Dick Francis - Dead Heat

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 hell 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.

“What’s that?” she asked, setting the tray down on a table.

“Yes, what is this marbling?” implored Bernard.

Toby looked at Caroline and he seemed a bit embarrassed. “It’s placing a large glass marble in the uterus of a mare to simulate a pregnancy.”

“But why would anyone do that?” asked Caroline.

“To stop her coming into season,” said Toby.

“Sorry,” said Bernard. “You’ve lost me.”

“Suppose you don’t want a filly or a mare coming into season at a certain time,” said Toby. “You place a large marble or two through her cervix and into the uterus. The fact that there is something in the uterus already seems somehow to fool the animal into thinking that she is pregnant, so she doesn’t ovulate, come into season or go into heat.”

“Why would that be a problem anyway?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes it may be that you want the mare in season at an exact moment-say, for breeding on a specific day to a stallion-so you could marble the mare for a few weeks, then remove the marbles and-hey, presto-the mare comes into heat almost immediately. I don’t know it all; you’d have to ask a vet. But I do know it’s done a lot. Some show jumpers are kept off heat for major competitions. Otherwise, they can go all moody and don’t behave properly. Just like a woman.” He laughed, and Sally playfully smacked his knee.

“Or a polo pony,” I said. “I doubt you would want a female polo pony to be in season during a match, especially if there were some male ponies playing as well.”

“Certainly not if any of them were full horses,” said Toby.

“Full horses?” asked Bernard, munching on a biscuit.

“Stallions,” said Toby. “As opposed to geldings.”

Bernard seemed to wince a little, and he put his knees tightly together.

“So you think this ball could be used instead of a glass marble?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re about the same size. But it would have to be sterilized. At least on the outside.”

“How many did you say could be inserted?” I asked.

“One or two is normal, I think,” he said. “But I do know that at least three have been used. Maybe more. You would have to ask a vet.”

“Wouldn’t they just fall out?” asked Caroline, amused.

“No,” said Toby. “You need to give the mare an injection to open the cervix to get them in. The marbles are placed in the uterus through a tube that looks like a short piece of plastic drain-pipe. When the injection wears off, the cervix closes and keeps them in. Easy. I’ve seen it done.”

“But how do you get them out again?” I asked.

“I’ve never actually seen them come out,” he said, “but I think you just give the mare the cervix-opening injection and the marbles are pushed out naturally.”

“But surely this ball wouldn’t be big enough to smuggle drugs,” said Bernard. “In horses or otherwise.”

“I was told that Peter Komarov imports horses by the jumbo jetful,” I said. “How many horses could you get on a jumbo?”

“I’ll try and find out,” said Toby, and he went out of the drawing room.

“We shall assume that each horse would have a minimum of three balls placed in it,” I said.

“Only the female horses,” said Caroline.

“True,” I said. “But wouldn’t they all be females if that is what he wanted?”

“Wouldn’t it depend on which horses were due to be imported?” said Sally.

“Not if Komarov owned the horses as well,” I said.

Toby came back. “According to LRT, the transport people who take and collect horses from Gatwick and Luton, there can be up to eighty horses on a jumbo.”

“Phew,” I said. “That’s a lot of horseflesh.”

“Eighty horses times three balls each,” said Caroline. “Two hundred and forty balls’ worth. How much is that?”

I remembered from school that the formula for the volume of a sphere was. The balls were about four centimeters across. I did a quick mental calculation. The volume of a ball was about thirty cubic centimeters. 30cc per ball × 240 balls = 7,200cc.

“Just over seven liters,” I said.

“And just how much is that?” asked Bernard. “I don’t work in liters.”

I did another rough calculation. “It would fill a bit more than twelve pint beer glasses.”

“And how much would that volume of cocaine be worth?” he asked.

“I’ve no idea of the price of cocaine,” I said.

“I expect it will say on the Internet,” said Toby. “I’ll go ask Google.” He disappeared again.

We sat and waited for him. I drank my tea, and Bernard sneaked his fourth chocolate biscuit.

Toby came back. “According to the Internet, cocaine is worth about forty pounds per gram at a sort of wholesale price,” he said.

“And how many grams are there in a pint mug?” asked Bernard, holding out his chubby hands with the palms up.

I laughed. “My brain hurts. If it was water, there would be a thousand grams in each liter. So there would be seven thousand grams in all. I don’t know whether cocaine powder is more or less dense than water. Does it float?”

“It can’t be much different,” said Bernard. “Say seven thousand grams at forty pounds at a time is”-he paused-“two hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Not bad. But not that much for all the risks involved.”

“But that’s not the half of it,” said Caroline. “For a start, you probably import cocaine at one hundred percent purity, and then you ‘cut’ it-that is, you add baking soda or vitamin C powder, or even sugar. At least a third, and sometimes as much as two-thirds to three-quarters, of what is sold on the street is the cut.”

I looked at her in shocked surprise. She smiled. “I once had a crackhead as a boyfriend. It lasted for a week or two, until I found out about his habit. But we stayed friends for a while longer, and he told me all about buying coke, as he called it. Users mostly buy it as a twist of powder or a rock of crack. That’s just enough for a single dose. A twist of cocaine powder may only contain fifty milligrams of pure cocaine. So you can get at least twenty twists from a single gram. That puts the potential street value of each gram hugely higher. In all, a jumbo jetload would be worth millions, and how many jumbo jetfuls are there?

“Plus, of course, the profit from the sale of the horses,” I said.

“If there is any,” said Toby. “He would have to buy them in South America and pay for the transportation. I don’t suppose there would be that much profit. Unless horses are very cheap in Argentina.”

“How would we find out?” I asked.

Toby went out again, and I thought he was going to somehow find out the answer to my question. But he didn’t. He came back with a book. It was like a large, thick paperback. “This is a catalog from the Horses in Training sale at Newmarket last October, when I bought a horse from Komarov. I thought I’d look it up.” He flicked through the pages. “Here it is.” He studied it. “It says here that it was sent to the sale by a company called Horse Imports Ltd. But I know it was Komarov’s horse. He was there. He congratulated me afterwards on my purchase.”