Dead Heat

18

W e all convened in Toby and Sally’s drawing room at four-thirty like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, with me playing the part of Hercule Poirot, except that unlike him I didn’t know all the answers, I wasn’t at all sure who done it and, for the most part, I didn’t have a clue of what it was they had done in the first place.

There were five of us in the room. I had thought that Sally would be busy caring for the children, but, after school, all three of them had gone to have tea with her sister, their aunt. So Sally sat on the settee with Toby, while Caroline and Bernard sat in armchairs on either side of them. I stood by the fireplace. All I needed, I thought, was a little mustache and a Belgian accent to complete the illusion.

I had previously threatened Bernard with excommunication from the Law Society if he misbehaved, and, to be fair, so far he had been propriety personified. He hadn’t even made any snide remarks to me when I had introduced him to Caroline. In fact, quite the reverse. He had been unusually effusive in his comments, with not a single mention of dropping the lawsuit in time with her knickers.

So now the four of them sat with expectant faces, waiting for every one of the facts to be revealed in front of them. They were going to be disappointed.

“Thank you all for being here,” I said by way of introduction. “And thank you, Toby and Sally, for allowing Caroline and me to stay here. And also, thank you, Bernard, for coming all the way from London.”

“Just get on with it,” said Toby a little impatiently. And he was right. I was procrastinating because I really didn’t know how or where to begin. Everyone laughed, and it lightened the mood.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t quite know where to start.”

“Try at the beginning,” said Caroline helpfully.

“OK,” I said, and took a deep breath. “The night before the 2,000 Guineas, I was engaged by the Newmarket racetrack caterers to be the guest chef at a gala dinner. They also engaged all my restaurant staff to be there as well, so the restaurant was closed that night. There were other staff too from a catering agency, but I was in charge of both the ordering of the food and the cooking of it.”

I smiled at Caroline. “Caroline was also at the dinner, as part of a string quartet.” She smiled back at me. “Well,” I went on, “nearly everyone who was at that dinner suffered from food poisoning during the night. I did, Caroline did and most of my staff did. One even ended up in hospital. Tests have since shown that the cause of the poisoning was undercooked kidney beans in the dinner.” I paused. “Now, everyone involved in food knows that undercooked kidney beans are very nasty, even though I didn’t realize that just one bean per person can be enough to cause terrible vomiting, and that’s what we all had. But there shouldn’t have been any kidney beans in that dinner. I made it from raw ingredients, and there were no kidney beans included. But the tests were conclusive, so someone else had to have put them there.”

“Are you saying that it was done on purpose?” asked Bernard.

“Yes,” I said. “You can’t accidentally add enough kidney beans to a dinner to make over two hundred people ill. And the beans had to be ground or finely chopped, otherwise they would have been visible in the sauce, which is where I think they must have been put.”

“But why would anyone do that?” said Toby.

“Good question,” I said. “And one that I spent days and days trying to find an answer to, and I still haven’t.” I looked around at the faces in front of me, and no one came up with any answer. I hadn’t expected one. “Let’s move on. The following day, I was again a guest chef, this time in the sponsor’s box at the races. We all know what happened there, and I was extremely lucky not to be killed along with the nineteen others who were, one of whom was a young waitress from my restaurant.” I paused again, thinking about Louisa’s funeral, remembering the pain of loss for her parents and friends, recalling the awful ache in my jaw. I took a couple of deep breaths and went on to describe just a little of what I had seen in the box that day without delving too deeply into the worst of the gory details. I could have left it all out, but I suppose I wanted to shock them a bit. They needed to be fully aware of what some people can do to others. They would later need to believe that my life, and maybe theirs, were truly in danger.

“I never realized you were so close to it,” said Toby. “Mum had said something about you being at the races, but nothing about…” He petered out. I decided that I must have successfully created the mental image I was after.

“It’s horrible,” said Sally, shivering. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“And I don’t want to wake up in a cold sweat having had another nightmare about it either,” I said quite forcibly. “But I know I will. And I will because it was real, it happened and it happened before my eyes to people I knew.” Sally looked quite shocked.

“The papers have all been saying that the bomb was aimed at an Arab prince,” said Bernard, bringing us all back from the brink. “So what has it got to do with the dinner?” He was one step ahead of the others.

“What if the bomb was not aimed at the prince but at those people it really hit?” I said. “And suppose the poisoning of the dinner was done to stop someone being at the races the following day so they wouldn’t get blown up.”

“But if someone knew there was going to be a bomb, then surely they could just have not turned up to the lunch,” said Bernard. “Why would they have to poison everyone the night before?”

“I don’t know,” I said almost angrily. I wasn’t angry with him, I was angry with myself for not knowing. I couldn’t be angry with Bernard. After all, that’s why I had asked him to come. I knew he would be skeptical and would argue. It’s what I wanted.

“But,” I said, “I do know that when I started saying this out loud and asking around about who was meant to be at the lunch but didn’t actually show up, someone tried to kill me.”

“How?” asked Bernard in the sudden silence.

“They caused the brakes to fail in my car and I hit a bus.”

“It’s a bit hit-and-miss, if you’ll excuse the pun,” he said. “Not the best way to kill someone.”

“It was designed to look like an accident,” I said.

“Are you absolutely sure it wasn’t?” he asked.

“No, I’m not,” I confessed. “For a while, I thought I was just being paranoid. I couldn’t think why anyone would want to do me harm. But then someone burned my house down with me in it. And I am certain that was another attempt on my life.”

“Have the fire brigade confirmed that it was arson?” Bernard asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I said, “but I know it was.”

“How?” he asked again.

“Because someone went into my house and removed the battery from my smoke alarm before they set the house on fire and I know for sure that there had been a battery in there. And I’m also sure that the fire was started at the bottom of the old wooden stairs to prevent me getting out.” In my mind, I could still see the flames roaring up the stairwell, cutting off my escape route. “It is only due to luck, and a few hefty blows on my bedroom window frame with a bedside table, that I am here now. And I wasn’t sure how much longer my luck would last, so I ran away to America.”

“Unlike you to run away,” said Toby. I was surprised, and pleased. It was indeed unlike me to run away, but I hadn’t expected him to know it, let alone to say it.

“No,” I said, “but I was frightened. I still am. And with good reason, if what happened in America is anything to go by.”

“What did happen?” asked Sally.

“Someone broke my arm with a polo mallet,” I said.

“What, surely not on purpose?” said Sally.

“I think you could say that,” I said. I told them about the maniac with the mallet and about the damage he did to the rental car.

“But why?” said Bernard.

Instead of answering, I removed the shiny metal ball from my pocket and tossed it to Toby.

“What is that?” asked Sally.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping one of you might be able to tell me. I know it’s significant. Having one probably contributed to my broken arm, and it might have cost me a lot more if I hadn’t managed to escape.”

Bernard looked me in the face.

“Life and death,” he said slowly, half under his breath.

They passed the ball back and forth between them, and I gave them a couple of minutes to examine it in silence.

“OK,” said Toby. “I give up. What is it?”

“Hey,” exclaimed Sally, “it unscrews. It comes apart.” She triumphantly held up the two pieces. She leaned over and showed Toby what she had done…She then put the ball back together and tossed it to Bernard. He struggled with his pudgy fingers, but finally he too was able to open the ball.

“But what is it for?” asked Toby again.

“I really don’t know,” I said. “But I feel it must be part of the key to all this.”

“Max and I think it must have been made to hold something,” Caroline said. “It fits so tightly together that we wondered if the contents mustn’t leak out.”

“And it might have something to do with polo ponies,” I added, as if another clue might help solve the riddle.

“Polo ponies?” said Bernard.

“Yes,” I said. “It may be to do with the importation of polo ponies.”

“From where?” asked Toby.

“South America, mostly,” I said, remembering what Dorothy Schumann had said. “Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia.”

“Drugs?” said Sally. “There’s an awful lot of cocaine in Colombia. Could this be used to hold drugs?”

They all examined the ball again, as if it would give up the answer.

“Like condoms,” I said.

“What?” said Bernard.

“Condoms,” I said again. “You must have heard of people who are paid to carry drugs in condoms through customs. They tie the end up and swallow condoms with drugs inside them. Then they fly to England, or somewhere, wait for nature to take its course and-hey, presto-you have condoms full of drugs.”

“Mules,” said Caroline. “They’re called mules. Lots of women do it from Jamaica or Nigeria. For the money.”

“Sounds rather dangerous to me,” said Toby. “Don’t the condoms burst?”

“Apparently not,” Caroline said. “I saw a television program about it. Some of them get caught by customs, using X-rays, but most of them don’t. And they’re desperate for money.”

“Are you suggesting,” said Bernard, “that metal balls like this could be somehow filled with drugs and swallowed to smuggle the stuff here from South America?” He held the ball up to his open mouth. It might have just about gone in, but his expression said that swallowing the ball would be another matter altogether.

“Not in humans, you fool,” I said, laughing at him. “In horses.”

“Could a horse really swallow something this big?” he asked, serious again.

“Easily,” said Toby. “They can swallow an apple whole. I’ve seen it. You twitch the top lip, hold the head up and throw the apple down the throat. It used to be done quite often to give pills. You hollow out an apple, fill it with the medicine and chuck it down. No problem.”

“What do you mean you twitch the top lip?” asked Caroline.

“A twitch is a stick with a loop of strong twine on the end,” he explained. “You put the loop round the animal’s top lip and twist the stick until the loop gets tight.”

“It sounds dreadful,” said Caroline, holding her own top lip.

“Well, it is,” said Toby. “But it works, I can tell you. It will control even the wildest of horses. They usually just stand very still. We sometimes have to use a twitch on one of ours for shoeing. Otherwise, the farrier gets kicked to hell.”

“So you could get a horse to swallow one of those,” I said to him, pointing at the ball.

“Oh yes, no problem. But I don’t think it would ever come out the other end.”

“Why not?” I said.

“Horses eat grass, we don’t,” he said.

“What’s that got to do with it?” Bernard asked.

“Grass is very indigestible,” said Toby. “Humans can’t live on it because everything goes through us so fast, the cellulose fibers of grass coming out much the same as they went in, so we wouldn’t get much nutrition from it. Horses have a system for slowing the process down, so there’s time for their system to break the cellulose down.”

“Like cows?” said Bernard.

“Well, not exactly,” Toby went on. “Cows have multiple stomachs, and they chew their cud, which means they constantly regurgitate their food and rechew it. Horses have only one, fairly small stomach, and once food is down there it won’t come back up due to a strong valve at the stomach opening. This valve also means that horses can’t vomit. So they have another method of breaking down the grass. It’s called the cecum, and it’s like a great big sack nearly four feet long and a foot wide that acts as a fermenter. But both the entry point and exit of this sack are near the top, and I think this ball would simply drop to the bottom of the sack and stay there.”

“What would happen then?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Unless you can be sure the ball would float in the cecum, I don’t think it would ever come out. God knows what would happen. I suspect the horse would eventually get seriously ill with colic. You would have to ask a vet. All I know is that surprisingly little actually comes out the back of a horse compared to the amount you put in it at the front, and I really think the ball would be most unlikely to ever be emitted with a horse’s dung. And it would certainly be far too chancy to try it.”

“That puts the kibosh on that theory, then,” I said. “I somehow don’t think that Mr. Komarov leaves anything to chance.”

“Komarov?” said Toby. “Not Peter Komarov?”

“Yes,” I said, surprised. “Do you know him?”

“I know of him,” said Toby. “He sells horses.”

“Yes,” I said. “Polo ponies.”

“Not just polo ponies,” he said. “He also sells lots of racehorses at the bloodstock sales. I’ve bought a few of them myself. For my owners, of course. Is it him you think is trying to kill you?” He sounded somewhat skeptical.

“I think he has something to do with it, yes.”

“Blimey,” he said. “I always thought of him as a pillar of racing society.”

“Why exactly?” I asked him.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “I suppose it’s because he seems to have given a bit of a boost to racing. At least, he’s given a bit of a boost to me!”

“How?”

“I’ve bought some reasonably priced horses from him,” said Toby. “Some of my one-horse owners have been talked into buying a second. Good for training fees.” He smiled.

“Do you know where the horses came from?” I asked.

“Now that you mention it, I think they did all come from Argentina. But that’s nothing special. Lots of racehorses trained here are bred in Argentina. What makes you think Komarov’s responsible?”

“A number of things,” I said. “The most important one being that when I mentioned his name and showed someone one of these balls, I got my arm broken for my trouble. Also, Komarov and his wife were invited to the lunch at Newmarket when the bomb exploded, but they unexpectedly didn’t turn up.”

“That’s not very conclusive,” said Bernard.

“I know,” I replied. “But his name keeps popping up. And he seems somehow connected with lots of what’s been going on.” I paused. “If I was dead certain that it was him, then I’d be telling this to the police. But, I have to admit, I’m slightly afraid they might just laugh at me. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to try it out on you first.” I looked at Toby, Sally and Bernard, but I couldn’t read their minds. I knew that Caroline believed me.

“It does all seem a bit far-fetched to me,” Sally said. She turned to Caroline. “What do you think?”

“I know it’s true,” said Caroline with certainty. “You might ask how I can be sure, so I’ll tell you.” She looked up at me and smiled lopsidedly. “I have been badly frightened by what has happened to Max over the past ten days. I was at the poisoned dinner and was dreadfully ill that night, and we have all seen the photos of the bombing and have heard Max’s description of what it was like after the explosion. There can be no doubting that those things did happen.”

“No,” said Bernard. “No doubt whatsoever.”

“And Max’s car did collide with a bus, and his house did burn down.”

“Yes,” said Bernard. “We don’t doubt those things happened either. The question is whether they were genuine attempts to murder him.”

“I presume,” she said, “that there’s no question that Max did have his arm broken by someone wielding a polo mallet just for mentioning this man Komarov’s name. I saw the mallet.”

Bernard looked around at Toby and Sally. “I think we can agree that Max had his arm broken, but was it because he mentioned Komarov’s name or because he had one of these balls?”

“Both,” I said. “But I was definitely threatened with the mallet before I even showed them the ball. The Komarov name was the key.”

“And,” said Caroline, “someone went into my flat when I was in America.”

“What do you mean?” said Bernard.

“Two men told my neighbor a pack of lies and managed to convince her to let them into my flat. I don’t know why, but we think they must have planted something there that would let them know when we got back.”

“But how did they know where you live?” said Bernard.

“Whoever it was must have followed me there,” I said.

“But why?” said Bernard.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “If someone could fix the brakes on my car the night I had dinner with Caroline, then they only had to follow me to the restaurant to know who I was seeing.”

“But that doesn’t mean they know where she lives,” said Bernard.

“I don’t know,” I said again. “If they saw me with her, they could have found out where she lives. Perhaps they followed her home.”

“That’s surely very unlikely,” said Bernard.

“It was surely unlikely that someone would bomb Newmarket races,” I said, “but they did.” I stared at Bernard. “And you were able to find out where Caroline lives.”

“That’s different,” he said.

“How exactly did you do that?” asked Caroline accusingly. “And you got my telephone number as well. How was that?”

Bernard went bright red, but he refused to say how he did it. He mumbled a bit about databases and so on, and about the data-protection act. As I had suspected, what he had done wasn’t entirely legal.

“But you are sure someone was in your flat,” he said, trying to get us back on track.

“Absolutely positive,” she said. She told them briefly about things being moved in her medicine cabinet. Sally nodded. It must be a girl thing, I thought.

They all sat silently, digesting what Caroline and I had just told them. But were we getting anywhere? I wondered. There were so many questions, and I was far too short of answers.

“Sally,” I said, “do you think we could have some tea?”

“Of course,” she said. She seemed relieved to be able to get up and move. She went out to the kitchen. It somehow broke up the formality of the gathering. Bernard started apologizing to Caroline. Now, that had me worried.

Toby sat and turned the ball over and over in his hands. “I suppose…” he said, almost to himself. “No, that’s ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous?” I asked him.

He looked up at my face. “I was just thinking aloud,” he said.

“So tell me your thoughts,” I urged him. Caroline and Bernard stopped talking and looked expectantly across at Toby.

“No, it was nothing,” he said.

“Tell us anyway,” I said.

“I was just wondering if it could be used for marbling.”

There was a brief silence as we thought about what he had said.

“And what the hell is ‘marbling’?” asked Bernard in his best lawyer voice.

“It’s not the proper name, but it’s what I call it,” Toby said.

“Call what?” asked Sally, coming back into the room with a silver tray, with teapot, cups and so on, plus some chocolate biscuits that clearly caught Bernard’s eye.

“Toby was just saying that this ball could be used for marbling,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked, setting the tray down on a table.

“Yes, what is this marbling?” implored Bernard.

Toby looked at Caroline and he seemed a bit embarrassed. “It’s placing a large glass marble in the uterus of a mare to simulate a pregnancy.”

“But why would anyone do that?” asked Caroline.

“To stop her coming into season,” said Toby.

“Sorry,” said Bernard. “You’ve lost me.”

“Suppose you don’t want a filly or a mare coming into season at a certain time,” said Toby. “You place a large marble or two through her cervix and into the uterus. The fact that there is something in the uterus already seems somehow to fool the animal into thinking that she is pregnant, so she doesn’t ovulate, come into season or go into heat.”

“Why would that be a problem anyway?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes it may be that you want the mare in season at an exact moment-say, for breeding on a specific day to a stallion-so you could marble the mare for a few weeks, then remove the marbles and-hey, presto-the mare comes into heat almost immediately. I don’t know it all; you’d have to ask a vet. But I do know it’s done a lot. Some show jumpers are kept off heat for major competitions. Otherwise, they can go all moody and don’t behave properly. Just like a woman.” He laughed, and Sally playfully smacked his knee.

“Or a polo pony,” I said. “I doubt you would want a female polo pony to be in season during a match, especially if there were some male ponies playing as well.”

“Certainly not if any of them were full horses,” said Toby.

“Full horses?” asked Bernard, munching on a biscuit.

“Stallions,” said Toby. “As opposed to geldings.”

Bernard seemed to wince a little, and he put his knees tightly together.

“So you think this ball could be used instead of a glass marble?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re about the same size. But it would have to be sterilized. At least on the outside.”

“How many did you say could be inserted?” I asked.

“One or two is normal, I think,” he said. “But I do know that at least three have been used. Maybe more. You would have to ask a vet.”

“Wouldn’t they just fall out?” asked Caroline, amused.

“No,” said Toby. “You need to give the mare an injection to open the cervix to get them in. The marbles are placed in the uterus through a tube that looks like a short piece of plastic drain-pipe. When the injection wears off, the cervix closes and keeps them in. Easy. I’ve seen it done.”

“But how do you get them out again?” I asked.

“I’ve never actually seen them come out,” he said, “but I think you just give the mare the cervix-opening injection and the marbles are pushed out naturally.”

“But surely this ball wouldn’t be big enough to smuggle drugs,” said Bernard. “In horses or otherwise.”

“I was told that Peter Komarov imports horses by the jumbo jetful,” I said. “How many horses could you get on a jumbo?”

“I’ll try and find out,” said Toby, and he went out of the drawing room.

“We shall assume that each horse would have a minimum of three balls placed in it,” I said.

“Only the female horses,” said Caroline.

“True,” I said. “But wouldn’t they all be females if that is what he wanted?”

“Wouldn’t it depend on which horses were due to be imported?” said Sally.

“Not if Komarov owned the horses as well,” I said.

Toby came back. “According to LRT, the transport people who take and collect horses from Gatwick and Luton, there can be up to eighty horses on a jumbo.”

“Phew,” I said. “That’s a lot of horseflesh.”

“Eighty horses times three balls each,” said Caroline. “Two hundred and forty balls’ worth. How much is that?”

I remembered from school that the formula for the volume of a sphere was. The balls were about four centimeters across. I did a quick mental calculation. The volume of a ball was about thirty cubic centimeters. 30cc per ball × 240 balls = 7,200cc.

“Just over seven liters,” I said.

“And just how much is that?” asked Bernard. “I don’t work in liters.”

I did another rough calculation. “It would fill a bit more than twelve pint beer glasses.”

“And how much would that volume of cocaine be worth?” he asked.

“I’ve no idea of the price of cocaine,” I said.

“I expect it will say on the Internet,” said Toby. “I’ll go ask Google.” He disappeared again.

We sat and waited for him. I drank my tea, and Bernard sneaked his fourth chocolate biscuit.

Toby came back. “According to the Internet, cocaine is worth about forty pounds per gram at a sort of wholesale price,” he said.

“And how many grams are there in a pint mug?” asked Bernard, holding out his chubby hands with the palms up.

I laughed. “My brain hurts. If it was water, there would be a thousand grams in each liter. So there would be seven thousand grams in all. I don’t know whether cocaine powder is more or less dense than water. Does it float?”

“It can’t be much different,” said Bernard. “Say seven thousand grams at forty pounds at a time is”-he paused-“two hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Not bad. But not that much for all the risks involved.”

“But that’s not the half of it,” said Caroline. “For a start, you probably import cocaine at one hundred percent purity, and then you ‘cut’ it-that is, you add baking soda or vitamin C powder, or even sugar. At least a third, and sometimes as much as two-thirds to three-quarters, of what is sold on the street is the cut.”

I looked at her in shocked surprise. She smiled. “I once had a crackhead as a boyfriend. It lasted for a week or two, until I found out about his habit. But we stayed friends for a while longer, and he told me all about buying coke, as he called it. Users mostly buy it as a twist of powder or a rock of crack. That’s just enough for a single dose. A twist of cocaine powder may only contain fifty milligrams of pure cocaine. So you can get at least twenty twists from a single gram. That puts the potential street value of each gram hugely higher. In all, a jumbo jetload would be worth millions, and how many jumbo jetfuls are there?

“Plus, of course, the profit from the sale of the horses,” I said.

“If there is any,” said Toby. “He would have to buy them in South America and pay for the transportation. I don’t suppose there would be that much profit. Unless horses are very cheap in Argentina.”

“How would we find out?” I asked.

Toby went out again, and I thought he was going to somehow find out the answer to my question. But he didn’t. He came back with a book. It was like a large, thick paperback. “This is a catalog from the Horses in Training sale at Newmarket last October, when I bought a horse from Komarov. I thought I’d look it up.” He flicked through the pages. “Here it is.” He studied it. “It says here that it was sent to the sale by a company called Horse Imports Ltd. But I know it was Komarov’s horse. He was there. He congratulated me afterwards on my purchase.”

“You mean you spoke to this man?” said Sally, disturbed. “Does he know who you are?”

“Not really,” said Toby.

“I hope not,” she said to him. “Not if he’s trying to kill your brother.” She looked at me. “You shouldn’t have come here.” I could see that for the first time she really did believe I was in danger, and, consequently, so was she, and so was her family.

Toby was actually my half brother. We shared the same mother, but my father had been her second husband. Toby was the son of a newly qualified accountant who had died of kidney failure when Toby had been two. Toby’s surname wasn’t Moreton. It was Chambers.

“Komarov won’t know that Toby is my brother,” I said.

“I hope you’re right,” Sally said.

So did I.