Dick Francis - Shattered

He looked with shock at what I’d brought him, and I nodded as if in confirmation that I’d got it right. He asked a shade austerely if I knew what he was with great care holding.

“Yes. It’s a sort of syringe. You can put the needle into any liquid drug and suck it into the bubble,” I said. “Then you push the needle into the patient and squeeze the bubble to deliver the drug. Veterinarians sometimes use them on horses that are upset by the sight of an ordinary hypodermic syringe.”

He said, “You’re right. You seem to know a lot about it.”

“I was with Martin once...” I broke off. So much of my life seemed to have touched Martin’s.

Lawson-Young made no comment about Martin but said, “These little syringes can be used too on manic patients, to make them manageable and calm them down.”

Phoenix House treated patients with mental illnesses. Adam Force had access to a well-stocked pharmacy.

George Lawson-Young turned away from me and, holding the tiny balloon with great care, led the way back to that part of the laboratory that held the gas chromatograph.

The thumbnail-sized balloon was full still of liquid, and was also wet outside from lying in the gutter. George Lawson-Young laid it carefully in a dish and asked one of his young doctors to identify the baby balloon’s contents as soon as possible.

“Should it be one of several forms of poison,” he warned me, “it might be impossible to find out what it is.”

“It surely had to be something already in the Phoenix House pharmacy,” I said. “It was only yesterday afternoon that I met Force. He hadn’t much time to mobilize anything too fancy.”

The balloon’s contents raised little but smiles.

It took the young research doctor barely ten minutes to come back with an identification. “It’s insulin,” he said confidently. “Plain ordinary insulin, as used by diabetics.”

“Insulin!” I exclaimed, disappointed. “Is that all?”

Both the young research doctor and the professor smiled indulgently. The professor said, “If you have diabetes, the amount of insulin in that syringe might send you into a permanent coma. If you don’t have diabetes, there’s enough to kill you.”

“To kill?”

“Yes, certainly.” Lawson-Young nodded. “That amount was a lethal dose. It’s reasonable to suppose it was intended for you, not your chauffeur, but I can hardly believe it of Adam.” He sounded shattered. “We knew he’d steal, but to kill...” He shook his head. “Are you sure that syringe came from him? You didn’t just find it lying in the road?”

“I’m positive he was holding it in his hand, and I dislodged it.”

The professor and I by that time were sitting on swiveling chairs in the professor’s personal office-like room section of the laboratory.

“Actually,” I murmured, “the big question is why?”

George Lawson-Young couldn’t say.

“Do me a favor,” he finally begged. “Start from the beginning.”

“I will phone my driver first.”

I used my mobile. When Jim answered his car phone he sounded first relieved that I was free and talking to him, and second, anxious that he was going to be late home for his wife’s risotto, and third, worried about where he was going to find me safe and on my own. I was glad enough that he proposed to wait for me. The professor, taking the phone, gave Jim pinpointing instructions for one hour’s time, and suggested to me that I waste none of it.

“It’s a tale of two tapes,” I tentatively began.

“Two?” said the professor.

“Yes, two,” I replied, but then hesitated.

“Do go on, then.” The professor was in a natural hurry.

“One was filmed here and stolen by Adam Force,” I said. “He persuaded Martin Stukely to keep it safe for him, so that it couldn’t be found.”

“We had obtained a Search and Seizure Order from the court and had already started searching everywhere for it,” said Lawson-Young, “including in Adam’s own home, but we didn’t ever think of it being in the care of a jockey.”

“That must be why he did it,” I said. “But as I understand it, Martin thought Force’s tape would be safer still with me, a friend who hasn’t four inquisitive children.” And no talkative or quarrelsome wife, I could have added. But, I thought, would Martin have really given me the tape if he knew the contents were stolen?

The professor smiled.

I continued, “Martin Stukely received the stolen tape from Force at Cheltenham races and gave it into the temporary care of his valet while he went out to ride a horse called Tallahassee, in the race from which he didn’t return.”

He nodded. “When Martin Stukely died his valet, Eddie, gave the tape to you, as he knew that’s what Martin intended.

“Eddie the valet,” the professor went on, “was eventually one of the people that our investigators talked to and he said he didn’t know anything about any stolen laboratory tape. He said he thought he was handling a tape that you yourself had made, which explained how to copy an ancient and priceless necklace.”

“That’s the second tape,” I said. “It’s also missing.”

“Eddie had seen your duplicate of the necklace in the jockeys’ changing rooms. And incidentally” — George Lawson-Young’s smile illuminated his little office — “he said your copy of the necklace was stunning. Perhaps you will show it to me one day, when all this is over.”

I asked him what he would consider “over,” and his smile disappeared. “For me it will be over when we find the tape of our work.”

He was aware, I supposed, that it was comparatively easy to make duplicates of videotapes. And that the knowledge recorded on them was like the contents of Pandora’s box; once out, it couldn’t be put back. The stolen tape itself might now show racing. The records of the cancer research might already be free in the world, and would never again be under the professor’s control. For him, perhaps, it was already over.

For me, I thought, it would be over when Rose and Adam Force left me alone... but abruptly, out of nowhere, the specter of the fourth black mask floated into my consciousness. It wouldn’t be over for me until his mask came off.

As casually as I could I mentioned Number Four to the professor, fearing he would discount my belief, but instead he took it seriously.

“Add your Number Four into all equations,” he instructed, “and what do you get in the way of answers? Do you get a reason for Force to want you dead? Do you get a reason for anyone to attack you? Think about it.”

I thought that that method must be what he used in nearly all research: if I added in an X factor, an “unknown,” into all I’d seen and heard and hadn’t wholly understood, what would I get?

Before I could really learn the technique, one of the young doctors came to tell me and the professor that Adam Force was standing on the sidewalk opposite with a thin woman with brown hair — my friend Rose. Doctor Force was staring at the entrance of his former workplace as if deciding how best to storm the Bastille. The young doctor, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy devising an escape from the fortress.

The professor said thoughtfully, “Adam knows his way round this house and its environs at least as well as any of us. He’ll have stationed the other man, the one we can’t see now, at the rear door into the mews. So how do we get Mr. Logan out of here without Adam Force being aware of it?”

The brilliant researchers came up with several solutions that required Tarzan-like swinging over an abyss, but with civil regard for each other’s brains, they voted unanimously for the exit I actually took.

The glowingly pretty female doctor whose idea I followed gave me life-threatening directions. “Go up the stairs. Beside the top of the staircase, on the sixth floor, there’s a bolted door. Unbolt it. Open it. You’ll find yourself on the roof. Slide down the tiles until you meet a parapet. Crawl along behind the parapet there, so that the man in the mews doesn’t see you. Crawl to the right. Keep your head down. There are seven houses joined together. Go along behind their parapets until you come to the fire escape at the end. Go down it. There’s a bolt mechanism that lets the last part of the iron ladder slide down to the pavement. When you’re down, shove the last part of the ladder up again until it clicks. My car is parked in the mews. I’ll drive out in half an hour. You should be on the ground there by then, out of sight of Doctor Force. I’ll pick you up and go to meet your driver. When I pick you up, lie on the floor, so that my car looks empty except for me.”