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  I gave evidence with photographs of having been there. Ravi Chand clinched things with New Delhi grins, and Amy lost her claim but kept her cows.

  Michael came to the hearing, too close on my horizon.

  Michael’s hunger, like a lion’s, was awake and prowling.

  He hadn’t properly understood Ravi Chand’s explanation of antibodies and in fury began taunting the Indian birth and skin color of the world expert witness. Who was he, Michael shouted, to interfere and to say his wife’s cattle carried a sickness?

  I left Ravi trying in vain to explain pasteurization techniques and went back into the room where the hearing had been held. I picked up the small chum of raw unpasteurized Trox milk that Amy had lied on oath was safe, and I took it outside and put it on the table near to Michael, and using a dipper, filled a glass and set it down.

  Michael looked at the glass with disgust and at me with a sneer as an adversary well beaten and now afraid of a replay.

  It was worth a try, I thought.

  “Don’t drink that.” I warned Michael. “It’s unpasteurized. It will make you ill.”

  I spoke the truth but, as I hoped, he didn’t believe me. Michael wouldn’t have believed me if I’d said the sun was hot, and in arrogance and bravado, he drank the milk.

  That evening, Michael, about to become the second-ever case of Mycobacterium paratuberculosis Chand-Stuart X. lost his cool, shot an intruder and was having to answer the difficult question—why did the bullet in the intruder match the one removed from a man discovered facedown in the Everglades with his legs half eaten by alligators?

  It wasn’t Michael’s day.

  See why Dick Francis was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America!

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