me?'
'Hang on a moment.' There was a fluttering of pages, and Terence told me the numbers and addresses. I wrote them down and thanked him.
'Your clothes are still here, sir,' he said.
'I know,' I grinned.
'I'll be along to collect them quite soon, I think.'
We rang off, and I tried Beckett's number. A dry, precise voice told me that Colonel Beckett was out, but that he would be dining at his Club at nine, and could be reached then. Sir Stuart Macclesfield, it transpired, was in a nursing home recovering from pneumonia. I had hoped to be able to summon some help in keeping a watch on Humber's yard so that when the horse-box left with Kandersteg on board it could be followed. It looked, however, as though I would have to do it myself, as I could visualize the local police neither believing my story nor providing anyone to assist me.
Armed with a rug and a pair of good binoculars bought in a pawn shop, and also with a pork pie, slabs of chocolate, a bottle of Vichy water, and some sheets of foolscap paper, I rode the motor-cycle back through Posset and out along the road which crossed the top of the valley in which Humber's stables lay. Stopping at the point I had marked on my previous excursion, I wheeled the cycle a few yards down into the scrubby heath land and found a position where I was off the sky line, more or less out of sight from passing cars, and also looking down into Humber's yard through the binoculars. It was one o'clock, and there was nothing happening there.
I unbuckled the suitcase from the carrier and used it as a seat, settling myself to stay there for a long time. Even if I could reach Beckett on the telephone at nine, he wouldn't be able to rustle up reinforcements much before the next morning.
There was, meanwhile, a report to make, a fuller, more formal, more explanatory affair than the notes scribbled in Posset's post office. I took out the foolscap paper and wrote, on and off, for most of the afternoon, punctuating my work by frequent glances through the binoculars. But nothing took place down at Humber's except the normal routine of the stable.
I began. To The Earl of October.
Sir Stuart Macclesfield.
Colonel Roderick Beckett. Sirs, The following is a summary of the facts which have so far come to light during my investigations on your behalf, together with some deductions which it seems reasonable to make from them.
Paul James Adams and Hedley Humber started collaborating in a scheme for ensuring winners about four years ago, when Adams bought the Manor House and came to live at Tellbridge, Northumberland.
Adams (in my admittedly untrained opinion) has a psychopathic personality, in that he impulsively gives himself pleasure and pursues his own ends without any consideration for other people or much apparent anxiety about the consequences to himself. His intelligence seems to be above average, and it is he who gives the orders. I believe it is fairly common for psychopaths to be aggressive swindlers: it might be enlightening to dig up his life history.
Humber, though dominated by Adams, is not as irresponsible. He is cold and controlled at all times. I have never seen him genuinely angry (he uses anger as a weapon) and everything he does seems to be thought out and calculated. Whereas Adams may be mentally abnormal, Humber seems to be simply wicked. His comparative sanity may act as a brake on Adams, and have prevented their discovery before this.
Jud Wilson, the head travelling-lad, and Cass, the head lad, are both involved, but only to the extent of being hired subordinates. Neither of them does as much stable work as their jobs would normally entail, but they are well paid. Both own big cars of less than a year old.
Adams' and Humber's scheme is based on the fact that horses learn by association and connect noises to events.
Like Pavlov's dogs who would come to the sound of a bell because they had been taught it meant feeding time, horses hearing the feed trolley rattling across a stable yard know very well that their food is on the way.
If a horse is accustomed to a certain consequence following closely on a certain noise, he automatically expects the consequence whenever he hears the noise. He reacts to the noise in anticipation of what is to come.
If something frightening were substituted if, for instance, the rattle of the feed trolley were followed always by a thrashing and no food the horse would soon begin to fear the noise, because of what it portended.
Fear is the stimulant which Adams and Humber have used. The appearance of all the apparently 'doped' horses after they had won the staring, rolling eyes and the heavy sweat was consistent with their having been in a state of terror.
Fear strongly stimulates the adrenal glands, so that they flood the bloodstream with adrenalin:
and the effect of extra adrenalin, as of course you know, is to release the upsurge of energy needed to deal with the situation, either by fighting back or by running away. Running, in this case. At top speed, in panic.
The laboratory reports stated that the samples taken from all the original eleven horses showed a high adrenalin content, but this was not significant because horses vary enormously, some always producing more adrenalin than others. I, however, think that it was significant that the adrenalin counts of those eleven horses were uniformly higher than average.
The noise which triggered off their fear is the high note of the sort of silent whistle normally used for training dogs. Horses can hear it well, though to human ears it is faint: this fact makes it ideal for the purpose, as a more obtrusive sound (a football rattle, for instance) would soon have been spotted. Humber keeps a dog whistle in the drinks compartment of his Bentley.
I do not yet know for sure how Adams and Humber frighten the horses, but I can make a guess.
For a fortnight I looked after a horse known in the yard as Mickey (registered name, Starlamp) who had been given the treatment. In Mickey's case, it was a disaster. He returned from three days' absence with large raw patches on his fore legs and in a completely unhinged mental state.
The wounds on his legs were explained by the head lad as having been caused by the application of a blister. But there was no blister paste to be seen, and I think they were ordinary burns caused by some sort of naked flame. Horses are more afraid of fire than of anything else, and it seems probable to me that it is expectation of being burnt that Adams and Humber have harnessed to the sound of a dog whistle.
I blew a dog whistle to discover its effect on Mickey. It was less than three weeks after the association had been planted, and he reacted violently and unmistakably. If you care to, you can repeat this trial on Six-Ply; but give him room to bolt in safety.
Adams and Humber chose horses which looked promising throughout then' racing careers but had never won on account of running out of steam or guts at the last fence; and there are of course any number of horses like this. They bought them cheaply one at a time from auction sales or out of selling races, instilled into them a noise-fear association, and quietly sold them again. Often, far from losing on the deal, they made a profit (of. past histories of horses collected by officer cadets).
Having sold a horse with such a built-in accelerator, Adams and Humber then waited for it to run in a selling 'chase at one of five courses:
Sedgefield, Haydock, Ludlow, Kelso, and Stafford. They seem to have been prepared to wait indefinitely for this combination of place and event to occur, and in fact it has only occurred twelve times (eleven winners and Superman) since the first case twenty months ago.
These courses were chosen, I imagine, because their extra long run-in gave the most room for the panic to take effect. The horses were often lying fourth or fifth when landing over the last fence, and needed time to overhaul the leaders. If a horse was left too hopelessly behind, Adams and Humber could just have left the whistle un blown forfeited their stake money, and waited for another day.
Selling 'chases were preferred, I think, because horses are less likely to fall in them, and because of the good possibility of the winners changing hands yet again immediately afterwards.
At first sight it looks as if it would have been safer to have applied this scheme to Flat racing:
but Flat racers do not seem to change hands so often, which would lessen the confusion. Then again Humber has never held a Flat licence, and probably can't get one.
None of the horses has been galvanized twice, the reason probably being that having once discovered they were not burnt after hearing the whistle they would be less likely to expect to be again. Their reaction would no longer be reliable enough to gamble on.
