Eddy Keith sat with his head held very still, watching me. I looked back at him, probably with much the same deceptively blank outer expression. Whatever he was thinking, I couldn't read. What I thought about was breaking into his office, and if he could read that he was clairvoyant.

Sir Thomas and the administrators, consulting among themselves, raised their heads to listen when Lucas Wainwright asked a question. 'Do you really think, Sid, that Deansgate infected those horses himself?' He seemed to think it unlikely. 'Surely he couldn't produce a syringe anywhere near any of those horses, let alone all four.'

'I did think,' I said, 'that it might have been someone else… like a work jockey, or even a vet…'Inky Poole and Brothersmith, I thought, would have had me for slander if they could have heard.'… But there's a way almost anyone could do it.'

I dipped again into my jacket and produced the packet containing the needle attached to the pea-sized bladder. I gave the packet to Sir Thomas, who opened it, tipping the contents onto his desk.

They all looked. Understood. Were convinced.

'He'd be more likely to do it himself if he could,' I said. 'He wouldn't want to risk anyone else knowing, and perhaps having a hold over him.'

'It amazes me,' Sir Thomas said with apparent genuineness, 'how you work these things out, Sid.'

'But I…'

'Yes,' he said, smiling. 'We all know what you're going to say. At heart you're still a jockey.'

There seemed to be a long pause. Then I said, 'Sir, you're wrong. This…' I pointed to the cassette, 'is what I am now. And from now on.'

His face sobered into a long frowning look in which it seemed that he was reassessing his whole view of me, as so many others had recently done. It was to him, as to Rosemary, that I still appeared as a jockey, but to myself, no longer. When he spoke again his voice was an octave lower, and thoughtful.

'We've taken you too lightly.' He paused. 'I did mean what I said to you at Chester about being a positive force for good in racing, but I also see that I thought of it as something of an unexpected joke.' He shook his head slowly. 'I'm sorry.'

Lucas Wainwright said briskly, 'It's been increasingly clear what Sid has become.' He was tired of the subject and waiting as usual to spur on to the next thing. 'Do you have any plans, Sid, as to what to do next?'

'Talk to the Caspars,' I said. 'I thought I might drive up there tomorrow.'

'Good idea,' Lucas said. 'You won't mind if I come? It's a matter for the Security Service now, of course.'

'And for the police, in due course,' said Sir Thomas, with a touch of gloom. He saw all public prosecutions for racing-based crimes as sources of disgrace to the whole industry, and was inclined to let people get away with things, if prosecuting them would involve a damaging scandal. I tended to agree with him, to the point of doing the same myself, but only if privately one could fix it so that the offence wouldn't be repeated.

'If you're coming, Commander,' I said to Lucas Wainwright, 'perhaps you could make an appointment with them. They may be going to York. I was simply going to turn up at Newmarket early and trust to luck, but you won't want to do that.'

'Definitely not,' he said crisply. 'I'll telephone straight away.'

He bustled off to his own office, and I put the cassette into its small plastic box and handed it to Sir Thomas.

'I put it on tape because it's complicated, and you might want to hear it again.'

'You're so right, Sid,' said one of the administrators, ruefully. 'All that about pigeons…!'

Lucas Wainwright came back. 'The Caspars are at York, but went by air-taxi and are returning tonight. George Caspar wants to see his horses work, in the morning, before flying back to York. I told his secretary chap that it was of the utmost importance I see Caspar, so we're due there at eleven. Suit you, Sid?'

'Yes, fine.'

'Pick me up here, then, at nine?' I nodded. 'O. K.'

'I'll be in my office, checking the mail.'

Eddy Keith gave me a final blank stare and without a word removed himself from the room.

Sir Thomas and all the administrators shook my hand and also Chico's; and going down in the lift Chico said, 'They'll be kissing you next.'

'It won't last.'

We walked back to where I had left the Scimitar, which was where I shouldn't have. There was a parking ticket under the wiper blade. There would be.

'Are you going back to the flat?' Chico said, folding himself into the passenger's seat.

'No.' 'You still think those boot men…?'

'Trevor Deansgate,' I said.

Chico's face melted into half-mocking comprehension.

'Afraid he'll duff you up?'

'He'll know by now… from his brother,' I shivered internally from a strong flash of the persistent horrors.

'Yeah, I suppose so.' It didn't worry him. 'Look, I brought that begging letter for you…'He dug into a trouser pocket and produced a much-folded and slightly grubby sheet of paper. I eyed it disgustedly, reading it through. Exactly the same as the ones Jenny had sent, except signed with a flourish 'Elizabeth More', and headed with the Clifton address.

'Do you realise they may have to produce this filthy bit of paper in court?'

'Been in my pocket, hasn't it?' he said defensively.

'What else've you got in there? Potting compost?'

He took the letter from me and put it in the glove box, and let down the window.

'Hot, isn't it?'

'Mm.'

I wound down my own side window, and started the car, and drove him back to his place in Finchley Road.

'I'll stay in the same hotel,' I said. 'And look… come to Newmarket with me tomorrow.'

'Sure, if you want. What for?'

I shrugged, making light of it. 'Bodyguard.'

He was surprised. He said wonderingly, 'You can't really be afraid of him… this Deansgate… are you?'

I shifted in my seat a bit, and sighed.

'I guess so,' I said.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I talked to Ken Armadale in the early evening. He wanted to know how my session with the Jockey Club had gone, but more than that he sounded smugly self satisfied, and not without reason.

'That erysipelas strain has been made immune to practically every antibiotic in the book,' he said. 'Very thorough. But I reckon there's an obscure little bunch he won't have bothered with, because no one would think of pumping them into horses. Rare, they are, and expensive. All the signs I have here are that they would work. Anyway, I've tracked some down.'

'Great,' I said. 'Where?'

'In London, at one of the teaching hospitals. I've talked with the pharmacist there, and he's promised to pack some in a box and leave it at the reception desk for you to collect. It will have Halley on it.'

'Ken, you're terrific.'

'I've had to mortage my soul, to get it.'

I picked up the parcel in the morning and arrived at Portman Square to find Chico again waiting on the doorstep. Lucas Wainwright came down from his office and said he would drive us in his car, if we liked, and I thought of all the touring around I'd been doing for the past fortnight, and accepted gratefully. We left the Scimitar in the car park which had been full the day before, a temporary open air affair in a cleared building site, and set off to Newmarket in a large, air-conditioned Mercedes.

'It's too darned hot,' Lucas said, switching on the refrigeration. 'Wrong time of year.'

He had come tidily dressed in a suit, which Chico and I hadn't: jeans and sports shirts and not a jacket between us.

'Nice car, this,' Chico said admiringly.

'You used to have a Merc, Sid, didn't you?' Lucas said.

I said yes, and we talked about cars half the way to Suffolk. Lucas drove well but as impatiently as he did everything else. A pepper and salt man, I thought, sitting beside him. Brown and grey speckled hair, brownish grey eyes, with flecks in the iris. Brown and grey checked shirt, with a nondescript tie. Pepper and salt in his manner, in his speech patterns, in all his behaviour.