Whip Hand Part 49

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 ca.s.sette 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 b.u.t.tons.

'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' b.u.t.tons together, and irrevocably broke my a.s.surance 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.'

'Circ.u.mstantial, 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 d.a.m.n 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 ca.s.sette 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?'