Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,112
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 hell.’
‘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 grass, we don’t,’ he said.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Bernard asked.
‘Grass is very indigestible,’ said Toby. ‘Humans can’t live on it because everything goes through us so fast, the cellulose fibres of grass 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 grass. It’s called the caecum 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 caecum, I don’t think it would ever come out. God 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.’
‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘I always thought of him as a pillar of racing society.’
‘Why exactly?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s because he seems to have given a bit of a boost to racing. At least, he’s given a bit of a boost to me.’
‘How?’
‘I’ve bought some reasonably priced horses from him,’ said Toby. ‘Some of my one-horse owners have been talked into buying a second. Good for training fees.’ He smiled.
‘Do you know where the horses came from?’ I asked.
‘Now that you mention it, I think they did all come from Argentina. But that’s nothing special. Lots of racehorses trained here are bred in Argentina. What makes you think Komarov’s responsible?’