“Well,” I said, “thanks anyway.”

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll ask George when he gets in. He’s out at some damn committee meeting for the club he’s chairman of. I’ll call you if he thinks of anything more.”

“Thanks. Bye, now.” I hung up. Another dead end.

I looked again at the list that Detective Inspector Turner had sent. Of the seventeen names not crossed out and without a d next to them, I knew eleven. I suspected that the others, the ones I didn’t recognize, were Delafield people, one of whom, according to Ms. Harding at the newspaper, had since died from her burns. The eleven that I did recognize included one couple who were regulars at the Hay Net, and at least four others lived locally and had been occasional customers. The remaining five were from farther afield, and included a trainer and his wife from Middleham in Yorkshire, the wife of the Irish businessman who had been killed and an ex-jockey from the West Country who now made a meager living giving tips to corporate guests at race meetings. I couldn’t remember him giving a talk before the lunch, but I would have been in the kitchen by then anyway. None of them looked likely targets of a terrorist.

The last one was Rolf Schumann. Was he the target?

I checked my e-mails again. Nothing new.

I looked at my watch and the half hour was up. D.I. Turner would have gone off duty for the day, maybe for the weekend, so I would just have to be patient and wait.

It was seven-thirty and the restaurant dinner service was beginning to get into full swing, so I went into the kitchen to check if everything was going well and was promptly ordered out by Carl.

“You’re sick,” he said. “Go home, and let us get on with it.”

“I’m not sick,” I said. “I’ve just got a headache. You can’t catch concussion, you know.”

He grinned at me. “No matter. We are coping fine without you. This is Oscar.” Carl pointed at a new face in the kitchen. “He’s doing fine.” Oscar smiled. Gary didn’t. He was clearly not having one of his good days. I left them and returned to my office. I would have loved to go home, but I still wanted to search a little more on the Internet and I had no computer at home.

I checked my e-mails yet again but still nothing more. I was beginning to give up on D.I. Turner when my phone rang. It was him.

“Sorry,” he said. “I have found a copy of the original list, but I can’t seem to work this damn scanner, now the secretary’s gone home. And I’ve got to go home now as well. I’m meant to be taking the missus out to the cinema for her birthday, and I’m going to be late as it is. I’ll send it to you next week.”

“Couldn’t you just read it out?” I said. “I’ll write them down.”

“Oh all right. But quickly.”

I grabbed a pen and wrote down the names on the back of an old menu card. Neil Jennings was there as expected, as were George and Emma Kealy, and I knew of two of the other four, Patrick and Margaret Jacobs, who together ran a successful saddlery business in the town. The other couple I’d never heard of. Their names were Pyotr and Tatiana Komarov.

I thanked him and wished him a pleasant evening with his wife and to blame me for his lateness. He said he intended to, and hung up.

I looked at the names I had written on the menu. Why had I thought that the key to everything would be the names of those invited to but not present in the bombed box? Patrick and Margaret Jacobs were nice people who, I knew, looked after their customers with efficiency and charm. They seemed well respected, even liked, by most of the local Newmarket trainers, some of whom had even brought them to dinner at the Hay Net. I searched through the copy of the guest list for the Friday-night dinner and, sure enough, “Mr. amp; Mrs. Patrick Jacobs” were listed as having been present.

There was no such luck with the Komarovs, who were absent from the Friday-night list. That didn’t necessarily mean they hadn’t been at the dinner, just that they were not named.

I typed “Komarov” into my computer. My Google search engine threw up over a million hits. I tried “Pyotr Komarov” and cut it down to about thirty-eight thousand. The one I wanted could be any of them, most of whom were Russians. I asked my machine to look for “Tatiana Komarov.” “Do you mean Tatiana Komarova?” it asked me. I remembered that in Russian and other Slavic languages the female version of a surname ends in a. I tried “Tatiana Komarova.” Another eighteen thousand hits. Pyotr and Tatiana Komarov together produced sixteen thousand. It was like searching for the correct needle in a needle stack when you didn’t even know what the correct one looked like.

One of the hits caught my eye. A certain Pyotr Komarov was listed as the president of the St. Petersburg Polo Club. He must be the one, I thought. Pyotr Komarov and Rolf Schumann must be acquainted through polo.

I searched further, bringing up the Web site for the St. Petersburg Polo Club. I hadn’t expected there to be so many until I realized that most of the results were for St. Petersburg in Florida. The one club I was after was in the burg founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703, the original St. Petersburg, the city on Russia’s Baltic coast.

According to the club site, polo in post-Soviet Russia was clearly on the rise. Clubs were apparently springing up like a rash and the new middle class was seemingly keen to emulate its American counterpart by making a trip to a polo match one of the social events of the week. In Russia, they even played polo on snow during the long winter, using an inflatable, football-sized orange ball instead of the traditional white solid-wood one. It was reported that the Snow Polo Cup, sponsored by a major Swiss watchmaker, was the premier event of the St. Petersburg winter season, the place to see and be seen among the most chic of society.

So what? What could polo possibly have to do with the bombing of Newmarket racetrack? I didn’t know for sure that it did, but polo was undeniably a connection between some of the victims of the bomb and someone else who hadn’t been, although they had been expected to be.

12

I had a restless night, again. However, rather than the all-too-familiar nightmare of MaryLou and her missing legs I instead lay awake, trying to get my mind to think of Caroline but always returning to the burning questions: Who poisoned the dinner? And why? Was it really done to try to stop someone being at the races the following day? And, if so, who? Did someone, in fact, try to kill me by fixing the brakes of my car? And, if so, who? And why? And, finally, was it anything to do with the polo connection? Lots of questions but precious few answers.

I had spent most of the previous evening on the Internet. I had learned all sorts of things about polo I hadn’t known, and would probably have been happy never to know. It had been an Olympic sport five times, but not since 1936, when Argentina had won the gold medal. It seemed they were still the major force in world polo, and most of the ponies used still came from South America.

The Hurlingham Polo Association was the governing body of the game in the United Kingdom, even though no matches have, in fact, been played at Hurlingham Club since the polo fields were dug up to provide food for war-torn Londoners in 1939.

I had looked up the rules on their Web site. They ran to fifty pages of closely printed text and were so complicated that it was a surprise to me that anyone understood them at all. I was amused to discover that if the three-and-a-half-inch wooden ball were to split into two unequal parts after being hit by a mallet or trodden on by a pony, a goal could still be scored if the larger part were deemed to have passed between the posts. I could just imagine what a defender might have said if defending the wrong part of the ball. The rules even went so far as to state in writing that the mounted umpires were not allowed to use their cell telephones during play, while the nonmounted referee should avoid distractions like talking to his neighbors or using his phone while watching from the sidelines.