Driving Force

Chapter 3

I spoke to Sandy.

‘What warrant? What for?’

‘Fraud. Dud cheques. Skipping hotels without paying. Petty stuff, mostly, it seems. The Nottingham police wanted him.’

‘Too bad,’ I said.

‘Had you ever seen him before, Freddie?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘He’d welshed on a bookie or two.’

People who failed to pay bookmakers weren’t necessarily my best buddies, as I pointed out.

‘No,’ Sandy agreed, ‘but he must have had something to do with racing if he asked for a lift in a horsebox.’

‘Dave said he was propositioning a tanker driver first. Maybe he had something to do with oil.’

‘Oh, very funny.’

‘Let me know the result of the post-mortem, will you?’

‘Well, all right, but I don’t expect I’ll get it today.’

‘Any time,’ I said. ‘Come in for a drink.’

He liked to do that, because sometimes I would keep him up to date with any local villainy I didn’t like the look of. On the other hand, the villainy going on on the undersides of my boxes needed more understanding before, or if ever, I told Sandy about it.

I spoke to Jogger again briefly, asking him to phone me without fail when he returned from Surrey.

‘Won’t hammer or bucket.’

With a sigh I heard him disconnect and reached Marigold’s old yard again before it clicked. Hammer and nail or bucket and pail.

Fail.

Most of the way I thought instead of the limpets and wondered what to do about them. I thought I might usefully set up an opportunity for advice without committing myself, so I pulled the horsebox into a roadside parking space, fished out my diary for the number and got through to the Security section of the Jockey Club in Portman Square in London, asking for the head man.

Everyone professionally engaged in racing knew Patrick Venables by name and most of them by sight. Transgressors wished they didn’t. Such sins as I’d been guilty of having luckily escaped his notice, I could go to him for help when I needed it and probably be believed.

Fortunately I found him in his office. I asked him if he would by any chance be going to Sandown races the next day.

‘Yes, but I’m also going this afternoon,’ he said. ‘If it’s urgent, come today.’

I explained about the flu and the driver shortage. ‘But I can drive one of my boxes to Sandown tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Right. Outside the weighing-room.’

‘Thanks very much.’

I resumed the journey, loaded the appointed horses, drove them and the two lads to join Marigold. She told me loudly I should have brought more than two lads with nine horses and I explained that her head lad had said two only, he’d had another one go home sick and he wasn’t feeling too well himself.

‘Blast the man,’ she screeched.

‘You can’t argue with a virus,’ I said pacifyingly.

‘I’ve got to get all the horses over here today,’ she yelled.

‘Yes, well, we will.’

I cleaned out the box, smiled reassuringly, shut up the ramps and made the third leg of the shuttle. Twenty-seven deliveries, I thought, seeing the third load rattle down the ramps into their new home, and supposedly two more trips to make, though the head lad had ominously told me Mrs English hadn’t counted right, she’d overlooked her own hack and two unbroken two-year-olds.

The yards were approximately thirty miles apart and each shuttle, with loading and unloading, was taking me two hours. By dusk at seven in the evening all but the oddments were safely settled in and Marigold for once looked tired. Her head lad had given best to the flu and gone home to bed and my own muscles were aching. When I suggested finishing the job early the next morning, the lady resignedly agreed. I tentatively kissed her cheek, an intimacy I would normally not have attempted, and to my utter astonishment her eyes filled with tears, instantly repudiated with a shake of her woolly-hatted head.

I offered, ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘A day I’ve looked forward to... and planned... for years.’

‘Then I’m glad it went OK.’

She was lonely, I perceived, surprised, the hard outer lady a gallant way of playing the cards life had dealt her. I knew moreover that I had indeed secured her future business, and was happy I’d had to do the shuttle myself.

Leaving her trudging with reviving voice round the new stables, I drove the nine-box along to the farmyard, pulled up by the pumps and wrote up the log books, both the box’s and my own. I’d spoken to Isobel on the phone several times during the day, hearing at one point that Jericho Rich had actually turned up in her office checking her records. Cheek, I thought. I’d also learned from Harve that all the planned work had been completed without trouble except that one of Jogger’s pair of broodmares had started to foal on the way to Surrey and that Jogger, mechanic, had unwillingly become midwife.

Jogger in his turn had reported the incident to me with shocked indignation because the stud groom at the destination had refused to move the mare from the horsebox until the foaling was complete, delaying Jogger’s return to Pixhill by a couple of hours. Jogger, it appeared, had never seen a foal born before: he had found it both eye-opening and disgusting.

‘Did you know the mare eats all that stuff? Fair turned me up.’

‘Don’t think about it,’ I advised him. ‘Tell me which boxes have sprouted little strangers.’

‘Eh? Oh... Phil’s and the one Dave’s driving, which is Pat’s box usually. But, see, most of the others had gone out by the time I found those. There may be more.’

He sounded cheerful, but then it wasn’t his business at stake. By the time I’d completed the log books, filled the tanks and moved the nine-box to the corner where we customarily cleaned the fleet, he had still not returned.

Under the strong outdoor lights, I hosed down the nine-box and squeegeed the windows, not a big job for once as the weather had been dry all day. In the farmyard, the cleaning water came out like a mist under pressure, driven through a pump with compressed air: more effective and more economical with water than a plain hose.

The interior took me more time, as forty-five horses and a relay of lads had left their mark despite the intermittent sweepings out, and I was dog-tired myself by the time I’d mopped the floors with disinfectant and fastened all the partitions ready for the morrow.

The front cab itself was a mess, littered with screwed-up sandwich wrappers and awash with the ropes, reins and other paraphernalia used and borrowed from the underseat locker.

I opened the locker and replaced all the gear in it. Even inside the locker, the lads had left their meal-remains. I picked out a small paper carrier and replaced it with a couple of re-folded horse rugs. Shutting the lid, I noticed again the stain on the seat from the previous night and wondered how to get rid of it, short of re-covering the whole thing. Certainly none of the lads that had sat on it that day had complained, but then they hadn’t known about Kevin Keith Ogden’s last ride.

Smiling a shade ruefully I swept the rubbish into the sack I’d provided but the lads had resolutely ignored, and stood it beside the small carrier which would have gone into the sack also, except that it proved heavier than empty and contained, I found, a thermos flask and a packet of uneaten sandwiches. Yawning, I thought I would get it back to Marigold’s lads in the morning, whether or not I did the last shuttle myself.

Finally I drove the box along to its usual parking space, locked everything, threw the rubbish sack into our own skip, carried the thermos flask and bag into the offices and typed my day’s records into Isobel’s computer. That done, I sat for a while calling to the screen the requirements for the next day, trying to work out if we would have enough drivers and hoping no one else would be ill by the morning.

I phoned Jogger to find out where he was. Ten minutes from the boozer, he said. The boozer, Jogger’s natural home, was the pub where he drank with his cronies every night. Ten minutes to the boozer meant maybe twelve to the farm.

‘Don’t stop on the way,’ I said.

While I waited for him I ran through the computer notes for the day; everything, that’s to say, that had been entered before Isobel and Rose had left at four o’clock.

The only hiccup, a very minor one, seemed to have been that Michael Watermead’s fillies had set off an hour and a half late to Newmarket.

‘Nigel reported,’ the screen informed me, ‘lads from Newmarket didn’t show until ten-thirty. Tessa’s message yesterday ordered box for nine a.m. Nigel set off with fillies at eleven. Reported arrival Newmarket one-thirty. Reported leaving Newmarket two-thirty.’

Nigel had returned uneventfully, Harve had said, and his box stood clean and shipshape in its accustomed place.

The Tessa in question was Michael’s daughter, so no one’s head would roll over the mistake; mix ups over time were all too common. If that was the worst that had happened it had been a near-perfect work-day.

Isobel’s last snippet of information read, ‘Mr Rich in person called at the office, checking our records on his transfer. I satisfied him on all points.’

Jogger’s lights swooped in through the gates and he rolled along to the pumps. I went out to meet him and found him still shaken by the confrontation with the bloody realities of birth. I myself had seen several foals and other animals delivered but never, I idly reflected, an actual human baby. Would I, I wondered, have found it more traumatic? My only child, a daughter, had been born in my absence to a girl who’d persuaded another man he was the father, and married him quickly. I saw them all sometimes, along with their two subsequent children, but I felt few paternal longings and knew I would never seek to prove the truth.

Jogger filled his tanks, moved to the cleaning area and grumbled his way through the mopping out. In the belief that if I interrupted I would be left with an incomplete job, I waited until he’d finished before I asked him the vital question.

‘Where exactly are these limpet strangers?’

‘You’ll never see them in the dark,’ he said, sniffing.

‘Jogger...’

‘Yeah, well, you can’t hardly see them in broad daylight—’ he wiped his nose on the back of his hand, ‘unless you want to get under on the slider with a torch?’

‘No.’

‘Didn’t think so.’

‘Just tell me about them.’

He walked along the row with me, pointing.

‘Phil’s box. I had it over the pit. There’s a tube container stuck on top of the rear fuel tank, in that space above the tank but under the box’s floor. It’s hidden by the side of the horsebox, and you can’t see it either from the front or the back of the box if you’re looking casually under the chassis. Bloody neat job.’

I frowned. ‘What would it hold?’

‘Search me. Half a dozen footballs, maybe. It’s empty now, though. It must have had a screw-on cap. The screw-thread’s there, but the cap is missing.’

Phil’s box was a super-six, as were half of the fleet. A super-six carried six horses in comfort, had an extra-spacious cab, a generous general layout, and could accommodate a seventh horse standing crossways at a pinch. I liked driving them better than the longer nine-boxes. Half a dozen footballs in a tube on the underside sounded macabre as well as downright improbable.

‘Pat’s box,’ Jogger said, pointing, ‘that’s the one Dave drove with broodmares, remember?’ He broke off, recalling his own frightful day. ‘Don’t never ask me to drive no broodmares no more.’

‘Er, no, Jogger. What about Pat’s box?’

Pat’s box, smaller, took four horses. Five of the fleet were that size, handy, less thirsty, the runabouts. In the Flat racing season, Pat’s box was retained full time by another Pixhill trainer with a phobia about sharing journeys with other trainers’ horses. Pat’s box went often to France, though not with her driving.

‘Under there,’ Jogger said, ‘is another tube, the same size. It’s empty. It has a screw-on cap, too, and the cap is there, on that one.’

‘Been there awhile?’ I asked. ‘Dirty?’

‘Natch.’

‘I’ll maybe take a look in the morning. And Jogger, keep it to yourself, will you? If you spread it around the boozer you’ll frighten off whoever stuck the things there, and we’ll never have a chance of finding out what’s going on.’

He could see the point of that. He said he’d be as silent as the wash (wash and shave; grave) and again I wondered if his reticence would outlast the evening’s pints.

On Saturday morning early, I drove one of the four-boxes to Salisbury Plain, collected Marigold’s oddment horses and delivered them to her by nine, realising along the way that I’d forgotten to take with me her lads’ lunch carrier bag. When I mentioned it to her, she enquired loudly of her employees about ownership but received no claims.

‘Throw it away,’ she counselled. ‘I’m sending horses to Doncaster. You can take them, I hope?’

Doncaster races, twelve days ahead, represented the prestigious opening of the Flat season. I assured her I’d be delighted to take anything she wanted.

‘In a box on their own,’ she added. ‘I don’t want them picking up other stables’ germs. My horses never share transport.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Good.’ She brought forth a smile, more a matter of eyes than of lips: as good a pledge as shaking hands on a contract.

Home again I drank coffee, ate cornflakes, talked to Harve, talked to Jogger (‘Didn’t say a dicky bird down the boozer’.) and checked the day’s list, again juggling the dearth of drivers and pressing Dave and Jogger again into behind-the-wheel service.

Rather against his will, I redrafted Phil into the nine-box and took his super-six myself, picking up jumpers from three different stables and delivering them and their lads to Sandown racecourse for the afternoon’s sport.

Over Sandown’s fences I’d ridden more winners than I could remember, its testing course so imprinted in my subconscious that I could probably have ridden it blindfold and had certainly navigated its intricacies familiarly in countless dreams. Of all courses, it evoked in me the strongest nostalgia for the close world I’d lost, the intimate body-to-body blending with a non-human powerhouse, the mind-into-mind flowing of courage and intent. One could speak to strangers of race-riding as being a ‘job like any other’ but the slightest introspection gave that the lie. Racing on horses over jumps at thirty or more miles an hour was, to me at least, a spiritual exaltation never achieved or even envisioned in any other way. To each his religion, I supposed. Big horses over big fences had been mine.

Nowadays at Sandown I felt excommunicated; no doubt a blasphemy, but a deep truth nevertheless.

I met Patrick Venables outside the weighing-room, as he’d promised.

The head of racing’s Security Service, a tall thin man with suitably hawk-like eyes, had in his time, one understood, been ‘something in counter-espionage,’ no details ever supplied. Racecourse wits said he’d been sired by a lie-detector out of a leech, in that one couldn’t fool him or shake him off.

Like others in his job before him, he ran the comparatively small Security section with brisk efficiency and was largely responsible for the reasonably honest state of racing, sniffing out new scams almost before they were invented.

He greeted me with the usual skin-deep friendliness, never to be mistaken for trust. Looking at his watch he said, ‘Five minutes, Freddie. Is that enough?’

Condense it, he meant, and, faced with his deadline and obvious lack of time, I began to retreat from asking his advice.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter really,’ I said lamely.

My hesitancy, instead of releasing him, seemed to switch on his attention. He told me to follow him into the weighing-room and led me through to a small inner office containing a table, two chairs and very little else.

He closed the door. ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and fire away.’

I told him about the three containers Jogger had so far found under the boxes. ‘I don’t know how long they’ve been there or what they contained. My mechanic says he can’t swear he won’t find more, as they’re pretty well camouflaged.’ I paused briefly. ‘Has anyone else come across anything like this?’

He shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. Have you told the police?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Curiosity, I suppose. I want to find out who’s been using me, and what for.’

He pondered, studying my face. ‘You’re using me as insurance,’ he said eventually, ‘in case one of your boxes is caught smuggling.’

I didn’t deny it. ‘I’d like to catch them myself, though.’

‘Mm.’ He pursed his mouth. ‘I’d have to advise you not to.’

I protested, ‘I can’t just do nothing.’

‘Let me think about it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘I suppose,’ he frowned, ‘this hasn’t anything to do with the man who died in one of your boxes? I heard about that.’

‘I don’t really know.’ I told him about the masked searcher. ‘I don’t know what he was looking for. If it was the dead man’s belongings, he wouldn’t have had any success because the police had them all. But then I wondered if he’d been leaving anything. And he had dirt and dust on his clothes, which was why I wondered if he’d been on the ground, and why I asked my mechanic to see if he’d stuck anything on the box underneath.’

‘And you think he had?’

‘No. The container under there had been in place for some time. It was filthy, with layers of grime.’

I told him that the box I had driven to Sandown that day had a capacious tube stuck above the fuel tank. ‘You can’t see it at all easily even if you’re looking for it, up from underneath,’ I explained. ‘Horseboxes are all coach built so that the sides are nearer the ground than the chassis. For aerodynamics and good looks. I expect you know that. Mine are built in Lambourn. They’re very good. Anyway, the sides hide and shield the underside mechanisms, same as cars. Bombs can be hidden there.’

‘I do understand,’ he assured me. ‘Are bombs what you fear?’

‘I suppose drugs are more likely.’

Patrick Venables looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Have to go,’ he said. ‘Come back to the weighing-room after the last race.’

My nod of agreement was made to his departing back. I wondered what he would make of it; shrug it off or take a look. Sometime during the afternoon he would decide, but in telling him I’d come to my own conclusion, that I really did need and mean to find out what was going on, with or without his help.

I went outside and spent a good deal of the afternoon in conversation, useful sometimes for business but a far cry from the urgency of race-riding, changing colours, weighing out and in, hurrying, racing, changing colours... Oh, well. On the good side, I no longer starved to remain artificially thin, no longer broke my bones and hid large bruises, no longer feared losing big races, good owners, my nerve or my job. I was now free in a way I’d never been and reflected that if I still had to please owners and trainers, then to prosper almost everyone had to please someone; performers, the paying public, presidents and prime ministers, their population.

On afternoons like that at Sandown I’d found I behaved like all my drivers, that is to say I took especial note of those particular runners that I’d brought to the course. A winner lifted the spirits of every driver: a horse killed, as occasionally happened, sent them home in depression. The undoubted if illogical feelings of proprietorship had a noticeable effect on how cheerfully, fast and thoroughly the boxes got serviced on their return.

As two of the horses I had ferried that day belonged to a trainer I’d ridden for intermittently in the past, it was natural that I’d end up talking to him and his wife.

Benjy Usher and Dot appeared to be quarrelling as usual when he shot out an arm and grabbed my sleeve as I passed.

‘Freddie,’ he demanded, ‘tell this woman which year Fred Archer shot himself. She says 1890. I say that’s rubbish.’

I glanced at Dot’s normal mixed expression of resignation and anxiety. Years of living with an irascible man had carved permanent facial lines that even her infrequent smiles could barely override, yet although they’d been figuratively spitting at each other for as long as I’d known them, the pair were still grimly together.

They were both unusually good looking, which only made it odder. Both were well dressed, in their forties, socially practised and intelligent. Fifteen years earlier I wouldn’t have given their union five minutes, which just shows how little an outsider can see of a marriage.

‘Well?’ Benjy challenged.

‘I don’t know,’ I said diplomatically, though I did know actually that it had been in 1886, when the brilliant champion jockey was twenty-nine, and had won 2,749 races, travelling everywhere by train.

‘You’re useless,’ Benjy said, and Dot looked relieved.

Benjy changed the subject, mercurial always. ‘Did my horses get here all right?’

‘Yes, they did indeed.’

‘My lad tells me you drove them yourself.’

I nodded. ‘Three of my drivers have flu.’

Many trainers came out into their stable yards to see their runners load safely into the transport, but Benjy seldom did. His idea of supervision was to yell out of the window if he saw anything to displease him, which I understood was often. Benjy’s turnover of stable-lads was higher than most. Benjy’s head travelling lad, who should have accompanied the runners to Sandown, had walked out on the previous day.

Benjy asked if I knew of that awkward fact. Yes, I’d been told, I said.

‘Then do me a favour. Saddle my runners and come into the ring with us.’

Most trainers in the circumstances would have saddled their own runners, but not Benjy. He scarcely liked touching them, I’d observed. I guessed the question about Fred Archer had been only a pretext; grabbing me on the wing had been the purpose.

I told him I’d be glad to saddle the horses. Not too far from the truth.

‘Good,’ he said, satisfied.

Accordingly I did the work while he and Dot chatted to the first runner’s owner, and the same for the second runner later in the afternoon. The first ran respectably without earning medals and the second won his race. As always in the winner’s unsaddling enclosure on such occasions, Benjy’s handsome face reddened and sweated as if with orgasmic pleasure. The owners petted their horse. Dot told me seriously I would have made a good head lad.

I smiled.

‘Oh dear.’

‘Well, I would,’ I said.

There was always something I didn’t understand about Dot; some deep reserve in her nature. I knew her no better after fifteen years than I had at the beginning.

Benjy’s odd training methods were due, one understood, to his not having to make training pay. Benjy’s inherited multi-millions, moreover, had been deployed in acquiring good horses overseas which were trained there by other trainers and which won better events in France and Italy than Benjy’s horses in England. Benjy, like many owners, preferred the higher prize-money of mainland Europe, but he chose still to live in Pixhill and to train for other people as a hobby and to use my horseboxes for his transport, a fact guaranteed to earn my approbation.

He and Dot took me for a drink: double gins for them, tonic for me. The one thing I couldn’t afford to lose was my driving licence.

Benjy said, ‘I’ve a colt in Italy that’s pulled a tendon. I want him back here to heal and rest. Care to fetch him?’

‘Very much so.’

‘Good. I’ll tell you when.’ He patted my shoulder. ‘You do a good job with those boxes. We can trust you, can’t we, Dot?’

Dot nodded.

‘Well... thanks,’ I said.

One way and another the afternoon passed quickly and after the last race I waited for Patrick Venables outside the weighing-room. He came eventually at a half-trot, still pressed for time.

‘Freddie,’ he said, ‘you told me yesterday you were short of drivers. Is that still the case?’

‘Three have flu, and one’s left for good.’

‘Er, um. Then I suggest I send you a replacement; one who can look into your problem.’

I wasn’t immediately enthusiastic. ‘He’d have to know the job,’ I said dubiously.

‘It’s a she. And you’ll find she does. I’ve arranged for her to go to Pixhill tomorrow morning. Show her your operation and let her take it from there.’

I thanked him unconvincingly. He smiled faintly and told me to give her a try. ‘Nothing lost if nothing comes of it.’

I wasn’t so sure, but I’d asked his help and could see no way of backing out. He hurried off with a last piece of information. ‘I gave her your address.’

He’d gone before I thought to ask her name, but it hardly mattered, I supposed. I hoped she would have the decency to arrive before I went to Maudie Watermead’s lunch.

Her name was Nina Young. She swept up the drive onto my tarmac at nine a.m., catching me unshaven and reading newspapers in a towelling robe, coffee and cornflakes to hand.

I went to the door to answer her ring, not realising at once who she was.

She’d been driving a scarlet Mercedes and, although not young, she wore slender skin-tight jeans, a white shirt with romantically large sleeves, an embroidered Afghan waistcoat, heavy gold chains and an expensive scent. Her shining dark hair had an expert cut. Her high cheekbones, long neck and calm eyes reminded me of noble ancestor portraits, bone structure three hundred years old. My idea of a working box-driver, she was not.

‘Patrick Venables said to come early,’ she said, offering a nail-varnished hand. The voice was Roedean — Benenden — St Mary’s, Calne, the social poise learned in the cradle. From my male chauvinist point of view, the only drawback was her age, near mid-forties at a guess.

‘Come in,’ I invited, standing back and thinking she was good for the scenery if not for the matter in hand.

‘Freddie Croft,’ she said, as if seeing a cardboard cut-out come to life. ‘The man himself.’

‘Well, yes,’ I agreed. ‘Like some coffee?’

‘No, thank you. Do I detect a faint air of exasperation?’

‘Not in the least.’ I led the way into the sitting room, and indicated any chair she chose to sit on.

She chose a deep armchair, crossing the long legs to show fine ankles above buckled leather shoes. From a shoulder bag of equal pedigree, she produced a small folder which she waved in my general direction.

‘Driving licence with Large Goods Vehicle qualification,’ she assured me. ‘The real McCoy.’

‘He wouldn’t have sent you without it. How did you get it?’

‘Driving my hunters,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘Also my show horses and eventers. Any questions?’

The sort of horseboxes she would have been driving had home-from-home large living quarters in front of the stalls, the nomadic luxury motors for eventing at Badminton and Burleigh. She had to be a familiar figure in that world, widely recognisable to too many people for the present purpose.

‘Perhaps I ought to know you?’ I suggested.

‘I shouldn’t think so. I don’t go racing.’

‘Er,’ I said mildly, ‘here you’d need to be able to find the racecourses.’

‘Patrick said you were bound to have a map.’

Patrick, I thought, had taken leave of his senses.

She watched my no doubt obvious misgivings with cool amusement.

‘My horseboxes are basic transport,’ I said. ‘No fridges, no cookers, no bathrooms.’

‘They’ve Mercedes engines, haven’t they?’

I nodded, surprised.

‘I’m a good driver.’

I believed her. ‘All right, then,’ I said.

I reflected that whatever she might lack as an investigator, I definitely did need an extra pair of hands for my wheels. What Harve and Jogger would make of her I dreaded to think.

‘Good,’ she said prosaically and after a brief second’s pause asked, ‘Do you take Horse and Hound?’

I fetched that week’s as yet unread copy of the magazine from a side table and handed it to her, watching as she flicked through towards the end, to the many pages of classified advertisements. She came to the horse-transport section where about once a month I advertised Croft Raceways, and tapped the page with a rose-pink fingernail.

‘Patrick wants to know if you’ve seen this?’

I took the magazine from her and read where she’d pointed. In an outlined, single-column-width advertisement were the simple words:

A fourth line gave a telephone number.

I frowned. ‘Yes, I’ve seen that. It’s in the transport ads now and then. Rather pointless, I’ve thought.’

‘Patrick wants me to check it out.’

‘No one,’ I objected, ‘would advertise a smuggling service. It’s impossible.’

‘Why don’t we try?’

I passed her a cordless telephone. ‘Go ahead.’

She pressed the numbers, listened, wrinkled her nose and switched the phone off.

‘Answering machine,’ she reported succinctly. ‘Leave name and number and they’ll get back.’

‘Man or woman?’

‘Man.’

We looked at each other. I didn’t believe there was anything sinister in the advertisement, but I said, ‘Perhaps Patrick Venables could use his muscle on Horse and Hound and find out where that ad comes from.’

She nodded. ‘He’s doing it tomorrow.’

Impressed despite my disbelief I went over to the desk and consulted the chart.

‘I’ve probably got two boxes going to Taunton races tomorrow,’ I told her. ‘My woman driver Pat’s got the flu. You can take her box. It can carry four horses but you’re only likely to have three. You can follow my other box to Taunton so that you arrive at the right place at the right time, and for the pick-up this end I’ll send a man called Dave with you. He knows the stable the horses are going from. After you’ve collected the horses, drop him back at our base and follow the other box from then on.’

‘All right.’

‘It would be better if you didn’t report for work in that car out there.’

She gave me a glimmering smile. ‘You’ll hardly know me in the morning. And what do I call you? Sir?’

‘Freddie will do. And you?’

‘Nina.’

She stood up, tall and composed, every inch the opposite of what I needed. The trip to Taunton, I thought, would be her first and last, especially when it came to cleaning the box after the return home. She shook my hand — her own was firm and dry — and went unhurriedly out to her car. I followed her to the door and watched the scarlet excitement depart with its expensive distinctive Mercedes purr.

No one, I reflected, had mentioned pay. Rose would want to know what I’d agreed. Not even undercover missions for the Jockey Club could be conducted without ubiquitous paperwork.

Sundays were always comparatively quiet, businesswise, with rarely as many as half the fleet on the road. That particular Sunday, the driver shortage posing no problem, Harve, Jogger and Dave could all take their accustomed day off, along with a bunch of others. Most of the drivers liked Saturday and Sunday work as they were paid more for weekends, but I was lucky in general with all of them as a team, as they hated to see work go to rival firms and would drive on their allotted days off to prevent it. According to the law, their hours and compulsory rest periods were strictly set out: I sometimes had difficulty persuading them that I could be prosecuted if they bent the rules too far.

Like most jobs in racing, driving horseboxes was more a way of life than simply a means of earning a living and, as a result, only people who enjoyed it, did it. Stamina was essential, also good humour and adaptability. Brett had been a mistake.

The news of his leaving had spread already through the racing grapevine, and before eleven that morning two applicants had phoned for his job. I turned them both down: one had worked for too many other firms, the other was over sixty, too old already for the intense physical demands and no good as a long-term prospect.

I phoned Harve and told him I’d engaged a temporary woman driver to take Pat’s place until she was well again. She would be doing the Taunton run planned for Pat.

‘Good,’ Harve said, unsuspecting.

So far, the week ahead looked less busy than the one just completed, not a bad thing in the circumstances. I would be able to go to Cheltenham races in spectator comfort, to watch other lucky slobs win the Gold Cup and smash their collarbones.

Jericho Rich on the telephone bounced me out of unprofitable regrets.

‘You got my fillies to Newmarket okay, then,’ he shouted.

‘Yes, Jericho,’ I held the receiver an inch from my ear.

‘I expect you know I checked everything in your office. A good job well done, I’ll say that for you.’

Good grief, I thought. The heavens would fall.

‘I’ve got a daughter,’ he said loudly.

‘Er, yes, I’ve met her at the races.’

‘She’s bought a showjumper, some damned fancy name. Can’t remember it. It’s in France. Send a box for it, will you?’

‘Pleasure, Jericho. When and where from?’

‘She’ll tell you. Give her a buzz. I said I’d pay for the transport if it was you who fetched it, so she’s doing you the honour.’ He laughed, fortissimo but for him almost mellow. ‘Don’t send that driver, though. That one that picked up the hitchhiker.’

‘He’s left,’ I assured him. ‘Didn’t my girls tell you?’

‘Well, yes they did.’ He read out his daughter’s phone number. ‘Give her a buzz now. No time like the present.’

‘Thanks, Jericho.’

I buzzed the daughter as directed and began on the details of the showjumper: age, sex, colour, value, all for the agents who would arrange the paperwork for the horse, and overnight provision for the driver. She sounded straightforward and less fussy than her father, merely asking me to complete the transfer as soon as I could as she needed to practise before the show-jumping season started. She gave me an address and phone number in France and asked if I could arrange for a groom to travel over with the horse.

‘I could provide a good man from here,’ I suggested. ‘One I trust.’

‘Yes. Great. Send the bill to my father.’

I said I would and, to do him justice, Jericho Rich was a prompt payer. Mostly I billed the trainers for the transport of all their runners, the trainers then billing the individual owners, but Jericho always wanted his bills sent direct to himself. Jericho believed trainers would charge him more than they’d paid, all of a piece with his general mistrust of anyone working for him.

On the whole, people accused others of doing what they would do themselves. Dishonesty began at home.

He’d accused me in his time of taking bribes from a bookmaker to lose on one of his hurdlers. I’d told him very politely that I wouldn’t ride for him any more, and a week later, as if nothing had happened, he’d offered me an enormous retainer to ride all his jumpers the next season. It had turned out profitably: I put up with his yelling and he gave me lavish presents when I won. A permanent stand-off perhaps described our ongoing relations.

I took a quick look at the time and switched the phone through to Isobel, who took bookings on Sundays when I was busy. Then I got on with such small things as dressing and tidying and going out into the garden to pick flowers. This peaceful activity was the result of strong promptings from my absent sister and brother who considered that flowers should occasionally be put on our parents’ grave. As it was I, the youngest, who had inherited the family home, and as it was I who lived near the cemetery, they felt it only right and proper that it was I who picked the flowers and put them in place. The whole point, for them, was that the flowers should come from the right garden. Bought flowers would not be the same.

There was little but daffodils in the first week of March, though I scavenged also some crocuses and an early hyacinth along with evergreen sprigs of cupressus, and drove them to the gates of the orderly cemetery on a hillside where we’d buried the parents within two years of each other some time ago.

Actually, I never minded the errand. The grave was high on the hill but the view was worth the walk up there, and as I had no sense of their being around in any way, I tended to leave the flowers as thanks for my own satisfactory childhood, their gift.

The flowers would die, of course. It was delivering them that mattered.

Maudie Watermead’s lunch began in spring sunshine in the garden, with her younger children and guests bouncing on a trampoline and their elders playing tennis. Still too chilly for standing around in, the March air drove faint-hearts back through the garden door to the drawing-room to enjoy the bright log fire and Maudie’s idea of champagne cocktails, which began with angostura bitters on sugar lumps and fizzed to the brim with cold pink bubbles.

Benjy and Dot Usher were playing in long trousers on the hard court, arguing about balls being in or out. We engaged in unathletic mixed doubles, Dot and I being out-argued by Benjy and the Watermeads’ daughter, Tessa. Benjy and Tessa were enjoying their partnership in a way that had Dot hissing, to my private amusement and our public defeat.

Benjy and Tessa, as victors, took on the Watermeads’ son, Ed, and Maudie’s sister, Lorna. Dot glowered until I persuaded her into the drawing-room, where the numbers had swelled and the chatter-level risen to the point where individual voices were lost in conglomerate noise.

Maudie handed me a glass and gave me a smile with the friendly blue eyes that as usual set me thinking powerfully adulterous thoughts. Thoroughly aware of my dilemma, she was for ever trying to transfer my feelings to her sister Lorna who, while alike in platinum hair, shapely waist and endless legs, simply lacked for me anything but physical attraction. Maudie was fun, Lorna was troubled. Maudie laughed, Lorna earnestly championed praiseworthy causes. Maudie cooked roast potatoes, Lorna worried about her weight. Maudie thought I would be good for Lorna but I had no intention of becoming her therapist: that way threatened boredom and disaster. I thought Lorna would be perfect for Bruce Farway.

The worthy doctor himself was at that moment standing near the fire with Maudie’s husband. The bubbles in the Farway glass were colourless. Mineral water, I surmised.

Maudie followed my gaze and answered my unexpressed surprise.

‘Michael thought that as it looks as if he intends to stay in Pixhill, we’d better teach the good doctor that we’re not all rogues and fools.’

I smiled. ‘He’ll have trouble being supercilious with Michael, that’s for sure.’

‘Don’t you believe it.’

My attention moved on towards the woman now talking to Dot, a younger woman, blonde like Maudie, blue-eyed like Maudie, light hearted, left handed, a pianist and thirty-eight.

‘Do you know her?’ Maudie asked, again following my gaze. ‘Susan Palmerstone. Her family are all here somewhere.’

I nodded. ‘I used to ride her father’s horses.’

‘Did you? It’s easy to forget you were a jockey.’

Like many flat-racing trainers’ wives, Maudie seldom went to jump meetings. I’d come to know her only through the transport.

From across the room, Susan Palmerstone looked in my direction and finally walked over.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Hugo and the children are here.’

‘I saw the children on the trampoline.’

‘Yes.’

Maudie, making nothing much of the exchange, wandered over to Dot.

Susan said, ‘I didn’t realise you’d be here. We don’t know the Watermeads very well. I would have said we couldn’t come.’

‘Of course not. It doesn’t matter.’

‘No, but... someone told Hugo he couldn’t have a brown-eyed child and he’s been fussing about it for weeks.’

‘Hugo’s a green-eyed redhead. He can have anything as a throwback.’

‘I thought I’d better warn you. He’s halfway to obsessed.’

‘OK.’

The tennis players came in from the garden and also Hugo Palmerstone, who’d been watching the children. Through the window I could see my daughter standing on the grass, arms akimbo, disparagingly critical of her straight-haired blond brothers’ bouncing. Cinders, my daughter, had brown eyes and dark curly hair like mine and was nine years old.

I would have married Susan. I’d loved her and been devastated when she chose Hugo, but it had been a long time ago. Nothing remained of the emotion. It was difficult, even, to remember how I’d felt. I didn’t want the long-buried past casting a shadow over that child’s life.

Susan moved from my side the moment Hugo entered the room, but not before he realised we’d been talking together. His expression as he made his way directly to me was not promising.

‘Come outside,’ he said curtly, stopping a yard away. ‘Now.’

I could have refused him but I thought, perhaps wrongly, that if I didn’t give him the opportunity to say what he clearly intended to say it could fester in his mind and do harm to his family. Accordingly I quietly parked my glass and followed him out onto the lawn.

‘I could kill you,’ he said.

It was a remark to which there seemed to be no answer. When I said nothing, he added bitterly, ‘My bloody aunt told me to open my eyes. My father-in-law’s ex-jockey! Take a look at him, she said. Do some sums. Cinders was born seven months after your marriage. Open your eyes.’

‘Your aunt has done you no service.’

He could see, of course, that she hadn’t, but his anger was all for me.

‘She’s my daughter,’ he insisted.

I glanced over towards Cinders, now somersaulting high with exuberance.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I saw her born. She’s mine, and I love her.’

I looked regretfully at Hugo’s furious green eyes. He and I were almost totally unalike in nature as in looks. A middle-rank City executive, he had an incandescent temper as fiery as his hair, allied to a strong streak of sentimentality. Our lack of affinity with each other had proved, until now, a natural barrier to my getting too close and too fond of my daughter, and I saw clearly, even if he didn’t, that allowing myself to be drawn into a fight with him would destroy what should never be touched.

He was clenching and unclenching his fists but with still a degree of control.

I said, ‘You won the girl I wanted. You’ve a daughter and two sons. You’re lucky. You’d be a fool to light a bonfire. What good would it do?’

‘But you... you.’ He spluttered with hurt incoherent rage, wanting me dead.

‘Hate me if you like,’ I said, ‘but don’t take it out on your family.’

I turned away from him, more than half expecting him to haul me back and hit me, but to his credit he didn’t. I thought uneasily, all the same, that if he came across a less direct and physical way of doing me harm, he might take it.

I walked back through the garden door and Maudie, by the window, said, ‘What was that about?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Susan Palmerstone looks scared.’

‘Yes, well, I had a disagreement with Hugo, but forget it. Introduce Lorna to Bruce Farway and don’t put me next to her at lunch.’

‘What?’ She laughed, then looked thoughtful. ‘If I do, in return you can detach Tessa from Benjy Usher. I don’t like her flirting with him, and Dot is livid.’

‘Why did you ask them?’

‘They live practically next door, dammit. We always have Benjy and Dot.’

I did my best for her, but detaching Tessa from Benjy proved impossible. Tessa was a great whisperer and thought nothing of turning her back to prevent people hearing what she was spilling into Benjy’s ear. I got the turned-back treatment a couple of times and left Benjy alone to his foolishness.

Bruce Farway was taking an interest in Lorna, the delectably pretty sister full of good works. Susan stood with her arm through Hugo’s, talking brightly to Michael about horses. Intrigue and woven threads, typical of racing villages. Change partners and dance.

We ate Maudie’s splendid ribs of beef with the crunching roast potatoes and honey-walnut ice cream after. I sat between Maudie and Dot and behaved with propriety.

The younger children chattered about the rabbit run in the garden where the family pets had doubled themselves in number within the past year. ‘They’ll go to the butcher one of these days,’ Maudie muttered to me darkly. ‘They get out and eat my dahlias.’

‘One of the bunnies is missing,’ her younger daughter was insisting.

‘How can you possibly tell?’ Michael asked. ‘There are so many of them.’

‘There were fifteen last week and today there are only fourteen. I counted them.’

‘Probably the dogs ate one.’

‘Daddy!’

Lorna talked to Bruce Farway about pensioned-off steeplechasers, one of her current charities, and he listened with interest. Unbelievable.

The talk turned to Jericho Rich and his desertion of Michael’s stable.

‘Ungrateful beast,’ Maudie said vehemently. ‘After all those winners!’

‘I hate him,’ Tessa said with enough intensity to earn a sharp glance from her father.

‘Why especially?’ he asked.

She shrugged, tight mouthed, denying him an answer. Seventeen, full of unspecified resentments, she was one of those children who’d never lacked for anything but couldn’t settle for being one of life’s favoured mortals. She was a head-tosser besides a whisperer and she didn’t like me any more than I liked her.

Ed, her brother, sixteen and pretty stupid, said, ‘Jericho Rich wanted sex with Tessa and she wouldn’t, and that’s why he took his horses away.’

As a conversation stopper it was of Oscar-earning calibre, and in the breath-held aghast silence the front doorbell rang.

Constable Sandy Smith had called. Apologetically he told Michael that he needed Dr Farway and also Freddie Croft.

‘What’s happened?’ Michael asked.

Sandy told Michael, Bruce Farway and myself privately out in the front entrance hall.

‘That mechanic of yours, Freddie. That Jogger. He’s just been found along at your farmyard. He’s in the inspection pit. And he’s dead.’