We digested the information in silence for a mile or two, and finally Gordon said ‘How did you know it was warfarin? I mean, how can you tell?’
‘I handle it every day,’ she said. ‘I know the dosages, the sizes, the colors, the manufacturers’ marks. You see all those things so often, you get to know them at a glance.’
‘Do you mean,’ I said interestedly, ‘that if you saw fifty different pills laid out in a row you could identify the lot?’
‘Probably. If they all came from major drug companies and weren’t completely new, certainly, yes.’
‘Like a wine-taster,’ Judith said.
‘Clever girl,’ Gordon said, meaning Pen.
‘It’s just habit.’ She thought. ‘And something else in those cupboards wasn’t strictly herbal, I suppose. He had one or two bags of potassium sulphate, bought from Goodison’s Garden Centre, wherever that is.’
‘Whatever for?’ Judith asked. ‘Isn’t potassium sulphate a fertiliser?’
‘Potassium’s just as essential to animals as to plants,’ Pen said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t one of the ingredients in that secret brew.’
‘What else would you put in it, if you were making it?’ I asked curiously.
‘Oh heavens.’ She pondered. ‘Any sort of tonic. Perhaps liquorice root, which he once mentioned. Maybe caffeine. All sorts of vitamins. Just a pepping-up mish-mash.’
The hardest part of the day had been to find somewhere decent to have lunch, and the place I’d chosen via the various gourmet guides turned out, as so often happens, to have changed hands and chefs since the books were written. The resulting repast was slow to arrive and disappointing to eat, but the mood of my guests forgave all.
‘You remember,’ Gordon said thoughtfully over the coffee, ‘that you told us on the way to Newmarket that Calder was worried about his business when that vet was killed?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He was, at the time.’
‘Isn’t it possible,’ Gordon said, ‘that the vet was letting Calder have regular official medicines, like warfarin, and Calder thought his supplies would dry up, when the vet died?’
‘Gordon!’ Judith said. ‘How devious you are, darling.’
We all thought about it however, and Pen nodded. ‘He must have found another willing source, I should think.’
‘But,’ I protested, ‘would vets really do that?’
‘They’re not particularly brilliantly paid,’ Pen said. ‘Not badly by my standards, but they’re never rich.’
‘But Ian Pargetter was very much liked,’ I said.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Pen said. ‘Nothing to stop him passing on a few pills and advice to Calder in return for a fat untaxed fee.’
‘To their mutual benefit,’ Gordon murmured.
‘The healer’s feet of clay,’ Judith said. ‘What a shame.’
The supposition seemed slightly to deflate the remembered pleasure of the morning, but the afternoon’s visit put the rest o f the day up high.
We went this time to Oliver Knowles’ stud farm and found the whole place flooded with foals and mares and activity.
‘How beautiful,’ Judith said, looking away over the stretches of white railed paddocks with their colonies of mothers and babies. ‘How speechlessly great.’
Oliver Knowles, introduced, was as welcoming as Calder and told Gordon several times that he would never, ever, be out of his debt of gratitude to Paul Ekaterin’s, however soon he had paid off his loan.
The anxiety and misgivings to be seen in him on my February visit had all disappeared: Oliver was again, and more so, the capable and decisive executive I had met first. The foals had done well, I gathered. Not one from the mares coming to Sandcastle had been lost, and none of those mares had had any infection, a triumph of care. He told me all this within the first ten minutes, and also that Sandcastle had proved thoroughly potent and fertile and was a dream of a stallion. ‘He’s tireless,’ he said. ‘Forty mares will be easy.’
‘I’m so glad,’ I said, and meant it from the bottom of my banking heart.
With his dog Squibs at his heels he showed us all again through the succession of yards, where since it was approximately four o’clock the evening ritual of mucking out and feeding was in full swing.
‘A stud farm is not like a racing stable, of course,’ Oliver was explaining to Gordon. ‘One lad here can look after far more than three horses, because they don’t have to be ridden. And here we have a more flexible system because the mares are sometimes in, sometimes out in the paddocks, and it would be impossible to assign particular mares to particular lads. So here a lad does a particular section of boxes, regardless of which animals are in them.’
Gordon nodded, genially interested.
‘Why are some foals in the boxes and some out in the paddocks?’ Judith asked, and Oliver without hesitation told her it was because the foals had to stay with their dams, and the mares with foals in the boxes were due to come into heat, or were already in heat, and would go from their boxes to visit the stallion. When their heat was over they would go out into the paddocks, with their foals.
‘Oh,’ Judith said, blinking slightly at this factory aspect. ‘Yes, I see.’
In the foaling yard we came across Nigel and also Ginnie, who ran across to me when she saw me and gave me a great hug and a smacking kiss somewhere to the left of the mouth. Quite an advance in confidence, I thought, and hugged her back, lifting her off her feet and whirling her round in a circle. She was laughing when I put her down, and Oliver watched in some surprise.
‘I’ve never known her so demonstrative,’ he said.
Ginnie looked at him apprehensively and held onto my sleeve. ‘You didn’t mind, did you?’ she asked me worriedly.
‘I’m flattered,’ I said, meaning it and also thinking that her father would kill off her spontaneity altogether if he wasn’t careful.
Ginnie, reassured, tucked her arm into mine and said ‘Come and look at the newest foal. It was born only about twenty minutes ago. It’s a colt. A darling.’ She tugged me off, and I caught a fleeting glance of Judith’s face which was showing a mixture of all sorts of unreadable thoughts.
‘Oliver’s daughter,’ I said in explanation over my shoulder, and heard Oliver belatedly introducing Nigel.
They all came to look at the foal over the half-door; a glistening little creature half-lying, half-sitting on the thick straw, all long nose, huge eyes and folded legs, new life already making an effort to balance and stand up. The dam, on her feet, alternately bent her head to the foal and looked up at us warily.
‘It was an easy one,’ Ginnie said. ‘Nigel and I just watched.
‘Have you seen many foals born?’ Pen asked her.
‘Oh, hundreds. All my life. Most often at night.’
Pen looked at her as if she, as I did, felt the imagination stirred by such an unusual childhood: as if she, like myself, had never seen one single birth of any sort, let alone a whole procession by the age of fifteen.
‘This mare has come to Sandcastle,’ Oliver said.
‘And will that foal win the Derby?’ Gordon asked, smiling.
Oliver smiled in return. ‘You never know. He has the breeding.’ He breathed deeply, expanding his chest. ‘I’ve never been able to say anything like that before this year. No foal born or conceived here has in the past won a classic, but now...’ he gestured widely with his arm,‘... one day, from these...’ he paused. ‘It’s a whole new world. It’s... tremendous.’
‘As good as you hoped?’ I asked.
‘Better.’
He had a soul after all, I thought, under all that tidy martial efficiency. A vision of the peaks, which he was reaching in reality. And how soon, I wondered, before the glossy became commonplace, the Classic winners a routine, the aristocrats the common herd. It would be what he’d aimed for; but in a way it would be blunting.