Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,71
It was like searching for the correct needle in a needle stack when you didn’t even know what the correct one looked like.
One of the hits caught my eye. A certain Pyotr Komarov was listed as the president of the St Petersburg Polo Club. He must be the one, I thought. Pyotr Komarov and Rolf Schumann must be acquainted through polo.
I searched further, bringing up the website for the St Petersburg Polo Club. I hadn’t expected there to be so many until I realized that most of the results were for St Petersburg in Florida. The one club I was after was in the burg founded by Tsar Peter the Great in 1703, the original St Petersburg, the city on Russia’s Baltic coast.
According to the club website, polo in post-Soviet Russia was clearly on the rise. Clubs were apparently springing up like a rash and the new middle class was seemingly keen to emulate its American counterpart in making a trip to a polo match one of the social events of the week. In Russia, they even played polo on snow during the long winter, using an inflatable, football-sized orange ball instead of the traditional white solid-wood one. It was reported that the Snow Polo Cup, sponsored by a major Swiss watchmaker, was the premier event of the St Petersburg winter season, the place to see and be seen among the most chic society.
So what? What could polo possibly have to do with the bombing of Newmarket racecourse? I didn’t know for sure that it did, but polo was undeniably a connection between some of the victims of the bomb, and someone else who hadn’t been, although they had been expected to be.
CHAPTER 12
I had a restless night, again. However, rather than the all-too-familiar nightmare of MaryLou and her missing legs, I instead lay awake trying to get my mind to think of Caroline but always returning to the burning questions: who poisoned the dinner? And why? Was it really done to try to stop someone being at the races the following day? And, if so, who? Did someone in fact try to kill me by fixing the brakes of my car? And, if so, who? And why? And finally, was it anything to do with the polo connection? Lots of questions, but precious few answers.
I had spent most of the previous evening on the Internet. I had learnt all sorts of things about polo I hadn’t known, and would probably have been happy never to know. It had been an Olympic sport five times, but not since 1936, when Argentina had won the gold medal. It seemed they were still the major force in world polo and most of the ponies used still came from South America.
The Hurlingham Polo Association was the governing body of the game in the United Kingdom, even though no matches have, in fact, been played at Hurlingham Club since the polo fields were dug up to provide food for war-torn Londoners in 1939.
I had looked up the rules of the game on their website. They ran to fifty pages of closely printed text and were so complicated that it was a surprise to me that anyone understood them at all. I was amused to discover that, if the three-and-a-half-inch wooden ball was to split into two unequal parts after being hit by a mallet or trodden on by a pony, a goal could still be scored if the larger part were deemed to have passed between the posts. I could just imagine what a defender might say if he was defending the wrong part of the ball. The rules even went as far as to state in writing that the mounted umpires were not allowed to use their mobile telephones during play, while the non-mounted referee should avoid distractions, such as talking to his neighbours or using his phone, while watching from the sidelines.
I had also discovered that polo ponies were not actually ponies at all. They were horses. Many were Argentinian Criollo horses, and others were ex-Thoroughbred racehorses that had proved to be not fast enough to be winners on the track. In America, Thoroughbreds were often crossed with Quarter Horses to produce fast, sure-footed animals, capable of quick acceleration and deceleration, and able to make the sharp turns essential for success. But ponies they certainly were not, averaging over fifteen hands, or five feet, at the withers, rather than the maximum fourteen and a half hands of a true pony.