Dead Heat Part 30

'I think you could say that,' I said. I told them about the maniac with the mallet and about the damage he did to the rental car.

'But why?' said Bernard.

Instead of answering, I removed the shiny metal ball from my pocket and tossed it to Toby.

'What is that?' asked Sally.

'I don't know,' I said. 'I was hoping one of you might be able to tell me. I know it's significant. Having one probably contributed to my broken arm, and it might have cost me a lot more if I hadn't managed to escape.'

Bernard looked me in the face.

'Life and death,' he said slowly, half under his breath.

They pa.s.sed the ball back and forth between them and I gave them a couple of minutes to examine it in silence.

'OK,' said Toby. 'I give up. What is it?'

'Hey,' exclaimed Sally, 'it unscrews. It comes apart.' She triumphantly held up the two pieces. She leaned over and showed Toby what she had done. She then put the ball back together and tossed it to Bernard. He struggled with his podgy fingers but, finally, he too was able to open the ball.

'But what is it for?' asked Toby again.

'I really don't know,' I said. 'But I feel it must be part of the key to all this.'

'Max and I think it must have been made to hold something,' Caroline said. 'It fits so tightly together that we wondered if the contents mustn't leak out.'

'And it might have something to do with polo ponies,' I added, as if another clue might help solve the riddle.

'Polo ponies?' said Bernard.

'Yes,' I said. 'It may be to do with the importation of polo ponies.'

'From where?' asked Toby.

'South America mostly,' I said, remembering what Dorothy Schumann had said. 'Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia.'

'Drugs?' said Sally. 'There's an awful lot of cocaine in Colombia. Could this be used to hold drugs?'

They all examined the ball again as if it would give up the answer.

'Like condoms,' I said.

'What?' said Bernard.

'Condoms,' I said again. 'You must have heard of people who are paid to carry drugs in condoms through customs. They tie the end up and swallow condoms with drugs inside them. Then they fly to England, or somewhere, wait for nature to take its course and, hey presto, you have condoms full of drugs.'

'Mules,' said Caroline. 'They're called mules. Lots of women do it from Jamaica or Nigeria. For the money.'

'Sounds rather dangerous to me,' said Toby. 'Don't the condoms burst?'

'Apparently not,' Caroline said. 'I saw a television programme about it. Some of them get caught by Customs using X-rays, but most of them don't. And they're desperate for money.'

'Are you suggesting,' said Bernard, 'that metal b.a.l.l.s like this could be somehow filled with drugs and swallowed to smuggle the stuff here from South America?' He held the ball up to his open mouth. It might have just about gone in, but his expression said that swallowing the ball would be another matter altogether.

'Not in humans, you fool,' I said, laughing at him. 'In horses.'

'Could a horse really swallow something this big?' he asked, serious again.

'Easily,' said Toby. 'They can swallow an apple whole. I've seen it. You twitch their top lip, hold the head up and throw the apple down their throat. It used to be done quite often to give pills. You hollow out an apple, fill it with the medicine and chuck it down. No problem.'

'What do you mean, you twitch their top lip?' asked Caroline.

'A twitch is a stick with a loop of strong twine on the end,' he explained. 'You put the loop round the animal's top lip and twist the stick until the loop gets tight.'

'It sounds dreadful,' said Caroline, holding her own top lip.

'Well, it is,' said Toby. 'But it works, I can tell you. It will control even the wildest of horses. They usually just stand very still. We sometimes have to use a twitch on one of ours for shoeing. Otherwise the farrier gets kicked to h.e.l.l.'

'So you could get a horse to swallow one of those,' I said to him, pointing at the ball.

'Oh yes, no problem. But I don't think it would ever come out the other end.'

'Why not?' I said.

'Horses eat gra.s.s, we don't,' he said.

'What's that got to do with it?' Bernard asked.

'Gra.s.s is very indigestible,' said Toby. 'Humans can't live on it because everything goes through us so fast, the cellulose fibres of gra.s.s coming out much the same as they went in, so we wouldn't get much nutrition from it. Horses have a system for slowing down the process, so there's time for their system to break the cellulose down.'

'Like cows?' said Bernard.

'Well, not exactly,' Toby went on. 'Cows have multiple stomachs and they chew the cud, which means they constantly regurgitate their food and rechew it. Horses have only one iairly small stomach, and once food is down there it won't come back up due to a strong valve at the stomach opening. This valve also means that horses can't vomit. So they have another method of breaking down the gra.s.s. It's called the caec.u.m and it's like a great big sack nearly four feet long and a foot wide that acts as a fermenter. But both the entry point and exit of this sack are near the top and I think this ball would simply drop to the bottom of the sack and stay there.'

'What would then happen?' I asked him.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Unless you can be sure the ball would float in the caec.u.m, I don't think it would ever come out. G.o.d knows what would happen. I suspect the horse would eventually get seriously ill with colic. You would have to ask a vet. All I know is that surprisingly little actually comes out the back of a horse compared to the amount you put in it at the front, and I really think the ball would be most unlikely to ever be emitted with the dung. And it would certainly be far too chancy to try it.'

'That puts the kybosh on that theory then,' I said. 'I somehow don't think that Mr Komarov leaves anything to chance.'

'Komarov?' said Toby. 'Not Peter Komarov?'

'Yes,' I said, surprised. 'Do you know him?'

'I know of him,' said Toby. 'He sells horses.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Polo ponies.'

'Not just polo ponies,' he said. 'He also sells lots of racehorses at the bloodstock sales. I've bought a few of them myself. For my owners, of course. Is it him you think is trying to kill you?' He sounded somewhat sceptical.

'I think he has something to do with it, yes.'

'Blimey,' he said. 'I always thought of him as a pillar of racing society.'

'Why exactly?' I asked him.

'I don't really know,' he said. 'I suppose it's because he seems to have given a bit of a boost to racing. At least, he's given a bit of a boost to me.'

'How?'

'I've bought some reasonably priced horses from him,' said Toby. 'Some of my one-horse owners have been talked into buying a second. Good for training fees.' He smiled.

'Do you know where the horses came from?' I asked.

'Now that you mention it, I think they did all come from Argentina. But that's nothing special. Lots of racehorses trained here are bred in Argentina. What makes you think Komarov's responsible?'

'A number of things,' I said. 'The most important one being that when I mentioned his name and showed someone one of these b.a.l.l.s I got my arm broken for my trouble. Also, Komarov and his wife were invited to the lunch at Newmarket when the bomb exploded but they unexpectedly didn't turn up.'

'That's not very conclusive,' said Bernard.

'I know,' I replied. 'But his name keeps popping up. And he seems somehow connected with lots of what's been going on.' I paused. 'If I was dead certain that it was him, then I'd be telling this to the police but, I have to admit, I'm slightly afraid they might just laugh at me. That's one of the reasons I wanted to try it out on you first.' I looked at Toby, Sally and Bernard but I couldn't read their minds. I knew that Caroline believed me.

'It does all seem a bit far-fetched to me,' Sally said. She tarned to Caroline. 'What do you think?'

'I know it's true,' said Caroline with certainty. 'You might ask how I can be sure, so I'll tell you.' She looked up at me and smiled lopsidedly. 'I have been badly frightened by what has happened to Max over the past ten days. I was at the poisoned dinner and was dreadfully ill that night, and we have all seen the photos of the bombing and have heard Max's description of what it was like after the explosion. There can be no doubting that those things did happen.'

'No,' said Bernard. 'No doubt, whatsoever.'

'And Max's car did collide with a bus, and his house did burn down.'

'Yes,' said Bernard. 'We don't doubt those things happened either. The question is whether they were genuine attempts to murder him.'

'I presume,' she said, 'that there's no question that Max did have his arm broken by someone wielding a polo mallet just for mentioning this man Komarov's name. I saw the mallet.'

Bernard looked round at Toby and Sally. 'I think we can agree that Max had his arm broken, but was it because he mentioned Komarov's name or because he had one of these b.a.l.l.s?'

'Both,' I said. 'But I was definitely threatened with the mallet before I even showed them the ball. The Komarov name was the key.'

'And,' said Caroline, 'someone went into my flat when I was in America.'

'What do you mean?' said Bernard.

'Two men told my neighbour a pack of lies and managed to convince her to let them into my flat. I don't know why, but we think they must have planted something there that would let them know when we got back.'

'But how did they know where you live?' said Bernard.

'Whoever it was must have followed me there,' I said.

'But why?' said Bernard.

'I don't know,' I replied. 'If someone could fix the brakes on my car the night I had dinner with Caroline, then they only had to follow me to the restaurant to know who I was seeing.'

'But that doesn't mean they know where she lives,' said Bernard.

'I don't know,' I said again. 'If they saw me with her they could have found out where she lives. Perhaps they followed her home.'

'That's surely very unlikely,' said Bernard.

'It was surely unlikely that someone would bomb Newmarket races,' I said, 'but they did.' I stared at Bernard. 'And you were able to find out where Caroline lives.'

'That's different,' he said.

'How exactly did you do that?' asked Caroline accusingly. 'And you got my telephone number as well. How was that?'

Bernard went bright red but he refused to say how he did it. He mumbled a bit about databases and so on, and about the Data Protection Act. As I had suspected, what he had done wasn't entirely legal.

'But are you sure someone was in your flat?' he said, trying to get us back on track.

'Absolutely positive,' she said. She told them briefly about things being moved in her bathroom cabinet. Sally nodded. It must be a girl thing, I thought.

They all sat silently, digesting what Caroline and I had just told them. But were we getting anywhere, I wondered? There were so many questions, and I was far too short of answers.

'Sally,' I said. 'Do you think we could have some tea?'

'Of course,' she said. She seemed relieved to be able to get up and move. She went out to the kitchen. It somehow broke up the formality of the gathering. Bernard started apologizing to Caroline. Now, that had me worried.

Toby sat and turned the ball over and over in his hands. 'I suppose...' he said, almost to himself. 'No, that's ridiculous.'

'What's ridiculous?' I asked him.

He looked up at my face. 'I was just thinking aloud,' he said.

'So tell me your thoughts,' I urged him. Caroline and Bernard stopped talking and looked expectantly across at Toby.

'No, it was nothing,' he said.

'Tell us anyway,' I said.

'I was just wondering if it could be used for marbling.'

There was a brief silence as we thought about what he had said.

'And what the h.e.l.l is "marbling"?' asked Bernard in his best lawyer voice.

'It's not the proper name, but it's what I call it,' Toby said.

'Call what?' asked Sally, coming back into the room with a silver tray with teapot, cups and so on, plus some chocolate biscuits that clearly caught Bernard's eye.

'Toby was just saying that this ball could be used for marbling,' I said.