Comeback (36 page)

“True.” A smile glimmered briefly. He didn’t say whether or not he would obtain a list, nor whether he would show it to me if he did. Police the world over weren’t renowned for sharing their information.

He rose to his feet again and came with me out to the car park, carefully locking doors behind him. He seemed avuncular more than forbidding, but then bears could look cuddly. He might listen to me and reckon that Ken had killed the horses himself. Ken had at first been reluctant, if not afraid, to tell me how horses could be killed on the grounds that knowledge could be twisted into a presumption of guilt.

“I’ll hear from you tomorrow,” Ramsey said, nodding and getting into his car.

“Right.”

He waited until I had started my own car and driven to the exit, almost as if shepherding me out. He needn’t have worried that I’d go back: there was barely time to scorch the miles to the Fulham Road by six o’clock.

ANNABEL, RELATIVELY CONSERVATIVE in the silver cowboy boots below a straight black dress, opened her door and looked at her watch, laughing.

“Ten seconds late.”

“Abject apologies,” I said.

“Accepted. Where are we going?”

“You’re the Londoner. You choose.”

She chose an adventure film and dinner in a bistro. The hero in the film got punched six times in the solar plexus and came up smiling.

The bistro had candles in chianti bottles, red-checked tablecloths and a male gypsy singer with a flower behind his ear. I told Annabel about Vicky and Greg’s singing. Old-fashioned but great voices. She would like to hear them, she said.

“Come down on Sunday,” I said on impulse.

“Sunday I see the bishop and his wife.”

“Oh.”

She looked down at her pasta, candlelight on her bouncy chopped-off hair, her eyes in shadow, considering.

“I only miss Sundays with them if it’s important,” she said.

“This is important.”

She raised her eyes. I could see candle flames in them.

“Don’t say it lightly,” she said.

“It’s important,” I repeated.

She smiled briefly. “I’ll come on the train.”

“For country pub lunch?”

She nodded.

“And stay for the evening and I’ll drive you home.”

“I can go back on the train.”

“No. Not alone.”

“You’re as bad as my father. I can look after myself, you know.”

“All the same, I’ll drive you.”

She smiled at her pasta. “The bishop will have to approve of you in spite of your job.”

“I tremble to meet him.”

She nodded as if trembling were expected and asked how things were going in the practice. “I can’t get that poor man Scott out of my mind.”

I told her about the results from the pharmaceutical companies, which fascinated and alarmed her by turns. I told her that since Carey had dissolved the partnership, all the vets were rushing around like chickens without heads, looking after sick animals but with no central organization.

“But
can
anyone dissolve a partnership like that?”

“Heaven knows. The legal problems look knotty. Carey’s exhausted and wants out. Half the others want him out. They jointly pay the mortgage on the hospital, which is currently shut. God help Ken if there’s a middle-of-the-night emergency.”

“What a mess.”

“Yup. It’s a long way from here or now, though.”

“Mm.”

“So ... er ... does the bishop have any other daughters or sons?”

“Two of each.”

“Wow.”

“I’d guess,” she said, “that you’re an only child.”

“How do you know?”

“You don’t need roots.”

I’d never thought of my nomadic life in that way, but perhaps it was solitariness that made the go-where-you’re-sent discipline easy.

“How strong are yours?” I asked.

“I’ve never tried to pull them up.”

We looked at each other.

“I’ll be in England for four years,” I said. “After that, a month or so every two years. If I reach sixty, I can stay here always. Most diplomats buy a house here somewhere along the line. My parents have one but I can’t live there now because it’s leased to a company. When my father retires in four years’ time and the lease runs out, they’ll come back here to stay.”

She listened carefully.

“The Foreign Office pays for children to come home from foreign postings and go to boarding schools,” I said.

“Did you do that?”

“Only for my last two years.” I explained about learning the languages in one’s teens. “Also I wanted to stay with my parents. I like them and it’s a multi-everything life.”

A job description, I thought, was an odd sort of way to tell her I was more than ordinarily interested in her future. She seemed to have no trouble understanding. It was also plain that this was to be no lusty rush into uncontrollable sexual attraction and damn the consequences. Annabel wanted to be sure of her footing.

I drove her home and kissed her goodbye as before. This time the kiss lasted longer and was a tingling matter that made uncontrollable sex look totally desirable. I smiled at myself and at her, and she said she would take whichever train on Sunday reached Cheltenham nearest to noon.

 

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING the letter from Parkway Chemicals finally arrived, and to me looked like gobbledegook. While I waited for Ken I read the few intelligible pieces of information supplied with the invoices.

The Parkway Chemical Company was in the business of selling biochemical organic compounds for research, and also diagnostic reagents. The company that had sent insulin and collagenase had had similar headings. Parkway Chemicals could be ordered by fax and by Freefone.

I read the few ordinary invoices but the only substance ordered that I recognized was fibrinogen, used to help blood clot.

The delivery note given to Scott had warnings stamped all over it.

“Extremely hazardous material.” “For the use of qualified personnel.” “Laboratory only.” “Hand delivered.”

Scott had signed his name in acceptance.

The fuss, it seemed, was over three small ampoules of something called tetrodotoxin.

When Ken saw it he said immediately, “Anything with the suffix toxin is poisonous.” He frowned over the details and read them aloud. “‘Three ampoules one mg tetrodotoxin with sodium citrate buffer. Soluble in water. Read safety sheet.’”

“What is it?” I asked.

“I’ll have to look it up.”

Although the owners of Thetford Cottage weren’t book people, they did have a row of reference books and a small encyclopedia. Ken and I searched in vain for tetrodotoxin. The nearest the dictionary came to it was tetrode, a vacuum tube containing four electrodes, which hardly seemed to fit the case.

“I’d better go home for my books on poisons,” Ken said.

“OK.”

As I had the dictionary in my hands, and on the off chance, I looked up puffer fish. The entry read:

So far, so good. It was the sting in the tail that had me gasping.

It was my old friend fugu after all.

 

 

 

 

P
uffer fish?”
Ramsey said.

The Superintendent had met us alone again in the empty hospital. It was rather as if he wanted to keep his sessions with Ken and me separate from whatever other inquiries he was making.

Ken had been home for his book on poisons.

“Tetrodotoxin,” he read aloud, “is one of the most potent poisons known. It comes from the puffer fish and causes respiratory and cardiovascular failure through paralysis of the neuromuscular system. A fatal dose is extremely small; only micrograms per kilogram of body weight. It is very unlikely to be detected by forensic examination.”

“Let me read that,” Ramsey said.

Ken gave him the book and we waited while he digested the bad news. Then he picked up the delivery note and read through it for the second or third time.

“You’re telling me,” he said, “that one milligram of this powder will kill a horse? One thousandth of a gram?”

“Yes, easily,” Ken said. “A racehorse weighs approximately 450 kilograms. A microgram is
one-millionth
of a gram. One of the ampoules would be enough to kill four horses, at a rough guess. So far, we’ve two dead, Fitzwalter’s chipped knee and the broodmare.”

There was a dismayed pause while we each worked out that there might still be a good deal of the stuff lying around.

“Would you sprinkle the powder on the horse’s food?” Ramsey asked.

“I suppose you could,” Ken said doubtfully, “but it would be more usual to reconstitute it in water and inject it, preferably into a vein.”

“And wear surgical gloves while you do it,” I suggested.

“My God, yes.”

“Scott,” I said, “must have known who had asked him to travel that distance to fetch the package. Must have known who he gave it to. He didn’t necessarily know what was in it.” I paused and added, “I guess he found out the hard way.”

“Jeez,” Ken said under his breath.

“Tell us,” I begged Ramsey. “Just say yes or no. Did you find any needle puncture mark on Scott?”

He pursed his mouth. Looked at the question from north round to south. Consulted a mental rule book.

“You’ve been of considerable assistance,” he said finally. “The answer is yes.” He checked some more with his inner self and squeezed out a few more sentences. “Four days of tests have revealed the presence of treble a normal dose of soporific, taken in coffee. No other toxic material of any sort has so far been found. The needle puncture was into a vein on the back of the hand.”

At least, I thought, Scott had been asleep when he died. I reckoned he would have had to have been. All that explosive muscle power would have presented a daunting prospect to anyone wishing to creep up on him holding a death-laden syringe. Too much possibility of the tables being turned.

The symbolic closing of Scott’s mouth, I thought, had been itself an unconscious declaration of motive. I’d never been involved with a murder before and understood little of the overpowering impulse to kill, but in the macabre state of Scott’s body a compulsion of extreme magnitude was unmistakably visible. It hadn’t been enough just to stop him talking: the raw statement must have sprung from subterranean urges too powerful to combat. In the depths of the psyche, logic foundered, caution dissolved, obsession swept all decency away.

Scott might have been an accomplice who finally objected. He might have discovered irregularities and threatened to reveal them. He might have tried a little dangerous blackmail. The brutality of the staples had been the violent response.

Ramsey, having once begun to divulge, continued. “I see no harm in telling you what will be released to the press later today. We’ve identified the person burned in your fire.”

“You have?” Ken exclaimed. “Who was it?”

Maddeningly, Ramsey answered the question crabwise. “Usually if someone goes missing it’s reported. In this case, the person was not reported missing as his family believed he was away for a few days’ fishing and at a trade conference. When he didn’t return this Thursday evening at the expected time, the family discovered he hadn’t been to the conference at all. They were alarmed and informed us at once. Owing partly to your information and your innuendos, sir,” he said to me, “we speculated that the missing man and the unidentified body were one and the same. Dental records have now proved this to be the case.”

He stopped. Ken, disgusted, said, “Come on man, who was it?”

Ramsey savored his disclosures. “A man, thirty-two years old, not on very good terms with his wife, who hadn’t expected him to phone her from the conference. He was an insurance agent.” He paused. “His name,” he said finally, “was Travers. Theodore Travers.”

I knew my mouth fell open.

Theo,
I thought. The Travers I’d played with, the Travers of the millhouse, his name was Theo.

Dear God, I thought. Perhaps one should never go back to the scenery of one’s childhood, perhaps never learn the fates of one’s friends. To come back as a stranger into the future of one’s past life, an adventure that had at first pleased and captivated me, now seemed like a danger best left alone.

It was too late to wish I’d never returned. Since I had, in the most fortuitous unrolling of events, all I could do was try to leave the present state of Kenny’s son in better shape than if I’d stayed away.

“Upjohn and Travers,” I said.

Ramsey nodded. “We looked them up after you spoke of them yesterday. The firm no longer exists, and hasn’t for many years, but in the days of old lecherous Travers it was an insurance agency. It broke up when both Travers and Upjohn died.” He looked at me straightly. “How did you hear, sir, of Upjohn and Travers?”

I said weakly, “I don’t know.”

Ken gave me a sharp-eyed look, trusting still, but ever more puzzled.

I must have heard the old firm’s name at Theo’s house, I supposed. I simply didn’t know why it had stuck in my mind.

“Why,” I said, “should an insurance agent be present in the veterinary building late in the evening?”

“Well, why?” Ramsey asked, as if knowing the answer.

“Someone let him in to discuss insurance schemes,” I said. “Maybe illicit insurance of horses. Maybe they had an argument that ended either in the accidental or intentional death of Travers. Maybe the place was set on fire to cover it up.”

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Ramsey observed, “though I’m not saying you’re wrong.”