‘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.’