‘Any self-respecting computer would come up with a consultant surgeon, ear, nose and throat.’
Gerard was startled. ‘You don’t suppose...? No, most unlikely.’
‘Computers only spit out what you feed in.’
‘Whereas you can feed countless facts into a human being and get no connections at all.’ He sighed resignedly. ‘All right, then. Work arising. Find out if Larry Trent had a brother. Search further to know how Kenneth Junior knew Zarac. Sort out bottling plants. And Rannoch, by the way, have posted to us profile analyses of the loads they sent in Charter’s tankers. If you can wheedle a sample from the Silver Moondance out of your pal Ridger, I can get the comparisons made. For proof rather than speculation.’ He paused. ‘Anything else?’
‘Well...’ I hesitated.
‘Go on.’
‘Ramekin, then. The horse Flora saw Larry Trent buy at Doncaster Sales a year ago. If Ramekin was snipped abroad, someone shipped it. There aren’t so very many shippers. They’d have Ramekin in their records... racehorses have passports, like people. Masses of export documents, besides. If we could find the shipper we’d know the destination. Larry Trent might always have used the same shipper and sold all the horses through one agent at the same destination... If you’ve set up a line, so to speak, you carry on using it. The agent at the far end might know... just might know... whose cash had bought the horses. The real owner, for whom Larry Trent was acting.’
He listened intently, but he said, ‘That’s stretching it.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘I’ll see how much is involved.’
‘Do you want me to do it?’
He shook his head. ‘We’ll do it in the office, if at all. We have country-wide ‘phone books and our staff are used to that sort of routine. They make it sound enormously official and get the most surprising results. They’ll do the bottling plant sales and leases first; a long job but more promising.’
‘I suppose it would be too simple...’ I began diffidently.
‘What would?’
‘I mean... you could try them first... there’s nothing to lose...’
‘Do get on,’ he said.
I felt foolish. I said, ‘The plants to which Kenneth Charter took red wine in his tankers.’
Gerard looked at me levelly for a while with unblinking eyes. ‘Right,’ he said eventually, without inflection. ‘We’ll start with those. As you say, nothing to lose.’ He looked at his watch and took the second-to-last mouthful of his brandy. ‘Tina will be locking me out.’
‘Come any time,’ I said.
I didn’t mean to sound lonely, but maybe that’s what he heard. He looked at the photograph of Emma and myself on our wedding day which stood on a table near him in a silver frame. We were laughing in a shower of bubbles from a shaken-up champagne bottle in the hands of my best man, and Emma had liked the picture for its informality. ‘Most brides and grooms look like waxworks,’ she’d said. ‘At least you can tell we were alive.’
‘You were a good-looking couple,’ Gerard said neutrally. ‘And happy.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did she die?’
He asked it straightforwardly, without emotion, and after a moment I answered him similarly, as I had learned to do, as if it happened to someone else.
‘She had a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage. Something called Berry’s aneurism. In effect a blood vessel split in her brain.’
‘But...’ His gaze slid to the photograph, ‘... how old was she?’
‘Twenty-seven.’
‘So young.’
‘Apparently it can happen at any age.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘She was pregnant,’ I said, and surprised myself. I normally didn’t say that. Normally I said the absolute minimum. But to Gerard, after months of silence, I found myself slowly telling it all, wanting to and not wanting to, trying to keep my voice steady and not cry... for God’s sake don’t cry.
‘She’d been having headaches on and off for ages. Then she had backaches. Nothing specific. Just aches in her spine. Everyone put it down to her being pregnant. And it passed off... until next time. Every week or so, for a day or two. One Sunday when she was nearly six months pregnant she woke up with one of those headaches, a fairly bad one. She took some aspirins but they never did much good. It got worse during the morning and when I went to do the midday stint in the shop she said she would go to bed and sleep it off. But when I got back she was crying... moaning... with pain. I tried to get a doctor... but it took ages... it was Sunday afternoon... Sunday... an ambulance finally came for her but by then she was begging me... begging me somehow to knock her out... but how could I? I couldn’t. We were both terrified... more than frightened... it was so implacable... she was in awful agony in the ambulance... hitting her head with her fists... nothing I could do... I couldn’t even hold her... she was yelling, rolling, jerking with pain. At the end of the journey she went slowly unconscious, and I was glad for her, even though by then I feared... well, I feared.’
‘My dear man.’
I sat for a while looking back to the past, and then swallowed and told him the rest of it coldly.
‘She was in a coma for four days, going deeper... I stayed with her. They let me stay. They said they couldn’t save the baby, it was too soon. In another month, perhaps... They told me the blood vessel must have been leaking for ages... it was the blood leaking into her brain and down her spinal nerves that had given her the headaches and backaches... but even if they’d diagnosed the trouble earlier they couldn’t have done much... it would have split open more one day, as it did... so perhaps it was better we didn’t know.’
I stopped. No tears. All I couldn’t have borne at that point was sympathy, and Gerard didn’t offer it.
‘Life’s most unfair,’ he said calmly.
‘Yes.’
He didn’t say I would get over it, or that time was a great healer. He didn’t say I would find another girl. Marry again... I approved of Gerard more and more.
‘Thank you for telling me,’ he said.
‘I don’t usually,’ I said apologetically.
‘No. Flora told me. You clam up, she said, if anyone asks.’
‘Flora chatters.’
‘Chattering does good, sometimes.’
I was silent. What I felt, having told him about Emma, was a sort of release. Chattering helped. Sometimes.
He finished his brandy and stood up to go. ‘If you have any more thoughts, telephone.’
‘O.K.’
He walked towards the door and stopped by a side table upon which stood three or four more photo frames among Emma’s collection of shells.
‘Your mother?’ he asked, picking up the lady on horseback with hounds. ‘Most handsome.’
‘Mother,’ I nodded.
He put her down. Picked up another. ‘Father?’
‘Father.’
He looked at the strong amused face above the colonel’s uniform with its double row of medal ribbons, at the light in the eyes and the tilt of the chin, at the firm half-smiling mouth.
‘You’re like him,’ Gerard said.
‘Only in looks.’ I turned away. ‘I loved him when I was small. Adored him. He died when I was eleven.’
He put the picture down and peered at the others. ‘No brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’ I grinned faintly. ‘My birth interfered with a whole season’s hunting. Once was enough, my mother said.’
Gerard glanced at me. ‘You don’t mind?’
‘No, I never did. I never minded being alone until I got used to something else.’ I shrugged abruptly. ‘I’m basically all right alone. I will be again, in the end.’
Gerard merely nodded and moved on out into the hall and from there to the kitchen and beyond to the rear door, where neither of us shook hands because of the slings.