Comeback (29 page)

“And, sir, have you succeeded?”

I said regretfully, “No.”

“How long have you been trying?”

“Since last Thursday.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head slightly, forgiving me, it seemed, for not having achieved results in five days. He made another note, then looked up and began again.

“Do you think the deaths of the horses and the death of the anesthetist are connected?”

I frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Do you think the deaths of the horses and the burning of the main building are connected?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you discussed any theories with anyone, sir?”

“I think it may not be safe to discuss theories round here.”

His eyes narrowed sharply. “You saw Sylvester’s body, I understand.”

“Yes.” I swallowed. “How did he die?”

“All in good time,” he said blandly. “When you were in the theater, did you touch anything?”

“No.”

“Are you positive, sir?”

“Absolutely positive.”

“Did you see anything of note? Except Sylvester, of course.”

“There was a surgical stapler on the floor near the operating table.”

“Ah ... you know surgical staplers by sight?”

“I’ve seen Ken use one.”

He made another note.

“Also,” I said, “I think all the doors were unlocked, which isn’t usual. I went round outside to check the outer reception door, which is where the sick animals enter, and it was unlocked. I put the key in the hole and locked it to prevent anyone just walking in there and seeing Scott. . . .” I paused. “And when Ken and I went into the theater, the door to the padded room was open, and so was the one from there to the corridor and the reception room.”

He made a note. “And was it you who put up the notices and locked the door between the passage here and the theater?”

I nodded.

“So after you locked the doors, no one went in there?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said slowly. “Everyone has keys.”

“Do you have keys?”

“No. I used Ken McClure’s.”

“Where were you, sir, between nine last night and nine this morning?”

I almost smiled, the inquiry being classic. I said calmly, “I went to London, to a private dinner. I was in the company of the Jockey Club’s deputy director of security from eleven until two, then I drove back here to Cheltenham and went to bed. I’m staying with Ken McClure’s fiancée’s parents about a mile from here.”

He made short notes. “Thank you, sir.”

“When did he die?” I asked.

“You don’t expect me to answer that.”

I sighed. It had to have been after three, when Ken had left Scott in charge. Everyone’s alibi would be the same and as hazy as mine: home in bed.

Superintendent Ramsey asked how long I would be staying with Ken McClure’s fiancée’s parents.

“It’s in the air,” I said. “Several more days, I should think.”

“We may need to speak to you again, sir.”

“Ken will know where I am, if I leave.”

He nodded, made one more note, thanked me in general and asked the constable to invite Ken to the office. As I went out into the passage, Carey and the policeman from Sunday, whose name I still didn’t know, were coming out of the theater vestibule. Carey walked heavily, gray head bowed, deep in distress.

He walked towards me unseeingly and turned into the office.

“There’s nothing out of place,” he said leadenly to Ramsey.

The Sunday policeman followed Carey into the office and closed the door, and I and the constable left the hospital by the rear and found Ken and Belinda doing nothing much but leaning on the closed lower halves of the stable doors, aimlessly watching their patients recover.

“Your turn with the top brass,” I said to Ken.

He looked depressed.

“I’m going back to Thetford Cottage,” I said. “I’ll be there if you want me.”

Belinda said, “I’m staying here with Ken.”

I smiled at her and after a second she smiled back, the wattage not blinding but an advance nevertheless.

 

 

VICKY AND GREG were out when I reached the house. They had solved the boredom factor to some extent by making an arrangement to be driven on demand by a taxi firm, neither of them feeling confident enough to rent and drive a car themselves. “The taxi drivers know where to go,” Vicky had said. “They tell us what to do and see.”

I let myself in, took Ken’s typewriter and the folder of letters up to my bedroom, and set to work.

Ken’s letters, each made on the partnership writing paper and personally signed with his own sprawling signature, explained the police’s need-to-know request for the pharmacy’s burned contents and asked for the firm’s cooperation. The letter was all right as far as it went, I thought, but as a candidate for the “sometime or other” tray it got full marks. I slotted the first copy into the machine, typed in the first name on the address list at the top and rolled down to the bottom, below Ken’s signature, to add an extra paragraph.

“This matter is of extreme urgency,” I wrote, “as the police are concerned that certain dangerous, unusual and/or illegal substances may have been stolen prior to the arson, and may have passed into the general community. Please would you treat this request
with the utmost urgency
and send copies of all relevant invoices back by return of post in the stamped addressed envelope provided. Hewett and Partners expresses its profound appreciation of your kind and rapid participation.”

In Japan I’d have scattered a few “respectfuls” around, but respect didn’t seem to go down well with British commerce, as various mystified Japanese businessmen had told me. Bowing, too, for instance, produced not a contract but a squirm. In Japan it was the host who gave a gift to his guest, not the other way round. The opportunities for mutual embarrassment were endless.

I lavishly stamped a page-size envelope for the return information, addressing it to Hewett and Partners at Thetford Cottage (temporary office). The resulting missive looked official and commanding enough, I hoped, to get results.

Then I folded the letter and return envelope together, enclosing them in a business envelope addressed to the pharmaceutical firms. Without a copier or even carbons (which I hadn’t thought of) it took me a fair while to type the extra paragraph on every letter and complete the task, but when they were all done I drove to the post office in the long shopping street and sent the whole inquiring bunch on its way.

Back in Thetford Cottage I made up on an hour’s sleep and then on the off chance phoned Ken’s portable number.

He answered at once, “Ken McClure.”

“Where are you?” I asked. “It’s Peter.”

“On my way to a dicky tendon. What do you need?”

“I thought we might go and see the Mackintoshes ... or the Nagrebbs.”

He drew in an audible breath. “You do think of vicious ways of passing the afternoon. No thanks.”

“Where do I find them?” I asked.

“You don’t mean it?”

“Do you or don’t you want your reputation back?”

After a silence he gave me directions. “Zoe Mackintosh is a tigress and her old man’s in dreamland. I’ll meet you outside there in, say, fifteen minutes.”

“Fine.”

I drove through Riddlescombe and stopped on a hillside looking down on the Mackintoshes’ village. Slate roofs, yellow-gray Cotswold stone walls, winter trees not yet swollen in bud. Charcoal and cream sky, heaped and hurrying. Sleeping fields waiting for spring.

The sense of actual déjà vu was immensely strong. I’d come over these hills before and seen these roofs. I’d run down the road where I now sat in the car. Jimmy and I, laughing ourselves sick over an infantile joke, had chucked off our clothes and splashed naked in the stream going down to the valley. I couldn’t see the stream from where I sat but I knew it was there.

Near the appointed time for meeting Ken, I started the engine, released the brake and rolled down the hill. I still couldn’t see the stream. Must have muddled the places, I thought, but I’d been so certain. I shrugged it away. Memory was unreliable enough after a week: hopeless after twenty years.

Ken met me at the entrance to the drive to a long gray house with gables and ivy. I’d been there before. I knew the patterns on the folded-back wrought-iron entrance gates.

“Hi,” I said prosaically, getting out of my car.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said with resignation, looking out of the driver’s window of his own car.

“Often,” I said.

“Oh God.” He paused. “Zoe knows my car. She’ll attack me.”

“Get in mine, then, coward.”

He climbed out of his car and folded his length in with me and put an arresting hand on mine when I moved to put the car in gear.

“Carey says he’s resigning,” he said. “I thought I’d better tell you.”

“That’s unthinkable.”

“I know. I believe he does mean it, though. And he’s all that holds us together.”

“When did he say he was resigning?”

“In the office. You know, after you left, when I went along there? Carey was there with that superintendent.”

I nodded.

“Carey had more or less collapsed. When I went in, the policeman was giving him a glass of water. Water! He should have had brandy. The moment he saw me he said he couldn’t go on, it was all too much. I told him we needed him, but he didn’t answer properly. All he said was that Scott had worked for the practice for ten or more years and we’d never find an anesthetist like him.”

“And will you?”

He made a shrugging gesture that involved not just his shoulders but his neck and head.

“If Carey disbands the partnership,” he said, “because that’s what will happen if he resigns, we’ll have to start again.”

“And to start again,” I pointed out, “you need a clean slate. So we walk up the drive here and jerk the bellpull.”

His long head turned slowly towards me.

“How do you know about jerking the bellpull?”

I couldn’t answer. I hadn’t realized when I was speaking that I was drawing on memory.

“Figure of speech,” I said lamely.

He shook his head. “You know things you couldn’t know. I’ve noticed before. You knew my father’s name was Kenny, that very first evening. How did you know?”

After a while I said, “If I do any good for you, I’ll tell you.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

I started the car, drove in through the gates and stopped in a circular graveled area short of the house. Then, alone, I got out of the car and I walked along the last piece of driveway and jerked the bellpull, which was a wrought-iron rod with a gilded knob on the end. I knew, before I heard them, what the distant chimes would sound like inside the house.

I couldn’t remember who should be opening the door, but it certainly wasn’t the woman who did. Of indeterminate age, she was sandy-colored with dry curly hair, fair eyelashes and noticeable down on her upper lip and lower jaw. Thin and strong, dressed in jeans, checked shirt and faded sweater, she made no attempt at personal show but was not unattractive, in an unconventional sort of way. She looked me up and down, and waited.

“Miss Zoe Mackintosh?” I asked.

“I’m not buying anything. Good afternoon.”

The door began closing.

“I’m not a salesman,” I said hastily.

“What then?” The door paused.

“I’m from Hewett and Partners.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” She opened the door wider. “But I didn’t send for anyone.”

“We’re . . . er ... working on the question of why two of your horses died in our hospital.”

“Bit late for that,” she said crisply.

“Could we possibly ask you a few questions?”

She put her head on one side. “I suppose so. Who’s we?” I looked back to the car. “Ken McClure’s with me.” “Oh, no. He killed them.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Couldn’t you please listen?” She hesitated. “He told me some rubbish about atropine.”

“What if it wasn’t rubbish?”

She gave me a straight uncompromising inspection, then made up her mind at least to hear the case for the defense.

“Come in, then,” she said, stepping back. She looked across to the car and said grudgingly, “I told Ken he’d never set foot in here again, but he can come too.”

“Thank you.”

I made a beckoning arm movement to Ken but he approached warily and stopped a full pace behind me.

“Zoe . . .” he said tentatively.

“Yes, well, you’ve brought a devil’s advocate, I see. So come in and get on with it.”

We stepped into a black-and-white-tiled hallway and she closed the door behind us. Then she led the way across the hall, down a short passage and into a square room crowded with office paraphernalia, racing colors, photographs, sagging armchairs and six assorted dogs. Zoe scooped several dogs off the chairs and invited us to sit.

In an obscure way I thought the interior of the house was somehow wrong: it didn’t smell the way it should, and there was an absence of sound. Zoe’s room smelled of dogs. I couldn’t get back past that, the way one can’t remember a particular tune with a different one bombarding one’s eardrums.

“Have you lived here long?” I asked,

She raised her eyebrows humorously, glancing round at the clutter.

“Doesn’t it look like it?” she said.

“Well, yes.”

“Twenty-something years,” she said. “Twenty-three, twenty-four.”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“Yes. So what about these horses?”

“I think they and several others died as a result of insurance swindles.”

She shook her head decisively. “Our two weren’t insured. Their owners don’t let us forget it.”

I said, “Horses can be insured without the owner or the trainer knowing.”