‘Also try to discover if there’s anything else that might be a common denominator for those three. Perhaps they flew to Louisville on the same flight or something.’
‘OK,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll get on to it. Oh yes, there’s one more thing. We’ve had the results back from the samples taken from Hayden Ryder’s horses after he was killed in the raid at Churchill. At least half of them were dosed to the eyeballs with the steroid stanozolol and had obviously been running with it in their system.’
‘That’ll be why he was trying to ship them out to Chattanooga.’
‘Stupid man,’ Tony said. ‘Hardly worth dying for.’
I agreed.
‘Anything else?’
‘Not that I can think of at the moment,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you again tomorrow, same time.’
‘I’ll be here.’
I went back into the recreation hall. Maria was now sitting on one of the young men’s laps holding court, and cousin Diego was almost beside himself with rage. Meanwhile, the baseball was in the bottom of the fifth inning, not that anyone was taking much notice any longer.
There was now a far more interesting game to watch — sexual electricity.
I left them to it.
One of my greatest frustrations at working undercover was that I’d had to leave my laptop and iPhone at Tony’s house — a groom working on minimum wage would never have such things — and I desperately wanted to do some Internet research on EVA.
I left Maria to her admirers and sat myself at one of the recreation-hall computer workstations, the one at the far end closest to the wall. I angled the screen such that prying eyes could not see what I was reading.
According to a veterinary website, equine viral arteritis had been first isolated as a separate disease in horses in Ohio in the 1950s, although it had been blighting horses around the world for centuries. It was easily confused with other equine respiratory diseases such as influenza or herpes, and could be confirmed only by the detection of EVA antibodies in blood.
Most infected horses, even those badly affected with the associated hives, conjunctivitis and swelling of the legs, made complete clinical recoveries in three to four weeks without any specific treatment other than rest.
I learned that, apart from the snotty discharge route, it could also be sexually transmitted from stallion to mare.
What’s more, the virus was able to remain permanently active in equine sperm, totally unaffected by the animal’s natural immune system. It seemed that this was because testicles, both equine and human, are strange organs in immunological terms insofar that they generate proteins that are not present at birth. Nature has had to develop a mechanism to prevent the body’s own immune system from reacting against these alien substances when puberty comes around.
And the same process that prevents the immune system from attacking sperm tissue also means that it can’t kill off any virus that settles in the testicles. Consequently, stallions that become infected continue to shed EVA virus in their ejaculate for the rest of their lives, whilst otherwise being entirely healthy.
The owner I had seen weeping behind the media tent at Churchill Downs was about to have a fresh reason to cry. His hoped-for future stud-fee gold mine had struck iron pyrite — fool’s gold.
Even if the three infected colts recovered sufficiently quickly from the disease itself to become champion racehorses, they would never be permitted to stand at stud for fear of infecting the mares they covered, often resulting in barren seasons or miscarriages.
I also discovered that a vaccine existed against EVA but it was not widely used in the United States or Europe unless there had been a specific outbreak.
The vaccine worked, as did most vaccines, by introducing a quantity of dead virus, which couldn’t infect the horse but nevertheless stimulated the production of antibodies in the blood. These antibodies would remain in the system and immediately kill off any live virus that might subsequently appear, so preventing infection.
Because the illness was relatively rare in Thoroughbreds and generally short-lived without any lasting complications, the racehorse population was not routinely vaccinated.
The only animals for which infection was a serious matter were stallions or sexually mature colts destined to be such. But there was an added problem. If vaccinated, a routine blood test of a colt would confirm EVA antibodies and it was extremely difficult, if not impossible, to prove that those antibodies were as a result of the vaccine rather than due to the live virus.
Would you then take the chance of breeding the stallion with your best mare?
Hence colts were also not normally vaccinated as a matter of course. It was only given to valuable stallions, when it could be categorically proven by every single test available that they were free of the virus prior to vaccination.
So where did that leave the seventeen other colts that had made it to the starting gate in Louisville the previous Saturday and, in particular, the winner? Any colt that won the Kentucky Derby would be expected to retire to a lucrative career at stud after his racing days were over.
It was now almost five days since the three horses had become ill. With an incubation period of up to two weeks, there were still another nervous nine illness-free days to go before it could be safe to assume that Fire Point and the others had not also contracted the disease.
I clicked off the website and erased the web history. I am sure that some computer whiz kid would have been able to find out precisely what I’d been browsing, and there would definitely be a record on the server, but no one here would casually be able to look.
Next I checked my emails.
Among the usual junk were several messages from work colleagues in London, most of which I was able to ignore.
But there was one from Nigel Green that caught my eye.
He reported that Jimmy Robinson, the jockey nicked for buying banned diuretics in the A34 lay-by, had since been sacked as stable jockey for a top Newmarket establishment. He may not have done anything against the law of the land but British racing valued its integrity.
‘Be warned though,’ Nigel wrote, ‘there’s a strong rumour he’s off to ride for a trainer called Sidney Austin in New York.’
Nigel was one of the very few people at the horseracing authority who knew where I was, and why. Most of the others believed I was on extended unpaid leave, visiting friends in the Far East and Australia.
I scanned again through the list of emails.
There was nothing from Henrietta.
I hadn’t really expected there to be and, strangely, I wasn’t sure if I was happy or sad by the omission.
However, there was one from Faye.
She said that her new course of chemotherapy had started and it was making her tired but, as always, she was positive about the outcome and didn’t complain — although, God knows, she had enough to complain about.
As usual, she was more concerned with me than herself, asking how I was doing and reminding me that I was to (a) get enough sleep, (b) eat healthily and (c) launder my clothes regularly.
I smiled. She couldn’t help herself. Faye had taken over the maternal role when I was eight and she’d been twenty, when our dear mother had died from cancer.
Here we were, twenty-five years later, and nothing had changed.
I wrote back sending her all my love and wishing her success with the treatment. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be too emotional about it, so I wasn’t. I knew she could just about hold everything together provided everyone else was not wailing and whining on her behalf. We all had to be strong individually and collectively.