Driving Force

Chapter 13

Isobel was still in the office when I returned to the farmyard although it was by then nearly five. Rose had gone home.

Lewis had phoned, Isobel said. I had just missed him. He and Nina were back through the Mont Blanc tunnel and had stopped for a sandwich and refuelling. Nina had been driving. The colt had had its head out of the window all the way but had not gone berserk. Lewis would be driving north through the night, though he would stop somewhere to fill the jerrycans with French water for the colt.

‘Right,’ I said.

French water, pure and sweet from springs, was good for horses. Such a stop would be unremarkable.

‘Aziz asked for tomorrow off,’ Isobel said. ‘He doesn’t want to drive tomorrow. Something to do with his religion.’

‘His religion?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘He’s a rogue. Where is he now?’

‘On his way back from taking horses to Doncaster sales.’

I sighed. Religions were difficult to argue with, but Aziz was still a rogue, if not something worse.

‘Anything else?’

‘Mr Usher asked if we’d collected the colt. I told him he’d be in Pixhill by six tomorrow evening, if there were no ferry delays.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Fingers crossed,’ Isobel said.

‘Mm.’

‘You look awfully worried,’ she said.

‘It’s this Jogger business.’

She nodded in understanding. The police, she said, had been irritated to find so many drivers away out on the road.

‘They don’t seem to realise we’ve a business to run,’ she said. ‘They think we should all down tools. I told them we couldn’t.’

‘Thanks again.’

‘Get some sleep,’ she said impulsively, young but no fool.

‘Mm.’

I tried to take her advice. Concussion no longer did the trick. I lay awake thinking of Lewis stopping somewhere to fill the cans with French water. I hoped to hell Nina would keep her head down and her eyes — partially — shut.

On Wednesday morning I saw off the lorries going out again to Doncaster, where the Flat racing season would open the next day. The March meeting of Doncaster sales and races were the start of Croft Raceways’ busiest time: we were entering six months of work, work, improvisation and scramble, an atmosphere I usually loved. Juggling the number of boxes, the number of drivers, against the prospects of profitability: normally it excited me, but this week so far I could barely concentrate.

‘The whole fleet,’ Isobel said, cheeringly, ‘will be rolling tomorrow.’

I cared only that Lewis would roll home today.

At nine, when the telephone rang for the nth time, Isobel answered it, frowning.

‘Aziz?’ she said. ‘Just a moment.’ She put her hand over the receiver. ‘What’s “hold on” in French?’

‘Ne quittez pas,’ I said.

Isobel repeated ‘Ne quittez pas’ into the instrument and rose to her feet. ‘It’s a Frenchman, for Aziz.’

‘He isn’t here today,’ I said.

She replied over her shoulder as she went through the door, ‘He’s in the canteen.’

Aziz came in hurriedly and picked up the receiver from Isobel’s desk.

‘Oui... Aziz. Oui.’ He listened and spoke rapidly in French, stretching out a hand for a piece of memo paper and a pencil. ‘Oui. Oui. Merci, Monsieur. Merci.’ Aziz wrote carefully, thanked his informant profusely and put the phone back in its cradle.

‘A message from France,’ he said unnecessarily. He pushed the memo sheet towards me. ‘It seems Nina asked the man to phone here. She gave him money for the phone call and an address. This is it.’

I took the paper and read the scant words. ‘Ecurie Bonne Chance, près de Belley.’

‘Good Luck Stables,’ Aziz translated. ‘Near Belley.’

He gave me the usual brilliant smile and smartly left the office.

‘I thought Aziz had the day off,’ I said to Isobel.

She shrugged. ‘He said he didn’t want to drive. He was here already in the canteen when I arrived for work. Reading and drinking tea. He said, “Good morning, darlin’”.’

Isobel faintly blushed.

I looked at the French address and phoned the Jockey Club. Peter Venables must have been sitting there, waiting.

‘Nina sent an address via a Frenchman,’ I told him. ‘Ecurie Bonne Chance, near Belley. Can you ask your equivalents in France for any information about it?’

‘Spell it.’

I spelled it. ‘Aziz took the message in French,’ I said.

‘Good.’ He sounded decisive. ‘I’ll ask my French colleagues and phone you back.’

I sat for a few seconds looking at the telephone after he’d disconnected, and then went and found Aziz in the canteen and invited him into the open air.

‘What’s your religion?’ I asked, out in the farmyard.

‘Er...’ He gave me a sideways look with his bright eyes, the smile untroubled.

‘Do you work for the Jockey Club?’ I asked flatly.

The smile simply broadened.

I turned away from him. Patrick Venables, I thought bitterly, and Nina also, had trusted me so little that they’d sent another undercover man, one I wouldn’t know of, to make sure I wasn’t myself the villain I purported to be looking for. Aziz had turned up the day after Jogger died. I suppose I shouldn’t have minded, but I did.

‘Freddie,’ Aziz took a step and grasped my sleeve, ‘listen.’ The smile had faded. ‘Patrick wanted Nina to have back-up. I suppose we should have told you, but...’

‘Stick around,’ I said briefly, and returned to my office.

An hour later, Patrick Venables came on the line.

‘First of all, I think I owe you an apology,’ he said. ‘But I’m curious. How did you suss out Aziz? He phoned to say you’d rumbled him.’

‘Little things,’ I explained. ‘He’s too bright for the job. I’ll bet he never drove for a racing stable. The phone caller from France asked for him specifically, which meant Nina had arranged for Aziz to be available. And you, yourself, didn’t ask who Aziz was when I mentioned him.’

‘Dear God.’

‘As you say.’

‘Ecurie Bonne Chance,’ he said, ‘is a small stable run by a minor French trainer. The owner of the property is Benjamin Usher.’

‘Ah.’

‘The property is south of Belley and is situated near the River Rhône where the river runs from east to west, before turning south at Lyons.’

‘Very thorough,’ I commented.

‘The French know nothing against the place. They have had some sick horses there, but none have died.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Nina insisted on going on the journey,’ he said, ‘and she was adamant we don’t intercept your box on its way back.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

I hoped so too.

I phoned Guggenheim. ‘I can’t promise,’ I said, ‘but fly down and come to the farmyard today, in a taxi, and bring something to carry a small animal in.’

‘Rabbit?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Pray,’ I said.

The hours crawled.

Lewis phoned Isobel eventually in the afternoon and said they had crossed on the ferry and were leaving Dover.

After another slow hour Isobel and Rose went home and I locked the office and went over to the Fourtrak, starting the engine. The passenger door opened, with Aziz standing there.

‘Can I come with you?’ he said. Bright eyes. No smile.

I didn’t immediately answer.

‘You’ll be safer if I do. No one, anyway, will hit you on the head when you’re not looking.’

I made a non-committal gesture and he swung into the seat beside me.

‘You’re going to meet Nina, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What do you expect will happen?’

I drove out of the yard, turned out of the village and drove uphill to a place where one could look down on Pixhill below.

‘Lewis,’ I said, ‘should come over the brow of that far hill and drive into Benjy Usher’s yard. If he does, I’ll drive down there to meet them. If he goes anywhere else we can see that from here too.’

‘Where do you think he might go?’

‘I don’t know how much you know.’

‘Nina said the method was complicated but the simple matter is that someone is bringing sickness to Pixhill’s horses.’

‘Roughly, yes.’

‘But why?’

‘Partly to make a certain category of races easier to win by methodically infecting all the horses of that category that can be got at in Pixhill.’ I paused. ‘Halve the runners in the Chester Vase, for instance, and you more or less double your chances of winning. There are seldom more than six or so runners in the Chester Vase, or the Dante Stakes at York. They are nice prestigious races. Winning them puts a trainer in good standing in the profession.’

Aziz sat digesting the implications. ‘A blanket illness?’ he said.

‘Occurring here and there,’ I nodded. ‘It’s not like nobbling the favourite for the Derby.’

‘Irkab Alhawa,’ he said. ‘Ride the Air.’

‘Ride the Wind.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘in Arabic it means “ride the air.” It’s the way jockeys ride, standing in the stirrups, sitting on air, not the saddle.’

‘Ride the wind’s better,’ I said.

‘But you don’t think anyone’s going to make that horse sick?’

After a pause I said, ‘Lewis didn’t kill Jogger, he was in France. I don’t think Lewis destroyed my car or took an axe to my house. I’m sure Lewis didn’t crash the hard disk in my computer. As I said, that Sunday he was in France.’

‘He couldn’t have done it,’ Aziz agreed.

‘I thought I was up against two forces,’ I said. ‘Muscle and money. But there’s a third.’

‘What is it?’

‘Malice.’

‘The worst,’ Aziz said slowly.

The driving force within you, I thought, leaps out. Under stress, it can’t be hidden.

Apply the stress.

‘Do you have any reason to think anyone would destroy Irkab Alhawa?’ Aziz asked, frowning.

‘No. I just intend to use the thought as a lever.’

‘To do what?’

‘Wait and see, and guard my back.’

Aziz leaned sideways against the passenger door and assessed me quizzically, the irrepressible smile reappearing.

‘You’re not like you look, are you?’ he said.

‘How do I look?’

‘Physical.’

‘So do you,’ I said.

‘But then... I am.’

An odd ally, I thought; and unexpectedly, I was glad he was there.

A Croft Raceways horsebox came over the opposite hill. I raised a pair of binoculars and focused, and saw the horse’s head sticking out of the window.

‘That’s them,’ I said. ‘Lewis and Nina.’

The horsebox turned into the road towards Benjy Usher’s stables, almost next door to Michael’s. I started the Fourtrak and drove down the hill, reaching Benjy’s yard almost before Lewis switched off his engine.

Benjy’s head appeared in his upstairs window, poking out rather like his colt’s from the horsebox. He issued orders to his lads below with his customary force, and Lewis and Nina lowered the ramp. I got out of my jalopy and watched them.

My presence there was taken for granted by everyone. Nina noticed Aziz still sitting in the Fourtrak and threw him an enquiring glance, to which he responded with a quick thumbs-up.

The colt clattered wild-eyed down the ramp, led by Nina, and limped away in the hands of Benjy’s head lad. Benjy shouted an enquiry to Lewis about the journey: Lewis went nearer to the window and shouted up, ‘It all went right.’ Benjy, relieved, retreated and closed his window.

I said to Nina, ‘Did you stop anywhere since Dover?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Go with Aziz, now, will you?’

I went over to Aziz and spoke to him through the Fourtrak’s window.

‘Please take Nina with you and go to the farmyard. There may be a young man wandering about there, carrying a small animal transporter. His name’s Guggenheim. Collect him and in about a quarter of an hour take him on with you.’

‘Where to?’

‘To Centaur Care. That place where you took the old horses. I’ll drive this horsebox and meet you there.’

‘Let me come with you,’ he said.

‘No. Look after Nina.’

‘As if she needed it!’

‘Everyone needs their back watched.’

I left him, walked over to the horsebox while Lewis was lifting the ramp back into place, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

Lewis was surprised, but when I waved him towards the passenger side he climbed in there without demur. He’d worked for me for two years: he was accustomed to doing what I said.

I started the powerful engine and drove carefully out of Benjy’s yard, continuing on down the road towards Michael’s place. Opposite Michael’s gate, where the road temporarily widened and the space allowed it, I pulled the box over to the side, stepped on the foot brake, rolled gently to a stop, applied the hand-brake and switched off.

Lewis looked surprised, but not very. The vagaries of bosses, his manner seemed to imply, had to be tolerated.

‘How’s the rabbit?’ I said conversationally.

His expression gave new meaning to the word ‘flabbergasted.’ He looked for a moment as if his heart had actually stopped beating. His mouth opened and no sound came out.

Lewis, I thought, with his biker past, his tattooed dragon, his expert fists; Lewis with his bimbo and his ambitions for his baby, Lewis might be a dishonest muscle-man out to make money, but he was no actor.

‘I’ll tell you what you’ve been doing,’ I said. ‘Benjy Usher owns a stable in France where he discovered last year by chance that the horses there were falling ill with an unspecified fever. He learned that there was a possibility that the fever was carried by ticks. So he thought it a good wheeze to bring the illness to England and give it to a few horses here so as to clear his path a bit to winners he might not otherwise have. The problem was how to bring the ticks to England; and first of all, you tried to bring them on soap which you carried in a cash box stuck to the bottom of one of my nine-boxes that you were driving at the time.’

Lewis went on looking dumbfounded, a pulse throbbing now in a swelled vein on his forehead.

‘The ticks didn’t survive that journey. They don’t, as you now know, survive long enough on soap. A different way of travel had to be found. An animal. A hamster, maybe. Or a rabbit. How are we doing?’

Silence.

‘You looked after the Watermeads’ rabbits. Perfect. You thought they wouldn’t miss one or two, but they did. Anyway, last year, driving Pat’s four-box, you went to France to the Ecurie Bonne Chance, that’s Benjy Usher’s place outside Belley, down near the River Rhône, and you wiped ticks onto a rabbit. You brought it back here, wiped the ticks from the rabbit on to two old horses that Benjy Usher had in a paddock outside his drawing-room window, and although one of them died, there you both were with flourishing live ticks on the other, ready to be transferred to any horse that Benjy decided on, and that you could get close to by driving it to the races.’

I wondered what incipient heart failure looked like.

‘The ticks are unpredictable,’ I continued, ‘and in the end probably just disappeared, so in August you went again to France, but this time taking the box Phil drives now, which you used to drive regularly at that time. But on that occasion, things went wrong. The horsebox was due for maintenance and was driven straight to the barn on your return. The cap had unscrewed itself from the tube, perhaps from vibration. Before you could retrieve the rabbit, it fell into the inspection pit and died, and Jogger threw it away, ticks and all.’

Strangled silence.

‘So this year,’ I said, ‘you went in the new super-six to fetch the two-year-olds for Michael Watermead, and you took a rabbit with you. The ticks came back alive and were transferred to the old horse, Peterman. But Peterman went to Marigold English, not Benjy Usher, and Peterman died. The ticks died soon after him. So now we have the Flat season about to start and all the Chester Vase and Dante Stakes contestants this year are strong and healthy still, so you set off with the rabbit to fetch Benjy Usher’s colt from Milan, and on the way back you stopped at the Ecurie Bonne Chance, and what will you bet that in the tube container above the fuel tanks of this horsebox we’ll find a rabbit with ticks on?’

Silence.

I asked, ‘Why didn’t you just wipe ticks straight onto Benjy’s colt?’

‘He wants it to race again when its leg gets healed.’

The admission slipped painlessly out. Lewis’s voice was hoarse. He didn’t even try to protest innocence.

‘So now,’ I said, ‘we’re going to take the rabbit straight to Centaur Care, where the two old horses destined for Benjy’s field are waiting. This time you are not going to have to retrieve the rabbit from the tube at eleven o’clock at night, and hit me on the head when I catch you at it.’

‘I never,’ he said fiercely. ‘I never hit you.’

‘You did drop me into the water, though. And you said “If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.” ’

Lewis seemed to have gone beyond being astounded and had reached the stage of anxiety to salvage whatever he could.

‘I needed the money,’ he said, ‘for my kid’s education.’

One more shock, I thought, and he would really start talking.

I said, ‘If it came to a choice, which would you prefer, to drive Irkab Alhawa to the Derby and maybe bring him back as the winner in your own box on the television to this village, or to infect him with ticks to stop him even running?’

‘He’d never do that!’ he said. His horror, indeed, looked genuine.

‘He’s violent and spiteful,’ I said, ‘so why not?’

‘No!’ He stared at me, belatedly thinking. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘John Tigwood, of course.’

Lewis closed his eyes.

‘Benjy’s reward is winning,’ I said. ‘Yours is money. Tigwood’s is the power to spoil other people’s achievements. That’s a commoner sin than you may think. Knocking people is a major sport.’

To win by cheating. Ambition for one’s child. Malice and secretly-enjoyed destructive power, bolstering an inadequate personality. To each his driving force.

And mine? Ah, mine. Who ever understood his own?

Lewis looked sick.

‘Does Benjy Usher pay Tigwood?’ I asked.

Lewis said without humour, ‘He gives him wads of the stuff in one of those collecting tins, right out in public.’

After a pause I said, ‘Tell me what happened the night you chucked me in the water.’

He practically moaned, ‘I’m no grass.’

‘You’re a witness,’ I said. ‘Witnesses get off lighter.’

‘I didn’t do your car.’

‘You didn’t kill Jogger,’ I pointed out, ‘because you were in France. But as for my car, you certainly could have done it.’

‘I didn’t. I never. He did.’

‘Well... why?’

Lewis stared at me, his eyes deep in their sockets.

‘See, he was like a wild thing. Going on about you having everything so easy. Why should you have everything, he said, when he had nothing. There you were, he said, with your house and your money and your looks and your business and being a top jockey all that time and everyone liking you, and what did he have, people never looked pleased to see him, they turned away from him. Whatever he did, he would never be you. He absolutely hated you. It turned my stomach, like, but I reckoned he might turn on me if I contradicted him so I went along with him... and he had the axe with him in his car...’

‘Did he hit me with the axe?’ I asked incredulously.

‘No. A rusty old tyre lever. He had a lot of tools in his car, he said. When he hit you we put you in the boot of my car, as there was more room and he told me to drive to the Docks. He was laughing, see!’

‘Did you think I was dead?’

‘I didn’t know, like. But you weren’t. You were talking, sort of delirious, when we got there. I never meant to kill you. Honest.’

‘Mm.’

‘He said we were in it together. He said how would I like him to get me in trouble. How would I like to lose my job and not drive the best horses any more.’

Lewis stopped talking, looking now at a future which meant all those things.

‘Bloody bugger,’ he said.

‘So you came back from Southampton,’ I said, taking it for granted, ‘and collected the axe and chopped up my house and my car and my sister’s helicopter.’

‘He did that. He did it. He was shouting and raving and laughing. He chopped all the stuff in your room. So bloody strong. I’ll tell you, he frightened me rigid.’

‘You watched him?’

‘Well... yeah.’

‘And enjoyed it?’

‘Never.’

But he had, I saw. He might just possibly have been frightened by the vigour of that attack but deep down there had been an awestruck guilty pleasure.

Ruefully, I restarted the engine.

‘Like,’ Lewis said, ‘how did you know about the journeys?’

‘They’re in the computer.’

‘He said he’d wiped out your records on the Sunday with a Michelangelo or something, and not to worry.’

‘I had copies,’ I said succinctly.

Tigwood had been in the pub the night everyone heard Jogger say he’d found the secret containers. From spite he must have stolen Jogger’s tools. Then if Jogger found Tigwood tampering with my computer on the Sunday... I could see Tigwood going to his car for Jogger’s own tyre lever, walking along to the barn after him and aiming just one lethal blow. Jogger wouldn’t have expected it. He knew of no reason to fear.

I released the brakes and started down the road.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that it was Tigwood with all his medical journals who understood about ticks? And who knew what you needed for bringing the virus from Yorkshire for Tessa Watermead to infect Jericho Rich’s horses? You couldn’t give the Jericho Rich horses tick fever, because by then you hadn’t been over to collect this year’s ticks.’

He was again speechless. I glanced at him.

I said, ‘You haven’t much chance if you’re not willing to be a witness. Tessa told me and her father what you did.’

I phoned Sandy Smith’s number and, finding him at home, invited him to drive along to Centaur Care. ‘Bring your handcuffs,’ I said.

It took Lewis a slow painful mile to make up his mind, but as I turned through the gates of the crumbling headquarters of a disgraced charity, he said, mumbling, ‘All right. A witness.’

The decrepit place was alive with people.

Lorna Lipton’s Range Rover stood in the driveway. Lorna was talking to Tigwood and there were children — children — running about. Maudie’s two youngest children... and Cinders.

Aziz was out of the Fourtrak, also Nina, also Guggenheim. They stood indeterminately, not knowing what to expect.

John Tigwood looked bewildered.

I stopped the horsebox and jumped to the ground. Sandy Smith joined the crowd, lights flashing, uniform buttoned, no siren.

‘What’s going on?’ Tigwood asked.

I wasn’t sure how he would react. The trail he’d left with his axe on my property urged any defence I could think of. Keeping the children safe was a first priority.

I said to Maudie’s young ones, ‘Take Cinders and wriggle under the horsebox and play being in a pirate’s cave there, or something.’

They giggled.

‘Go on,’ I said, urging them. ‘Crawl in there.’

They did, all three of them. Lorna, watching, said merely, ‘Won’t they get dirty?’

‘They’ll clean.’

Tigwood said, ‘Why are you here?’

I answered him. ‘We brought back your rabbit.’

‘What?’

‘Lewis and I,’ I said, ‘have brought back the rabbit — with ticks.’

Tigwood strode to the passenger seat side and yanked open the door.

‘Lewis!’ he yelled. It came out as a screech, all fruitiness gone.

Lewis shrank away from him. ‘He knows it all,’ he said desperately. ‘Freddie knows everything.’

Tigwood stretched an arm into the cab and pulled Lewis out. Tigwood’s weedy-looking appearance was misleading. Everyone could see the stringy power that tweaked the bigger man out onto the ground with a crash. Lewis’s shoulders landed first, then his head, then his legs.

Lewis, rolling in pain, took a rough swing at Tigwood. Tigwood kicked him in the face and turned his attention to me.

‘You bastard,’ he said, white faced, intent. ‘I’ll kill you.’

He meant it. He tried. He rushed me, smashing me by sheer speed against the side of the horsebox.

He hadn’t an axe, however, or a tyre lever, but only his hands; and they, had we been alone, might have indeed been enough.

Aziz came up behind him and hauled him off. Aziz displayed a timely and useful skill in twisting a man’s arm up behind his back until it reached the point of cracking.

Tigwood screamed. Sandy produced his handcuffs portentously and with help from Aziz locked Tigwood’s wrists together behind his back.

Sandy said to me out of the side of his mouth, ‘What’s going on?’

‘I think you’ll find that John Tigwood axed my house.’

‘Bastard,’ Tigwood said, his voice a snarl.

I asked Sandy, ‘I don’t suppose you have a search warrant handy?’

He shook his head bemusedly.

‘I don’t need one,’ Aziz said. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘An axe. A rusty tyre lever. A thing for sliding under lorries. A bunch of tools in a red plastic crate. And perhaps a grey metal cash box with a round bright patch amid the dirt. They might be in his car. If you find them, don’t touch them.’

His smile shone out, bright, white and happy. ‘Got you,’ he said. He left Tigwood to Sandy and bounced away out of sight.

Lorna bleated in bafflement, ‘John? I don’t understand...’

‘Shut up,’ he said furiously.

‘What’ve you done?’ Lorna wailed.

No one told her.

Tigwood stared at me with unnerving naked hatred and in a taut white rage called me a bastard again, among other things, repeating what Lewis had told me. I’d never imagined the overpowering strength of his murderous corrosive loathing, not even with his axe’s handiwork all around me. I felt shriveled by it, and weak. Sandy, who had seen so many dreadful things, looked deeply shocked.

Lorna swung round at me with loathing of her own. ‘What did you do to him?’ she accused me.

‘Nothing.’

She didn’t believe me, and never would.

Aziz reappeared from the direction of the ramshackle stables.

‘Everything’s there,’ he reported, beaming. ‘They’re in one of the stalls, under a horse rug.’

Sandy smiled at me briefly, pushing Tigwood hard against the horsebox. ‘Reckon it’s time to call my colleagues.’

‘Reckon it is,’ I agreed. ‘They can take it from here on.’

‘And the Jockey Club can take on Benjy Usher,’ said Aziz.

Another car joined the mêlée. Not the colleagues yet, but Susan and Hugo Palmerstone, with Maudie. Michael had told them that the children were here with Lorna, they said. They’d come to take them home.

Tigwood in handcuffs appalled them. Lorna told them it was all my fault. Hugo believed her easily.

‘Where are the children?’ Susan asked. ‘Where’s Cinders?’

‘They’re safe.’ I bent down and looked under the horsebox. ‘You can come out now,’ I said.

Guggenheim touched my arm as I straightened. ‘Did you... I mean...’ he said. ‘Is the rabbit there?’

‘I think so.’

He, at least, looked happy. He was carrying a white plastic small-animal carrier and wearing protective gloves.

Maudie’s two children wriggled out on their backs and stood up, brushing off dirt. One of them said to me, in a quiet little voice, ‘Cinders doesn’t like it under there. She’s crying.’

‘Is she?’ I went down on my knees and looked underneath. She was lying flat on her stomach, her face pressed to the ground, her whole body quivering. ‘Come on out,’ I said.

She didn’t move.

I lay down on the ground on my back and put my head under the side of the horsebox. I shuffled backwards on heels, hips and shoulders, until I reached her. I found there were things I would go under tons of steel for without a second thought.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll go out together.’

She said, shivering, ‘I’m frightened.’

‘Mm. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ I looked up at the steel of the chassis not far above my face. ‘Turn onto your back,’ I said. ‘Hold my hand and we’ll wriggle out together.’

‘It’ll fall on me.’

‘No... it won’t.’ I swallowed. ‘Turn over, Cinders. It’s easier on your back.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Your mother and father are here.’

‘There’s a man shouting...’

‘He’s stopped now,’ I said. ‘Come on, darling, everything’s fine. Hold my hand.’

I touched her hand with mine and she grabbed it tightly.

‘Turn over,’ I said.

She turned slowly onto her back and looked upwards to the steel struts.

‘It’s pretty dirty under here,’ I said prosaically. ‘Keep your head down or you’ll make your hair filthy. Now, our toes are pointing to where your parents are, so just shunt along beside me and we’ll be out in no time.’

I began to wriggle out, and she wriggled, sobbing, beside me.

It was after all only a few feet. It can’t have seemed much to the people outside.

When we were out I knelt beside her, brushing dirt from her clothes and her hair. She clung to me. Her little face, close to mine, was so like the pictures of myself at her age. The tenderness I felt for her was devastating.

Her gaze slid beyond me to where her parents stood. She let go of me and ran to them. Ran to Hugo.

‘Daddy!’ she said, hugging him.

He put protective arms around her and glared at me with the green eyes.

I said nothing. I stood up: brushed some grit off myself; waited.

Susan put one arm round Hugo’s waist and with the other enclosed Cinders; the three of them a family.

Hugo brusquely turned them away with him towards their car, looking fiercely over his shoulder. He shouldn’t fear me, I thought. Perhaps in time he wouldn’t. I would never upset that child.

I was aware that Guggenheim and Aziz were slithering under the horsebox. Guggenheim scrambled out with visions of immortality in his eyes, cuddling the white plastic carrier as if it contained the Holy Grail.

‘The rabbit’s here,’ he said joyfully, ‘and it’s got ticks!’

‘Great.’

Nina came to stand beside me. I put my arm round her shoulders. It felt right there. Eight and a half years didn’t matter.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Mm.’

We watched the Palmerstones’ car drive away.

‘Freddie...?’ Nina murmured tentatively, ‘that little girl... when your heads were together, she looked... almost...’

‘Don’t say it,’ I said.