Loricroft, the seeker and collector of the stuff of profitable deals, he certainly, with his conviction of his own superiority, with his wife ever nearer on the trail of his transactions, he most of all was closest to detonation.
I thought him dangerous, as likely to cause heartless damage as any of his cold-blooded customers.
I said to Bell, ‘If Glenda wants out, take her with you.’
Bell shook her head.
‘I’ll come back in an hour,’ I said, and asked Jett to drive me in her car through the town.
‘To the hospital?’ she asked hopefully.
‘Sort of,’ I said.
Chapter 10
The hospital I sought cared for horses.
I’d made a phone call to prepare the way, and was greeted inside the main door of the Equine Research Establishment by a woman whose given name was Zinnia. Although a research veterinarian in general, she introduced herself as a specialist in poisonous plants and on their effect on any horse that ate them.
It had been she who’d been given the task not just of saving if possible the life of Caspar Harvey’s filly but of finding what was wrong with her to begin with.
Zinnia had already attained fifty, I guessed, and wore a professional white coat over a grey flannel skirt. In spite of her colourful name she had short grey hair, no hint of lipstick, flat-heeled shoes and an air of tiredness, which I discovered to be a permanent mannerism, not a pointer to lack of sleep.
‘Dr Stuart?’ She greeted me with a toe-to-head inspection but no enthusiasm, and raised her eyebrows over Jett, who’d declined to be left outside in her car. A recital by me of Jett’s nursing certificates brought the eyebrows down again, and we were invited to follow the flower into a laboratory equipped with a herd of microscopes, centrifuges, measuring devices and a gas chromatograph. We all sat on high laboratory stools, and I went on feeling lousy.
‘Mr Harvey’s filly,’ Zinnia said without emotion, ‘presented with severe symptoms of intestinal distress. By the time I was called in to see her here, late on a Sunday afternoon, she was in a state of collapse.’ She detailed her actions and her thoughts at the time which, as in nature horses had no provision for anti-peristalsis, or in plainer words, couldn’t throw up, had consisted to a great extent of purging and of offering copious amounts of water, which the filly fortunately drank.
‘I thought it certain that she’d eaten some form of plant poison that had been ground up into chaff and mixed into her hay, as there were no whole specimen leaves or stems in the haynet that came with her. I expected her to die, when of course I would have analysed the stomach contents, but as she clung to life I had to make do with the copious droppings. I thought that she might have had ingested ragwort, which is extremely poisonous, often fatal for horses. It attacks the liver and is usually chronic but it can have acute effects as with Harvey’s filly.’
She paused, looking from my face to Jett’s and seeing considerable ignorance in both.
‘Are you cognisant with Senecio jacobaea?’ she asked.
‘Er...’ I said. ‘No.’
‘Better known as ragwort.’ She smiled thinly. ‘It mostly lives in wasteland and was designated an injurious weed under the 1959 Weeds Act, so it’s your duty to pull it up if you see any.’
If she’d said that neither Jett nor I had any idea what it looked like on the hoof, so to speak, she would have been absolutely right. We asked, and she described.
‘It has yellow flowers and jagged leaves...’ She broke off. ‘Ragwort has to do with cyclic diesters, the most toxic of pyrrelizidine alkaloids, and it causes the symptoms shown by the filly, the digestive tract upset, the abdominal pain and ataxia, the lack of control of the legs.’
We listened respectfully. I wondered if I’d been eating ragwort myself.
‘The leaves can be dried and will keep their poisoning capacity for ages, unfortunately making it all the more suitable for chopping and mixing with other dried fodder, like hay.’
Jett said to Zinnia, ‘So you found ragwort in the filly’s droppings?’
Zinnia glanced from her to me. ‘No,’ she said without dramatics. ‘There was no identifiable ragwort in the filly’s droppings. We treated her with a series of antibiotics in case an infection was present, and she gradually recovered. We then sent her to George Loricroft, having been given instructions to do that by the owner, Caspar Harvey. The filly had been trained by Oliver Quigley before that, of course, and we made enquiries in that yard from the head lad downwards, but the whole workforce there strongly denied that anyone could possibly have tampered with the filly’s haynet. None of the other horses showed any symptoms like the filly, do you see?’
‘What was wrong with her, then?’ Jett asked. ‘Did you ever find out?’
‘There are other theories, I believe,’ she said, sounding as if any theory advanced by anyone except herself would automatically be wrong. ‘But the filly isn’t here, of course. If you want to do blood tests for antibodies, Dr Stuart, we have already suggested that course to Caspar Harvey but so far he has declined the procedure.’
Zinnia was saying, in her meticulous way, that if a horse — or a human — had had a disorder successfully treated, then that creature’s blood would likely forever contain the antibodies summoned up to defeat the infection. The presence of the antibodies to any disease proved that the individual had been exposed to the disease.
‘No, I don’t want to test for antibodies,’ I said, ‘but... did you keep any of the droppings? Do you still have any of them here in the research lab?’
Zinnia said with starch, ‘I assure you, Dr Stuart, we tested the droppings for every infection and every poison in the book and we found nothing.’
My forehead was damp with sweat. I felt more or less on a par with the filly. No cracked bones that I’d heard of gave one such unquiet guts.
Zinnia with surprise agreed grudgingly that the Research Establishment had indeed retained some of the material in question, as the riddle of the filly’s illness hadn’t been solved.
‘Caspar Harvey might change his mind,’ Zinnia said.
I thought Caspar Harvey most unlikely to want light poured onto the filly’s ailment, but regardless of his feelings, I said to Zinnia, ‘Does the Equine Research Establishment by any chance have a Geiger counter among its equipment?’
‘A Geiger...’ Words dried in Zinnia’s throat.
‘I believe,’ I said without emphasis, ‘that someone here reckons the filly was suffering from radiation sickness.’
‘Oh no,’ Zinnia shook her head decisively. ‘She would have deteriorated and died from that, but she recovered within days when treated with antibiotics. We have a research scientist here who advanced the radiation theory, chiefly, I think, on the grounds of some of the filly’s hair dropping out. But yes, to answer your enquiry, we do have a Geiger counter somewhere, but the filly showed no abnormal count when she left here.’
There was a pause. I had no intention of annoying or contradicting her, and after a short while she raised an at least semi-friendly smile and said she would go and find the researcher in question. Within five minutes she returned with another white-coated lady whose knowledge of radioactivity could have done with a dusting off.
Her name, she said, was Vera; she was earnest, thorough and a cutting genius in bad cases of colic.
‘I’m a veterinary surgeon, not a physicist,’ she explained, ‘but since Zinnia found no trace of poison — and believe me, if she couldn’t, then no one could I began to think of other possibilities, and I just floated the idea of radiation sickness... and of course it generated an instant atmosphere of fear, but we called in an expert on radiation and he did tests and told us not to worry, neither radiation sickness nor the filly could have been infectious. I wish I could remember everything he said.’