“Embarrassing, though! What do you prescribe, Doctor?” Joe managed to say, beginning to win the struggle with his heaving stomach.
“Keep starching the old upper lip and stay away from dead rats, of course. Ready to come back inside? Your friend is anxious.”
Hunnyton was standing by with a glass of water when they rejoined him.
Adelaide exchanged a meaningful look with him and voiced the thoughts of both of them. “Just imagine, Superintendent—if it can do that to him—what must it have done for an animal with a hundred times the sensitivity?”
“Terrified the poor beast to death,” said Hunnyton. “I think we understand now after that little demonstration. Is the commissioner all right?” He peered at Joe with concern. “Looks a bit seedy to me … Now listen. There’s not many who know and I ought not to be speaking out, but … oh, well. We all accept that it’s fear and its response, flight, that dominate in a horse? Fear is what’s kept the species alive through the millions of years they’ve been on earth.” Joe and Adelaide nodded. “Man has always tried to influence and tame horses to fulfil his own requirements. He’s worked out some subtle ways of doing that. There’s horse lure, like the curry spices, and then there’s horse bate. Nasty stuff that has the opposite effect. Smear a trace of it on the posts of a horse’s stall and it won’t pass between them even if it’s starving. Push a load of it on a bun close up to its nostrils and you’d send it out of its mind. Do that when you’re advancing on it in a narrow space, driving it backwards, blocking its escape route, and, mad with fear, it’s going to tear right through you. As its nature insists. It has no choice.”
“Bate, you say? What is ‘bate’? Superintendent, what exactly do you think was smeared on that piece of cake?” Adelaide asked. “What’s the commissioner just breathed into his lungs? I insist on hearing.”
“Decayed stoat liver, steeped until rancid in rabbit’s blood and cat’s urine, then dried out. Most likely,” he said with relish.
“You can’t get that off the shelf at Mr. Harrison’s,” Adelaide said. “And how on earth do you get a cat to pee in a pot?”
“Well, lacking a cooperative moggie, horse’s urine is more plentiful and does the job.”
“You’re having me on!”
“No indeed. Believe me—this is serious magic! Produced locally, I’d say, to an ages-old recipe by someone with the knowledge. The Horse Knowledge.”
“It sounds like hogwash to me,” Adelaide said crisply. “Well, no, that’s about the one ingredient that didn’t feature in your little confection. Why do people think they need to have recourse to magic potions? My father’s been handling horses all his working life without benefit of fenugreek and cumin. Rabbit’s blood and stoat’s liver have never featured in his materia medica.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Horses hate stoats, even the live ones,” Joe remarked. “The sight and smell of one on the road will send them into paroxysms of fear or fury—you must have noticed?”
“We certainly didn’t miss the paroxysms in the rose bed, I’ll grant you that,” she said thoughtfully and summed up for herself: “So, Lavinia bought the lure from Mr. Harrison, helped herself to a bun from the tea table and gave it a very special frosting. It’s this she must have thought she was using when she went down to the stable to make her overtures to young Lucifer. But somewhere along the way—where? and when?—the sweet spiced cake was … exchanged?—for a piece that had been ‘bated’ with a substance obnoxious and threatening to the horse. Am I getting this right?”
Time for Hunnyton to show his cards, Joe decided. Professional etiquette told him he should wait until they were alone together before putting him to the question but a glance at the doctor’s face, good-humoured and quizzical, made this reticence seem unnecessary. “You’re getting it right,” he said. “But, Hunnyton, it’s time to come clean, I think. Son of a horseman of repute as you tell me you are, you must have acquired the knowledge of lures and bates—the ingredients must be as well known to you as the recipe for fruit scones. In Scotland this knowledge is passed down to a select few initiates, never more than one or two per district. The numbers of these have diminished drastically since the war and few remain on either side of the border. Now tell us, which local man would have had the skills to mark Lady Truelove’s card for her? Who would have the formulae for lures and bates off by heart?”