Driving Force

Chapter 10

Dave and Aziz set off for Ireland, Dave looking only moderately chastened, apparently confident that I wouldn’t actually sack him. He was probably right, as he didn’t appear to have broken any laws except my own and could go off to an industrial tribunal muttering about wrongful dismissal if I gave him grounds and he had a mind to. There was nothing new in his irresponsibility. He was still very good and reliable with horses and an adequate driver. I hoped he would think twice in future about taking money for lifts, but I wouldn’t bet he’d never do it. The main change, as far as I could see, was in my own attitude towards him, my indulgent liking having faded towards irritation.

Out in the farmyard Lewis was showing photographs of his baby to Nina who had arrived in her working persona and her working car.

‘He’s a right little raver,’ Lewis said, looking adoringly at his offspring. ‘You know what, he likes soccer on the telly, he watches it all the time.’

‘How old is he?’ Nina asked, dutifully admiring.

‘Eight months. Look at this one, in the bath, sucking his yellow duck.’

‘He’s lovely,’ Nina said.

Lewis beamed and said, ‘Nothing’s too good for him. We might send him to Eton, why not?’ He tucked the photos away in an envelope. ‘Better be off to Lingfield, I guess,’ he said. ‘Two for Benjy Usher. Last time I went to that yard,’ he told Nina, ‘they led out the wrong horse, and not for the first time, either. I’d loaded up and was driving out of the gate when one of the lads came tearing along yelling and screaming. I ask you! The wrong horse! And there’s Mr Usher yelling out of his upstairs window as if it was my fault, not his head lad’s, the stupid git.’

Nina listened, fascinated, and asked me, ‘Is it easy to pick up the wrong horse?’

‘We take the horses they give us,’ I said. ‘If they’re the wrong ones, it’s not our fault. As you know, our drivers have worksheets with times, pick-up points, destinations, and the names of the horses, but it’s not their job to check identities.’

‘We took two of Mr Usher’s all the way to the wrong races, last year,’ Lewis said, enjoying it.

I enlarged. ‘We were taking one from Usher’s to Leicester and one to Plumpton, and although Lewis and the other driver each said clearly which box was going to which destination, the Usher head lad mixed them up. They didn’t find out until the first one arrived at the wrong place. There was quite a fracas.’

‘Frack-ass,’ Lewis said, grinning. ‘I’ll say.’

‘Look in a newspaper and check you’ve got the right names of the Usher runners,’ I told Lewis, ‘so we have no more mix ups today.’

‘OK.’

He walked off to the canteen where he could be seen consulting the racing programmes, then with a wave took himself over to his super-six to set off on his journey.

‘When he came here first,’ I told Nina, ‘Lewis had ringlets. Now he has the baby instead. He’s handy with his fists if you ever need defending. There won’t be many people messing with his boy.’

‘School bullies beware?’

‘And their dads.’

‘They’re all very different from each other when you get to know them,’ Nina said.

‘The drivers, do you mean? Yes, they are.’ She came with me into my office. ‘Tell me about Nigel.’

She settled herself comfortably into the second chair while I perched on the edge of the desk.

‘He drove nearly all the way, there and back, regardless of hours, but we wrote up the logbooks as if we’d shared it more evenly.’

‘Tut.’

She smiled. ‘He said I could look after the horse. He’s not too fond of horses, did you know? He said some drivers he talks to at race meetings are downright scared of them.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Nigel thinks you aren’t too bad to work for. A bit fussy, like, he said.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘He’s proud of his body. He gave me a run-down of the state of his muscles, practically each of them separately. He told me how to develop my pectorals.’

I laughed in my throat. ‘How useful.’

‘I have a message for you from Patrick Venables.’

Abrupt change of subject. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Those tubes you gave me for analysis. He says,’ she frowned indecisively, ‘he says they held something called viral transport medium.’

I made no immediate comment, so she went on. ‘It’s a liquid apparently made up of sterile water, sucrose — it sounds odd but that’s what he said — and bovine albumin which is what keeps the virus going, and glutamic acid, that’s an amino acid or something, and an antibiotic called geranium... er, no... Gentamicin... which kills off invading bacteria, but won’t act on a virus. The whole stuff’s used for transporting a virus from place to place.’

‘Did they find a virus in it?’

‘No. They said a virus wouldn’t last very long out of a body. They apparently don’t use the word “live” with viruses, as viruses can’t go on working or reproducing, or whatever it is they do, once they’re away from a living host cell. It’s all a bit complicated, it seems to me. Anyway, Patrick wants to know where the tubes came from.’

‘From Pontefract service station in Yorkshire. Before that, I don’t know.’

I told her what I’d learned from Lynn Melissa Ogden, relict of Kevin Keith.

‘Poor woman,’ I said. ‘They led a wretched existence.’

‘There are so many awful lives. And you never expect it when you’re starting.’

I told her about my confrontation with Dave, earlier that morning.

‘So you were right!’ she exclaimed. ‘You said he had to have arranged that hitchhiker in advance.’

‘Mm. But he didn’t react when I asked him what Kevin Keith was carrying. I’m sure he didn’t know.’

‘So it couldn’t have been him who came in the black balaclava to search the cab.’

‘I’m certain it wasn’t. He wouldn’t have needed to disguise himself. He could have come back openly. He was hoping for his pay to be left in the cab, but, not surprisingly, it wasn’t. The person who came disguised was searching, not leaving an envelope.’

‘So who was it?’

‘Good question.’ I thought a bit. ‘There are two minds at work here. Two at least,’ I said. ‘One is logical but destructive. The other’s as illogical as a poltergeist.’

‘Two at least? You mean, more than two?’

‘I think it was two men who dropped me into the Southampton Docks. One was male, certainly. And they carried me easily. But the person who arranged the transport of the virus medium was female.’

‘Or falsetto?’

‘What would be the point? And not easy to do.’ I paused. ‘What we don’t know,’ I said, ‘is whether Kevin Keith was supposed to take the virus medium with him when he got off at Chieveley, or whether he was supposed to leave it in the cab so that it would arrive in Pixhill. Arrive here at the farmyard, that is. Also we don’t know whether there was in fact any virus in the tubes on the way here, or whether someone in this general area had ordered the medium for future use.’

‘Oh Jeez.’

I fished in a pocket and gave her a folded piece of paper bearing the transcript of Jogger’s phone call.

‘Get Patrick Venables’ cockney friends to unscramble it,’ I suggested.

‘What cockney friends?’

‘He’s bound to know the London brotherhood.’

‘Such faith. All right.’ She read the words aloud. ‘Take a butcher’s at them nuns... ye Gods.’

‘Does it mean anything to you?’

‘Poland had the same five on a horse last summer... It’s all rubbish.’ She put the paper in her handbag. ‘No one came near us on the French trip,’ she said. ‘No one anywhere showed the slightest interest in the underside of the horsebox. Nigel said he didn’t like driving Phil’s super-six because it has heavier steering than his own. He approves of the one-man one-box arrangement and he likes driving for some trainers more than others. He would like to drive for the Watermeads more often, but Lewis is jealous if he does. Lewis drives for Benjy Usher too, but Nigel doesn’t like Benjy Usher’s ways. He says Harve told him he’ll be driving for a new trainer, a Mrs English, and he’s heard she’s a dragon.’

‘Mm.’ I smiled. ‘She’ll get on well with Nigel, all the same. He’ll chat her up. She’s demanding, but he’s tireless. By the end of the summer she won’t want anyone else.’

‘You go in for quite a lot of applied psychology,’ she observed, ‘pairing the drivers to the jobs.’

‘Happier drivers work better. It’s obvious. Happier trainers don’t employ my rivals.’

‘So it’s all for profit?’

‘And... um... no harm in all-round contentment, is there?’

‘I do see,’ she said, half mocking, ‘why everyone likes you.’

I sighed. ‘Not everyone, by a long shot.’ I stood up off the desk, pleased to talk to her but with things to get on with. ‘You’re not on the driving chart today, are you? You could take a day off after the French trip.’

‘I don’t want to. I’ll spend the morning here, looking around in general and available if you get a last-minute driving job.’

‘Fine. Good. Well, Isobel’s arrived.’ We’d both seen her car drive in. ‘Come and listen while I try to find out who knew that Dave would be going to Newmarket the day he picked up Kevin Keith.’

Her eyes widened in comprehension. ‘Like I said before,’ she said, ‘you don’t need me here.’

‘I like you here.’

‘As a witness, Patrick said. I’m the insurance you apparently wanted. Your vindicator. He said you were that subtle, and I didn’t really believe him.’

‘Devious, he probably meant.’

‘He approved of the idea, anyway. That’s why I’m here.’

I thought her almost too frank and wondered what her boss would have said. We went along to Isobel’s office, where I said thank you for the visitors’ list, and Isobel brought it onto the screen. She gave me a flashing smile of thanks for my message at the end, but shook her head when I asked her if she could remember which actual day each of the people on the list had been to her office.

‘Can you remember,’ I asked neutrally, ‘which of them were here the day before Brett and Dave picked up the hitchhiker? That would be nine days ago, on the Wednesday.’

She shook her head. ‘I could call up the drivers’ list for that day.’ She turned automatically to the computer and then looked stricken. ‘Oh... that day’s wiped out.’

‘It’s all right.’ I’d pieced together various scraps of the pencil-and-paper chart that had been on the desk in my sitting-room, and had written them down in a list.

‘Harve took the first load of Jericho Rich’s horses from Michael Watermead to Newmarket,’ I said. ‘Was anyone from the Watermead yard here in the office that day? Was Jericho Rich here? Was anyone here from Newmarket? Anyone who could have had a sight of the Thursday schedule? You usually have the schedule on the screen a lot of the time. Who could have seen it?’

She looked bewildered. I’d asked the questions too fast. I went back and asked them again slowly.

‘Oh, I see. Well, obviously all the drivers could see who was going where. I mean, they always come in for a look.’

‘And beside the drivers?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s so long ago. People are in and out of here all the time.’ She considered. ‘They didn’t need to come here themselves to know who was doing that trip. I told Betsy when she called here that it was down for Brett and she said both Mr Rich and Mr Watermead wouldn’t be thrilled about it because Brett was such a whiner, and I said... well, I said don’t tell them, but I expect she did.’

I read the list on her screen. ‘What about Dr Farway?’

‘Oh no, he came the day after, when that hitchhiker had died. He came on the Friday.’

‘And... er... John Tigwood?’

‘He’s such a bore with those collecting boxes. Sorry, I shouldn’t say that.’

‘Why not? He is. Which day did he come?’

‘That must have been Friday as well. Yes, Sandy Smith was here too. I remember them all talking about the dead man.’

‘OK. What about Tessa Watermead?’

‘She must have come before Friday because that was the day she wanted to go with Nigel to Newmarket and he wouldn’t take her.’ Isobel frowned. ‘Tessa’s often in and out. I think she gets bored. She wants me to teach her how to do this job... do you mind if I show her?’

‘Not as long as she’s not a nuisance to you, or wastes your time.’

‘She does a bit,’ Isobel said frankly. ‘I asked her why she didn’t go to a secretarial college and learn properly and she said she’d think about it.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘how about Mr Rich?’

‘Friday. While you were doing the shuttle.’

‘Any other day?’

‘Um... yes, of course, he came in on the Tuesday, fussing about his transfer. I told you, do you remember?’

‘Yes, vaguely.’

‘I told him you’d arranged it for three consecutive days. I went through it all with him.’

‘Mm. How about Lorna Lipton, Mrs Watermead’s sister?’

‘She walks her dog past here. Well, you know that. She... er... drops in to see you, now and then. She came in on that Friday when you were doing the shuttle.’

‘What about earlier in the week?’

Isobel said doubtfully, ‘I can’t remember which days.’

‘Um,’ I said, ‘do you remember if anyone asked for Dave the day before he went to Newmarket?’

‘What?’

I repeated the question. ‘Did anyone want to speak to him?’

Her forehead wrinkled. ‘I don’t remember anyone asking, but I couldn’t swear. I mean... oh yes! Mr Rich wanted to know if Dave was going to Newmarket with his first lot of horses but I said no, we were short of drivers because of the flu and he’d have to take some runners to Folkestone. It was Folkestone wasn’t it?’ She looked despairingly at the computer, feeling lost without its memory but doing not too badly with her own. ‘I expect I did tell him Dave would be going with the nine two-year-olds on the Thursday, though.’

I thanked her with a stroke down her arm and went on out into the yard, Nina following.

‘It’s a maze,’ she said. ‘How do you keep it all in your head?’

‘I can’t. I keep losing bits.’ And I still kept wanting to go to sleep, which didn’t help.

The fleet was steadily leaving, the farmyard looking empty with most of its herd of monsters out on the trail. Only three boxes remained in separated slots, quiet, clean, gleaming in the sunshine and in their way, majestic.

‘You’re proud of them,’ Nina exclaimed, watching my face.

‘I’d better not be, or something will happen to them. I loved my Jag... oh, well, never mind.’

Isobel came to the office door and looked relieved to see me still there. She had Benjy Usher’s secretary on the phone, she said: could we please send another box immediately as Mr Usher had forgotten he was running a pair in the second division of the novice hurdle at Lingfield, the last race of the day?

‘She says he clean forgot they were declared,’ Isobel reported. ‘Then just now he let out a yell and said they must be sent off at once. She says the blacksmith’s there now, putting racing plates on them and swearing blue murder. What shall I tell her? She’s waiting to know. Mr Usher’s yelling at her elbow. I can hear him. Lewis has left there with the first two and Mr Usher says there’s no time for him to go back. What do you think?’

‘Say we’ll send another box at once.’

‘But... will you drive it yourself? Everyone else has gone.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Nina said.

‘Oh yes. Sorry... yes, of course.’ Isobel hurried inside and presently came out again to confirm the journey, pleasurably saying ‘Mr Usher’s frantically trying to reach his second jockey.’

‘Find a good map for Nina, will you?’ I asked her. ‘Mark the racecourse.’ To Nina I said, ‘I’ll lead you to Benjy’s stable. Can you manage from there?’

‘Sure. Which horsebox?’

We looked at the remnants. ‘Pat’s,’ I said, pointing at a four-box, ‘the one you drove the first day. There’s a lone ranger under it, don’t forget, though I can’t see that mattering.’

‘I’ll keep a look out anyway,’ she smiled. ‘What an incredible trainer, forgetting his runners!’

‘Not so incredible, really. Trainers make shattering mistakes, declaring the wrong horse sometimes, even in big races, and forgetting others altogether. Benjy’s eccentric, but he’s not the only last-minute merchant we deal with. Many trainers change their minds violently, some when the clock’s begun striking. Makes life more interesting.’

‘As long as you’re happy.’

I checked the map with her, marking the road clearly, made sure she had the right paperwork and then drove ahead of her to Benjy’s yard, not the easiest of places to find.

He was leaning out of his upstairs window when we arrived, issuing a stream of invective and instructions to his luckless lads and greeting me personally with, ‘Don’t let your driver go without the jockeys’ colours.’

Nina helped the lads load the two young upset hurdlers who were reacting with trembles and rolling eyes to the general scramble. Nina, I saw, had a calming effect as powerful and natural as Dave’s, so that in the end the nervous creatures walked docilely up the ramp without needing blindfolds or brute force. Benjy stopped complaining, Nina and the head lad closed the ramp, the jockeys’ colours were put on board, a couple of scurrying lads climbed into the passenger seats to accompany their charges and the circus was ready to roll.

Nina gave me a laugh through the window. ‘They say there’s a new head travelling lad in Lewis’s box ahead of us, and he doesn’t know these other two horses are coming. He has to declare them, and saddle them. What a to-do.’

‘Phone Isobel and ask her to tell Lewis,’ I said.

‘Yes, boss.’

She went on her way in good humour and I found myself regretting her stay would be temporary. Highly competent and good company, Nina Young.

Benjy withdrew and closed his window like one of the characters exiting in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. I half expected him to reappear on his doorstep but when he didn’t I drifted off in the Fourtrak to go home.

A short way along the road I slowed before passing a man leading a horse, hardly an unusual sight in Pixhill. The horse was swinging from side to side with his attendant yanking down again and again on the leading rein in a sharp manner guaranteed to produce more skittering, not less. I passed the pair with caution, stopped ahead, and walked back to meet them.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked.

‘No, you can’t.’ He was brusque, if not downright rude. Young, belligerent, surly.

I realised with minor shock that the badly behaved horse was my old friend Peterman, his name plain on his headcollar.

‘Would you like me to lead him?’ I asked. ‘I know him.’

‘No, I wouldn’t. It’s none of your effing business.’

I shrugged, went back to the Fourtrak and sat watching the erratic and potentially dangerous progress along the road. When he passed me, the groom raised two fingers in my direction with a jerk.

A fool, I thought him. I watched him turn right a good way ahead, taking the road towards Marigold English’s yard. I followed slowly to the turning, stopping on the main road but watching until horse and man turned off the side road and in through Marigold’s gates. At least, I thought, old Peterman had reached his new home safely, and I would check with Marigold to make sure he was all right.

Outside my own house, when I reached it, there seemed to have sprouted a well-filled car park. Clustered around the Jaguar and the Robinson 22 were cars in all directions with their drivers in chatting groups. These, on my arrival, attempted to introduce themselves all at once.

‘Hey,’ I protested, ‘who got here first?’

The simple order of precedence identified the crowd into various insurance assessors, air-accident inspectors, a transport firm surveying the possibility of shipping the helicopter to Scotland, a salesman hoping I would order a new Jaguar and the man to open the safe.

I took the last one pronto into the house, even though he was apparently the latest on the scene. He looked at the hatchet job, scratched his head, asked if there was anything fragile inside (yes, I said, computer disks) and said he thought it a case for a drill.

‘Drill away,’ I said.

The rest of the men outside had sprouted notebooks and were discussing the mechanics of bricks-on-sticks on accelerators. By no means impossible, they agreed. Very dicey, but possible. The helicopter-shipper asked questions about fuel in the tanks. Not much there, I told him. My sister had said she would have to refuel at Oxford. Full, the tank and auxiliary tank held about 130 litres, she’d said, but she’d flown from Carlisle on that. The shipper began discussing technical ways to disassemble the tri-hinge rotor, and lost me.

The air-accident inspector produced a letter from Lizzie which he asked me to read and confirm. Neither of us had seen the collision, she wrote. I confirmed it.

Insurance assessors, hers and mine, said they’d never seen anything like it, not right outside someone’s back door, that was. They’d studied Sandy’s report. They asked me to sign various forms. I signed.

The Jaguar salesman told me about the Jaguar XJ220. Made in Bloxham, near Banbury, he said. Only 350 of them built, costing £480,000 each.

‘Each?’ I repeated. ‘Four hundred and eighty thousand pounds each?’

Did I want to order one?

‘No,’ I said.

‘Just as well. They’re all sold.’

I wondered if it were I who was surreal and whether my concussion was worse than I suspected.

‘Actually,’ the salesman said, ‘I came to see if your XJS could be salvaged.’

‘And can it?’

Shaking his head, he looked with regret at the whole-looking white rear end of my pride and joy. ‘I might find you another one like it. That same year. Advertise for one, secondhand. And they’re still in production. I could get you a new one.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll let you know.’

I wouldn’t seek a twin, I thought. Life had changed. I was changing. I would buy a different car.

The flock of notebooks returned to their vehicles and drove away, leaving only the workmanlike van of the safecracker beside the wreck on the tarmac. I went in to check on his progress and found my safe door open but minus its lock mechanism, which lay bent on the floor.

We discussed the possibility of mending the safe but he advised me to take the insurance money and buy a newer and better model which he would be happy to sell me. It would not, he assured me, have a lock that could be assaulted by an axe.

He went out to the van for a pamphlet with illustrations and an order form, and I signed my name again. He shook my hand. He asked me to check that the contents of the old safe were untouched and, when I’d done that, to sign his worksheet. I signed.

When he’d gone, I retrieved the packet of money and the back-up floppy disks and went into the kitchen to phone the computer wizard. Sure, he agreed, bring the disks in for a check as soon as I liked; he would be in his workshop all afternoon and would wash Michelangelo out of my hair with his little virus scrubbers. Did all computer wizards talk like that, I wondered?

‘Great,’ I said.

I made coffee and drank it and thought a bit, and after a while telephoned the local Customs and Excise office.

I explained who I was. They knew of me, they said. I explained that as my horseboxes went fairly regularly across the Channel, I wanted an up-to-date list of what could and could not be carried in them, in view of the ever-changing European regulations. My drivers were confused, I said.

Ah, they said understandingly. They didn’t themselves deal with import and export, but mostly with tax. If I wanted the up-to-the-minute gen on international movement of goods I would need to see their Single Market Liaison Officer in the regional office.

‘Which regional office?’ I asked.

‘Southampton,’ they said.

I almost laughed. They enlarged. The Southampton regional office was actually in Portsmouth. The Single Market Liaison Officer there would answer all my questions and give me the latest copy of the Single Market report. If I wanted to go there in person, they suggested I should arrive well before four o’clock. It was Friday, they explained.

I thanked them and looked at my watch. Plenty of time. I drove to Newbury, shopped for a week’s food and ran the wizard to earth in his workshop, which proved to be a smallish room half lined with large brown cardboard boxes bearing words like ‘Fragile’ or ‘This way up ALWAYS.’ A busy desk bore piles of papers — letters, invoices, pamphlets — held down by public house ashtrays used as paperweights. Ceiling-high bookshelves supported instruction manuals and catalogues by the score. Plastic-covered leads snaked everywhere. A table along one wall bore a keyboard, two or three computers, a laser printer and a live colour monitor showing a bright row of miniature playing cards apparently halfway through a game of patience.

‘Black jack on red queen,’ I said, looking.

‘Yeah.’ He grinned, ran his hand through his hair, and with a mouse moved the cards around on the screen. ‘It’s not coming out,’ he observed, and switched it all off. ‘Did you bring your disks?’

I handed them to him in an envelope. ‘There are four,’ I said. ‘A new one for each calendar year since I took over the business.’

He nodded. ‘I’ll start with the latest.’ He fed it into a drive slot in one of the computers on the table and called up onto the monitor the directory of the files stored for the current year.

Muttering under his breath he pressed a series of keys on the keyboard and in a while the screen was flickering rapidly with letters and numbers as he scanned my disk for deadly strangers.

Lone rangers, I thought. Aliens everywhere.

‘There we are,’ he said, when the flickering steadied to a single message. ‘Scan complete. No virus found.’ He grinned at me. ‘No Michelangelo. You’re safe.’

‘That’s... er... rather more than extremely interesting,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘I used the disk last to back-up the work entered on the main office computer a week ago yesterday,’ I said. ‘That was March 3rd.’

His eyes savoured the knowledge.

‘On March 3rd, then,’ he said, ‘I’d say there was no Michelangelo in your office. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘So you caught it on the Friday or Saturday...’ He pondered. ‘Ask your secretaries if they fed anyone else’s disks into your machine. Say, for instance, someone lent them a game disk, like the patience game, which no one should do, really, it’s an infringement of copyright, but say they did, well, Michelangelo could have been lurking in the game disk and it would leap across to your machine instantly.’

‘The monitor in the office is black-and-white,’ I said.

‘Kids would play patience in black-and-white,’ he replied. ‘Like Nintendo. No problem. Did you have any kids in the office?’

‘Isobel’s brother, Paul,’ I said, remembering his name on the list. ‘He’s fifteen. Always cadging money from his sister.’

‘Ask him, then. I’ll bet that’s where your trouble lies.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘I may as well scan your other disks, just to be safe.’ He fed the three others through the scanning process, all with nil results. ‘There you are, then. At present they’re clean. But, like I said, you have to patrol your defences all the time.’

I thanked him and paid him, took my clean disks out to the car and set off on the drive south to Portsmouth, giving Southampton Docks a wide berth.

Customs and Excise were fortunately helpful, extending the impression that talking to the general public made a change from regular bureaucracy. The near-top man I was finally steered to, who introduced himself briefly as ‘Collins,’ offered me a seat, a cup of tea and a willing expression. An office around us: desk, green plant, second-generation Scandinavian decor.

‘What may your drivers carry and what may they not?’ Collins repeated.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Yes. As you know, it’s all different from the old cut-and-dried days.’

‘Mm.’

‘We’re positively forbidden to make spot checks on anything coming in from the EC.’ He paused. ‘European Community,’ he said.

‘Mm.’

‘Even drugs.’ He spread his hands in what looked like a long-standing frustration. ‘We can act — search — only on specific information. The stuff floods in, I’ve no doubt, but we can’t do anything about it. Customs checks on goods are now allowed only at the point of entry into the Community. Once inside, movement is free.’

‘I expect it saves a lot of paperwork,’ I said.

‘Tons of it. Hundreds of tons. Sixty million fewer forms.’ The plus side lightened his scowl. ‘Saves time too, saves days and months.’ He searched briefly for a booklet, found it and slid it towards me across his desk. ‘Most of the present regulations are listed in there. There’s very little restriction on alcohol, tobacco and personal goods. One day there’ll be none. But of course there’ll still be duty and restrictions of goods entering from outside the EC.’

I picked up the booklet and thanked him.

‘We spend a good deal of our time juggling with VAT,’ he said. ‘Different rates, you see, in different EC countries.’

‘I was wondering,’ I murmured, ‘what one may still not bring into this country from Europe, and... er... what one may not take out.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘Not take out?’

‘Anything that doesn’t have free movement.’

He pursed his lips. ‘Some things need licences,’ he said. ‘Are your drivers breaking the law?’

‘I came to find out.’

His interest sharpened as if he’d suddenly realised I was there from more than normal curiosity.

‘Your horseboxes come and go through Portsmouth, don’t they?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And they’re never searched.’

‘No.’

‘And you have the necessary permissions, of course, to move live animals across the Channel.’

‘All that’s done for us by a specialist firm.’

He nodded. He thought. ‘I suppose if your boxes carried other animals than horses, we’d never know. Your drivers haven’t been bringing in cats or dogs, have they?’ His voice was censorious and alarmed. ‘We maintain the quarantine laws, of course. The threat of rabies is always with us.’

I said calmingly, ‘I’ve never heard of them bringing in cats or dogs, and if they had it would be common knowledge in my village, where news travels faster than lightning.’

He relaxed slightly; a fortyish man with receding hair and white careful hands.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘thanks to vaccines, no one has died of rabies contracted in Europe for the past thirty years, but we still don’t want the disease here.’

‘Um,’ I said, ‘what do you need a licence for?’

‘Dozens of things. From your point of view, I suppose veterinary medicines would be interesting. You’d need to get a separate licence for each movement, a Therapeutic Substance licence from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Veterinary Medicines Directorate. But there would be no check on the substance here on entry through Portsmouth. Enforcement of licensing would be a matter for MAFF itself.’

MAFF? Oh, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Shades of Jogger.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘what else isn’t one supposed to bring in and out?’

‘Guns,’ he said. ‘There are still exit checks, of course, for firearms in baggage at airports. No import checks here. You could bring in a horseboxful of guns, and we’d never know. Smuggling in the old sense has vanished within the EC.’

‘So it seems.’

‘There are intellectual property rights,’ he said. ‘That’s about the infringement of existing patents between member states.’

‘I don’t think my drivers are into intellectual property rights.’

He smiled briefly, a quick movement of lips. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t been of much help.’

‘Indeed you’ve been most kind,’ I assured him, rising to go. ‘Negative results are often as helpful as positive.’

I thought, however, as I drove back to Pixhill with the Single Market booklet on the seat beside me, that I was as far as ever from understanding why anyone should need or want to fix hiding-places under my lorries. If smuggling was out, what were they for?

At home I sat in my poor green leather chair with the stuffing coming out of the axe-holes and one by one fed my clean disks and their information into my new computer. Then, feeling rusty and all thumbs and impatient to begin my lessons with the wizard, I looked up my original computer manuals and worked out how to organise all the data now inside the machine into various categories, both chronological and geographic.

I studied in turn each driver’s work over the past three years, looking for I knew not what. A pattern? Something worth destroying my records for, if that should happen not to be the work of Isobel’s brother. I tended to doubt it was Paul’s doing as, first, he was more idle than bright and, second, Isobel would never let him play games in the office.

The patterns I was looking for were definitely there, but told me nothing I didn’t know. Each driver went most often to the racecourses favoured by the trainers they mostly drove for. Lewis, for instance, drove most regularly each summer to Newbury, Sandown, Goodwood, Epsom, Salisbury and Newmarket, Michael Watermead’s preferred prestigious destinations. At other times he went where Benjy Usher sent his jumpers, Lingfield, Fontwell, Chepstow, Cheltenham, Warwick and Worcester. Most of his overseas journeys had been for Michael, all to Italy, Ireland or France.

Although there was horseracing all over Europe, British trainers rarely sent horses anywhere but Italy, Ireland and France. Often British runners travelled by air (and had to be taken to the airports), but Michael much preferred to go all the way by road; all the better for me.

Nigel had made the most overseas journeys, but that was my doing, owing to his long-distance stamina. Harve had made few, both my choice and his. Dave had made dozens as relief driver and horse-handler, often with broodmares rather than racers.

All in all, the categories were informative but told me nothing surprising, and after about an hour I switched off, as puzzled as ever.

I phoned Nina, reckoning she would be in her horsebox on the way back from Lingfield, and she answered immediately.

‘Phone me when you get to Pixhill,’ I said briefly.

‘Will do.’

End of conversation.

I phoned Isobel at her home. Nothing unusual had happened during the day’s work, she assured me. She’d told Lewis that Nina was following him, and all the Usher horses had run in the right races at Lingfield. Aziz and Dave had arrived in Ireland with their mares. Harve and Phil had each taken a winner to Wolverhampton, great rejoicing. None of the other drivers had hit snags.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Um... your brother Paul...’

‘I’ve told him not to bother me at work.’ She sounded guiltily apologetic.

‘Yes, but, um, how is he with computers?’

‘Computers?’

I explained the wizard’s game-virus theory.

‘Oh, no,’ she said positively. ‘I’d never let him near your computer and, to be honest he wouldn’t know how to load data in our machine.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘A hundred per cent.’

Another good theory down the drain.

‘Did anyone else,’ I asked, ‘know enough to get near enough to the computer last Friday to feed any disk into it?’

‘I’ve thought and thought...’ She stopped. ‘Why last Friday?’

‘Or Saturday,’ I said. ‘Our computer wizard thinks we picked up the infection as late as that.’

‘Oh golly.’

‘Nothing comes to your mind?’

‘No.’ It was a wail of regret and worry. ‘I wish I knew.’

‘Did you leave any of those people on your list of visitors alone in your office?’

‘But... but... oh dear. I can’t remember. I might have done. I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong in it. I mean, there weren’t any strangers there, not right in my office, and I can’t believe...’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Don’t think about it.’

‘I can’t help it.’

I put the phone down just as Sandy Smith rolled onto my tarmac. He came towards the back door taking off his peaked cap and combing his flattened hair with his fingers.

‘Come in,’ I said, meeting him. ‘Whisky?’

‘I’m on duty,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Who’s to know?’

He squared it with his conscience and took the Scotch with water. We sat in the kitchen, one on each side of the table, and he relaxed as far as unbuttoning his tunic.

‘It’s about Jogger,’ he said. He frowned at his glass, his rounded face troubled. ‘About rust.’

His gloom spread to me fast. ‘What did they find?’ I asked.

‘I’ve heard,’ he began, and I reflected that this was Sandy’s semaphore at its best. ‘I’ve... er... unofficially heard that they did find rust all round the pit and on the edges. But the rust was everywhere mixed with oil and grease. And there wasn’t any oil or grease in the wound on Jogger’s head.’

‘Damn,’ I said.

‘They’re going to treat it as murder. Don’t say I told you.’

‘No. Thanks, Sandy.’

‘They’ll be asking you questions.’

‘They’ve asked questions already,’ I said.

‘They’ll want to know who had it in for Jogger.’

‘I want to know that too.’

‘I knew old Jog for years,’ Sandy said. ‘He wasn’t one to have enemies.’

‘I would think,’ I said neutrally, ‘that he may have done what I did on Tuesday night, which was to walk in to the farmyard unexpectedly. Maybe both of us were hit on the head to prevent us seeing... whatever... but Jogger died, and was put into the pit to make it look like an accident.’

Sandy gazed at me thoughtfully.

‘What’s going on there, in the farmyard?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. I bloody don’t know, and it’s driving me crazy.’

‘Did Jogger know?’

‘It’s possible he found out. That’s perhaps why he died, and I didn’t want it to be that. I’ve been sort of praying for it to be proved an accident.’

‘You’ve thought all along, though, that it was murder.’ He scratched his neck absentmindedly. ‘What did Jogger mean about lone rangers under your lorries? My colleagues will want to know.’

‘I’ll show you,’ I said. ‘Come into the sitting-room.’

We went into the jumbled wreckage and I led him across to where I’d left the cash box Jogger had prised from under the nine-box a week ago.

I led Sandy to the place, but the cash box wasn’t there.

‘That’s odd,’ I said. ‘It was right here on this spot on the newspaper...’

‘What was?’

I described the cash box: grey metal, ordinary, fresh-smelling inside, empty, unlocked by Jogger, the round mark of where it had been held onto a magnet the only bright section on its filthy grime-laden exterior.

I looked round the room for it and so did Sandy, poking about in the general mess.

No cash box.

‘When did you last see it?’ Sandy asked.

‘Tuesday, I suppose. I showed it to my sister.’ I frowned. ‘When this room was done over, I didn’t think to look for the cash box.’

He supposed, he said, that he could understand that, and asked if anything else was missing.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Jogger said lone rangers. Plural. There must have been more than one.’

‘Two of the other boxes have been trundling about with containers fixed to their undersides: but the containers are empty, same as the cash box was.’

Sandy said doubtfully, ‘Everyone in the pub last Saturday heard him talking about it. I mean, he can’t have been killed to stop him telling anyone about them because he’d already done it.’

‘What’s more,’ I said, ‘Dave, Harve and Brett, besides Jogger, saw the cash box here in this room, just after Jogger levered it off the nine-box. It was on my desk at that point, in plain sight. I put it down on the floor sometime later.’

‘You must have an idea what it was for,’ Sandy said, a policemanlike suspicion creeping into his voice despite the non-adversarial status between us.

‘We thought of drugs, if that’s what you mean? Harve, Jogger and I discussed that. But drugs don’t just appear out of thin air. Someone had to supply them. Harve and I don’t believe that any of our drivers deal in drugs. I mean, there would be signs, wouldn’t there? And money going around. We would notice.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me about this last Tuesday?’ Still the suspicious tone. ‘You should have told me, I reckon.’

‘I wanted to find out for myself what’s happening. I still do, but I haven’t much chance if there’s a murder investigation going on. You’ll have to admit that once your colleagues get to looking at the containers under the lorries, those containers will never be used again. I wanted to leave them in place, to keep quiet about them and to wait. I implored Jogger not to talk about them in the pub, but the beer got the better of him. I’m afraid that he said too much. I’m afraid he blew the whole operation and frightened the fish away. I’ve been hoping he didn’t. But your colleagues will certainly frighten him away for ever and I will never find out... and that’s why I didn’t tell you, because you’re a policeman first and a friend second, and your conscience wouldn’t have let you keep silent.’

He said slowly, ‘You’re right about that.’

‘It’s Friday evening,’ I said. ‘How long can you sit on what I’ve told you?’

‘Freddie...’ He was unhappy.

‘Till Monday?’

‘Oh shit. What do you want to do before then?’

‘To get some answers.’

‘You have to ask the right questions,’ he said.

He didn’t promise even temporary silence and I didn’t try to crowd him with a decision. He would do whatever sat comfortably in his own mind.

He buttoned his tunic round his solid waist. He said he’d better be going. On his way out he picked up his peaked cap and put it on, reaching his car as a fully uniformed and thorough policeman, looking uncompromising in his vocation.

I poured the remains of his whisky down the kitchen sink and hoped our friendship wasn’t sliding away with it down the drain.