I laughed. She walked beside me back along the twisting corridors, down the stairs, and right back to the outside door, talking easily about her life in college, talking to me freely, as an equal. She told me that Durham was the oldest English university after Oxford and Cambridge, and that it was the only place in Britain which offered a course in Geophysics. She was indeed, a very nice girl.
She shook hands with me on the step.
'Goodbye,' she said.
'I'm sorry Patty was so beastly.'
'I'm not. If she hadn't been, I wouldn't have been here this afternoon.'
She laughed.
'But what a price to pay.'
'Worth it.'
Her grey eyes had darker grey flecks in them, I noticed. She watched me go over and sit on the motorcycle and fasten on the helmet. Then she waved her hand briefly, and went back through the door. It closed with finality behind her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I stopped in Posset on the return journey to see if there were any comment from October on the theory I had sent him the previous week, but there was no letter for me at all.
Although I was already late for evening stables, I stopped longer to write to him. I couldn't get Tommy Stapleton out of my head: he had died without passing on what he knew. I didn't want to make the same mistake. Or to die either, if it came to that. I scribbled fast.
'I think the trigger is a silent whistle, the sort used for dogs.
Humber keeps one in the drinks compartment of his car. Remember Old Etonian? They hold hound trails at Cartmel, on the morning of the races. '
Having posted that, I bought a large slab of chocolate for food, and also Jerry's comic, and slid as quietly as I could back into the yard.
Cass caught me, however, and said sourly that I'd be lucky to get Saturday off next week as he would be reporting me to Humber. I sighed resignedly, started the load of evening chores,
and felt the cold, dingy, sub-violent atmosphere of the place seep back into my bones.
But there was a difference now. The whistle lay like a bomb in my money belt. A death sentence, if they found me with it. Or so I believed. There remained the matter of making sure that I had not leaped to the wrong conclusion.
Tommy Stapleton had probably suspected what was going on and had walked straight into Plumber's yard to tax him with it. He couldn't have known that the men he was dealing with were prepared to kill.
But, because he had died, I did know. I had lived under their noses for seven weeks, and I had been careful: and because I intended to remain undetected to the end I spent a long time on Sunday wondering how I could conduct my experiment and get away with it.
On Sunday evening, at about five o'clock, Adams drove into the yard in his shining grey Jaguar. As usual at the sight of him, my heart sank.
He walked round the yard with Humber when he made his normal tour of inspection and stopped for a long time looking over the door at Mickey. Neither he nor Humber came in. Humber had been into Mickey's box several times since the day he helped me take in the first lot of drugged water, but Adams had not been in at all.
Adams said, 'What do you think, Hedley?'
Humber shrugged, 'There's no change.'
'Write him off?'
'I suppose so.' Humber sounded depressed.
'It's a bloody nuisance,' said Adams violently. He looked at me.
'Still bolstering yourself up with tranquillizers?'
'Yes, sir.'
He laughed rudely. He thought it very funny. Then his face changed to a scowl, and he said savagely to Humber, 'It's useless, I can see that. Give him the chop, then.'
Humber turned away, and said, 'Right, I'll get it done tomorrow.'
Their footsteps moved off to the next box. I looked at Mickey. I had done my best for him, but he was too far gone, and had been from the beginning. After a fortnight, what with his mental chaos, his continual state of drugged ness and his persistent refusal to eat, Mickey's condition was pitiable, and anyone less stony than Humber would have had him put down long ago.
I made him comfortable for his last night and evaded yet another slash from his teeth. I couldn't say I was sorry not to have to deal with him any more, as a fortnight of looking after an unhinged horse would be enough for anyone; but the fact that he was to be put down the next day meant that I would have to perform my experiment without delay.
I didn't feel ready to do it. Thinking about it, as I put away my brushes for the night and walked across the yard towards the kitchen, I tried to find one good reason for putting it off.
The alacrity with which a good excuse for not doing it presented itself led me to the unwelcome, swingeing realization that for the first time since my childhood, I was thoroughly afraid.
I could get October to make the experiment, I thought, on Six-Ply. Or on any of the other horses. I hadn't got to do it myself. It would be definitely more prudent not to do it myself. October could do it with absolute safety, but if Humber found me out I was as good as dead:
therefore I should leave it to October.
That was when I knew I was afraid, and I didn't like it. It took me most of the evening to decide to do the experiment myself. On Mickey.
The next morning. Shuffling it off on to October doubtless would have been more prudent, but I had myself to live with afterwards. What had I really wanted to leave home for, if not to find out what I could or couldn't do?
When I took the bucket to the office door in the morning for Mickey's last dose of phenobarbitone, there was only a little left in the jar.
Cass tipped the glass container upside down and tapped it on the bucket so that the last grains of white powder should not be wasted.
'That's his lot, poor bastard,' he observed, putting the stopper back in the empty jar.
'Pity there isn't a bit more left, we could have given him a double dose, just this once. Well, get on with it,' he added sharply.
'Don't hang about looking mournful. It's not you that's going to be shot this afternoon.'
Well, I hoped not.
I turned away, went along to the tap, splashed in a little water, swilled round in it the instantly dissolved phenobarbitone, and poured it away down the drain. Then I filled the bucket with clean water and took it along for Mickey to drink.
He was dying on his feet. The bones stuck out more sharply under his skin and his head hung down below his shoulders. There was still a disorientated wildness in his eye, but he was going downhill so fast that he had little strength left for attacking anyone. For once he made no attempt to bite me when I put the bucket down at his head, but lowered his mouth into it and took a few half-hearted swallows.
Leaving him, I went along to the tack room and took a new head collar out of the basket of stores. This was strictly against the rules: only Cass was supposed to issue new tack. I took the head collar along to Mickey's box and fitted it on to him, removing the one he had weakened by constant fretting during his fortnight's illness and hiding it under a pile of straw. I undipped the tethering chain from the old collar and clipped it on to the ring of the new one. I patted Mickey's neck, which he didn't like, walked out of his box, and shut and bolted only the bottom half of the door.
We rode out the first lot, and the second lot; and by then, I judged, Mickey's brain, without its morning dose, would be coming out of its sedation.
