Dick Francis - Straight

If I went on riding until solvency dawned I might be the oldest jump jockey in history...

Again the telephone interrupted the daydreams, and I’d barely made a start on the letters.

It was a man with a long order for cabochons and beads. I hopped to the door and yelled for June to pick up the phone and to put the order on the computer, and Alfie came along to complain we were running out of heavy-duty binding tape and to ask why we’d ever needed Jason. Tina did his work in half the time without the swear words.

Annette almost with gaiety vacuumed everywhere, though I thought I would soon ask Tina to do it instead. Lily came with downcast eyes to ask meekly if she could have a title also. Stockroom Manager? she suggested.

“Done!” I said with sincere pleasure; and before the day was out we had a Shipment Manager (Alfie) and an Enabling Manager (Tina), and it seemed to me that such a spirit had been released there that the enterprise was now flying. Whether the euphoria would last or not was next week’s problem.

I telephoned Maarten-Pagnier in Antwerp and discussed the transit of twelve teardrops, eight stars and five fakes.

“Our customer has paid us for the diamonds,” I said. “I’d like to be able to tell him when we could get them to him.”

“Do you want them sent direct to him, monsieur?”

“No. Here to us. We’ll pass them on.” I asked if he would insure them for the journey and send them by Euro-Securo; no need to trouble his partner again personally as we did not dispute that five of the stones sent to him had been cubic zirconia. The real stones had been returned to us, I said.

“I rejoice for you, monsieur. And shall we expect a further consignment for cutting? Monsieur Franklin intended it.”

“Not at the moment, I regret.”

“Very well, monsieur. At any time, we are at your service.”

After that I asked Annette if she could find Prospero Jenks to tell him his diamonds would be coming. She ran him to earth in one of his workrooms and appeared in my doorway saying he wanted to speak to me personally.

With inner reluctance I picked up the receiver. “Hello, Pross,” I said.

“Truce, then?” he asked.

“We’ve banked the check. You’ll get the diamonds.”

“When?”

“When they get here from Antwerp. Friday, maybe.”

“Thanks.” He sounded fervently pleased. Then he said with hesitation, “You’ve got some light blue topaz, each fifteen carats or more, emerald cut, glittering like water... can I have it? Five or six big stones, Grev said. I’ll take them all.”

“Give it time,” I said, and God, I thought, what unholy nerve.

“Yes, well, but you and I need each other,” he protested.

“Symbiosis?” I said.

“What? Yes.”

It had done Greville no harm in the trade, I’d gathered, to be known as the chief supplier of Prospero Jenks. His firm still needed the cachet as much as the cash. I’d taken the money once. Could I afford pride?

“If you try to steal from me one more time,” I said, “I not only stop trading with you, I make sure everyone knows why. Everyone from Hatton Garden to Pelikanstraat.”

“Derek!” He sounded hurt, but the threat was a dire one.

“You can have the topaz,” I said. “We have a new gemologist who’s not Greville, I grant you, but who knows what you buy. We’ll still tell you what special stones we’ve imported. You can tell us what you need. We’ll take it step by step.”

“I thought you wouldn’t!” He sounded extremely relieved. “I thought you’d never forgive me the wallet. Your face...”

“I don’t forgive it. Or forget. But after wars, enemies trade.” It always happened, I thought, though cynics might mock. Mutual benefit was the most powerful of bridge-builders, even if the heart remained bitter. “We’ll see how we go,” I said again.

“If you find the other diamonds,” he said hopefully, “I still want them.” Like a little boy in trouble, I thought, trying to charm his way out.

Disconnecting, I ruefully smiled. I’d made the same inner compromise that Greville had, to do business with the treacherous child, but not to trust him. To supply the genius in him, and look to my back.

June came winging in and I asked her to go along to the vault to look at the light blue, large stone topaz, which I well remembered. “Get to know it while it’s still here. I’ve sold it to Prospero Jenks.”

“But I don’t go into the vault,” she said.

“You do now. You’ll go in there every day from now on at spare moments to learn the look and feel of the faceted stones, like I have. Topaz is slippery, for instance. Learn the chemical formulas, learn the cuts and the weights, get to know them so that if you’re offered unusual faceted stones anywhere in the world you can check them against your knowledge for probability.”

Her mouth opened.

“You’re going to buy the raw materials for Prospero Jenks’s museum pieces,” I said. “You’ve got to learn fast.”

Her eyes stretched wide as well, and she vanished.

With Annette I finished the letters.

At four o’clock I answered the telephone yet again, and found myself talking to Phil Urquhart, whose voice sounded strained.

“I’ve just phoned the lab for the results of Dozen Roses’ tests.” He paused. “I don’t think I believe this.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Do you know what a metabolite is?”

“Only vaguely.”

“What, then?” he said.

“The result of metabolism, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he said. “It’s what’s left after some substance or other has broken down in the body.”

“So what?”

“So,” he said reasonably, “if you find a particular metabolite in the urine, it means a particular substance was earlier present in the body. Is that clear?”

“Like viruses produce special antibodies, so the presence of the antibodies proves the existence of the viruses?”

“Exactly,” he said, apparently relieved I understood. “Well, the lab found a metabolite in Dozen Roses’ urine. A metabolite known as benzyl ecognine.”

“Go on,” I urged, as he paused. “What is it the metabolite of ?”

“Cocaine,” he said.

I sat in stunned disbelieving silence.

“Derek?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Racehorses aren’t routinely tested for cocaine because it isn’t a stimulant. Normally a racehorse could be full of cocaine and no one would know.”

“If it isn’t a stimulant,” I said, loosening my tongue, “why give it to them?”

“If you believed it was a stimulant, you might. Knowing it wouldn’t be tested for.”

“How could you believe it?”

“It’s one of the drugs that potentiates adrenaline. I particularly asked the lab to test for all drugs like that because of what you said about the adrenaline yourself. What happens with a normal adrenaline surge is that after a while an enzyme comes along to control it. Cocaine blocks out that enzyme, so the adrenaline goes roaring round the body for much longer. When the cocaine decays, its chief metabolic product is benzyl ecognine, which is what the lab found in its gas chromatograph analyzer this afternoon.”

“There were some cases in America...” I said vaguely.

“It’s still not part of a regulation dope test even there.”

“But my God,” I said blankly, “Nicholas Loder must have known.”

“Almost certainly, I should think. You’d have to administer the cocaine very soon before the race, because its effect is short lived. One hour, an hour and a half at most. It’s difficult to tell, with a horse. There’s no data. And although the metabolite would appear in the blood and the urine soon after that, the metabolite itself would be detectable for probably not much longer than forty-eight hours, but with a horse, that’s still a guess. We took the sample from Dozen Roses on Monday evening about fifty-two hours after he’d raced. The lab said the metabolite was definitely present, but they could make no estimate of how much cocaine had been assimilated. They told me all this very very carefully. They have much more experience with humans. They say in humans the rush from cocaine is fast, lasts about forty minutes and brings little post-exhilaration depression.”