Second Wind

Chapter 10

The hospital I sought cared for horses.

I’d made a phone call to prepare the way, and was greeted inside the main door of the Equine Research Establishment by a woman whose given name was Zinnia. Although a research veterinarian in general, she introduced herself as a specialist in poisonous plants and on their effect on any horse that ate them.

It had been she who’d been given the task not just of saving if possible the life of Caspar Harvey’s filly but of finding what was wrong with her to begin with.

Zinnia had already attained fifty, I guessed, and wore a professional white coat over a grey flannel skirt. In spite of her colourful name she had short grey hair, no hint of lipstick, flat-heeled shoes and an air of tiredness, which I discovered to be a permanent mannerism, not a pointer to lack of sleep.

‘Dr Stuart?’ She greeted me with a toe-to-head inspection but no enthusiasm, and raised her eyebrows over Jett, who’d declined to be left outside in her car. A recital by me of Jett’s nursing certificates brought the eyebrows down again, and we were invited to follow the flower into a laboratory equipped with a herd of microscopes, centrifuges, measuring devices and a gas chromatograph. We all sat on high laboratory stools, and I went on feeling lousy.

‘Mr Harvey’s filly,’ Zinnia said without emotion, ‘presented with severe symptoms of intestinal distress. By the time I was called in to see her here, late on a Sunday afternoon, she was in a state of collapse.’ She detailed her actions and her thoughts at the time which, as in nature horses had no provision for anti-peristalsis, or in plainer words, couldn’t throw up, had consisted to a great extent of purging and of offering copious amounts of water, which the filly fortunately drank.

‘I thought it certain that she’d eaten some form of plant poison that had been ground up into chaff and mixed into her hay, as there were no whole specimen leaves or stems in the haynet that came with her. I expected her to die, when of course I would have analysed the stomach contents, but as she clung to life I had to make do with the copious droppings. I thought that she might have had ingested ragwort, which is extremely poisonous, often fatal for horses. It attacks the liver and is usually chronic but it can have acute effects as with Harvey’s filly.’

She paused, looking from my face to Jett’s and seeing considerable ignorance in both.

‘Are you cognisant with Senecio jacobaea?’ she asked.

‘Er...’ I said. ‘No.’

‘Better known as ragwort.’ She smiled thinly. ‘It mostly lives in wasteland and was designated an injurious weed under the 1959 Weeds Act, so it’s your duty to pull it up if you see any.’

If she’d said that neither Jett nor I had any idea what it looked like on the hoof, so to speak, she would have been absolutely right. We asked, and she described.

‘It has yellow flowers and jagged leaves...’ She broke off. ‘Ragwort has to do with cyclic diesters, the most toxic of pyrrelizidine alkaloids, and it causes the symptoms shown by the filly, the digestive tract upset, the abdominal pain and ataxia, the lack of control of the legs.’

We listened respectfully. I wondered if I’d been eating ragwort myself.

‘The leaves can be dried and will keep their poisoning capacity for ages, unfortunately making it all the more suitable for chopping and mixing with other dried fodder, like hay.’

Jett said to Zinnia, ‘So you found ragwort in the filly’s droppings?’

Zinnia glanced from her to me. ‘No,’ she said without dramatics. ‘There was no identifiable ragwort in the filly’s droppings. We treated her with a series of antibiotics in case an infection was present, and she gradually recovered. We then sent her to George Loricroft, having been given instructions to do that by the owner, Caspar Harvey. The filly had been trained by Oliver Quigley before that, of course, and we made enquiries in that yard from the head lad downwards, but the whole workforce there strongly denied that anyone could possibly have tampered with the filly’s haynet. None of the other horses showed any symptoms like the filly, do you see?’

‘What was wrong with her, then?’ Jett asked. ‘Did you ever find out?’

‘There are other theories, I believe,’ she said, sounding as if any theory advanced by anyone except herself would automatically be wrong. ‘But the filly isn’t here, of course. If you want to do blood tests for antibodies, Dr Stuart, we have already suggested that course to Caspar Harvey but so far he has declined the procedure.’

Zinnia was saying, in her meticulous way, that if a horse — or a human — had had a disorder successfully treated, then that creature’s blood would likely forever contain the antibodies summoned up to defeat the infection. The presence of the antibodies to any disease proved that the individual had been exposed to the disease.

‘No, I don’t want to test for antibodies,’ I said, ‘but... did you keep any of the droppings? Do you still have any of them here in the research lab?’

Zinnia said with starch, ‘I assure you, Dr Stuart, we tested the droppings for every infection and every poison in the book and we found nothing.’

My forehead was damp with sweat. I felt more or less on a par with the filly. No cracked bones that I’d heard of gave one such unquiet guts.

Zinnia with surprise agreed grudgingly that the Research Establishment had indeed retained some of the material in question, as the riddle of the filly’s illness hadn’t been solved.

‘Caspar Harvey might change his mind,’ Zinnia said.

I thought Caspar Harvey most unlikely to want light poured onto the filly’s ailment, but regardless of his feelings, I said to Zinnia, ‘Does the Equine Research Establishment by any chance have a Geiger counter among its equipment?’

‘A Geiger...’ Words dried in Zinnia’s throat.

‘I believe,’ I said without emphasis, ‘that someone here reckons the filly was suffering from radiation sickness.’

‘Oh no,’ Zinnia shook her head decisively. ‘She would have deteriorated and died from that, but she recovered within days when treated with antibiotics. We have a research scientist here who advanced the radiation theory, chiefly, I think, on the grounds of some of the filly’s hair dropping out. But yes, to answer your enquiry, we do have a Geiger counter somewhere, but the filly showed no abnormal count when she left here.’

There was a pause. I had no intention of annoying or contradicting her, and after a short while she raised an at least semi-friendly smile and said she would go and find the researcher in question. Within five minutes she returned with another white-coated lady whose knowledge of radioactivity could have done with a dusting off.

Her name, she said, was Vera; she was earnest, thorough and a cutting genius in bad cases of colic.

‘I’m a veterinary surgeon, not a physicist,’ she explained, ‘but since Zinnia found no trace of poison — and believe me, if she couldn’t, then no one could I began to think of other possibilities, and I just floated the idea of radiation sickness... and of course it generated an instant atmosphere of fear, but we called in an expert on radiation and he did tests and told us not to worry, neither radiation sickness nor the filly could have been infectious. I wish I could remember everything he said.’

‘Dr Stuart is a physicist,’ Zinnia smoothly remarked.

‘He reads the weather on the BBC,’ the second vet contradicted flatly, unimpressed.

‘He’s both,’ Jett assured her, ‘and a lecturer also.’

I looked at her in surprise.

‘Your grandmother told me,’ she smiled. ‘She said you lecture on physics in general and radiation in particular. Mostly to young people, like teenagers.’

Vera, the second white coat, showed none of Zinnia’s constant tiredness, but quite the opposite. She woke to see me as a different creature.

She said, ‘Give me a sample of your lecturing wares and I’ll lend you my records of the filly’s droppings.’

‘That’s totally reprehensible,’ Zinnia reproved. ‘Totally unacceptable.’

Her friend nodded, unabashed.

‘Promise?’ I said.

‘Of course.’

I thought it might take my mind off greenish gills, so I started on a portion of the lecture I’d given so often that I knew it by heart. ‘This is about uranium,’ I said. ‘It’s from a lecture I give to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds usually.’

The second white coat approved. ‘Right. Carry on.’

In a conversational voice I did her bidding.

I said from memory, ‘Just one gram of uranium ore contains more than two thousand million million million atoms; that’s a two with twenty-one zeros after it. Too big to imagine. Even though natural uranium is not very radioactive compared to some other really dangerous stuff, a couple of grams of it, less than half a teaspoonful, will emit about thirty thousand alpha particles every second and will go on doing so at almost that rate for millions of years. Thirty thousand alpha particles attacking your guts every second for a couple of days might certainly make you feel sick but I think you would recover eventually.’

I stopped. I certainly did feel sick, but I hadn’t touched uranium that I knew of. Jett looked alarmed, however, and Vera, evidently considering the bargain kept, made a short exit and returned carrying a buff folder that to my eyes looked the exact double of the one that had agitated the Unified Traders.

The contents, alas, were not twenty letters offering for sale or offering to buy any of the enriched version of the ore I’d just been chronicling, but a scholarly account and graph of the amount of radioactive waste expelled by a two-year-old filly over the short number of days she’d spent in recovery.

By the time Vera had thought of radiation sickness the Geiger count was already on the decline. The source of it, I reckoned, had been passed by the filly very early, maybe even in diarrhoea during that first Sunday afternoon, while she lay and groaned in her box in Quigley’s stable.

As a charming gesture Vera also gave me a parcel of shoe-box size which she said not to open in polite company. Zinnia, still disapproving, pointed out that the contents of the box were the property of the Research Establishment, or perhaps of Caspar Harvey, or even, arguably, of the filly, but not, definitely not, mine.

I stood up abruptly and asked for directions to the lavatory, and through the closing door behind me heard Jett thanking the two white coats and saying goodbye, and shortly, still unwell, I was sitting beside her on the way back to Loricroft’s yard.

‘Is that what’s wrong with you?’ Jett asked anxiously.

‘Radiation sickness?’

‘You have the symptoms.’

‘I simply don’t know.’

She braked to a halt on Loricroft’s gravel. There was no one about.

‘Don’t argue,’ she said. ‘I’m coming with you into the house.’

I felt too rough anyway to demur. I slid out of the Honda and with Jett firmly alongside crossed the gravel and, after the briefest of taps on the door knocker, walked into the kitchen.

George Loricroft himself, to my enormous relief, wasn’t there. I’d had visions of having to deal with him physically and, apart from my persistent and weakening nausea, George was taller, stronger, and had already tried once to see me off.

The only person there was Glenda, who sat beside the big central table shaking with apprehension and looking a light shade of grey. She was clearly relieved that it was we, Jett and I, who had come.

She said, ‘George isn’t here. He said he was going out with the second lot to jump them on the Heath.’ Her voice sounded flat, without life.

‘And Bell?’ I asked.

Glenda sat motionless, her stiff eyelashes unblinking. She still wore the semi-bimbo trappings of a too-tight sweater, high-heeled clattering boots, and the puffed-up glittery blonde hair, but the Glenda of before Doncaster had vanished. The woman who had enraged and stripped away the shaky facade of Oliver Quigley was now wholly in charge, except that she hadn’t yet settled entirely into the role.

‘Bell went to her house to pack a suitcase,’ she said at length. ‘She’s coming back here to take me with her.’

After a pause I asked Glenda if she had discussed with George the list of frosty discrepancies I’d brought for her.

‘Discussed!’ She almost laughed. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with girls, you know.’ In bitterness it sounded as if she wished it was. ‘There hasn’t been any racing at Baden-Baden since September.’

I nodded. I’d looked it up.

‘George is a traitor to his country,’ she declaimed, and I murmured, ‘That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?’

‘He knows I think so. I’m going to London with Bell because I don’t want to be here when he comes back. If you think I’m afraid of him, you’re right, and I’m going to tell you things I never meant to tell anybody.’

She swallowed, paused, screwed up her nerve.

‘All those places, where I thought he was with girls, he was buying and selling nuclear secrets.’ To do her justice, she sounded scandalised. ‘And once,’ her disgust intensified, ‘once he brought home a heavy little package and because I thought it was gold... a gold present for a girl... I was so furious...’

She visibly drew in an outraged gulp of air. ‘How could he... we’ve always had good sex... I took the packet out of his briefcase and opened it, and inside there was only this heavy grey box. So I opened that, too, and right in the middle of some foam packing there was only this tiny twist of a coarse grey powder, but it was wrapped up tight in a tissue and I couldn’t wrap it back again the way it had been before, and then George came in.’

‘And he noticed you’d opened his parcel?’ I suggested, as she paused to draw breath.

‘No, he didn’t, but I was afraid he would, because he stuck around... and I had this stuff out of its box, so I popped it into my handbag in the tissue and it was still there when we went round to Oliver Quigley’s yard on our way to Nottingham races on the day before Caspar Harvey’s lunch. When I was looking for my lipstick... the tissue fell out of my bag and the powder went into a feed bowl full of oats lying on the ground ready for one of Oliver’s horses. I didn’t do it on purpose and I didn’t know the horse would be sick. But I didn’t tell George as I was frightened of him. I just left it.’

‘And,’ I asked, completely stunned but also believing her, ‘did you see which horse got that particular bowl?’

Her eyes were wide, and she said ‘No.’

‘Glenda!’ I protested.

‘All right then, you’ve guessed. I saw which box it went into, but I didn’t know it was Caspar’s filly that was in that box. I didn’t even think of it until Bell said the filly could have had radiation sickness, and then I really knew what George was probably doing, in all those places and lying about it. He was buying stuff to make bombs with, so I asked you to sort out what he’d said about where he’d been. And I do wish Bell would hurry up.’

So did I.

I asked Glenda, ‘Did George know at Doncaster that I’d said I would look up those weather discrepancies?’

‘He sure did. I told him. He wasn’t going to do me any harm as long as he knew someone else could give him away.’

Glenda, the new lesser-varnished edition, was still far too naive. I was less and less inclined to be in George’s house when he returned, but Bell at last arrived, saying she’d packed a suitcase, argued with her father and talked to Kris on the telephone to persuade him to give her bedroom.

Without urgency she loaded Glenda into her car while protesting that none of this haste was necessary.

‘It will avoid a scene,’ I pointed out and, with the equivalent of ‘wagons rol’, we at last set off in two cars towards London.

Jett glanced over at me and said, ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘I didn’t understand everything that Glenda said.’

‘You came in halfway through the movie.’

‘Was that powder uranium?’

‘Judging from its wrapping in tissue paper and lead — that heavy container sounds like lead — I’d guess it might be perhaps ordinary basic uranium ore, but also it might have been some other radioactive stuff giving off alpha particles.’

Jett said, ‘And is George buying and selling uranium? Is Glenda right?’

‘She’s half right. He’s putting in touch with each other people who know where to buy enriched uranium and enriched plutonium with people who want to buy it. The grey powder wasn’t bomb-making stuff, though, since the filly recovered.’

I told Jett about the Unified Traders frightening away the residents of Trox Island, and she said it explained why my grandmother spent her days biting her manicured nails.

‘Then don’t make it worse for her... but about that dipstick...’ I stopped, in hesitation.

‘Do you know who took it?’ Jett asked.

‘Do you remember what George Loricroft said at breakfast?’

She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Something about Kris must have left the dipstick on the ground at Doncaster when he clipped shut the folded-back engine cowling.’

‘Absolutely right, but Kris didn’t unclip or fold back the engine cowling at all at Doncaster, so George couldn’t have seen that. Add to that a few more facts, such as George’s car was in the car park near Kris’s private aeroplane. Glenda had just told him that I would have him investigated. He knew I’d been to Trox Island, but didn’t know what I’d learned there. And he could have known oil on the windscreen could kill, as he could have read about a case of it that was in the news last year.’

‘That’s damning,’ Jett said.

‘And all circumstantial. He could have folded back half of the engine cowling and taken out the dipstick. Also he might not.’

It was a bit later that I asked why we weren’t on the right road in London. Wait and see, Miss van Els uttered calmly, and soon after that she found a parking place in a side street near wide busy Marylebone Road.

‘Follow me... in sickness and in health,’ Jett said with humour, and I found myself in a medical specialist’s waiting-room in an annexe to a small private hospital that I certainly couldn’t afford. The specialist’s name, a placard informed me, was Dr Ravi Chand, citizen of Uttar Pradesh.

‘I can’t stay long,’ I warned. ‘At two-thirty I’m due in Wood Lane.’

Jett didn’t answer but was some sort of miracle worker, as in a very short time I was prodded, inspected and generally turned inside out by a briskly competent Indian practitioner with a wide grin of splendid teeth. To Jett, summoned as my nursing companion, the odd news was delivered in the neat accent of New Delhi.

‘My dear Jett, your impatient Dr Stuart isn’t suffering from radiation sickness of any sort, nor are his troubles to do with fractured ribs. He is developing a rash which is still under his skin but may erupt into sores in a day or two, or perhaps later today. He has been infected with a disease I can’t readily identify. I need to grow cultures and take blood tests. Meanwhile, he shouldn’t go to work, but I can give him prescriptions to allay the severe nausea. This may be unwelcome news to you, my dear Jett — and how nice it is to see you again — but I would advise you not to sleep with this young man until we know how infectious he may be.’

Demurely she said, ‘He hasn’t asked me yet.’

‘That’s unfair,’ I protested. ‘Who said don’t hurry? Consider yourself asked.’

Ravi Chand smiled, ruminated, inspected his nails, which were lighter against the brown of his fingers, and told me to rest in bed (alone) in the hospital next door for at least a day or until he knew what was wrong with me.

‘I can’t afford it,’ I said, and got overruled by Dr Chand’s quick reply that money came tailed off compared with health. He himself phoned the BBC and alarmed them far too much. So I spent a worse pincushion and pill-popping afternoon with X-rays, CT scan and embarrassing interior searches, and wrote as requested a long list of where I’d been in the past two months. Halfway through the list I realised what might be wrong with me, relaying the revelation to the gleeful satisfaction of my Indian inquisitor.

‘Cows!’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought so. Unpasteurised milk! Paratuberculosis!’ He frowned. ‘You do not, though, have any ordinary form of tuberculosis. I had you tested for that routinely, to begin with.’

He bustled away, thin, good humoured, dedicated to mystery solving.

In a bedroom that would have honoured a hotel for comfort I watched someone else on television foretell cold showery periods for the following day with a chance of sunshine in Wales later, and I recognised with gratitude that the feeling of abject illness had abated to a much more bearable level. Jett, returning to visit briefly in the evening, wore an anti-infection surgical mask and, having incautiously asked what she could do for me, made a face at the length of my list.

‘In sickness and in health,’ I reminded her teasingly.

‘For richer, for poorer,’ she replied, nodding. ‘I promised Ravi I would pay your bill here, so you can cross off number one on your list, “bring credit cards over”. You don’t need them.’

‘Bugger that,’ I said. ‘Please do get the cards.’

‘I’ll pay your bill out of the money I earned looking after your grandmother. That,’ Jett explained, ‘came from your BBC salary, didn’t it? I know it did.’

I said, shaking my head, ‘After all those dreadful tests today, you must leave me at least a little pride.’

‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘I’m not used to your sort of man. I’m not used to self-sufficient survivors. I’m used to adult little boys being brave but needing succour. Needing comfort. Needing their hands held. Why don’t you?’

I would give it a try, I thought, one day.

‘Please bring my cards,’ I meanwhile said.

The looking-glass in the morning (Thursday) confirmed the Indian doctor’s prognosis. There were three sores round my mouth and several small outposts of the same bad news from forehead to chin, from chin to waist, and other places besides. The knowledgeable product of New Delhi seemed quite pleased, however, and sent in well-protected and gloved nurses with relays of pills, needles and swabs.

He hustled in again himself at what would have been lunch time if I’d felt like it, and with obvious pleasure rattled off his diagnosis.

‘The already good news is, of course, that you don’t have straightforward tuberculosis, as we’d established already,’ he said. ‘The rest of the news, my dear Dr Stuart, is that you have a variation of an already rare complication of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis.’

He waited quizzically for some sort of reaction from me, but all I was numbly thinking was that it seemed to be my week for long incomprehensible medical terminology and other words to that effect.

‘The point is,’ the precise voice confided, ‘that an absolutely positive culture may take weeks, as this is a bacterium that’s uncommonly difficult to grow in a Petri dish.’

I said, horrified, ‘I can’t afford weeks away from work.’

‘No, no, of course not. We have already started you on antibiotics, and as far as can be seen up to now, you are not developing Crohn’s disease — good news — or Johne’s disease, which is more or less endemic in cattle — more good news. The best of all news is that on present showing, you should make a full recovery.’ He paused, considering, then said, ‘This infection you have, this unusual variant of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis... it’s from a strain that was developed originally for measuring how much or how little heat was needed to achieve viable infection after pasteurisation. I would say that you might have drunk raw milk from a cow with yet another new variant...’ He broke off, then continued, ‘I see you understand what I’m saying.’

An experimental herd, I thought. A mixed herd, with specimens of several breeds: Charollais, Hereford, Angus, Brahman... Friesian...

A herd isolated on an island, breeding only among itself... The presence and the purpose of the cattle on Trox abruptly made sense.

‘Very little is known about the human incidence of paratuberculosis,’ the Indian said cheerfully. ‘I’ll bring you some information booklets, if you like. In return, you might tell me where I can find this cow.’

‘Thank you... yes, OK. When can I leave?’

He looked at his watch, but dashed my hopes.

‘Sunday,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. The tests I’m running will not be conclusive until Sunday morning, and even then I’m accelerating them.’ He smiled primly. ‘I will eventually publish my results. Until then I will keep my findings thoroughly locked away, and I’m afraid even you won’t know every detail before I publish...’

‘Do you mean,’ I asked slowly, ‘that you will meanwhile lock your findings in a safe?’

‘Certainly. There is fierce competition among researchers. I do not want any competitor to scoop me, now do I?’

The word ‘scoop’ sat amusingly on his tongue, but did explain the purpose of the safe on Trox Island. The results from the experimental herd were worth a lifetime’s fortune in prestige. I’d been grateful to those cows. Too late to wish I’d starved.

‘Am I still likely to infect anyone else?’ I asked.

He took longer to answer, then he said, ‘Just bear in mind that no one knows. Among cattle the basic disease — Johne’s — is only spread through ingesting either faeces or infected milk.’ He grinned broadly. ‘You should be all right here. Visitors may come without a mask.’

Jett came often, usually with my grandmother’s gifts of a book not too heavy for holding when sitting in a wheelchair or bed, or anywhere with gin and tonic or busted ribs. Even though upright and walking round and round a civilised room, I learned from Wednesday to Sunday an approximation of my grandmother’s restricted life.

I talked to her on Thursday on the telephone, and I sent her a bowl of Christmas roses and a spray bottle of cologne.

On Friday morning early, colleagues at work phoned to urge my a.s.a.p. return, as it seemed I had won the annual Bracknell Met Office sweepstake by guessing which day in the year would register the hottest shade temperature on the roof (September 1^st), and they wanted to help me with unpopping the cork of the prize bottle of fizz.

They had barely left me smiling when I had Bell exploding in trouble in my ear, almost unintelligibly full of a five-star disaster.

‘Slow down, dearest Bell,’ I begged, hoping that what she’d just told me pretty hysterically was at least only half true. ‘What did you say about Glenda?’

‘I told you,’ she shouted. ‘Why don’t you bloody listen? Kris is frantic. She stole his trains—’

‘Bell! Slow down.’

‘She jumped in front of a train.’ The words still tumbled out.

‘Glenda?’

‘Of course, Glenda. Stop being so stupid. An underground train. Late last night. The police came here this morning. She’s... terribly... dead. They’ve not long gone.’

Bell swallowed between words to get them out, but she was audibly crying. ‘I’ve talked to Dad...’

‘Bell...’ I had at last, and with growing dismay, taken it in. ‘Where are you? Is somebody with you? Kris? Jett could be with you. I could come myself.’

‘No, you can’t, you’re in hospital. Glenda yattered all the way to London on Wednesday and honestly I got fed up with her — oh hell...’ She gulped, but the tears wouldn’t stop. ‘I wish I had been nicer to her, but I’d never truly liked her...I’ve done my best while I’ve been working for George, but I was going to change jobs — but that’s only half of it and the rest is worse.’

It couldn’t be much worse, I thought, and of course I was wrong.

Bell said, ‘Glenda went on and on about George being a traitor. She said she couldn’t bear to be married to a traitor. She said she’d told you all about it, and you knew it was true — and she couldn’t bear the shame of having a trial. She couldn’t live with the disgrace... and I thought... I thought she was exaggerating. You know how she always rattles on and swings her arms about... oh dear. Oh dear...’

I’d tried Kris’s flat several times without reply, so into the pause for sobs I asked again, ‘Bell, where are you right now?’

‘In your attic.’ Bell said it matter-of-factly as if I should have expected it. ‘We moved in here yesterday evening. Kris had a key,’ she added. ‘He said you wouldn’t mind. We’d got so utterly bored with Glenda going on and on all day yesterday, so when she finally went out at last we just came here to get away from her and of course we never dreamt...’

The unstoppable sobs, I thought, might almost have a compound of guilt.

‘When Glenda was with you,’ I asked, ‘couldn’t you in any way have calmed her about George?’

‘Perry,’ Bell’s voice on the phone was a wail, ‘you don’t understand. The Newmarket police went to George’s house to tell him Glenda was dead. They didn’t go to arrest him. They just went because of Glenda...’ Bell fell into a silence that seemed past even sobs.

‘Go on,’ I said, ‘what did George say?’

‘He was dead,’ Bill said.

‘Dead?’

Bell said jerkily, ‘He was upstairs in his bedroom. He had been hit on the back of his head. His skull was crushed. The police went round to see Dad because of me working for George, and they told him George was dead... and Glenda had left a letter in the bedroom saying she couldn’t bear the disgrace...’ She wept. ‘Dad told the police to look for us here because I wasn’t at Kris’s place...’

‘Are you saying,’ I asked her plainly, ‘that while Glenda sat in Newmarket, in her kitchen, telling Jett and me how she’d given radiation sickness to the filly, George was lying dead upstairs?’

‘Yes.’ Bell’s distress carried its own measure of horror. ‘He must have been. When you and Jett drove off to the Equine Research place and I went home to pack a case... we left them in that state of really murderous fury... she must have killed him during that time when we weren’t there. And then she packed a few things and went down to wait for us.’ Bell still couldn’t quite control her voice. ‘Kris thinks she told George she was going upstairs to pack as she was leaving him, and was going to tell the world about his trade in uranium, and he went upstairs after her to stop her...’

One could imagine George, in a rage, leaning over Glenda’s suitcase to pull things out of it... and one could also imagine Glenda, snatching up a heavy object...

‘What did she hit him with?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Hell, Perry, what does it matter? I’ve hardly ever been in their bedroom... they have a heavy brass clock... modern...’ Her voice was cracking, and Jett would have reckoned she needed a tranquilliser, or better, a hug.

‘Is Kris with you now?’ I asked.

‘He went to get some food.’

‘Then eat it.’

‘Glenda!’ she said miserably. ‘And George!’

Disbelief racked her, and she felt more pain for them dead than she’d felt affection for them while they lived.

It would be no use telling her not to think about them. She had known them for most of her life.

I thought of them myself as I had seen them first at Caspar Harvey’s lunch, no odder than many a bickering married couple, and I thought how their central cores had slowly begun a melt-down after that, until the bedrock character had clarified in each.

George’s innate villainy had taken over from the still-respected racehorse trainer until he was ready to try killing with blinding oil. Glenda with her foolish unfounded sexual suspicions had uncovered not the lover but the traitor in her house, and in shame and disillusion had both killed and died.

I thought of the manifest instinct to destroy that had throbbed between the pair of them in that kitchen. There had been, that Wednesday morning, the basic bloody urge of nature — all red teeth and claws.

Did a murderer, I wondered, live deep within us all?