Dead Heat Part 31

'What's that?' she asked, setting the tray down on a table.

'Yes, what is this "marbling"?' implored Bernard.

Toby looked at Caroline and he seemed a bit embarra.s.sed.

'It's placing a large gla.s.s marble in the uterus of a mare to simulate a pregnancy.'

'But why would anyone do that?' asked Caroline.

'To stop her coming into season,' said Toby.

'Sorry,' said Bernard. 'You've lost me.'

'Suppose you don't want a filly or a mare coming into season at a certain time,' said Toby. 'You place a large marble or two through her cervix and into the uterus. The fact that there is something in the uterus already seems somehow to fool the animal into thinking that she is pregnant so she doesn't ovulate, come into season or go on heat.'

'Why would that be a problem anyway?' I asked.

'Well, sometimes it may be that you want the mare in season at an exact moment, say for breeding on a specific day to a stallion, so you could marble the mare for a few weeks, then remove the marbles and, hey presto, the mare comes on heat almost immediately. I don't know it all; you'd have to ask a vet. But I do know it's done a lot. Some show jumpers are kept off heat for major compet.i.tions. Otherwise they can go all moody and don't behave properly. Just like a woman.' He laughed, and Sally playfully smacked his knee.

'Or a polo pony,' I said. 'You probably wouldn't want a female polo pony to be in season during a match, especially if there were some male ponies playing as well.'

'Certainly not if any of them were full horses,' said Toby.

'Full horses?' asked Bernard, munching on a biscuit.

'Stallions,' said Toby. 'As opposed to geldings.'

Bernard seemed to wince a little, and he pressed his knees tightly together.

'So you think this ball could be used instead of a gla.s.s marble?' I asked.

'I don't know,' he said. 'They're about the same size. But it would have to be sterilised. At least on the outside.'

'How many did you say could be inserted?' I asked.

'One or two is normal, I think,' he said. 'But I do know that at least three have been used. Maybe more. You would have to ask a vet.'

'Wouldn't they just fall out?' asked Caroline, amused.

'No,' said Toby. 'You need to give the mare an injection to open the cervix to get them in. The marbles are placed in the uterus through a tube that looks like a short piece of plastic drainpipe. When the injection wears off, the cervix closes and keeps them in. Easy. I've seen it done.'

'But how do you get them out again?' I asked.

'I've never actually seen them come out,' he said, 'but I think you just give the mare the cervix-opening injection and the marbles are pushed out naturally.'

'But surely this ball wouldn't be big enough to smuggle drugs,' said Bernard. 'In horses or otherwise.'

'I was told that Peter Komarov imports horses by the jumbo-jetful,' I said. 'How many horses could you get on a jumbo?'

'I'll try and find out,' said Toby, and he went out of the drawing room.

'We shall a.s.sume that each horse would have a minimum of three b.a.l.l.s placed in it,' I said.

'Only the female horses,' said Caroline.

'True,' I said. 'But wouldn't they all be females if that is what he wanted?'

'Wouldn't it depend on which horses were due to be imported?' said Sally.

'Not if Komarov owned the horses as well,' I said.

Toby came back. 'According to LRT, the transport people who take and collect horses from Gatwick and Luton, there can be up to eighty horses on a jumbo.'

'Phew,' I said. 'That's a lot of horseflesh.'

'Eighty horses times three b.a.l.l.s each,' said Caroline. 'Two hundred and forty b.a.l.l.s' worth. How much is that?'

I remembered from school that the formula for the volume of a sphere was r r3. The b.a.l.l.s were about four centimetres across. I did a quick mental calculation. The volume of a ball was about thirty cubic centimetres: 30CC per ball 240 b.a.l.l.s = 7,200CC.

'Just over seven litres,' I said.

'And just how much is that?' asked Bernard. 'I don't work in litres.'

I did another rough calculation. 'It would fill a bit more than twelve pint beer gla.s.ses.'

'And how much would that volume of cocaine be worth?' he asked.

'I've no idea of the price of cocaine,' I said.

'I expect it will say on the Internet,' said Toby. 'I'll go and ask Google.' He disappeared again.

We sat and waited for him. I drank my tea, and Bernard sneaked his fourth chocolate biscuit.

Toby came back. 'According to the Internet, cocaine is worth about forty pounds per gram as a sort of wholesale price,' he said.

'And how many grams are there in a pint mug?' asked Bernard, holding out his chubby hands with the palms up.

I laughed. 'My brain hurts. If it was water there would be a thousand grams in each litre. So there would be seven thousand grams in all. I don't know whether cocaine powder is more or less dense than water. Does it float?'

'It can't be much different,' said Bernard. 'Say seven thousand grams at forty pounds a time is,' he paused, 'two hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Not bad. But not that much for all the risks involved.'

'But that's not the half of it,' said Caroline. 'For a start, you probably import cocaine at ioo per cent purity, and then you "cut" it, that is you add baking soda or vitamin C powder, or even sugar. At least a third, and sometimes as much as two thirds or three quarters of what is sold on the street is the cut.'

I looked at her in shocked surprise. She smiled. 'I once had a crackhead as a boyfriend. It lasted for a week or two, until I found out about his habit. But we stayed friends for a while longer and he told me all about buying c.o.ke, as he called it. I sers mostly buy it as a twist of powder or a rock of crack. That's just enough for a single dose. A twist of cocaine powder may only contain fifty milligrams of pure cocaine. So you can get at least twenty twists from a single gram. That puts the potential street value of each gram hugely higher. In all, a jumbo-jet-load would be worth millions, and how many jumbo-jetfuls are there?'

'Plus, of course, the profit from the sale of the horses,' I said.

'If there is any,' said Toby. 'He would have to buy them in South America and pay for the transportation. I don't suppose there would be that much profit. Unless horses are very cheap in Argentina.'

'How would we find out?' I asked.

Toby went out again and I thought he was going to somehow discover the answer to my question. But he didn't. He came back with a book. It was like a large thick paperback. 'This is a catalogue from the Horses in Training sale at Newmarket last October when I bought a horse from Komarov. I thought I'd look it up.' He flicked through the pages. 'Here it is.' He studied it. 'It says here that it was sent to the sale by a company called Horse Imports Ltd. But I know it was Komarov's horse. He was there. He congratulated me afterwards on my purchase.'

'You mean you spoke to this man?' said Sally, disturbed. 'Does he know who you are?'

'Not really,' said Toby.

'I hope not,' she said to him. 'Not if he's trying to kill your brother.' She looked at me. 'You shouldn't have come here.' I could see that, for the first time, she really did believe I was in danger, and, consequently, so was she, and so was her family.

Toby was actually my half-brother. We shared the same mother, but my father had been her second husband. Toby was the son of a newly qualified accountant who had died of kidney failure when Toby had been two. Toby's surname wasn't Moreton. It was Chambers.

'Komarov won't know that Toby is my brother,' I said.

'I hope you're right,' Sally said.

So did I.

CHAPTER 19.

Toby spent much of the evening going through the sale catalogue page by page. He came up with the fact that sixty-eight of the fifteen hundred or so horses sold at that sale were from Horse Imports Ltd. And every single one of them was female, either a mare or a filly. And that couldn't be a coincidence.

That sale was just one of eleven similar sales held each year at Newmarket. There were also many major bloodstock auctions at Doncaster, and at Fairyhouse and Kill in Ireland, not to mention many others around the world. Then there were the horses sold privately. The horse-selling business worldwide was enormous. Lots and lots of jumbo-jetfuls, each one producing millions.

As Toby had studied the catalogue, Caroline and I had sat in front of his computer screen and ran searches on Horse Imports Ltd on the Companies House website. It was a British subsidiary of a Dutch company. It had an annual turnover that ran into tens of millions, but it seemed to have liabilities to its parent company equal to its gross profit, and so it showed no net profit, and hence paid no UK tax. I didn't know how many horses it sold each year but, if they were all as reasonably priced as Toby had said, there must have been thousands of them. I wondered if they all had a uterus, and whether they had all arrived in the UK with drug-filled metal b.a.l.l.s. And those were just the British-bound horses. I knew he also sold horses in the United States and I suspected he did too in his native Russia, if only to his polo club. Where else? I wondered. Would there be enough female horses in the whole of South America?

I tried to use the computer to trace the parent company into the Dutch system but without any success. I was fairly confident that the Dutch company would, itself, prove to have a parent company, and so on. I suspected that the overall parent, the matriarch company at the top of the tree, would turn out to have a Dutch Antilles base, to be an offsh.o.r.e ent.i.ty where such considerations as corporation taxes were not a worry.

Bernard had made an interesting little speech before he had taken himself back to London. 'One of the major problems for drug dealers,' he had said, 'is what to do with the vast amounts of cash generated by the trade. Nowadays governments have wised up and put anti-money-laundering measures in place. You know how difficult it is now to open a bank account? Well, that's because the banks are required to prove not only who you are but that funds in your accounts are come by in a legal and tax-reported fas.h.i.+on. These days you can't buy things with cash, not really expensive things like cars and houses. Even bookmakers won't take a large bet in cash any more, and they certainly won't pay you out in cash if you win. It has to be by bank transfer or credit card. So cash is a problem. It's all right if it's only a few hundred or even a few thousand; that's easy to spend. But millions in cash? You can't just buy your luxury Mediterranean yacht with suitcases full of cash. The yacht seller won't take it, because he has the same problem.'

'Can't you take the suitcases of cash into the Cayman Islands or somewhere and put it in a bank?' I had asked.

'No chance,' he'd replied. 'It's now more difficult to open a bank account in the Cayman Islands than it is here. They are subject to all sorts of regulations laid down by both the United States and the European Union.'

'But I thought they were an offsh.o.r.e centre for saving tax? What have the US and Europe got to do with it?'

'If the offsh.o.r.e centres don't comply with the rules, the US won't allow its citizens to go there. It would be like Cuba,' he had gone on. 'And the Cayman Islands rely on the tourism industry to survive, and nearly all their tourists come from the United States, mostly on cruise s.h.i.+ps.'

I sat playing with the computer and thinking about how I would deal with millions of pounds in cash if I had been Mr Komarov.

'Suppose,' I said to Caroline, 'he sends the cash back to South America along with the empty b.a.l.l.s. Customs don't care about cash leaving. They're too busy looking out for drugs arriving.'

'So,' she said, 'what good would that do? Bernard said you can't transfer large amounts from South America to banks over here without having to prove first it's not drug money.'

'I know,' I said. 'But how about if you don't transfer it back. How about if you use the cash to buy horses as well as drugs.'

She sat there looking at me with her mouth open.

'No one,' I went on, 'is going to worry about being paid in cash for a moderately priced horse or two in Argentina, Uruguay or Colombia. I bet that Komarov has hundreds of small horse breeders who regularly provide him with the horses for cash in hand. You simply send the profit generated from the drug smuggling back to South America as cash to buy more female horses to continue the trade, in a never-ending cycle. It's self-perpetuating. Remember, Toby said he doubted that the sale of the horses would make much profit. It doesn't have to. It's not there to make a profit. It's there to launder the cash. In the end you have legitimate money from the legitimate sale of the horses at the prestigious Newmarket Bloodstock Sales, where Mr Komarov is seen as a pillar of society, and is, no doubt, welcomed with open arms and a gla.s.s of champagne because he brings sixty-eight horses to every sale.'

'But we don't actually know he smuggles drugs,' Caroline said.

'It doesn't matter what he's smuggling,' I said. 'It could be anything of high value that can fit into those b.a.l.l.s. Provided someone is prepared to pay, it could be computer chips, explosives, or even radioactive materials.'

'Wouldn't that injure the horses?' she said.

'Not if they were alpha particle sources,' I said. 'Alpha particles can be stopped by a piece of paper and the horse would easily be s.h.i.+elded from them by the metal of the ball. But they are very deadly if they enter the body without any s.h.i.+eld at all. Remember that ex-KGB spy who was murdered in London with polonium 2.10? That stuff is an alpha source, and it had to have been smuggled here from Russia or somewhere in Eastern Europe. These metal b.a.l.l.s could easily have been used to smuggle polonium 210 here without any harm being done to the horse.'

Caroline s.h.i.+vered. 'It's scary.'

'It certainly is.'

'But surely the b.a.l.l.s would show up if the horses were X-rayed,' she said.

'I expect so,' I said. 'But they don't X-ray the horses. X-rays can damage a developing embryo or a foetus and many horses ire transported after they are pregnant. It would be far too risky.'

'But,' she said, smiling, 'if someone was to anonymously whisper to Her Majesty's customs that Mr Komarov's next jumbo-jetful of horses from South America might just be worth X-raying, then Mr Komarov might find himself in a bit of hot water, not to mention in the slammer.'

I kissed her. Perfect.

'But something is still worrying me,' she said. 'Why did Komarov bomb the box at Newmarket? Surely that was stupid and dangerous.'

'I wonder if it was a punishment,' I said.

'For what?'

'Maybe Rolf Schumann was not paying his dues to Komarov.' I thought for a moment. 'Perhaps he'd been using the cash from the drug and horse sales to support his ailing tractor business instead of pa.s.sing it on. Maybe the bombing was a demonstration to warn Komarov's a.s.sociates in other countries around the world that he means business, and he won't stand for anyone robbing him.'

'You mean he killed innocent people just to send a warning?' she said.

'Komarov wouldn't care about the innocent,' I said. 'Drugs kill innocent people every day, one way or another.'

Toby was very moody in the morning. He snapped at the children over breakfast and even swore at the dog in front of them. It was out of character.

He had been out on the gallops with the first string of horses at six, an unusually warm May driving them out earlier and earlier. Breakfast with the family was between the first and second lots, before the three little ones were packed off to school in the car with Sally. They were at an age when the coming and going in this house washed over their world of school, parties, television and computer games.

'Bye, Uncle Max,' they all shouted to me as they clambered into Sally's people carrier, and then they were gone. I had left Caroline in bed catching up on six hours' time difference, and I had dragged myself from between the sheets only because I felt I had neglected the children the previous evening.

I went back inside and found Toby sitting at the kitchen table trying to read the Racing Post Racing Post. But, he obviously wasn't concentrating on the newspaper as I saw him restart the same article at least three times.

'What's the matter?' I asked, sitting myself down with a mug of coffee.