Free Comeback by Dick Francis Page A

bone?”
    “What?” He looked at me blankly, then understood my ignorance, and explained. “We’re partners in a big general practice but we all have our own specialities. Carey and the two women are small-animal vets, though Lucy Amhurst does sheep and ponies as well. Jay Jardine does cattle. I do horses. Oliver Quincy is a general large-animal man working with both Jay and me, though he does mostly medical work and only minor surgery, almost never here in the hospital. Castrations, things like that. They’re done on-site.”
    He had almost stopped shaking, as if the unburdening and explanations themselves had released the worst of the pressure.
    “We’re all interchangeable to some extent,” he said. “I mean, we can all stitch up a gash whether it is a ferret or a carthorse. We know all the usual animal diseases and remedies. But after all that, we specialize.” He paused. “There aren’t all that number of surgeons like me in the whole country, actually. I get sent cases from other vets. This hospital has earned a reputation we can’t afford to lose.”
    I reflected a bit and asked, “Have there been any over-the-top calamities in the dog and cat departments?”
    Ken shook his head in depression. “Only horses.”
    “Racehorses?”
    “Mostly. But a couple of weeks ago there was an Olympic-standard show-jumper—and that didn’t die during an operation. I had to put it down.” He looked into tormented space. “I’d done a big repair job on its near hind a week earlier where it had staked itself breaking a jump, and it was healing fine back at home, and then they asked me out to it as the whole leg had swelled like a balloon, and the tendon was shot to hell. The poor thing couldn’t put its foot to the ground. I gave it painkillers and brought it here and opened the leg up, but it was hopeless ... the tendon had disintegrated. There wasn’t anything to repair.”
    “Does that happen often?” I asked.
    “No, it damn well doesn’t. The owner was furious, his daughter was in tears, there was a hullabaloo all over the place. They’d insured the horse, thank God, otherwise we would have had another lawsuit on our hands. We’ve had to insure ourselves against malpractice suits just like American doctors. You get some very belligerent people these days in the horse world. They demand perfection a hundred percent of the time, and it’s impossible.”
    I had a vague feeling that he’d glossed over some fact or other, but decided it was probably to do with a technicality he knew I wouldn’t understand. I wasn’t in a position, anyway, to demand that he tell me his every thought.
    The night grew colder. Ken seemed to have retreated into introspection. I felt a great desire to make up for some of the sleep I’d missed. No one would come to set fire to the hospital. It had been a stupid idea of mine to suggest it.
    I shook myself mentally awake and went out into the passage. All quiet, all brightly lit. I walked back to the entrance hall and checked that the departing vets had locked the front door when they left.
    All secure.
    Although wet, the entrance hall was distinctly warmer than the passage and the office. I put my hand on the wall nearest the burned building and felt the heat in it, which was of a comforting level rather than dangerous. The solid door to the glass-walled connecting passage was fastened with bolts and bore an engraved strip of plastic with the instruction “Keep This Fire Door Shut” The door’s surface was warmer than the wall, but nowhere near to frying eggs.
    A third door led from the entrance hall into a Spartan roomy washroom and a fourth opened onto cleaning materials. No arsonists crouching anywhere.
    Passing the defunct coffee machine, I went back to the office and asked Ken to show me round the rest of the hospital. Lethargically he rose and told me that the office we were in was used by whoever was operating in the theater for writing notes of the procedures used,