Comeback (25 page)

He closed the incision with a neat row of staples and the hoist once again lifted the big inert body by its feet to transport it to the padded recovery room. Everyone followed and waited in safety behind the breast-high partition while the patient staggered and lunged back to consciousness, to stand in dumb and no doubt sore bewilderment.

“Good. Good,” Carey said again, sighing nevertheless. “Nothing wrong with that.”

He still looked overtired, I thought, still gray. He seemed to be functioning in irregular spurts of energy, not, like Scott, with inexhaustible stamina.

As if to confirm my impression, he rubbed a hand over his face and round his neck, easing out stiffness, and said, “I’ve asked Lucy to be on call instead of me. That makes Lucy and Jay tonight. Let’s hope it’s a quiet one. I’m going home.”

Ken and I went with him along to the office, where he phoned the referring vets to tell them their horse was recovering normally. In his voice there was only a taking-it-for-granted tone; no hint of excessive relief. Oliver Quincy, who’d been writing notes all afternoon while monitoring the closed-circuit television to check continually on the well-being of the morning’s patient, said grumpily it was about time he was relieved.

“Jay’s been spelling me,” he protested, “but this isn’t my job. It’s Scott’s or Belinda’s.”

“We must all muck in,” Carey said, seeing no difficulty. “Where’s Jay now?”

“Taking what he wants of the new drugs. Yvonne and Lucy have been in doing that as well. I got them to write down what they took.”

“Good. Good,” Carey said.

Oliver gave him an unfriendly glance, which he didn’t notice, and said that as he had two calls to make on his way home, he’d better be going. Jay put his head in briefly with much the same message, and they left together, thick as thieves.

Ken began writing his own professional notes to supplement those I’d taken and through the window I watched Carey go out to his car and drive away. I borrowed the phone again and got through to Vicky, telling her I was going to London and not to be scared if she heard me coming back in the early hours, or even later. Thank you, dear, she said. She sounded bored, I thought.

Ken looked up from his task. “All right for some,” he said.

“You’ve got yours on the doorstep.”

He grinned. “Is Annabel the girl at Stratford?”

“She is.”

“You don’t waste time.”

“This is just a reconnaissance.”

“You know,” he said unexpectedly, “I can’t imagine you getting drunk.”

“Try harder.”

He shook his head in friendly evaluation. “You wouldn’t want to lose that much control.”

He surprised me, and not just because he was right.

“You’ve only known me since Thursday,” I said, repeating his own reservations.

“I basically knew you in half an hom.” He hesitated. “Funny, that. Vicky told me the same.”

“Yeah,” I said. “An open book.” I smiled and prepared to go. “See you tomorrow.”

“See you.”

I left the hospital and walked across the car park to the car. I would be early for the planned meeting: I’d have time for buying newspapers with accommodation ads. I’d get to know how difficult it would be to find somewhere to live, and how expensive.

Belinda came out of the hospital and went into the intensive-care box briefly to get it ready for the new incumbent. Leaving the first door wide open, she then took a look in the next box, where the morning’s patient stood, and after that went along for a routine peek at the mare. I watched her trim capable figure and wondered if time and motherhood would soften or harden her caring instincts. Some nurses grew gentle, some unsympathetic. A tossup, I thought.

She unbolted the mare’s door and went in, and came tearing out at high speed yelling, “Ken. Ken.” She ran into the hospital and I thought, Oh, God, no, and went over to the end box to see.

The big mare lay on her side.

There were no heaving breaths, no agitation in the limbs. The head lay floppily. The liquid eye looked gray, opaque, unseeing.

The mare was dead.

Ken came at a run, stricken. He fell on his knees beside her and put his ear to her brown body behind the shoulder, but one could see from his face that there was nothing to hear.

He sat back on his heels as moved and devastated as if she’d been a child, and I saw and understood his dedicated love of horses and the solicitude he unstintingly lavished on them without any thought or possibility of thanks.

I thought of the courage he’d dredged up to operate on that mare. Thought of the extreme skill he’d summoned to save her life while believing he was risking his own future. Felt impotently angry that so much holy nerve, so much artistry had gone to waste. In a way missing before, when I’d only heard about murdered horses but hadn’t seen one, I felt personally engaged in avenging them. It was no longer just for Ken and to please my mother that I’d do my utmost to pierce the fog, but now too for the horses themselves, the silent splendid victims with no defense against predatory man.

“She shouldn’t have died,” Ken said numbly. “She was out of danger.”

It was a fraction too soon, I judged, to say I disagreed. Danger, in that place, wore many faces.

He smoothed his hand over the brown flank, then rose and knelt again, this time by her head, lifting the drooping eyelid, opening the mouth, peering down her throat.

“She’s been dead for some time,” he said. He stood up wearily and trembled as of old. “We’ll never survive this. It’s the absolute end.”

“It’s not your fault”

“How do I know? How does anyone know?”

Belinda, in the doorway, said defensively, “She was all right at lunchtime. When we brought the wind-op gelding out here I came along and checked, and she was eating hay, quite all right.”

Ken was only half listening. “We’ll have to have a postmortem,” he said dully. “I’ll see if I can get any blood.” He walked away disjointedly towards his car and after a while returned with a case containing syringes, bottles and a supply of rubber gloves from the well-stocked trunk.

“I phoned the knackers on the car phone,” he said. “They’re coming to fetch her. I told them we’d need to do a postmortem at their place, and I’ll have to get Carey and any number of outside vets to be there, and I don’t think I’m going to do the postmortem myself. I mean . . . I can’t. And as for what Wynn Lees will say . . .”

His voice stopped; the shakes didn’t.

“He was here this morning,” I said.

“Dear God.”

I described what I’d seen of Wynn Lees’s visit. “The mare was all right when he left. Scott moved her along to the end box afterwards and she was fine. You ask Carey.”

Ken looked down at the corpse. “God knows what Carey will say about this.”

“If he’s got any sense he’ll start thinking about poison.”

It was Belinda who protested that I was being melodramatic, not Ken.

“But last time,” he said, taking the idea in his stride, “when the Fitzwalter horse dropped dead out here, all the tests we could think of were negative. No poison. It cost us a lot in specialist lab fees, and all for nothing.”

“Try again.”

Without answering, he pulled on a pair of gloves and tried with several syringes to draw blood from various areas in the mare’s anatomy.

“How did you say you would give a horse atropine?” I asked.

“Inject it or scatter it on its feed. But this isn’t atropine.”

“No, but test its feed anyway.”

He nodded. “Makes sense. Water, too. Belinda, see if you can find two glass jars with tight lids. There ought to be some specimen jars in the cupboard under the drugs cupboard.”

Belinda went off without question, accustomed to being given orders in the line of duty. Ken shook his head over his task and muttered about the speed with which blood started decomposing after death.

“And the foal,” he said with a deep sigh. “Such a
waste.”

I said, “What are we going to do with that needle you cut out of her gut?”

“God knows. What do you think? Does it matter anymore?”

“It does if Wynn Lees ever mentions it”

“But he hasn’t”

“No,” I agreed, “but if he shoved it down her throat he must be
wondering
. . . He might just ask, one day.”

“All it would prove would be that he did want the mare dead and did his best to kill her, and he might be prosecuted for cruelty, but I wouldn’t put any bets on a conviction. Every vet in the kingdom would testify that cats and dogs swallow sewing needles and stitch their guts into knots.”

He began to label the phials containing the pathetic samples of blood.

“I’ll divide each sample into two and send them to two different labs,” he said. “Double check.”

I nodded.

“Also we’ll take umpteen sections of tissue from her organs at the postmortem, and I tell you, there will be no results, like before, because we don’t know what to look for.”

“You’re such a pessimist.”

“With reason.”

He produced from the bag a large rectal thermometer and took the internal temperature, explaining it helped to indicate the time of death. Horses, because of their body mass, retained heat for hours and the result could be approximate only.

Belinda returned with two suitable jars into which she put and labeled samples of water from the half-empty bucket and hay from the half-empty net. There was no doubt that the mare had drunk and eaten from those sources.

Scott came fast on Belinda’s heels and couldn’t contain his feelings, a mixture of disbelief, rage and fear of being held responsible, as far as I could see.

“I put her in the box. I even gave her new water and fresh hay and she was right as rain. Peter will tell you. There’s just no way she could be dead.”

No one bothered to say that, one way or another, she was.

Ken stripped off his gloves, finished packing the samples, snapped the case shut and stood up to his six foot four.

“Who’s looking after this afternoon’s patient?” he said. “Scott, go and check at once. Belinda, set up the drip in the intensive-care box. We can move him out here soon, then Scott can oversee him all evening. He’s not to be left alone, even if I have to sit on a chair all night outside his door.” He gave me a wild look, still shattered for all his surface decisiveness. “I’ll have to tell Carey.”

I went with him into the office and listened to the fateful phone call. Carey on the other end received the news not with screeching fury but with silence.

“Carey?” Ken said anxiously. “Did you hear what I said?”

It appeared that he had heard and was speechless.

Ken told him he’d talked to the knackers; told him he wanted an outside vet to do the postmortem; told him Peter suggested they look for poison.

That last sentence produced a sharp reaction that I couldn’t quite hear but which surprised and embarrassed Ken. He skipped on hurriedly to his opinion that the mare had been dead at least two hours when Belinda found her. Two hours, he said, clearly having done some thinking, meant a possible or probable period when he (Ken) and Carey and Belinda and Scott and Peter had all been together in the theater, engaged in a long operation. Who knew, he said, what had been going on outside?

There was a lengthy issue of scratchy noises of disapproval from the telephone until finally Ken said, “Yes. Yes, OK,” and slowly put down the receiver.

“He won’t believe anyone deliberately killed the mare. He says you’re panicking.” Ken looked at me apologetically. “I suppose I shouldn’t have told him what you think.”

“It doesn’t matter. Is he coming here?”

He shook his head. “He’s going to fix the postmortem for tomorrow morning and he’s going to tell Wynn Lees, which is one chore I’m very relieved to get out of.”

“Wynn Lees might know already.”

“Jeez,” Ken said.

 

 

I SCORCHED THE tires to London not even in time for my appointment and with no chance of newspapers. I solved the problem of my sketchy if not nonexistent knowledge of most of London by stopping at a multistory car park as soon as I was off the M.40 motorway and letting a taxi find Draycott Avenue and Daphne’s restaurant, which it achieved irritatingly slowly.

Annabel efficiently had arrived on time. I was seventeen minutes late. She was sitting primly at at table for two, a single glass of wine before her.

“Sorry,” I said, taking the opposite chair.

“Excuses?”

“A dead horse. A hundred miles. Dearth of taxis. Traffic.”

“I suppose that will do.” The small mouth curved. “What dead horse?”

I told her in some detail and no doubt with heat.

“You care,” she said when I’d finished.

“Yes, I do. Anyway ...” I shook my head, dismissing it, “did the Oriental chums get off all right?”

She said they had. We consulted menus and chose, and I took stock of the surroundings and of herself.

She’d come dressed again in black and white: black skirt, loose harlequin black-and-white top with big black pompoms for buttons down the front. The cropped frizzy hair looked fluffy from recent washing and she wore gentle eye makeup and pale pink lipstick. I didn’t know how much was normal to her or how much she’d done for the evening’s benefit, but I definitely liked the result.

As at Stratford, she effortlessly established a neutral zone around herself, across which she would be friendly to a point. The amusement in her big eyes was like a moat, I thought, dug for the deterrence of over-the-top attentions.

The narrow restaurant was packed and noisy, the waiters hurrying precariously holding big trays head high.

“Lucky to get a table,” I commented, looking round.

“I booked.”

I smiled. Effective public relations. “I’ve no idea where I am,” I said. “In terms of London, I mean.”