Banker

April

Alec had bought a bunch of yellow tulips when he went out for What’s Going On, and they stood on his desk in a beer mug, catching a shaft of spring sunshine and standing straight like guardsmen.

Gordon was making notes in a handwriting growing even smaller, and the two older colleagues were counting the weeks to their retirement. Office life: an ordinary day.

My telephone rang, and with eyes still bent on a letter from a tomato grower asking for more time to repay his original loan because of needing a new greenhouse (half an acre) right this minute, I slowly picked up the receiver.

‘Oliver Knowles,’ the voice said. ‘Is that you, Tim?’

‘Hello,’ I replied warmly. ‘Everything going well?’

‘No.’ The word was sickeningly abrupt, and both mentally and physically I sat up straighter.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Can you come down here?’ he asked, not directly answering. ‘I’m rather worried. I want to talk to you.’

‘Well... I could come on Sunday,’ I said.

‘Could you come today? Or tomorrow?’

I reviewed my work load and a few appointments. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, if you like,’ I said. ‘If it’s bank business.’

‘Yes, it is.’ The anxiety in his voice was quite plain, and communicated itself with much ease to me.

‘Can’t you tell me what’s the trouble?’ I asked. ‘Is Sandcastle all right?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you when you come.’

‘But Oliver...’

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Sandcastle is in good health and he hasn’t escaped again or anything like that. It’s too difficult to explain on the telephone. I want your advice, that’s all.’

He wouldn’t say any more and left me with the dead receiver in my hand and some horrid suspenseful question marks in my mind.

‘Sandcastle?’ Gordon asked.

‘Oliver says he’s in good health.’

‘That horse is insured against everything — those enormous premiums — so don’t worry too much,’ Gordon said. ‘It’s probably something minor.’

It hadn’t sounded like anything minor, and when I reached the stud farm the next day I found that it certainly wasn’t. Oliver came out to meet me as I braked to a standstill by his front door, and there were new deep lines on his face that hadn’t been there before.

‘Come in,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘I’m seriously worried. I don’t know what to do.’

He led the way through the house to the office-sitting room and gestured me to a chair. ‘Sit down and read this,’ he said, and gave me a letter.

There had been no time for ‘nice day’ or ‘how is Ginnie?’ introductory noises, just this stark command. I sat down, and I read, as directed.

The letter dated April 21st, said:

‘Is that very bad?’ I asked, frowning.

In reply he wordlessly handed me another letter. This one said:

‘And now this,’ Oliver said, and handed me a third.

The heading was that of a highly regarded and well-known stud farm, the letter briefly impersonal.

I gave him back the letters and with growing misgiving asked, ‘How common are these malformations?’

Oliver said intensely, ‘They happen. They happen occasionally. But those letters aren’t all. I’ve had two telephone calls — one last night. Two other foals have died of holes in the heart. Two more! That’s five with something wrong with them.’ He stared at me, his eyes like dark pits. ‘That’s far too many.’ He swallowed. ‘And what about the others, the other thirty-five? Suppose... suppose there are more...’

‘If you haven’t heard, they’re surely all right.’

He shook his head hopelessly. ‘The mares are scattered all over the place, dropping Sandcastle’s foals where they are due to be bred next. There’s no automatic reason for those stud managers to tell me when a foal’s born, or what it’s like. I mean, some do it out of courtesy but they just don’t usually bother, and nor do I. I tell the owner of the mare, not the manager of the stallion.’

‘Yes, I see.’

‘So there may be other foals with deformities... that I haven’t heard about.’

There was a long fraught pause in which the enormity of the position sank coldly into my banking consciousness. Oliver developed sweat on his forehead and a tic beside his mouth, as if sharing his anxiety had doubled it rather than halved.

The telephone rang suddenly, making us both jump.

‘You answer it,’ he said. ‘Please.’

I opened my mouth to protest that it would be only some routine call about anything else on earth, but then merely picked up the receiver.

‘Is that Oliver Knowles?’ a voice said.

‘No... I’m his assistant.’

‘Oh. Then will you give him a message?’

‘Yes, I will.’

‘Tell him that Patrick O’Marr rang him from Limballow, Ireland. Have you got that?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Go ahead.’

‘It’s about a foal we had born here three or four weeks ago. I thought I’d better let Mr Knowles know that we’ve had to put it down, though I’m sorry to give him bad news. Are you listening?’

‘Yes,’ I said, feeling hollow.

‘The poor little fellow was born with a sort of curled-in hoof. The vet said it might straighten out in a week or two, but it didn’t, so we had it X-rayed, and the lower pastern bone and the coffin bone were fused and tiny. The vet said there was no chance of them developing properly, and the little colt would never be able to walk, let alone race. A beautiful little fella too, in all other ways. Anyway, I’m telling Mr Knowles because of course he’ll be looking out for Sandcastle’s first crop to win for him, and I’m explaining why this one won’t be there. Pink Roses, that’s the mare’s name. Tell him, will you? Pink Roses. She’s come here to be bred to Dallaton. Nice mare. She’s fine herself, tell Mr Knowles.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry.’

‘One of those things.’ The cultured Irish accent sounded not too despairing. ‘The owner of Pink Roses is cut up about it, of course, but I believe he’d insured against a dead or deformed foal, so it’s a case of wait another year and better luck next time.’

‘I’ll tell Mr Knowles,’ I said. ‘And thank you for letting us know.’

‘Sorry and all,’ he said. ‘But there it is.’

I put the receiver down slowly and Oliver said dully, ‘Another one? Not another one.’

I nodded and told him what Patrick O’Marr had said.

‘That’s six,’ Oliver said starkly. ‘And Pink Roses... that’s the mare you saw Sandcastle cover, this time last year.’

‘Was it?’ I thought back to that majestic mating, that moment of such promise. Poor little colt, conceived in splendour and born with a club foot.

‘What am I going to do?’ Oliver said.

‘Get out Sandcastle’s insurance policy.’

He looked blank. ‘No, I mean, about the mares. We have all the mares here who’ve come this year to Sandcastle. They’ve all foaled except one and nearly all of them have already been covered. I mean... there’s another crop already growing, and suppose those... suppose all of those...’ He stopped as if he simply couldn’t make his tongue say the words. ‘I was awake all night,’ he said.

‘The first thing,’ I said again, ‘is to look at that policy.’

He went unerringly to a neat row of files in a cupboard and pulled out the needed document, a many-paged affair, partly printed, partly typed. I spread it open and said to Oliver, ‘How about some coffee? This is going to take ages.’

‘Oh. All right.’ He looked around him vaguely. ‘There’ll be some put ready for me for dinner. I’ll go and plug it in.’ He paused. ‘Percolator,’ he explained.

I knew all the symptoms of a mouth saying one thing while the mind was locked on to another. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be fine.’ He nodded with the same unmeshed mental gears, and I guessed that when he got to the kitchen he’d have trouble remembering what for.

The insurance policy had been written for the trade and not the customer, a matter of jargon-ridden sentences full of words that made plain sense only to people who used them for a living. I read it very carefully for that reason; slowly and thoroughly from start to finish.

There were many definitions of the word ‘accident’, with stipulations about the number of veterinary surgeons who should be consulted and should give their signed opinions before Sandcastle (hereinafter called the horse) could be humanely destroyed for any reason whatsoever. There were stipulations about fractures, naming those bones which should commonly be held to be repairable, and about common muscle, nerve and tendon troubles which would not be considered grounds for destruction, unless of such severity that the horse couldn’t actually stand up.

Aside from these restrictions the horse was to be considered to be insured against death from any natural causes whatsoever, to be insured against accidental death occurring while the horse was free (such a contingency to be guarded against with diligence, gross negligence being a disqualifying condition) to be insured against death by fire should the stable be consumed, and against death caused maliciously by human hand. He was insured fully against malicious or accidental castration and against such accidental damage being caused by veterinarians acting in good faith to treat the horse. He was insured against infertility on a sliding scale, his full worth being in question only if he proved one hundred per cent infertile (which laboratory tests had shown was not the case).

He was insured against accidental or malicious poisoning and against impotence resulting from non-fatal illness, and against incapacitating or fatal injuries inflicted upon him by any other horse.

He was insured against death caused by the weather (storm, flood, lightning, etc.) and also, surprisingly, against death or incapacity caused by war, riot or civil commotion, causes usually specifically excluded from insurance.

He was insured against objects dropped from the sky and against being driven into by mechanical objects on the ground and against trees falling on him and against hidden wells opening under his feet.

He was insured against every foreseeable disaster except one. He was not insured against being put out of business because of congenital abnormalities among his progeny.

Oliver came back carrying a tray on which sat two kitchen mugs containing tea, not coffee. He put the tray on the desk and looked at my face, which seemed only very slightly to deepen his despair.

‘I’m not insured, am I,’ he said, ‘against possessing a healthy potent stallion to whom no one will send their mares.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes... I see you do.’ He was shaking slightly. ‘When the policy was drawn up about six people, including myself and two vets, besides the insurers themselves, tried to think of every possible contingency, and to guard against it. We threw in everything we could think of.’ He swallowed. ‘No one... no one thought of a whole crop of deformed foals.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I mean, breeders usually insure their own mares, if they want to, and the foal, to protect the stallion fee, but many don’t because of the premiums being high. And I... I’m paying this enormous premium... and the one thing... the one thing that happens is something we never... no one ever imagined... could happen.’

The policy, I thought, had been too specific. They should have been content with something like ‘any factor resulting in the horse not being considered fit for stud purposes’; but perhaps the insurers themselves couldn’t find underwriters for anything so open to interpretation and opinion. In any case, the damage was done. All-risk policies all too often were not what they said; and insurance companies never paid out if they could avoid it.

My own skin felt clammy. Three million pounds of the bank’s money and two million subscribed by private people were tied up in the horse, and if Oliver couldn’t repay, it was we who would lose.

I had recommended the loan. Henry had wanted the adventure and Val and Gordon had been willing, but it was my own report which had carried the day. I couldn’t have foreseen the consequences any more than Oliver, but I felt most horribly and personally responsible for the mess.

‘What shall I do?’ he said again.

‘About the mares?’

‘And everything else.’

I stared into space. The disaster that for the bank would mean a loss of face and a sharp dip in the profits and to the private subscribers just a painful financial set-back meant in effect total ruin for Oliver Knowles.

If Sandcastle couldn’t generate income, Oliver would be bankrupt. His business was not a limited company, which meant that he would lose his farm, his horses, his house; everything he possessed. To him too, as to my mother, the bailiffs would come, carrying off his furniture and his treasures and Ginnie’s books and toys....

I shook myself mentally and physically and said, ‘The first thing to do is nothing. Keep quiet and don’t tell anyone what you’ve told me. Wait to hear if any more of the foals are... wrong. I will consult with the other directors at Ekaterin’s and see what can be done in the way of providing time. I mean... I’m not promising... but we might consider suspending repayments while we look into other possibilities.’

He looked bewildered. ‘What possibilities?’

‘Well... of having Sandcastle tested. If the original tests of his fertility weren’t thorough enough, for instance, it might be possible to show that his sperm had always been defective in some way, and then the insurance policy would protect you. Or at least it’s a very good chance.’

The insurers, I thought, might in that case sue the laboratory that had originally given the fertility all-clear, but that wasn’t Oliver’s problem, nor mine. What did matter was that all of a sudden he looked a fraction more cheerful, and drank his tea absentmindedly.

‘And the mares?’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘In fairness to their owners you’ll have to say that Sandcastle’s off colour.’

‘And repay their fees,’ he said gloomily.

‘Mm.’

‘He’ll have covered two today,’ he said. ‘I haven’t mentioned any of this to Nigel. I mean, it’s his job to organise the breeding sessions. He has a great eye for those mares, he knows when they are feeling receptive. I leave it to his judgement a good deal, and he told me this morning that two were ready for Sandcastle. I just nodded. I felt sick. I didn’t tell him.’

‘So how many does that leave, er, uncovered?’

He consulted a list, fumbling slightly. ‘The one that hasn’t foaled, and... four others.’

Thirty-five more mares, I thought numbly, could be carrying that seed.

‘The mare that hasn’t yet foaled,’ Oliver said flatly, ‘Was bred to Sandcastle last year.’

I stared. ‘You mean... one of his foals will be born here?’

‘Yes.’ He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘Any day.’

There were footsteps outside the door and Ginnie came in, saying on a rising, enquiring inflection, ‘Dad?’

She saw me immediately and her face lit up. ‘Hello! How lovely. I didn’t know you were coming.’

I stood up to give her a customarily enthusiastic greeting, but she sensed at once that the action didn’t match the climate. ‘What’s the matter?’ She looked into my eyes and then at her father. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Dad, you’re lying.’ She turned again to me. ‘Tell me. I can see something bad has happened. I’m not a child any more. I’m seventeen.’

‘I thought you’d be at school,’ I said.

‘I’ve left. At the end of last term. There wasn’t any point in me going back for the summer when all I’m interested in is here.’

She looked far more assured, as if the schooldays had been a crysallis and she were now the imago, flying free. The beauty she had longed for hadn’t quite arrived, but her face was full of character and far from plain, and she would be very much liked, I thought, throughout her life.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’

Oliver made a small gesture of despair and capitulation. ‘You’ll have to know sometime.’ He swallowed. ‘Some of Sandcastle’s foals... aren’t perfect.’

‘How do you mean, not perfect?’

He told her about all six and showed her the letters, and she went slowly, swaying, pale. ‘Oh Dad, no. No. It can’t be. Not Sandcastle. Not that beautiful boy.’

‘Sit down,’ I said, but she turned to me instead, burying her face against my chest and holding on to me tightly. I put my arms round her and kissed her hair and comforted her for an age as best I could.

I went to the office on the following morning, Friday, and with a slight gritting of teeth told Gordon the outcome of my visit to Oliver.

He said ‘My God,’ several times, and Alec came over from his desk to listen also, his blue eyes for once solemn behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, the blond eyelashes blinking slowly and the laughing mouth grimly shut.

‘What will you do?’ he said finally, when I stopped.

‘I don’t really know.’

Gordon stirred, his hands trembling unnoticed on his blotter in his overriding concern. ‘The first thing, I suppose,’ he said, ‘is to tell Val and Henry. Though what any of us can do is a puzzle. As you said, Tim, we’ll have to wait to assess quite how irretrievable the situation is, but I can’t imagine anyone with a top-class broodmare having the confidence to send her to Sandcastle in future. Can you, really, Tim? Would you?’

I shook my head. ‘No.’

‘Well, there you are,’ Gordon said. ‘No one would.’

Henry and Val received the news with undisguised dismay and told the rest of the directors at lunch. The man who had been against the project from the beginning reacted with genuine anger and gave me a furious dressing-down over the grilled sole.

‘No one could foresee this,’ Henry protested, defending me.

‘Anyone could foresee,’ said the dissenting director caustically, ‘that such a scatterbrained scheme would blow up in our faces. Tim has been given too much power too soon, and it’s his judgement that’s at fault here, his alone. If he’d had the common nous to recognise the dangers, you would have listened to him and turned the proposal down. It’s certainly because of his stupidity and immaturity that the bank is facing this loss, and I shall put my views on record at the next board meeting.’

There were a few uncomfortable murmurs round the table, and Henry with unruffled geniality said, ‘We are all to blame, if blame there is, and it is unfair to call Tim stupid for not foreseeing something that escaped the imaginations of all the various experts who drew up the insurance policy.’

The dissenter however repeated his ‘I told you so’ remarks endlessly through the cheese and coffee, and I sat there depressedly enduring his digs because I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me leave before he did.

‘What will you do next?’ Henry asked me, when at long last everyone rather silently stood up to drift back to their desks. ‘What do you propose?’

I was grateful that by implication he was leaving me in the position I’d reached and not taking the decisions out of my hands. ‘I’m going down to the farm tomorrow,’ I said, ‘to go through the financial situation. Add up the figures. They’re bound to be frightful.’

He nodded with regret. ‘Such a marvellous horse. And no one, Tim, whatever anyone says, could have dreamt he’d have such a flaw.’

I sighed. ‘Oliver has asked me to stay tomorrow night and Sunday night. I don’t really want to, but they do need support.’

‘They?’

‘Ginnie, his daughter, is with him. She’s only just seventeen. It’s very hard on them both. Shattering, in fact.’

Henry patted my arm and walked with me to the lift. ‘Do what you can,’ he said. ‘Let us know the full state of affairs on Monday.’

Before I left home that Saturday morning I had a telephone call from Judith.

‘Gordon’s told me about Sandcastle. Tim, it’s so terrible. Those poor, poor people.’

‘Wretched,’ I said.

‘Tim, tell Ginnie how sorry I am. Sorry... how hopeless words are, you say sorry if you bump someone in the supermarket. That dear child... she wrote to me a couple of times from school, just asking for feminine information, like I’d told her to.’

‘Did she?’

‘Yes. She’s such a nice girl. So sensible. But this... this is too much. Gordon says they’re in danger of losing everything.’

‘I’m going down there today to see where he stands.’

‘Gordon told me. Do please give them my love.’

‘I will.’ I paused fractionally. ‘My love to you, too.’

‘Tim...’

‘I just wanted to tell you. It’s still the same.’

‘We haven’t seen you for weeks. I mean... I haven’t.’

‘Is Gordon in the room with you?’ I asked.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

I smiled twistedly. ‘I do hear about you, you know,’ I said. ‘He mentions you quite often, and I ask after you... it makes you feel closer.’

‘Yes,’ she said in a perfectly neutral voice. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I feel the same about it exactly.’

‘Judith...’ I took a breath and made my own voice calm to match hers. ‘Tell Gordon I’ll telephone him at home, if he’d like, if there is anything that needs consultation before Monday.’

‘I’ll tell him. Hang on.’ I heard her repeating the question and Gordon’s distant rumble of an answer, and then she said, ‘Yes, he says please do, we’ll be at home this evening and most of tomorrow.’

‘Perhaps you’ll answer when the telephone rings.’

‘Perhaps.’

After a brief silence I said, ‘I’d better go.’

‘Goodbye then, Tim,’ she said. ‘And do let us know. We’ll both be thinking of you all day, I know we will.’

‘I’ll call,’ I said. ‘You can count on it.’

The afternoon was on the whole as miserable as I’d expected and in some respects worse. Oliver and Ginnie walked about like pale automatons making disconnected remarks and forgetting where they’d put things, and lunch, Ginnie version, had consisted of eggs boiled too hard and packets of potato crisps.

‘We haven’t told Nigel or the lads what’s happening,’ Oliver said. ‘Fortunately there is a lull in Sandcastle’s programme. He’s been very busy because nearly all his mares foaled in mid-March, close together, except for four and the one who’s still carrying.’ He swallowed. ‘And the other stallions, of course, their mares are all here too, and we have their foals to deliver and their matings to be seen to. I mean... we have to go on. We have to.’

Towards four o’clock they both went out into the yards for evening stables, visibly squaring their shoulders to face the stable hands in a normal manner, and I began adding the columns of figures I’d drawn up from Oliver’s records.

The tally when I’d finished was appalling and meant that Oliver could be an undischarged bankrupt for the rest of his life. I put the results away in my briefcase and tried to think of something more constructive; and Oliver’s telephone rang.

‘Oliver?’ a voice said, sounding vaguely familiar.

‘He’s out,’ I said. ‘Can I take a message?’

‘Get him to ring me. Ursula Young. I’ll give you the number.’

‘Ursula!’ I said in surprise. ‘This is Tim Ekaterin.’

‘Really?’ For her it was equally unexpected. ‘What are you doing there?’

‘Just staying the weekend. Can I help?’

She hesitated slightly but then said, ‘Yes, I suppose you can. I’m afraid it’s bad news for him, though. Disappointing, you might say.’ She paused. ‘I’ve a friend who has a small stud farm, just one stallion, but quite a good one, and she’s been so excited this year because one of the mares booked to him was in foal to Sandcastle. She was thrilled, you see, to be having a foal of that calibre born on her place.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, she rang me this morning, and she was crying.’ Ursula herself gulped: she might appear tough but other people’s tears always moved her. ‘She said the mare had dropped the Sandcastle foal during the night and she hadn’t been there. She said the mare gave no sign yesterday evening, and the birth must have been quick and easy, and the mare was all right, but...’

‘But what?’ I said, scarcely breathing.

‘She said the foal — a filly — was on her feet and suckling when she went to the mare’s box this morning, and at first she was overjoyed, but then... but then...’

‘Go on,’ I said hopelessly.

‘Then she saw. She says it’s dreadful.’

‘Ursula...’

‘The foal has only one eye.’

Oh my God, I thought: dear God.

‘She says there’s nothing on the other side,’ Ursula said, ‘No proper socket.’ She gulped again. ‘Will you tell Oliver? I thought he’d better know. He’ll be most disappointed. I’m so sorry.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘These things happen, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But it’s so upsetting when they happen to your friends.’

‘You’re very right.’

‘Goodbye then, Tim. See you soon, I hope, at the races.’

I put down the receiver and wondered how I would ever tell them, and in fact I didn’t tell Ginnie, only Oliver, who sat with his head in his hands, despair in every line of his body.

‘It’s hopeless,’ he said.

‘Not yet,’ I said encouragingly, though I wasn’t as certain as I sounded. ‘There are still the tests to be done on Sandcastle.’

He merely slumped lower. ‘I’ll get them done, but they won’t help. The genes which are wrong will be minute. No one will see them, however powerful the microscope.’

‘You can’t tell. If they can see DNA, why not a horse’s chromosomes?’

He raised his head slowly. ‘Even then... it’s such a long shot.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I think I’ll ask the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket to have him there, to see what they can find. I’ll ring them on Monday.’

‘I suppose,’ I said tentatively, ‘Well, I know it sounds silly, but I suppose it couldn’t be anything as simple as something he’d eaten? Last year, of course.’

He shook his head. ‘I thought of that. I’ve thought of bloody well everything, believe me. All the stallions had the same food, and none of the others’ foals are affected... or at least we haven’t heard of any. Nigel feeds the stallions himself out of the feed room in that yard, and we’re always careful what we give them because of keeping them fit.’

‘Carrots?’ I said.

‘I give carrots to every horse on the place. Everyone here does. Carrots are good food. I buy them by the hundredweight and keep them in the first big yard where the main feed room is. I put handfuls in my pockets every day. You’ve seen me. Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet all had them. It can’t possibly be anything to do with carrots.’

‘Paint: something like that? Something new in the boxes, when you put in all the security? Something he could chew?’

He again shook his head. ‘I’ve been over it and over it. We did all the boxes exactly the same as each other. There’s nothing in Sandcastle’s box that wasn’t in the others. They’re all exactly alike.’ He moved restlessly. ‘I’ve been down there to make sure there’s nothing Sandcastle could reach to lick if he put his head right over the half-door as far as he could get. There’s nothing, nothing at all.’

‘Drinking pails?’

‘No. They don’t always have the same pails. I mean, when Lenny fills them he doesn’t necessarily take them back to the particular boxes they come from. The pails don’t have the stallions’ names on, if that’s what you mean.’

I didn’t mean anything much: just grabbing at straws.

‘Straw...’ I said. ‘How about an allergy? An allergy to something around him? Could an allergy have such an effect?’

‘I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’ll ask the Research people, though, on Monday.’

He got up to pour us both a drink. ‘It’s good to have you here,’ he said. ‘A sort of net over the bottomless pit.’ He gave me the glass with a faint half-smile, and I had a definite impression that he would not in the end go to pieces.

I telephoned then to the Michaels’ house and Gordon answered at the first ring as if he’d been passing nearby. Nothing good to report, I said, except that Ginnie sent Judith her love. Gordon said Judith was in the garden picking parsley for supper, and he would tell her. ‘Call tomorrow,’ he said, ‘if we can help.’

Our own supper, left ready in the refrigerator by Oliver’s part-time housekeeper, filled the hollows left by lunch, and Ginnie went to bed straight afterwards, saying she would be up at two o’clock and out with Nigel in the foal yard.

‘She goes most nights,’ Oliver said. ‘She and Nigel make a good team. He says she’s a great help, particularly if three or four mares are foaling at the same time. I’m often out there myself, but with all the decisions and paperwork as well I get very tired if I do it too much. Fall asleep over meals, that sort of thing.’

We ourselves went to bed fairly early, and I awoke in the large high-ceilinged guest room while it was still blackly dark. It was one of those fast awakenings which mean that sleep won’t come back easily, and I got out of bed and went to the window, which looked out over the yard.

I could see only roofs and security lights and a small section of the first yard. There was no visible activity, and my watch showed four-thirty.

I wondered if Ginnie would mind if I joined her in the foaling yard; and got dressed and went.

They were all there, Nigel and Oliver as well as Ginnie, all in one open-doored box where a mare lay on her side on the straw. They all turned their heads as I approached but seemed unsurprised to see me and gave no particular greeting.

‘This is Plus Factor,’ Oliver said. ‘In foal to Sandcastle.’

His voice was calm and so was Ginnie’s manner, and I guessed that they still hadn’t told Nigel about the deformities. There was hope, too, in their faces, as if they were sure that this one, after all, would be perfect.

‘She’s coming,’ Nigel said quietly. ‘Here we go.’

The mare gave a grunt and her swelling sides heaved. The rest of us stood silent, watching, taking no part. A glistening half-transparent membrane with a hoof showing within it appeared, followed by the long slim shape of the head, followed very rapidly by the whole foal, flopping out onto the straw, steaming, the membrane breaking open, the fresh air reaching the head, new life beginning with the first fluttering gasp of the lungs.

Amazing, I thought.

‘Is he all right?’ Oliver said, bending down, the anxiety raw, unstifled.

‘Sure,’ Nigel said. ‘Fine little colt. Just his foreleg’s doubled over...’

He knelt beside the foal who was already making the first feeble efforts to move his head, and he stretched out both hands gently to free the bent leg fully from the membrane, and to straighten it. He picked it up... and froze.

We could all see.

The leg wasn’t bent. It ended in a stump at the knee. No cannon bone, no fetlock, no hoof.

Ginnie beside me gave a choking sob and turned abruptly towards the open door, towards the dark. She took one rocky pace and then another, and then was running: running nowhere, running away from the present, the future, the unimaginable. From the hopeless little creature on the straw.

I went after her, listening to her footsteps, hearing them on gravel and then losing them, guessing she had reached the grass. I went more slowly in her wake down the path to the breeding pen, not seeing her, but sure she was out somewhere in the paths round the paddocks. With eyes slowly acclimatising I went that way and found her not far off, on her knees beside one of the posts, sobbing with the deep sound of a wholly adult desperation.

‘Ginnie,’ I said.

She stood up as if to turn to me was natural and clung to me fiercely, her body shaking from the sobs, her face pressed hard against my shoulder, my arms tightly round her. We stood like that until the paroxysm passed; until, dragging a handkerchief from her jeans, she could speak.

‘It’s one thing knowing it in theory,’ she said, her voice full of tears and her body still shaking spasmodically from after-sobs. ‘I read those letters. I did know. But seeing it... that’s different.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘And it means...’ She took gulps of air, trying hard for control. ‘It means, doesn’t it, that we’ll lose our farm. Lose everything?’

‘I don’t know yet. Too soon to say that.’

‘Poor Dad.’ The tears were sliding slowly down her cheeks, but like harmless rain after a hurricane. ‘I don’t see how we can bear it.’

‘Don’t despair yet. If there’s a way to save you, we’ll find it.’

‘Do you mean... your bank?’

‘I mean everybody.’

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and finally moved away a pace, out of my arms, strong enough to leave shelter. We went slowly back to the foaling yard and found nobody there except horses. I undid the closed top half of Plus Factor’s box and looked inside; looked at the mare standing there patiently without her foal and wondered if she felt any fretting sense of loss.

‘Dad and Nigel have taken him, haven’t they?’ Ginnie said.

‘Yes.’

She nodded, accepting that bit easily. Death to her was part of life, as to every child brought up close to animals. I closed Plus Factor’s door and Ginnie and I went back to the house while the sky lightened in the east to the new day, Sunday.

The work of the place went on.

Oliver telephoned to various owners of the mares who had come to the other three stallions, reporting the birth of foals alive and well and one dead before foaling, very sorry. His voice sounded strong, civilized, controlled, the competent captain at the helm, and one could almost see the steel creeping back, hour by hour, into his battered spirit. I admired him for it; and I would fight to give him time, I thought, to come to some compromise to avert permanent ruin.

Ginnie, showered, breakfasted, tidy in sweater and shirt, went off to spend the morning at the Watcherleys’ and came back smiling; the resilience of youth.

‘Both of those mares are better from their infections,’ she reported, ‘and Maggie says she’s heard Calder Jackson’s not doing so well lately, his yard’s half empty. Cheers Maggie up no end, she says.’

For the Watcherleys too, I thought briefly, the fall of Oliver’s business could mean a return to rust and weeds, but I said, ‘Not enough sick horses just now, perhaps.’

‘Not enough sick horses with rich owners, Maggie says.’

In the afternoon Ginnie slept on the sofa looking very childlike and peaceful, and only with the awakening did the night’s pain roll back.

‘Oh dear...’ The slow tears came. ‘I was dreaming it was all right. That that foal was a dream, only a dream...’

‘You and your father,’ I said. ‘Are brave people.’

She sniffed a little, pressing against her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Do you mean,’ she said slowly, ‘that whatever happens, we mustn’t be defeated?’

‘Mm.’

She looked at me, and after a while nodded. ‘If we have to, we’ll start again. We’ll work. He did it all before, you know.’

‘You both have the skills,’ I said.

‘I’m glad you came.’ She brushed the drying tears from her cheeks. ‘God knows what it would have been like without you.’

I went with her out into the yards for evening stables, where the muck-carrying and feeding went on as always. Ginnie fetched the usual pocketful of carrots from the feed room and gave them here and there to the mares, talking cheerfully to the lads while they bent to their chores. No one, watching and listening, could ever have imagined that she feared the sky was falling.

‘Evening, Chris, how’s her hoof today?’

‘Hi, Danny. Did you bring this one in this morning?’

‘Hello, Pete. She looks as if she’ll foal any day now.’

‘Evening, Shane. How’s she doing?’

‘Hi, Sammy, is she eating now OK?’

The lads answered her much as they spoke to Oliver himself, straightforwardly and with respect, and in most cases without stopping what they were doing. I looked back as we left the first big yard for the second, and for a moment took one of the lads to be Ricky Barnet.

‘Who’s that?’ I said to Ginnie.

She followed my gaze to where the lad walked across to the yard tap, swinging an empty bucket with one hand and eating an apple with the other.

‘Shane. Why?’

‘He reminded me of someone I knew.’

She shrugged. ‘He’s all right. They all are, when Nigel’s looking, which he doesn’t do often enough.’

‘He works all night,’ I said mildly.

‘I suppose so.’

The mares in the second yard had mostly given birth already and Ginnie that evening had special eyes for the foals. The lads hadn’t yet reached those boxes and Ginnie didn’t go in to any of them, warning me that mares with young foals could be protective and snappy.

‘You never know if they’ll bite or kick you. Dad doesn’t like me going in with them alone.’ She smiled. ‘He still thinks I’m a baby.’

We went on to the foaling yard, where a lad greeted as Dave was installing a heavy slow-walking mare into one of the boxes.

‘Nigel says she’ll foal tonight,’ he told Ginnie.

‘He’s usually right.’

We went on past the breeding pen and came to the stallions, where Larry and Ron were washing down Diarist (who appeared to have been working) in the centre of the yard, using a lot of water, energy and oaths.

‘Mind his feet,’ Larry said. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’

Ginnie gave carrots to Parakeet and Rotaboy, and we came finally to Sandcastle. He looked as great, as charismatic as ever, but Ginnie gave him his tit-bit with her own lips compressed.

‘He can’t help it all, I suppose,’ she said sighing. ‘But I do wish he’d never won any races.

‘Or that we’d let him die that day on the main road?’

‘Oh no!’ She was shocked. ‘We couldn’t have done that, even if we’d known...’

Dear girl, I thought; many people would personally have mown him down with a truck.

We went back to the house via the paddocks, where she fondled any heads that came to the railings and parted with the last of the crunchy orange goodies. ‘I can’t believe that this will all end,’ she said, looking over the horse-dotted acres, ‘I just can’t believe it.’

I tentatively suggested to both her and Oliver that they might prefer it if I went home that evening, but they both declared themselves against.

‘Not yet,’ Ginnie said anxiously and Oliver nodded forcefully. ‘Please do stay, Tim, if you can.’

I nodded, and rang the Michaels’, and this time got Judith.

‘Do let me speak to her,’ Ginnie said, taking the receiver out of my hand. ‘I do so want to.’

And I, I thought wryly, I too want so much to talk to her, to hear her voice, to renew my own soul through her: I’m no one’s universal pillar of strength, I need my comfort too.

I had my crumbs, after Ginnie. Ordinary words, all else implied; as always.

‘Take care of yourself,’ she said finally.

‘You, too,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ The word was a sigh, faint and receding, as if she’d said it with the receiver already away from her mouth. There was the click of disconnection, and Oliver was announcing briskly that it was time for whisky, time for supper; time for anything perhaps but thinking.

Ginnie decided that she felt too restless after supper to go to bed early, and would go for a walk instead.

‘Do you want me to come?’ I said.

‘No. I’m all right. I just thought I’d go out. Look at the stars.’ She kissed her father’s forehead, pulling on a thick cardigan for warmth. ‘I won’t go off the farm. You’ll probably find me in the foal yard, if you want me.’

He nodded to her fondly but absentmindedly, and with a small wave to me she went away. Oliver asked me gloomily, as if he’d been waiting for us to be alone, how soon I thought the bank would decide on his fate, and we talked in snatches about his daunting prospects, an hour or two sliding by on possibilities.

Shortly before ten, when we had probably twice repeated all there was to say, there came a heavy hammering on the back door.

‘Whoever’s that?’ Oliver frowned, rose to his feet and went to find out.

I didn’t hear the opening words, but only the goose-pimpling urgency in the rising voice.

‘She’s where?’ Oliver said loudly, plainly, in alarm. ‘Where?’

I went quickly into the hallway. One of the lads stood in the open doorway, panting for breath, wide-eyed and looking very scared.

Oliver glanced at me over his shoulder, already on the move.

‘He says Ginnie’s lying on the ground unconscious.’

The lad turned and ran off, with Oliver following and myself close behind: and the lad’s breathlessness, I soon found, was owing to Ginnie’s being on the far side of the farm, away down beyond Nigel’s bungalow and the lads’ hostel, right down on the far drive, near the gate to the lower road.

We arrived there still running, the lad now doubling over in his fight for breath, and found Ginnie lying on her side on the hard asphalt surface with another of the lads on his knees beside her, dim figures in weak moonlight, blurred outlines of shadow.

Oliver and I too knelt there and Oliver was saying to the lads, ‘What happened, what happened? Did she fall?’

‘We just found her,’ the kneeling lad said. ‘We were on our way back from the pub. She’s coming round, though, sir, she’s been saying things.’

Ginnie in fact moved slightly, and said ‘Dad.’

‘Yes, Ginnie, I’m here.’ He picked up her hand and patted it. ‘We’ll soon get you right.’ There was relief in his voice, but short-lived.

‘Dad,’ Ginnie said, mumbling. ‘Dad.’

‘Yes, I’m here.’

‘Dad...’

‘She isn’t hearing you,’ I said worriedly.

He turned his head to me, his eyes liquid in the dark of his face. ‘Get an ambulance. There’s a telephone in Nigel’s house. Tell him to get an ambulance here quickly. I don’t think we’ll move her.... Get an ambulance.’

I stood up to go on the errand but the breathless lad said, ‘Nigel’s out. I tried there. There’s no one. It’s all locked.’

‘I’ll go back to the house.’

I ran as fast on the way back and had to fight to control my own gulping breaths there to make my words intelligible. ‘Tell them to take the lower road from the village... the smaller right fork... where the road divides. Nearly a mile from there... wide metal farm gate, on the left.’

‘Understood,’ a man said impersonally. ‘They’ll be on their way.’

I fetched the padded quilt off my bed and ran back across the farm and found everything much as I’d left it. ‘They’re coming,’ I said. ‘How is she?’

Oliver tucked the quilt round his daughter as best he could. ‘She keeps saying things. Just sounds, not words.’

‘Da—’ Ginnie said.

Her eyelids trembled and slightly opened.

‘Ginnie,’ Oliver said urgently. ‘This is Dad.’

Her lips moved in a mumbling unformed murmur. The eyes looked at nothing, unfocussed, the gleam just reflected moonlight, not an awakening.

‘Oh God,’ Oliver said. ‘What’s happened to her? What can have happened?’

The two lads stood there, awkward and silent, not knowing the answer.

‘Go and open the gate,’ Oliver told them. ‘Stand on the road. Signal to the ambulance when it comes.’

They went as if relieved; and the ambulance did come, lights flashing, with two brisk men in uniform who lifted Ginnie without much disturbing her onto a stretcher. Oliver asked them to wait while he fetched the Land Rover from Nigel’s garage, and in a short time the ambulance set off to the hospital with Oliver and me following.

‘Lucky you had the key,’ I said, indicating it in the ignition. Just something to say: anything.

‘We always keep it in that tin on the shelf.’

The tin said ‘Blackcurrant Coughdrops. Take as Required.’

Oliver drove automatically, following the rear lights ahead. ‘Why don’t they go faster?’ he said, though their speed was quite normal.

‘Don’t want to jolt her, perhaps.’

‘Do you think it’s a stroke?’ he said.

‘She’s too young.’

‘No. I had a cousin... an aneurysm burst when he was sixteen.’

I glanced at his face: lined, grim, intent on the road.

The journey seemed endless, but ended at a huge bright hospital in a sprawling town. The men in uniform opened the rear doors of the ambulance while Oliver parked the Land Rover and we followed them into the brightly lit emergency reception area, seeing them wheel Ginnie into a curtained cubicle, watching them come out again with their stretcher, thanking them as they left.

A nurse told us to sit on some nearby chairs while she fetched a doctor. The place was empty, quiet, all readiness but no bustle. Ten o’clock on Sunday night.

A doctor came in a white coat, stethoscope dangling. An Indian, young, black-haired, rubbing his eyes with forefinger and thumb. He went behind the curtains with the nurse and for about a minute Oliver clasped and unclasped his fingers, unable to contain his anxiety.

The doctor’s voice reached us clearly, the Indian accent making no difference.

‘They shouldn’t have brought her here,’ he said. ‘She’s dead.’

Oliver was on his feet, bounding across the shining floor, pulling back the curtains with a frantic sweep of the arm.

‘She’s not dead. She was talking. Moving. She’s not dead.’

In dread I followed him. She couldn’t be dead, not like that, not so fast, not without the hospital fighting long to save her. She couldn’t be.

The doctor straightened up from bending over her, withdrawing his hand from under Ginnie’s head, looking at us across the small space.

‘She’s my daughter,’ Oliver said. ‘She’s not dead.’

A sort of weary compassion drooped in the doctor’s shoulders. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Very sorry. She is gone.’

‘No!’ The word burst out of Oliver in an agony. ‘You’re wrong. Get someone else.’

The nurse made a shocked gesture but the young doctor said gently, ‘There is no pulse. No heartbeat. No contraction of the pupils. She has been gone for perhaps ten minutes, perhaps twenty. I could get someone else, but there is nothing to be done.’

‘But why?’ Oliver said. ‘She was talking.’

The dark doctor looked down to where Ginnie was lying on her back, eyes closed, brown hair falling about her head, face very pale. Her jerseys had both been unbuttoned for the stethoscope, the white bra showing, and the nurse had also undone the waistband of the skirt, pulling it loose. Ginnie looked very young, very defenceless, lying there so quiet and still, and I stood numbly, not believing it, unable, like Oliver, to accept such a monstrous change.

‘Her skull is fractured,’ the doctor said. ‘If she was talking, she died on the way here, in the ambulance. With head injuries it can be like that. I am sorry.’

There was a sound of an ambulance’s siren wailing outside, and sudden noise and rushing people by the doors where we had come in, voices raised in a jumble of instructions.

‘Traffic accident,’ someone shouted, and the doctor’s eyes moved beyond us to the new need, to the future, not the past.

‘I must go,’ he said, and the nurse, nodding, handed me a flat white plastic bottle which she had been holding.

‘You may as well take this,’ she said. ‘It was tucked into the waistband of her skirt, against the stomach.’

She made as if to cover Ginnie with a sheet, but Oliver stopped her.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I want to be with her.’

The young doctor nodded, and he and I and the nurse stepped outside the cubicle, drawing the curtains behind us. The doctor looked in a brief pause of stillness towards the three or four stretchers arriving at the entrance, taking a breath, seeming to summon up energy from deep reserves.

‘I’ve been on duty for thirty hours,’ he said to me. ‘And now the pubs are out. Ten o’clock, Sundays. Drunk drivers, drunk pedestrians. Always the same.’

He walked away to his alive and bleeding patients and the nurse pinned a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign onto the curtains of Ginnie’s cubicle, saying she would be taken care of later.

I sat drearily on a chair, waiting for Oliver. The white plastic bottle had a label stuck onto one side saying ‘Shampoo’. I put it into my jacket pocket and wondered if it was just through overwork that the doctor hadn’t asked how Ginnie’s skull had been fractured, asked whether she’d fallen onto a rock or a kerb... or been hit.

The rest of the night and all the next day were in their own way worse, a truly awful series of questions, answers, forms and officialdom, with the police slowly taking over from the hospital and Oliver trying to fight against a haze of grief.

It seemed to me wicked that no one would leave him alone. To them he was just one more in a long line of bereaved persons, and although they treated him with perfunctory sympathy, it was for their own paperwork and not for his benefit that they wanted signatures, information and guesses.

Large numbers of policemen descended on the farm early in the morning, and it gradually appeared that that area of the country was being plagued by a stalker of young girls who jumped out of bushes, knocked them unconscious and sexually assaulted them.

‘Not Ginnie...’ Oliver protested in deepening horror.

The most senior of the policemen shook his head. ‘It would appear not. She was still wearing her clothing. We can’t discount, though, that it was the same man, and that he was disturbed by your grooms. When young girls are knocked unconscious at night, it’s most often a sexual attack.’

‘But she was on my own land,’ he said, disbelieving.

The policeman shrugged. ‘It’s been known in suburban front gardens.’

He was a fair-haired man with a manner that was not exactly brutal but spoke of long years of acclimatisation to dreadful experiences. Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold, he’d said, introducing himself. Forty-fivish, I guessed, sensing the hardness within him at sight and judging him through that day more dogged than intuitive, looking for results from procedure, not hunches.

He was certain in his own mind that the attack on Ginnie had been sexual in intent and he scarcely considered anything else, particularly since she’d been carrying no money and had expressly said she wouldn’t leave the farm.

‘She could have talked to someone over the gate,’ he said, having himself spent some time on the lower drive. ‘Someone walking along the road. And there are all your grooms that we’ll need detailed statements from, though from their preliminary answers it seems they weren’t in the hostel but down at the village, in the pubs.’

He came and went and reappeared again with more questions at intervals through the day and I lost track altogether of the hours. I tried, in his presence and out, and in Oliver’s the same, not to think much about Ginnie herself. I thought I would probably have wept if I had, of no use to anyone. I thrust her away into a defensive compartment knowing that later, alone, I would let her out.

Some time in the morning one of the lads came to the house and asked what they should do about one of the mares who was having difficulty foaling, and Lenny also arrived wanting to know when he should take Rotaboy to the breeding pen. Each of them stood awkwardly, not knowing where to put their hands, saying they were so shocked, so sorry, about Ginnie.

‘Where’s Nigel?’ Oliver said.

They hadn’t seen him, they said. He hadn’t been out in the yards that morning.

‘Didn’t you try his house?’ Oliver was annoyed rather than alarmed: another burden on a breaking back.

‘He isn’t there. The door’s locked and he didn’t answer.’

Oliver frowned, picked up the telephone and pressed the buttons: listened: no reply.

He said to me, ‘There’s a key to his bungalow over there on the board, third hook from the left. Would you go and look... would you mind?’

‘Sure.’

I walked down there with Lenny who told me repeatedly how broken up the lads were over what had happened, particularly Dave and Sammy, who’d found her. They’d all liked her, he said. All the lads who lived in the hostel were saying that perhaps if they’d come back sooner, she wouldn’t have been attacked.

‘You don’t live in the hostel, then?’ I said.

‘No. Down in the village. Got a house. Only the ones who come just for the season, they’re the ones in the hostel. It’s shut up, see, all winter.’

We eventually reached Nigel’s bungalow where I rang the doorbell and banged on the knocker without result. Shaking my head slightly I fitted the key in the lock, opened the door, went in.

Curtains were drawn across the windows, shutting out a good deal of daylight. I switched on a couple of lights and walked into the sitting room, where papers, clothes and dirty cups and plates were strewn haphazardly and the air smelled faintly of horse.

There was no sign of Nigel. I looked into the equally untidy kitchen and opened a door which proved to be that of a bathroom and another which revealed a room with bare-mattressed twin beds. The last door in the small inner hall led into Nigel’s own bedroom... and there he was, face down, fully clothed, lying across the counterpane.

Lenny, still behind me, took two paces back.

I went over to the bed and felt Nigel’s neck behind the ear Felt the pulse going like a steam-hammer. Heard the rasp of air in the throat. His breath would have anesthetized a crocodile, and on the floor beside him lay an empty bottle of gin. I shook his shoulder unsympathetically with a complete lack of result.

‘He’s drunk,’ I said to Lenny. ‘Just drunk.’

Lenny looked all the same as if he was about to vomit. ‘I thought... I thought.’

‘I know,’ I said: and I’d feared it also, instinctively, the one because of the other.

‘What will we do, then, out in the yard?’ Lenny asked.

‘I’ll find out.’

We went back into the sitting room where I used Nigel’s telephone to call Oliver and report.

‘He’s flat out,’ I said. ‘I can’t wake him. Lenny wants instructions.’

After a brief silence Oliver said dully, ‘Tell him to take Rotaboy to the breeding shed in half an hour. I’ll see to things in the yards. And Tim?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can I ask you... would you mind... helping me here in the office?’

‘Coming straight back.’

The disjointed, terrible day wore on. I telephoned to Gordon in the bank explaining my absence and to Judith also, a: Gordon’s suggestion, to pass on the heartbreak, and I took countless incoming messages as the news spread. Outside on the farm nearly two hundred horses got fed and watered, and birth and procreation went inexorably on.

Oliver came back stumbling from fatigue at about two o’clock, and we ate some eggs, not tasting them, in the kitchen. He looked repeatedly at his watch and said finally, ‘What’s eight hours back from now? I can’t even think.’

‘Six in the morning,’ I said.

‘Oh.’ He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I suppose I should have told Ginnie’s mother last night.’ His face twisted. ‘My wife... in Canada...’ He swallowed. ‘Never mind, let her sleep. In two hours I’ll tell her.’

I left him alone to that wretched task and took myself upstairs to wash and shave and lie for a while on the bed. It was in taking my jacket off for those purposes that I came across the plastic bottle in my pocket, and I took it out and stood it on the shelf in the bathroom while I shaved.

An odd sort of thing, I thought, for Ginnie to have tucked into her waistband. A plastic bottle of shampoo; about six inches high, four across, one deep, with a screw cap on one of the narrow ends. The white label saying ‘Shampoo’ had been handwritten and stuck on top of the bottle’s original dark brown, white-printed label, of which quite a bit still showed round the edges.

‘Instructions,’ part of the underneath label said. ‘Shake well. Be careful not to get the shampoo in the dog’s eyes. Rub well into the coat and leave for ten or fifteen minutes before rinsing.’

At the bottom, below the stuck-on label, were the words, in much smaller print, ‘Manufactured by Eagle Inc., Michigan, U.S.A. List number 29931.

When I’d finished shaving I unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle gently over the basin.

A thick greenish liquid appeared, smelling powerfully of soap.

Shampoo: what else.

The bottle was to all intents full. I screwed on the cap again and put it on the shelf, and thought about it while I lay on the bed with my hands behind my head.

Shampoo for dogs.

After a while I got up and went down to the kitchen, and in a high cupboard found a small collection of empty, washed, screw-top glass jars, the sort of thing my mother had always saved for herbs and picnics. I took one which would hold perhaps a cupful of liquid and returned upstairs, and over the washbasin I shook the bottle well, unscrewed the cap and carefully poured more than half of the shampoo into the jar.

I screwed the caps onto both the bottle and the jar, copied what could be seen on the original label into the small engagement diary I carried with me everywhere, and stowed the now half full round glass container from Oliver’s kitchen inside my own sponge-bag: and when I went downstairs again I took the plastic bottle with me.

‘Ginnie had it?’ Oliver said dully, picking it up and squinting at it. ‘Whatever for?’

‘The nurse at the hospital said it was tucked into the waistband of her skirt.’

A smile flickered. ‘She always did that when she was little. Plimsols, books, bits of string, anything. To keep her hands free, she said. They all used to slip down into her little knickers, and there would be a whole shower of things sometimes when we undressed her.’ His face went hopelessly bleak at this memory, I can’t believe it, you know,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking she’ll walk through the door.’ He paused. ‘My wife is flying over. She says she’ll be here tomorrow morning.’ His voice gave no indication as to whether that was good news or bad. ‘Stay tonight, will you?’

‘If you want.’

‘Yes.’

Chief Inspector Wyfold turned up again at that point and we gave him the shampoo bottle, Oliver explaining about Ginnie’s habit of carrying things in her clothes.

‘Why didn’t you give this to me earlier?’ he asked me.

‘I forgot I had it. It seemed so paltry at the time, compared with Ginnie dying.’

The Chief Inspector picked up the bottle by its serrated cap and read what one could see of the label, and to Oliver he said, ‘Do you have a dog?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would this be what you usually use, to wash him?’

‘I really don’t know. I don’t wash him myself. One of the lads does.’

‘The lads being the grooms?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Which lad washed your dog?’ Wyfold asked.

‘Um... any. Whoever I ask.’

The Chief Inspector produced a thin white folded paper bag from one of his pockets and put the bottle inside it. ‘Who to your knowledge has handled this, besides yourselves?’ he asked.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘the nurse at the hospital... and Ginnie.’

‘And it spent from last night until now in your pocket?’ He shrugged. ‘Hopeless for prints, I should think, but we’ll try.’ He fastened the bag shut and wrote on a section of it with a ball pen. To Oliver, almost as an aside, he said, i came to ask you about your daughter’s relationship with men.’

Oliver said wearily, ‘She didn’t have any. She’s only just left school.’

Wyfold made small negative movements with head and hands as if amazed at the naiveté of fathers. ‘No sexual relationship to your knowledge?’

Oliver was too exhausted for anger. ‘No,’ he said.

‘And you sir?’ he turned to me. ‘What were your relations with Virginia Knowles?’

‘Friendship.’

‘Including sexual intercourse?’

‘No.’

Wyfold looked at Oliver who said tiredly, ‘Tim is a business friend of mine. A financial adviser, staying here for the weekend, that’s all.’

The policeman frowned at me with disillusion as if he didn’t believe it. I gave him no amplified answer because I simply couldn’t be bothered, and what could I have said? That with much affection I’d watched a child grow into an attractive young woman and yet not wanted to sleep with her? His mind ran on carnal rails, all else discounted.

He went away in the end taking the shampoo with him, and Oliver with immense fortitude said he had better go out into the yards to catch the tail end of evening stables. ‘Those mares,’ he said. ‘Those foals... they still need the best of care.’

‘I wish I could help,’ I said, feeling useless.

‘You do.’

I went with him on his rounds, and when we reached the foaling yard, Nigel, resurrected, was there.

His stocky figure leaned against the doorpost of an open box as if without its support he would collapse, and the face he slowly turned towards us had aged ten years. The bushy eyebrows stood out starkly over charcoal shadowed eyes, puffiness in his skin swelling the eyelids and sagging in deep bags on his cheeks. He was also unshaven, unkempt and feeling ill.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Heard about Ginnie. Very sorry.’ I wasn’t sure whether he was sympathizing with Oliver or apologising for the drunkenness. ‘A big noise of a policeman came asking if I’d killed her. As if I would.’ He put a shaky hand on his head, almost as if physically to support it on his shoulders. ‘I feel rotten. My own fault. Deserve it. This mare’s likely to foal tonight. That shit of a policeman wanted to know if I was sleeping with Ginnie. Thought I’d tell you... I wasn’t.’

Wyfold, I reflected, would ask each of the lads individually the same question. A matter of time, perhaps, before he asked Oliver himself; though Oliver and I, he had had to concede, gave each other a rock-solid alibi.

We walked on towards the stallions and I asked Oliver if Nigel often got drunk, since Oliver hadn’t shown much surprise.

‘Very seldom,’ Oliver said. ‘He’s once or twice turned out in that state but we’ve never lost a foal because of it. I don’t like it, but he’s so good with the mares.’ He shrugged. ‘I overlook it,’

He gave carrots to all four stallions but scarcely glanced at Sandcastle, as if he could no longer bear the sight.

‘I’ll try the Research people tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Forgot about it, today.’

From the stallions he went, unusually, in the direction of the lower gate, past Nigel’s bungalow and the hostel, to stand for a while at the place where Ginnie had lain in the dark on the night before.

The asphalt driveway showed no mark. Oliver looked to where the closed gate sixty feet away led to the road and in a drained voice said, ‘Do you think she could have talked to someone out there?’

‘She might have, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’ He turned to go back. ‘It’s all so senseless. And unreal. Nothing feels real.’

Exhaustion of mind and body finally overtook him after dinner and he went grey-faced to bed, but I in the first quiet of the long day went out again for restoration: for a look at the stars, as Ginnie had said.

Thinking only of her I walked slowly along some of the paths between the paddocks, the way lit by a half-moon with small clouds drifting, and stopped eventually at the place where on the previous morning I’d held her tight in her racking distress. The birth of the deformed foal seemed so long ago, yet it was only yesterday: the morning of the last day of Ginnie’s life.

I thought about that day, about the despair in its dawn and the resolution of its afternoon. I thought of her tears and her courage, and of the waste of so much goodness. The engulfing, stupefying sense of loss which had hovered all day swamped into my brain until my body felt inadequate, as if it wanted to burst, as if it couldn’t hold in so much feeling.

When Ian Pargetter had been murdered I had been angry on his behalf and had supposed that the more one loved the dead person the greater one’s fury against the killer. But now I understood that anger could simply be crowded out by something altogether more overwhelming. As for Oliver, he had displayed shock, daze, desolation and disbelief in endless quantities all day, but of anger, barely a flicker.

It was too soon to care who had killed her. The fact of her death was too much. Anger was irrelevant, and no vengeance could give her life.

I had loved her more than I’d known, but not as I loved Judith, not with desire and pain and longing. I’d loved Ginnie as a friend; as a brother. I’d loved her, I thought, right back from the day when I’d returned her to school and listened to her fears. I’d loved her up on the hill, trying to catch Sand castle, and I’d loved her for her expertise and for her growing adult certainty that here, in these fields, was where her future lay.

I’d thought of her young life once as being a clear stretch of sand waiting for footprints, and now there would be none, now only a blank, chopping end to all she could have been and done, to all the bright love she had scattered around her.

‘Oh... Ginnie,’ I said aloud, calling to her hopelessly in tearing body-shaking grief. ‘Ginnie... little Ginnie... come back.’

But she was gone from there. My voice fled away into darkness, and there was no answer.

May

On and off for the next two weeks I worked on Oliver’s financial chaos at my desk in the bank, and at a special board meeting argued the case for giving him time before we foreclosed and made him sell all he had.

I asked for three months, which was considered scandalously out of the question, but got him two, Gordon chuckling over it quietly as we went down together afterwards in the lift.

‘I suppose two months was what you wanted?’ he said.

‘Er... yes.’

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘They were talking of twenty-one days maximum before the meeting, and some wanted to bring in liquidators at once.’

I telephoned Oliver and told him. ‘For two months you don’t have to pay any interest or capital repayments, but this is only temporary, and it is a special, fairly unusual concession. I’m afraid, though, that if we can’t find a solution to Sand-castle’-S problem or come up with a cast-iron reason for the insurance company to pay out, the prognosis is not good.’

‘I understand,’ he said, his voice sounding calm. ‘I haven’t much hope, but thank you, all the same, for the respite — I will at least be able to finish the program for the other stallions, and keep all the foals here until they’re old enough to travel safely.’

‘Have you heard anything about Sandcastle?’

‘He’s been at the Research Establishment for a week, but so far they can’t find anything wrong with him. They don’t hold out much hope, I’d better tell you, of being able to prove anything one way or another about his sperm, even though they’re sending specimens to another laboratory, they say.’

‘They’ll do their best.’

‘Yes, I know. But... I walk around here as if this place no longer belongs to me. As if it isn’t mine. I know, inside, that I’m losing it. Don’t feel too badly, Tim. When it comes, I’ll be prepared.’

I put the receiver down not knowing whether such resignation was good because he would face whatever came without disintegration, or bad because he might be surrendering too soon. A great host of other troubles still lay ahead, mostly in the shape of breeders demanding the return of their stallion fees, and he needed energy to say that in most cases he couldn’t return them. The money had already been lodged with us, and the whole situation would have to be sorted out by lawyers.

The news of Sandcastle’s disgrace was so far only a doubtful murmur here and there, but when it all broke open with a screech it was, I suppose predictably, in What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t.

The bank’s six copies were read to rags before lunch on the day Alec fetched them, eyes lifting from the page with anything from fury to a wry smile.

Three short paragraphs headed ‘House on Sand’, said:

‘That’s done it,’ Gordon said, and I nodded: and the dailies, who always read What’s Going On as a prime news source, came up in the racing columns the next day with a more cautious approach, asking ‘Sandcastle’s Progeny Flawed?’ and saying things like ‘rumours have reached us’ and ‘we are reliably informed.’

Since our own home-grown leaker for once hadn’t mentioned the bank by name, none of the dailies did either, and for them of course the bank itself was unimportant compared with the implications of the news.

Oliver, in the next weekday issues, was reported as having been asked how many, precisely, of Sandcastle’s foals were deformed, and as having answered that he didn’t know. He had heard of some, certainly, yes. He had no further comment.

A day later still the papers began printing reports telephoned into them by the stud farms where Sandcastle’s scattered progeny had been foaled, and the tally of disasters mounted. Oliver was reported this time as having said the horse was at the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket, and everything possible was being done.

‘It’s a mess,’ Henry said gloomily at lunch, and even the dissenting director had run out of insults, beyond saying four times that we were the laughing-stock of the City and it was all my fault.

‘Have they found out who killed Knowles’ daughter?’ Val Fisher asked.

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘He says the police no longer come to the house.’

Val looked regretful. ‘Such a sadness for him, on top of the other.’

There were murmurs of sympathy and I didn’t think I’d spoil it by telling them what the police thought of Oliver’s lads.

That man Wyfold,’ Oliver had said on the telephone during one of our almost daily conversations, ‘he more or less said I was asking for trouble, having a young girl on the place with all those lads. What’s more, it seems many of them were half-way drunk that night, and with three pubs in the village they weren’t even all together and have no idea of who was where at what time, so one of Wyfold’s theories is that one of them jumped her and Dave and Sammy interrupted him. Alternatively Nigel did it. Alternatively some stranger walking down the road did it. Wyfold’s manner is downright abrasive but I’m past caring. He despises my discipline. He says I shouldn’t let my lads get drunk — as if anyone could stop them. They’re free men. It’s their business, not mine, what they do with their money and time on Sunday nights. I can only take action if they don’t turn up on Monday morning. And as for Nigel being paralytic!’ Words momentarily failed him. ‘How can Nigel possibly expect the lads to stay more or less sober if he gets like that? And he says he can’t remember anything that happened the night Ginnie died. Nothing at all. Total alcoholic black-out. He’s been very subdued since.’

The directors, I felt, would not be any more impressed than the Detective Chief Inspector with the general level of insobriety, and I wondered whether Nigel’s slackness with the lads in general had always stemmed from a knowledge of his own occasional weakness.

The police had found no weapon, Oliver said on another day. Wyfold had told him that there was no way of knowing what had been used to cause the depressed fracture at the base of her brain. Her hair over the fracture bore no traces of anything unexpected. The forensic surgeon was of the opinion that there had been a single very heavy blow. She would have been knocked unconscious instantly. She wouldn’t even have known. The period of apparent semi-consciousness had been illusory: parts of her brain would have functioned but she would not have been aware of anything at all.

‘I suppose it’s a mercy,’ Oliver said. ‘With some girls you hear of... how do their parents bear it?’

His wife, he said, had gone back to Canada. Ginnie’s death seemed not to have brought mother and father together, but to have made the separation complete.

‘The dog shampoo?’ Oliver repeated, when I asked. ‘Wyfold says that’s just what it was, they checked it. He asked Nigel and all the lads if it was theirs, if they’d used it for washing Squibs, but none of them had. He seems to think Ginnie may have seen it lying in the road and picked it up, or that she got into conversation over the gate with a man who gave her the shampoo for Squibs as a come-on and then killed her afterwards.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’d have taken the shampoo away again with him.’

‘Wyfold says not if he couldn’t find it, because of its being dark and her having hidden it to all intents and purposes under her skirt and two jumpers, and not if Dave and Sammy arrived at that point.’

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ I said doubtfully.

‘Wyfold says that particular shampoo isn’t on sale at all in England, it’s American, and there’s absolutely no way at all of tracing how it got here. There weren’t any fingerprints of any use; all a blur except a few of yours and mine.’

Another day he said, ‘Wyfold told me the hardest murders to solve were single blows on the head. He said the case would remain open, but they are busy again with another girl who was killed walking home from a dance, and this time she definitely is one of that dreadful series, poor child... I was lucky, Tim, you know, that Dave and Sammy came back when they did.’

There came a fine May day in the office when Alec, deciding we needed some fresh air, opened one of the windows which looked down to the fountain. The fresh air duly entered but like a lion, not a lamb, and blew papers off all the desks.

‘That’s a hurricane,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake shut it.’

Alec closed off the gale and turned round with a grin. ‘Sorry and all that,’ he said.

We all left our chairs and bent down like gleaners to retrieve our scattered work, and during my search for page 3 of a long assessment of a proposed sports complex I came across a severe and unwelcome shock in the shape of a small pale blue sheet off a memo pad.

There were words pencilled on it and crossed out with a wavy line, with other words underneath.

Build your castle not on Sand was crossed out, and so was Sandcastle gone with the tide, and underneath was written Build not your house on Sand. Build not your banking house on a Sandcastle.

‘What’s that?’ Alec said quickly, seeing it in my hand and stretching out his own. ‘Let’s see.’

I shook my head and kept it in my own hand while I finished picking up the sportsdrome, and when order was restored throughout the office I said, ‘Come along to the interview room.’

‘Right now?’

‘Right now.’

We went into the only room on our floor where any real privacy was possible and I said without shilly-shallying, ‘This is your handwriting. Did you write the article in What’s Going On?’

He gave me a theatrical sigh and a tentative smile and a large shrug of the shoulders.

‘That’s just doodling,’ he said. ‘It means nothing.’

‘It means, for a start,’ I said, ‘that you shouldn’t have left it round the office.’

‘Didn’t know I had.’

‘Did you write the article?’

The blue eyes unrepentantly gleamed at me from behind the gold rims. ‘It’s a fair cop, I suppose.’

‘But Alec...’ I protested.

‘Yeah.’

‘And the others,’ I said, ‘Those other leaks, was that you?’

He sighed again, his mouth twisting.

‘Was it?’ I repeated, wanting above all things to hear him deny it.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘What harm did it do? Yes, all right, the stories did come from me. I wrote them myself, actually, like that one.’ He pointed to the memo paper in my hand. ‘And don’t give me any lectures on disloyalty because none of them did us any harm. Did us good, if anything.’

‘Alec...’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but just think, Tim, what did those pieces really do? They stirred everyone up, sure, and it was a laugh a minute to see all their faces, but what else? I’ve been thinking about it, I assure you. It wasn’t why I did it in the first place, that was just wanting to stir things, I’ll admit, but because of what I wrote we’ve now got much better security checks than we had before.’

I listened to him open-mouthed.

‘All that work you did with the computer, making us safer against frauds, that was because of what I wrote. And the Corporate Finance boys, they now go around with their mouths zipped up like suitcases so as not to spill the beans to the investment managers. I did good, do you see, not harm.’

I stood and looked at him, at the tight tow-coloured curls, the cream coloured freckled skin, the eyes that had laughed with me for eight years. I don’t want to lose you, I thought: I wish you hadn’t done it.

‘And what about this piece about Sandcastle? What good has that done?’ I said.

He half grinned. ‘Too soon to say.’

I looked at the damaging scrap in my hands and almost automatically shook my head.

‘You’re going to say,’ Alec said, ‘that I’ll have to leave.’

I looked up. His face was wholly calm.

‘I knew I’d have to leave if any of you ever found out.’

‘But don’t you care?’ I said frustratedly.

He smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ll miss you, and that’s a fact. But as for the job... well, I told you, it’s not my whole life, like it is yours. I loved it, I grant you, when I came here. All I wanted was to be a merchant banker, it sounded great. But to be honest it was the glamour I suppose I wanted, and glamour never lasts once you’ve got used to something. I’m not a dedicated money-man at heart... and there’s honesty for you, I never thought I’d admit that, even to myself.’

‘But you do it well.’

‘Up to a point. We discussed all that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said helplessly.

‘Yeah, well, so am I in a way, and in a way I’m not. I’ve been dithering for ages, and now that it isn’t my choice I’m as much relieved as anything.’

‘But... what will you do?’

He gave a full cherubic smile. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll approve.’

‘What, then?’

‘What’s Going On,’ he said, ‘have offered me a whole-time job.’ He looked at my shattered expression. ‘I’ve written quite a bit for them, actually. About other things, of course, not us. But in most editions there’s something of mine, a paragraph or two or a whole column. They’ve asked me several times to go, so now I will.’

I thought back to all those days when Alec had bounded out for the six copies and spent his next hour chuckling. Alec, the gatherer of news, who knew all the gossip.

‘They get masses of information in,’ Alec said, ‘but they need someone to evaluate it all properly, and there aren’t so many merchant bankers looking for that sort of job.’

‘No,’ I said dryly. ‘I can imagine. For a start, won’t your salary be much less?’

‘A bit,’ he admitted, cheerfully. ‘But my iconoclastic spirit will survive.’

I moved restlessly, wishing things had been different.

‘I’ll resign from here,’ he said. ‘Make it easier.’

Rather gloomily I nodded. ‘And will you say why?’

He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘If you really want me to, yes,’ he said finally. ‘Otherwise not. You can tell them yourself, though, after I’ve gone, if you want to.’

‘You’re a damned fool,’ I said explosively, feeling the loss of him acutely. ‘The office will be bloody dull without you.’

He grinned, my long-time colleague, and pointed to the piece of memo paper. ‘I’ll send you pin-pricks now and then. You won’t forget me. Not a chance.’

Gordon, three days later, said to me in surprise, ‘Alec’s leaving, did you know?’

‘I knew he was thinking of it.’

‘But why? He’s good at his job, and he always seemed happy here.’

I explained that Alec had been unsettled for some time and felt he needed to change direction.

‘Amazing,’ Gordon said. ‘I tried to dissuade him, but he’s adamant. He’s going in four weeks.’

Alec, indeed, addressed his normal work with the bounce and zealousness of one about to be liberated, and for the rest of his stay in the office was better company than ever. Chains visibly dropped from his spirits, and I caught him several times scribbling speculatively on his memo pad with an anything but angelic grin.

Oliver had sent me at my request a list of all the breeders who had sent their mares to Sandcastle the previous year, and I spent two or three evenings on the telephone asking after those foals we didn’t know about. Oliver himself, when I’d asked him, said he frankly couldn’t face the task, and I didn’t in the least blame him: my enquiries brought forth an ear-burning amount of blasphemy.

The final count came to:

Five foals born outwardly perfect but dead within two weeks because of internal abnormalities.

One foal born with one eye. (Put down.)

Five foals born with deformed legs, deformation varying from a malformed hoof to the absent half-leg of Plus Factor’s colt. (All put down.)

Three foals born with part of one or both ears missing. (All still living.)

One foal born with no tail. (Still living.)

Two foals born with malformed mouths, the equivalent of human hare lip. (Both put down.)

One foal born with a grossly deformed head. (Foaled with heart-beat but couldn’t breathe; died at once.)

Apart from this horrifying tally, four mares who had been sent home as in foal had subsequently ‘slipped’ and were barren: one mare had failed to conceive at all; three mares had not yet foaled (breeders’ comments incendiary); and fourteen mares had produced live healthy foals with no defects of any sort.

I showed the list to Gordon and Henry, who went shockedly silent for a while as if in mourning for the superb racer they had so admired.’

‘There may be more to come,’ I said, not liking it. ‘Oliver says thirty mares covered by Sandcastle this year are definitely in foal. Some of those will be all right... and some may not.’

‘Isn’t there a test you can do to see if a baby is abnormal?’ Henry said. ‘Can’t they do that with the mares, and abort the deformed foals now, before they grow?’

I shook my head, ‘I asked Oliver that. He says amniocentesis — that’s what that process is called — isn’t possible with mares. Something to do with not being able to reach the target with a sterile needle because of all the intestines in the way.’

Henry listened with the distaste of the non-medical to these clinical realities. ‘What it means, I suppose,’ he said, ‘is that the owners of all of those thirty-one mares will have the foals aborted and demand their money back.’

‘I’d think so, yes.’

He shook his head regretfully. ‘So sad, isn’t it. Such a shame. Quite apart from the financial loss, a tragedy in racing terms.’

Oliver said on the telephone one morning, ‘Tim, I need to talk to you. Something’s happened.’

‘What?’ I said, with misgivings.

‘Someone has offered to buy Sandcastle.’

I sat in a mild state of shock, looking at Alec across the room sucking his pencil while he wrote his future.

‘Are you there?’ Oliver said.

‘Yes. What for and for how much?’

‘Well, he says to put back into training. I suppose it’s possible. Sandcastle’s only five. I suppose he could be got fit to race by August or September, and he might still win next year at six.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘He’s offering twenty-five thousand pounds.’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘Is that good or bad?’

‘Realistically, it’s as much as he’s worth.’

‘I’ll consult with my seniors here,’ I said. ‘It’s too soon, this minute, to say yes or no.’

‘I did tell him that my bankers would have to agree, but he wants an answer fairly soon, because the longer the delay the less time there is for training and racing this season.’

‘Yes,’ I said, understanding. ‘Where is he? Sandcastle, I mean.’

‘Still in Newmarket. But it’s pointless him staying there any longer. They haven’t found any answers. They say they just don’t know what’s wrong with him, and I think they want me to take him away.’

‘Well,’ I pondered briefly. ‘You may as well fetch him, I should think.’

‘I’ll arrange it,’ he said.

‘Before we go any further,’ I said. ‘Are you sure it’s a bona-fide offer and not just some crank?’

‘I had a letter from him and I’ve talked to him on the telephone, and to me he sounds genuine,’ Oliver answered. ‘Would you like to meet him?’

‘Perhaps, yes.’

We fixed a provisional date for the following Saturday morning, and almost as an afterthought I asked the potential buyer’s name.

‘Smith,’ Oliver said. ‘A Mr Dissdale Smith.’

I went to Hertfordshire on that Saturday with a whole host of question marks raising their eyebrows in my mind, but it was Dissdale, as it so happened, who had the deeper astonishment.

He drove up while I was still outside Oliver’s house, still clasping hands in greeting and talking of Ginnie. Dissdale had come without Bettina, and the first thing he said, emerging from his car, was ‘Hello, Tim, what a surprise, didn’t know you knew Oliver Knowles.’

He walked across, announced himself, shook hands with Oliver, and patted me chubbily on the shoulder. ‘How’s things, then? How are you doing, Tim?’

Fine,’ I said mildly.

Oliver looked from one of us to the other. ‘You know each other already?’

Dissdale said, ‘How do you mean, already?’

‘Tim’s my banker,’ Oliver said in puzzlement. ‘It was his bank, Ekaterin’s, which put up the money for Sandcastle.’

Dissdale stared at me in stunned amazement and looked bereft of speech.

‘Didn’t you know?’ Oliver said. ‘Didn’t I mention it?’

Dissdale blankly shook his head and finally found his voice. ‘You just said your banker was coming... I never for a moment thought...’

‘It doesn’t make much odds,’ Oliver said. ‘If you know each other it may simply save some time. Let’s go indoors. There’s some coffee ready.’ He led the way through his immaculate house to the sitting room-office, where a tray stood on the desk with coffee hot in a pot.

Oliver himself had had four weeks by then in that house without Ginnie, but to me, on my first visit back, she seemed still most sharply alive. It was I, this time, who kept expecting her to walk into the room; to give me a hug, to say hello with her eyes crinkling with welcome. I felt her presence vividly, to an extent that to start with I listened to Dissdale with only surface attention.

‘It might be better to geld him,’ he was saying. ‘There are some good prizes, particularly overseas, for geldings.’

Oliver’s instinctive response of horror subsided droopingly to defeat.

‘It’s too soon,’ I said, ‘to talk of that.’

‘Tim, face facts,’ Dissdale said expansively. ‘At this moment in time that horse is a walking bomb. I’m making an offer for him because I’m a bit of a gambler, you know that, and I’ve a soft spot for him, whatever his faults, because of him winning so much for me that day the year before last, when we were all in my box at Ascot. You remember that, don’t you?’

‘I do indeed.’

‘He saved my life, Sandcastle did.’

‘It was partly because of that day,’ I said, nodding, ‘That Ekaterin’s lent the money for him. When the request came in from Oliver, it was because Henry Shipton — our chairman, if you remember — and Gordon and I had all seen the horse in action that we seriously considered the proposition.’

Dissdale nodded his comprehension. ‘A great surprise, though,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry it’s you and Gordon. Sorry it’s your bank, I mean, that’s been hit so hard. I read about the deformed foals in the papers, of course, and that’s what gave me the idea of buying Sandcastle in the first place, but it didn’t say which bank...’

I wondered fleetingly if Alec could claim that omission as a virtue along with everything else.

Oliver offered Dissdale more coffee which he accepted with cream and sugar, drinking almost absentmindedly while he worked through the possible alterations he would need in approach now he’d found he was dealing with semi-friends.

Having had time myself over several days to do it, I could guess at the speed he was needing for reassessment.

‘Dissdale,’ I said neutrally, deciding to disrupt him, ‘Did the idea of buying Sandcastle come from your profitable caper with Indian Silk?’

His rounded features fell again into shock. ‘How... er... did you know about that?’

I said vaguely, ‘Heard it on the racecourse, I suppose. But didn’t you buy Indian Silk for a pittance because he seemed to be dying, and then sent him to Calder?’

‘Well...’

‘And didn’t Calder cure him? And then you sold him again, but well this time, no doubt needing the money, as don’t we all, since when Indian Silk’s won the Cheltenham Gold Cup? Isn’t that right?’

Dissdale raised a plump hand palm upwards in a gesture of mock defeat. ‘Don’t know where you heard it, but yes, there’s no secret, that’s what happened.’

‘Mm.’ I smiled at him benignly. ‘Calder said on television, didn’t he, that buying Indian Silk was his idea originally, so I wondered... I’m wondering if this is his idea too. I mean, did he by any chance suggest a repeat of the gamble that came off so happily last time?’

Dissdale looked at me doubtfully.

‘There’s nothing wrong in it,’ I said. ‘Is it Calder’s idea?’

‘Well, yes,’ he said, deciding to confide. ‘But it’s my money, of course.’

‘And, um, if you do buy Sandcastle, will you send him too along to Calder, like Indian Silk?’

Dissdale seemed not to know whether to answer or not, but appearing to be reassured by my friendly interest said finally, ‘Calder said he could give him a quick pepping-up to get him fit quickly for racing, yes.’

Oliver, having listened restlessly up to this point, said, ‘Calder Jackson can’t do anything for Sandcastle that I can’t.’

Both Dissdale and I looked at Oliver in the same way, hearing the orthodox view ringing out with conviction and knowing that it was very likely untrue.

‘I’ve been thinking these past few days,’ I said to Dissdale, ‘First about Indian Silk. Didn’t you tell Fred Barnet, when you offered him a rock-bottom price, that all you were doing was providing a dying horse with a nice quiet end in some gentle field?’

‘Well, Tim,’ he said knowingly. ‘You know how it is. You buy for the best price you can. Fred Barnet, I know he goes round grousing that I cheated him, but I didn’t, he could have sent his horse to Calder the same as I did.’

I nodded. ‘So now, be honest, Dissdale, are you planning again to buy for the best price you can? I mean, does twenty-five thousand pounds for Sandcastle represent the same sort of bargain?’

‘Tim,’ Dissdale said, half affronted, half in sorrow, ‘What a naughty suspicious mind. That’s not friendly, not at all.’

I smiled. ‘I don’t think I’d be wise, though, do you, to recommend to my board of directors that we should accept your offer without thinking it over very carefully?’

For the first time there was a shade of dismay in the chubby face. ‘Tim, it’s a fair offer, anyone will tell you.’

‘I think my board may invite other bids,’ I said. ‘If Sandcastle is to be sold, we must recoup the most we can.’

The dismay faded: man-of-the-world returned. ‘That’s fair,’ he said. ‘As long as you’ll come back to me, if anyone tops me.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘An auction, by telephone. When we’re ready, I’ll let you know.’

With a touch of anxiety he said, ‘Don’t wait too long. Time’s money, you know.’

‘I’ll put your offer to the board tomorrow.’

He made a show of bluff contentment, but the anxiety was still there underneath. Oliver took the empty coffee cup which Dissdale still held and asked if he would like to see the horse he wanted to buy.

‘But isn’t he in Newmarket?’ Dissdale said, again looking disconcerted.

‘No, he’s here. Came back yesterday.’

‘Oh. Then yes, of course, yes, I’d like to see him.’

He’s out of his depth, I thought abruptly: for some reason Dissdale is very very unsettled.

We went on the old familiar walk through the yards, with Oliver explaining the lay-out to the new visitor. To me there was now a visible thinning out of numbers, and Oliver, with hardly a quiver in his voice, said that he was sending the mares home with their foals in an orderly progression as usual, with in consequence lower feed bills, fewer lads to pay wages to, smaller expenses all round: he would play fair with the bank, he said, matter-of-factly, making sure to charge what he could and also to conserve what he could towards his debt. Dissdale gave him a glance of amused incredulity as if such a sense of honour belonged to a bygone age, and we came in the end to the stallion yard, where the four heads appeared in curiosity.

The stay in Newmarket hadn’t done Sandcastle much good, I thought. He looked tired and dull, barely arching his neck to lift his nose over the half-door, and it was he, of the four, who turned away first and retreated into the gloom of his box.

‘Is that Sandcastle?’ Dissdale said, sounding disappointed. ‘I expected something more, somehow.’

‘He’s had a taxing three weeks,’ Oliver said. ‘All he needs is some good food and fresh air.’

‘And Calder’s touch,’ Dissdale said with conviction. ‘That magic touch most of all.’

When Dissdale had driven away Oliver asked me what I thought, and I said, ‘If Dissdale’s offering twenty-five thousand he’s certainly reckoning to make much more than that. He’s right, he is a gambler, and I’ll bet he has some scheme in mind. What we need to do is guess what the scheme is, and decide what we’ll do on that basis, such as doubling or trebling the ante.’

Oliver was perplexed. ‘How can we possibly guess?’

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘Did you know about Indian Silk?’

‘Not before today.’

‘Well, suppose Dissdale acts to a pattern, which people so often do. He told Fred Barnet he was putting Indian Silk out to grass, which was diametrically untrue; he intended to send him to Calder and with luck put him back in training. He told you he was planning to put Sandcastle back into training, so suppose that’s just what he doesn’t plan to do. And he suggested gelding, didn’t he?’

Oliver nodded.

‘Then I’d expect gelding to be furthest from his mind,’ I said. ‘He just wants us to believe that’s his intention.’ I reflected ‘Do you know what I might do if I wanted to have a real gamble with Sandcastle?’

‘What?’

‘It sounds pretty crazy,’ I said. ‘But with Calder’s reputation it might just work.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Oliver said in some bewilderment. ‘What gamble?’

‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘that you could buy for a pittance a stallion whose perfect foals would be likely to win races.’

‘But no one would risk...’

‘Suppose,’ I interrupted. ‘There was nearly a fifty per cent chance, going on this year’s figures, that you’d get a perfect foal. Suppose Dissdale offered Sandcastle as a sire at say a thousand pounds, the fee only payable if the foal was born perfect and lived a month.’

Oliver simply stared.

‘Say Sandcastle’s perfect progeny do win, as indeed they should. There are fourteen of them so far this year, don’t forget. Say that in the passage of time his good foals proved to be worth the fifty per cent risk. Say Sandcastle stands in Calder’s yard, with Calder’s skill on the line. Isn’t there a chance that over the years Dissdale’s twenty-five thousand pound investment would provide a nice steady return for them both?’

‘It’s impossible,’ he said weakly.

‘No, not impossible. A gamble.’ I paused. ‘You wouldn’t get people sending the top mares, of course, but you might get enough dreamers among the breeders who’d chance it.’

‘Tim...’

‘Just think of it,’ I said. ‘A perfect foal by Sandcastle for peanuts. And if you got a malformed foal, well, some years your mare might slip or be barren anyway.’

He looked at his feet for a while, and then into the middle distance, and then he said, ‘Come with me. I’ve something to show you. Something you’d better know.’

He set off towards the Watcherleys’, and would say nothing more on the way. I walked beside him down the familiar paths and thought about Ginnie because I couldn’t help it, and we arrived in the next-door yard that was now of a neatness to be compared with all the others.

‘Over here,’ Oliver said, going across to one of the boxes. ‘Look at that.’

I looked where directed: at a mare with a colt foal suckling, not unexpected in that place.

‘He was born three days ago,’ Oliver said. ‘I do so wish Ginnie had seen him.’

‘Why that one, especially?’

‘The mare is one of my own,’ he said. ‘And that foal is Sandcastle’s.’

It was my turn to stare. I looked from Oliver to the foal and back again. ‘There’s nothing wrong with him,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘But...’

Oliver smiled twistedly. ‘I was going to breed her to Diarist. She was along here at the Watcherleys’ because the foal she had then was always ailing, but she herself was all right. I was along here looking at her one day when she’d been in season a while, and on impulse I led her along to the breeding pen and told Nigel to fetch Sandcastle, and we mated them there and then. That foal’s the result.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘He’ll be sold, of course, with everything else. I wish I could have kept him, but there it is.’

‘He should be worth quite a bit,’ I said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Oliver said. ‘And that’s the flaw in your gamble. It’s not just the racing potential that raises prices at auction, it’s the chance of breeding. And no one could be sure, breeding from Sandcastle’s stock, that the genetic trouble wouldn’t crop up for evermore. It’s not on, I’m afraid. No serious breeder would send him mares, however great the bargain.’

We stood for a while in silence.

‘It was a good idea,’ I said, ‘while it lasted.’

‘My dear Tim... we’re clutching at straws.’

‘Yes.’ I looked at his calm strong face; the captain whose ship was sinking. ‘I’d try anything, you know, to save you,’ I said.

‘And to save the bank’s money?’

‘That too.’

He smiled faintly. ‘I wish you could, but time’s running out.’

The date for bringing in the receivers had been set, the insurance company had finally ducked, the lawyers were closing in and the respite I’d gained for him was trickling away with no tender plant of hope growing in the ruins.

We walked back towards the house, Oliver patting the mares as usual as they came to the fences.

‘I suppose this may all be here next year,’ he said, ‘looking much the same. Someone will buy it... it’s just I who’ll be gone.’

He lifted his head, looking away over his white painted rails to the long line of the roofs of his yards. The enormity of the loss of his life’s work settled like a weight on his shoulders and there was a haggard set to his jaw.

‘I try not to mind,’ he said levelly. ‘But I don’t quite know how to bear it.’

When I reached home that evening my telephone was ringing. I went across the sitting room expecting it to stop the moment I reached it, but the summons continued, and on the other end was Judith.

‘I just came in,’ I said.

‘We knew you were out. We’ve tried once or twice.’

I went to see Oliver.’

‘The poor, poor man.’ Judith had been very distressed over Ginnie and still felt that Oliver needed more sympathy because of his daughter than because of his bankruptcy, which I wasn’t sure was any longer the case. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Pen asked me to call you as she’s tied up in her shop all day and you were out when she tried... She says she’s had the reply from America about the shampoo and are you still interested?’

‘Yes, certainly.’

‘Then... if you’re not doing anything else... Gordon and I wondered if you’d care to come here for the day tomorrow, and Pen will bring the letter to show you.’

‘I’ll be there,’ I said fervently, and she laughed.

‘Good, then. See you.’

I was at Clapham with alacrity before noon, and Pen, over coffee, produced the letter from the drug company.

‘I sent them a sample of what you gave me in that little glass jar,’ she said. ‘And, as you asked, I had some of the rest of it analyzed here, but honestly, Tim, don’t hope too much from it for finding out who killed Ginnie, it’s just shampoo, as it says.’

I took the official-looking letter which was of two pages clipped together, with impressive headings.

‘What are excipients?’ I asked, looking up.

‘The things you put in with the active drug for various reasons,’ she said. ‘Like for instance chalk for bulk in pills.’

I turned the top page over and read the list on the second.

‘Terrific,’ I said blankly. ‘What do they all mean?’

Pen, sitting beside me on the sofa, explained.

‘From the top... Bentonite is a thickening agent so that everything stays together and doesn’t separate out. Ethylene glycol monostearate is a sort of wax, probably there to add bulk. Citric acid is to make the whole mixture acid, not alkaline, and the next one, sodium phosphate, is to keep the acidity level more or less constant. Glyceryl monoricinoleate is a soap, to make lather, and perfume is there so that the dog smells nice to the owner when she’s washing him.’

‘How do you know so much?’ Gordon asked, marvelling.

‘I looked some of them up,’ said Pen frankly, with a smile. She turned back to me and pointed to the short lower column of active ingredients. ‘Captan and Amphoteric are both drugs for killing fungi on the skin, and Selenium is also anti-fungal and is used in shampoos to cure dandruff.’ She stopped and looked at me doubtfully. ‘I did tell you not to hope too much. There’s nothing there of any consequence.’

‘And nothing in the sample that isn’t on the manufacturer’s list?’

She shook her head. ‘The analysis from the British lab came yesterday, and the shampoo in Ginnie’s bottle contained exactly what it should.’

‘What did you expect, Tim?’ Gordon asked.

‘It wasn’t so much expect, as hope,’ I said regretfully. ‘Hardly hope, really. Just a faint outside chance.’

‘Of what?’

‘Well... the police thought — think — that the purpose of killing Ginnie was sexual assault, because of those other poor girls in the neighbourhood.’

They all nodded.

‘But it doesn’t feel right, does it? Not when you know she wasn’t walking home from anywhere, like the others, and not when she wasn’t actually, well, interfered with. And then she had the shampoo... and the farm was in such trouble, and it seemed to me possible, just slightly possible, that she had somehow discovered that something in that bottle was significant...’ I paused, and then said slowly to Pen, ‘I suppose what I was looking for was something that could have been put into Sandcastle’s food or water that affected his reproductive organs. I don’t know if that’s possible. I don’t know anything about drugs... I just wondered.’

They sat in silence with round eyes, and then Gordon, stirring, said with an inflection of hope, ‘Is that possible, Pen? Could it be something like that?’

‘Could it possibly?’ Judith said.

‘My loves,’ Pen said. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked also as if whatever she said would disappoint us. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like that, I simply haven’t.’

‘That’s why I took the shampoo and gave it to you,’ I said. ‘I know it’s a wild and horrible idea, but I told Oliver I’d try everything, however unlikely.’

‘What you’re suggesting,’ Judith said plainly, ‘Is that someone might deliberately have given something to Sandcastle to make him produce deformed foals, and that Ginnie found out... and was killed for it.’

There was silence.

‘I’ll go and get a book or two,’ Pen said. ‘We’ll look up the ingredients, just in case. But honestly, don’t hope.’

She went home leaving the three of us feeling subdued. For me this had been the last possibility, although since I’d heard from Oliver that the police check had revealed only the expected shampoo in the bottle, it had become more and more remote.

Pen came back in half an hour with a thick tome, a piece of paper, and worried creases across her forehead. ‘I’ve been reading,’ she said. ‘Sorry to be so long. I’ve been checking up on sperm deformities, and it seems the most likely cause is ‘radiation.’

I said instantly, ‘Let’s ring Oliver.’

They nodded and I got through to him with Pen’s suggestion.

‘Tim!’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can get anyone in Newmarket... even though it’s Sunday... I’ll ring you back.’

‘Though how a stallion could get anywhere near a radioactive source,’ Pen said while we were waiting, ‘would be a first-class mystery in itself.’ She looked down at the paper she carried. ‘This is the analysis report from the British lab, bill attached, I’m afraid. Same ingredients, though written in the opposite order, practically, with selenium put at the top, which means that that’s the predominant drug, I should think.’

Oliver telephoned again in a remarkably short time. ‘I got the chief researcher at home. He says they did think of radiation but discounted it because it would be more likely to result in total sterility, and there’s also the improbability of a horse being near any radio-active isotopes.’ He sighed. ‘Sand-castle has never even been X-rayed.’

‘See if you can check,’ I said. ‘If he ever was irradiated in any way it would come into the category of accidental or even malicious damage, and we’d be back into the insurance policy.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll try.’

I put down the receiver to find Pen turning the pages of her large pharmacological book with concentration.

‘What’s that?’ Judith asked, pointing.

‘Toxicity of minerals,’ Pen answered absentmindedly. ‘Ethylene glycol...’ she turned pages, searching. ‘Here we are.’ She read down the column, shaking her head. ‘Not that, anyway.’ She again consulted the index, read the columns, shook her head. ‘Selenium... selenium...’ She turned the pages, read the columns, pursed her lips. ‘It says that selenium is poisonous if taken internally, though it can be beneficial on the skin.’ She read some more. ‘It says that if animals eat plants which grow in soil which has much selenium in it, they can die.’

‘What is selenium?’ Judith asked.

‘It’s an element,’ Pen said. ‘Like potassium and sodium.’ She read on, ‘It says here that it is mostly found in rocks of the Cretaceous Age — such useful information — and that it’s among the most poisonous of elements but also an essential nutrient in trace quantities for both animals and plants.’ She looked up. ‘It says it’s useful for flower-growers because it kills insects, and that it accumulates mostly in plants which flourish where there’s a low annual rainfall.’

‘Is that all?’ Gordon asked, sounding disappointed.

‘No, there’s pages of it. I’m just translating the gist into understandable English.’

She read on for a while, and then it seemed to me that she totally stopped breathing. She raised her head and looked at me, her eyes wide and dark.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘Read it.’ She gave me the heavy book, pointing to the open page.

I read: Selenium is absorbed easily from the intestines and affects every part of the body, more lodging in the liver, spleen, and kidneys than in brain and muscle. Selenium is teratogenic.

‘What does teratogenic mean?’ I asked.

‘It means,’ Pen said, ‘that it produces deformed offspring.’

‘What’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t mean...’

Pen was shaking her head. ‘It couldn’t affect Sandcastle. It’s impossible. It would simply poison his system. Teratogens have nothing to do with males.’

‘Then what...?’

‘They act on the developing embryo,’ she said. Her face crumpled almost as if the knowledge was too much and would make her cry. ‘You could get deformed foals if you fed selenium to the mares.’

I went on the following morning to see Detective Chief Inspector Wyfold, both Gordon and Harry concurring that the errand warranted time off from the bank. The forceful policeman shook my hand, gestured me to a chair and said briskly that he could give me fifteen minutes at the outside, as did I know that yet another young girl had been murdered and sexually assaulted the evening before, which was now a total of six, and that his superiors, the press and the whole flaming country were baying for an arrest? ‘And we are no nearer now,’ he added with anger, ‘than we were five months ago, when it started.’

He listened all the same to what I said about selenium, but in conclusion shook his head.

‘We looked it up ourselves. Did you know it’s the main ingredient in an anti-dandruff shampoo sold off open shelves all over America in the drug stores? It used to be on sale here too, or something like it, but it’s been discontinued. There’s no mystery about it. It’s not rare, nor illegal. Just ordinary.’

‘But the deformities...’

‘Look,’ he said restively, ‘I’ll bear it in mind. But it’s a big jump to decide from one bottle of ordinary dog shampoo that that’s what’s the matter with those foals. I mean, is there any way of proving it?’

With regret I said, ‘No, there isn’t.’ No animal, Pen’s book had inferred, would retain selenium in its system for longer than a day or two if it was eaten only once or twice and in non-fatal amounts.

‘And how, anyway,’ Wyfold said, ‘would you get a whole lot of horses to drink anything as nasty as shampoo?’ He shook his head. ‘I know you’re very anxious to catch Virginia Knowles’ killer, and don’t think we don’t appreciate your coming here, but we’ve been into the shampoo question thoroughly, I assure you.’

His telephone buzzed and he picked up the receiver, his eyes still turned in my direction but his mind already elsewhere. ‘What?’ he said. ‘Yes, all right. Straightaway.’ He put down the receiver. ‘I’ll have to go.’

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘Isn’t it possible that one of the lads was giving selenium to the mares this year also, and that Ginnie somehow found out...’

He interrupted. ‘We tried to fit that killing onto one of those lads, don’t think we didn’t, but there was no evidence, absolutely none at all.’ He stood up and came round from behind his desk, already leaving me in mind as well as body. ‘If you think of anything else Mr Ekaterin, by all means let us know. But for now — I’m sorry, but there’s a bestial man out there we’ve got to catch — and I’m still of the opinion he tried for Virginia Knowles too, and was interrupted.’

He gave me a dismissing but not impatient nod, holding open the door and waiting for me to leave his office ahead of him. I obliged him by going, knowing that realistically he couldn’t be expected to listen to any further unsubstantiated theories from me while another victim lay more horribly and recently dead.

Before I went back to him, I thought, I had better dig further and come up with connected, believable facts, and also a basis, at least, for proof.

Henry and Gordon heard with gloom in the bank before lunch that at present we were ‘insufficient data’ in a Wyfold pigeonhole.

‘But you still believe, do you, Tim...?’ Henry said enquiringly.

‘We have to,’ I answered. ‘And yes, I do.’

‘Hm.’ He pondered. ‘If you need more time off from the office, you’d better take it. If there’s the slightest chance that there’s nothing wrong with Sandcastle after all, we must do our absolute best not only to prove it to our own satisfaction but also to the world in general. Confidence would have to be restored to breeders, otherwise they wouldn’t send their mares. It’s a tall order altogether.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well... I’ll do all I can’; and after lunch and some thought I telephoned to Oliver, whose hopes no one had so far raised.

‘Sit down,’ I said.

‘What’s the matter?’ He sounded immediately anxious. What’s happened?’

‘Do you know what teratogenic means?’ I said.

‘Yes, of course. With mares one always has to be careful.’

‘Mm... Well, there was a teratogenic drug in the bottle of dog shampoo that Ginnie had.’

‘What?’ His voice rose an octave on the word, vibrating with instinctive unthinking anger.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Now calm down. The police say it proves nothing either way, but Gordon and Henry, our chairman, agree that it’s the only hope we have left.’

‘But Tim...’ The realisation hit him, ‘That would mean... that would mean...’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It would mean that Sandcastle was always breeding good and true and could return to gold-mine status.’

I could hear Oliver’s heavily disturbed breathing and could only guess at his pulse rate.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. If shampoo had got into a batch of feed, all the mares who ate it would have been affected, not just those covered by Sandcastle.’

‘If the shampoo got into the feed accidentally, yes. If it was given deliberately, no.’

I can’t... I can’t...’

‘I did tell you to sit down,’ I said reasonably.

‘Yes, so you did.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m sitting,’ he said.

‘It’s at least possible,’ I said, ‘That the Equine Research people could find nothing wrong with Sandcastle because there actually isn’t anything wrong with him.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed faintly.

‘It is possible to give teratogenic substances to mares.’

‘Yes.’

‘But horses wouldn’t drink shampoo.’

‘No, thoroughbreds especially are very choosy.’

‘So how would you give them shampoo, and when?’

After a pause he said, still breathlessly, ‘I don’t know how. They’d spit it out. But when is easier, and that could probably be no more than three or four days after conception. That’s when the body tube is forming in the embryo... that’s when a small amount of teratogenic substance could do a lot of damage.’

‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that giving a mare selenium just once would ensure a deformed foal?’

‘Giving a mare what?’

‘Sorry. Selenium. A drug for treating dandruff.’

‘Good... heavens.’ He rallied towards his normal self. ‘I suppose it would depend on the strength of the dose, and its timing. Perhaps three or four doses... No one could really know, because no one would have tried... I mean, there wouldn’t have been any research.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But supposing that in this instance someone got the dosage and the timing right, and also found a way of making the shampoo palatable, then who was it?’

There was a long quietness during which even his breathing abated.

‘I don’t know,’ he said finally. ‘Theoretically it could have been me, Ginnie, Nigel, the Watcherleys or any of the lads who were here last year. No one else was on the place often enough.

‘Really no one? How about the vet or the blacksmith or just a visiting friend?’

‘But there were eighteen deformed foals,’ he said. ‘I would think it would have to have been someone who could come and go here all the time.’

‘And someone who knew which mares to pick,’ I said. ‘Would that knowledge be easy to come by?’

‘Easy!’ he said explosively. ‘It is positively thrust at everyone on the place. There are lists in all the feed rooms and in the breeding pen itself saying which mares are to be bred to which stallion. Nigel has one, there’s one in my office, one at the Watcherleys — all over. Everyone is supposed to double-check the lists all the time, so that mistakes aren’t made.’

‘And all the horses,’ I said slowly, ‘Wear head-collars with their names on.’

‘Yes, that’s right. An essential precaution.’

All made easy, I thought, for someone intending mischief towards particular mares and not to any others.

‘Your own Sandcastle foal,’ I said, ‘he’s perfect... and it may be because on the lists your mare was down for Diarist.’

‘Tim!’

‘Look after him,’ I said. ‘And look after Sandcastle.’

‘I will,’ he said fervently.

‘And Oliver... is that lad called Shane still with you?’

‘No, he’s gone. So have Dave and Sammy, who found Ginnie.’

‘Then could you send me at the bank a list of the names and addresses of all the people who were working for you last year, and also this year? And I mean everyone, even your house-keeper and anyone working for Nigel or cleaning the lads’ hostel, things like that.’

‘Even my part-time secretary girl?’

‘Even her.’

‘She only comes three mornings a week.’

‘That might be enough.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it straight away.’

‘I went to see Chief Inspector Wyfold this morning,’ I said. ‘But he thinks it’s just a coincidence that Ginnie had shampoo with a foal-deforming drug in it. We’ll have to come up with a whole lot more, to convince him. So anything you can think of...’

‘I’ll think of nothing else.’

‘If Dissdale Smith should telephone you, pressing for an answer,’ I said, ‘just say the bank are deliberating and keeping you waiting. Don’t tell him anything about this new possibility. It might be best to keep it to ourselves until we can prove whether or not it’s true.’

‘Dear God,’ he said fearfully, ‘I hope it is.’

In the evening I talked to Pen, asking her if she knew of any way of getting the selenium out of the shampoo.

‘The trouble seems to be,’ I said, ‘That you simply couldn’t get the stuff into a horse as it is.’

‘I’ll work on it,’ she said, ‘But of course the manufacturer’s chemists will have gone to a good deal of trouble to make sure the selenium stays suspended throughout the mixture and doesn’t all fall to the bottom.’

‘It did say “Shake Well” on the bottle.’

‘Mm, but that might be for the soap content, not for the selenium.’

I thought. ‘Well, could you get the soap out, then? It must be the soap the horses wouldn’t like.’

‘I’ll try my hardest,’ she promised. ‘I’ll ask a few friends.’ She paused. ‘There isn’t much of the shampoo left. Only what I kept after sending the samples off to America and the British lab.’

‘How much?’ I said anxiously.

‘Half an egg-cupful. Maybe less.’

‘Is that enough?’

‘If we work in test-tubes... perhaps.’

‘And Pen... Could you or your friends make a guess, as well, as to how much shampoo you’d need to provide enough selenium to give a teratogenic dose to a mare?’

‘You sure do come up with some difficult questions, dearest Tim, but we’ll certainly try.’

Three days later she sent a message with Gordon, saying that by that evening she might have some answers, if I would care to go down to her house after work.

I cared and went, and with a smiling face she opened her front door to let me in.

‘Like a drink?’ she said.

‘Well, yes, but...’

‘First things first.’ She poured whisky carefully for me and Cinzano for herself. ‘Hungry?’

‘Pen...’

‘It’s only rolls with ham and lettuce in. I never cook much, as you know.’ She disappeared to her seldom-used kitchen and returned with the offerings, which turned out to be nicely squelchy and much what I would have made for myself.

‘All right,’ she said finally, pushing away the empty plates, ‘Now I’ll tell you what we’ve managed.’

‘At last.’

She grinned. ‘Yes. Well then, we started from the premise that if someone had to use shampoo as the source of selenium then that someone didn’t have direct or easy access to poisonous chemicals, which being so he also wouldn’t have sophisticated machinery available for separating one ingredient from another — a centrifuge, for instance. OK so far?’

I nodded.

‘So what we needed, as we saw it, was a simple method that involved only everyday equipment. Something anyone could co anywhere. So the first thing we did was to let the shampoo crip through a paper filter, and we think you could use almost anything for that purpose, like a paper towel, a folded tissue or thin blotting paper. We actually got the best and fastest results from a coffee filter, which is after all specially designed to retain very fine solids while letting liquids through easily.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Highly logical.’

Pen smiled. ‘So there we were with some filter-papers in which, we hoped, the microscopic particles of selenium were trapped. The filters were stained bright green by the shampoo. I brought one here to show you... I’ll get it.’ She whisked off to the kitchen taking the empty supper plates with her, and returned carrying a small tray with two glasses on it.

One glass contained cut pieces of green-stained coffee filter lying in what looked like oil, and the second glass contained only an upright test-tube, closed at the top with a cork and showing a dark half-inch of solution at the bottom.

‘One of my friends in the lab knows a lot about horses,’ Pen said, ‘and he reckoned that all race horses are used to the taste of linseed oil, which is given them in their feed quite often as a laxative. So we got some linseed oil and cut up the filter and soaked it.’ She pointed to the glass. ‘The selenium particles floated out of the paper into the oil.’

‘Neat.’ I said.

‘Yes. So then we poured the result into the test-tube and just waited twenty-four hours or so, and the selenium particles slowly gravitated through the oil to the bottom.’ She looked at my face to make sure I understood. ‘We transferred the selenium from the wax-soap base in which it would remain suspended into an oil base, in which it wouldn’t remain suspended.’

‘I do understand,’ I assured her.

‘So here in the test-tube,’ she said with a conjuror’s flourish, ‘we have concentrated selenium with the surplus oil poured off.’ She picked the tube out of the glass, keeping it upright, and showed me the brownish shadowy liquid lying there, darkest at the bottom, almost clear amber at the top. ‘We had such a small sample to start with that this is all we managed to collect. But that dark stuff is definitely selenium sulphide. We checked it on a sort of scanner called a gas chromatograph.’ She grinned. ‘No point in not using the sophisticated apparatus when it’s there right beside you — and we were in a research lab of a teaching hospital, incidentally.’

‘You’re marvellous.’

‘Quite brilliant,’ she agreed with comic modesty. ‘We also calculated that that particular shampoo was almost ten per cent selenium, which is a very much higher proportion than you’d find in shampoos for humans. We all agree that this much, in the test-tube, is enough to cause deformity in a foal — or in any other species, for that matter. We found many more references in other books — lambs born with deformed feet, for instance, where the sheep had browsed off plants growing on selenium-rich soil. We all agree that it’s the time when the mare ingests the selenium that’s most crucial, and we think that to be sure of getting the desired result you’d have to give selenium every day for three or four days, starting two or three days after conception.’

I slowly nodded. ‘That’s the same sort of time-scale that Oliver said.’

‘And if you gave too much,’ she said, ‘Too large a dose, you’d be more likely to get abortions than really gross deformities. The embryo would only go on growing at all, that is, if the damage done to it by the selenium was relatively minor.’

‘There were a lot of different deformities,’ I said.

‘Oh sure. It could have affected any developing cell, regardless.’

I picked up the test-tube and peered closely at its murky contents. ‘I suppose all you’d have to do would be stir this into a cupful of oats.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Or... could you enclose it in a capsule?’

‘Yes, if you had the makings. We could have done it quite easily in the lab. You’d need to get rid of as much oil as possible, of course, in that case, and just scrape concentrated selenium into the capsules.’

‘Mm. Calder could do it, I suppose?’

‘Calder Jackson? Why yes, I guess he could if you wanted him to. He had everything there that you’d need.’ She lifted her head, remembering something. ‘He’s on the television tomorrow night, incidentally.’

‘Is he?’

‘Yes. They were advertising it tonight just after the news, before you came. He’s going to be a guest on that chat show... Mickey Bonwith’s show... Do you ever see it?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘It’s transmitted live, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ She looked at me with slight puzzlement. ‘What’s going on in that computer brain?’

‘A slight calculation of risk,’ I said slowly, ‘and of grasping unrepeatable opportunities. And tell me, dearest Pen, if I found myself again in Calder’s surgery, what should I look for, to bring out?’

She stared at me literally with her mouth open. Then, recovering, she said, ‘You can’t mean... Calder?’

‘Well,’ I said soberly. ‘What I’d really like to do is to make sure one way or another. Because it does seem to me, sad though it is to admit it, that if you tie in Dissdale’s offer for Sandcastle with someone deliberately poisoning the mares, and then add Calder’s expertise with herbs — in which selenium-soaked plants might be included — you do at least get a question mark. You do want to know for sure, don’t you think, whether or not Calder and Dissdale set out deliberately to debase Sandcastle’s worth so that they could buy him for peanuts... So that Calder could perform a well publicized “miracle cure” of some sort on Sandcastle, who would thereafter always sire perfect foals, and gradually climb back into favour. Whose fees might never return to forty thousand pounds, but would over the years add up to a fortune.’

‘But they couldn’t,’ Pen said, aghast. ‘I mean... Calder and Dissdale... we know them.’

‘And you in your trade, as I in mine, must have met presentable, confidence-inspiring crooks.’

She fell silent, staring at me in a troubled way, until finally I said, ‘There’s one other thing. Again nothing I could swear to — but the first time I went to Calder’s place he had a lad there who reminded me sharply of the boy with the knife at Ascot.’

‘Ricky Barnet,’ Pen said, nodding.

‘Yes. I can’t remember Calder’s lad’s name, and I couldn’t identify him at all now after all this time, but at Oliver’s I saw another lad, called Shane, who also reminded me of Ricky Barnet. I’ve no idea whether Shane and Calder’s lad are one and the same person, though maybe not, because I don’t think Calder’s lad was called Shane, or I would have remembered, if you see what I mean.’

‘Got you,’ she said.

‘But if — and it’s a big if — if Shane did once work for Calder, he might still be working for him... feeding selenium to mares.’

Pen took her time with gravity in the experienced eyes, and at last said, ‘Someone would have had to be there on the spot to do the feeding, and it certainly couldn’t have been Calder or Dissdale. But couldn’t it have been that manager, Nigel? It would have been easy for him. Suppose Dissdale and Calder paid him...? Suppose they promised to employ him, or even give him a share in Sandcastle, once they’d got hold of the horse.’

I shook my head. ‘I did wonder. I did think of Nigel. There’s one good reason why it probably isn’t him, though, and that’s because he and only he besides Oliver knew that one of the mares down for Diarist was covered by Sandcastle.’ I explained about Oliver’s impulse mating. ‘The foal is perfect, but might very likely not have been if it was Nigel who was doing the feeding.’

‘Not conclusive,’ Pen said, slowly.

‘No.’

She stirred. ‘Did you tell the police all this?’

‘I meant to,’ I said, ‘But when I was there with Wyfold on Monday it seemed impossible. It was all so insubstantial. Such a lot of guesses. Maybe wrong conclusions. Dissdale’s offer could be genuine. And a lad I’d seen for half a minute eighteen months ago... it’s difficult to remember a strange face for half an hour, let alone all that time. I have only an impression of blankness and of sunglasses... and I don’t have the same impression of Oliver’s lad Shane. Wyfold isn’t the sort of man to be vague to. I thought I’d better come up with something more definite before I went back to him.’

She bit her thumb. ‘Can’t you take another good look at this Shane?’

I shook my head. ‘Oliver’s gradually letting lads go, as he does every year at this time, and Shane is one who has already left. Oliver doesn’t know where he went and has no other address for him, which he doesn’t think very unusual. It seems that lads can drift from stable to stable for ever with their papers always showing only the address of their last or current employer. But I think we might find Shane, if we’re lucky.

‘How?’

‘By photographing Ricky Barnet, side view, and asking around on racetracks.’

She smiled. ‘It might work. It just might.’

‘Worth a try.’

My mind drifted back to something else worth a try, and it seemed that hers followed.

‘You don’t really mean to break into Calder’s surgery, do you?’ she said.

‘Pick the lock,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

‘But...’

‘Time’s running out, and Oliver’s future and the bank’s money with it, and yes, sure, I’ll do what I can.’

She curiously looked into my face. ‘You have no real conception of danger, do you?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean... I saw you, that day at Ascot, simply hurl yourself at that boy, at that knife. You could have been badly stabbed, very easily. And Ginnie told us that you frightened her to tears jumping at Sandcastle the way you did, to catch him. She said it was suicidal... and yet you yourself seemed to think nothing of it. And at Ascot, that evening, I remember you being bored with the police questions, not stirred up high by a brush with death...’

Her words petered away. I considered them and found in myself a reason and an answer.

‘Nothing that has happened so far in my life,’ I said seriously, ‘has made me fear I might die. I think... I know it sounds silly... I am unconvinced of my own mortality.’

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 gelatin 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 unlabeled 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, rocketing 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, pulverizing 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 skiing. I’d never been injured beyond the transient bumps of childhood. Never been to hospital, never troubled a surgeon, never slept from anesthetic. 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 riveting 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 authorization, 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 tranquilizer 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 plus w, b plus w, and c plus 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 plus 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.’

On Tuesday, June fifth, 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 focusing 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-restrained 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. Anesthesia 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 find, 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 dissipated 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’s yard.’

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.

October

Gordon was coming up to sixty, the age at which everyone retired from Ekaterin’s, like it or not. The bustle of young brains, the founder Paul had said, was what kept money moving, and his concept still ruled in the house.

Gordon had his regrets but they were balanced, it seemed to me, by a sense of relief. He had battled for three years now against his palsy and had finished the allotted work span honorably in the face of the enemy within. He began saying he was looking forward to his leisure, and that he and Judith would go on a celebratory journey as soon as possible. Before that, however, he was to be away for a day of medical tests in. hospital.

‘Such a bore,’ he said, ‘but they want to make these checks and set me up before we travel.’

‘Very sensible,’ I said. ‘Where will you go?’

He smiled with enthusiasm. ‘I’ve always wanted to see Australia. Never been there, you know.’

‘Nor have I.’

He nodded and we continued with our normal work in the accord we had felt together for so many years. I would miss him badly for his own sake, I thought, and even more because through him I would no longer have constant news and contact with Judith. The days seemed to gallop towards his birthday and my spirits grew heavy as his lightened.

Oliver’s problems were no longer the day-to-day communiqués at lunch. The dissenting director had conceded that even blue-chip certainties weren’t always proof against well-planned malice and no longer grumbled about my part in things, particularly since the day that Henry in his mild-steel voice made observations about defending the bank’s money beyond the call of duty.

‘And beyond the call of common sense,’ Val murmured in my ear. ‘Thank goodness.’

Oliver’s plight had been extensively aired by Alec in What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t, thanks to comprehensive leaks from one of Ekaterin’s directors; to wit, me.

Some of the regular newspapers had danced round the subject, since with Shane still awaiting trial the business of poisoning mares was supposed to be sub judice. Alec’s paper with its usual disrespect for secrecy had managed to let everyone in the bloodstock industry know that Sandcastle himself was a rock-solid investment, and that any foals already born perfect would not be carrying any damaging genes.

As for the mares covered this year, [the paper continued] there is a lottery as to whether they will produce deformed foals or not. Breeders are advised to let their mares go to term, because there is a roughly fifty per cent chance that the foal will be perfect. Breeders of mares who produce deformed or imperfect foals will, we understand, have their stallion fees refunded and expenses reimbursed.

The bloodstock industry is drawing up its own special guidelines to deal with this exceptional case.

Meanwhile, fear not. Sandcastle is potent, fertile and fully reinstated. Apply without delay for a place in next year’s program.

Alec himself telephoned me in the office two days after the column appeared.

‘How do you like it?’ he said.

‘Absolutely great.’

‘The editor says the newsagents in Newmarket have been ringing up like mad for extra copies.’

‘Hm,’ I said. ‘I think perhaps I’ll get a list of all breeders and bloodstock agents and personally — I mean anonymously — send each of them a copy of your column, if your editor would agree.’

‘Do it without asking him,’ Alec said. ‘He would probably prefer it. We won’t sue you for infringement of copyright, I’ll promise you.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said. ‘You’ve been really great.’

‘Wait till you get an eyeful of the next issue. I’m working on it now. Do-It-Yourself Miracles, that’s the heading. How does it grab you?’

‘Fine.’

‘The dead can’t sue,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I just hope I spell the drugs right.’

‘I sent you the list,’ I protested.

‘The typesetters,’ he said, ‘can scramble eggs, let alone sulphanilamide.’

‘See you someday,’ I said, smiling.

‘Yeah. Pie and beer. We’ll fix it.’

His miracle-working column in the next issue demolished Calder’s reputation entirely and made further progress towards restoring Sandcastle’s and after a third bang on the Sandcastle-is-tops gong in the issue after that, Oliver thankfully reported that confidence both in his stallion and his stud farm was creeping back. Two thirds of the nominations were filled already, and enquiries were arriving for the rest.

‘One of the breeders whose mare is in foal now is threatening to sue me for negligence, but the bloodstock associations are trying to dissuade him. He can’t do anything, anyway, until after Shane’s trial and after the foal is born, and I just hope to God it’s one that’s perfect.’

From the bank’s point of view his affairs were no longer in turmoil. The board had agreed to extend the period of the loan for three extra years, and Val, Gordon and I had worked out the rates at which Oliver could repay without crippling himself. All finally rested on Sandcastle, but if his progeny should prove to have inherited his speed, Oliver should in the end reach the prosperity and prestige for which he had aimed.

‘But let’s not,’ Henry said, smiling one day over roast lamb, ‘let’s not make a habit of going to the races.’

Gordon came to the office one Monday saying he had met Dissdale the day before at lunch in a restaurant which they both liked.

‘He was most embarrassed to see me,’ Gordon said. ‘But I had quite a talk with him. He really didn’t know, you know, that Calder was a fake. He says he can hardly believe, even now, that the cures weren’t cures, or that Calder actually killed two people. Very subdued, he was, for Dissdale.’

‘I suppose,’ I said diffidently, ‘You didn’t ask him if he and Calder had ever bought, cured and sold sick animals before Indian Silk.’

‘Yes, I did, actually, because of your thoughts. But he said they hadn’t. Indian Silk was the first, and Dissdale rather despondently said he supposed Calder and Ian Pargetter couldn’t bear to see all their time and trouble go to waste, so when Ian Pargetter couldn’t persuade Fred Barnet to try Calder, Calder sent Dissdale to buy the horse outright.’

‘And it worked a treat.’

Gordon nodded. ‘Another thing Dissdale said was that Calder was as stunned as he was himself to find it was Ekaterin’s who had lent the money for Sandcastle. There had been no mention of it in the papers. Dissdale asked me to tell you that when he told Calder who it was who had actually put up the money, Calder said ‘My God’ several times and walked up and down all evening and drank far more than usual. Dissdale didn’t know why, and Calder wouldn’t tell him, but Dissdale says he thinks now it was because Calder was feeling remorse at hammering Ekaterin’s after an Ekaterin had saved his life.’

‘Dissdale,’ I said dryly, ‘is still trying to find excuses for his hero.’

‘And for his own admiration of him,’ Gordon agreed. ‘But perhaps it’s true. Dissdale said Calder had liked you very much.’

Liked me, and apologised, and tried to kill me: that too.

Movement had slowly returned to my shoulder and arm once the body-restricting plaster had come off, and via electrical treatment, exercise and massage normal strength had returned.

In the ankle department things weren’t quite so good: I still after more than four months wore a brace, though now of removable aluminum and strapping, not plaster. No one would promise I’d be able to ski on the final outcome and meanwhile all but the shortest journeys required sticks. I had tired of hopping up and down my Hampstead stairs on my return there to the extent of renting a flat of my own with a lift to take me aloft and a garage in the basement, and I reckoned life had basically become reasonable again on the day I drove out of there in my car: automatic gear change, no work for the left foot, perfect.

A day or two before he was due to go into hospital for his check-up Gordon mentioned in passing that Judith was coming to collect him from the bank after work to go with him to the hospital, where he would be spending the night so as to be rested for the whole day of tests on Friday.

She would collect him again on Friday evening and they would go home together, and he would have the weekend to rest in before he returned to the office on Monday.

‘I’ll be glad when it’s over,’ he said frankly. ‘I hate all the needles and the pulling and pushing about.’

‘When Judith has settled you in, would she like me to give her some dinner before she goes home?’ I said.

He looked across with interest, the idea taking root. ‘I should think she would love it. I’ll ask her.’

He returned the next day saying Judith was pleased, and we arranged between us that when she left him in the hospital she would come to join me in a convenient restaurant that we all knew well: and on the following day, Thursday, the plan was duly carried out.

She came with a glowing face, eyes sparkling, white teeth gleaming; wearing a blue full-skirted dress and shoes with high heels.

‘Gordon is fine, apart from grumbling about tomorrow,’ she reported, ‘and they gave him almost no supper, to his disgust. He says to think of him during our fillet steaks.’

I doubt if we did. I don’t remember what we ate. The feast was there before me on the other side of the small table, Judith looking beautiful and telling me nonsensical things like what happens to a blase refrigerator when you pull its plug out.

‘What, then?’

‘It loses its cool.’

I laughed at the stupidity of it and brimmed over with the intoxication of having her there to myself, and I wished she was my own wife so fiercely that my muscles ached.

‘You’ll be going to Australia...’ I said.

‘Australia?’ She hesitated. ‘We leave in three weeks.’

‘So soon.’

‘Gordon’s sixty the week after next,’ she said. ‘You know he is. There’s the party.’

Henry, Val and I had clubbed together to give Gordon a small sending-off in the office after his last day’s work, an affair to which most of the banking managers and their wives had been invited.

‘I hate him going,’ I said.

‘To Australia?’

‘From the bank.’

We drank wine and coffee and told each other much without saying a word. Not until we were nearly leaving did she say tentatively ‘We’ll be away for months, you know.’

My feelings must have shown. ‘Months... How many?’

‘We don’t know. We’re going to all the places Gordon or I have wanted to see that couldn’t be fitted into an ordinary holiday. We’re going to potter. Bits of Europe, bits of the Middle East, India, Singapore, Bali, then Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Fiji, Hawaii, America.’ She fell silent, her eyes not laughing now but full of sadness.

I swallowed. ‘Gordon will find it exhausting.’

‘He says not. He passionately wants to go, and I know he’s always yearned to have the time to see things... and we’re going slowly, with lots of rests.’

The restaurant had emptied around us and the waiters hovered with polite faces willing us to go. Judith put on her blue coat and we went outside onto the cold pavement.

‘How do you plan to go home now?’ I asked.

‘Underground.’

‘I’ll drive you,’ I said.

She gave me a small smile and nodded, and we walked slowly across the road to where I’d left the car. She sat in beside me and I did all the automatic things like switching on the lights and letting off the handbrake, and I drove all the way to Clapham without consciously seeing the road.

Gordon’s house behind the big gates lay quiet and dark. Judith looked up at its bulk and then at me, and I leaned across in the car and put my arms round her and kissed her. She came close to me, kissing me back with a feeling and a need that seemed as intense as my own, and for a while we stayed in that way, floating in passion, dreaming in deep unaccustomed touch.

As if of one mind we each at the same time drew back and slowly relaxed against the seat. She put her hand on mine and threaded her fingers through, holding tight.

I looked ahead through the windscreen, seeing trees against the stars: seeing nothing.

A long time passed.

‘We can’t,’ I said eventually.

‘No.’

‘Especially not,’ I said, ‘in his own house.’

‘No.’

After another long minute she let go of my hand and opened the door beside her, and I too opened mine.

‘Don’t get out,’ she said, ‘because of your ankle.’

I stood up however on the driveway and she walked round the car towards me. We hugged each other but without kissing, a long hungry minute of body against body; commitment and farewell.

‘I’ll see you,’ she said, ‘at the party’; and we both knew how it would be, with Lorna Shipton talking about watching Henry’s weight and Henry flirting roguishly with Judith whenever he could, and everyone talking loudly and clapping Gordon on the back.

She walked over to the front door and unlocked it, and looked back, briefly, once, and then went in, putting the walls between us in final, mutual, painful decision.

December

I felt alone and also lonely, which I’d never been before, and I telephoned to Pen one Sunday in December and suggested taking her out to lunch. She said to come early as she had to open her shop at four, and I arrived at eleven thirty to find coffee percolating richly and Pen trying to unravel the string of the Christmas kite.

‘I found it when I was looking for some books,’ she said. ‘It’s so pretty. When we’ve had coffee, let’s go out and fly it.’

We took it onto the common, and she let the string out gradually until the dragon was high on the wind, circling and darting and fluttering its frilly tail. It took us slowly after it across the grass, Pen delightedly intent and I simply pleased to be back there in that place.

She glanced at me over her shoulder. ‘Are we going too far for your ankle? Or too fast?’

‘No and no,’ I said.

‘Still taking the comfrey?’

‘Religiously.’

The bones and other tissues round my shoulder had mended fast, I’d been told, and although the ankle still lagged I was prepared to give comfrey the benefit of the doubt. Anything which would restore decent mobility attracted my enthusiasm: life with brace and walking stick, still boringly necessary, made even buying groceries a pest.

We had reached a spot on a level with Gordon and Judith’s house when a gust of wind took the kite suddenly higher, setting it weaving and diving in bright-coloured arcs and stretching its land-line to tautness. Before anything could be done the string snapped and the dazzling butterfly wings soared away free, rising in a spiral, disappearing to a shape, to a black dot, to nothing.

‘What a pity,’ Pen said, turning to me with disappointment and then pausing, seeing where my own gaze had travelled downwards to the tall cream gates, firmly shut.

‘Let her go,’ Pen said soberly, ‘like the kite.’

‘She’ll come back.’

‘Take out some other girl,’ she urged.

I smiled lopsidedly. ‘I’m out of practice.’

‘But you can’t spend your whole life...’ she stopped momentarily, and then said, ‘Parkinson’s disease isn’t fatal. Gordon could live to be eighty or more.’

‘I wouldn’t want him dead,’ I protested. ‘How could you think it?’

‘Then what?’

‘Just to go on, I suppose, as we are.’

She took my arm and turned me away from the gates to return to her house.

‘Give it time,’ she said. ‘You’ve got months. You both have.’

I glanced at her. ‘Both?’

‘Gordon and I don’t go around with our eyes shut.’

‘He’s never said anything...’

She smiled. ‘Gordon likes you better than you like him, if possible. Trusts you, too.’ She paused. ‘Let her go, Tim, for your own sake.’

We went silently back to her house and I thought of all that had happened since the day Gordon stood in the fountain, and of all I had learned and felt and loved and lost. Thought of Ginnie and Oliver and Calder, and of all the gateways I’d gone through to grief and pain and the knowledge of death. So much — too much — compressed into so small a span.

‘You’re a child of the light,’ Pen said contentedly. ‘Both you and Judith. You always take sunshine with you. I don’t suppose you know it, but everything brightens when people like you walk in.’ She glanced down at my slow foot. ‘Sorry. When you limp in. So carry the sunlight to a new young girl who isn’t married to Gordon and doesn’t break your heart.’ She paused. ‘That’s good pharmacological advice, so take it.’

‘Yes, doctor,’ I said: and knew I couldn’t.

On Christmas Eve when I had packed to go to Jersey and was checking around the flat before leaving, the telephone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said.

There was a series of clicks and hums and I was about to put the receiver down when a breathless voice said, ‘Tim...’

‘Judith?’ I said incredulously.

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Listen, just listen. I don’t know who else to ask, not at Christmas... Gordon’s ill and I’m alone and I don’t know, I don’t know...’

‘Where are you?’

‘India... He’s in hospital. They’re very good, very kind, but he’s so ill... unconscious... they say cerebral haemorrhage... I’m so afraid... I do so love him...’ She was suddenly crying, and trying not to, the words coming out at intervals when control was possible. ‘It’s so much to ask... but I need... help.’

‘Tell me where,’ I said. ‘I’ll come at once.’

‘Oh...’

She told me where. I was packed and ready to go, and I went.

Because of the date and the off-track destination there were delays and it took me forty hours to get there. Gordon died before I reached her, on the day after Christmas, like her mother.