I sighed. ‘Oliver has asked me to stay tomorrow night and Sunday night. I don’t really want to, but they do need support.’
‘They?’
‘Ginnie, his daughter, is with him. She’s only just seventeen. It’s very hard on them both. Shattering, in fact.’
Henry patted my arm and walked with me to the lift. ‘Do what you can,’ he said. ‘Let us know the full state of affairs on Monday.’
Before I left home that Saturday morning I had a telephone call from Judith.
‘Gordon’s told me about Sandcastle. Tim, it’s so terrible. Those poor, poor people.’
‘Wretched,’ I said.
‘Tim, tell Ginnie how sorry I am. Sorry... how hopeless words are, you say sorry if you bump someone in the supermarket. That dear child... she wrote to me a couple of times from school, just asking for feminine information, like I’d told her to.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yes. She’s such a nice girl. So sensible. But this... this is too much. Gordon says they’re in danger of losing everything.’
‘I’m going down there today to see where he stands.’
‘Gordon told me. Do please give them my love.’
‘I will.’ I paused fractionally. ‘My love to you, too.’
‘Tim...’
‘I just wanted to tell you. It’s still the same.’
‘We haven’t seen you for weeks. I mean... I haven’t.’
‘Is Gordon in the room with you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
I smiled twistedly. ‘I do hear about you, you know,’ I said. ‘He mentions you quite often, and I ask after you... it makes you feel closer.’
‘Yes,’ she said in a perfectly neutral voice. ‘I know exactly what you mean. I feel the same about it exactly.’
‘Judith...’ I took a breath and made my own voice calm to match hers. ‘Tell Gordon I’ll telephone him at home, if he’d like, if there is anything that needs consultation before Monday.’
‘I’ll tell him. Hang on.’ I heard her repeating the question and Gordon’s distant rumble of an answer, and then she said, ‘Yes, he says please do, we’ll be at home this evening and most of tomorrow.’
‘Perhaps you’ll answer when the telephone rings.’
‘Perhaps.’
After a brief silence I said, ‘I’d better go.’
‘Goodbye then, Tim,’ she said. ‘And do let us know. We’ll both be thinking of you all day, I know we will.’
‘I’ll call,’ I said. ‘You can count on it.’
The afternoon was on the whole as miserable as I’d expected and in some respects worse. Oliver and Ginnie walked about like pale automatons making disconnected remarks and forgetting where they’d put things, and lunch, Ginnie version, had consisted of eggs boiled too hard and packets of potato crisps.
‘We haven’t told Nigel or the lads what’s happening,’ Oliver said. ‘Fortunately there is a lull in Sandcastle’s programme. He’s been very busy because nearly all his mares foaled in mid-March, close together, except for four and the one who’s still carrying.’ He swallowed. ‘And the other stallions, of course, their mares are all here too, and we have their foals to deliver and their matings to be seen to. I mean... we have to go on. We have to.’
Towards four o’clock they both went out into the yards for evening stables, visibly squaring their shoulders to face the stable hands in a normal manner, and I began adding the columns of figures I’d drawn up from Oliver’s records.
The tally when I’d finished was appalling and meant that Oliver could be an undischarged bankrupt for the rest of his life. I put the results away in my briefcase and tried to think of something more constructive; and Oliver’s telephone rang.
‘Oliver?’ a voice said, sounding vaguely familiar.
‘He’s out,’ I said. ‘Can I take a message?’
‘Get him to ring me. Ursula Young. I’ll give you the number.’
‘Ursula!’ I said in surprise. ‘This is Tim Ekaterin.’
‘Really?’ For her it was equally unexpected. ‘What are you doing there?’
‘Just staying the weekend. Can I help?’
She hesitated slightly but then said, ‘Yes, I suppose you can. I’m afraid it’s bad news for him, though. Disappointing, you might say.’ She paused. ‘I’ve a friend who has a small stud farm, just one stallion, but quite a good one, and she’s been so excited this year because one of the mares booked to him was in foal to Sandcastle. She was thrilled, you see, to be having a foal of that calibre born on her place.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well, she rang me this morning, and she was crying.’ Ursula herself gulped: she might appear tough but other people’s tears always moved her. ‘She said the mare had dropped the Sandcastle foal during the night and she hadn’t been there. She said the mare gave no sign yesterday evening, and the birth must have been quick and easy, and the mare was all right, but...’
‘But what?’ I said, scarcely breathing.
‘She said the foal — a filly — was on her feet and suckling when she went to the mare’s box this morning, and at first she was overjoyed, but then... but then...’
‘Go on,’ I said hopelessly.
‘Then she saw. She says it’s dreadful.’
‘Ursula...’
‘The foal has only one eye.’
Oh my God, I thought: dear God.
‘She says there’s nothing on the other side,’ Ursula said, ‘No proper socket.’ She gulped again. ‘Will you tell Oliver? I thought he’d better know. He’ll be most disappointed. I’m so sorry.’
‘I’ll tell him.’
‘These things happen, I suppose,’ she said. ‘But it’s so upsetting when they happen to your friends.’
‘You’re very right.’
‘Goodbye then, Tim. See you soon, I hope, at the races.’
I put down the receiver and wondered how I would ever tell them, and in fact I didn’t tell Ginnie, only Oliver, who sat with his head in his hands, despair in every line of his body.
‘It’s hopeless,’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ I said encouragingly, though I wasn’t as certain as I sounded. ‘There are still the tests to be done on Sandcastle.’
He merely slumped lower. ‘I’ll get them done, but they won’t help. The genes which are wrong will be minute. No one will see them, however powerful the microscope.’
‘You can’t tell. If they can see DNA, why not a horse’s chromosomes?’
He raised his head slowly. ‘Even then... it’s such a long shot.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I think I’ll ask the Equine Research Establishment at Newmarket to have him there, to see what they can find. I’ll ring them on Monday.’
‘I suppose,’ I said tentatively, ‘Well, I know it sounds silly, but I suppose it couldn’t be anything as simple as something he’d eaten? Last year, of course.’
He shook his head. ‘I thought of that. I’ve thought of bloody well everything, believe me. All the stallions had the same food, and none of the others’ foals are affected... or at least we haven’t heard of any. Nigel feeds the stallions himself out of the feed room in that yard, and we’re always careful what we give them because of keeping them fit.’
‘Carrots?’ I said.
‘I give carrots to every horse on the place. Everyone here does. Carrots are good food. I buy them by the hundredweight and keep them in the first big yard where the main feed room is. I put handfuls in my pockets every day. You’ve seen me. Rotaboy, Diarist and Parakeet all had them. It can’t possibly be anything to do with carrots.’
‘Paint: something like that? Something new in the boxes, when you put in all the security? Something he could chew?’
He again shook his head. ‘I’ve been over it and over it. We did all the boxes exactly the same as each other. There’s nothing in Sandcastle’s box that wasn’t in the others. They’re all exactly alike.’ He moved restlessly. ‘I’ve been down there to make sure there’s nothing Sandcastle could reach to lick if he put his head right over the half-door as far as he could get. There’s nothing, nothing at all.’