Whip Hand

'Been in my pocket, hasn't it?' he said defensively.

'What else've you got in there? Potting compost?'

He took the letter from me and put it in the glove box, and let down the window.

'Hot, isn't it?'

'Mm.'

I wound down my own side window, and started the car, and drove him back to his place in Finchley Road.

'I'll stay in the same hotel,' I said. 'And look… come to Newmarket with me tomorrow.'

'Sure, if you want. What for?'

I shrugged, making light of it. 'Bodyguard.'

He was surprised. He said wonderingly, 'You can't really be afraid of him… this Deansgate… are you?'

I shifted in my seat a bit, and sighed.

'I guess so,' I said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I talked to Ken Armadale in the early evening. He wanted to know how my session with the Jockey Club had gone, but more than that he sounded smugly self satisfied, and not without reason.

'That erysipelas strain has been made immune to practically every antibiotic in the book,' he said. 'Very thorough. But I reckon there's an obscure little bunch he won't have bothered with, because no one would think of pumping them into horses. Rare, they are, and expensive. All the signs I have here are that they would work. Anyway, I've tracked some down.'

'Great,' I said. 'Where?'

'In London, at one of the teaching hospitals. I've talked with the pharmacist there, and he's promised to pack some in a box and leave it at the reception desk for you to collect. It will have Halley on it.'

'Ken, you're terrific.'

'I've had to mortage my soul, to get it.'

I picked up the parcel in the morning and arrived at Portman Square to find Chico again waiting on the doorstep. Lucas Wainwright came down from his office and said he would drive us in his car, if we liked, and I thought of all the touring around I'd been doing for the past fortnight, and accepted gratefully. We left the Scimitar in the car park which had been full the day before, a temporary open air affair in a cleared building site, and set off to Newmarket in a large, air-conditioned Mercedes.

'It's too darned hot,' Lucas said, switching on the refrigeration. 'Wrong time of year.'

He had come tidily dressed in a suit, which Chico and I hadn't: jeans and sports shirts and not a jacket between us.

'Nice car, this,' Chico said admiringly.

'You used to have a Merc, Sid, didn't you?' Lucas said.

I said yes, and we talked about cars half the way to Suffolk. Lucas drove well but as impatiently as he did everything else. A pepper and salt man, I thought, sitting beside him. Brown and grey speckled hair, brownish grey eyes, with flecks in the iris. Brown and grey checked shirt, with a nondescript tie. Pepper and salt in his manner, in his speech patterns, in all his behaviour.

He said, as in the end he was bound to, 'How are you getting on with the syndicates?'

Chico, sitting in the back seat, made a noise between a laugh and a snort.

'Er…' I said. 'Pity you asked, really.'

'Like that, is it?' Lucas said, frowning.

'Well,' I said. 'There is very clearly something going on, but we haven't come up with much more than rumour and hearsay.' I paused. 'Any chance of us collecting expenses?'

He was grimly amused. 'I suppose I could put it under the heading of general assistance to the Jockey Club. Can't see the administrators quibbling, after yesterday.'

Chico gave me a thumbs up sign from behind Lucas's head, and I thought I would pile it on a bit while the climate was favourable, and recover what I'd paid to Jacksy. 'Do you want us to go on trying?' I said.

'Definitely.' He nodded positively. 'Very much so.'

We reached Newmarket in good time and came to a smooth halt in George Caspar's well-tended driveway.

There were no other cars there; certainly not Trevor Deansgate's Jaguar. On that day he should be in the normal course of things at York, attending to his bookmaking business. I had no faith that he was.

George, expecting Lucas, was not at all pleased to see me, and Rosemary, coming downstairs and spotting me in the hall, charged across the parquet and rugs with shrill disapproval.

'Get out,' she said. 'How dare you come here?'

Two spots of colour flamed in her cheeks, and she looked almost as if she was going to try to throw me out bodily.

'No, no, I say,' Lucas Wainwright said, writhing as usual with naval embarrassment in the face of immodest female behaviour, 'George, make your wife listen to what we've come to tell you.'

Rosemary was persuaded, with a ramrod stiff back, to perch on a chair in her elegant drawing room, while Chico and I sat lazily in armchairs, and Lucas Wainwright did the talking, this time, about pig disease and bad hearts.

The Caspars listened in growing bewilderment and dismay, and when Lucas mentioned 'Trevor Deansgate' George stood up and began striding about in agitation.

'It isn't possible,' he said. 'Not Trevor. He's a friend.'

'Did you let him near Tri-Nitro, after that last training gallop?' I said.

George's face gave the answer.

'Sunday morning,' Rosemary said, in a hard cold voice. 'He came on the Sunday. He often does. He and George walked round the yard.' She paused. 'Trevor likes slapping horses. Slaps their rumps. Some people do that. Some people pat necks. Some people pull ears. Trevor slaps rumps.'

Lucas said, 'In due course, George, you'll have to give evidence in court.'

'I'm going to look a damned fool, aren't I?' he said sourly. 'Filling my yard with guards and taking Deansgate in myself.'

Rosemary looked at me stonily, unforgiving.

'I told you they were being nobbled. I told you. You didn't believe me.'

Lucas looked surprised. 'But I thought you understood, Mrs Caspar. Sid did believe you. It was Sid who did all this investigating, not the Jockey Club.'

Her mouth opened, and stayed open, speechlessly.

'Look,' I said awkwardly. 'I've brought you a present. Ken Armadale along at the Equine Research has done a lot of work for you, and he thinks Tri-Nitro can be cured, by a course of some rather rare antibiotics. I've brought them with me from London.'

I stood up and took the box to Rosemary: put it into her hands, and kissed her cheek.

'I'm sorry, Rosemary love, that it wasn't in time for the Guineas. Maybe the Derby… but anyway the Irish Derby and the Diamond Stakes, and the Arc de Triomphe. Tri-Nitro will be fine for those.'

Rosemary Caspar, that tough lady, burst into tears.

We didn't get back to London until nearly five, owing to Lucas insisting on going to see Ken Armadale and Henry Thrace himself, face to face. The Director of Security to the Jockey Club was busy making everything official.

He was visibly relieved when Ken absolved the people who'd done blood tests on the horses after their disaster races.

'The germ makes straight for the heart valves, and in the acute stage you'd never find it loose in the blood, even if you were thinking of illness and not merely looking for dope. It's only later, sometimes, that it gets freed into the blood, as it had in Zingaloo, when we took that sample.'

'Do you mean,' Lucas demanded, 'that if you did a blood test on Tri-Nitro at this minute you couldn't prove he had the disease?'

Ken said, 'You would only find antibodies.'

Lucas wasn't happy. 'Then how can we prove in court that he has got it?' 'Well,' Ken said, 'you could do an erysipelas antibody count today and another in a week's time. There would be a sharp rise in the number present, which would prove the horse must have the disease, because he's fighting it.'

Lucas shook his head mournfully. 'Juries won't like this.'

'Stick to Gleaner,' I said, and Ken agreed.

At one point Lucas disappeared into the Jockey Club rooms in the High Street and Chico and I drank in the White Hart and felt hot.

I changed the batteries. Routine. The day crawled.

'Let's go to Spain,' I said.

'Spain?'

'Anywhere.'

'I could just fancy a senorita.'