Comeback (12 page)

Vicky in the kitchen had made me coffee and hot toast. I drank the coffee, kissed her cheek and took the toast with me for the drive to the hospital, crunching gratefully all the way.

Chaotic activity filled the rear car park. A towing truck was trying to maneuver a Portakabin into a space already occupied by cars whose drivers were reversing all over the place to get out of the way. There were animals weaving in and out, mostly on leads, and people with anxious expressions or open mouths, or both.

I backed out of the mêlée and left the rented car in the road outside, walking in and being accosted by an agitated lady carrying a large cloth-covered birdcage who told me her parrot was sick.

Fighting down a laugh, I said I was sorry about that.

“Aren’t you one of the vets?” she demanded.

“’Fraid not”

“Where am I supposed to take my parrot?”

I managed the diplomatic expression but it was a close-run thing.

“Let’s try that door over there,” I suggested, pointing to the visitors’ entrance in the hospital. “I expect you’ll find an answer there.”

“This fire’s very inconvenient,” she said severely, “and I do think they might have phoned to save me the journey.”

“The appointment book was burned,” I said.

She looked startled. “I didn’t think of that.”

From the rear, the main visible legacy of the flames was great black licks of soot above the frames where the windows had been and daylight itself showing in the openings because the space inside was open to the sky. There was still a lingering smell of doused ash, sour and acrid, leaving a taste in the mouth.

I steered the sick-parrot lady into the entrance hall, which had a chaotic quality all of its own with cats and barking dogs sitting on people’s laps all round the walls and the center filled by Carey Hewett in a white medical coat arguing with a fire officer, one of the women vets trying to sort out patient priority, yesterday’s receptionist stolidly taking names and addresses and a large man in a tweed suit demanding Carey Hewett’s attention.

Abandoning the parrot and all else, I threaded a way along to the office, which was almost as full, though not as noisy.

The television monitor, I noticed at once, showed the mare standing apathetically in the box, her head a mass of tubes and tapes and leather straps with buckles. Poor old thing, I thought, but at least she was alive.

The people in the office weren’t those of the night before. A motherly lady sat behind the desk answering nonstop inquiries on the telephone. “Hewett and Partners ... Yes, I’m afraid the news of the fire is correct ... if it’s urgent, we’ll send Lucy today, otherwise we’ll have a clinic running again by Monday ... Not urgent ... would you care to make an appointment?”

She was calm and reassuring, holding the disorganized practice together. Around her appeared to be an assortment of administrators, one audibly making a list of the most urgently needed replacements, another, a plaintive-looking man, demanding impossible details for insurance purposes of what had been lost.

Belinda was there, but not Ken. She noticed my arrival after a while and a spasm of annoyance crossed her thinly pretty face. The hair was scraped back, as before. No lipstick.

“What are you doing here?” she wanted to know. “Can’t you see we’re busy?”

“Where’s Ken?” I asked.

“Asleep. Leave him alone.”

I wandered out of the office and down the passage towards the operating theater. The door of the X-ray room stood ajar: I looked in there, and there was no Ken asleep on the bed.

The access door to the operating suite was locked. I made the turns instead towards the anorak-and-wellies rear entrance and let myself out into the stable area, and there I found Ken leaning on the half-door of the first of the boxes, looking in at his patient.

He was drooping with tiredness, the line of his shoulders and neck a commentary on the limits of muscle power: at what point, I wondered, did they literally stop working?

“How’s she doing?” I asked, reaching him.

He knew my voice without turning his head.

“Oh, hallo. Thanks for coming. She’s doing fine, thank God.”

She looked, of course, anything but fine to me. The intravenous drip led from a bag at the ceiling into her neck, another tube led out of one nostril, and there was a muzzle over her nose (to stop her dislodging everything else).

“Her owner’s coming,” Ken said. “Carey says he’s upset.”

“Understandable.”

Ken shook his head wearily. “Not about her colic. About me. He’d heard the rumors. Apparently he told Carey he should have got a different surgeon.”

“He’ll have to change his mind.”

“He’ll take a look at her and he’ll see her like this. He demanded I be here to talk to him, so I wanted you along for backup. Hope you don’t mind?”

“A witness you wanted and a witness you’ve got.”

He finally turned his head my way and openly studied my face.

“You’ve no obligation,” he said.

“I’m interested,” I said truthfully. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-four, just,” he answered, surprised. “Why?”

I’d thought him a good deal older, but it seemed tactless to say so. It was the elongated bone structure and the intimations of thinning hair that added the years; the opposite, I knew, of my own case, where people doubted my professional seniority as a matter of course.

“I’m thirty-three, almost,” I said as a quid pro quo, and after a moment, acknowledging the implicit as well as the factual information, he suddenly held out his hand to be shaken. The bond of mutual age was an odd one, but definitely existed. From that moment Ken and I, though not yet close friends, all the same became a team.

A good deal of bustle appeared to be going on behind us across the car park. The Portakabin had finally been positioned to everyone’s satisfaction and the tow truck disconnected. People were carrying flipped-up flip-up chairs from a van to the cabin, followed by trestle tables and a portable gas heater.

“Instant office,” Ken said, but it was more like instant clinic, as it was the animals with their owners who presently straggled across from the hospital, not the secretaries and administrators.

“Oliver Quincy and Jay Jardine are both out on calls,” Ken said, watching them. “Scott’s gone home to rest. Lucy’s out with some sheep. I’m dead on my feet. That leaves Carey himself and Yvonne Floyd to deal with that lot, and we ought to have a nurse helping them, but she left in a huff last week.” He sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t complain, but we have too much work.”

“How about Belinda?” I asked. “She’s here, I saw her.”

He nodded. “She brought the other three horses back this morning.” He gestured along the row. “Two of them go home today anyway. Belinda’s looking after this mare chiefly, though I expect Carey will want her over with him.”

Belinda appeared at that moment to check on her charge, giving me an irritated glance which made Ken frown.

“Peter doesn’t belong here,” Belinda said, “and we don’t need him.”

“I’m not so sure. Anyway, I asked him to come.”

Belinda bit off whatever rose into her mind to say and with compressed lips she opened the mare’s door and went in. Over her shoulder, as if only then remembering, she said, “Carey wants you in the entrance hall more or less five minutes ago.”

Ken gave her a fonder smile than I could have managed and set off round the outside of the building, taking it for granted that I would go with him.

Emptied of the cats, dogs, parrot and assorted owners, the entrance hall now held only Carey Hewett himself, the argumentative fireman, the woman vet, the receptionist and the bulky man in the tweed suit. Carey Hewett in his white coat seemed to be carrying on a multidirectional conversation, addressing a sentence to each in turn, a gray-haired pivot of calm within fringes of hysteria.

“Yvonne, do the best you can. Use the drugs from my car. Use anything from the hospital drugs cupboard. We’ve new supplies coming this afternoon. No, of course we don’t know any reason for it to burn down. Your mare came through the operation very well. Yvonne, better get moving or we’ll be here until bedtime.... Oh, Ken, there you are.”

His gaze moved past Ken to me and paused for a second or two while he remembered. Then he gave me a nod and made no comment about my presence, probably because of the other voices talking in his ears.

The fireman gave up and went away. The two women walked over towards the Portakabin with a bravely resigned air of being thrown to the lions, and the large importunate man finally held the field alone, swinging round to stare hard at Ken.

“Are you Ken McClure?”

Ken said he was.

Carey Hewett forestalled the large man as he drew breath and said to Ken, “This is the mare’s owner, Wynn Lees.”

Again the extraordinary fizz of memory. I knew a lot about Wynn Lees, if it was the same person. The Wynn Lees of twenty-five years ago had been a cautionary tale freely used by my mother to scare me into good behavior. “If you hang out with that Gribble gang, you’ll grow up to be like Wynn Lees.” “If you smoke at your age ... if you’re cruel to insects . . . if you steal... if you play truant . . . if you throw stones at trains (all of which things I’d done) ... you’ll grow up like Wynn Lees.”

The present-day Wynn Lees had a fleshy obstinate look on his heavy face, the cheeks broken-veined from wind and weather, the head thrust forward on a thick neck. A bull of a man with no razor brains, he was saying belligerently to Ken, “You had no right to operate on my mare without my say-so, and I certainly didn’t give it.”

Carey Hewett said patiently, “She’d be dead now if it weren’t for Ken.”

“He had no permission,” Lees insisted doggedly.

“Yes, I did,” Ken said.

“Whose?” Lees demanded.

“Your wife’s.”

The Lees mouth dropped again. “My wife wouldn’t do that.”

Ken explained. “The stud groom had your phone number. He stood beside me while I tried it. Your wife answered.”

“When was that?” Lees interrupted.

“About a quarter past three this morning.”

“She couldn’t have answered. She takes sleeping pills.”

“Well, she did answer. The stud groom will tell you. She said you weren’t at home and she didn’t know where you were. I explained the mare had colic and needed an emergency operation. She asked how much it would cost, and I told her, and the stud groom himself told her it was the only way to save the mare’s life and the life of the foal. She said to go ahead.”

Wynn Lees looked more shaken than seemed sensible by his wife’s wakefulness, and belatedly came around to acknowledging his debt to Ken.

“Well, if my wife said ... and the mare’s apparently all right ... well then, no hard feelings.”

I didn’t think the half-apology anywhere near good enough and nor, I sensed, did Ken, though from professional circumspection he swallowed it. Carey Hewett definitely relaxed inwardly and said he understood the operation had gone exceptionally well.

“How do you know?” Lees demanded, his truculence resurfacing like a conditioned reflex as though even the simplest statement was for him a cause of suspicion and challenge.

“I’ve read the notes,” Carey said.

“What notes?”

“Ken prudently asked his friend here to attend and take detailed notes of the whole procedure. There’s no room for doubt. From start to finish the operation was impeccable.”

“Oh.” Lees looked momentarily balked. “Well, I need to see my property.”

“Certainly,” Carey said pacifically. “Come this way.”

He took the owner out of the front door into the car park and turned left towards the stable. Ken and I followed, but halfway there I put my hand briefly on his arm and slowed him down a pace or two, to leave a gap wide enough for privacy.

“What is it?” Ken asked.

“Don’t trust Wynn Lees.”

“Why not? I mean, he’s obnoxious, that’s all.”

“No, not all. Don’t trust him. And don’t tell him what you found in the horse’s gut.”

“Why ever not?”

“In case he already knows.”

Ken gave me a stare of total astonishment but by then we were approaching the mare’s box and within earshot of Lees himself.

Lees was as shocked by the mare’s appearance as Ken had predicted but Carey tried to reassure him, and Belinda, who was still there, slapped the mare’s rump energetically and told him the old girl was doing fine. Lees shrugged a couple of times and displayed none of the joy he should have felt at the life preserved. Not a good dissimulator, I thought. No good for the Foreign Office.

“Will the foal be born normally?” he asked.

Carey said, “Ken?” and Ken gave it as his opinion that he couldn’t see any reason why not.

“Only a very skillful surgeon,” Carey said, “could have performed such an operation successfully so late in the gestation period.”

Ken showed no embarrassment at the accolade. He knew his worth. False modesty didn’t occur to him. His great fear earlier had been that he had somehow taken leave of his ability, and I guessed he had satisfactorily demonstrated to himself, as well as to Carey, that he hadn’t. To me, of course, his impressive performance had indicated something quite different, but then I had by training a nasty suspicious mind.

“I expect the mare’s insured,” I said neutrally.

I got swift glances from all three men, but it was Lees’s attention that sharpened on my presence.

“Who did you say you were?” he demanded. “It’s none of your business if she’s insured.”

“No, of course not,” I agreed. “Just a random thought.”

Carey said to me in mild rebuke, “You can’t put a price on a Rainbow Quest foal,” and Lees opened his mouth, thought better of it and closed it again.

Instead he said to Ken, “Did you find any reason for the colic?”