'Clouds,' she said contentedly. 'What do you think of when you're doing it?'

'Sex?'

She nodded.

'I feel. It isn't thought.'

'Sometimes I see roses… on trellises… scarlet and pink and gold. Sometimes spiky stars. This time it will be white frilly muslin clouds.'

I asked her, after.

'No. All bright sunlight. Quite blinding.'

The sunlight, in truth, had flooded into the room, making the whole white canopy translucent and shimmering.

'Why didn't you want the curtains drawn, last night?' she said.

'Don't you like the dark?'

'I don't like sleeping when my enemies are up and about.'

I said it without thinking. The actual truth of it followed after, like a freezing shower.

'Like an animal,' she said, and then, 'What's the matter?'

Remember me, I thought, as I am. And I said, 'Like some breakfast?'

We went back to Oxford. I took the film to be developed, and we had lunch at Les Quat' Saisons, where the delectable pat‚ de turbot and the superb quenelle de brochet soufflee kept the shadows at bay a while longer. With the coffee, though, came the unavoidable minute.

'I have to be in London at four o'clock,' I said.

Louise said, 'When are you going to the police about Nicky?'

'I'll come back here on Thursday, day after tomorrow, to pick up the photos. I'll do it then.' I reflected. 'Give that lady in Bristol two more happy days.'

'Poor thing.'

'Will I see you, Thursday?' I said.

'Unless you're blind.'

Chico was propping up the Portman Square building with a look of resignation, as if he'd been there for hours. He shifted his shoulder off the stonework at my on-foot approach and said 'Took your time, didn't you?'

'The car park was full.' From one hand he dangled the black cassette recorder we used occasionally, and he was otherwise wearing jeans and a sports shirt and no jacket. The hot weather, far from vanishing, had settled in on an almost stationary high pressure system, and I was also in shirtsleeves, though with a tie on, and a jacket over my arm. On the third floor all the windows were open, the street noises coming up sharply, and Sir Thomas Ullaston, sitting behind his big desk, had dealt with the day in pale blue shirting with white stripes.

'Come in, Sid,' he said, seeing me appear in his open doorway. 'I've been waiting for you.'

'I'm sorry I'm late,' I said, shaking hands.

'This is Chico Barnes, who works with me.' He shook Chico's hand. 'Right,' he said. 'Now you're here, we'll get Lucas Wainwright and the others along.' He pressed an intercom button and spoke to his secretary. 'And bring some more chairs, would you?'

The office slowly filled up with more people than I'd expected, but all of whom I knew at least to talk to. The top administrative brass in full force, about six of them, all urbane worldly men, the people who really ran racing. Chico looked at them slightly nervously as if at an alien breed, and seemed to be relieved when a table was provided for him to put the recorder on. He sat with the table between himself and the room, like a barrier. I fished into my jacket for the cassette I'd brought, and gave it to him.

Lucas Wainwright came with Eddy Keith on his heels: Eddy looking coldly out of the genial face; big bluff Eddy whose warmth for me was slowly dying.

'Well, Sid,' Sir Thomas said. 'Here we all are. Now, on the telephone yesterday you told me you had discovered how Tri-Nitro had been nobbled for the Guineas, and as you see… we are all very interested.' He smiled. 'So fire away.'

I made my own manner match theirs: calm and dispassionate, as if Trevor Deansgate's threat wasn't anywhere in my mind, instead of continually flashing through it like stabs.

'I've… er… put it all onto tape,' I said. 'You'll hear two voices. The other is Ken Armadale, from the Equine Research. I asked him to clarify the veterinary details, which are his province, not mine.'

The well-brushed heads nodded. Eddy Keith merely stared. I glanced at Chico, who pressed the start button, and my own voice, disembodied, spoke loudly into a wholly attentive silence.

'This is Sid Halley, at the Equine Research Establishment, on Monday, May fourteenth…'

I listened to the flat sentences, spelling it out. The identical symptoms in four horses, the lost races, the bad hearts. My request, via Lucas Wainwright, to be informed if any of the three still alive should die. The post mortem on Gleaner, with Ken Armadale repeating in greater detail my own simpler account. His voice explaining, again after me, how horses had come to be infected by a disease of pigs. His voice saying, 'I found active live germs in the lesions on Gleaner's heart valves, and also in the blood taken from Zingaloo…" and my voice continuing, 'A mutant strain of the disease was produced at the Tierson Vaccine Laboratory at Cambridge in the following manner…'

It wasn't the easiest of procedures to understand, but I watched the faces and saw that they did, particularly by the time Ken Armadale had gone through it all again, confirming what I'd said.

'As to motive and opportunity,' my voice said, 'we come to a man called Trevor Deansgate…'

Sir Thomas's head snapped back from its forward, listening posture, and he stared at me bleakly from across the room. Remembering, no doubt, that he had entertained Trevor Deansgate in the Stewards' box at Chester. Remembering perhaps that he had brought me and Trevor Deansgate there face to face.

Among the other listeners the name had created an almost equal stir. All of them either knew him or knew of him: the big up-and-coming influence among bookmakers, the powerful man shouldering his way into top-rank social acceptance. They knew Trevor Deansgate, and their faces were shocked.

'The real name of Trevor Deansgate is Trevor Shummuck,' my voice said. 'There is a research worker at the vaccine laboratory called Barry Shummuck, who is his brother. The two brothers, on friendly terms, have been seen together at the laboratories on several occasions…'

Oh God, I thought. My voice went on, and I listened in snatches. I've really done it. There's no going back.

'… This is the laboratory where the mutant strain originally arose… unlikely after all this time for there to be any of it anywhere else…

'Trevor Deansgate owns a horse which George Caspar trains. Trevor Deansgate is on good terms with Caspar… watches the morning gallops and goes to breakfast. Trevor Deansgate stood to make a fortune if he knew in advance that the overwinter favourites for the Guineas and the Derby couldn't win. Trevor Deansgate had the means – the disease; the motive -money; and the opportunity- entry into Caspar's well-guarded stable. It would seem, therefore, that there are grounds for investigating his activities further.'

My voice stopped, and after a minute or two Chico switched off the recorder. Looking slightly dazed himself, he ejected the cassette and laid it carefully on the table.

'It's incredible,' Sir Thomas said, but not as if he didn't believe it.

'What do you think, Lucas?'

Lucas Wainwright cleared his throat. 'I think we should congratulate Sid on an exceptional piece of work.'

Except for Eddy Keith, they agreed with him and did so, to my embarrassment, and I thought it generous of him to have said it at all, considering the Security themselves had done negative dope tests and left it at that. But then. the Security, I reflected, hadn't had Rosemary Caspar visiting them in false curls and hysteria: and they hadn't had the benefit of Trevor Deansgate revealing himself to them as a villain before they even positively suspected him, threatening vile things if they didn't leave him alone.

As Chico had said, our successes had stirred up the enemy to the point where they were likely to clobber us before we knew why.