Дик Фрэнсис - Banker

‘And all the horses,’ I said slowly, ‘Wear head-collars with their names on.’

‘Yes, that’s right. An essential precaution.’

All made easy, I thought, for someone intending mischief towards particular mares and not to any others.

‘Your own Sandcastle foal,’ I said, ‘he’s perfect... and it may be because on the lists your mare was down for Diarist.’

‘Tim!’

‘Look after him,’ I said. ‘And look after Sandcastle.’

‘I will,’ he said fervently.

‘And Oliver... is that lad called Shane still with you?’

‘No, he’s gone. So have Dave and Sammy, who found Ginnie.’

‘Then could you send me at the bank a list of the names and addresses of all the people who were working for you last year, and also this year? And I mean everyone , even your house-keeper and anyone working for Nigel or cleaning the lads’ hostel, things like that.’

‘Even my part-time secretary girl?’

‘Even her.’

‘She only comes three mornings a week.’

‘That might be enough.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it straight away.’

‘I went to see Chief Inspector Wyfold this morning,’ I said. ‘But he thinks it’s just a coincidence that Ginnie had shampoo with a foal-deforming drug in it. We’ll have to come up with a whole lot more, to convince him. So anything you can think of...’

‘I’ll think of nothing else.’

‘If Dissdale Smith should telephone you, pressing for an answer,’ I said, ‘just say the bank are deliberating and keeping you waiting. Don’t tell him anything about this new possibility. It might be best to keep it to ourselves until we can prove whether or not it’s true.’

‘Dear God,’ he said fearfully, ‘I hope it is.’

In the evening I talked to Pen, asking her if she knew of any way of getting the selenium out of the shampoo.

‘The trouble seems to be,’ I said, ‘That you simply couldn’t get the stuff into a horse as it is.’

‘I’ll work on it,’ she said, ‘But of course the manufacturer’s chemists will have gone to a good deal of trouble to make sure the selenium stays suspended throughout the mixture and doesn’t all fall to the bottom.’

‘It did say “Shake Well” on the bottle.’

‘Mm, but that might be for the soap content, not for the selenium.’

I thought. ‘Well, could you get the soap out, then? It must be the soap the horses wouldn’t like.’

‘I’ll try my hardest,’ she promised. ‘I’ll ask a few friends.’ She paused. ‘There isn’t much of the shampoo left. Only what I kept after sending the samples off to America and the British lab.’

‘How much?’ I said anxiously.

‘Half an egg-cupful. Maybe less.’

‘Is that enough?’

‘If we work in test-tubes... perhaps.’

‘And Pen... Could you or your friends make a guess, as well, as to how much shampoo you’d need to provide enough selenium to give a teratogenic dose to a mare?’

‘You sure do come up with some difficult questions, dearest Tim, but we’ll certainly try.’

Three days later she sent a message with Gordon, saying that by that evening she might have some answers, if I would care to go down to her house after work.

I cared and went, and with a smiling face she opened her front door to let me in.

‘Like a drink?’ she said.

‘Well, yes, but...’

‘First things first.’ She poured whisky carefully for me and Cinzano for herself. ‘Hungry?’

‘Pen...’

‘It’s only rolls with ham and lettuce in. I never cook much, as you know.’ She disappeared to her seldom-used kitchen and returned with the offerings, which turned out to be nicely squelchy and much what I would have made for myself.

‘All right,’ she said finally, pushing away the empty plates, ‘Now I’ll tell you what we’ve managed.’

‘At last.’

She grinned. ‘Yes. Well then, we started from the premise that if someone had to use shampoo as the source of selenium then that someone didn’t have direct or easy access to poisonous chemicals, which being so he also wouldn’t have sophisticated machinery available for separating one ingredient from another — a centrifuge, for instance. OK so far?’

I nodded.

‘So what we needed, as we saw it, was a simple method that involved only everyday equipment. Something anyone could co anywhere. So the first thing we did was to let the shampoo crip through a paper filter, and we think you could use almost anything for that purpose, like a paper towel, a folded tissue or thin blotting paper. We actually got the best and fastest results from a coffee filter, which is after all specially designed to retain very fine solids while letting liquids through easily.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Highly logical.’

Pen smiled. ‘So there we were with some filter-papers in which, we hoped, the microscopic particles of selenium were trapped. The filters were stained bright green by the shampoo. I brought one here to show you... I’ll get it.’ She whisked off to the kitchen taking the empty supper plates with her, and returned carrying a small tray with two glasses on it.

One glass contained cut pieces of green-stained coffee filter lying in what looked like oil, and the second glass contained only an upright test-tube, closed at the top with a cork and showing a dark half-inch of solution at the bottom.

‘One of my friends in the lab knows a lot about horses,’ Pen said, ‘and he reckoned that all race horses are used to the taste of linseed oil, which is given them in their feed quite often as a laxative. So we got some linseed oil and cut up the filter and soaked it.’ She pointed to the glass. ‘The selenium particles floated out of the paper into the oil.’

‘Neat.’ I said.

‘Yes. So then we poured the result into the test-tube and just waited twenty-four hours or so, and the selenium particles slowly gravitated through the oil to the bottom.’ She looked at my face to make sure I understood. ‘We transferred the selenium from the wax-soap base in which it would remain suspended into an oil base, in which it wouldn’t remain suspended.’

‘I do understand,’ I assured her.

‘So here in the test-tube,’ she said with a conjuror’s flourish, ‘we have concentrated selenium with the surplus oil poured off.’ She picked the tube out of the glass, keeping it upright, and showed me the brownish shadowy liquid lying there, darkest at the bottom, almost clear amber at the top. ‘We had such a small sample to start with that this is all we managed to collect. But that dark stuff is definitely selenium sulphide. We checked it on a sort of scanner called a gas chromatograph.’ She grinned. ‘No point in not using the sophisticated apparatus when it’s there right beside you — and we were in a research lab of a teaching hospital, incidentally.’

‘You’re marvellous.’

‘Quite brilliant,’ she agreed with comic modesty. ‘We also calculated that that particular shampoo was almost ten per cent selenium, which is a very much higher proportion than you’d find in shampoos for humans. We all agree that this much, in the test-tube, is enough to cause deformity in a foal — or in any other species, for that matter. We found many more references in other books — lambs born with deformed feet, for instance, where the sheep had browsed off plants growing on selenium-rich soil. We all agree that it’s the time when the mare ingests the selenium that’s most crucial, and we think that to be sure of getting the desired result you’d have to give selenium every day for three or four days, starting two or three days after conception.’

I slowly nodded. ‘That’s the same sort of time-scale that Oliver said.’