Straight. Part 27

'It's all right for you,' Milo said sharply. 'Youhaven't been waiting for more than two hours for the d.a.m.ned animal to stale.'

On Singapore racecourse, one time,' I said, 'they got a sample with nicotine in it. The horse didn't smoke, but the lad did. He got tired of waiting for the horse and just supplied the sample himself.'

Very funny,' Milo said repressively.

'This often takes hours, though, so why the rage?'

It sounded always so simple, of course, to take a regulation urine sample from two horses after every race, one nearly always from the winner. In practice, it meant waiting around for the horses to oblige. After two hours of non-performance, blood samples were taken instead, but blood wasn't as easy to come by.

Many tempers were regularly lost while the horses made up their minds.

Come away,' I said, 'he'll do it in the end. And he's definitely the horse that ran at York. Dozen Roses without doubt.'

He followed me away reluctantly and we went into the kitchen where Milo switched lights on and asked me if I'd like a drink.

'Wouldn't mind some tea,' I said.

'Tea? At this hour? Well, help yourself.' He watched me fill the kettle and set it to boil. 'Are you off booze for ever?'

'No.'

'Thank G.o.d.'

Phil Urquhart's car scrunched into the yard and pulled up outside the window, and he came breezing into the kitchen asking if there were any results. He read Milo's scowl aright and laughed.

'Do you think the horse is doped?' I asked him.

'Me? No, not really. Hard to tell. Milo thinks so.'

He was small and sandy-haired, and about thirty, the grandson of a three-generation family practice, and to my mind the best of them. I caught myself thinking that when I in the future trained here in Lambourn, I would want him for my horses. An odd thought. The future planning itself behind my back.

'I hear we're lucky you're still with us,' he said. 'An impressive crunch, so they say.' He looked at me a.s.sessingly with friendly professional eyes 'You've a few rough edges, one can see.'

'Nothing that will stop him racing,' Milo said crisply.

Phil smiled. 'I detect more alarm than sympathy.'

'Alarm?'

'You've trained more winners since he came here.'

'Rubbish,' Milo said.

He poured drinks for himself and Phil, and I made my tea; and Phil a.s.sured me that if the urine pa.s.sed all tests he would give the thumbs up to Dozen Roses.

'He may just be showing the effects of the hard race he had at York,' he said. 'It might be that he's always like this. Some horses are, and we don't know how much weight he lost.'

'What will you get the urine tested for?' I asked.

He raised his eyebrows. 'Barbiturates, in this case.'

'At York,' I said thoughtfully, 'one of Nicholas Loder's owners was walking around with a nebulizer in his pocket. A kitchen baster, to be precise.'

'An owner?' Phil asked, surprised.

'Yes He owned the winner of the five-furlong sprint.

He was also in the saddling box with Dozen Roses'

Phil frowned. 'What are you implying?'

'Nothing. Merely observing. I can't believe he interfered with the horse. Nicholas Loder wouldn't have let him. The stable money was definitely on. They wanted to win, and they knew if it won it would be tested. So the only question is, what could you give a horse that wouldn't disqualify it? Give it via a nebulizer just before a race?'

'Nothing that would make it go faster. They test for all stimulants'

'What if you gave it, say, sugar? Glucose? Or adrenalin?'

'You've a criminal mind!'

'I just wondered.'

'Glucose would give energy, as to human athletes It wouldn't increase speed, though. Adrenalin is more tricky. If it's given by injection you can see it, because the hairs stand up all round the puncture. But straight into the mucous membranes ... well, I suppose it's possible.'

'And no trace.'

He agreed. 'Adrenalin pours into a horse's bloodstream naturally anyway, if he's excited. If he wants to win. If he feels the whip. Who's to say how much? If you suspected a booster, you'd have to take a blood sample in the winner's enclosure, practically, and even then you'd have a hard job proving any reading was excessive.

Adrenalin levels vary too much. You'd even have a hard job proving extra adrenalin made any difference at all.'

He paused and considered me soberly. 'You do realize that you're saying that if anything was done, Nicholas Loder condoned it?'

'Doesn't seem likely, does it?'

'No, it doesn't,' he said. 'If he were some tin-pot little crook, well then, maybe, but not Nicholas Loder with his Cla.s.sic winners and everything to lose.'

'Mm.' I thought a bit. 'If I asked, I could get some of the urine sample that was taken from Dozen Roses at York. They always make it available to owners for private checks. To my brother's company, that is to say, in this instance.' I thought a bit more. 'When Nicholas Loder's friend dropped his baster, Martha Ostermeyer handed the bulb part back to him, but then Harley Ostermeyer picked up the tube part and gave it to me.

But it was clean. No trace of liquid. No adrenalin. So I suppose it's possible he might have used it on his own horse and still had it in his pocket, but did nothing to Dozen Roses.'

They considered it.

'You could get into a lot of trouble making unfounded accusations,' Phil said.

'So Nicholas Loder told me.'

'Did he? I'd think twice, then, before I did. It wouldn't do you much good generally in the racing world, I shouldn't think.'

'Wisdom from babes,' I said, but he echoed my thoughts.

'Yes, old man.'

'I kept the baster tube,' I said, shrugging, 'but I guess I'll do just what I did at the races, which was nothing.'

'As long as Dozen Roses tests clean both at York and here, that's likely best,' Phil said, and Milo, for all his earlier pugnaciousness, agreed.

A commotion in the darkening yard heralded the success of the urine mission and Phil went outside to unclip the special bag and close its patented seal. He wrote and attached the label giving the horse's name, the location, date and time and signed his name.

'Right,' he said, 'I'll be off. Take care.' He loaded himself, the sample and his gear into his car and with economy of movement scrunched away. I followed soon after with Brad still driving, but decided again not to go home.

'You saw the mess in London,' I said. 'I got knocked out by whoever did that. I don't want to be in if they come to Hungerford. So let's go to Newbury instead, and try The Chequers.'

Brad slowed, his mouth open.

'A week ago yesterday,' I said, 'you saved me from a man with a knife. Yesterday someone shot at the car I was in and killed the chauffeur. It may not have been your regulation madman. So last night I slept in Swindon, tonight in Newbury.'

'Yerss,'he said, understanding.

'If you'd rather not drive me any more, I wouldn't blame you.'

After a pause, with a good deal of stalwart resolution, he made a statement. 'You need me.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Until I can walk properly, I do.'

'I'll drive you, then.'

'Thanks,' I said, and meant it wholeheartedly, and he could hear that, because he nodded twice to himself emphatically and seemed even pleased.

The Chequers Hotel having a room free, I booked in for the night. Brad took himself home in my car, and I spent most of the evening sitting in an armchair upstairs learning my way round the Wizard.

Computers weren't my natural habitat like they were Greville's and I hadn't the same appet.i.te for them. The Wizard's instructions seemed to take it for granted that everyone reading them would be computer-literate, so it probably took me longer than it might have done to get results What was quite clear was that Greville had used the gadget extensively. There were three separate telephone and address lists, the world-time clock, a system for entering daily appointments, a prompt for anniversaries, a calendar flashing with the day's date, and provision for storing oddments of information. By plugging in the printer, and after a few false starts I ended with long printed lists of everything held listed under all the headings, and read them with growing frustration.

None of the addresses or telephone numbers seemed to have anything to do with Antwerp or with diamonds, though the 'Business Overseas' list contained many gem merchants' names from all round the world. None of the appointments scheduled, which stretched back six weeks or more, seemed to be relevant, and there were no entries at all for the Friday he'd gone to Ipswich.

There was no reference to Koningin Beatrix.

I thought of my question to June the day she'd found her way to 'pearl': what if it were all in there, but stored in secret?

The Wizard's instruction manual, two hundred pages long, certainly did give lessons in how to lock things away. Entries marked 'secret' could only be retrieved by knowing the pa.s.sword which could be any combination of numbers and letters up to seven in all. Forgetting the pa.s.sword meant bidding farewell to the entries: they could never be seen again. They could be deleted unseen, but not printed or brought to the screen.

One could tell if secret files were present, the book said, by the small symbol s, which could be found on the lower right-hand side of the screen. I consulted Greville's screen and found the s there, sure enough.

It would be, I thought. It would have been totally unlike him to have had the wherewithal for secrecy and not used it.

Any combination of numbers or letters up to seven . . .

The book suggested 1234, but once I'd sorted out the opening moves for unlocking and entered 1234 in the s.p.a.ce headed 'Secret Off', all I got was a quick dusty answer,'Incorrect Pa.s.sword'.

d.a.m.n him, I thought, wearily defeated. Why couldn't he make any of it easy?

I tried every combination of letters and numbers I thought he might have used but got absolutely nowhere.

Clarissa was too long, 12Roses should have been right but wasn't. To be right, the pa.s.sword had to be entered exactly as it had been set, whether in capital letters or lower case. It all took time. In the end I was ready to throw the confounded Wizard across the room, and stared at its perpetual 'Incorrect Pa.s.sword' with hatred.

I finally laid it aside and played the tiny tape recorder instead. There was a lot of office chat on the tapes and I couldn't think why Greville should have bothered to take them home and hide them. Long before I reached the end of the fourth side, I was asleep.

I woke stiffly after a while, unsure for a second where I was. I rubbed my face, looked at my watch, thought about all the constructive thinking I was supposed to be doing and wasn't, and rewound the second of the baby tapes to listen to what I'd missed. Greville's voice, talking business to Annette.

The most interesting thing, the only interesting thing about those tapes, I thought, was Greville's voice. The only way I would ever hear him again.

_.

'. . . going out to lunch,' he was saying. 'I'll be back by two-thirty.'

Annette's voice said, 'Yes, Mr Franklin.'

A click sounded on the tape.

Almost immediately, because of the concertina-in"

of time by the voice-activated mechanism, a different voice said, 'I'm in his office now and I can't find them.

He hides everything, he's security mad, you know that.'

Click. 'I can't ask. He'd never tell me, and I don't think he trusts me.' Click. 'Po-faced Annette doesn't sneeze unless he tells her to. She'd never tell me anything.'

Click. 'I'll try. I'll have to go, he doesn't like me using this phone, he'll be back from lunch any second.' Click.

End of tape.

b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, I thought. I rewound the end of the tape and listened to it again. I knew the voice, as Greville must have done. He'd left the recorder on, I guessed by mistake, and he'd come back and listened, with I supposed sadness, to treachery. It opened up a whole new world of questions and I went slowly to bed groping towards answers.

I lay a long time awake. When I slept, I dreamed the usual surrealist muddle and found it no help, but around dawn, awake again and thinking of Greville, it occurred to me that there was one pa.s.sword I hadn't tried because I hadn't thought of his using it.

The Wizard was across the room by the armchair.

Impelled by curiosity I turned on the light, rolled out of bed and hopped over to fetch it. Taking it back with me, I switched it on, pressed the b.u.t.tons, found 'Secret Off'

and into the offered s.p.a.ce typed the word Greville had written on the last page of his racing diary, below the numbers of his pa.s.sport and national insurance.

DEREK, all in capital letters.

I typed DEREK and pressed Enter, and the Wizard with resignation let me into its data.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.