Free Comeback by Dick Francis

Needing nursing care. We’ve sent them to a trainer who had room in his yard. Belinda went to look after them.” Another pause. “They were upset, you see. They could smell the smoke. And we didn’t know ... I mean, the hospital might have burnt too, and the boxes.”
    “Yes.”
    He was still faintly trembling.
    I said, “It’s pretty cold in here.”
    “What? I suppose it is. The firemen said not to turn the central heating on until we’d had it checked. It’s gas-fired.”
    “Gas-fired in the office building too?”
    “Yes, but it was all switched off. It always is at night. The firemen asked.” He stared at me. “They made a point of shutting off the mains.” The shakes came back strongly. “It’s all a nightmare. It’s ... it’s ...”
    “Yes,” I said, “sit down.” I pointed to the gray-haired man’s padded chair behind the desk, the only remotely comfortable perch in sight.
    Ken groped his way onto it and sat as if his legs had given way. He had the sort of long loose-jointed limbs that seem always on the point of disconnecting from the hipbone, the thighbone, the anklebone—the skeleton coming apart. The longish Norwegian head accentuated it, and the thin big-knuckled fingers were an anatomy lesson in themselves.
    “Apart from the fire,” I said, “what’s the problem?”
    He put his elbows on the desk and his head in his hands and didn’t answer for at least a minute. When he finally spoke his voice was low and painfully controlled.
    “I operate on horses about five times a week. Normally you’ll lose less than one out of every two hundred on the table. For me, that means maybe one or at most two deaths a year. You can’t help it, horses are difficult under anesthetic. Anyway,” he swallowed, “I’ve had four die that way in the last two months.”
    It seemed more like bad luck to me than utter tragedy, but I said, “Is that excessive?”
    “You don’t understand!” The pressure rose briefly in his voice and he stifled it with an effort. “The word goes round like wildfire in the profession. People begin to snigger. Then any minute the public hears it and no one’s sending horses to you anymore. They ask for a different vet. It takes years to build a reputation. You can lose it like that.” He snapped the long fingers. “I know I’m a good surgeon. Carey knows it, they all know it, or I’d be out already. But they’ve got themselves to consider. We’re all in it together.”
    I swept a hand round the empty office.
    “The people who were here...?”
    Ken nodded. “Six vets in partnership, including me, and also Scott, the anesthetist. And before you ask, no, I can’t blame him. He’s a good technician and a trained veterinary nurse, like Belinda.”
    “What happened this morning?” I asked.
    “Same thing,” Ken said miserably. “I was putting some screws in a split cannon bone. Routine. But the horse’s heart slowed and his blood pressure dropped like a stone and we couldn’t get it back.”
    “We?”
    “Usually it would have been just Scott, Belinda and me, but today we had Oliver Quincy assisting as well. And that was because the owner insisted, because he’d heard the rumors. And still the horse died, and I can’t ... I don’t ... it’s my whole life.”
    After an interval I said, “I suppose you’ve checked all the equipment and the drugs you use.”
    “Of course we have. Over and over. This morning we double-checked everything before we used it. Triple-checked. I checked, Scott checked, Oliver checked. We each did it separately.”
    “Who checked last?”
    “I did.” He said it automatically, then understood the significance of what I was asking. He said again, more slowly, “I checked last. I see that maybe I shouldn’t have. But I wanted to be sure.”
    The remark and action, I thought, of an innocent man.
    I said, “Mightn’t it have been more prudent, in the circumstances, to let one of the other vets see to the cannon