Driving Force

Chapter 12

I travelled back on the last Edinburgh to Heathrow flight of the day, again surrounded by shoals of red-and-white scarves belting out bawdier-than-ever verses. Bass and baritone voices, tuneful, reverberating. The red and white scarves, it was clear, had won the International at Murrayfield. Beer disappeared at a Jogger-like pace. A naked flame would have exploded the alcohol fumes in the cabin. The flight attendants got their bottoms pinched. The ecstasy level rose, if anything, during the hour in the air.

I sat with my head whirling from different stimuli, hearing in flashbacks the facts that had poured out of Guggenheim.

The man himself was somewhere among the scarves, sitting separately because there hadn’t been two seats available together. He had brought with him minimal overnight necessities, a huge amount of hope and a large bag of scientific field instruments. Nothing would have stopped him in his quest for the unnamed vector of E. risticii. He quivered with hunger. He reached out with percipient fingertips, like Handel to Hallelujah, like Newton to calculus, like Ehrlich, no doubt, to arsenic for syphilis. Reached out with genius towards recognition.

‘It’s early in the year for Potomac fever,’ he had said. ‘It’s a warm weather thing, usually...’

‘The ticks came from down south in France,’ I told him. ‘From the Rhône Valley.’

‘A river! But usually May through October.’

‘We had a dead rabbit crawling with ticks in August last year.’

‘Yes. Yes. August.’

‘We had a bug going round locally in Pixhill last summer that put a small number of horses out of action for the season.’

He groaned. With pleasure, as far as I could see.

‘They had the same sort of unspecified feverish illness also in places in France,’ I said. ‘I read it again in the newspaper only this week.’

‘Find the newspaper.’

‘Yes, OK.’

‘No one would have tested for equine ehrlichiosis... it’s still almost an unknown infection. Rare. Sporadic. Not an epidemic. Hard to find. This is wonderful.’

‘Not to the horse owners.’

‘But this is history...’

It was a hopeless disaster, I thought, if I couldn’t clear everything up quickly. ‘Freddie Croft’s horseboxes brought Potomac horse fever to Britain.’ I could just see the headlines. ‘Freddie Croft’s drivers brought fever to Britain.’ Perhaps it would be safer not to employ Freddie Croft’s transport? Sorry and all that, Freddie, but I can’t take the risk.

Confidence was fragile. Loyalty was fickle. Rabbits bringing ticks? No, thanks very much.

Freddie Croft Raceways out of business.

I sweated.

One of the Watermead rabbits had been missing, on the previous Sunday. There were only fourteen, not fifteen, the children had said. Maybe Lewis, the trusted rabbit handler, had taken that one rabbit with him to France. Taken it in a hidden compartment, out of sight above the fuel tanks. Last August it had been Lewis who had brought from France the dead rabbit crawling with ticks... Jogger’s dead nun.

Ticks. Jogger’s voice came distinctly through the roaring rugby songs... ‘Poland had the same five’... A childhood rhyme presented itself in synchronising time with the singing. One, two, buckle my shoe: three, four, knock at the door: five, six, pick up sticks... ‘Poland had the same five, six’... six, sticks, ricks, mix, fix... Poland had the same... ticks.

Poland had the same ticks on a horse last summer, and it died.

Who was Poland?

Oh God, I thought. Not Poland and Waleska. Not Poland and coal or Poland and Danzig or Poland and corridor or Poland and solidarity. No... Poland and Russia.

Russia... Usher.

Benjy Usher had the same ticks...

Dot’s voice, ‘Those old wrecks. They died. I hate it. They were always outside the drawing-room window...’

A well-pinched flight attendant asked if she could fetch me anything, raising her voice above the joyful surrounding din.

‘Treble Scotch... well, no, just one. Got to drive home.’

Pictures crowded my inner eye. Benjy Usher, training through his upstairs window. Benjy never touching his horses. Benjy getting me to saddle his runners at Sandown.

Benjy couldn’t have known, surely, that his old dying lodgers probably carried Ehrlichiae... Could he? Benjy... afraid the microscopic organisms would hop onto himself?

But if he’d feared that, why was he proposing to take two more old horses? Did he know that they, too, might carry ticks?

Lewis drove for him often.

The flight attendant brought my drink.

Benjy entered his horses in small-field races and had had the luck of the devil with walk-overs.

It had to be coincidental. Benjy was rich.

What if what he hankered for were winners, not money? Harve’s voice, Mr Usher’s ‘a rotten trainer...’

It was nonsense. It had to be.

From somewhere, mingled with the rugby songs, a sentence I’d read once surfaced into consciousness: ‘It isn’t necessary to speculate about the driving force within us, it leaps out and reveals itself. Under pressure, it can’t be hidden.’

What if Benjy Usher’s driving force were a hunger for winners, a hunger his own skill wasn’t enough to assuage...?

No. Impossible. Yet winners gave him orgasmic pleasure.

Lewis often drove for Benjy.

Lewis had cut off his ringlets last summer.

Had Lewis been afraid he would get ticks in his long hair?

He’d transported the tick-infested nun in Jogger’s pit.

Jogger.

Benjy hadn’t killed Jogger. Benjy had been playing tennis on the Watermeads’ court at about the time Jogger had died.

Lewis hadn’t killed Jogger. He’d been in France.

Lewis had come back to the farmyard later than intended, at two in the morning on Monday-to-Tuesday night. He’d stabled Michael’s two-year-olds in the farmyard and left me a note to say he had flu. I’d driven his super-six on Tuesday morning with the two-year-olds to Michael’s yard, and I’d had breakfast and watched Irkab Alhawa gallop. Then the super-six had gone racing for the day with one of the fleet’s other drivers.

What if Lewis had in fact taken the missing rabbit to France to pick up its sick-making cargo? What if it had still been there, now tick-infested, in the hidden container, when I’d driven the super-six to Michael’s yard? What if it had still been there until the box returned from the races in the evening? What if Lewis, with only a cold after all, had gone late to the yard to retrieve the rabbit... and what if I had walked in there while this retrieval was in progress?

Did it make sense?

As much sense as anything else.

What had Jogger walked in on, then?

What had occurred on Sunday morning in the farmyard that Jogger had seen, and would tell me about, that it wasn’t intended that he should see?

What had happened in the farmyard on that Sunday morning?

‘Ask the right questions,’ Sandy had said.

That Sunday morning had been March 6th, the day the office computer had been switched on in order to activate the Michelangelo virus. Jogger wouldn’t have understood the computer. It wasn’t what he’d seen in the farmyard office that mattered, but who.

The rugby songs swelled around me.

I had an acute sense of danger.

On the way home from Heathrow I phoned Isobel, apologising for the lateness of the hour.

Think nothing of it, she said. The day had gone well. Harve had taken two winners to Chepstow. Aziz and Dave had returned all right from Ireland but Aziz had said Dave wasn’t in good shape. Dave, Isobel thought, might be developing flu.

‘Bugger,’ I said.

Nina had taken a winner to Lingfield, and so had Nigel. Lewis had driven three of Benjy Usher’s jumpers to Chepstow, and had been reminded to bring his overnight things on Monday for going to Italy. Phil had been phlegmatically to Uttoxeter. Michael Watermead and Marigold English had both booked two boxes for Tuesday to take horses to Doncaster sales.

‘Great,’ I said thankfully. Marigold had disregarded Peterman’s problem: so far, at least.

Jericho Rich had reportedly fallen out already with his new trainer, Isobel said. She thought we might be bringing the whole string back to Pixhill any day soon.

‘The man’s mad,’ I remarked.

‘I hear you’re going to the Watermeads’ for lunch again tomorrow,’ Isobel said. ‘I’ll go on doing the bookings, shall I?’

‘Yes, please,’ I said gratefully. ‘And who told you?’

‘Tessa Watermead. She came by. I taught her a few things. That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sure.’

‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight.’

Guggenheim, sitting beside me in the Fourtrak, repudiated my suggestion that we stop for something to eat. I’d had no lunch and was hungry. Guggenheim’s hunger for truth won the day. Besides, he said, rationalising it and silencing me, Peterman needed the tetracycline as soon as possible.

For poor old Peterman, however, it was already too late. When Guggenheim and I went out into the dark garden, my game old partner was lying in the shadows on my lawn barely a yard from where I’d left him, his visible eye already dull, the stillness of death unmistakable.

Guggenheim’s grief was for his own career; mine for the long-ago races and the speed of a great horse.

Guggenheim had brought not soap for finding ticks but a very small battery-powered hand-held vacuum cleaner. He tried his best all over Peterman, but an inspection of the collected debris from the horse’s skin disappointed him abysmally.

He bent over his microscope in my kitchen uttering soft despairing moans.

‘Nothing. Nothing. You must have brought all of them on the soap.’ He sounded almost accusing, as if I’d ruined things on purpose. ‘But this is typical. The carrier of E. risticii is brutally elusive. Ticks feed on blood. They burrow their heads right through the skin of their host. The Ehrlichiae that live in the tick pass from the tick into the blood of the host and combine with certain blood cells. I won’t bore you with it, it’s incredibly complicated... but they’re only viable in living cells, and this horse has been dead for hours.’

‘Have a drink?’ I suggested.

‘Alcohol’s irrelevant,’ he said.

‘Mm.’

I poured for myself, however, and after a minute he took the whisky bottle out of my hand and half filled the glass I’d set out for him.

‘Anaesthetic for lost hopes,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘When I was your age,’ I said, ‘I rode the wind. Quite often.’

He looked at me over his glass. ‘You’re saying there will be other days? You don’t understand.’

‘I do, you know. I’ll try to get you some more of those ticks.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll sleep on it.’

We found a dinner of sorts in the fridge and cupboard, and he slept in Lizzie’s room silently all night.

In the morning I telephoned John Tigwood and told him Peterman was dead.

Tigwood’s voice, pompous as ever, full of bogus fruitiness, was also defensive and querulous.

‘Marigold English complained to me that the horse was ill and she said he had ticks. Rubbish. Utter rubbish, I told her so. Horses don’t have ticks, dogs and cattle do. I’m not having her or you going round spreading such malicious rumors.’

I saw with clarity that he feared his whole act would fall apart if no one would board his geriatrics. No more collecting tins. No more self-important bustling about. He had as powerful a reason for keeping quiet as I had.

‘The horse is at my house,’ I said. ‘I’ll get the knackers to collect him, if you like.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘How are the other old horses?’ I asked.

‘Perfectly well,’ he said furiously. ‘And it’s your fault Peterman went to Mrs English. She refused point blank to take any of the others.’

I made soothing noises and put down the receiver.

Looking about sixteen, Guggenheim came mournfully downstairs and stared out of the window at Peterman’s carcass as if willing him back to tick-infested life.

‘I’d better go back to Edinburgh,’ he said despondently, ‘unless any other horses are ill.’

‘I can find out at lunch. All the gossip and news in Pixhill will be available then, at Michael Watermead’s house.’

He said if it was all right with me he would stay until after that and then leave: he had on-going work in the laboratory that he shouldn’t be neglecting. Fine, I agreed; and he could come back instantly, of course, if anything significant happened.

He gloomily watched the knackers position their van by my garden gate and winch the thin old corpse away. What would become of him? Guggenheim asked. Glue factory, I said. He looked as if he’d just as soon not have known.

He couldn’t believe, he said, the state of my sitting-room, still in a mess. He couldn’t believe the impact that had destroyed the helicopter and the car. The mind that had done it, I told him, was still wandering around somewhere, still in possession of the axe.

‘But aren’t you... well... scared?’ he asked.

‘Careful,’ I said. ‘That’s why I’m not taking you with me to lunch. I don’t want anyone knowing I know a scientist, especially one who’s an expert on ticks. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not.’ He looked at the axe-slashed room and shivered.

I took him to the farmyard, though, and showed him the horseboxes which impressed him by their size. I explained about the containers under three of them and said I thought the ticks had come into England that way on the rabbits.

‘There would have to be air holes in the containers,’ he said.

‘So there would.’

‘Haven’t you looked?’

‘No.’

He was surprised, but I didn’t explain. I took him back to my house and left him there while I went to the Watermeads’ lunch.

Maudie greeted me with affection and Michael with warmth. Many of the usual people were there: the Ushers and Bruce Farway included. Tessa indulged in back-turning and whispering into Benjy’s ear. The younger children were missing: they’d gone to stay with Susan and Hugh Palmerstone for the weekend. ‘They get on so well with Cinders,’ Maudie said. ‘Such a nice little girl.’ I realised that I’d hoped Cinders would again be at the Watermeads’. Don’t think about her, I told myself. Couldn’t help it.

I asked Michael if he’d accepted any of the old horses yet.

‘Two of them,’ he said, nodding. ‘Skittish old things. Running about in my bottom paddock like two-year-olds.’

I asked Dot the same question and got a different answer.

‘Benjy says we can put Tigwood off for a few days. Don’t know what’s got into the old shit, actually doing what I asked.’

‘What did that old horse die of, last year?’

‘Old age. Some sort of fever. What does it matter? I hate having them about the place.’

The vet who’d given my geriatric passengers the all clear was there, comparing notes with Bruce Farway.

‘How’s trade?’ I asked them. ‘How are the sick of Pixhill? Anything interesting?’

‘I hear the knackers were at your house this morning,’ the vet observed.

‘News zooms round,’ I said, resignedly. ‘One of the old horses died.’

‘You didn’t call me in.’

‘I didn’t know he was that ill, or I would have done.’

He nodded. ‘They’re old. They die. Can’t be helped, it’s nature.’

‘Is anyone else in trouble? Anyone got last year’s bug?’

‘No, thank goodness. Just the usual tendons and teeth.’

‘What was last year’s bug?’ Farway asked.

The vet said, ‘Some unspecified infection. Horses got feverish. I gave them various antibiotics, and they recovered.’ He frowned. ‘It was worrying, really, because all those horses lost their speed and form after it. But, thank goodness, it wasn’t widespread.’

‘Interesting, though,’ Farway said.

‘You’ll be involved in Pixhill’s fortunes before you know it,’ the vet teased him, and Farway looked disconcerted.

Maudie’s sister, Lorna, came proprietorially to Farway’s side, taking his arm and eyeing me with the disapproval left over from my not having transported the geriatrics without payment. I found her disapprobation much less alarming than her earlier interest in me. Farway gave her a fond look while sharing her opinions of myself.

I drifted away from them, feeling isolated by how much I had discovered and wondering what else I didn’t know.

Ed, Tessa’s brother, stood alone, looking surly. I talked to him for a bit, trying to cheer him up.

‘You remember your show-stopper last week?’ I asked him. ‘About Jericho Rich making a play for Tessa?’

‘It was true what I said,’ he insisted defensively.

‘I don’t doubt it.’

‘He was pawing her. I saw him. She slapped his face.’

‘Really?’

‘Don’t you believe me? No one believes a word I say.’ Self-pity swamped him. ‘Jericho Rich swore at her and told her he would take his horses away and Tessa said if he did she’d get even. Silly little bitch. How could she get even with a man like that? So, anyway, he did take the horses away and what has Tessa done about it? Bloody nothing, of course. And Dad isn’t even angry with her, only with me for telling everyone why Jericho Rich left. It isn’t fair.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘You’re not too bad,’ he said reluctantly.

I sat next to Maudie at lunch but there was little left of the enjoyment I’d found at that table a week ago. Maudie sensed it, trying to dispel my sadness, but I left after the coffee with no great regrets.

There were no feverish horses in Pixhill, I reported to Guggenheim, and drove him in his own depression back to the airport. On the way home I stopped for petrol and, after a bit of thought, phoned Nina’s Stow-on-the-Wold number.

‘Um,’ I said, ‘when you come to work tomorrow, bring a parachute.’

‘What?’

‘For landing behind the enemy lines in occupied France.’

‘Is this the concussion?’

‘It is not. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.’

‘I wish you’d explain.’

‘Can I meet you somewhere? Are you busy?’

‘I’m alone... and bored.’

‘Good. I mean, how about the Cotswold Gateway? I could be there before six.’

‘All right.’

Accordingly I changed direction and drove west and north to arrive an hour and a half later at a large impersonal old hotel on the A40 main road which ran across the top of the Cotswold town of Burford. I parked outside the great old-fashioned charming pile, a landmark passed endless times in my life on the way to Cheltenham races.

She was already there when I arrived, having had by far the shorter journey, and she was the original compelling Nina, not the scrubbed and workaday version.

She was sitting in a chintz armchair beside a glowing log fire in the entrance hall, a tea tray primly before her on a low table.

Post-Cheltenham but before the summer tourist season, the place was almost empty. She rose when I came in, and enjoyed my admiration of her appearance. No jeans, this time: the long slender legs were covered instead by black tights. No sloppy old sweater but a black skirt, black waistcoat, white silk shirt with big sleeves, large gold cufflinks and a long neck-chain of enough half sovereigns to fund a ransom. She smelled, not of horses, but subtly of gardenias. The economical bones of her face were revealed and softened by a dusting of powder. Lips, softly red.

‘I hardly like to ask you...’ I said, kissing her cheek as if from long close habit, ‘looking as you do...’

‘You sounded serious.’

‘Mm.’

We sat down near enough to each other to talk, though there was no one to overhear.

‘First of all,’ I said, ‘I found out what’s been carried under my lorries, and it is not as simple as drugs.’ She waited while I paused, her interest sharpening to acute. ‘I went to see a top Customs man in Portsmouth,’ I said, ‘to ask what couldn’t move freely in and out of Britain under the EC regulations. I expect you know, the Customs men never search any traffic nowadays unless they have specific information that drugs will be found in a certain vehicle. In practice, it means that anything — guns, cocaine, whatever, coming here from Europe — has untroubled entry. But he got very excited about cats and dogs, and rabies... and it seems the quarantine rules apply, and also one needs a license for things like veterinary medicines. Anyway, my boxes have been carrying extra livestock, though not cats and dogs, I don’t think, because they would both make a noise.’

‘Make a noise?’

‘Sure. If you carried a cat in one of those containers, someone would hear it complaining.’

‘But why? You’ve lost me. Why take livestock in those containers?’

‘So that the lads with the horses wouldn’t know about it. If any horsebox carried anything in public out of the ordinary, half the village would hear about it in the pub.’

‘Then who’s been carrying secret livestock?’

‘One of my drivers.’

‘Which one?’

‘Lewis.’

‘Oh no, Freddie. He has that baby!’

‘One can love one’s offspring and be a villain.’

‘You don’t mean it...’

‘Yeah. And I don’t like it.’

‘Do you mean... you can’t mean... that Lewis had been deliberately trying to bring rabies into England?’

‘No, not rabies, thank God. Just a fever that makes horses temporarily ill, but takes the edge off their speed so drastically that they don’t win again.’

I told her that Jogger’s dead nun had been a rabbit.

‘Nun — rabbit — habit.’ She sighed. ‘How did you find out?’

‘I asked Isobel what Jogger found dead in the pit, and she told me.’

‘So simple!’

‘Then I looked at the computer files for last August, for the time when I was away, and there it was. August 10th. Jogger reported a dead rabbit fell into the pit from a box he was servicing, and it was on the day after Lewis brought that box back from France.’

She frowned, ‘But the computer files were lost.’

I told her about the back-ups in my safe.

‘You didn’t tell anyone! You didn’t tell me. Don’t you trust me?’

‘Mostly,’ I said.

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I said, ‘Jogger told Isobel the rabbit had ticks on it and she put a note about that in the computer. The computer also lists each box’s journeys individually, and two of those boxes that have hidden containers, Pat’s box, that you drove, and Phil’s box, both of those were driven to France by Lewis last year. This year he’s driving my newest super-six, and it too, as you found, has a container under it. Last weekend, the Watermead children missed one of their tame rabbits that Lewis looks after for them, cleaning their runs and so on, and also last weekend Lewis drove the super-six to France, and this weekend a horse has died in Pixhill of a tick-borne fever.’

She listened wide eyed, her mouth opening. I went over it all again, slowly, telling her about Benjy’s training habits, about Lewis’s shorn ringlets, about Peterman and finally about Guggenheim.

Once an old horse had come through the fever stage, I said, he could live with ticks on him all summer. A continual source of potential illness for other designated recipients. An Ehrlichiae farm, in fact. A quick wipe over an old horse with a wet bar of soap and, within an hour, a wipe of the same soap onto a new host. Tick-transfer completed. Enough of the ticks would survive. The transfer, I said gloomily, might even have been done by Lewis when he drove the unfortunate victims to the races in my boxes.

When the weather grew cold, the ticks would die. A new lot had to be brought in by a temporary host for the new year, and then, without much delay, transferred to their natural host, a horse. Peterman hadn’t survived it.

Whatever doubts she had at the beginning, they had gone by the end.

‘When we first found the containers,’ I said, ‘I begged Jogger not to talk about them. But he did, of course, down at the pub on the Saturday night. I reckon he’d been thinking a lot about them. Turning them over in his mind, I’d think he remembered the rabbit, which must have seemed to him at the time to appear from nowhere, and perhaps he’d worked out that it might have fallen out of one of those containers, the one under what is now Phil’s box, because that container had lost its screw-on end. I don’t know if anyone understood Jogger plainly in the pub. They might have done. Anyway, in the morning he left me the message... and he told me, Jogger told me... about rabbits and ticks and Benjy Usher’s horse that died.’

She was silent for a while and then asked, ‘Was it Lewis who wrecked your car and the house?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sure he was one of the people who dropped me into the water at Southampton. The one who said, “If that doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.” His voice was hoarse because he had a cold, and in my memory, that voice reverberated a bit, as I was half unconscious, but yes, I’m sure that was him. Whether he hates me enough for the rest... I don’t know.’

‘That’s awful.’

‘Mm.’

‘So what next?’

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘Lewis is driving the super-six to Milan, in Italy, to fetch home one of Benjy Usher’s colts, that has a dicky leg. It’s a three-day trip, mostly through France.’

She grew still. Then she said, ‘I’ll go. Have parachute, will travel.’

‘I don’t want you to do anything,’ I explained. ‘I don’t want you to alarm him. I want him to have every opportunity to pick up another rabbitful of ticks, because if all of last weekend’s cargo were on Peterman and have died with him, and if no other horses are ill, then perhaps this is a chance for them to get some replacements. Those ticks are highly perishable, and also hard to find. I’d think they’d need some more. All I want you to do is to note where you go. The route Lewis will take to Italy is down to the Rhône Valley, which is where he went last weekend also. He should be going through the Mont Blanc tunnel from France to Italy but if he takes another route, don’t remark on it. If he wants to stop anywhere at all, let him stop. Don’t ask questions. Agree to whatever he suggests. Notice nothing. Don’t watch him. Yawn, sleep, act dumb.’

‘He won’t want me with him, you know.’

‘I know he thinks you tire easily. So tire. This time, he may be glad of it.’

‘And don’t, I suppose, look under the box?’

‘No, don’t. If the place is littered with lettuce leaves and rabbit droppings, ignore it.’

She smiled.

‘Be careful,’ I begged. ‘I’d go myself, except that if I did, nothing would happen. All I want to know is where Lewis goes.’

‘All right.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Nor did my mother.’

‘Lewis might be just as dangerous.’

‘I promise,’ she said emphatically, ‘that I’ll be as blind as a bat.’ She paused. ‘There’s only one thing.’

‘What?’

‘I want to tell Patrick Venables where I’m going.’

‘Would he stop you?’

‘Probably the opposite.’

‘Don’t let him do anything,’ I said anxiously. ‘Don’t let him frighten them off.’ My instinct was against the Jockey Club knowing too much, too soon, but perhaps also for this possibly risky mission I might need the insurance of Venables’ foreknowledge.

‘I don’t want to be prosecuted,’ she said, half playfully, ‘for trying to nobble half of Pixhill’s best colts.’

‘You won’t be. I—’ I stopped dead, a revelation presenting itself to me with breath-thieving force. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘What is it?’

‘Um. Nothing. When you get back on Wednesday you’ll be met. Don’t worry about anything except not frightening Lewis.’

We ate dinner in the dining-room, discussing the trip to begin with but passing pretty soon to our lives in general. I enjoyed being with her. I was growing unfaithful to Maudie, I thought ironically. I asked Nina how old her eldest child was.

‘Twenty-four.’ She smiled down at her pasta. ‘Much younger than you.’

‘Am I that transparent?’

‘You’re no toy-boy,’ she said.

‘Your children might think so.’

‘Your sister is older than her professor, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, she is,’ I said, mildly surprised. ‘Who told you?’

‘Aziz told me.’

‘Aziz?’

‘Your sister told him. He told me. We drivers hang together, you know.’

‘Wipe that demure smile off your face.’

The smile, however, deepened. I thought of all the empty bedrooms upstairs in the hotel. I thought of the year-long celibacy and felt a strong desire to end it. She must have known what was in my mind. She simply waited.

I sighed. ‘It’s not what I’d prefer,’ I said, ‘but I’m going home.’

She said passively, ‘All right.’

I rubbed my eyes. ‘When this is over...’

‘Yes. We’ll see.’

We went out together, as before, to our separate cars. She had come in her Mercedes.

I kissed her mouth, not her cheek. She drew her head away, her eyes gleaming in the car park lights. I saw that I didn’t displease her. I could so easily... so easily...

‘Freddie...’ Her voice was soft, non-committal, leaving it to me.

‘I have to... I really do have to go,’ I said almost desperately. ‘I’m not sending you off to France without sensible preparations. Bring your overnight things in the morning and pick up a travel kit from the office. It will hold money and phone numbers and a precaution or two against thieves. Lewis always takes a similar kit.’ I stopped. Travel kits were not what I wanted to talk about. I kissed her again and felt resolution draining away.

‘Do the kit in the morning,’ she suggested.

‘Oh, God.’

‘Freddie...’

‘I’ll tell you tomorrow why I have to go.’

I kissed her hard, then turned away and went over to the Fourtrak, feeling clumsy and annoyed with myself for going so far and inexplicably retreating. She didn’t seem to mind. There were no hurt rejected feelings in the smile she gave me as she shut herself into the red car.

‘See you,’ she said through the opening window, starting the engine.

‘Goodnight.’

With a wave she drove away, as self-possessed as ever. I watched her tail lights into the distance and strove to quieten my pulse. The basic drives of nature were so bloody powerful after all. And I’d thought I had the turmoil licked, which only showed that dormant volcanoes were simply that; fires temporarily asleep.

Eight and a half years. Did they matter? I didn’t know, and I understood that she didn’t know either. She was attracted to me; I had to believe it. She was also, I thought, in an odd way shy, not wanting me to think she had rushed me. She was making me decide whether what I felt was a passing arousal or a longer commitment.

I belted the Fourtrak back to my house, pushing decisions away for the night, and changed into soft black shoes and the darkest of clothes I could find. Then, with my eyes adjusting to night vision, I walked in the shadows along to the farmyard and unlocked the padlock on the gates to let myself in, locking it again behind me.

It was after midnight. The sky was clear and cold, stars blazing. All those distant suns, I thought; as mysterious and inaccessible as Ehrlichia risticii.

All the horseboxes were home in the roost, subduedly shining in the light of the night bulb over the canteen door. A quiet Sunday evening, peace after bustle. I had not, this time, walked into a mortal situation.

Harve, I imagined, had done his last rounds, and was watching video football. I unlocked the offices and, without switching on the interior lights, went along to my own room, enough glow creeping in through the windows for me to locate the torch I kept in the desk there and to check that its batteries were functioning. Then, relocking the office door on my way out, I padded across the farmyard to Jogger’s old van from whose front seats I could see all my monsters partially, and one or two of them clearly.

The super-six Lewis would drive to Milan was one of those. I settled into the dark interior of Jogger’s van and tried resolutely to stay awake.

I managed it for an hour.

Dozed.

Woke with a jerk. Two o’clock. Sentries could be court-martialled for sleeping on duty. No one could help going to sleep. When the brain wanted to switch off, it did.

I tried reciting old verses. Nursery rhymes. One two, buckle my shoe.

Went to sleep.

Three o’clock. Four. Half the night passed across my shut eyes. Absolutely no good. Waste of time, sitting there.

When he came, the padlock clicked and rattled on its chain, and I was fully alert instantly.

I held my breath, not moving.

Lewis’s unmistakable short haircut passed in silhouette between me and the outside light. Lewis, carrying a shapeless bag, moved unhesitatingly towards his own lorry, where he lay down on the ground and disappeared from my sight.

He remained out of sight for what seemed a long time, until I began to think he must have left without my noticing. But then, there he was, standing up, moving away, returning with his bag to the main gate and fastening the padlock with an almost inaudible click.

Gone.

I sat for another half hour, not entirely from wanting to be sure he wouldn’t come back but from reluctance to face the next bit.

Phobias were irrational and stupid. Phobias were paralysing, petrifying and all too real. I slowly emerged from the van, took the torch, tried to think of race-riding... anything... and lay down on my back beside Lewis’s box in the location of the fuel tanks.

The cold stars up there didn’t care that my skin sweated and my courage shrank to the size of a nut.

The horsebox would not collapse on me. It obviously would not.

For fuck’s sake, do it, I told myself. Don’t be so fucking stupid.

I shifted my shoulders and hips over the ground and wriggled sideways until I was totally under the tons of steel, and of course they did not collapse on me, they hung over me immobile and impassive, a threat unfulfilled. I stopped under the fuel tanks and felt the stupid sweat wet on my face and came near to complete panic when I tried to raise my hand to wipe the sweat away and hit metal instead.

Fuck, I thought. No word was bad enough. I didn’t habitually think in that casual expletive universal on the racecourse, but there were times when no other word would do.

I’d chosen to lie where I was. Stop bloody trembling, I told myself, and get on with the matter in hand.

Yes, Freddie.

I felt for, and found, the round end of the container above the rear fuel tank. I unscrewed and laid it on the ground beside me. I switched on the torch and raised my head to look into the container.

My hair brushed against the metal. Tons of steel. Shut up. My hands were slippery with sweat and I could hardly breathe and my heart pounded, and I’d risked death in racing thousands of times over fourteen years and I hadn’t cared... it had been nothing like this.

Inside the tubular container there lay what seemed to be a long flat narrow plywood tray stretching away into shadow. Standing on the plywood was an oblong plastic kitchen food-box very like the one I’d taken to Scotland, except that this one had no lid.

Gripping the flashlight convulsively, I stuck my arm with the torch into the tube for a deeper look.

The kitchen food-box held water.

Little stars appeared above the tubular container, showing on the underside of the horsebox floor above. The stars were from the torch-light inside the tube. The stars were the result of holes in the tube.

‘There would have to be air holes in the container,’ Guggenheim had said.

There were air holes.

I peered straight into the tube, my head hard against the metal above, arms constricted by metal on both sides, nerves shot to pathetic crumbs.

Deep along in the tube something moved. An eye shone brightly. In his metal burrow, the rabbit seemed at ease.

I switched off the torch, screwed the end back onto the tube and wriggled out again into the free night air.

I lay on the hard ground, regrouping, heart thudding, ashamed of myself. Nothing, I thought, nothing would get me to do anything like that ever again.

In the morning, life in the farmyard looked normal.

Lewis, predictably, was annoyed that I’d allocated Nina to go with him instead of Dave.

‘Dave wasn’t well on Saturday,’ I said. ‘I’m not risking him getting flu away in Italy.’

Dave at that moment creaked into view on his bicycle, obligingly flushed and heavy-eyed. Flu wasn’t going to stop him, he said.

‘Sorry, but it is,’ I replied. ‘Go home to bed.’

Nina arrived looking the epitome of feminine frailty, yawning artistically and stretching. Lewis regarded her thoughtfully and made no more objections.

He and she both collected their travel kits from Isobel and went over the paperwork requirements with her. When Lewis went into the washroom I had a private moment to murmur in Nina’s ear.

‘You’re taking a nun with you.’

Wide-eyed, she said, ‘How do you know?’

‘I saw her arrive.’

‘When?’

‘Five this morning. About then.’

‘So that’s why...’

Lewis reappeared, saying if they were going to catch the ferry they’d better be off.

‘Phone home,’ I said.

‘Sure thing,’ he agreed easily.

He drove out of the gate without a worry in the world. I hoped to hell that Nina would come back safely.

From the business point of view it was not an overpoweringly busy day, but the plain clothes police swept in with sharp eyes to take over the place before nine, setting up an interview room in my office. Dispossessed, I showed them whatever they wanted, offered them the run of the canteen and sat for a while on a spare chair in Isobel’s office, watching her work.

Sandy drove in in his uniform, still confused in his loyalties.

‘Tell them about the containers,’ he blurted. ‘I haven’t.’

‘Thanks, Sandy.’

‘Did you find your answers?’

‘I asked some questions.’

He knew I wasn’t being open with him, but he seemed to prefer ignorance. In any case, he joined his colleagues and ran errands for them all day.

The colleagues found out about the containers from the landlord of the pub.

‘Lone rangers?’ I repeated when they asked me out in the farmyard. ‘Yes, Jogger came across three containers under the lorries. All empty. We don’t know how long they’ve been there.’

The Force wanted to inspect them. Go ahead, I agreed, though Phil wouldn’t be back with his own horsebox until evening.

Lewis had reached the ferry in good time, Isobel reported, and was now in France. I metaphorically bit my nails.

The police interviewed everyone they could reach and spent time sliding in and out under the boxes. Rather them than me. When Phil returned they removed the tube from above the fuel tanks (with my permission) and brought it out to where it could be easily inspected. Four feet long, eight inches in diameter, empty except for dust, small holes punched through it, screw cap missing.

They took it away for examination. I wondered if they would find rabbit hairs in it.

I drove home. The little helicopter had gone. My poor crunched car stood alone and forlorn, awaiting a tow-truck on the morrow. I patted it. Silly, really. The end of a big part of my life. Saying goodbye.

I went early to bed and tossed and turned.

In the morning Lewis reported to Isobel that he had cleared the Mont Blanc tunnel and would collect the colt before noon.

The police asked more questions. Half the fleet set off to take merchandise to Doncaster sales, Nigel driving for Marigold. I progressed from metaphorical nail biting to actual.

At noon Lewis reported that Benjy Usher’s colt was unmanageable.

I talked to him myself.

‘I’m not driving it,’ he said. ‘It’s a wild animal. It’ll damage the box. It’ll have to stay here.’

‘Is Nina around?’

‘She’s trying to pacify it. No chance.’

‘Let me talk to her.’

She came on the line. ‘The colt’s scared,’ she agreed. ‘He keeps trying to lie down and thrash about. Give me an hour.’

‘If he’s really unmanageable, come back without him.’

‘OK.’

‘Anything else?’ I asked.

‘No. Nothing.’

I sat watching the clock.

After an hour, Lewis phoned back. ‘Nina reckons the colt suffers from claustrophobia,’ he said. ‘He goes berserk if we try to shut him in a single stall in the horsebox, and also if we try to tie him up. She’s got him quiet, like, but he’s loose in a big stall, like we arrange it for a mare and foal. You know. Room for three, all to himself. And she’s opened all the windows. The colt’s standing with his nose out of one of them at the moment. What do you reckon?’

‘It’s up to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell Mr Usher we can’t bring his colt out, if you like.’

‘No.’ He sounded indecisive but finally said, ‘OK, I’ll give it a try. But if he goes mad again when we start off, I’ll scrub it.’

‘Right.’

A claustrophobic horse. We did sometimes come across animals that no amount of persuasion or brute force would get them up a ramp into a horsebox. I sympathised with them, especially after the previous night, but I could have done, this time, with a dozy docile passenger giving Lewis no trouble.

I waited. Another hour crawled by.

‘They must be on their way,’ Isobel said, unconcerned.

‘I hope so.’

Another hour. No news.

‘I’m going to Michael Watermead’s,’ I told Isobel. ‘Call me on the mobile phone if Lewis reports.’

She nodded, busy with other things, and I trundled down to Michael’s trying to work out how best to tell him something he wouldn’t want to hear.

He was surprised to see me in the hour of afternoon doldrums before the lads arrived to feed and water the horses and prepare them for the night.

‘Hello!’ he said. ‘What can I do for you? Come along in.’

He took me into a small friendly sitting-room, not the big imposing room of Sunday-lunch champagne cocktails. He’d been reading newspapers, which lay scattered over a low table and nearby armchair, and he roughly gathered them together to make a space for me to sit.

‘Maudie’s out,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some tea in a minute.’

He waved for me to sit down, obviously waiting for me to begin. And where to begin... that was the problem.

‘You remember,’ I said, ‘the man who died in one of my horseboxes?’

‘Died? Oh yes, of course. On the way back from taking Jericho’s two-year-olds, wretched man.’

‘Mm.’ I paused. ‘Look,’ I said awkwardly, ‘I wouldn’t bother you with this, but I do want to clear something up.’

‘Carry on, then.’ He sounded receptive, not impatient, simply interested.

I told him that Dave had picked the man up not casually but by arrangement. Michael frowned. I explained about the carrier-bag with the thermos flask that I’d found in the nine-box the next evening, and I showed him the last two tubes that had been carried in the thermos, that I’d had in my safe.

‘What are they?’ he asked curiously, holding one up to the light. ‘What’s in them?’

‘Viral transport medium,’ I said. ‘For transporting a virus.’

‘Virus...’ He was shocked. ‘Did you say virus?’

Virus, to all trainers, meant ‘the virus,’ the dreaded respiratory infection that made horses cough and run at the nose. The virus could put a stable out of winners for most of a year. The worst news possible, that was ‘the virus.’

Michael handed the tubes back as if they’d stung him.

‘They came from Pontefract,’ I said. ‘From Yorkshire.’

He stared. ‘They’ve got the virus up there. Two or three yards have it.’ He looked worried. ‘You haven’t mixed any of my horses in with horses from up north, have you? Because, if so...’

‘No,’ I said positively. ‘Your horses always travel alone, unless you give specific permission otherwise. I’d never ever put your horses in danger of infection in my transport.’

He marginally relaxed. ‘I didn’t think you would.’ He was eyeing the tubes as if they were snakes. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because I think... er... if the hitchhiker hadn’t died, the virus that was in these tubes might have found its way into the last of Jericho Rich’s string — the fillies — on the last day of the transfer to Newmarket.’

He stared some more. He thought it over. ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘That’s criminal.’

‘Mm.’

‘Why?’ he said again.

‘To get even with Jericho Rich.’

‘Oh no,’ he said protestingly, standing up sharply, striding away from me, anger rising. ‘I would never, never do a thing like that.’

‘I know you wouldn’t.’

He swung round furiously. ‘Then who?’

‘Um... I think... you might ask Tessa.’

‘Tessa!’ His anger increased; at me, not at her. ‘She wouldn’t. What’s more she couldn’t. This is utter rubbish, Freddie, and I’m not listening to any more of it.’

I sighed. ‘All right.’ I stood up to go. ‘Sorry, Michael.’

I went out of his house and over to my Fourtrak and he followed me indecisively as far as his door.

‘Come back,’ he said.

I retraced a few steps in his direction.

‘You can’t make accusations like that and simply bugger off,’ he said. ‘Do you or don’t you want to go on driving my horses?’

‘Very badly,’ I admitted.

‘Then this is not the way to go about it.’

‘I can’t let my business be used for carrying viruses from place to place and do nothing to stop it.’

‘Huh,’ he said on a low breath. ‘When you think of it like that... but Tessa? It’s preposterous. She wouldn’t know how to do it, for a start.’

‘I’d like to ask her,’ I said reasonably. ‘Is she at home?’

He looked at his watch. ‘She ought to be here at any minute. She only went shopping.’

‘I could come back,’ I said.

He hesitated, then jerked his head towards the inside of the house, bidding me to follow. ‘You might as well wait,’ he said.

I followed him through to the sitting-room.

‘Tessa,’ he said, not believing it. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’

‘If I have, I’ll grovel.’

He gave me a sharp look. ‘You’ll need to.’

We waited. Michael tried to read a newspaper and put it down crossly, unable to concentrate.

‘Nonsense,’ he said, meaning what I’d said about Tessa. ‘Total nonsense.’

His daughter returned, looking into the sitting-room as she passed, festooned with boutique bags, on her way upstairs. Brown haired, light-eyed, perpetually sulky-looking, she glanced at me with disfavour.

‘Come in, Tessa,’ her father said. ‘Shut the door.’

‘I want to go upstairs.’ She peered into one of the bags. ‘I want to try this dress on.’

‘Come in,’ he said, sharply for him, and frowning, ungraciously, she did so.

‘What is it, then?’ she asked.

‘All right, Freddie,’ her father said to me. ‘Ask her.’

‘Ask me what?’ She was displeased, but not frightened.

‘Um...’ I said, ‘did you arrange for some tubes containing virus to be brought to Pixhill?’

It took a moment for my deliberately casual tone of voice to reach her understanding. When she realised what I’d asked her, she stopped fidgeting with her shopping and grew still with shock, her face stiffening, mouth open, eyes wary. Even to Michael it was plain that she knew what I was talking about.

‘Tessa,’ he said despairingly.

‘Well, what of it?’ she said defiantly. ‘What if I did? It never got here. So what?’

I took the two tubes out of my pocket again and put them on the table. She looked at them vaguely, then worked out what they were. A bad moment for her, I thought.

‘There were six tubes,’ I said. ‘What were you going to do with them? Pour the contents up the noses of six fillies belonging to Jericho Rich?’

‘Dad!’ She turned to him, imploring. ‘Get rid of him.’

‘I can’t,’ Michael said sadly. ‘Is that what you intended?’

‘I didn’t do it.’ She sounded triumphant more than abashed.

‘You didn’t do it,’ I agreed, ‘because your courier died of heart failure on the journey and failed to deliver the thermos.’

‘You don’t know anything,’ she said. ‘You’re making it up.’

‘You wanted to get even with Jericho Rich for taking his horses away because he made a pass at you and you slapped his face. You thought you would make his horses ill so they couldn’t win, serve him right. You saw an advertisement in Horse and Hound saying more or less “anything transported anywhere,” so you phoned the number in the ad and arranged for Kevin Keith Ogden — the man who died — to pick up a thermos at Pontefract service station and bring it down the A1 to the junction with the M25 at South Mimms. You arranged with my driver, Dave, to get Ogden picked up there and to bring him to Chieveley. You phoned Dave late in the evening after he got back from Folkestone, as you knew it was no good trying to reach him earlier because you knew his schedule. You’re always in and out of Isobel’s office and you could see the day’s list. Ogden was supposed to disembark at Chieveley and hand over the thermos, but as he’d died my men brought him all the way to my house. I expect you may have been surprised when Ogden didn’t appear at Chieveley, but it was soon all over the village why not, and certainly your father knew about it almost at once.’ I paused briefly. Neither father nor daughter tried to speak.

‘When you found Ogden was dead,’ I went on, ‘you knew the thermos had to be still in the horsebox, so you came looking for it, Tessa, disguised in dark clothes with a black balaclava over your head, so that if I saw you I wouldn’t know you. I found you in the cab, if you remember, and you ran away.’

It was Michael who said, ‘No.’

‘You couldn’t find the thermos,’ I told Tessa. ‘You tried twice. Then I decided to sleep in the cab, which put an end to it.’

Michael said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ But he did.

‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ I said to Tessa. ‘I won’t tell Jericho Rich what you intended for his fillies if you’ll answer a few questions.’

‘You can’t prove a thing,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. ‘And that’s blackmail.’

‘Maybe. In return for my never mentioning this again to anyone, I want a few answers. It’s not a bad bargain.’

‘How do I know you’ll keep it?’

‘He will,’ Michael said.

‘Why do you trust him so much?’ his daughter demanded.

‘I just do.’

She didn’t like it. She tossed her head. She said tightly, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Chiefly,’ I said, ‘where did the virus transport medium come from?’

‘What?’

I repeated the question. She went on looking blank.

‘The liquid in those tubes,’ I said, ‘is a mixture used for transporting viruses outside a living body.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘If you simply collected the nasal discharge of a horse with the virus,’ I said, ‘the virus would disappear in a very short time. To bring the infection to Pixhill from Yorkshire by road, the way it came, you’d need to combine the nasal discharge with a mixture that would keep the virus active. That’s what’s in these tubes, that mixture. Even in these, a virus won’t survive more than two days. This mixture here is harmless now. But where did it come from?’

She didn’t answer. Michael said, ‘Where, Tessa?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘All you know,’ I suggested, ‘was that if you held a horse’s head up and poured the mixture down his nostril, he would be infected?’

‘Well, probably. Probably be infected.’

‘Who told you?’ I asked. ‘Who got the stuff for you?’

Silence.

‘Tessa?’ Michael said.

‘Was it Benjy Usher?’ I asked.

‘No!’ She was truly astonished. ‘Of course not.’

‘Not Benjy,’ Michael agreed, amused. ‘But who, Tessa?’

‘I’m not saying.’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ I murmured.

A silence lengthened while the head-tosser, the whisperer, thought it over.

‘Oh, all right,’ she burst out. ‘It was Lewis.’

Michael was as surprised as I was not. I would have been astounded if she’d said anyone else.

‘I don’t know where he got it from,’ she said wildly. ‘All he said was he could get a pal up north to collect some snot from a horse with the virus — that’s what he said, snot, not all posh like nasal discharge — and this pal would take it to Pontefract service station if I could get someone to collect it. The pal couldn’t get away to bring it down here and I’d no chance of going to Yorkshire without making endless excuses, so yes, I’d seen the ad in the magazine and suggested to Lewis that I could use it and he said get Dave to pick the man up; Dave was down for the trip to Newmarket and he would do anything for money, and the man would get to Chieveley, where I could meet him easily, and how was I to know he was going to die? I phoned Lewis and told him what had happened and asked him to find the thermos for me but all he would do was give me the key to get into the cab with. And if you want to know, you looked pretty stupid when you caught me searching, when you were trying to run in sleeping shorts and gumboots and a raincoat half off. Pretty silly, you looked.’

‘I expect so,’ I said equably. ‘Did you look under the horsebox as well as in it?’

‘Mr Know-all, aren’t you? Yes, I did.’

‘Er, why?’

‘Lewis told me one day you could carry anything under the horseboxes if you wanted to.’

‘Why did he say that?’ I asked.

‘Why does anyone say anything? He liked saying things to get you going. He said he’d carried soap in a container under one of your boxes, but he’d given it up, it didn’t work.’

‘Soap,’ Michael said, hopelessly lost, ‘why ever soap?’

‘I don’t know. How should I know? Lewis just says weird things. Just his way.’

‘So... er...’ I said, ‘did you find any soap under my horsebox?’

‘No, of course I didn’t. I was looking for a thermos. There was nothing at all under there. It was all filthy dirty.’

‘When you tried to get Nigel to take you to Newmarket with the fillies,’ I said, ‘were you still hoping to find the virus container and infect the horses on the journey?’

‘What if I was?’

‘It was a different horsebox,’ I said.

‘It wasn’t... well, they all look alike.’

‘Many do.’

She looked shattered.

‘Did you pay Dave?’ I asked mildly.

‘No, I didn’t. I mean, I never got the stuff, did I?’

‘And you didn’t pay Ogden, because he was dead. Did you pay Lewis?’

After a pause she said sullenly, ‘He wanted it in advance. So, yes.’

Michael said, ‘Tessa,’ again, almost wailing.

‘Well I did it for you, Dad,’ she said. ‘I hate Jericho Rich. Taking his horses away because I slapped his face! I did it for you.’

Michael was overcome, full of too-easy indulgence. I didn’t believe her, but perhaps Michael needed to.