Straight

18

Pross had sent me a letter and a certified bank draft: instantly cashable money.

I blinked at the numbers on the check and reread them very carefully. Then I read the letter.

It said:

What a mess, I thought. I did need the money, yet if I accepted it I was implicitly agreeing not to take any action against him. The trouble about taking action against him was that however much I might want to I didn’t know that I could. Apart from difficulties of evidence, I had more or less made a bargain that for information he would get inaction, but that had been before the wallet. It was perceptive of him, I thought, to see that it was betrayal and attacks on our brother that would anger both Greville and me most.

Would Greville want me to extend, if not forgiveness, then at least suspended revenge? Would Greville want me to confirm his forgiveness or to rise up in wrath and tear up the check...

In the midst of these somber squirreling thoughts the telephone rang and I answered it.

“Elliot Trelawney here,” the voice said.

“Oh, hello.”

He asked me how things were going and I said life was full of dilemmas. Ever so, he said with a chuckle.

“Give me some advice.” I said on impulse, “As a magistrate.”

“If I can, certainly.”

“Well. Listen to a story, then say what you think.”

“Fire away.”

“Someone knocked me out with a brick...” Elliot made protesting noises on my behalf, but I went on, “I know now who it was, but I didn’t then, and I didn’t see his face because he was masked. He wanted to steal a particular thing from me, but although he made a mess in the house searching, he didn’t find it, and so didn’t rob me of anything except consciousness. I guessed later who it was, and I challenged another man with having sent him to attack me. That man didn’t deny it to me, but he said he would deny it to anyone else. So... what do I do?”

“Whew.” He pondered. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I need the advice.”

“Did you report the attack to the police at the time?”

“Yes.”

“Have you suffered serious aftereffects?”

“No.”

“Did you see a doctor?”

“No.”

He pondered some more. “On a practical level you’d find it difficult to get a conviction, even if the prosecution service would bring charges of actual bodily harm. You couldn’t swear to the identity of your assailant if you didn’t see him at the time, and as for the other man, conspiracy to commit a crime is one of the most difficult charges to make stick. As you didn’t consult a doctor, you’re on tricky ground. So, hard as it may seem, my advice would be that the case wouldn’t get to court.”

I sighed. “Thank you,” I said.

“Sorry not to have been more positive.”

“It’s all right. You confirmed what I rather feared.”

“Fine then,” he said. “I rang to thank you for sending the Vaccaro notes. We held the committee meeting and turned down Vaccaro’s application, and now we find we needn’t have bothered because on Saturday night he was arrested and charged with attempting to import illegal substances. He’s still in custody, and America is asking for him to be extradited to Florida where he faces murder charges and perhaps execution. And we nearly gave him a gambling license! Funny old world.”

“Hilarious.”

“How about our drink in the Rook and Castle?” he suggested. “Perhaps one evening next week?”

“OK.”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

I put the phone down thinking that if Vaccaro had been arrested on Saturday evening and held in custody it was unlikely he’d shot Simms from a moving car in Berkshire on Sunday afternoon. But then, I’d never really thought he had.

Copycat. Copycat, that’s what it had been.

Pross hadn’t shot Simms either. Had never tried to kill me. The Peter Pan face upon which so many emotions could be read had shown a total blank when I’d asked him what he was doing on Sunday afternoon.

The shooting of Simms, I concluded, had been random violence like the other murders in Hungerford. Pointless and vicious; malignant, lunatic and impossible to explain.

I picked up the huge check and looked at it. It would solve all immediate problems: pay the interest already due, the cost of cutting the diamonds and more than a fifth of the capital debt. If I didn’t take it we would no doubt sell the diamonds later to someone else, but they had been cut especially for Prospero Jenks’s fantasies and might not easily fit necklaces and rings.

A plea. A bargain. A chance that the remorse was at least half real. Or was he taking me again for a sucker?

I did some sums with a calculator and when Annette came in with the day’s letters I showed her my figures and the check and asked her what she thought.

“That’s the cost price,” I pointed. “That’s the cost of cutting and polishing. That’s for delivery charges. That’s for loan interest and tax. If you add those together and subtract them from the figure on this check, is that the sort of profit margin Greville would have asked?”

Setting prices was something she well understood, and she repeated my steps on the calculator.

“Yes,” she said finally, “it looks about right. Not overgenerous, but Mr. Franklin would have seen this as a service for commission, I think. Not like the rock crystal, which he bought on spec, which had to help pay for his journeys.” She looked at me anxiously. “You understand the difference?”

“Yes,” I said. “Prospero Jenks says this is what he and Greville agreed on.”

“Well then,” she said, relieved, “he wouldn’t cheat you.”

I smiled with irony at her faith. “We’d better bank this check, I suppose,” I said, “before it evaporates.”

“I’ll do it at once,” she declared. “With a loan as big as you said, every minute costs us money.”

She put on her coat and took an umbrella to go out with, as the day had started off raining and showed no signs of relenting.

It had been raining the previous night when Clarissa had been ready to leave, and I’d had to ring three times for a taxi, a problem Cinderella didn’t seem to have encountered. Midnight had come and gone when the wheels had finally arrived, and I’d suggested meanwhile that I lend her Brad and my car for going to her wedding.

I didn’t need to, she said. When she and Henry were in London, they were driven about by a hired car firm. The car was already ordered to take her to the wedding, which was in Surrey. The driver would wait for her and return her to the hotel, and she’d better stick to the plan, she said, because the bill for it would be sent to her husband.

“I always do what Henry expects,” she said. “Then there are no questions.”

“Suppose Brad picks you up from the Selfridge after you get back?” I said, packing the little stone bears and giving them to her in a carrier. “The forecast is lousy and if it’s raining you’ll have a terrible job getting a taxi at that time of day.”

She liked the idea except for Brad’s knowing her name. I assured her he never spoke unless he couldn’t avoid it, but I told her I would ask Brad to park somewhere near the hotel. Then she could call the car phone’s number when she was ready to leave, and Brad would beetle up at the right moment and not need to know her name or ask for her at the desk.

As that pleased her, I wrote down the phone number and the car’s license plate so that she would recognize the right pumpkin, and described Brad to her, going bald, a bit morose, an open-necked shirt, a very good driver.

I couldn’t tell Brad’s own opinion of the arrangement. When I’d suggested it in the morning on the rainy way to the office he had merely grunted, which I’d taken as preliminary assent.

When he’d brought Clarissa, I thought as I looked through the letters Annette had given me, he could go on home, to Hungerford, and Clarissa and I might walk along to the restaurant at the end of Greville’s street where he could have been known but I was not, and after an early dinner we would return to Greville’s bed, this time for us, and we’d order the taxi in better time... perhaps.

I was awoken from this pleasant daydream by the ever-demanding telephone, this time with Nicholas Loder on the other end spluttering with rage.

“Milo says you had the confounded cheek,” he said, “to have Dozen Roses dope-tested.”

“For barbiturates, yes. He seemed very sleepy. Our vet said he’d be happier to know the horse hadn’t been tranquilized for the journey before he gave him an all-clear certificate.”

“I’d never give a horse tranquilizers,” he declared.

“No, none of us really thought so,” I said pacifyingly, “but we decided to make sure.”

“It’s shabby of you. Offensive. I expect an apology.”

“I apologize,” I said sincerely enough, and thought guiltily of the further checks going on at that moment.

“That’s not good enough,” Nicholas Loder said huffily.

“I was selling the horse to good owners of Milo’s, people I ride for,” I said reasonably. “We all know you disapproved. In the same circumstances, confronted by a sleepy horse, you’d have done the same, wouldn’t you? You’d want to be sure what you were selling.”

Weigh the merchandise, I thought. Cubic zirconia, size for size, was one point seven times heavier than diamond. Greville had carried jewelers’ scales in his car on his way to Harwich, presumably to check what the Koningin Beatrix was bringing.

“You’ve behaved disgustingly,” Nicholas Loder said. “When did you see the horse last? And when next?”

“Monday evening, last. Don’t know when next. As I told you, I’m tied up a bit with Greville’s affairs.”

“Milo’s secretary said I’d find you in Greville’s office,” he grumbled. “You’re never at home. I’ve got a buyer for Gemstones, I think, though you don’t deserve it. Where will you be this evening, if he makes a definite offer?”

“In Greville’s house, perhaps.”

“Right, I have the number. And I want a written apology from you about those dope tests. I’m so angry I can hardly be civil to you.”

He hardly was, I thought, but I was pleased enough about Gemstones. The money would go into the firm’s coffers and hold off bankruptcy a little while longer. I still held the Ostermeyers’ check for Dozen Roses, waiting for Phil Urquhart’s final clearance before cashing it. The horses would make up for a few of the missing diamonds. Looking at it optimistically, saying it quickly, the millstone had been reduced to near one million dollars.

June out of habit brought me a sandwich for lunch. She was walking with an extra bounce, with unashamed excitement. Way down the line, I thought, if we made it through the crisis, what then? Would I simply sell the whole of Saxony Franklin as I’d meant or keep it and borrow against it to finance a stable, as Greville had financed the diamonds? I wouldn’t hide the stable! Perhaps I would have learned enough by then to manage both businesses on a sound basis: I’d learned a good deal in ten days. I had also, though I found it surprising, grown fond of Greville’s firm. If we saved it, I wouldn’t want to let it go.

If I went on riding until solvency dawned I might be the oldest jump jockey in history...

Again the telephone interrupted the daydreams, and I’d barely made a start on the letters.

It was a man with a long order for cabochons and beads. I hopped to the door and yelled for June to pick up the phone and to put the order on the computer, and Alfie came along to complain we were running out of heavy-duty binding tape and to ask why we’d ever needed Jason. Tina did his work in half the time without the swear words.

Annette almost with gaiety vacuumed everywhere, though I thought I would soon ask Tina to do it instead. Lily came with downcast eyes to ask meekly if she could have a title also. Stockroom Manager? she suggested.

“Done!” I said with sincere pleasure; and before the day was out we had a Shipment Manager (Alfie) and an Enabling Manager (Tina), and it seemed to me that such a spirit had been released there that the enterprise was now flying. Whether the euphoria would last or not was next week’s problem.

I telephoned Maarten-Pagnier in Antwerp and discussed the transit of twelve teardrops, eight stars and five fakes.

“Our customer has paid us for the diamonds,” I said. “I’d like to be able to tell him when we could get them to him.”

“Do you want them sent direct to him, monsieur?”

“No. Here to us. We’ll pass them on.” I asked if he would insure them for the journey and send them by Euro-Securo; no need to trouble his partner again personally as we did not dispute that five of the stones sent to him had been cubic zirconia. The real stones had been returned to us, I said.

“I rejoice for you, monsieur. And shall we expect a further consignment for cutting? Monsieur Franklin intended it.”

“Not at the moment, I regret.”

“Very well, monsieur. At any time, we are at your service.”

After that I asked Annette if she could find Prospero Jenks to tell him his diamonds would be coming. She ran him to earth in one of his workrooms and appeared in my doorway saying he wanted to speak to me personally.

With inner reluctance I picked up the receiver. “Hello, Pross,” I said.

“Truce, then?” he asked.

“We’ve banked the check. You’ll get the diamonds.”

“When?”

“When they get here from Antwerp. Friday, maybe.”

“Thanks.” He sounded fervently pleased. Then he said with hesitation, “You’ve got some light blue topaz, each fifteen carats or more, emerald cut, glittering like water... can I have it? Five or six big stones, Grev said. I’ll take them all.”

“Give it time,” I said, and God, I thought, what unholy nerve.

“Yes, well, but you and I need each other,” he protested.

“Symbiosis?” I said.

“What? Yes.”

It had done Greville no harm in the trade, I’d gathered, to be known as the chief supplier of Prospero Jenks. His firm still needed the cachet as much as the cash. I’d taken the money once. Could I afford pride?

“If you try to steal from me one more time,” I said, “I not only stop trading with you, I make sure everyone knows why. Everyone from Hatton Garden to Pelikanstraat.”

“Derek!” He sounded hurt, but the threat was a dire one.

“You can have the topaz,” I said. “We have a new gemologist who’s not Greville, I grant you, but who knows what you buy. We’ll still tell you what special stones we’ve imported. You can tell us what you need. We’ll take it step by step.”

“I thought you wouldn’t!” He sounded extremely relieved. “I thought you’d never forgive me the wallet. Your face...”

“I don’t forgive it. Or forget. But after wars, enemies trade.” It always happened, I thought, though cynics might mock. Mutual benefit was the most powerful of bridge-builders, even if the heart remained bitter. “We’ll see how we go,” I said again.

“If you find the other diamonds,” he said hopefully, “I still want them.” Like a little boy in trouble, I thought, trying to charm his way out.

Disconnecting, I ruefully smiled. I’d made the same inner compromise that Greville had, to do business with the treacherous child, but not to trust him. To supply the genius in him, and look to my back.

June came winging in and I asked her to go along to the vault to look at the light blue, large stone topaz, which I well remembered. “Get to know it while it’s still here. I’ve sold it to Prospero Jenks.”

“But I don’t go into the vault,” she said.

“You do now. You’ll go in there every day from now on at spare moments to learn the look and feel of the faceted stones, like I have. Topaz is slippery, for instance. Learn the chemical formulas, learn the cuts and the weights, get to know them so that if you’re offered unusual faceted stones anywhere in the world you can check them against your knowledge for probability.”

Her mouth opened.

“You’re going to buy the raw materials for Prospero Jenks’s museum pieces,” I said. “You’ve got to learn fast.”

Her eyes stretched wide as well, and she vanished.

With Annette I finished the letters.

At four o’clock I answered the telephone yet again, and found myself talking to Phil Urquhart, whose voice sounded strained.

“I’ve just phoned the lab for the results of Dozen Roses’ tests.” He paused. “I don’t think I believe this.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Do you know what a metabolite is?”

“Only vaguely.”

“What, then?” he said.

“The result of metabolism, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he said. “It’s what’s left after some substance or other has broken down in the body.”

“So what?”

“So,” he said reasonably, “if you find a particular metabolite in the urine, it means a particular substance was earlier present in the body. Is that clear?”

“Like viruses produce special antibodies, so the presence of the antibodies proves the existence of the viruses?”

“Exactly,” he said, apparently relieved I understood. “Well, the lab found a metabolite in Dozen Roses’ urine. A metabolite known as benzyl ecognine.”

“Go on,” I urged, as he paused. “What is it the metabolite of?”

“Cocaine,” he said.

I sat in stunned disbelieving silence.

“Derek?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Racehorses aren’t routinely tested for cocaine because it isn’t a stimulant. Normally a racehorse could be full of cocaine and no one would know.”

“If it isn’t a stimulant,” I said, loosening my tongue, “why give it to them?”

“If you believed it was a stimulant, you might. Knowing it wouldn’t be tested for.”

“How could you believe it?”

“It’s one of the drugs that potentiates adrenaline. I particularly asked the lab to test for all drugs like that because of what you said about the adrenaline yourself. What happens with a normal adrenaline surge is that after a while an enzyme comes along to control it. Cocaine blocks out that enzyme, so the adrenaline goes roaring round the body for much longer. When the cocaine decays, its chief metabolic product is benzyl ecognine, which is what the lab found in its gas chromatograph analyzer this afternoon.”

“There were some cases in America...” I said vaguely.

“It’s still not part of a regulation dope test even there.”

“But my God,” I said blankly, “Nicholas Loder must have known.”

“Almost certainly, I should think. You’d have to administer the cocaine very soon before the race, because its effect is short lived. One hour, an hour and a half at most. It’s difficult to tell, with a horse. There’s no data. And although the metabolite would appear in the blood and the urine soon after that, the metabolite itself would be detectable for probably not much longer than forty-eight hours, but with a horse, that’s still a guess. We took the sample from Dozen Roses on Monday evening about fifty-two hours after he’d raced. The lab said the metabolite was definitely present, but they could make no estimate of how much cocaine had been assimilated. They told me all this very very carefully. They have much more experience with humans. They say in humans the rush from cocaine is fast, lasts about forty minutes and brings little post-exhilaration depression.”

“Nice,” I said.

“In horses,” he went on, “they think it would probably induce skittishness at once.”

“I thought back to Dozen Roses’ behavior both at York and on the TV tapes. He’d certainly woken up dramatically between saddling box and starting gate.

“But,” Phil added, “they say that at the most it might give more stamina, but not much more speed. It wouldn’t make the horse go faster, but just make the adrenaline push last longer.”

That might be enough sometimes, I thought. Sometimes you could feel horses “die” under you near the finish, not from lack of ability, but from lack of perseverance, of fight. Some horses were content to be second. In them, uninhibited adrenaline might perhaps tip the balance.

Caffeine, which had the same potentiating effect, was a prohibited substance in racing.

“Why don’t they test for cocaine?” I asked.

“Heaven knows,” Phil said. “Perhaps because enough to wind up a horse would cost the doper too much to be practicable. I mean... more than one could be sure of winning back on a bet. But cocaine’s getting cheaper, I’m told. There’s more and more of it around.”

“I don’t know much about drugs,” I said.

“Where have you been?”

“Not my scene.”

“Do you know what they’d call you in America?”

“What?”

“Straight,” he said.

“I thought that meant heterosexual.”

He laughed. “That too. You’re straight through and through.”

“Phil,” I said, “what do I do?”

He sobered abruptly. “God knows. My job ends with passing on the facts. The moral decisions are yours. All I can tell you is that some time before Monday evening Dozen Roses took cocaine into his bloodstream.”

“Via a baster?” I said.

After a short silence he said, “We can’t be sure of that.”

“We can’t be sure he didn’t.”

“Did I understand right, that Harley Ostermeyer picked up the tube of the baster and gave it to you?”

“That’s right,” I said. “I still have it, but like I told you, it’s clean.”

“It might look clean,” he said slowly, “but if cocaine was blown up it in powder form, there may be particles clinging.”

I thought back to before the race at York.

“When Martha Ostermeyer picked up the blue bulb end and gave it back to Rollway,” I said, “she was brushing her fingers together afterwards. She seemed to be getting rid of dust from her gloves.”

“Oh glory,” Phil said.

I sighed and said, “If I give the tube to you, can you get it tested without anyone knowing where it came from?”

“Sure. Like the urine, it’ll be anonymous. I’ll get the lab to do another rush job, if you want. It costs a bit more, though.”

“Get it done, Phil,” I said. “I can’t really decide anything unless I know for sure.”

“Right. Are you coming back here soon?”

“Greville’s business takes so much time. I’ll be back at the weekend, but I think I’ll send the tube to you by carrier, to be quicker. You should get it tomorrow morning.”

“Right,” he said. “We might get a result late tomorrow. Friday at the latest.”

“Good, and er... don’t mention it to Milo.”

“No, but why not?”

“He told Nicholas Loder we tested Dozen Roses for tranquilizers and Nicholas Loder was on my phone hitting the roof.”

“Oh God.”

“I don’t want him knowing about tests for cocaine. I mean, neither Milo nor Nicholas Loder.”

“You may be sure,” Phil said seriously, “they won’t learn it from me.”

It was the worst dilemma of all, I thought, replacing the receiver.

Was cocaine a stimulant or was it not? The racing authorities didn’t think so: didn’t test for it. If I believed it didn’t affect speed then it was all right to sell Dozen Roses to the Ostermeyers. If I thought he wouldn’t have got the race at York without help, then it wasn’t all right.

Saxony Franklin needed the Ostermeyers’ money.

The worst result would be that, if I banked the money and Dozen Roses never won again and Martha and Harley ever found out I knew the horse had been given cocaine, I could say goodbye to any future Gold Cups or Grand Nationals on Datepalm. They wouldn’t forgive the unforgivable.

Dozen Roses had seemed to me to run gamely at York and to battle to the end. I was no longer sure. I wondered now if he’d won all his four races spaced out, as the orthopedist would have described it; as high as a kite.

At the best, if I simply kept quiet, banked the money and rode Dozen Roses to a couple of respectable victories, no one would ever know. Or I could inform the Ostermeyers privately, which would upset them.

There would be precious little point in proving to the world that Dozen Roses had been given cocaine (and of course I could do it by calling for a further analysis of the urine sample taken by the officials at York) because if cocaine weren’t a specifically banned substance, neither was it a normal nutrient. Nothing that was not a normal nutrient was supposed to be given to thoroughbreds racing in Britain.

If I disclosed the cocaine, would Dozen Roses be disqualified for his win at York? If he were, would Nicholas Loder lose his license to train?

If I caused so much trouble, I would be finished in racing. Whistle-blowers were regularly fired from their jobs.

My advice to myself seemed to be, take the money, keep quiet, hope for the best.

Coward, I thought. Maybe stupid as well.

My thoughts made me sweat.