“I hear we’re lucky you’re still with us,” he said. “An impressive crunch, so they say.” He looked at me assessingly with friendly professional eyes. “You’ve a few rough edges one can see.”
“Nothing that will stop him racing,” Milo said crisply.
Phil smiled. “I detect more alarm than sympathy.”
“Alarm?”
“You’ve trained more winners since he came here.”
“Rubbish,” Milo said.
He poured drinks for himself and Phil, and I made my tea; and Phil assured me that if the urine passed all tests he would give the thumbs-up to Dozen Roses.
“He may just be showing the effects of the hard race he had at York,” he said. “It might be that he’s always like this. Some horses are, and we don’t know how much weight he lost.”
“What will you get the urine tested for?” I asked.
He raised his eyebrows. “Barbiturates, in this case.”
“At York,” I said thoughtfully, “one of Nicholas Loder’s owners was walking around with an inhaler in his pocket. A kitchen baster, to be precise.”
“An owner?” Phil asked, surprised.
“Yes. He owned the winner of the five-furlong sprint. He was also in the saddling box with Dozen Roses.”
Phil frowned. “What are you implying?”
“Nothing. Merely observing. I can’t believe he interfered with the horse. Nicholas Loder wouldn’t have let him. The stable money was definitely on. They wanted to win, and they knew if it won it would be tested. So the only question is, what could you give a horse that wouldn’t disqualify it? Give it via an inhaler just before a race?”
“Nothing that would make it go faster. They test for all stimulants.”
“What if you gave it, say, sugar? Glucose? Or adrenaline?”
“You’ve a criminal mind!”
“I just wondered.”
“Glucose would give energy, as to human athletes. It wouldn’t increase speed, though. Adrenaline is more tricky. If it’s given by injection you can see it, because the hairs stand up all round the puncture. But straight into the mucous membranes... well, I suppose it’s possible.”
“And no trace.”
He agreed. “Adrenaline pours into a horse’s bloodstream naturally anyway, if he’s excited. If he wants to win. If he feels the whip. Who’s to say how much? If you suspected a booster you’d have to take a blood sample in the winner’s enclosure, practically, and even then you’d have a hard job proving any reading was excessive. Adrenaline levels vary too much. You’d even have a hard job proving extra adrenaline made any difference at all.” He paused and considered me soberly. “You do realize that you’re saying that if anything was done, Nicholas Loder condoned it?”
“Doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “If he were some tin-pot little crook, well then, maybe, but not Nicholas Loder with his classic winners and everything to lose.”
“Mm.” I thought a bit. “If I asked, I could get some of the urine sample that was taken from Dozen Roses at York. They always make it available to owners for private checks. To my brother’s company, that is to say, in this instance.” I thought a bit more. “When Nicholas Loder’s s friend dropped his baster, Martha Ostermeyer handed the bulb part back to him, but then Harley Ostermeyer picked up the tube part and gave it to me. But it was clean. No trace of liquid. No adrenaline. So I suppose it’s possible he might have used it on his own horse and still had it in his pocket, but did nothing to Dozen Roses.”
They considered it.
“You could get into a lot of trouble making unfounded accusations,” Phil said.
“So Nicholas Loder told me.”
“Did he? I’d think twice, then, before I did. It wouldn’t do you much good generally in the racing world, I shouldn’t think.”
“Wisdom from babes,” I said, but he echoed my thoughts.
“Yes, old man.”
“I kept the baster tube,” I said shrugging, “but I guess I’ll do just what I did at the races, which was nothing.”
“As long as Dozen Roses tests clean both at York and here, that’s likely best,” Phil said, and Milo, for all his earlier pugnaciousness, agreed.
A commotion in the darkening yard heralded the success of the urine mission and Phil went outside to unclip the special bag and close its patented seal. He wrote and attached the label giving the horse’s name, the location, date and time and signed his name.
“Right,” he said, “I’ll be off. Take care.” He loaded himself, the sample and his gear into his car and with economy of movement scrunched away. I followed soon after with Brad still driving but decided again not to go home.
“You saw the mess in London,” I said. “I got knocked out by whoever did that. I don’t want to be in if they come to Hungerford. So let’s go to Newbury instead, and try The Chequers.”
Brad slowed, his mouth open.
“A week ago yesterday,” I said, “you saved me from a man with a knife. Yesterday someone shot at the car I was in and killed the chauffeur. It may not have been your regulation madman. So last night I slept in Swindon, tonight in Newbury.”
“Yerss,” he said, understanding.
“If you’d rather not drive me anymore, I wouldn’t blame you.”
After a pause, with a good deal of stalwart resolution, he made a statement. “You need me.”
“Yes,” I said. “Until I can walk properly, I do.”
“I’ll drive you, then.”
“Thanks,” I said, and meant it wholeheartedly, and he could hear that, because he nodded twice to himself emphatically and seemed even pleased.
The Chequers Hotel having a room free, I booked in for the night. Brad took himself home in my car, and I spent most of the evening sitting in an armchair upstairs learning my way round the Wizard.
Computers weren’t my natural habitat like they were Greville’s and I hadn’t the same appetite for them. The Wizard’s instructions seemed to take it for granted that everyone reading them would be computer-literate, so it probably took me longer than it might have done to get results.
What was quite clear was that Greville had used the gadget extensively. There were three separate telephone and address lists, a world-time clock, a system for entering daily appointments, a prompt for anniversaries, a calendar flashing with the day’s date, and a provision for storing oddments of information. By plugging in the printer, and after a few false starts, I ended with long printed lists of everything held listed under all the headings, and read them with growing frustration.
None of the addresses or telephone numbers seemed to have anything to do with Antwerp or with diamonds, though the “Business Overseas” list contained many gem merchants’ names from all round the world. None of the appointments scheduled, which stretched back six weeks or more, seemed to be relevant, and there were no entries at all for the Friday he’d gone to Ipswich. There was no reference to Koningin Beatrix.
I thought of my question to June the day she’d found her way to “pearl”: what if it were all in there, stored in secret.
The Wizard’s instruction manual, two hundred pages long, certainly did give lessons in how to lock things away. Entries marked “secret” could be retrieved only by knowing the password which could be any combination of numbers and letters up to seven in all. Forgetting the password meant bidding farewell to the entries: they could never be seen again. They could be deleted unseen, but not printed or brought to the screen.
One could tell if secret files were present, the book said, by the small symbol s, which could be found on the lower right-hand side of the screen. I consulted Greville’s screen and found the s there, sure enough.
It would be, I thought. It would have been totally unlike him to have had the wherewithal for secrecy and not used it.