‘Dr Stuart is a physicist,’ Zinnia smoothly remarked.
‘He reads the weather on the BBC,’ the second vet contradicted flatly, unimpressed.
‘He’s both,’ Jett assured her, ‘and a lecturer also.’
I looked at her in surprise.
‘Your grandmother told me,’ she smiled. ‘She said you lecture on physics in general and radiation in particular. Mostly to young people, like teenagers.’
Vera, the second white coat, showed none of Zinnia’s constant tiredness, but quite the opposite. She woke to see me as a different creature.
She said, ‘Give me a sample of your lecturing wares and I’ll lend you my records of the filly’s droppings.’
‘That’s totally reprehensible,’ Zinnia reproved. ‘Totally unacceptable.’
Her friend nodded, unabashed.
‘Promise?’ I said.
‘Of course.’
I thought it might take my mind off greenish gills, so I started on a portion of the lecture I’d given so often that I knew it by heart. ‘This is about uranium,’ I said. ‘It’s from a lecture I give to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds usually.’
The second white coat approved. ‘Right. Carry on.’
In a conversational voice I did her bidding.
I said from memory, ‘Just one gram of uranium ore contains more than two thousand million million million atoms; that’s a two with twenty-one zeros after it. Too big to imagine. Even though natural uranium is not very radioactive compared to some other really dangerous stuff, a couple of grams of it, less than half a teaspoonful, will emit about thirty thousand alpha particles every second and will go on doing so at almost that rate for millions of years. Thirty thousand alpha particles attacking your guts every second for a couple of days might certainly make you feel sick but I think you would recover eventually.’
I stopped. I certainly did feel sick, but I hadn’t touched uranium that I knew of. Jett looked alarmed, however, and Vera, evidently considering the bargain kept, made a short exit and returned carrying a buff folder that to my eyes looked the exact double of the one that had agitated the Unified Traders.
The contents, alas, were not twenty letters offering for sale or offering to buy any of the enriched version of the ore I’d just been chronicling, but a scholarly account and graph of the amount of radioactive waste expelled by a two-year-old filly over the short number of days she’d spent in recovery.
By the time Vera had thought of radiation sickness the Geiger count was already on the decline. The source of it, I reckoned, had been passed by the filly very early, maybe even in diarrhoea during that first Sunday afternoon, while she lay and groaned in her box in Quigley’s stable.
As a charming gesture Vera also gave me a parcel of shoe-box size which she said not to open in polite company. Zinnia, still disapproving, pointed out that the contents of the box were the property of the Research Establishment, or perhaps of Caspar Harvey, or even, arguably, of the filly, but not, definitely not, mine.
I stood up abruptly and asked for directions to the lavatory, and through the closing door behind me heard Jett thanking the two white coats and saying goodbye, and shortly, still unwell, I was sitting beside her on the way back to Loricroft’s yard.
‘Is that what’s wrong with you?’ Jett asked anxiously.
‘Radiation sickness?’
‘You have the symptoms.’
‘I simply don’t know.’
She braked to a halt on Loricroft’s gravel. There was no one about.
‘Don’t argue,’ she said. ‘I’m coming with you into the house.’
I felt too rough anyway to demur. I slid out of the Honda and with Jett firmly alongside crossed the gravel and, after the briefest of taps on the door knocker, walked into the kitchen.
George Loricroft himself, to my enormous relief, wasn’t there. I’d had visions of having to deal with him physically and, apart from my persistent and weakening nausea, George was taller, stronger, and had already tried once to see me off.
The only person there was Glenda, who sat beside the big central table shaking with apprehension and looking a light shade of grey. She was clearly relieved that it was we, Jett and I, who had come.
She said, ‘George isn’t here. He said he was going out with the second lot to jump them on the Heath.’ Her voice sounded flat, without life.
‘And Bell?’ I asked.
Glenda sat motionless, her stiff eyelashes unblinking. She still wore the semi-bimbo trappings of a too-tight sweater, high-heeled clattering boots, and the puffed-up glittery blonde hair, but the Glenda of before Doncaster had vanished. The woman who had enraged and stripped away the shaky facade of Oliver Quigley was now wholly in charge, except that she hadn’t yet settled entirely into the role.
‘Bell went to her house to pack a suitcase,’ she said at length. ‘She’s coming back here to take me with her.’
After a pause I asked Glenda if she had discussed with George the list of frosty discrepancies I’d brought for her.
‘Discussed!’ She almost laughed. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with girls, you know.’ In bitterness it sounded as if she wished it was. ‘There hasn’t been any racing at Baden-Baden since September.’
I nodded. I’d looked it up.
‘George is a traitor to his country,’ she declaimed, and I murmured, ‘That’s a bit dramatic, don’t you think?’
‘He knows I think so. I’m going to London with Bell because I don’t want to be here when he comes back. If you think I’m afraid of him, you’re right, and I’m going to tell you things I never meant to tell anybody.’
She swallowed, paused, screwed up her nerve.
‘All those places, where I thought he was with girls, he was buying and selling nuclear secrets.’ To do her justice, she sounded scandalised. ‘And once,’ her disgust intensified, ‘once he brought home a heavy little package and because I thought it was gold... a gold present for a girl... I was so furious...’
She visibly drew in an outraged gulp of air. ‘How could he... we’ve always had good sex... I took the packet out of his briefcase and opened it, and inside there was only this heavy grey box. So I opened that, too, and right in the middle of some foam packing there was only this tiny twist of a coarse grey powder, but it was wrapped up tight in a tissue and I couldn’t wrap it back again the way it had been before, and then George came in.’
‘And he noticed you’d opened his parcel?’ I suggested, as she paused to draw breath.
‘No, he didn’t, but I was afraid he would, because he stuck around... and I had this stuff out of its box, so I popped it into my handbag in the tissue and it was still there when we went round to Oliver Quigley’s yard on our way to Nottingham races on the day before Caspar Harvey’s lunch. When I was looking for my lipstick... the tissue fell out of my bag and the powder went into a feed bowl full of oats lying on the ground ready for one of Oliver’s horses. I didn’t do it on purpose and I didn’t know the horse would be sick. But I didn’t tell George as I was frightened of him. I just left it.’
‘And,’ I asked, completely stunned but also believing her, ‘did you see which horse got that particular bowl?’
Her eyes were wide, and she said ‘No.’
‘Glenda!’ I protested.
‘All right then, you’ve guessed. I saw which box it went into, but I didn’t know it was Caspar’s filly that was in that box. I didn’t even think of it until Bell said the filly could have had radiation sickness, and then I really knew what George was probably doing, in all those places and lying about it. He was buying stuff to make bombs with, so I asked you to sort out what he’d said about where he’d been. And I do wish Bell would hurry up.’