Part 30 (1/2)

'I think you could say that,' I said. I told them about the maniac with the mallet and about the damage he did to the rental car.

'But why?' said Bernard.

Instead of answering, I removed the s.h.i.+ny metal ball from my pocket and tossed it to Toby.

'What is that?' asked Sally.

'I don't know,' I said. 'I was hoping one of you might be able to tell me. I know it's significant. Having one probably contributed to my broken arm, and it might have cost me a lot more if I hadn't managed to escape.'

Bernard looked me in the face.

'Life and death,' he said slowly, half under his breath.

They pa.s.sed the ball back and forth between them and I gave them a couple of minutes to examine it in silence.

'OK,' said Toby. 'I give up. What is it?'

'Hey,' exclaimed Sally, 'it unscrews. It comes apart.' She triumphantly held up the two pieces. She leaned over and showed Toby what she had done. She then put the ball back together and tossed it to Bernard. He struggled with his podgy fingers but, finally, he too was able to open the ball.

'But what is it for?' asked Toby again.

'I really don't know,' I said. 'But I feel it must be part of the key to all this.'

'Max and I think it must have been made to hold something,' Caroline said. 'It fits so tightly together that we wondered if the contents mustn't leak out.'

'And it might have something to do with polo ponies,' I added, as if another clue might help solve the riddle.

'Polo ponies?' said Bernard.

'Yes,' I said. 'It may be to do with the importation of polo ponies.'

'From where?' asked Toby.

'South America mostly,' I said, remembering what Dorothy Schumann had said. 'Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia.'

'Drugs?' said Sally. 'There's an awful lot of cocaine in Colombia. Could this be used to hold drugs?'

They all examined the ball again as if it would give up the answer.

'Like condoms,' I said.

'What?' said Bernard.

'Condoms,' I said again. 'You must have heard of people who are paid to carry drugs in condoms through customs. They tie the end up and swallow condoms with drugs inside them. Then they fly to England, or somewhere, wait for nature to take its course and, hey presto, you have condoms full of drugs.'

'Mules,' said Caroline. 'They're called mules. Lots of women do it from Jamaica or Nigeria. For the money.'

'Sounds rather dangerous to me,' said Toby. 'Don't the condoms burst?'

'Apparently not,' Caroline said. 'I saw a television programme about it. Some of them get caught by Customs using X-rays, but most of them don't. And they're desperate for money.'

'Are you suggesting,' said Bernard, 'that metal b.a.l.l.s like this could be somehow filled with drugs and swallowed to smuggle the stuff here from South America?' He held the ball up to his open mouth. It might have just about gone in, but his expression said that swallowing the ball would be another matter altogether.

'Not in humans, you fool,' I said, laughing at him. 'In horses.'

'Could a horse really swallow something this big?' he asked, serious again.

'Easily,' said Toby. 'They can swallow an apple whole. I've seen it. You twitch their top lip, hold the head up and throw the apple down their throat. It used to be done quite often to give pills. You hollow out an apple, fill it with the medicine and chuck it down. No problem.'

'What do you mean, you twitch their top lip?' asked Caroline.

'A twitch is a stick with a loop of strong twine on the end,' he explained. 'You put the loop round the animal's top lip and twist the stick until the loop gets tight.'

'It sounds dreadful,' said Caroline, holding her own top lip.

'Well, it is,' said Toby. 'But it works, I can tell you. It will control even the wildest of horses. They usually just stand very still. We sometimes have to use a twitch on one of ours for shoeing. Otherwise the farrier gets kicked to h.e.l.l.'

'So you could get a horse to swallow one of those,' I said to him, pointing at the ball.

'Oh yes, no problem. But I don't think it would ever come out the other end.'

'Why not?' I said.

'Horses eat gra.s.s, we don't,' he said.

'What's that got to do with it?' Bernard asked.

'Gra.s.s is very indigestible,' said Toby. 'Humans can't live on it because everything goes through us so fast, the cellulose fibres of gra.s.s coming out much the same as they went in, so we wouldn't get much nutrition from it. Horses have a system for slowing down the process, so there's time for their system to break the cellulose down.'

'Like cows?' said Bernard.

'Well, not exactly,' Toby went on. 'Cows have multiple stomachs and they chew the cud, which means they constantly regurgitate their food and rechew it. Horses have only one iairly small stomach, and once food is down there it won't come back up due to a strong valve at the stomach opening. This valve also means that horses can't vomit. So they have another method of breaking down the gra.s.s. It's called the caec.u.m and it's like a great big sack nearly four feet long and a foot wide that acts as a fermenter. But both the entry point and exit of this sack are near the top and I think this ball would simply drop to the bottom of the sack and stay there.'

'What would then happen?' I asked him.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Unless you can be sure the ball would float in the caec.u.m, I don't think it would ever come out. G.o.d knows what would happen. I suspect the horse would eventually get seriously ill with colic. You would have to ask a vet. All I know is that surprisingly little actually comes out the back of a horse compared to the amount you put in it at the front, and I really think the ball would be most unlikely to ever be emitted with the dung. And it would certainly be far too chancy to try it.'

'That puts the kybosh on that theory then,' I said. 'I somehow don't think that Mr Komarov leaves anything to chance.'

'Komarov?' said Toby. 'Not Peter Komarov?'

'Yes,' I said, surprised. 'Do you know him?'

'I know of him,' said Toby. 'He sells horses.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Polo ponies.'

'Not just polo ponies,' he said. 'He also sells lots of racehorses at the bloodstock sales. I've bought a few of them myself. For my owners, of course. Is it him you think is trying to kill you?' He sounded somewhat sceptical.

'I think he has something to do with it, yes.'