Comeback (20 page)

“But you weren’t really satisfied?”

“Well, I mean, it was a mystery. I began thinking how the colt had behaved before the head lad found him, I mean, maybe for several hours alone in his box during the night. What he’d been like before he got to that final state. I wondered if he’d had seizures, perhaps like epileptic fits. The tremors at the end might have been just the last twitches of something absolutely terrible. I hate horses to suffer.... If that colt had suffered the way I was imagining, and if it was the result of poison, I thought I’d never stop before I got whoever had done it prosecuted.” He shrugged. “I never did get anyone prosecuted because there was no way of knowing who’d done it, but I woke up one morning with the answer in my head, and I’m certain that that colt was deliberately killed even if there wasn’t an obvious reason for it”

“So what killed him?” I asked, fascinated.

“Insulin,” he said, “though I can’t prove it.”

“Yes. Well horses don’t get diabetes, except so rarely it’s almost never. You wouldn’t give horses insulin for anything. If you gave a horse a big overdose his blood sugar would fall catastrophically and he would go into hypoglycemic shock, with convulsions and then coma, and death would be inevitable. It fitted the symptoms of the colt. I began looking for mentions of insulin in veterinary case reports, but there isn’t much anywhere about normal insulin levels in horses. As they don’t get diabetes, there isn’t the need for research. But I found enough to know better what to look for next time in the blood chemistry—if there is a next time. And I found that in America three or four racehorses had almost certainly been killed that way for the insurance. I showed Carey the case reports and we both told Oliver what I thought so that he would be on the lookout, but we haven’t come across it again.”

“It
must
have been for the insurance,” I said, pondering.

“But Mr. Eaglewood said it wasn’t insured.”

“Did he own the colt himself?”

“No. As a matter of fact, it belonged to the man who owns the mare. Wynn Lees.”

I drew in a breath sharply enough for him to wonder why, and he sought for and found an explanation.

“I suppose it is a coincidence,” he said. “But the mare didn’t die.”

“But for you, she would have.”

“Have you still got that bit of gut?” he asked.

“I transferred it into the freezer,” I said.

“Oh.” He nodded. “Good.”

“How much do you know about Wynn Lees?” I asked.

“Nothing much. I’d never met him before Friday morning. Why did you tell me not to trust him?”

I thought briefly about letting him know, but decided not to. Not yet. I might find a more oblique path. There were more ways of revealing truths than marching straight up to them, and if one could get a truth revealed without disclosing one’s own hand in it, it gave one an advantage next time around.

Ken waited for his answer.

“Instinct,” I said. “Natural antipathy. Hostile vibes. Call it what you like. He gave me the shivers.”

There was enough truth in all that to be convincing. Ken nodded and said the man had had much the same effect on himself.

After a moment I said, “Is your mother still alive?”

“Yes, she is. Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know ... I just wondered if she’d had a chance yet of enjoying Greg and Vicky being here. They’d have a lot to talk about, with the wedding just ahead. And I’d like to meet her, too.”

He looked at me in dawning dismay. “Why in hell haven’t I arranged it? I must be mad. But there’s been so much on my mind. How about today, for lunch?” He stretched a hand out to the phone. “I’ll ask the old lady at once.”

“Check with Belinda first, I should. Er ... to make sure there’s enough food.”

He gave me a sideways glance but saw the wisdom of asking Belinda first. It was actually Vicky who answered and who received the suggestion with enthusiasm, who said it was a lovely idea and that she would tell Belinda it was fixed. Ken disconnected with a smile and redialed, reaching his own parent and evoking a more moderate response. Ken was persuasive, his mother slowly let herself be persuaded. He would pick her up, he promised, and take her home afterwards, and she would be quite safe.

“My mother’s not like Vicky,” he said, putting down the receiver. “She likes things planned well in advance. I mean, at least days in advance, if not weeks. She thinks we’re hurrying the wedding, but the truth is she’s been against me marrying
anyone.”
He sighed. “She’ll never make friends with Belinda. She calls her Miss Larch half the time. Parents!”

“Do you remember your father?”

“Only vaguely. I was ten when he died so I ought to remember him clearly, but I don’t. I know him from his photographs. I know he played with me and was fun. I wish ...” he paused, “... but what’s the point of wishing? I wish I knew why he died.”

I waited without movement, and he said, “He killed himself.” It was clearly still a painful thought. “The older I get the more I want to know why. I wish I could talk to him. Silly, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“Anyway, it explains a lot about my mother.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. I looked down at his note pad on which he’d written the single word “insulin.” “How about if you let me write the notes while you talk?”

He pushed the pad and pen across gladly. I turned to a new page, and after a bit of thought he began again on the saga.

“The next one I can’t explain was soon after Christmas. That was the one I thought had been given atropine.”

“What sort of horse?” I asked, writing.

“Racehorse. A hurdler. Trained by Zoe Mackintosh out past Riddlescombe.”

“Zoe
Mackintosh?”

“Quite a lot of women train,” Ken said reasonably.

Sure, I thought, but Mackintosh in my shadowy memory was a man.

“Is she a trainer’s daughter?” I asked.

Ken nodded. “Her father, old Mac, he’s still there, but his memory’s going. Zoe holds the license and does what she wants when he isn’t looking. He’s a cantankerous old man and he’s always breathing over her shoulder. She still employs Hewett and Partners because she’s known Carey all her life—he and Mac are great buddies—but she’s been huffy to me about the dead horses, and I can’t blame her.”

“More than one?”

“Two. And I’d swear they were both given atropine. After the second one, I tackled Zoe about it and she practically threw me over her left shoulder. Very muscular lady, our Zoe. But it does no good to have her going round implying I’m crazy as well as incompetent, which she does.”

I thought it over.

“Were both these horses owned by the same person?” I asked.

“No idea.”

“And were they insured?”

“I don’t think so. You’d have to ask Zoe or the owners, and frankly, I’m not going to.”

“You’re scared of her!”

“You haven’t met her.”

“What were the horses’ names?”

“What a question! I’m always told their names but I can’t remember them after I’ve finished treating them. Well, seldom. Only if they’re in the top rank. I attend hundreds of horses in a year. They’re filed under their names in the computer—well, they were—but to jog my own memory I write them down as, say, ”Three-year-old filly, white socks, herring-gutted,’ then I know at once which horse I’m referring to.”

“Describe the atropine horses.”

“The first one, a bay four-year-old gelding, large white blaze down its nose. The second one, a five-year-old gelding, chestnut, two white socks in front, white face.”

“OK.” I wrote down the descriptions. “How did they die?”

“Colic cases, both times the same. We had the colon out on the table, like you saw, and I was palpating—that’s feeling—the smaller intestines for obstructions, and not finding any, and without warning their hearts started to fail and their blood pressure dropped disastrously. The alarm signal went off and we’d lost them. Hopeless. But, like I told you, it does sometimes happen, so I didn’t think much about the first one.”

“How many have died like that now?”

“Four in eight weeks.” He swallowed. “It should be impossible.”

“Exactly the same way?”

“Yes, more or less.”

“How do you mean, more or less?”

“They weren’t all colic operations. Like I told you, the last one was putting screws in a split cannon bone, and before that there was the respiratory tract, a tieback like the one here now. Those two were both Eaglewood’, as I told you at Stratford.”

“Um,” I said, looking at my increasingly chaotic notes.

“Do you remember in which order they happened?”

“Well ...” He thought. “Put the insulin colt first, even though he didn’t die here in the hospital.”

“OK.”

“Then Zoe Mackintosh’s four-year-old.”

“Right.”

“Then ... Eaglewood’s respiratory tieback.”

“OK,” I said. “Do you ever do tubing? I remember being fascinated as a child that you could put a tube through into a horse’s trachea so that it could breathe better, with a plug like a bath plug that you can put in and out of its neck—in for rest, out for galloping!”

“Not often. It’s still done here sometimes, but you can’t run tubed horses in America, and it will end here soon.”

“And here, once upon a time, a tubed horse with the plug out galloped into a canal and drowned?”

“Ages ago.” He nodded, smiling. “In the Grand National. It forgot to turn at the Canal Turn and made a proper balls of it.”

“Derby Day II in 1930,” I said, from the depths.

He was startled. “How the hell do you know that?”

“I’ve an endless memory for trivia.” I said it as a joke, but realized it was more or less true. “And trivia,” I said apologetically, “means ‘three roads’ in Latin. Wherever three roads met, the Romans put up notice boards with the news on. Little bits of information.”

“Jeez,” Ken said.

I laughed. “Well, after the respiratory tieback, what next?”

He thought for a good while. “I suppose the next one was Nagrebb’s show-jumper. The horse that staked itself, that I told you about. It splintered one of the jumps while they were schooling it at home, and when I went there it was still in the field with a sharp piece of wood a foot long driven into its near hind above the hock. There was blood pouring down its leg, and it was fearfully agitated and trying to wrench itself away from the two people holding its head collar. One of them was a groom and the other was the girl who rode it and she was in tears the whole time, which didn’t help the horse. Horses react to fear with fear. I think they can smell it. They’re very receptive. Anyway, she was afraid he would have to be put down, and her father was jumping around yelling at me to
do
something, which upset the horse too. Between them, they’d wound it up into such a state that the first thing I had to do was tranquilize it and wait until it calmed down and that wasn’t popular either. In the end I got old man Nagrebb to take his daughter into the house as I could manage well with just the groom. So after that I pulled the stake out of the leg and inspected the damage, which was considerable but mainly muscular, with a few severed blood vessels but not the main artery or vein. Well, I did a clean-and-repair job and closed the skin with strong sutures. Staples, like you saw me use on the mare, aren’t adequate for that sort of wound. It looked neat enough. I told the Nagrebbs the leg would be swollen and hot for a bit but with antibiotics it should heal satisfactorily, and I would take the sutures out after a week. They wanted me to promise the leg would be as good as new but how could I? I didn’t know. I rather doubted it myself but I didn’t tell them that. I said to give it time.”

He paused, thinking back. “Well, then, as I told you, the leg was healing OK. I went out there several times. I took out the sutures. End of case. Then a day or two later, I got a panic call and went and found its lower leg and fetlock up like a balloon and the horse unable to put his foot to the ground. So we brought him here and I opened the leg because I was worried that infection had got into the tendon sheath and, like I told you, the tendon had literally disintegrated. There was nothing to repair. I’d never seen anything so bad. I got Carey to come and look at it because I thought Nagrebb would take his word for it better than mine, because of course we had to put the horse down and it was this famous show-jumper. Nagrebb had insured it, so we told the insurers the horse couldn’t be saved. They agreed to the lethal injection, which I gave. Then shortly after that, old man Nagrebb started complaining that I must have somehow damaged the fetlock and tendon myself when I repaired the stake wound but I know for certain I hadn’t”

He stopped again and looked at me earnestly. “I’ m going to tell you something because I promised I’d tell you everything, but you’re not to think me raving mad.”

“You’re not raving mad,” I said.

“All right. Well, you might say I brooded about that horse, about why its tendon disintegrated and, well, there is something that would make that happen.”

“What?” I asked.

“Some stuff called collagenase.” He swallowed. “If you injected, say, two cc’s of collagenase into a tendon you would get that result.”

“How, exactly?”

“It’s an enzyme that dissolves collagen, which is what tendons and ligaments are made of.”

I stared at him. He stared apprehensively back.

“You are not raving mad,” I repeated.

“But you can’t just go out and
buy
collagenase,” he said. “It’s supplied by chemical companies but it’s only used in research laboratories. It’s pretty dicey stuff. I mean, it would dissolve human tendons too. You wouldn’t want to ram a needleful into your wrist.”

I felt like saying Jeez myself.

“You can buy it freeze-dried, in small bottles,” Ken said. “I looked it up. You reconstitute it with one cc of water. You’d only need a small needle.”