Driving Force

Chapter 11

I drove along to the farmyard when Nina phoned to say she was back, and found her filling her tanks, yawning as before.

Lewis had finished cleaning his box and was positioning it in its usual place. Harve and Phil weren’t back so far from Wolverhampton but except for Aziz’s nine-box, which had gone to Ireland, the broodmare force had returned.

Lewis slid his completed log through the office letter-box, told me briefly that he’d taken his pair safely back to Mr Usher and that he’d had to help the Usher head travelling lad saddle all the runners as their lads were useless and Nina had said she wasn’t dressed for it. He thought little of Nina, I gathered, for letting him do so much work. The approval she’d lavished that morning on the photos of his baby had, I thought in amusement, been wasted.

Nina drove along to the cleaning area and set to work with the pressure hose. Looking at her old jeans, the unsmart sweater and the scraped-back hair escaping in wisps, one could see why she’d backed away from public gaze, quite apart from the fact that someone in the horse world might have recognised her and asked astonished questions.

Lewis left. I went over to Nina and offered to clean her box for her if she would do a different job for me. She agreed with relief, saying, ‘What if Harve comes back?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘OK. What do I do?’

‘Fetch the new slider from the barn and look at all the fuel tanks to see if there are any containers stuck on them.’

She was surprised. ‘I thought Jogger looked and there were only the three.’

‘Looking back,’ I said, ‘he told me of three. I don’t know for sure if he’d looked under all the others. I just want to check.’

‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘Don’t you want to do it yourself?’

‘Not particularly.’

She gave me a curious look but made no comment, just fetched the slider from the barn and started methodically along the row. I finished the cleaning, inside and out, and positioned her box where it belonged, joining her afterwards by the office door.

‘Well,’ she said, rubbing dirt off her elbows, ‘There’s one more, and it’s under Lewis’s box, but it’s empty, like the others. Lewis! So we took two hidden containers to Lingfield today, but I stayed with the lorries the whole time, to Lewis’s disgust, but he could perfectly well manage to help the head travelling lad saddle up on his own, he didn’t need me really, but I’m in his bad books.’ The thought hardly upset her. ‘No one came near either box, I’d swear it. No one showed the slightest interest in their undersides.’

I thought back. ‘Lewis’s box was on its way to France when Jogger found the second and third container. Lewis went on Friday, and got back at about two on Tuesday morning.’

‘There you are, then. Jogger didn’t know about Lewis’s box. He was dead before Lewis got back.’

Harve drove into the farmyard, his lights bright in the gathering dusk.

‘Do you want me to check Harve’s?’ Nina asked.

‘If you have a chance. And any others we’ve missed.’

‘OK.’ She yawned again. ‘Am I driving tomorrow?’

‘Isobel’s got you down again for Lingfield.’

‘Oh, well... at least I know the way, now.’

I said penitently, ‘I don’t even know where you live. Do you have a long drive home?’

‘Near Stow-on-the-Wold,’ she said. ‘It takes me an hour.’

‘That’s a fair commute. Um... how about if I give you dinner somewhere on your way home?’

‘I’m hardly dressed for going out to dinner.’

‘A pub, then?’

‘Yes, all right. Thank you.’

I went over to talk to Harve as he filled his tanks and found him happy to have taken a winner to Wolverhampton, as he’d also backed it. The lad with the horse had told him it was a certainty. ‘For once, he was right.’

When his tanks were full I asked him to come over to the office to look at the next day’s schedule. He came as a matter of course while, looking back, I saw Nina taking the opportunity to slide underneath his box for an inspection.

We went through the list, which was healthily busy. He himself was down for Chepstow, one of his favourite runs. ‘Good,’ he said. I told him about Benjy Usher overlooking the hurdlers. ‘How he ever trains a winner I’ll never know,’ he said. ‘Mind you, he has the luck of the devil. Who else had three walkovers last summer? You remember there was that bug going about in Pixhill? All those Classic Trial weight-for-age races, they always cut up to five or six runners every year anyway, and Mr Usher’s always keen to win them. He won the Chester Vase last year against only two opponents. I know, because I drove his winner myself, if you remember.’

I nodded. ‘He’s always tended to enter horses in races that are likely to have very few runners,’ I agreed. ‘I won several two- and three-horse races for him myself, mostly three-mile chases.’

‘He runs the poor buggers on rock-hard going too,’ Harve went on disapprovingly. ‘Doesn’t seem to care if they finish lame.’

‘They limp all the way to the bank.’

‘You can laugh,’ Harve objected, ‘but he’s still a rotten trainer.’

‘We have that colt of his to bring back from Italy next week,’ I reminded him. ‘Isobel’s arranged the paperwork and the ferry for Monday.’

‘A broken down colt,’ Harve said, sniffing.

‘Er... yes.’

‘Who’s going?’

‘Who do you suggest? He asked for Lewis and Dave.’

Harve shrugged. ‘We may as well please him.’

‘I thought so, yes.’

Across the farmyard Nina emerged from her search and shook her head exaggeratedly.

I said to Harve, ‘You remember that cash box container that Jogger found stuck under the nine-box? Has anything occurred to you about what it could be for?’

‘I haven’t thought about it,’ he said frankly. ‘Jogger found two more, didn’t he, and they were all empty? Whatever was in them is history.’ He sounded as unconcerned as ever. ‘Poor old Jogger.’

As Sandy had told me off the record that the Jogger enquiry was veering to murder, I didn’t mention it to Harve. Everyone would find out only too soon. Harve and I went back towards his box and he eyed the backview of Nina, who was disappearing into the barn.

‘This job’s too much for her,’ he observed, not unkindly. ‘She’s a good driver by all accounts, but Nigel says she gets tired easily.’

‘She’s temporary,’ I said. ‘One more week, if we get no one else down with flu.’

The other Wolverhampton box returned. I left Harve to supervise the end of the day and followed Nina’s car as she waved to Harve and drove through the gates. She stopped after half a mile to walk back and suggest I follow her to a place to eat that she passed every day, and half an hour later we both pulled into the busy car park of a restaurant where good cheap food was important and the bar itself secondary.

She had loosed and combed her hair and applied lipstick, so that the Nina I had dinner with looked younger and halfway back to the original. The place was crowded, the tables small and close together. We ate steak, chips and fried onions with a carafe of house red wine and a chunk of cheddar cheese. ‘I get fed up with healthy eating,’ Nina said, secure in her slender body. ‘Did you starve when you were a jockey?’

‘Grilled fish and salads,’ I said, nodding.

‘Have some butter.’ With a smile she passed me a small silver-wrapped packet. ‘I adore junk food. My daughter despises me.’

‘Black forest chocolate cake?’ I suggested, handing her the menu.

‘I’m not that mad.’

Companionably we drank coffee, neither of us in much hurry to be gone.

I told her the police thought Jogger had been murdered and that perhaps I now only had hours to find solutions before we were swamped by heavy boots.

‘You’re unfair to the police,’ she observed.

‘I dare say.’

‘The solutions, I do agree, seem as far away as ever.’

‘Sandy Smith,’ I said, ‘says it’s a matter of asking the right questions.’

‘Which are?’

‘Yes, well, there’s the rub.’

‘Think of one.’ She drank her coffee, smiling.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What do you think of Aziz?’

‘What?’ She was surprised; almost, I would have said, disconcerted.

‘He’s odd,’ I remarked. ‘I don’t know how he could have caused any of my troubles, but he turned up in my farmyard the day after Jogger died and I gave him Brett’s job because he speaks French and Arabic and had worked in a Mercedes garage. But my sister says he’s far too bright for what he’s doing and I respect my sister’s insight. So why is Aziz working for me?’

She asked how my sister knew Aziz and I explained about the day he fetched the old horses, and that he’d driven Lizzie to Heathrow the next morning.

‘That Tuesday night, when I ended up in Southampton Docks, I don’t know if Aziz helped to put me there.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said, shocked. ‘I’m sure he didn’t.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘It’s just... he’s so cheerful.’

‘One can smile and smile and be a villain.’

‘Not Aziz,’ she said.

To be honest, my gut reaction to Aziz was the same as Nina’s: he might be a rogue but not a villain. Yet I did have villains about me, and I badly needed to know them.

‘Who killed Jogger?’ she asked.

I said, ‘Who would you put your money on?’

‘Dave,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘He’s got a violent streak that he never shows you.’

‘I’ve heard about it. But not Dave. No, I’ve known him too long.’ I could hear the doubts creeping into my own voice, despite my conviction. ‘Dave didn’t know about the containers under the floorboards.’

‘One can grin a little boy grin and be a villain.’

Against all probability I laughed, my cares unaccountably lifting.

‘The police will find Jogger’s killer,’ Nina said, ‘and you will have no more trouble and I will go home and that will be that.’

‘I don’t want you to go home.’

I said it without thinking, and surprised myself as much as her. She looked at me thoughtfully, unerringly hearing what I hadn’t meant to say.

‘That’s loneliness speaking,’ she said slowly.

‘I’m happy alone.’

‘Yes. Like I am.’

She finished her coffee and patted her mouth on a napkin with an air of finality.

‘Time to go,’ she said. ‘Thanks for the dinner.’

I paid the bill and we went out to the cars, hers and mine, both our workhorse wheels.

‘Goodnight,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘See you in the morning.’ She climbed without pause or tension into her seat, adept at unembarrassing partings. ‘Good night, Freddie.’

‘Night,’ I said.

She drove away with a smile, friendly, nothing else. I wasn’t sure whether or not to feel relieved.

Sometime during the night I woke suddenly, hearing again in my mind Sandy’s insistent voice, ‘You have to ask the right questions.’

I’d thought of a question I should have asked, and hadn’t. I’d been slow and dim. I would ask the question first thing in the morning.

First thing in the morning, rousing me from depths of renewed slumber, the telephone bell brought Marigold’s loud voice into my wincing ear.

‘I’m not too happy about your friend Peterman,’ she said, coming at once to the point. ‘I’d like your advice. Can you call round here? Say, at about nine o’clock?’

‘Mm,’ I said, surfacing as sluggishly as any half-drowned swimmer. ‘Yes, Marigold. Nine o’clock. Fine.’

‘Are you drunk?’ she demanded.

‘No, just asleep.’ In bed, supine, eyes shut.

‘But it’s seven already,’ she pointed out severely. ‘The day’s half over.’

‘I’ll be there.’ I fumbled the receiver towards its bedside cradle.

‘Good,’ her voice said from a distance. ‘Great.’

Sleep was alluring, sleep a temptress, sleep as beckoning as a drug. Only the remembrance of the essential question I hadn’t asked got me out of bed and into the bathroom.

Saturday morning. Coffee. Cornflakes.

Still bleary-brained, I padded from the kitchen into the wreck of the sitting-room and switched on the computer. There was no crash of hard disk. I called up Isobel’s new entries of details of the drivers and found them still basic and abbreviated: names, addresses, dates of birth, next-of-kin, driving licence numbers, journeys driven that week, hours spent at the wheel.

Invading her privacy, I typed Nina’s name, and read her address, care of Lauderhill Abbey, Stow-on-the-Wold, and her age, forty-four.

Nine years older than myself. Eight and a half, to be accurate. I drank my second cup of coffee very hot and wondered how much that age gap mattered.

I answered four telephone calls in quick succession, receiving, altering, agreeing to trips for that day and typing them into the programme for Isobel, who worked in the office most Saturday mornings from eight until noon. At ten to eight she phoned me herself, reporting her arrival, allowing me gratefully to switch the business line to the farmyard.

I drove along there myself to watch the day’s journeys begin and to sort out any last-minute hitches, but again Isobel and Harve seemed to have everything running smoothly.

Nina (forty-four) gave me a small hello smile as she arrived to go to Lingfield, her appearance as determinedly unattractive as ever. Harve, Phil and the crowd were in and out of the canteen, stretching, picking up worksheets, flirting mildly with Isobel. Any Saturday morning. Another race day. Twenty-four hours in a life.

Most of the fleet had gone by eight-thirty. I went into Isobel’s office to find her typing the day’s adjusted programmes into her computer, working mostly from what I’d typed in at home.

‘How’s things?’ I asked vaguely.

‘Always frantic.’ She smiled, happy enough.

‘I want to ask you to remember something.’

‘Fire away.’ She went on typing, looking at the screen.

‘Um,’ I said, ‘last August...’ I paused, waiting for more of her attention.

‘What about last August?’ she asked vaguely, still typing. ‘You go away in August.’

‘Yes, I know. When I was away last August, what did Jogger find in the inspection pit?’

She stopped typing and looked at me in puzzlement.

‘What did you say?’ she asked.

‘What did Jogger find in the pit? Something dead. What did he find dead in the pit?’

‘But Jogger... he was dead in the pit, wasn’t he?’

‘Last Sunday Jogger was dead in the pit, yes. But last August, apparently he found something else dead there... a dead nun, he said, but it can’t have been a dead nun. So can you remember what he found? Did he tell you? Did he tell anyone?’

‘Oh.’ Her forehead developed lines of thought as she raised her eyebrows. ‘I do vaguely remember, but it wasn’t anything to worry you about. I mean, it was so silly.’

‘What did he find?’

‘I think it was a rabbit.’

‘A rabbit?’

‘Yes. A dead rabbit. He said it was crawling with maggots or something and he threw it in the skip. That was all.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked doubtfully.

She nodded. ‘He didn’t know what else to do with it, so he threw it in the Dumpster.’

‘I mean, are you sure it was a rabbit?’

‘I think so. I didn’t see it. Jogger said it must have hopped in there somehow and once it had fallen into the pit of course it couldn’t get out.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Do you remember what day it was?’

She shook her head decisively. ‘If you can’t remember it, it must have been when you were away.’ She turned automatically to the computer and again the familiar frustration crossed her face. ‘It might have been in the records we lost, though I don’t really think so. I can’t remember bothering to enter anything like that.’

‘Did anyone else see Jogger’s rabbit?’

‘I simply can’t remember.’ It was clear from her expression that she couldn’t see any importance in it either.

‘Oh, well. Thanks anyway,’ I said.

She smiled without guile and turned back to her work.

Nuns, I thought. Rabbits. Nuns and monks, nuns and sisters... nuns and habits.

Jogger’s words. ‘Take a butcher’s at them nuns. There was a dead one in the pit last August — and it was crawling.’

The only rabbits that I could think of that he might mean were the rabbits belonging to the Watermead children, but even if one of those rabbits had somehow escaped and got as far as the inspection pit, it would hardly have been crawling with maggots unless, of course, it had been there dead for days when Jogger found it. It didn’t seem to be of any importance... but to Jogger it had seemed important enough for him to tell me about it — in his own unintelligible way — seven months after the event.

I looked at my watch. Approaching nine o’clock. What was I supposed to be doing at nine o’clock? The sleep-filled assignation with Marigold English swam to the surface.

I told Isobel where I was going and to reach me by mobile phone for a while if she needed me, and drove to Marigold’s yard.

She was outside in her woolly hat and came hurrying towards me when I appeared, carrying with her a bowl of horse nuts.

‘Don’t get out,’ she commanded. ‘Drive me to look at Peterman.’

Accordingly I followed her directions, which involved bumping down a grassy track to a distant paddock behind her house. The paddock sloped down to a brook and was edged with tall willow trees that would give great shade for old horses when the leaves came out.

Peterman, however, was up near the gate and looked thoroughly miserable. He put his nose down to Marigold’s offered horse nuts and then moved his head away as if offended.

‘See?’ she said. ‘He won’t eat.’

‘What are the nuts?’ I asked.

She mentioned a standard brand much used and well respected. ‘All horses like them, they never fail.’

I looked at Peterman, puzzled. ‘What’s the matter with him, then?’

Marigold hesitated. ‘I phoned my old vet on Salisbury Plain to ask him, but he said just to give the old chap time to settle in. Then I came down here again yesterday evening, and you know what a nice sunny evening it was? The sun was shining low and yellow on the old horse, and you could see them.’

‘See what?’

‘Ticks.’

I stared at her.

‘Tick bites,’ she said. ‘I think that’s what’s wrong with him. I phoned John Tigwood not half an hour ago to tell him to do something about it and he said it was rubbish and impossible, and anyway you, Freddie, had got the local vet round on Tuesday when the horses got to Pixhill, and you’d insisted on an examination, and the vet had passed the horses fully fit and had signed a document to that effect which he would show me if I liked, and really, I didn’t like his tone much and I nearly told him to fetch the horse back again, but then I’d already asked you to come and look, and knowing that you wanted this old thing well looked after... well, I decided to wait until you came and to ask you what you thought.’ She stopped, running out of breath. ‘What do you think?’

‘Um... where were the ticks?’

‘On his neck.’

I peered at Peterman’s neck, but could see only his bay coat, still thick for the winter. Come warmer weather he would shed a lot of it, revealing the short cooler coat of summer.

‘What were they like?’ I asked Marigold.

‘Tiny brown things. The same colour as his coat. I would never have seen them except for the sun, and because one of them moved.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t know... maybe seven or eight. I couldn’t see them very clearly.’

‘But Marigold...’

‘You think I’m potty? What about the bees?’

‘Er...’

She said impatiently, ‘Bees, Freddie. Bees. Varroa jacobonsi.’

‘Start at the beginning,’ I begged.

‘They are mites,’ she said. ‘They live on bees. They don’t kill them, they just suck their blood until the bees can’t fly.’

‘I didn’t know bees had blood.’

She gave me a withering look. ‘My brother panics about varroa,’ she said. ‘He’s a fruit farmer and half his trees don’t bear fruit because the bees are too weak to pollinate.’

‘Oh. Yes, I see.’

‘So he smokes a pipe at them.’

‘For God’s sake...’

‘Pipe tobacco smoke is about the only thing that knocks out varroa mites. If you blow pipe tobacco smoke into a beehive all the mites fall down dead.’

‘Um,’ I said. ‘It’s fascinating, but what has it got to do with Peterman?’

‘Don’t be so slow,’ she commanded. ‘Ticks carry illnesses, don’t they? I can’t risk the ticks on Peterman hopping onto my two-year-olds, now can I?’

‘No,’ I said slowly, ‘you can’t.’

‘So regardless of what John Tigwood says, I’m not going to keep this old horse here. I’m very sorry, Freddie, but you’ll have to find him another home.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’

‘When?’

I thought of her star-studded stable and of my own strong desire to transport them for ever to the winners’ enclosures.

I said, ‘I’ll walk him down to my house. There’s a patch of garden he can stay in temporarily. Then I’ll walk back for my car. Would that do?’

She nodded with approval. ‘You’re a good lad, Freddie.’

‘I’m sorry to have given you this trouble.’

‘I just hope you understand.’

I assured her I did. I drove back along the grassy track to her stable yard, where she lent me a leading-rein for Peterman and then led me by the arm to peer over a half-door at her absolute pride and joy, the three-year-old colt that, if all went well, would be contesting the 2,000 Guineas and the Derby against Michael Watermead’s sensation, Irkab Alhawa. In her, as in Michael, the fledgling excitement shimmered in the eyes, the wild hope growing.

‘You do see,’ she reiterated, ‘about Peterman.’

‘Of course,’ I said. I kissed her cheek. She nodded. I could slaughter John Tigwood, I thought, for putting me in such an awkward position, even though, I thought more fairly, it wasn’t actually his fault, as I had myself asked Marigold to take specifically Peterman.

Sighing at my folly I returned to the paddock, put on the leading-rein and led my old friend out of his idyllic pasture and along the road to the very much smaller patch of shaggy lawn in the walled garden behind my house.

‘Don’t eat the bloody daffodils,’ I told him.

He looked at me balefully. As I took off the leading-rein to walk away, I noticed he wasn’t even interested in the grass.

I collected my Fourtrak from Marigold’s yard and went home again. Peterman stood more or less where I’d left him, looking miserable, the daffodils intact. If it hadn’t been for the fallacy of endowing animals with human feelings, I’d have said the old horse was depressed. I gave him a bucket of water, but he didn’t drink.

Various thoughts had been popping into my mind, almost as if a couple of sleeping cylinders had resumed firing. I sat down at the computer in my battered room and looked up the instruction manuals again for a renewed expedition through the old information on the healthy disks.

In surveying the drivers’ journeys I had not, I’d remembered, pulled out Jogger’s own. Even when I did, I learned little, as he’d driven very seldom; barely half a dozen times the previous year and nearly all on Bank Holiday Mondays, the days when with all the holiday race meetings countrywide, we were always scraping the barrel for chauffeurs.

I rubbed my nose, thought a bit more, and began to bring to the screen the horseboxes themselves, one by one, identifying them by registration number.

The columns on the screen came up looking completely different: the same information as before but illuminated from the side, like Marigold’s view of otherwise invisible ticks.

Identified by registration number, each box’s history now gave me dates, journeys, purpose of journey, drivers, engine hours logged, odometer readings, maintenance schedules, repairs, licensing, roadworthy certificates, unladen weights, fuel capacity, fuel actually used day by day.

After some taxing cerebration, much consultation with the manuals and a few false starts, I came up next with details of all maintenance work performed by Jogger the previous August. This time I’d sorted the work by chronology, and had provided myself more simply with the date, the horsebox registration number and the work done.

Day by summer day I looked back through that one month in Jogger’s life, and there I found her, the dead nun.

August 10th. The registration number of the horsebox regularly driven by Phil. Oil change over the inspection pit. Tanks of air for the air brakes drained. Air brake compressor checked. All grease nipples filled. At the end, a note entered on the day by Isobel and forgotten: ‘Jogger says a dead rabbit fell out of the horsebox into the pit. Crawling with ticks, he said. Disposed of in skip.’

I sat looking vaguely into space.

After a while I went back to the beginning and called Phil’s records to the screen, to find out where he’d been on August 10th or 9th or 8th.

Phil, my faithful aid told me, had not been driving that particular horsebox on any of those days. He’d been driving another box, an older one, which I had, I remembered, subsequently sold.

Back to the drawing board: back to registration numbers, the sideways illumination.

On August 7th the horsebox Phil nowadays drove had gone to France with two runners for Benjy Usher. They had run on the 8th at Cagnes-sur-Mer, down on the Mediterranean, and returned to Pixhill on the 9th.

That horsebox, on that journey, had been driven by Lewis.

Lewis had actually driven that particular box most of the previous year, as I knew perfectly well once I’d thought about it. I’d transferred Lewis to the sparkling new super-six I’d bought in the autumn to replace the old one; transferred him so that the Usher and Watermead horses should go in my best style to their destinies. Lewis had driven one of Michael’s horses to Doncaster in September in the new super-six to win the last Classic race of the year, the St Leger.

At about ten-fifteen I telephoned Edinburgh.

‘Quipp here,’ a pleasant voice said. English, not a Scot.

‘Um... excuse me phoning you,’ I said, ‘but do you happen to know where I could find my sister, Lizzie?’

After the briefest of pauses he said, ‘Which are you, Robin or Freddie?’

‘Freddie.’

‘Hold on.’

I held, and heard his voice yelling, ‘Liz, your brother Fred...’ and then she was, moderately startled, saying, ‘Is it your head?’

‘What? No. Except it’s been slow and stupid. Look, um... Lizzie, do you know anyone who knows anything about ticks?’

‘Ticks?’

‘Yeah. Little biters.’

‘For God’s sake...’

She told Professor Quipp what I wanted and he came back on the line.

‘What sort of ticks?’ he asked.

‘That’s what I want to find out. The sort that live on horses and... er... rabbits.’

‘Do you have any specimens?’

‘I’ve got a horse in the garden which probably has some.’

After a silence Lizzie came back. ‘I’ve tried to explain to Quipp that you’re concussed.’

‘Far from it, at last.’

‘What horse in the garden?’

‘Peterman. One of the geriatrics from last Tuesday. Seriously, Lizzie, ask your professor how I get information about ticks. There are too many multi-million animals in Pixhill for messing about if ticks could make them ill.’

‘Ye Gods.’

I listened to three full minutes of silence, then Professor Quipp said, ‘Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve a friend who’s a tick expert. He says can you bring him some specimens?’

‘Do you mean... put the horse in a horsebox and drive it to Edinburgh?’

‘That’s one way, I suppose.’

‘The horse is terribly old and shaky. Lizzie knows, she saw him. He might not last the journey.’

‘I’ll phone you back,’ he said.

I waited. My Jaguar and Lizzie’s helicopter sat uselessly on the tarmac. Lovely fast transport at a standstill.

Quipp came back quite soon.

‘Lizzie says if you say this is urgent, it’s urgent.’

‘It’s urgent,’ I said.

‘Right. In that case, fly up here on the shuttle. We’ll meet you at Edinburgh Airport. Say... one o’clock? Soon after?’

‘Er...’ I began.

‘Of course you can’t bring the horse with you,’ Quipp said, ‘just bring some ticks.’

‘But I can’t actually see them.’

‘Quite normal. They’re very small. Use soap.’

Surreal.

‘Wet a bar of soap until it’s sticky,’ he said. ‘Rub it over the horse. If you find any round brown specks on the soap, you’ve got ticks.’

‘But won’t they die?’

‘My friend says perhaps not, if you don’t waste time on the way here, and anyway, it might not matter. Oh, yes, bring a blood sample from the horse.’

I opened my mouth to say it would take an hour or more to get the vet but Lizzie’s voice in my ear forestalled me.

‘There’s a hypodermic needle and a syringe in my bathroom cupboard,’ she said. ‘Left over from my wasp allergy days when I lived at home. I saw it the other day. Use that.’

‘But Lizzie...’

‘Get on and do it,’ she commanded, and Quipp’s voice said ‘See you on the lunchtime shuttle. Phone if you’re going to be later.’

‘Yes,’ I said dazed, and heard the disconnecting click at the other end. A far from absent-minded don, I reflected. A good match for my sister.

What Peterman himself would think about my sticking needles into him I dreaded to think. I went upstairs to the little pink and gold bathroom off Lizzie’s bedroom and found the syringe, as she’d said, in the mirror-fronted cabinet there. The syringe, disposable, instructions ‘for single use only,’ was inside an opaque white plastic envelope and looked much too small for anything equine. Still, Lizzie had said to use it, so I took it downstairs along with her cake of soap, moistened to stickiness, and approached the old fellow in the garden.

His apathy seemed complete. I merely held his forelock while I traced the visible vein running along his lower jaw, sticking the fine needle into it gently. His head remained still, as if he’d felt nothing. I found I needed two hands, in my inexperience, to pull back the plunger in order to draw blood into the syringe, and even then he remained unmoving, as if half asleep. The little syringe filled easily with the red stuff. I pulled the needle out again, laid the syringe aside, picked up the bar of soap and wiped it around Peterman’s head and down his neck. Despite my doubts and disbelief there were, after three or four passes, a few discernible dark brown pinhead dots on the soft white surface.

Peterman went on paying no attention as I packed my trophies into a nest of scrumpled tissues inside a plastic food container from the kitchen and firmly closed the lid. Automatically I raised a hand to pat the old fellow, to say thanks, and in mid-gesture stopped dead. What if, I thought, in patting him, I transferred his ticks to myself? What if I’d already done it? Would it matter? I hadn’t even thought of wearing protective gloves.

Shrugging, I left my old friend unpatted, washed my hands in the kitchen, and within five minutes I was spinning along the road in the direction of Heathrow Airport.

I phoned Isobel on the way.

‘You’re going where?’ she said.

‘Edinburgh. Be a dear and keep all the phone lines switched to you until I get back. Bonus, of course.’

‘OK. How long will you be gone?’

‘A day or two. I’ll keep phoning you, to stay in touch.’

By luck I had a clear run to the airport, parked in the short-stay car park and caught the last seat on the noon shuttle at nothing faster than a flat-out sprint. My only luggage was the kitchen food container and the envelope of money from the safe. My clothes were the jeans and sweatshirt I’d worn to work. Everyone else on the aircraft seemed to be sporting huge scarlet and white scarves and loudly singing bawdy songs. ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ with the obscenest of gestures. Life grew steadily weirder. I held the container on my lap and slept away the hour in the air.

Lizzie was waiting at the other end beside a man who looked more like a ski instructor than a professor of organic chemistry, the impact of his dark beardless good looks heightened by a rainbow jacket straight off the slopes.

‘Quipp,’ he introduced himself, extending a hand. ‘I suppose you’re Freddie.’

As I’d just kissed Lizzie, this seemed a reasonable assumption.

‘I told him you’d get here,’ she said. ‘He worked out that you couldn’t do it in the time. I told him your jockey instincts made you faster across country than a hurricane.’

‘Hurricanes are slow across country,’ I said, ‘actually.’

Quipp laughed. ‘So they are. Forward speed, not much more than twenty-five miles an hour. Right?’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘Come on, then.’ He eyed the kitchen container. ‘You’ve brought the goods? We’re going straight to the lab. No time to waste.’

Quipp drove a Renault with a verve to match his jacket. We pulled up at what looked like a tradesmen’s back entrance of a private hospital and entered a light featureless corridor that led round a corner to a pair of swing doors with ‘McPherson Foundation’ painted in black letters on non-see-through glass.

Quipp pushed familiarly through the doors, Lizzie and I following, and we entered first a vestibule, and then a room windowed solely by skylights.

From pegs in the vestibule, Quipp issued to each of us a white lab overall-coat which buttoned at the neck and needed to be tied round the waist with tapes. Inside the lab itself we met a man similarly dressed who turned from a microscope on our arrival and said to Quipp, ‘This had better be good, you son of a bitch. I’m supposed to be at the International rugby match at Murrayfield.’

Quipp, unabashed, introduced him to me as Guggenheim, the resident nutter.

Guggenheim, who seemed, like Quipp, to prefer to be identified solely by his last name, was audibly American and visibly about as young as the computer wizard.

‘Disregard his youth,’ Quipp advised. ‘Remember that Isaac Newton was twenty-four when he discovered the binomial theorem in 1666.’

‘I’ll remember,’ I said dryly.

‘I’m twenty-five,’ Guggenheim said. ‘Let’s see what you’ve brought.’

He took the plastic container from me and retreated to one of the work benches that lined two of the walls. With time to look around, it seemed to me that except for the microscope there wasn’t a single piece of equipment there that I could identify. Guggenheim moved in this mysterious territory with the certainty of a Rubik round his cube.

He was slight in build with light brown crinkly hair and the well-disciplined eyes of habitual concentration. He transferred one of the brown dots from the soap to a slide and took a quick look at it under the microscope.

‘Well, well, well, we have a tick. Now what do you suppose he’s carrying?’

‘Er,’ I said, but it appeared that Guggenheim’s question was rhetorical.

‘If it came from a horse,’ he said cheerfully, ‘perhaps we should be looking for Ehrlichia risticii. What do you think? Does Ehrlichia risticii spring to mind?’

‘It does not,’ I said.

Guggenheim looked up from his microscope in good humour. ‘Is the horse ill?’ he asked.

‘The horse is standing still looking depressed, if that doesn’t sound fanciful.’

‘Depression is clinical,’ he said. ‘Anything else? Fever?’

‘I didn’t take his temperature.’ I thought back to Peterman’s behaviour that morning. ‘He wouldn’t eat,’ I said.

Guggenheim looked happy. ‘Depression, anorexia and fever,’ he said, ‘classic symptoms.’ He looked at Lizzie, Quipp and myself. ‘Why don’t you three go away for a bit? Give me an hour. I might find you some answers. I’m not promising. We’ve some powerful microscopes here and we’re dealing with organisms on the edge of visibility. Anyway... an hour.’

We retreated as instructed, leaving our lab coats in the vestibule. Quipp drove us to his lodgings, which were masculine and bookish but bore unmistakable signs of Lizzie’s occupation, though her expression forbade me to comment. She made coffee. Quipp took his cup with the murmured thanks of familiarity.

‘How’s my little Robinson?’ Lizzie asked me. ‘Still in the same place?’

‘A low-loader’s coming on Monday to bring it up here.’

‘Tell them to be careful!’

‘It’ll reach you in cotton wool.’

‘They’ll have to disassemble the rotor linkage...’

We drank the coffee, strong and black.

I telephoned Isobel. All going well, she reported.

‘What exactly is the McPherson Foundation?’ I asked Quipp.

‘Scottish philanthropist,’ Quipp said succinctly. ‘Also a tiny university grant. Small public funding. It has state-of-the-art electron microscopes and at present two resident geniuses, one of whom you met. It pushes out the frontiers of knowledge, and people in obscure places cease dying of obscure illnesses.’ He drank some coffee. ‘Guggenheim’s speciality is the identification of the vectors of Ehrlichiae.’

‘I don’t speak that language,’ I said.

‘Ah. Then you won’t understand that when I asked him about ticks on horses he was, for him, riveted. It’s remotely possible that you’ve solved a mystery for him. Nothing less would have torn him away from Murrayfield.’

‘Well... what are erlic... whatever you said?’

‘Ehrlichiae? They are,’ he said with a touch of mischief, ‘pleomorphic organisms symbiotic in and transmitted by arthropod vectors. In general, that is.’

‘Quipp!’ Lizzie protested.

He relented. ‘They’re parasitic organisms spread by ticks. The best-known make dogs and cattle ill. Guggenheim did some work on Ehrlichiae in horses back in America. He’ll have to tell you about it himself. All I’m sure of is that he’s talking about a new disease that arose only in the mid-nineteen eighties.’

‘A new disease?’ I exclaimed.

‘Nature’s always evolving,’ Quipp said. ‘Life never stands still. Diseases come and go. AIDS is new. Something even more destructive may be just round the corner.’

‘How fearful,’ Lizzie protested, frowning.

‘Dear Liz, you know it’s possible.’ He looked at me. ‘Guggenheim has a theory that the dinosaurs died not of cataclysmic weather upheavals but of tick-borne rickettsial-like pathogens — and those, before you ask, are parasitic micro organisms that cause fevers like typhus. Guggenheim thinks the ticks and their parasites died with their hosts, leaving no trace.’

I pondered. ‘Could you transport these er — pathogens — in viral transport medium? The stuff in those small glass tubes?’

He looked momentarily startled but decisively shook his head. ‘No. Not possible. Ehrlichiae aren’t viruses. As far as I know, they won’t live at all in any sort of medium or on a culture dish, which makes the research difficult. No. Whatever was in your virus transport medium, it definitely did not come from ticks.’

‘That doesn’t,’ I said ruefully, ‘make anything any clearer.’

‘Lizzie is an astro physicist,’ he said, ‘listening to the cosmic ripple from the beginning of the universe, and Guggenheim looks inward into parasitic elementary bodies detectable only by magnifying them a million times in a beam of electrons instead of light. Outer deeps and inner deeps, with our puny intellects here and now trying to see and understand incredible mysteries.’ He smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘The humbling truth is that with all our discoveries, we’re only on the fringe of knowledge.’

‘But from the practical point of view,’ I said, ‘all we need to know is that arsenic can cure syphilis.’

‘You’re no scientist!’ he accused me. ‘You need Guggenheim lookalikes to find out that arsenic can cure syphilis.’

The ultimate squelch, I acknowledged. Lizzie patted my shoulder kindly.

‘I suppose you didn’t know,’ Quipp said, ‘that it was Ehrlich himself, after whom Ehrlichiae are named, who first showed synthetic arsenic to be active against syphilis?’

‘No,’ I said, astonished. ‘I’ve never heard of Ehrlich.’

‘German scientist. Nobel prizewinner. A founder of immunology, pioneer of chemotherapy. Died, 1915. You’ll never forget him.’

In 1915, I thought, Pommern won the war-time Derby. The quirks of life were endless.

After an hour Quipp drove us back to the McPherson Foundation to find Guggenheim pale and trembling, apparently from excitement.

‘Where did these ticks come from?’ he demanded, as soon as we appeared in our white gear. ‘Did they come from America?’

‘I think they came from France.’

‘When?’

‘Last Monday. On a rabbit.’

He peered at me, assessing things. ‘Yes. Yes. They could have travelled on a rabbit. They wouldn’t live long on soap. But transfer them from a horse to a rabbit by soap... there’s no reason why they couldn’t live on a rabbit... The rabbit wouldn’t be receptive to the horse Ehrlichiae... the rabbit could carry the live ticks with impunity.’

‘And then one could transfer the ticks to a different horse?’ I asked.

‘It’s possible. Yes, yes, I can’t see why not.’

‘I can’t see why,’ Lizzie said. ‘Why would anyone do that?’

‘Research,’ Guggenheim said with certainty.

Lizzie looked at me doubtfully but didn’t pursue it.

‘See,’ he said to me, ‘equine ehrlichiosis is known in America. I’ve seen it in Maryland, and Pennsylvania, though it’s a very new disease. Not ten years old yet. Rare. When it’s caused by Ehrlichia risticii it’s been called Potomac horse fever. That’s because it’s been found mostly near big rivers like the Potomac. How did these ticks get to France?’

‘France imports racehorses bred in America. So does Britain, come to that.’

‘Then why the rabbits?’

‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘that you know where to find the ticks in France but not in England.’

‘Yes. Yes.’ His excitement, though internalised, was catching. ‘You realise that the ticks you’ve brought me have no name? No one has so far identified the vector of E. risticii. Do you realise that if... if these ticks are the vector — a vector is a carrier of a disease — then we’re on the verge of a breakthrough in identifying the path of Potomoc horse fever?’ He stopped, overcome.

‘Practically,’ I said. ‘Could you answer some questions?’

‘Fire away.’

‘Well, what happens to a horse if it gets Potomac horse fever? Does it die?’

‘Not usually. Eighty per cent live. Mind you, if it’s a thoroughbred racehorse, which presumably you’re most interested in, it will probably never win another race. What I’ve seen of the disease, it’s very debilitating.’

‘How, exactly?’

‘It’s an enteric infection. That’s to do with the intestines. Apart from the anorexia and so on, there is usually fierce diarrhoea and colic. The horse is much weakened by the fever.’

‘How long does the fever last?’

‘Four or five days.’

‘So short?’

‘The horse develops antibodies so the Ehrlichiae don’t affect it any more. If the vector is a tick, the tick would go right on living. Ticks, I may say, are themselves not much understood. For instance, only the mature ones are brown. Your soap was crowded with nymphets, young ticks, which are almost transparent.’ He paused very briefly. ‘Do you mind if I come to see what you’ve got there, down in Pixhill? Can I see, for example, your rabbit?’

‘I’m afraid I deduced the rabbit.’

‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed.

‘But come,’ I invited him. ‘Stay in my house.’

‘Soon? I mean, I don’t want to upset you, but you said your horse was old, and it’s typically old retired horses out at pasture that get this illness, and the older they are, the more likely to die. Sorry. Sorry.’

‘Can younger horses be affected?’

‘If it’s racehorses in a stable that you mean, then yes, they can, but they’re groomed, aren’t they? The grooming might get rid of the tick. Yes, that’s a theory. In America it is mostly horses out at pasture that get ill.’

‘Um,’ I said, ‘is there a cure for it?’

‘Tetracycline,’ he said promptly. ‘I’ll bring some for your old boy. It may be in time. It depends.’

‘And... er...’ I said, ‘can humans catch this disease?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. They can. It’s usually not properly diagnosed as there are so many confusing symptoms. It gets mistaken for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, but it’s different. It’s rare. And tetracycline does the trick there too.’

‘How could it be diagnosed?’

‘Blood test,’ he said promptly. ‘The amount you brought wasn’t really enough.’