I glanced once more at my watch — 5.10. Eighteen minutes to the race.
The drug store was well ordered with packets of powders and bottles of pills in neat rows on the two upper shelves. Below that there was an open box of sterile needles along with small red-, green- and purple-capped glass Vacutainer test tubes used for taking blood. There was also a supply of multi-sized hypodermic syringes in sealed plastic packs.
Several brown clenbuterol syrup bottles were lined up next to them, and also some packs of stanozolol, the anabolic steroid that the FACSA vets had tested for at Hayden Ryder’s barn at Churchill Downs.
Was Raworth using them too close to a race, just as Ryder had been suspected of doing? Was that a good enough reason to raid the barn?
I had seen no sign of their illicit use, but I looked after only four of the twenty-eight horses. I was also confident that Fire Point hadn’t been on steroids as he’d been tested both before and after the Kentucky Derby and found to be completely clear of any banned substance.
Standing upright on the left-hand side of the second shelf was the stable drug register, a ledger in which all drugs given to all the horses in the barn had to be recorded. At least that is what the New York Racing Association demanded.
I flicked through the pages and looked at the entries for the past few days. The record showed the pre-race injections of Lasix given to Anchorage Bay on Thursday and Teetotal Tiger on Friday, plus the ones given today to the two runners in the Man o’War Stakes. It also recorded the sedatives, hyaluronic acid and Adequan injected into Paddleboat by the vet on Thursday morning. There was also a record of the clenbuterol being administered daily in Paddleboat’s feed.
I checked my watch again: 5.16. Twelve minutes to post-time.
Beneath the shelves of drugs were stacked several cardboard boxes and I briefly took a mental snapshot of their positions before looking in them. One had rolls of unused leg bandages, a second had spare saddle pads and a third was full with plastic containers of disinfectant.
Underneath the boxes, in the corner of the store, there sat what appeared at first to be a rather stumpy beer keg — a heavy metal cylinder about eighteen inches tall and a little over a foot in diameter, with two carrying handles welded to the top. I lifted out the cardboard boxes so I could see it more clearly.
The white cylinder had ‘CryoBank’ painted in blue letters on its side, and it certainly didn’t contain beer — far from it.
The lid was much smaller in width than the cylinder, similar in size and shape to the caps on those large bottles of water used in office drinking fountains, except that it was metal not plastic. There was a slight ‘pop’ sound as I removed it, as if a little pressure had been released. I tried to look in but couldn’t see anything due to a white fog that swirled about inside the container.
I’d seen something like this before, at the equine research hospital in Newmarket. This was a cryogenic flask used to store living cells at very low temperatures, immersed in liquid nitrogen. But what was it doing here?
I remembered asking the laboratory staff at the hospital how often the liquid nitrogen had to be replaced due to it evaporating into the air. Every two or three weeks, they had said, depending on how often the flask was opened and how much material was being stored.
So this flask, which clearly still had liquid nitrogen in it, must have been refilled fairly recently.
I glanced again at my watch: 5.20.
I had to get back to the office in time to watch the race. I needed to know what happened.
The flask had a metal rod clipped to the rim that went down into the tank beneath. I went to touch it but it had frost on the handle, so I folded one of the saddle pads from the box and used it as an insulating glove to lift the rod. On the end was a metal cup containing three straws, similar to plastic drinking straws but rather smaller in both length and diameter. Each of the three contained some deep-frozen material.
I would have loved to remove one of the straws for testing but, with only three there, I was worried it would be missed. But, if I couldn’t take the chance of taking a whole straw, how about if I took just a bit of one? Or would it then stand out as being shorter than the other two?
I went back into the feed store. Hanging on a hook were a pair of scissors used to open the feed bags. I fetched them and cut about half an inch off the bottom of each of the straws, making sure that the bits contained some of the frozen material. I carefully placed them into one of the red-capped Vacutainer test tubes, which I then slipped into my pocket.
5.23.
Time to go.
I returned the three straws to the metal cup, lowered it back into the liquid nitrogen and re-clipped it to the rim as before. Then I secured the lid, returned the saddle pad and restacked the cardboard boxes. I spent a moment checking they were back exactly as I had found them.
5.25.
Satisfied, I relocked the drug store, silently let myself out into the shedrow and went quickly back to the office.
The ten runners were at the start, still having their girths checked. The Man o’War Stakes was run on the turf course that sits inside the main dirt track. The race was over a mile and three furlongs so the starting gate was in front of the grandstand.
With one eye on the TV screen, and with the outer office door shut and locked, I used the picks to let myself into Keith’s bedroom. Maybe I was just naturally inquisitive, but it seemed a shame not to have a quick look in there while I had the opportunity. I might not get the chance again.
Not that there was much to see.
Keith appeared to have very few clothes, hardly enough to fill even half the available locker space. Indeed, he had more well-thumbed copies of hardcore girlie magazines than anything else, mostly spread across the floor under his bed.
Each to their own.
I went back into the office, locking the door to Keith’s bedroom behind me.
‘They’re in the gate,’ called the track announcer through the TV. ‘And they’re off and running in the Man o’War Stakes.’
Neither of the Raworth horses won the race. One finished a creditable third but the other was always well off the pace, trailing in last of the ten, some twenty lengths behind the winner.
The mood in the camp when everyone returned to the barn couldn’t have been more in contrast to that of the previous day after Teetotal Tiger’s triumph.
George Raworth was spitting feathers in anger, in particular over the horse that had brought up the rear of the field.
‘That damned jockey,’ he kept saying over and over to Charlie Hern. ‘He never gave the horse a chance.’
I’d watched the race pretty closely on the TV and, in my opinion, a combined reincarnation of both Fred Archer and Willie Shoemaker wouldn’t have managed to get the horse any closer. It was sometimes easier for a trainer to blame the pilot than to accept the fact that the horse was simply not good enough.
I slid away from the inquest.
Just as I had been happy to hang around during the good times of yesterday, I was eager to be away from the doom and gloom of today. I wanted to be perceived as a lucky omen, not a portent of failure.
Instead, I found a quiet spot away from listening ears to call Tony.
‘A cryogenic flask?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s hidden away under boxes in the drug store. There are three straws of material kept in it, frozen solid in liquid nitrogen.’
‘Liquid nitrogen?’ Tony said. ‘Is that toxic?’
‘No,’ I said, laughing. ‘Eighty per cent of the air we breathe is nitrogen.’
‘But that’s not a liquid.’