Whip Hand

He walked purposefully along and pushed open the door of the lab we were in. Head and shoulders leaned forward.

'Morning, Mr Livingston,' he said. 'Have you seen my box of transparencies, anywhere?'

The basic voice was the same, self-confident and slightly abrasive. Manchester accent, much stronger. I held my left arm out of sight half behind my back and willed him to go away.

'No,' said Mr Livingston, with just a shade of pleasure. 'But Barry, can you spare…' Livingston and I were standing in front of a work bench which held various empty glass jars and a row of clamps. I turned leftwards, with my arm still hidden, and clumsily, with my right hand, knocked over a clamp and two glass jars.

More clatter than breakage. Livingston gave a quick nibble of surprised annoyance, and righted the rolling jars. I gripped the clamp, which was metal and heavy, and would have to do.

I turned back towards the door.

The door was shutting. The backview of Barry Shummuck was striding away along the corridor, the front edges of his white coat flapping.

I let a shuddering breath out through my nose and carefully put the clamp back at the end of the row.

'He's gone,' Mr Livingston said. 'What a pity.'

I drove back to Newmarket, to the Equine Research Establishment and Ken Armadale.

I wondered how long it would take chatty Mr Livingston to tell Barry Shummuck of the visit of a man called Halley who wanted to know about a pig disease in horses.

I felt faintly, and continuously, sick.

'It's been made resistant to all ordinary antibiotics,' Ken said. 'A real neat little job.'

'How do you mean?'

'If any old antibiotic would kill it, you couldn't be sure the horse wouldn't be given a shot as soon as he had a temperature, and never develop the disease.'

I sighed. 'So how do they make it resistant?'

'Feed it tiny doses of antibiotic until it becomes immune.'

'All this is technically difficult, isn't it?'

'Yes, fairly.'

'Have you ever heard of Barry Shummuck?'

He frowned. 'No, I don't think so.'

The craven inner voice told me urgently to shut up, to escape, to fly to safety… to Australia… to a desert.

'Do you have a cassette recorder here?' I said.

'Yes. I use it for making notes while I'm operating.' He went out and fetched it and set it up for me on his desk, loaded with a new tape. 'Just talk,' he said. 'It has a built-in microphone.'

'Stay and listen,' I said. 'I want… a witness.'

He regarded me slowly. 'You look so strained… It's no gentle game, is it, what you do?'

'Not always.'

I switched on the recorder, and for introduction spoke my name, the place, and the date. Then I switched off again and sat looking at the fingers I needed for pressing the buttons.

'What is it, Sid?' Ken said. I glanced at him and down again.

'Nothing.' I had got to do it, I thought. I had absolutely got to. I was never in any way going to be whole again, if I didn't.

If I had to choose, and it seemed to me that I did have to choose, I would have to settle for wholeness of mind, and put up with what it cost. Perhaps I could deal with physical fear. Perhaps I could deal with anything that happened to my body, and even with helplessness. What I could not forever deal with… and I saw it finally with clarity and certainty… was despising myself.

I pressed the 'play' and 'record' buttons together, and irrevocably broke my assurance to Trevor Deansgate.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I telephoned Chico at lunchtime and told him what I'd found out about Rosemary's horses.

'What it amounts to,' I said, 'is that those four horses had bad hearts because they'd been given a pig disease. There's a lot of complicated info about how it was done, but that's now the Stewards' headache.'

'Pig disease?' Chico said disbelievingly.

'Yeah. That big bookmaker Trevor Deansgate has a brother who works in a place that produces vaccines for inoculating people against smallpox and diphtheria and so on, and they cooked up a plan to squirt pig germs into those red-hot favourites.'

'Which duly lost,' Chico said. 'While the bookmaker raked in the lolly.'

'Right,' I said. It felt very odd to put Trevor Deansgate's scheme into casual words and to be talking about him as if he were just one of our customary puzzles.

'How did you find out?' Chico said. 'Gleaner died at Henry Thrace's, and the pig disease turned up at the post mortem. When I went to the vaccine lab I saw a man called Shummuck who deals in odd germs, and I remembered that Shummuck was Trevor Deansgate's real name. And Trevor Deansgate is very thick with George Caspar… and all the affected horses, that we know of, have come from George Caspar's stable.'

'Circumstantial, isn't it?' Chico said.

'A bit, yes. But the Security Service can take it from there.'

'Eddy Keith?' he said sceptically.

'He can't hush this one up, don't you worry.'

'Have you told Rosemary?'

'Not yet.'

'Bit of a laugh,' Chico said.

'Mm.'

'Well, Sid mate,' he said. 'This is results day all round. We got a fix on Nicky Ashe.'

Nicky Ashe with a knife in his sock. A pushover, compared with… compared with…

'Hey,' Chico's voice said aggrievedly through the receiver.

'Aren't you pleased?'

'Yes, of course. What sort of fix?'

'He's been sending out some of those damn fool letters. I went to your place this morning, just to see, like, and there were two envelopes there with our sticky labels on.'

'Great,' I said.

'I opened them. They'd both been sent to us by people whose names start with P. All that leg work paid off.'

'So we've got the begging letter?'

'We sure have. It's exactly the same as the ones your wife had, except for the address to send the money to, of course. Got a pencil?'

'Yeah.'

He read the address, which was in Clifton, Bristol. I looked at it thoughtfully. I could either give it straight to the police, or I could check it first myself. Checking it, in one certain way, had persuasive attractions.

'Chico,' I said. 'Ring Jenny's flat in Oxford and ask for Louise Mclnnes. Ask her to ring me here at the Rutland Hotel in Newmarket.'

'Scared of your missus, are you?'

'Will you do it?'

'Oh sure.' He laughed, and rang off.

When the bell rang again, however, it was not Louise at the other end, but still Chico. 'She's left the flat,' he said. 'Your wife gave me her new number.' He read it out. 'Anything else?'

'Can you bring your cassette player to the Jockey Club, Portman Square, tomorrow afternoon at, say, four o'clock?'

'Like last time?'

'No,' I said. 'Front door, all the way.'

Louise, to my relief, answered her telephone. When I told her what I wanted, she was incredulous.

'You've actually found him?'

'Well,' I said. 'Probably. Will you come, then, and identify him?'

'Yes.' No hesitation.

'Where and when?'

'Some place in Bristol.' I paused, and said diffidently, 'I'm in Newmarket now. I could pick you up in Oxford this afternoon, and we could go straight on. We might spot him this evening… or tomorrow morning.'

There was a silence at the other end. Then she said, 'I've moved out of Jenny's flat.'

'Yes.'

Another silence, and then her voice, quiet, and committed.

'All right.'

She was waiting for me in Oxford, and she had brought an overnight bag.

'Hallo,' I said, getting out of the car.

'Hallo.'

We looked at each other. I kissed her cheek. She smiled with what I had to believe was enjoyment, and slung her case in the boot beside mine.

'You can always retreat,' I said.

'So can you.'

We sat in the car, however, and I drove to Bristol feeling contented and carefree. Trevor Deansgate wouldn't yet have started looking for me, and Peter Rammileese and his boys hadn't been in sight for a week, and no one except Chico knew where I was going. The shadowy future, I thought, was not going to spoil the satisfactory present. I decided not even to think of it, and for most of the time, I didn't.