said. ‘I know it’s a wild and horrible idea, but I told Oliver I’d try everything, however unlikely.’
‘What you’re suggesting,’ Judith said plainly, ‘Is that someone might deliberately have given something to Sandcastle to make him produce deformed foals, and that Ginnie found out… and was killed for it.’
There was silence.
‘I’ll go and get a book or two,’ Pen said. ‘We’ll look up the ingredients, just in case. But honestly, don’t hope.’
She went home leaving the three of us feeling subdued. For me this had been the last possibility, although since I’d heard from Oliver that the police check had revealed only the expected shampoo in the bottle, it had become more and more remote.
Pen came back in half an hour with a thick tome, a piece of paper, and worried creases across her forehead. ‘I’ve been reading,’ she said. ‘Sorry to be so long. I’ve been checking up on sperm deformities, and it seems the most likely cause is ‘radiation.’
I said instantly, ‘Let’s ring Oliver.’
They nodded and I got through to him with Pen’s suggestion.
‘Tim!’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can get anyone in Newmarket… even though it’s Sunday… I’ll ring you back.’
‘Though how a stallion could get anywhere near a radioactive source,’ Pen said while we were waiting, ‘would be a first-class mystery in itself.’ She looked down at the paper she carried. ‘This is the analysis report from the British lab, bill attached, I’m afraid. Same ingredients, though written in the opposite order, practically, with selenium put at the top, which means that that’s the predominant drug, I should think.’
Oliver telephoned again in a remarkably short time. ‘I got the chief researcher at home. He says they did think of radiation but discounted it because it would be more likely to result in total sterility, and there’s also the improbability of a horse being near any radio-active isotopes.’ He sighed. ‘Sand-castle has never even been X-rayed.’
‘See if you can check,’ I said. ‘If he ever was irradiated in any way it would come into the category of accidental or even malicious damage, and we’d be back into the insurance policy.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll try.’
I put down the receiver to find Pen turning the pages of her large pharmacological book with concentration.
‘What’s that?’ Judith asked, pointing.
‘Toxicity of minerals,’ Pen answered absentmindedly. ‘Ethylene glycol…’ she turned pages, searching. ‘Here we are.’ She read down the column, shaking her head. ‘Not that, anyway.’ She again consulted the index, read the columns, shook her head. ‘Selenium… selenium…’ She turned the pages, read the columns, pursed her lips. ‘It says that selenium is poisonous if taken internally, though it can be beneficial on the skin.’ She read some more. ‘It says that if animals eat plants which grow in soil which has much selenium in it, they can die.’
‘What is selenium?’ Judith asked.
‘It’s an element,’ Pen said. ‘Like potassium and sodium.’ She read on, ‘It says here that it is mostly found in rocks of the Cretaceous Age – such useful information – and that it’s among the most poisonous of elements but also an essential nutrient in trace quantities for both animals and plants.’ She looked up. ‘It says it’s useful for flower-growers because it kills insects, and that it accumulates mostly in plants which flourish where there’s a low annual rainfall.’
‘Is that all?’ Gordon asked, sounding disappointed.
‘No, there’s pages of it. I’m just translating the gist into understandable English.’
She read on for a while, and then it seemed to me that she totally stopped breathing. She raised her head and looked at me, her eyes wide and dark.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Read it.’ She gave me the heavy book, pointing to the open page.
I read:
Selenium is absorbed easily from the intestines and affects every part of the body, more lodging in the liver, spleen, and kidneys than in brain and muscle. Selenium is teratogenic.
‘What does teratogenic mean?’ I asked.
‘It means,’ Pen said, ‘that it produces deformed offspring.’
‘What’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean…’
Pen was shaking her head. ‘It couldn’t affect Sandcastle. It’s impossible. It would simply poison his system. Teratogens have nothing to do with males.’
‘Then what…?’
‘They act on the developing embryo,’ she said. Her face crumpled almost as if the knowledge was too much and would make her cry. ‘You could get deformed foals if you fed selenium to the mares.’
I went on the following morning to see Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold, both Gordon and Harry concurring that the errand warranted time off from the bank. The forceful policeman shook my hand, gestured me to a chair and said briskly that he could give me fifteen minutes at the outside, as did I know that yet another young girl had been murdered and sexually assaulted the evening before, which was now a total of six, and that his superiors, the press and the whole flaming country were baying for an arrest? ‘And we are no nearer now,’ he added with anger, ‘than we were five months ago, when it started.’
He listened all the same to what I said about selenium, but in conclusion shook his head.
‘We looked it up ourselves. Did you know it’s the main mgredient in an anti-dandruff shampoo sold off open shelves all over America in the drug stores? It used to be on sale here too, or something like it, but it’s been discontinued. There’s no mystery about it. It’s not rare, nor illegal. Just ordinary.’
‘But the deformities…’
‘Look,’ he said restively, ‘I’ll bear it in mind. But it’s a big jump to decide from one bottle of ordinary dog shampoo that that’s what’s the matter with those foals. I mean, is there any way of proving it?’
With regret I said, ‘No, there isn’t.’ No animal, Pen’s book had inferred, would retain selenium in its system for longer than a day or two if it was eaten only once or twice and in non-fatal amounts.
‘And how, anyway,’ Wyfold said, ‘would you get a whole lot of horses to drink anything as nasty as shampoo?’ He shook his head. ‘I know you’re very anxious to catch Virginia Knowles’ killer, and don’t think we don’t appreciate your coming here, but we’ve been into the shampoo question thoroughly, I assure you.’
His telephone buzzed and he picked up the receiver, his eyes still turned in my direction but his mind already elsewhere. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Yes, all right. Straightaway.’ He put down the receiver. ‘I’ll have to go.’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘Isn’t it possible that one of the lads was giving selenium to the mares this year also, and that Ginnie somehow found out…’
He interrupted. ‘We tried to fit that killing onto one of those lads, don’t think we didn’t, but there was no evidence, absolutely none at all.’ He stood up and came round from behind his desk, already leaving me in mind as well as body. ‘If you think of anything else Mr Ekaterin, by all means let us know. But for now – I’m sorry, but there’s a bestial man out there we’ve got to catch – and I’m still of the opinion he tried for Virginia Knowles too, and was interrupted.’
He gave me a dismissing but not impatient nod, holding open the door and waiting for me to leave his office ahead of him. I obliged him by going, knowing that realistically he couldn’t be expected to listen to any further unsubstantiated theories from me while another victim lay more horribly and recently dead.
Before I went back to him, I thought, I had better dig further and come up with connected, believable facts, and also a basis, at least, for proof.
Henry and Gordon heard with gloom in the bank before lunch that at present we were ‘insufficient data’ in a Wyfold pigeonhole.
‘But you still believe, do you, Tim…?’ Henry said enquiringly.
‘We have to,’ I answered. ‘And yes, I do.’
‘Hm.’ He pondered. ‘If you need more time off from the office, you’d better take it. If there’s the slightest chance that there’s nothing wrong with Sandcastle after all, we must do our absolute best not only to prove it to our own satisfaction but also to the world in general. Confidence would have to be restored to breeders, otherwise they wouldn’t send their mares. It’s a tall order altogether.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well… I’ll do all I can’; and after lunch and some thought I telephoned to Oliver, whose hopes no one had so far raised.
‘Sit down,’ I said.
‘What’s the matter?’ He sounded immediately anxious. What’s happened?’
‘Do you know what teratogenic means?’ I said.
‘Yes, of course. With mares one always has to be careful.’
‘Mm… Well, there was a teratogenic drug in the bottle of dog shampoo that Ginnie had.’
‘What?’ His voice rose an octave on the word, vibrating with instinctive unthinking anger.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now calm down. The police say it proves nothing either way, but Gordon and Henry, our chairman, agree that it’s the only hope we have left.’
‘But Tim…’ The realisation hit him, ‘That would mean… that would mean…’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It would mean that Sandcastle was always breeding good and true and could return to gold-mine status.’
I could hear Oliver’s heavily disturbed breathing and could only guess at his pulse rate.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No. If shampoo had got into a batch of feed, all the mares who ate it would have been affected, not just those covered by Sandcastle.’
‘If the shampoo got into the feed accidentally, yes. If it was given deliberately, no.’
I can’t… I can’t…’
‘I did tell you to sit down,’ I said reasonably.
‘Yes, so you did.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m sitting,’ he said.
‘It’s at least possible,’ I said, ‘That the Equine Research people could find nothing wrong with Sandcastle because there actually isn’t anything wrong with him.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed faintly.
‘It is possible to give teratogenic substances to mares.’
‘Yes.’
‘But horses wouldn’t drink shampoo.’
‘No, thoroughbreds especially are very choosy.’
‘So how would you give them shampoo, and when?’
After a pause he said, still breathlessly, ‘I don’t know how. They’d spit it out. But when is easier, and that could probably be no more than three or four days after conception. That’s when the body tube is forming in the embryo… that’s when a small amount of teratogenic substance could do a lot of damage.’
‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that giving a mare selenium just once would ensure a deformed foal?’
‘Giving a mare what?’
‘Sorry. Selenium. A drug for treating dandruff.’
‘Good… heavens.’ He rallied towards his normal self. ‘I suppose it would depend on the strength of the dose, and its timing. Perhaps three or four doses… No one could really know, because no one would have tried… I mean, there wouldn’t have been any research.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But supposing that in this instance someone got the dosage and the timing right, and also found a way of making the shampoo palatable, then who was it?’
There was a long quietness during which even his breathing abated.
‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘Theoretically it could have been me, Ginnie, Nigel, the Watcherleys or any of the lads who were here last year. No one else was on the place often enough.
‘Really no one? How about the vet or the blacksmith or just a visiting friend?’
‘But there were eighteen deformed foals,’ he said. ‘I would think it would have to have been someone who could come and go here all the time.’
‘And someone who knew which mares to pick,’ I said. ‘Would that knowledge be easy to come by?’
‘Easy!’ he said explosively. ‘It is positively thrust at everyone on the place. There are lists in all the feed rooms and in the breeding pen itself saying which mares are to be bred to which stallion. Nigel has one, there’s one in my office, one at the Watcherleys – all over. Everyone is supposed to double-check the lists all the time, so that mistakes aren’t made.’
‘And all the horses,’ I said slowly, ‘Wear head-collars with their names on.’
‘Yes, that’s right. An essential precaution.’
All made easy, I thought, for someone intending mischief towards particular mares and not to any others.
‘Your own Sandcastle foal,’ I said, ‘he’s perfect… and it may be because on the lists your mare was down for Diarist.’
‘Tim!’
‘Look after him,’ I said. ‘And look after Sandcastle.’
‘I will,’ he said fervently.
‘And Oliver… is that lad called Shane still with you?’
‘No, he’s gone. So have Dave and Sammy, who found Ginnie.’
‘Then could you send me at the bank a list of the names and addresses of all the people who were working for you last year, and also this year? And I mean everyone, even your house-keeper and anyone working for Nigel or cleaning the lads’ hostel, things like that.’
‘Even my part-time secretary girl?’
‘Even her.’
‘She only comes three mornings a week.’
‘That might be enough.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it straight away.’
‘I went to see Chief Inspector Wyfold this morning,’ I said. ‘But he thinks it’s just a coincidence that Ginnie had shampoo with a foal-deforming drug in it. We’ll have to come up with a whole lot more, to convince him. So anything you can think of…’
‘I’ll think of nothing else.’
‘If Dissdale Smith should telephone you, pressing for an answer,’ I said, ‘just say the bank are deliberating and keeping you waiting. Don’t tell him anything about this new possibility. It might be best to keep it to ourselves until we can prove whether or not it’s true.’
‘Dear God,’ he said fearfully, ‘I hope it is.’
In the evening I talked to Pen, asking her if she knew of any way of getting the selenium out of the shampoo.
‘The trouble seems to be,’ I said, ‘That you simply couldn’t get the stuff into a horse as it is.’
‘I’ll work on it,’ she said, ‘But of course the manufacturer’s chemists will have gone to a good deal of trouble to make sure the selenium stays suspended throughout the mixture and doesn’t all fall to the bottom.’
‘It did say “Shake Well” on the bottle.’
‘Mm, but that might be for the soap content, not for the selenium.’
I thought. ‘Well, could you get the soap out, then? It must be the soap the horses wouldn’t like.’
‘I’ll try my hardest,’ she promised. ‘I’ll ask a few friends.’ She paused. ‘There isn’t much of the shampoo left. Only what I kept after sending the samples off to America and the British lab.’
‘How much?’ I said anxiously.
‘Half an egg-cupful. Maybe less.’
‘Is that enough?’
‘If we work in test-tubes… perhaps.’
‘And Pen… Could you or your friends make a guess, as well, as to how much shampoo you’d need to provide enough selenium to give a teratogenic dose to a mare?’
‘You sure do come up with some difficult questions, dearest Tim, but we’ll certainly try.’
Three days later she sent a message with Gordon, saying that by that evening she might have some answers, if I would care to go down to her house after work.
I cared and went, and with a smiling face she opened her front door to let me in.
‘Like a drink?’ she said.
‘Well, yes, but…’
‘First things first.’ She poured whisky carefully for me and Cinzano for herself. ‘Hungry?’
‘Pen…’
‘It’s only rolls with ham and lettuce in. I never cook much, as you know.’ She disappeared to her seldom-used kitchen and returned with the offerings, which turned out to be nicely squelchy and much what I would have made for myself.
‘All right,’ she said finally, pushing away the empty plates, ‘Now I’ll tell you what we’ve managed.’
‘At last.’
She grinned. ‘Yes. Well then, we started from the premise that if someone had to use shampoo as the source of selenium then that someone didn’t have direct or easy access to poisonous chemicals, which being so he also wouldn’t have sophisticated machinery available for separating one ingredient from another – a centrifuge, for instance. OK so far?’
I nodded.
‘So what we needed, as we saw it, was a simple method that involved only everyday equipment. Something anyone could co anywhere. So the first thing we did was to let the shampoo crip through a paper filter, and we think you could use almost anything for that purpose, like a paper towel, a folded tissue or tnin blotting paper. We actually got the best and fastest results from a coffee filter, which is after all specially designed to retain very fine solids while letting liquids through easily.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Highly logical.’
Pen smiled. ‘So there we were with some filter-papers in which, we hoped, the microscopic particles of selenium were trapped. The filters were stained bright green by the shampoo. I brought one here to show you… I’ll get it.’ She whisked off to the kitchen taking the empty supper plates with her, and returned carrying a small tray with two glasses on it.
One glass contained cut pieces of green-stained coffee filter lying in what looked like oil, and the second glass contained only an upright test-tube, closed at the top with a cork and showing a dark half-inch of solution at the bottom.
‘One of my friends in the lab knows a lot about horses,’ Pen said, ‘and he reckoned that all race horses are used to the taste of linseed oil, which is given them in their feed quite often as a laxative. So we got some linseed oil and cut up the filter and soaked it.’ She pointed to the glass. ‘The selenium particles floated out of the paper into the oil.’
‘Neat.’ I said.
‘Yes. So then we poured the result into the test-tube and just waited twenty-four hours or so, and the selenium particles slowly gravitated through the oil to the bottom.’ She looked at my face to make sure I understood. ‘We transferred the selenium from the wax-soap base in which it would remain suspended into an oil base, in which it wouldn’t remain suspended.’
‘I do understand,’ I assured her.
‘So here in the test-tube,’ she said with a conjuror’s flourish, ‘we have concentrated selenium with the surplus oil poured off.’ She picked the tube out of the glass, keeping it upright, and showed me the brownish shadowy liquid lying there, darkest at the bottom, almost clear amber at the top. ‘We had such a small sample to start with that this is all we managed to collect. But that dark stuff is definitely selenium sulphide. We checked it on a sort of scanner called a gas chromatograph.’ She grinned. ‘No point in not using the sophisticated apparatus when it’s there right beside you – and we were in a research lab of a teaching hospital, incidentally.’
‘You’re marvellous.’
‘Quite brilliant,’ she agreed with comic modesty. ‘We also calculated that that particular shampoo was almost ten per cent selenium, which is a very much higher proportion than you’d find in shampoos for humans. We all agree that this much, in the test-tube, is enough to cause deformity in a foal – or in any other species, for that matter. We found many more references in other books – lambs born with deformed feet, for instance, where the sheep had browsed off plants growing on selenium-rich soil. We all agree that it’s the time when the mare ingests the selenium that’s most crucial, and we think that to be sure of getting the desired result you’d have to give selenium every day for three or four days, starting two or three days after conception.’
I slowly nodded. ‘That’s the same sort of time-scale that Oliver said.’
‘And if you gave too much,’ she said, ‘Too large a dose, you’d be more likely to get abortions than really gross deformities. The embryo would only go on growing at all, that is, if the damage done to it by the selenium was relatively minor.’
‘There were a lot of different deformities,’ I said.
‘Oh sure. It could have affected any developing cell, regardless.’
I picked up the test-tube and peered closely at its murky contents. ‘I suppose all you’d have to do would be stir this into a cupful of oats.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Or… could you enclose it in a capsule?’
‘Yes, if you had the makings. We could have done it quite easily in the lab. You’d need to get rid of as much oil as possible, of course, in that case, and just scrape concentrated selenium into the capsules.’
‘Mm. Calder could do it, I suppose?’
‘Calder Jackson? Why yes, I guess he could if you wanted him to. He had everything there that you’d need.’ She lifted her head, remembering something. ‘He’s on the television tomorrow night, incidentally.’
‘Is he?’
‘Yes. They were advertising it tonight just after the news, before you came. He’s going to be a guest on that chat show… Mickey Bonwith’s show… Do you ever see it?’
‘Sometimes,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘It’s transmitted live, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She looked at me with slight puzzlement. ‘What’s going on in that computer brain?’
‘A slight calculation of risk,’ I said slowly, ‘and of grasping unrepeatable opportunities. And tell me, dearest Pen, if I found myself again in Calder’s surgery, what should I look for, to bring out?’
She stared at me literally with her mouth open. Then, recovering, she said, ‘You can’t mean… Calder?’
‘Well,’ I said soberly. ‘What I’d really like to do is to make sure one way or another. Because it does seem to me, sad though it is to admit it, that if you tie in Dissdale’s offer for Sandcastle with someone deliberately poisoning the mares, and then add Calder’s expertise with herbs – in which selenium-soaked plants might be included – you do at least get a question mark. You do want to know for sure, don’t you think, whether or not Calder and Dissdale set out deliberately to debase Sandcastle’s worth so that they could buy him for peanuts.… So that Calder could perform a well publicised “miracle cure” of some sort on Sandcastle, who would thereafter always sire perfect foals, and gradually climb back into favour. Whose fees might never return to forty thousand pounds, but would over the years add up to a fortune.’
‘But they couldn’t,’ Pen said, aghast. ‘I mean… Calder and Dissdale… we know them.’
‘And you in your trade, as I in mine, must have met presentable, confidence-inspiring crooks.’
She fell silent, staring at me in a troubled way, until finally I said, ‘There’s one other thing. Again nothing I could swear to – but the first time I went to Calder’s place he had a lad there who reminded me sharply of the boy with the knife at Ascot.’
‘Ricky Barnet,’ Pen said, nodding.
‘Yes. I can’t remember Calder’s lad’s name, and I couldn’t identify him at all now after all this time, but at Oliver’s I saw another lad, called Shane, who also reminded me of Ricky Barnet. I’ve no idea whether Shane and Calder’s lad are one and the same person, though maybe not, because I don’t think Calder’s lad was called Shane, or I would have remembered, if you see what I mean.’
‘Got you,’ she said.
‘But if – and it’s a big if – if Shane did once work for Calder, he might still be working for him… feeding selenium to mares.’
Pen took her time with gravity in the experienced eyes, and at last said, ‘Someone would have had to be there on the spot to do the feeding, and it certainly couldn’t have been Calder or Dissdale. But couldn’t it have been that manager, Nigel? It would have been easy for him. Suppose Dissdale and Calder paid him…? Suppose they promised to employ him, or even give him a share in Sandcastle, once they’d got hold of the horse.’
I shook my head. ‘I did wonder. I did think of Nigel. There’s one good reason why it probably isn’t him, though, and that’s because he and only he besides Oliver knew that one of the mares down for Diarist was covered by Sandcastle.’ I explained about Oliver’s impulse mating. ‘The foal is perfect, but might very likely not have been if it was Nigel who was doing the feeding.’
‘Not conclusive,’ Pen said, slowly.
‘No.’
She stirred. ‘Did you tell the police all this?’
‘I meant to,’ I said, ‘But when I was there with Wyfold on Monday it seemed impossible. It was all so insubstantial. Such a lot of guesses. Maybe wrong conclusions. Dissdale’s offer could be genuine. And a lad I’d seen for half a minute eighteen months ago… it’s difficult to remember a strange face for half an hour, let alone all that time. I have only an impression of blankness and of sunglasses… and I don’t have the same impression of Oliver’s lad Shane. Wyfold isn’t the sort of man to be vague to. I thought I’d better come up with something more definite before I went back to him.’
She bit her thumb. ‘Can’t you take another good look at this Shane?’
I shook my head. ‘Oliver’s gradually letting lads go, as he does every year at this time, and Shane is one who has already left. Oliver doesn’t know where he went and has no other address for him, which he doesn’t think very unusual. It seems rhat lads can drift from stable to stable for ever with their papers always showing only the address of their last or current employer. But I think we might find Shane, if we’re lucky.
‘How?’
‘By photographing Ricky Barnet, side view, and asking around on racetracks.’
She smiled. ‘It might work. It just might.’
‘Worth a try.’
My mind drifted back to something else worth a try, and it seemed that hers followed.
‘You don’t really mean to break into Calder’s surgery, do you?’ she said.
‘Pick the lock,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘But…’
‘Time’s running out, and Oliver’s future and the bank’s money with it, and yes, sure, I’ll do what I can.’
She curiously looked into my face. ‘You have no real conception of danger, do you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean… I saw you, that day at Ascot, simply hurl yourself at that boy, at that knife. You could have been badly stabbed, very easily. And Ginnie told us that you frightened her to tears jumping at Sandcastle the way you did, to catch him. She said it was suicidal… and yet you yourself seemed to think nothing of it. And at Ascot, that evening, I remember you being bored with the police questions, not stirred up high by a brush with death…’
Her words petered away. I considered them and found in myself a reason and an answer.
‘Nothing that has happened so far in my life,’ I said seriously, ‘has made me fear I might die. I think… I know it sounds silly… I am unconvinced of my own mortality.’