Banker

JUNE

On the following day, Friday, June 1st, I took up a long-offered invitation and went to lunch with the board of a security firm to whom we had lent money for launching a new burglar alarm on the market. Not greatly to their surprise I was there to ask a favour, and after a repast of five times the calories of Ekaterin’s they gave me with some amusement three keys which would unlock almost anything but the crown jewels, and also a concentrated course on how to use them.
‘Those pickers are strictly for opening doors in emergencies,’ the locksmiths said, smiling. ‘If you end up in jail, we don’t know you.’
‘If I end up in jail, send me another set in a fruit cake.’
I thanked them and left, and practised discreetly on the office doors in the bank, with remarkable results. Going home I let myself in through my own front door with them, and locked and unlocked every cupboard and drawer which had a keyhole. Then I put on a dark roll-neck jersey over my shirt and tie and with scant trepidation drove to Newmarket.
I left my car at the side of the road some distance from Calder’s house and finished the journey on foot, walking quietly into his yard in the last of the lingering summer dusk, checking against my watch that it was almost ten o’clock, the hour when Micky Bonwith led his guests to peacock chairs and dug publicly into their psyches.
Calder would give a great performance, I thought: and the regrets I felt about my suspicions of him redoubled as I looked at the outline of his house against the sky and remembered his uncomplicated hospitality.
The reserve which had always at bottom lain between us I now acknowledged as my own instinctive and stifled doubt. Wanting to see worth, I had seen it: and the process of now trying to prove myself wrong gave me more sadness than satisfaction.
His yard was dark and peaceful, all lads long gone. Within the hall of the house a single light burned, a dim point of yellow glimpsed through the bushes fluttering in a gentle breeze. Behind the closed doors of the boxes the patients would be snoozing, those patients with festering sores and bleeding guts and all manner of woes awaiting the touch.
Sandcastle, if I was right, had been destined to stand there, while Calder performed his ‘miracle’ without having to explain how he’d done it. He never had explained: he’d always broadcast publicly that he didn’t know how his power worked, he just knew it did. Thousands, perhaps millions, believed in his power. Perhaps even breeders, those dreamers of dreams, would have believed, in the end.
I came to the surgery, a greyish block in the advancing night, and fitted one of the lock-pickers into the keyhole. The internal tumblers turned without protest, much oiled and used, and I pushed the door open and went in.
There were no windows to worry about. I closed the door behind me and switched on the light, and immediately began the search for which I’d come: to find selenium in home-made capsules, or in a filtering device, or in bottles of shampoo.
Pen had had doubts that anyone would have risked giving selenium a second year if the first year’s work had proved so effective, but I’d reminded her that Sandcastle had already covered many new mares that year before the deformed foals had been reported.
‘Whoever did it couldn’t have known at that point that he’d been successful. So to make sure, I’d guess he’d go on, and maybe with an increased dose… and if no selenium was being given this year, why did Ginnie have it?’
Pen had reluctantly given in. ‘I suppose I’m just trying to find reasons for you not to go to Calder’s.’
‘If I find anything, Chief Inspector Wyfold can go there later with a search warrant. Don’t worry so.’
‘No,’ she’d said, and gone straight on looking anxious.
The locked cabinets at both ends of Calder’s surgery proved a doddle for the picks, but the contents were a puzzle, as so few of the jars and boxes were properly labelled. Some indeed had come from commercial suppliers, but these seemed mostly to be the herbs Calder had talked of: hydrastis, comfrey, fo-ti-tieng, myrrh, sarsaparilla, liquorice, passiflora, papaya, garlic; a good quantity of each.
Nothing was obligingly labelled selenium.
I had taken with me a thickish polythene bag which had a zip across one end and had formerly enclosed a silk tie and handkerchief, a present from my mother at Christmas. Into that I systematically put two or three capsules from each bottle, and two or three pills of each sort, and small sachets of herbs: and Pen, I thought, was going to have a fine old time sorting them all out.
With the bag almost half full of samples I carefully locked the cabinets again and turned to the refrigerator, which was of an ordinary domestic make with only a magnetic door fastening.
Inside there were no bottles of shampoo. No coffee filters. No linseed oil. There were simply the large plastic containers of Calder’s cure-all tonic.
I thought I might as well take some to satisfy Pen’s curiosity, and rooted around for a small container, finding some empty medicine bottles in a cupboard below the work bench. Over the sink I poured some of the tonic into a medicine bottle, screwed on the cap, and returned the plastic container carefully to its place in the ’fridge. I stood the medicine bottle on the workbench ready to take away, and turned finally to the drawers where Calder kept things like hops and also his antique pill-making equipment.
Everything was clean and tidy, as before. If he had made capsules containing selenium there, I could see no trace.
With mounting disappointment I went briefly through every drawer. Bags of seeds: sesame, pumpkin, sunflower. Bags of dried herbs, raspberry leaves, alfalfa. Boxes of the empty halves of gelatine capsules, waiting for contents. Empty unused pill bottles. All as before: nothing I hadn’t already seen.
The largest bottom drawer still contained the plastic sacks of hops. I pulled open the neck of one of them and found only the expected strong-smelling crop: closed the neck again, moving the bag slightly to settle it back into its place, and saw that under the bags of hops lay a brown leather briefcase, ordinary size, six inches deep.
With a feeling of wasting time I hauled it out onto the working surface on top of the drawers, and tried to open it.
Both catches were locked. I fished for the keys in my trousers pocket and with the smallest of the picks delicately twisted until the mechanisms clicked.
Opened the lid. Found no bottles of dog shampoo, but other things that turned me slowly to a state of stone.
The contents looked at first sight as if the case belonged to a doctor: stethoscope, pen torch, metal instruments, all in fitted compartments. A cardboard box without its lid held four or five small tubes of antibiotic ointment. A large bottle contained only a few small white pills, the bottle labelled with a long name I could scarcely read, let alone remember, with ‘diuretic’ in brackets underneath. A pad of prescription forms, blank, ready for use.
It was the name and address rubber-stamped onto the prescription forms and the initials heavily embossed in gold into the leather beneath the case’s handle which stunned me totally.
I.A.P. on the case.
Ian A. Pargetter on the prescriptions.
Ian Pargetter, veterinary surgeon, address in Newmarket.
His case had vanished the night he died.
This case…
With fingers beginning to shake I took one of the tubes of antibiotics and some of the diuretic pills and three of the prescription forms and added them to my other spoils, and then with a heart at least beating at about twice normal speed checked that everything was in its place before closing the case.
I felt as much as heard the surgery door open, the current of air reaching me at the same instant as the night sounds. I turned thinking that one of Calder’s lads had come on some late hospital rounds and wondering how I could ever explain my presence; and I saw that no explanation at all would do.
It was Calder himself crossing the threshold. Calder with the light on his curly halo, Calder who should have been a hundred miles away talking to the nation on the tube.
His first expression of surprise turned immediately to grim assessment, his gaze travelling from the medicine bottle of tonic mixture on the workbench to the veterinary case lying open. Shock, disbelief and fury rose in an instantly violent reaction, and he acted with such speed that even if I’d guessed what he would do I could hardly have dodged.
His right arm swung in an arc, coming down against the wall beside the door and pulling from the bracket which held it a slim scarlet fire extinguisher. The swing seemed to me continuous. The red bulbous end of the fire extinguisher in a split second filled my vision and connected with a crash against my forehead, and consciousness ceased within a blink.
The world came back with the same sort of on—off switch: one second I was unaware, the next, awake. No grey area of daze, no shooting stars, simply on—off, off—on.
I was lying on my back on some smelly straw in an electrically lit horse box with a brown horse peering at me suspiciously from six feet above.
I couldn’t remember for a minute how I’d got there; it seemed such an improbable position to be in. Then I had a recollection of a red ball crashing above my eyes, and then, in a snap, total recall of the evening.
Calder.
I was in a box in Calder’s yard. I was there because, presumably, Calder had put me there.
Pending? I wondered.
Pending what?
With no reassuring thoughts I made the moves to stand up, but found that though consciousness was total, recovery was not. A whirling dizziness set the walls tilting, the grey concrete blocks seeming to want to lean in and fall on me. Cursing slightly I tried again more slowly and made it to one elbow with eyes balancing precariously in their sockets.
The top half of the stable door abruptly opened with the sound of an unlatching bolt. Calder’s head appeared in the doorway, his face showing shock and dismay as he saw me awake.
‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you’d be unconscious… that you wouldn’t know. I hit you so hard… you’re suppose to be out.’ His voice saying these bizarre words sounded nothing but normal.
‘Calder…’ I said.
He was looking at me no longer with anger but almost with apology. ‘I’m sorry, Tim,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry you came.’
The walls seemed to be slowing down.
‘Ian Pargetter…’ I said. ‘Did you… kill him? Not you?’
Calder produced an apple and fed it almost absentmindedly to the horse. ‘I’m sorry, Tim. He was so stubborn. He refused…’ He patted the horse’s neck. ‘He wouldn’t do what I wanted. Said it was over, he’d had enough. Said he’d stop me, you know.’ He looked for a moment at the horse and then down to me. ‘Why did you come? I’ve liked you. I wish you hadn’t.’
I tried again to stand up and the whirling returned as before. Calder took a step backwards, but only one, stopping when he saw my inability to arise and charge.
‘Ginnie,’ I said. ‘Not Ginnie… Say it wasn’t you who hit Ginnie…’
He simply looked at me, and didn’t say it. In the end he said merely, and with clear regret, ‘I wish I’d hit you harder… but it seemed… enough.’ He moved another step backwards so that I could see only the helmet of curls under the light and dark shadows where his eyes were; and then while I was still struggling to my knees he closed the half door and bolted it, and from outside switched off the light.
Night-blindness made it even harder to stand up but at least I couldn’t see the walls whirl, only feel they were spinning. I found myself leaning against one of them and ended more or less upright, spine supported, brain at last settling into equilibrium.
The grey oblong of window gradually detached itself from the blackness, and when my equine companion moved his head I saw the liquid reflection of an eye.
Window… way out.
I slithered round the walls to the window and found it barred on the inside, not so much to keep horses in, I supposed, but to prevent them breaking the glass. Five strong bars, in any case, were set in concrete top and bottom, as secure as any prison cell, and I shook them impotently with two hands in proving them immovable.
Through the dusty window panes I had a sideways view across the yard towards the surgery, and while I stood there and held onto the bars and watched, Calder went busily in and out of the open lighted doorway, carrying things from the surgery to his car. I saw what I was sure was Ian Pargetter’s case go into the boot, and remembered with discomfiture that I’d left the bunch of picks in one of its locks. I saw him carry also an armful of the jars which contained unlabelled capsules and several boxes of unguessable contents, stowing them in the boot carefully and closing them in.
Calder was busy obliterating his tracks.
I yelled at him, calling his name, but he didn’t even hear or turn his head. The only result was startled movement in the horse behind me, a stamping of hooves and a restless swinging round the box.
‘All right,’ I said soothingly. ‘Steady down. All right. Don’t be frightened.’
The big animal’s alarm abated, and through the window I watched Calder switch off the surgery light, lock the door, get into his car and drive away.
He drove away out of his driveway, towards the main road, not towards his house. The lights of his car passed briefly over the trees as he turned out through the gates, and then were gone: and I seemed suddenly very alone, imprisoned in that dingy place for heaven knew how long.
Vision slowly expanded so that from the dim light of the sky I could see again the outlines within the box: walls, manger… horse. The big dark creature didn’t like me being there and wouldn’t settle, but I could think of no way to relieve him of my presence.
The ceiling was solid, not as in some stables open through the rafters to the roof. In many it would have been possible for an agile man to climb the partition from one box to the next, but not here; and in any case there was no promise of being better off next door. One would be in a different box but probably just as simply and securely bolted in.
There was nothing in my trousers pockets but a handkerchief. Penknife, money and house keys were all in my jacket in the boot of my own unlocked car out on the road. The dark jersey which had seemed good for speed, quiet and concealment had left me without even a coin for a screwdriver.
I thought concentratedly of what a man could do with his fingers that a horse couldn’t do with superior strength, but found nothing in the darkness of the door to unwind or unhinge; nothing anywhere to pick loose. It looked most annoyingly as if that was where I was going to stay until Calder came back.
And then… what?
If he’d intended to kill me, why hadn’t he already made sure of it? Another swipe or two with the fire extinguisher would have done… and I would have known nothing about it.
I thought of Ginnie, positive now that that was how it had been for her, that in one instant she had been thinking, and in the next… not.
Thought of Ian Pargetter, dead from one blow of his own brass lamp. Thought of Calder’s shock and grief at the event, probably none the less real despite his having killed the man he mourned. Calder shattered over the loss of a business friend… the friend he had himself struck down.
He must have killed him, I thought, on a moment’s ungovernable impulse, for not… what had he said?… for not wanting to go on, for wanting to stop Calder doing… what Calder planned.
Calder had struck at me with the same sort of speed: without pause for consideration, without time to think of consequences. And he had lashed at me as a friend too, without hesitation, while saying shortly after that he liked me.
Calder, swinging the fire extinguisher, had ruthlessly aimed at killing the man who had saved his life.
Saved Calder’s life… Oh God, I thought, why ever did I do it?
The man in whom I had wanted to see only goodness had after that day killed Ian Pargetter, killed Ginnie: and if I hadn’t saved him they would both have lived.
The despair of that thought filled me utterly, swelling with enormity, making me feel, as the simpler grief for Ginnie had done, that one’s body couldn’t hold so much emotion. Remorse and guilt could rise like dragons’ teeth from good intentions, and there were in truth unexpected paths to hell.
I thought back to that distant moment that had affected so many lives: to that instinctive reflex, faster than thought, which had launched me at Ricky’s knife. If I could have called it back I would have been looking away, not seeing, letting Calder die… letting Ricky take his chances, letting him blast his young life to fragments, destroy his caring parents.
One couldn’t help what came after.
A fireman or a lifeboatman or a surgeon might fight to the utmost stretch of skill to save a baby and find he had let loose a Hitler, a Nero, Jack the Ripper. It couldn’t always be Beethoven or Pasteur whose life one extended. All one asked was an ordinary, moderately sinful, normally well-intentioned, fairly harmless human. And if he cured horses… all the better.
Before that day at Ascot Calder couldn’t even have thought, of owning Sandcastle, because Sandcastle at that moment was in mid-career with his stud value uncertain. But Calder had seen, as we all had, the majesty of that horse, and I had myself listened to the admiration in his voice.
At some time after that he must have thought of selenium, and from there the wickedness had grown to encompass us all: the wickedness which would have been extinguished before birth if I’d been looking another way.
I knew logically that I couldn’t have not done what I did; but in heart and spirit that didn’t matter. It didn’t stop the engulfing misery or allow me any ease.
Grief and sorrow came to us all, Pen had said: and she was right.
The horse became more restive and began to paw the ground.
I looked at my watch, the digital figures bright in the darkness: twenty minutes or thereabouts since Calder had left. Twenty minutes that already seemed like twenty hours.
The horse swung round suddenly in the gloom with unwelcome vigour, bumping against me with his rump.
‘Calm down now, boy,’ I said soothingly. ‘We’re stuck with each other. Go to sleep.’
The horse’s reply was the equivalent of unprintable: the crash of a steel-clad hoof against a wall.
Perhaps he didn’t like me talking, I thought, or indeed even moving about. His head swung round towards the window, his bulk stamping restlessly from one side of the box to the other, and I saw that he, unlike Oliver’s horses, wore no head-collar: nothing with which to hold him, while I calmed him, patting his neck.
His head reared up suddenly, tossing violently, and with a foreleg he lashed forward at the wall.
Not funny, I thought. Horrific to have been in the firing-line of that slashing hoof. For heaven’s sake, I said to him mentally, I’ll do you no harm. Just stay quiet. Go to sleep.
I was standing at that time with my back to the door, so that to the horse I must have been totally in shadow: but he would know I was there. He could smell my presence, hear my breathing. If he could see me as well, would it be better?
I took a tentative step towards the dim oblong of window, and had a clear, sharp, and swiftly terrifying view of one of his eyes.
No peace. No sleep. No prospect of anything like that. The horse’s eye was stretched wide with white showing all round the usual darkness, staring not at me but as if blind, glaring wildly at nothing at all.
The black nostrils looked huge. The lips as I watched were drawing back from the teeth. The ears had gone flat to the head and there was froth forming in the mouth. It was the face, I thought incredulously, not of unrest or alarm… but of madness.
The horse backed suddenly away, crashing his hindquarters into the rear wall and rocking again forwards, but this time advancing with both forelegs off the ground, the gleams from thrashing hooves curving in silvery streaks in the gloom, the feet hitting the wall below the window with sickening intent.
I pressed in undoubted panic into the corner made by wall and door, but it gave no real protection. The box was roughly ten feet square by eight feet high, a space even at the best of times half filled by horse. For that horse at that moment it was a strait-jacket confinement out of which he seemed intent on physically smashing his way.
The manger, I thought. Get in the manger.
The manger was built at about waist height diagonally across one of the box’s rear corners; a smallish metal trough set into a sturdy wooden support. As a shelter it was pathetic, but at least I would be off the ground.…
The horse turned and stood on his forelegs and let fly backwards with an almighty double kick that thudded into the concrete wall six inches from my head, and it was then, at that moment, that I began to fear that the crazed animal might not just hurt but kill me.
He wasn’t purposely trying to attack; most of his kicks were in other directions. He wasn’t trying to bite, though his now open mouth looked savage. He was uncontrollably wild, but not with me… though that, in so small a space, made little difference.
He seemed in the next very few seconds to go utterly berserk. With speeds I could only guess at in the scurrying shadows he whirled and kicked and hurled his bulk against the walls, and I, still attempting to jump through the tempest into the manger, was finally knocked over by one of his flailing feet.
I didn’t realise at that point that he’d actually broken one of my arms because the whole thing felt numb. I made it to the manger, tried to scramble up, got my foot in… sat on the edge… tried to raise my other, now dangling foot… and couldn’t do it fast enough. Another direct hit crunched on my ankle and I knew, that time, that there was damage.
The air about my head seemed to hiss with hooves and the horse was beginning a high bubbling whinny. Surely someone, I thought desperately, someone would hear the crashing and banging and come…
I could see him in flashes against the window, a rearing, bucking, kicking, rocketting nightmare. He came wheeling round, half seen, walking on his hind legs, head hard against the ceiling, the forelegs thrashing as if trying to climb invisible walls… and he knocked me off my precarious perch with a swiping punch in the chest that had half a ton of weight behind it and no particular aim.
I fell twisting onto the straw and tried to curl my head away from those lethal feet, to save instinctively one’s face and gut… and leave backbone and kidney to their fate. Another crushing thud landed on the back of my shoulder and jarred like a hammer through every bone, and I could feel a scream forming somewhere inside me, a wrenching cry for mercy, for escape, for an end to battering, for release from terror.
His mania if anything grew worse, and it was he who was finally screaming, not me. The noise filled my ears, bounced off the walls, stunning, mind-blowing, the roaring of furies.
He somehow got one hoof inside my rolled body and tumbled me fast over, and I could see him arching above me, the tendons like strings, the torment in him too, the rage of the gods bursting from his stretched throat, his forelegs so high that he was hitting the ceiling.
This is death, I thought. This is dreadful, pulverising extinction. Only for this second would I see and feel… and one of his feet would land on my head and I’d go… I’d go…
Before I’d even finished the thought his forelegs came crashing down with a hoof so close it brushed my hair; and then again, as if driven beyond endurance, he reared dementedly on his hind legs, the head going up like a reverse thunderbolt towards the sky, the skull meeting the ceiling with the force of a ram. The whole building shook with the impact, and the horse, his voice cut off, fell in a huge collapsing mass across my legs, spasms shuddering through his body, muscles jerking in stiff kicks, the air still ringing with the echoes of extremity.
He was dying in stages, unconscious, reluctant, the brain finished, the nerve messages still passing to convulsing muscles, turmoil churning without direction in stomach and gut, the head already inert on the straw.
An age passed before it was done. Then the heavy body fell flaccid, all systems spent, and lay in perpetual astonishing silence, pinning me beneath.
The relief of finding him dead and myself alive lasted quite a long time, but then, as always happens with the human race, simple gratitude for existence progressed to discontent that things weren’t better.
He had fallen with his spine towards me, his bulk lying across my legs from my knees down; and getting out from under him was proving an impossibility.
The left ankle, which felt broken, protested screechingly at any attempted movement. I couldn’t lift my arm for the same reason. There was acute soreness in my chest, making breathing itself painful and coughing frightful; and the only good thing I could think of was that I was lying on my back and not face down in the straw.
A very long time passed very slowly. The crushing weight of the horse slowly numbed my legs altogether and transferred the chief area of agony to the whole of my left arm, which I might have thought totally mangled if I hadn’t been able to see it dimly lying there looking the same as usual, covered in blue sweater, white cuff slightly showing, hand with clean nails, gold watch on wrist.
Physical discomfort for a while shut out much in the way of thought, but eventually I began to add up memories and ask questions, and the biggest, most immediate question was what would Calder do when he came back and found me alive.
He wouldn’t expect it. No one could really expect anyone to survive being locked in with a mad horse, and the fact that I had was a trick of fate.
I remembered him giving the horse an apple while I’d struggled within the spinning walls to stand up. Giving his apple so routinely, and patting the horse’s neck.
I remembered Calder saying on my first visit that he gave his remedies to horses in hollowed-out apples. But this time it had been no remedy, this time something opposite, this time a drug to make crazy, to turn a normal steel-shod horse into a killing machine.
What had he said when he’d first found me conscious? Those bizarre words… ‘I thought you’d be out. I thought you wouldn’t know…’ And something else… ‘I wish I’d hit you harder, but it seemed enough.’
He had said also that he was sorry, that he wished I hadn’t come… He hadn’t meant, I thought, that I should be aware of it when the horse killed me. At the very least, he hadn’t meant me to see and hear and suffer that death. But also, when he found me awake, it hadn’t prevented him from then giving the apple, although he knew that I would see, would hear, would… suffer.
The horse hadn’t completed the task. When Calder returned, he would make good the deficit. It was certain.
I tried, on that thought, again to slide my legs out, though how much it would have helped if I had succeeded was debatable. It was as excruciating as before, since the numbness proved temporary. I concluded somewhat sadly that dragging a broken ankle from beneath a dead horse was no jolly entertainment, and in fact, given the state of the rest of me, couldn’t be done.
I had never broken any bones before, not even ski-ing. I’d never been injured beyond the transient bumps of childhood. Never been to hospital, never troubled a surgeon, never slept from anaesthetic. For thirty-four years I’d been thoroughly healthy and, apart from chicken-pox and such, never ill. I even had good teeth.
I was unprepared in any way for the onslaught of so much pain all at once, and also not quite sure how to deal with it. All I knew was that when I tried to pull out my ankle the protests throughout my body brought actual tears into my eyes and no amount of theoretical resolution could give me the power to continue. I wondered if what I felt was cowardice. I didn’t much care if it was. I lay with everything stiffening and getting cold and worse, and I’d have given a good deal to be as oblivious as the horse.
The oblong of window at length began to lighten towards the new day; Saturday, June 2nd. Calder would come back and finish the job, and no reasonable pathologist would swear the last blow had been delivered hours after the first. Calder would say in bewilderment, ‘But I had no idea Tim was coming to see me… I was in London for the television… I have no idea how he came to shut himself into one of the boxes… because it’s just possible to do that, you know, if you’re not careful.… I’ve no idea why the horse should have kicked him, because he’s a placid old boy, as you can see… the whole thing’s a terrible accident, and I’m shattered… most distressed…’, and anyone would look at the horse from whose bloodstream the crazing drug would have departed and conclude that I’d been pretty unintelligent and also unlucky, and too bad.
Ian Pargetter’s veterinary case had gone to a securer hiding place or to destruction, and there would be only a slight chance left of proving Calder a murderer. Whichever way one considered it, the outlook was discouraging.
I couldn’t be bothered to roll my wrist over to see the time. The sun rose and shone slantingly through the bars with the pale brilliance of dawn. It had to be five o’clock, or after.
Time drifted. The sun moved away. The horse and I lay in intimate silence, dead and half dead; waiting.
A car drove up fast outside and doors slammed.
It will be now, I thought. Now. Very soon.
There were voices in the distance, calling to each other. Female and male. Strangers.
Not Calder’s distinctive, loud, edgy, public voice. Not his at all.
Hope thumped back with a tremendous surge and I called out myself, saying ‘Here… Come here,’ but it was at best a croak, inaudible beyond the door.
Suppose they were looking for Calder, and when they didn’t find him, drove away… I took all possible breath into my lungs and yelled ‘Help… Come here.’
Nothing happened. My voice ricocheted off the walls and mocked me, and I dragged in another grinding lungful and shouted again… and again… and again.
The top half of the door swung outward and let in a dazzle of light, and a voice yelled incredulously, ‘He’s here. He’s in here…’
The bolt on the lower half-door clattered and the daylight grew to an oblong, and against the light three figures appeared, coming forward, concerned, speaking with anxiety and joy and bringing life.
Judith and Gordon and Pen.
Judith was gulping and so I think was I.
‘Thank God,’ Gordon said. ‘Thank God.’
‘You didn’t go home,’ Pen said. ‘We were worried.’
‘Are you all right?’ Judith said.
‘Not really… but everything’s relative. I’ve never been happier, so who cares.’
‘If we put our arms under your shoulders,’ Gordon said, surveying the problem, ‘We should be able to pull you out.’
‘Don’t do that,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘One shoulder feels broken. Get a knacker.’
‘My dear Tim,’ he said, puzzled.
‘They’ll come with a lorry… and a winch. Their job is dead horses.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘And an ambulance,’ Pen said. ‘I should think.’
I smiled at them with much love, my fairly incompetent saviours. They asked how I’d got where I was, and to their horror I briefly told them: and I in turn asked why they’d come, and they explained that they’d been worried because Calder’s television programme had been cancelled.
‘Micky Bonwith was taken ill,’ Pen said. ‘They just announced it during the evening. There would be no live Micky Bonwith show, just an old recording, very sorry, expect Calder Jackson at a later date.’
‘Pen telephoned and told us where you were going, and why,’ Judith said.
‘And we were worried,’ Gordon added.
‘You didn’t go home… didn’t telephone,’ Pen said.
‘We’ve been awake all night,’ Gordon said. ‘The girls were growing more and more anxious… so we came.’
They’d come a hundred miles. You couldn’t ask for better friends.
Gordon drove away to find a public telephone and Pen asked if I’d found what I’d come for.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Half the things had no labels.’
‘Don’t talk any more, ‘Judith said. ‘Enough is enough.’
‘I might as well.’
‘Take your mind off it,’ Pen nodded, understanding.
‘What time is it?’ I asked.
Judith looked at her watch. ‘Ten to eight.’
‘Calder will come back…’ And the lads too, I thought. He’d come when the lads turned up for work. About that time. He’d need witnesses to the way he’d found me.
‘Tim,’ Pen said with decision, ‘if he’s coming… Did you take any samples? Did you get a chance?’
I nodded weakly.
‘I suppose you can’t remember what they were…’
‘I hid them.’
‘Wouldn’t he have found them?’ She was gentle and prepared to be disappointed; careful not to blame.
I smiled at her. ‘He didn’t find them. They’re here.’
She looked blankly round the box and then at my face. ‘Didn’t he search you?’ She said in surprise. ‘Pockets… of course, he would.’
‘I don’t know… but he didn’t find the pills.’
‘Then where are they?’
‘I learned from Ginnie about keeping your hands free,’ I said. ‘They’re in a plastic bag… below my waistband… inside my pants.’
They stared incredulously, and then they laughed, and Judith with tears in her eyes said, ‘Do you mean… all the time…?’
‘All the time,’ I agreed. ‘And go easy getting them out.’
Some things would be best forgotten but are impossible to forget, and I reckon one could put the next half hour into that category: at the end of it I lay on a table-like stretcher in the open air, and my dead-weight pal was half up the ramp of the knacker’s van that Gordon with exceptional persuasiveness had conjured out at that hour of the morning.
The three lads who had at length arrived for work stood around looking helpless, and the two ambulance men, who were not paramedics, were farcically trying to get an answer on a radio with transmission troubles as to where they were supposed to take me.
Gordon was telling the knacker’s men that I said it was essential to remove a blood sample from the horse and that the carcass was not to be disposed of until that was done. Judith and Pen both looked tired, and were yawning. I wearily watched some birds wheeling high in the fair blue sky and wished I were up there with them, as light as air; and into this rivetting tableau drove Calder.
Impossible to know what he thought when he saw all the activity, but as he came striding from his car his mouth formed an oval of apprehension and shock.
He seemed first to fasten his attention on Gordon, and then on the knacker’s man who was saying loudly, ‘If you want a blood sample you’ll have to give us a written authorisation, because of calling in a vet and paying him.’
Calder looked from him to the dead horse still halfway up the ramp, and from there towards the horse’s normal box, where the door stood wide open.
From there he turned with bewilderment to Judith, and then with horror saw the bag Pen held tightly, the transparent plastic bag with the capsules, pills and other assorted treasures showing clearly inside.
Pen remarkably found her voice and in words that must have sounded like doom to Calder said, ‘I didn’t tell you before… I’m a pharmacist.’
‘Where did you get that?’ Calder said, staring at the bag as if his eyes would burn it. ‘Where…’
‘Tim had it.’
Her gaze went to me and Calder seemed finally to realise that my undoubted stillness was not that of death. He took two paces toward the stretcher and looked down at my face and saw me alive, awake, aware.
Neither of us spoke. His eyes seemed to retreat in the sockets and the shape of the upper jaw stood out starkly. He saw in me I dare say the ravages of the night and I saw in him the realisation become certainty that my survival meant his ruin.
I thought: you certainly should have hit harder; and maybe he thought it too. He looked at me with a searing intensity that defied analysis and then turned abruptly away and walked with jerky steps back to his car.
Gordon took two or three hesitant steps towards perhaps stopping him, but Calder without looking back started his engine, put his foot on the accelerator and with protesting tyres made a tight semi-circular turn and headed for the gate.
‘We should get the police,’ Gordon said, watching him go.
Judith and Pen showed scant enthusiasm and I none at all. I supposed we would have to bring in the police in the end, but the longer the boring rituals could be postponed, from my point of view, the better. Britain was a small island, and Calder too well-known to go far.
Pen looked down at the plastic store-house in her hands and i hen without actual comment opened her handbag and put the whole thing inside. She glanced briefly at me and smiled faintly, and I nodded with relief that she and her friends would have the unravelling of the capsules to themselves.
On that same Saturday, at about two-thirty in the afternoon, a family of picnickers came across a car which had been parked out of sight of any road behind some clumps of gorse bushes. The engine of the car was running and the children of the family, peering through the windows, saw a man slumped on the back seat with a tube in his mouth.
They knew him because of his curly hair, and his beard.
The children were reported to be in a state of hysterical shock and the parents were angry, as if some authority, somewhere or other, should prevent suicides spoiling the countryside.
Tributes to Calder’s miracle-working appeared on television that evening, and I thought it ironic that the master who had known so much about drugs should have chosen to gas his way out.
He had driven barely thirty miles from his yard. He had left no note. The people who had been working with him on the postponed Micky Bonwith show said they couldn’t understand it, and Dissdale telephoned Oliver to say that in view of Calder’s tragic death he would have to withdraw his offer for Sandcastle.
I, by the time I heard all this, was half covered in infinitely irritating plaster of paris, there being more grating edges of bone inside me than I cared to hear about, and horse-shoe-shaped crimson bruises besides.
I had been given rather grudgingly a room to myself, privacy in illness being considered a sinful luxury in the national health service, and on Monday evening Pen came all the way from London again to report on the laboratory findings.
She frowned after she’d kissed me. ‘You look exhausted,’ she said.
‘Tiring place, hospital.’
‘I suppose it must be. I’d never thought…’
She put a bunch of roses in my drinking-water jug and said they were from Gordon and Judith’s garden.
‘They send their love,’ she said chattily, ‘and their garden’s looking lovely.’
‘Pen…’
‘Yes. Well.’ She pulled the visitor’s chair closer to the bed upon which I half sat, half lay in my plaster and borrowed dressing gown on top of the blankets. ‘You have really, as they say, hit the jackpot.’
‘Do you mean it?’ I exclaimed.
She grinned cheerfully. ‘It’s no wonder that Calder killed himself, not after seeing you alive and hearing you were going to get the dead horse tested, and knowing that after all you had taken all those things from his surgery. It was either that or years in jail and total disgrace.’
‘A lot of people would prefer disgrace.’
‘Not Calder, though.’
‘No.’
She opened a slim black briefcase on her knees and produced several typewritten pages.
‘We worked all yesterday and this morning,’ she said, ‘But first I’ll tell you that Gordon got the dead horse’s blood test done immediately at the Equine Research Establishment, and they told him on the telephone this morning that the horse had been given ethyl isobutrazine, which was contrary to normal veterinary practice.’
‘You don’t say.’
Her eyes gleamed. ‘The Research people told Gordon that any horse given ethyl isobutrazine would go utterly berserk and literally try to climb the walls.’
‘That’s just what he did,’ I said soberly.
‘It’s a drug which is used all the time as a tranquilliser to stop dogs barking or getting car-sick, but it has an absolutely manic effect on horses. One of its brand names is Diquel, in case you’re interested. All the veterinary books warn against giving it to horses.’
‘But normally… in a horse… it would wear off?’
‘Yes, in six hours or so, with no trace.’
Six hours, I thought bleakly. Six hours…
‘In your bag of goodies,’ Pen said, ‘guess what we found? Three tablets of Diquel.’
‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘Really. And now pin back your ears, dearest Tim, because when we found what Calder had been doing, words simply failed us.’
They seemed indeed to fail her again, for she sat looking at the pages with a faraway expression.
‘You remember,’ she said at last, ‘when we went to Calder’s yard that time at Easter, we saw a horse that had been bleeding in its urine… crystalluria was what he called it… that antibiotics hadn’t been able to cure?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Other times too, he cured horses with that.’
‘Mm. And those patients had been previously treated by Ian Pargetter before he died, hadn’t they?’
I thought back. ‘Some of them, certainly.’
‘Well… you know you told me before they carted you off in the ambulance on Saturday that some of the jars of capsules in the cupboards were labelled only with letters like a+w, b+w, and c+s?’
I nodded.
‘Three capsules each with one transparent and one blue end, did contain c and s. Vitamin C, and sulphanilamide.’ She looked at me for a possible reaction, but Vitamin C and sulphanilamide sounded quite harmless, and I said so.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘separately they do nothing but good, but together they can cause crystalluria.’
I stared at her.
‘Calder had made those capsules expressly to cause the horse’s illness in the first place, so that he could “cure” it afterwards. And then the only miracle he’d have to work would be to stop giving the capsules.’
‘My God,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘We could hardly believe it. It meant, you see, that Ian Pargetter almost certainly knew. Because it was he, you see, who could have given the horse’s trainer or owner or lad or whatever a bottle of capsules labelled “antibiotic” to dole out every day. And those capsules were precisely what was making the horse ill.’
‘Pen!’
‘I’d better explain just a little, if you can bear it,’ she said. ‘If you give sulpha drugs to anyone – horse or person – who doesn’t need them, you won’t do much harm because urine is normally slightly alkaline or only slightly acid and you’ll get rid of the sulpha safely. But vitamin C is ascorbic acid and makes the urine more acid, and the acid works with sulpha drugs to form crystals, and the crystals cause pain and bleeding… like powdered glass.’
There was a fairly long silence, and then I said, ‘It’s diabolical.’
She nodded. ‘Once Calder had the horse in his yard he could speed up the cure by giving him bicarbonate of soda, which will make the urine alkaline again and also dissolve the crystals, and with plenty of water to drink the horse would be well in no time. Miraculously fast, in fact.’ She paused and smiled, and went on, ‘We tested a few more things which were perfectly harmless herbal remedies and then we came to three more homemade capsules, with pale green ends this time, and we reckon that they were your a+w.’
‘Go on, then,’ I said. ‘What’s a, and what’s w?’
‘A is antibiotic, and w is warfarin. And before you ask, warfarin is a drug used in humans for reducing the clotting ability of the blood.’
‘That pink pill you found on the surgery floor,’ I said. ‘That’s what you said.’
‘Oh yes.’ She looked surprised. ‘So I did. I’d forgotten. Well… if you give certain antibiotics with warfarin you increase the effect of the warfarin to the extent that blood will hardly clot at all… and you get severe bleeding from the stomach, from the mouth, from anywhere where a small blood-vessel breaks… when normally it would clot and mend at once.’
I let out a held breath. ‘Every time I went, there was a bleeder.’
She nodded. ‘Warfarin acts by drastically reducing the effect of vitamin K, which is needed for normal clotting, so all Calder had to do to reverse things was feed lots of vitamin K… which is found in large quantities in alfalfa.’
‘And b+w?’ I asked numbly.
‘Barbiturate and warfarin. Different mechanism, but if you used them together and then stopped just the barbiturate, you could cause a sort of delayed bleeding about three weeks later.’ She paused. ‘We’ve all been looking up our pharmacology textbooks, and there are warnings there, plain to see if you’re looking for them, about prescribing antibiotics or barbiturates or indeed phenylbutazone or anabolic steroids for people on warfarin without carefully adjusting the warfarin dosage. And you see,’ she went on, ‘putting two drugs together in one capsule was really brilliant, because no one would think they were giving a horse two drugs, but just one… and we reckon Ian Pargetter could have put Calder’s capsules into any regular bottle, and the horse’s owner would think that he was giving the horse what it said on the label.’
I blinked. ‘It’s incredible.’
‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘And it gets easier as it goes on.’
‘There’s more?’
‘Sure there’s more.’ She grinned. ‘How about all those poor animals with extreme debility who were so weak they could hardly walk?’
I swallowed. ‘How about them?’
‘You said you found a large bottle in Ian Pargetter’s case with only a few pills in it? A bottle labelled “diuretic”, or in other words, pills designed to increase the passing of urine?’
I nodded.
‘Well, we identified the ones you took, and if you simply gave those particular thiazide diuretic pills over a long period to a horse you would cause exactly the sort of general progressive debility shown by those horses.’
I was past speech.
‘And to cure the debility,’ she said, ‘you just stop the diuretics and provide good food and water. And hey presto!’ She smiled blissfully. ‘Chemically, it’s so elegant. The debility is caused by constant excessive excretion of potassium which the body needs for strength, and the cure is to restore potassium as fast as safely possible… with potassium salts, which you can buy anywhere.’
I gazed at her with awe.
She was enjoying her revelations. ‘We come now to the horses with non-healing ulcers and sores.’
Always those, too, in the yard, I thought.
‘Ulcers and sores are usually cleared up fairly quickly by applications of antibiotic cream. Well… by this time we were absolutely bristling with suspicions, so last of all we took that little tube of antibiotic cream you found in Ian Pargetter’s case, and we tested it. And lo and behold, it didn’t contain antibiotic; cream at all.’
‘What then?’
‘Cortisone cream.’
She looked at my non-comprehension and smiled. ‘Cortisone cream is fine for eczema and allergies, but not for general healing. In fact, if you scratched a horse and smeared some dirt into the wound to infect it and then religiously applied cortisone cream twice a day you would get a nice little ulcer which would never heal. Until, of course, you sent your horse to Calder, who would lay his hands upon your precious… and apply antibiotics at once, to let normal healing begin.’
‘Dear God in heaven.’
‘Never put cortisone cream on a cut,’ she said. ‘A lot of people do. It’s stupid.’
‘I never will,’ I said fervently.
Pen grinned. ‘They always fill toothpaste from the blunt end. We looked very closely and found that the end of the tube had been unwound and then re-sealed. Very neat.’
She seemed to have stopped, so I asked ‘Is that the lot?’
‘That’s the lot.’
We sat for a while and pondered.
‘It does answer an awful lot of questions,’ I said finally.
‘Such as?’
‘Such as why Calder killed Ian Pargetter,’ I said. ‘Ian Pargetter wanted to stop something… which must have been this illness caper. Said he’d had enough. Said also that he would stop Calder too, which must have been his death warrant.’
Pen said, ‘Is that what Calder actually told you?’
‘Yes, that’s what he said, but at the time I didn’t understand what he meant.’
‘I wonder,’ Pen said, ‘why Ian Pargetter wanted to stop altogether? They must have had a nice steady income going between the two of them. Calder must have recruited him years ago.’
‘Selenium,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Selenium was different. Making horses ill in order to cure them wasn’t risking much permanent damage, if any at all. But selenium would be forever. The foals would be deformed. I’d guess when Calder suggested it the idea sickened Ian Pargetter. Revolted him, probably, because he was after all a vet.’
‘And Calder wanted to go on with it all… enough to kill.’
I nodded. ‘Calder would have had his sights on a fortune as well as an income. And but for Ginnie somehow getting hold of that shampoo, he would very likely have achieved it.’
‘I wonder how she did,’ Pen said.
‘Mm.’ I shifted uncomfortably on the bed. ‘I’ve remembered the name of the lad Calder had who looked like Ricky Barnet. It was Jason. I remembered it the other night… in that yard… funny the way the mind works.’
‘What about him?’ Pen said sympathetically.
‘I remembered Calder saying he gave the pills to Jason for Jason to give to the horses. The herb pills, he meant. But with Ian Pargetter gone, Calder would have needed someone else to give those double-edged capsules to horses… because he still had horses in his yard with those same troubles long after Ian Pargetter was dead.’
‘So he did,’ she said blankly. ‘Except.…’
‘Except what?’
‘Only that when we got to the yard last Saturday, before I heard you calling, we looked into several other boxes, and there weren’t many horses there. The place wasn’t full, like it had been.’
‘I should think,’ I said slowly, ‘that it was because Jason had been busy working for three months or more at Oliver’s farm, feeding selenium in apples.’
A visual memory flashed in my brain. Apples… Shane, the stable lad, walking across the yard, swinging a bucket and eating an apple. Shane, Jason: one and the same.
‘What is it?’ Pen said.
‘Photos of Ricky Barnet.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘They say I can leave here tomorrow,’ I said, ‘if I insist.’
She looked at me with mock despair. ‘What exactly did you break?’
‘They said this top lot was scapula, clavicle, humerus, sternum and ribs. Down there,’ I pointed, ‘they lost me. I didn’t know there were so many bones in one ankle.’
‘Did they pin it?’
‘God knows.’
‘How will you look after yourself?’
‘In my usual clumsy fashion.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘Stay until it stops hurting.’
‘That might be weeks… there’s some problem with ligaments or tendons or something.’
‘What problem?’
‘I didn’t really listen.’
‘Tim.’ She was exasperated.
‘Well… it’s so boring,’ I said.
She gave an eyes-to-heaven laugh. ‘I brought you a present from my shop.’ She dug into her handbag. ‘Here you are, with my love.’
I took the small white box she offered, and looked at the label on its side.
Comfrey, it said.
She grinned. ‘You might as well try it,’ she said. ‘Comfrey does contain allantoin, which helps to knit bones. And you never know… Calder really was an absolute expert with all sorts of drugs.’
image

On Tuesday, June 5th, Oliver Knowles collected me from the hospital to drive me on some errands and then take me to his home, not primarily as an act of compassion but mostly to talk business. I had expected him to accept my temporary disabilities in a straightforward and unemotional manner, and so he did, although he did say dryly when he saw me that when I had invited myself over the telephone I had referred to a ‘crack or two’ and not to half an acre of plaster with clothes strung on in patches.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘I can hop and I can sit and my right arm is fine.’
‘Yes. So I see.’
The nurse who had wheeled me in a chair to his car said however, ‘He can’t hop, it jars him,’ and handed Oliver a slip of paper. ‘There’s a place along that road…’ she pointed, ‘… where you can hire wheel-chairs.’ To me she said, ‘Get a comfortable one. And one which lets your leg lie straight out, like this one. You’ll ache less. All right?’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘Hm. Well… take care.’
She helped me into the car with friendly competence and went away with the hospital transport, and Oliver and I did as she advised, storing the resulting cushioned and chromium comfort into the boot of his car.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Then the next thing to do is buy a good instant camera and a stack of films.’
Oliver found a shop and bought the camera while I sat in the front passenger seat as patiently as possible.
‘Where next?’ he said, coming back with parcels.
‘Cambridge. An engineering works. Here’s the address.’ I handed him the piece of paper on which I’d written Ricky Barnet’s personal directions. ‘We’re meeting him when he comes out of work.’
‘Who?’ Oliver said. ‘Who are we meeting?’
‘You’ll see.’
We parked across the road from the firm’s gate and waited, and at four-thirty on the dot the exodus occurred.
Ricky Barnet came out and looked this way and that in searching for us, and beside me I heard Oliver stir and say, ‘But that’s Shane’ in surprise, and then relax and add doubtfully, ‘No it isn’t.’
‘No, it isn’t.’ I leaned out of the open window and called to him ‘Ricky… over here.’
He crossed the road and stopped beside the car.
‘Hop in,’ I said.
‘You been in an accident?’ he said disbelievingly.
‘Sort of.’
He climbed into the back of the car. He hadn’t been too keen to have his photograph taken for the purpose I’d outlined, but he was in no great position to refuse; and I’d made my blackmailing pressure sound like honey, which I wasn’t too bad at, in my way. He still wasn’t pleased however, which had its own virtues, as the last thing I wanted was forty prints of him grinning.
Oliver drove off and stopped where I asked at a suitably neutral background – a grey-painted factory wall – and he said he would take the photographs if I explained what I wanted.
‘Ricky looks like Shane,’ I said. ‘So take pictures of Ricky in the way he most looks like Shane. Get him to turn his head slowly like he did when he came out of work, and tell him to hold it where it’s best.’
‘All right.’
Ricky got out of the car and stood in front of the wall, with Oliver focussing at head-and-shoulder distance. He took the first picture and we waited for it to develop.
Oliver looked at it, grunted, adjusted the light meter, and tried again.
‘This one’s all right,’ he said, watching the colours emerge. ‘Looks like Shane. Quite amazing.’
With a faint shade of sullenness Ricky held his pose for as long as it took to shoot four boxes of film. Oliver passed each print to me as it came out of the camera, and I laid them in rows along the seat beside me while they developed.
‘That’s fine,’ I said, when the films were finished. ‘Thank you, Ricky.’
He came over to the car window and I asked him without any great emphasis, ‘Do you remember, when Indian Silk got so ill with debility, which vet was treating him?’
‘Yeah, sure, that fellow that was murdered. Him and his partners. The best, Dad said.’
I nodded non-committally. ‘Do you want a ride to Newmarket?’
‘Got my motor-bike, thanks.’
We took him back to his engineering works where I finally cheered him up with payment for his time and trouble, and watched while he roared off with a flourish of self-conscious bravado.
‘What’s now?’ Oliver said. ‘Did you say Newmarket?’
I nodded. ‘I’ve arranged to meet Ursula Young.’
He gave me a glance of bewilderment and drove without protest, pulling duly into the mid-town car park where Ursula had said to come.
We arrived there first, the photography not having taken as long as I’d expected, and Oliver finally gave voice to a long testrained question.
‘Just what,’ he said. ‘Are the photographs for?
‘For finding Shane.’
‘But why?’
‘Don’t explode.’
‘No.’
‘Because I think he gave the selenium to your mares.’
Oliver sat very still. ‘You asked about him before,’ he said. ‘I did wonder… if you thought… he killed Ginnie.’
It was my own turn for quiet. ‘I don’t know if he did,’ I said at last. ‘I don’t know.’
Ursula arrived in her car with a rush, checking her watch and apologising all the same, although she was on time. She, like Oliver and Ricky, looked taken aback at my unorthodox attire, but rallied in her usual no-nonsense fashion and shuffled into the back seat of Oliver’s car, leaning forward to bring her face on a level with ours.
I passed her thirty of the forty pictures of Ricky Barnet, who of course she knew immediately.
‘Yes, but,’ I explained, ‘Ricky looks like a lad who worked for Oliver, and it’s that lad we want to find.
‘Well, all right. How important is it?’
Oliver answered her before I could. ‘Ursula, if you find him, we might be able to prove there’s nothing wrong with Sand-castle. And don’t ask me how, just believe it.’
Her mouth had opened.
‘And Ursula,’ Oliver said, ‘if you find him – Shane, that lad – I’ll put business your way for the rest of my life.’
I could see that to her, a middle-rank bloodstock agent, it was no mean promise.
‘All right,’ she said briskly. ‘You’re on. I’ll start spreading the pictures about at once, tonight, and call you with results.’
‘Ursula,’ I said. ‘If you find where he is now, make sure he isn’t frightened off. We don’t want to lose him.’
She looked at me shrewdly. ‘This is roughly police work?’
I nodded. ‘Also, if you find anyone who employed him in the past, ask if by any chance a horse he looked after fell ill. Or any horse in the yard, for that matter. And don’t give him a name… he isn’t always called Shane.’
‘Is he dangerous?’ she said straightly.
‘We don’t want him challenged,’ I said. ‘Just found.’
‘All right. I trust you both, so I’ll do my best. And I suppose one day you’ll explain what it’s all about?’
‘If he’s done what we think,’ I said, ‘we’ll make sure the whole world knows. You can count on it.’
She smiled briefly and patted my unplastered shoulder. ‘You look grey,’ she said, and to Oliver, ‘Tim told me a horse kicked him and broke his arm. Is that right?’
‘He told me that, too.’
‘And what else?’ she asked me astringently. ‘How did you get in this state?’
‘The horse didn’t know its own strength.’ I smiled at her. ‘Clumsy brute.’
She knew I was dodging in some way, but she lived in a world where the danger of horse kicks was ever present and always to be avoided, and she made no more demur. Stowing the photographs in her capacious handbag she wriggled her way out of the car, and with assurances of action drove off in her own.
‘What now?’ Oliver said.
‘A bottle of scotch.’
He gave me an austere look which then swept over my general state and softened to understanding.
‘Can you wait until we get home?’ he said.
That evening, bit by bit, I told Oliver about Pen’s analysis of the treasures from Calder’s surgery and of Calder’s patients’ drug-induced illnesses. I told him that Calder had killed Ian Pargetter, and why, and I explained again how the idea of first discrediting, then buying and re-building Sandcastle had followed the pattern of Indian Silk.
‘There may be others besides Indian Silk that we haven’t heard of,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Show jumpers, eventers, even prize ponies. You never know. Dissdale might have gone along more than twice with his offer to buy the no-hoper.’
‘He withdrew his offer for Sandcastle the same night Calder died.’
‘What exactly did he say?’ I asked.
‘He was very upset. Said he’d lost his closest friend, and that without Calder to work his miracles there was no point in buying Sandcastle.’
I frowned. ‘Do you think it was genuine?’
‘His distress? Yes, certainly.’
‘And the belief in miracles?’
‘He did sound as if he believed.’
I wondered if it was in the least possible that Dissdale was an innocent and duped accomplice and hadn’t known that his bargains had been first made ill. His pride in knowing the Great Man had been obvious at Ascot, and perhaps he had been flattered and foolish but not wicked after all.
Oliver asked in the end how I’d found out about the drug-induced illnesses and Ian Pargetter’s murder, and I told him that too, as flatly as possible.
He sat staring at me, his gaze on the plaster.
‘You’re very lucky to be in a wheel-chair, and not a coffin,’ he said. ‘Damn lucky.’
‘Yes.’
He poured more of the brandy we had progressed to after dinner. Anaesthesia was coming along nicely.
‘I’m almost beginning to believe,’ he said, ‘that somehow or other I’ll still be here next year, even if I do have to sell Sandcastle and whatever else is necessary.’
I drank from my replenished glass. ‘Tomorrow we’ll make a plan contingent upon Sandcastle’s being reinstated in the eyes of the world. Look out the figures, see what the final damage is likely to be, draw up a time scale for recovery. I can’t promise because it isn’t my final say-so, but if the bank gets all its money in the end, it’ll most likely be flexible about when.’
‘Good of you,’ Oliver said, hiding emotion behind his clipped martial manner.
‘Frankly,’ I said, ‘you’re more use to us salvaged than bust.’
He smiled wryly. ‘A banker to the last drop of blood.’
Because of stairs being difficult I slept on the sofa where Ginnie had dozed on her last afternoon, and I dreamed of her walking up a path towards me looking happy. Not a significant dream, but an awakening of fresh regret. I spent a good deal of the following day thinking of her instead of concentrating on profit and loss.
In the evening Ursula telephoned with triumph in her strong voice and also a continual undercurrent of amazement.
‘You won’t believe it,’ she said, ‘but I’ve already found three racing stables in Newmarket where he worked last summer and autumn, and in every case one of the horses in the yard fell sick!’
I hadn’t any trouble at all with belief and asked what sort of sickness.
‘They all had crystalluria. That’s crystals…’
‘I know what it is,’ I said.
‘And… it’s absolutely incredible… but all three were in stables which had in the past sent horses to Calder Jackson, and these were sent as well, and he cured them straight away. Two of the trainers said they would swear by Calder, he had cured horses for them for years.’
‘Was the lad called Shane?’ I asked.
‘No. Bret. Bret Williams. The same in all three places.’
She dictated the addresses of the stables, the names of the trainers, and the dates (approximate) when Shane – Jason – Bret had been in their yards.
‘These lads just come and go,’ she said. ‘He didn’t work for any of them for as long as a month. Just didn’t turn up one morning. It happens all the time.’
‘You’re marvellous,’ I said.
‘I have a feeling,’ she said with less excitement, ‘that what I’m telling you is what you expected to hear.’
‘Hoped.’
‘The implications are unbelievable.’
‘Believe them.’
‘But Calder,’ she protested. ‘He couldn’t…’
‘Shane worked for Calder,’ I said. ‘All the time. Permanently. Wherever he went, it was to manufacture patients tor Calder.’
She was silent so long that in the end I said ‘Ursula?’
‘I’m here,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to go on with the photos?’
‘Yes, if you would. To find him.’
‘Hanging’s too good for him,’ she said grimly. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
She disconnected, and I told Oliver what she’d said.
‘Bret Williams? He was Shane Williams here.’
‘How did you come to employ him?’ I asked.
Oliver frowned, looking back. ‘Good lads aren’t that easy to lind, you know. You can advertise until you’re blue in the face and only get third- or fourth-rate applicants. But Nigel said Shane impressed him at the interview and that we should give him a month’s trial, and of course after that we kept him on, and took him back gladly this year when he telephoned asking, because he was quick and competent and knew the job backwards, and was polite and a good time-keeper…’
‘A paragon,’ I said dryly.
‘As lads go, yes.’
I nodded. He would have to have been good; to have taken pride in his deception, with the devotion of all traitors. I considered those fancy names and thought that he must have seen himself as a sort of macho hero, the great foreign agent playing out his fantasies in the day to day tasks, feeling superior to his employers while he tricked them with contempt.
He could have filled the hollowed cores of apples with capsules, and taken a bite or two round the outside to convince, and fed what looked like remainders to his victims. No one would ever have suspected, because suspicion was impossible.
I slept again on the sofa and the following morning Oliver telephoned to Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold and asked him to come to the farm. Wyfold needed persuading; reluctantly agreed; and nearly walked out in a U-turn when he saw me waiting in Oliver’s office.
‘No. Look,’ he protested, ‘Mr Ekaterin’s already approached me with his ideas and I simply haven’t time.…’
Oliver interrupted. ‘We have a great deal more now. Please do listen. We quite understand that you are busy with all those other poor girls, but at the very least we can take Ginnie off that list for you.’
Wyfold finally consented to sit down and accept some coffee and listen to what we had to say: and as we told him in turns and in detail what had been happening his air of impatience dis.sipated and his natural sharpness took over.
We gave him copies of Pen’s analyses, the names of ‘Bret’s’ recent employers and the last ten photographs of Ricky. He glanced at them briefly and said, ‘We interviewed this groom, but…’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Oliver said. ‘The photo is of a boy who looks like him if you don’t know either of them well.’
Wyfold pursed his lips, but nodded. ‘Fair enough.’
‘We do think he may have killed Ginnie, even if you couldn’t prove it,’ Oliver said.
Wyfold began putting together the papers we’d given him. ‘We will certainly redirect our enquiries,’ he said, and giving me a dour look added, ‘If you had left it to the police to search Calder’s surgery, sir, Calder Jackson would not have had the opportunity of disposing of Ian Pargetter’s case and any other material evidence. These things are always mishandled by amateurs.’ He looked pointedly at my plaster jacket. ‘Better have left it to the professionals.’
I gave him an amused look but Oliver was gasping. ‘Left to you,’ he said, ‘there would have been no search at all… or certainly not in time to save my business.’
Wyfold’s expression said plainly that saving people’s businesses wasn’t his prime concern, but beyond mentioning that picking locks and stealing medicinal substances constituted a breach of the law he kept any further disapproval to himself.
He was on his feet ready to go when Ursula rang again, and he could almost hear every word she said because of her enthusiasm.
‘I’m in Gloucestershire,’ she shouted. ‘I thought I’d work from the other end, if you see what I mean. I remembered Calder had miraculously cured Binty Rockingham’s utterly brilliant three-day-eventer who was so weak he could hardly totter, so I came here to her house to ask her, and guess what?’
‘What?’ I asked obligingly.
‘That lad worked for her!’ The triumph exploded. ‘A good lad, she says, would you believe it? He called himself Clint. She can’t remember his last name, it was more than two years ago and he was only here a few weeks.’
‘Ask her if it was Williams,’ I said.
There was some murmuring at the other end and then Ursula’s voice back again, ‘She thinks so, yes.’
‘You’re a dear, Ursula,’ I said.
She gave an unembarrassed laugh. ‘Do you want me to go on down the road to Rube Golby’s place? He had a show pony Calder cured a fair time ago of a weeping wound that wouldn’t heal.’
‘Just one more, then, Ursula. It’s pretty conclusive already, I’d say.’
‘Best to be sure,’ she said cheerfully. ‘And I’m enjoying myself, actually, now I’m over the shock.’
I wrote down the details she gave me and when she’d gone off the line I handed the new information to Wyfold.
‘Clint,’ he said with disillusion. ‘Elvis next, I shouldn’t wonder.’
I shook my head. ‘A man of action, our Shane.’
Perhaps through needing to solve at least one murder while reviled for not catching his rapist, Wyfold put his best muscle into the search. It took him two weeks only to find Shane, who was arrested on leaving a pub in the racing village of Malton, Yorkshire, where he had been heard boasting several times about secret exploits of undisclosed daring.
Wyfold told Oliver, who telephoned me in the office, to which I’d returned via a newly installed wheel-chair ramp up the front steps.
‘He called himself Dean,’ Oliver said. ‘Dean Williams. It seems the police are transferring him from Yorkshire back here to Hertfordshire, and Wyfold wants you to come to his police headquarters to identify Shane as the man called Jason at Calder’syard.’
I said I would.
I didn’t say that with honesty I couldn’t.
‘Tomorrow,’ Oliver added. ‘They’re in a hurry because of holding him without a good enough charge, or something.’
‘I’ll be there.’
I went in a chauffeur-driven hired car, a luxury I seemed to have spent half my salary on since leaving Oliver’s house.
I was living nearer the office than usual with a friend whose flat was in a block with a lift, not up stairs like my own. The pains in my immobile joints refused obstinately to depart, but owing to a further gift from Pen (via Gordon) were forgettable most of the time. A new pattern of ‘normal’ life had evolved, and all I dearly wanted was a bath.
I arrived at Wyfold’s police station at the same time as Oliver, and together we were shown into an office, Oliver pushing me as if born to it. Two months minimum, they’d warned me to expect of life on wheels. Even if my shoulder would be mended before then, it wouldn’t stand my weight on crutches. Patience, I’d been told. Be patient. My ankle had been in bits and they’d restored it like a jig-saw puzzle and I couldn’t expect miracles, they’d said.
Wyfold arrived, shook hands briskly (an advance) and said that this was not a normal identity parade, as of course Oliver knew Shane very well, and I obviously knew him also, because of Ricky Barnet.
‘Just call him Jason,’ Wyfold told me, ‘If you are sure he’s the same man you saw at Calder Jackson’s.’
We left the office and went along a fiercely-lit institutional corridor to a large interview room which contained a table, three chairs, a uniformed policeman standing… and Shane, sitting down.
He looked cocky, not cowed.
When he saw Oliver he tilted his head almost jauntily, showing not shame but pride, not apology but a sneer. On me he looked with only a flickering glance, neither knowing me from our two very brief meetings nor reckoning on trouble from my direction.
Wyfold raised his eyebrows at me to indicate the need for action.
‘Hello, Jason,’ I said.
His head snapped round immediately and this time he gave me a full stare.
‘I met you at Calder Jackson’s yard,’ I said.
‘You never did.’
Although I hadn’t expected it, I remembered him clearly. ‘You were giving sun-lamp treatment to a horse and Calder Jackson told you to put on your sunglasses.’
He made no more effort to deny it. ‘What of it, then?’ he said.
‘Conclusive evidence of your link with the place, I should think,’ I said.
Oliver, seeming as much outraged by Shane’s lack of contrition as by his sins, turned with force to Wyfold and in half-controlled bitterness said, ‘Now prove he killed my daughter.’
‘What!’
Shane had risen in panic to his feet, knocking his chair over behind him and losing in an instant the smart-alec assurance. ‘I never did,’ he said.
We all watched him with interest, and his gaze travelled fast from one face to another, seeing only assessment and disbelief and nowhere admiration.
‘I didn’t kill her,’ he said, his voice hoarse and rising. ‘I didn’t. Straight up, I didn’t. It was him. He did it.’
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Calder. Mr Jackson. He did it. It was him, not me.’ He looked across us all again with desperation. ‘Look, I’m telling you the truth, straight up I am. I never killed her, it was him.’
Wyfold began telling him in a flat voice that he had a right to remain silent and that anything he said might be written down and used in evidence, but Shane wasn’t clever and fright had too firm a hold. His fantasy world had vanished in the face of unimaginable reality, and I found myself believing every word he said.
‘We didn’t know she was there, see. She heard us talking, but we didn’t know. And when I carried the stuff back to the hostel he saw her moving so he hit her. I didn’t see him do it, I didn’t, but when I went back there he was with Ginnie on the ground and I said she was the boss’s daughter, which he didn’t even know, see, but he said all the worse if she was the boss’s daughter because she must have been standing there in the shadow listening and she would have gone straight off and told everybody.’
The words, explanations, excuses came tumbling out in self-righteous urgency and Wyfold thankfully showed no signs of regulating the flow into the careful officialese of a formal statement. The uniformed policeman, now sitting behind Shane, was writing at speed in a notebook, recording, I imagined, the gist.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Wyfold said impatiently. ‘What did he hit her with?’
Shane redoubled his efforts to convince, and from then on I admired Wyfold’s slyly effective interrogatory technique.
‘With a fire extinguisher,’ Shane said. ‘He kept it in his car, see, and he had it in his hand. He was real fussy about fire always. Would never let anyone smoke anywhere near the stables. That Nigel…’ the sneer came back temporarily,’… the lads all smoked in the feed room, I ask you, behind his back. He’d no idea what went on.’
‘Fire extinguisher…‘Wyfold spoke doubtfully, shaking his head.
‘Yeah, it was. It was. One of them red things about this long.’ Shane anxiously held up his hands about fifteen inches apart. ‘With the nozzle, sort of, at the top. He was holding it by that, sort of swinging it. Ginnie was lying flat on the ground, face down, like, and I said, “What have you gone and done?” and he said she’d been listening.’
Wyfold sniffed.
‘It was like that, straight up,’ Shane said urgently.
‘Listening to what?’
‘We were talking about the stuff, see.’
‘The shampoo…’
‘Yeah.’ He seemed only briefly to feel the slightest alarm at the mention of it. ‘I told him, see, that the stuff had really worked because there’d been a foal born that morning with half a leg, that Nigel he tried to hush it up but by afternoon he was half cut and he told one of the lads so we all knew. So I told Mr Jackson and he said great, because it was time we’d heard, and there hadn’t been a murmur in the papers and he was getting worried he hadn’t got the dose right, or something. So anyway when I told him about the foal with half a leg he laughed, see, he was so pleased, and he said this was probably the last lot I’d have to do, just do the six bottles he’d brought, and then scarper.’
Oliver looked very pale, with sweat along his hair-line and whitely clenched fists. His mouth was rigidly closed with the effort of self control, and he listened throughout without once interrupting or cursing.
‘I took the six bottles off to the hostel but when I got there I’d only got five, so I went back to look for the one I’d dropped, but I forgot it, see, when I saw him standing there over Ginnie and him saying she’d heard us talking, and then he said for me to come with him down to the village in his car and he’d drop me at a pub where the other lads were, so as I couldn’t have been back home killing the boss’s daughter, see? I remembered about the bottle I’d dropped when we were on our way to the village but I didn’t think he’d be best pleased and anyway I reckoned I’d find it all right when I went back, but I never did. I didn’t think it would matter much, because no one would know what it was for, it was just dog shampoo, and anyway I reckoned I’d skip using the new bottles after all because of the fuss there would be over Ginnie. But if it hadn’t been for that bottle I wouldn’t have gone out again at all, see, and I wouldn’t know it was him that killed her, and it wasn’t me, it wasn’t.’
He came to what appeared in his own mind to be a halt, but as far as Wyfold, Oliver and myself were concerned he had stopped short of enough.
‘Are you saying,’ Wyfold said, ‘That you walked back from the village with the other grooms, knowing what you would find?’
‘Well, yeah. Only Dave and Sammy, see, they’d got back first, and when I got back there was an ambulance there and such, and I just kept in the background.’
‘What did you do with the other five bottles of shampoo?’ Wyfold asked. ‘We searched all the rooms in the hostel. We didn’t find any shampoo.’
The first overwhelming promptings of fear were beginning to die down in Shane, but he answered with only minimal hesitation, ‘I took them down the road a ways and threw them in a ditch. That was after they’d all gone off to the hospital.’ He nodded in the general direction of Oliver and myself. ‘Panicked me a bit, it did, when Dave said she was talking, like. But: I was glad I’d got rid of the stuff afterwards, when she was dead after all, with everyone snooping around.’
‘You could show me which ditch?’ Wyfold said.
‘Yeah, I could.’
‘Good.’
‘You mean,’ Shane said, with relief, ‘you believe what I told you…’
‘No, I don’t mean that,’ Wyfold said repressively. ‘I’ll need to know what you ordinarily did with the shampoo.’
‘What?’
‘How you prepared it and gave it to the mares.’
‘Oh.’ An echo of the cocky cleverness came back: a swagger to the shoulders, a curl to the lip. ‘It was dead easy, see. Mr Jackson showed me how. I just had to put a coffee filter in a wash basin and pour the shampoo through it, so’s the shampoo all ran down the drain and there was that stuff left on the paper, then I just turned the coffee filter inside out and soaked it in a little jar with some linseed oil from the feed shed, and then I’d stir a quarter of it into the feed if it was for a mare I was looking after anyway, or let the stuff fall to the bottom and scrape up a teaspoonful and put it in an apple for the others.
Mr Jackson showed me how. Dead easy, the whole thing.’
‘How many mares did you give it to?’
‘Don’t rightly know. Dozens, counting last year. Some I missed. Mr Jackson said better to miss some than be found out. He liked me to do the oil best. Said too many apples would be noticed.’ A certain amount of anxiety returned. ‘Look, now I‘ve told you all this, you know I didn’t kill her, don’t you?’
Wyfold said impassively, ‘How often did Mr Jackson bring you bottles of shampoo?’
‘He didn’t. I mean, I had a case of it under my bed. Brought it with me when I moved in, see, same as last year. But this year I ran out, like, so I rang him up from the village one night for some more. So he said he’d meet me at the back gate at nine on Sunday when all the lads would be down in the pub.’
‘That was a risk he wouldn’t take,’ Wyfold said sceptically.
‘Well, he did.’
Wyfold shook his head.
Shane’s panic resurfaced completely. ‘He was there,’ he almost shouted. ‘He was. He was.’
Wyfold still looked studiedly unconvinced and told Shane t hat it would be best if he now made a formal statement, which t he sergeant would write down for him to sign when he, Shane, was satisfied that it represented what he had already told us: and Shane in slight bewilderment agreed.
Wyfold nodded to the sergeant, opened the door of the loom, and gestured to Oliver and me to leave. Oliver in indiluted grimness silently pushed me out. Wyfold, with a satisfied air, said in his plain uncushioning way, ‘There you are then, Mr Knowles, that’s how your daughter died, and you’re luckier than some. That little sod’s telling the truth. Proud of himself, like a lot of crooks. Wants the world to know.’ He shook hands perfunctorily with Oliver and nodded briefly to me, and walked away to his unsolved horrors where the papers called for his blood and other fathers choked on their tears.
Oliver pushed me back to the outside world but not directly to where my temporary chauffeur had said he would wait. I found myself making an unscheduled turn into a small public garden, where Oliver abruptly left me beside the first seat we came to and walked jerkily away.
I watched his back, ramrod stiff, disappearing behind bushes and trees. In grief, as in all else, he would be tidy.
A boy came along the path on roller skates and wheeled round to a stop in front of me.
‘You want pushing?’ he said.
‘No. But thanks all the same.’
He looked at me judiciously. ‘Can you make that chair go straight, using just one arm?’
‘No. I go round in a circle and end where I started.’
‘Thought so.’ He considered me gravely. ‘Just like the earth,’ he said.
He pushed off with one foot and sailed away straight on the other and presently, walking firmly, Oliver came back.
He sat on the bench beside me, his eyelids slightly reddened, his manner calm.
‘Sorry,’ he said, after a while.
‘She died happy,’ I said. ‘It’s better than nothing.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘She heard what they were doing. She picked up the shampoo Shane dropped. She was coming to tell you that everything was all right, there was nothing wrong with Sandcastle and you wouldn’t lose the farm. At the moment she died she must have been full of joy.’
Oliver raised his face to the pale summer sky.
‘Do you think so?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then I’ll believe it,’ he said.