Driving Force

Chapter 4

Jogger’s neck was broken.

We stood looking down at him, the sideways angle of his head to his body impossible in life.

‘He must have fallen in,’ Farway said as if stating the obvious.

From the other side of the pit Harve met my eyes, clearly thinking, as I was, that for Jogger to have fallen accidentally into an inspection pit he would have to have been reeling drunk, and even then I would have bet on his instincts to save him.

As if catching the thought, or at least the first half of it, Sandy Smith sighed. ‘He had a right skinful last night in the pub. Raving on about aliens under the lorries. Lone rangers, stuff like that. I took his car keys off him and drove him home in the end. I’d’ve had to arrest him for being drunk in charge, otherwise.’

Bruce Farway asked him officiously, ‘Have you informed his wife of this?’

‘Not married,’ Sandy said.

‘No next-of-kin at all,’ I amplified. ‘I have next-of-kin listed for all my employees, and Jogger said he hadn’t any.’

Farway shrugged, climbed down the metal ladder bolted to the inspection pit wall and bent clinically over the crooked body, lightly touching the bent neck. Then, standing upright, nodding, he reported to me almost accusingly, ‘Yes, this one’s dead as well.’

Two corpses found on my property in four days, he seemed to imply, were suspiciously excessive.

Michael Watermead, who had deserted the tail-end of his lunch party to follow me along to the disaster in the farmyard, asked curiously, ‘As well as what?’

‘The hitchhiker,’ I said. ‘Thursday.’

‘Oh yes. Of course. I was forgetting. On the way back from taking Jericho’s two-year-olds.’ The thought of Jericho brought a scowl to the naturally patrician features, his son Ed’s appallingly casual revelation as yet undigested, unprocessed.

Michael, I guessed, had been prompted to be present now in my barn by a mixture of straightforward morbid interest, supportive friendliness and the typical fuzzy overall sense of responsibility in the community which kept much of rural English life within sane parameters. He brought anyway a weight of authority to the proceedings which Harve, Sandy, Farway and myself might have lacked.

‘How long has he been dead?’ I asked. ‘I mean... hours? Last night?’

Bruce Farway said hesitantly, ‘He’s pretty cold, but I’d say fairly late this morning.’

We understood, all of us, that a closer guess was impossible at that point. The pit itself and the air temperature were cold also. The doctor climbed up the ladder and suggested that he and Sandy should again call for the ultimate in removers.

‘How about photographs?’ I said. ‘I’ve a camera in the office.’

Everyone solemnly agreed on photographs. I walked through the yard, unlocked the offices, collected my Nikon and returned to the barn. The others were still where I’d left them, standing round the pit looking down at Jogger with unreadable thoughts.

Although there was a certain amount of daylight in the barn from a window looking into the farmyard we always had to top it up with electricity for work. The overhead lights were all on, but even so I used flash for the pictures, taking several shots from round the rim of the pit and several others from its floor, down beside my poor mechanic.

I didn’t touch him, though I bent near to photograph his head. He lay in the angle between wall and floor; rough grease-streaked concrete walls, oil-blackened floor. He seemed to be looking at the wall six inches from his nose, his eyes, like those of so many suddenly dead, still open. The yellow teeth showed in two uneven rows within his mouth. He wore the old army jersey, the dirt-clogged trousers, the old cracked boots. He still smelled, extraordinarily, of oil and dust; of earth, not death.

The pit was five feet deep. Standing upright, my direct line of sight was roughly level with the ankles of Sandy, Harve and Michael. Bruce Farway was behind me. For a petrifying second, a primitive instinct warned me against standing up with my neck sticking out of a hole in the ground and I turned quickly but saw Farway harmlessly writing in a small notebook, and felt foolish.

I hauled myself up the ladder out of the pit and asked Harve how he’d happened to find Jogger at that particular time.

Harve shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just wandered round the yard, like I often do. The boxes working today had all left. I was here earlier checking them out, see, to make sure. Then to waste time, sort of, while I was waiting for lunch to be ready, I walked round again.’

I nodded. Harve liked to be on his feet always, and on the move.

‘So then I noticed the lights were on in the barn,’ he said, ‘and I thought I might save us a bit of electricity so I walked over here thinking that I hadn’t seen anyone come over here earlier. No one needed to. I wasn’t worried, see, only I just came over for a look around and, like I said, to switch the lights off.’ He paused. ‘Don’t ask me why I got as far over as the pit. I don’t know why. I just did it.’

The pit in fact was well over to the far side of the barn, expressly to stop people stepping over its edge unawares. A large roll-back door at one end of the barn made it possible to drive a horsebox straight in over the pit. The small door nearest the farmyard, which people on foot used, opened into a general workshop area, with tools kept in a large locked store in one corner.

I asked, ‘Do you think Jogger was lying here all the time while drivers came in to work and took the boxes out?’

Harve was troubled. ‘I don’t know. He could have been. Gives you the shudders, doesn’t it?’

‘The post-mortem will tell us, eh, Bruce?’ Michael said, and Bruce, preening slightly at the intimacy of the use of his first name, agreed that speculation could be safely left for that event.

Michael caught the satirical glance I gave in his direction and came very close to a wink. The winning over of the doctor was clearly succeeding.

Farway and Sandy between them produced their mobile phones and summoned the necessary cohorts. Michael asked if he could use the phone in my office. Help yourself, I said, it’s open. He sauntered off on his errand and when Harve and I followed, feeling upset and insecure, Michael was saying, ‘Damned shame for poor old Freddie,’ into Isobel’s phone, the first one he’d come to, and ‘Oh, accidental, undoubtedly. Must go now. See you.’

He rang off, said thanks and goodbye and left smiling with universal benignity, happy in the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to feel any personal repercussions from Jogger’s death.

‘What do you reckon?’ Harve asked as we reached our jointly-used sanctum and paused for consideration.

‘Do you believe he fell in?’ I asked.

‘Don’t want to think of the alternative.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘But if he didn’t fall...’

He left the words hanging, and so did I.

I said, ‘Who was in the pub last night with Jogger?’

Harve began answering automatically, ‘Sandy, of course. Dave was bound to be... I wasn’t...’ He broke off, aghast. ‘Do you mean... who was in the pub to hear him talking about aliens under the lorries? You can’t mean... you can’t...’

I shook my head, though how could one help wondering?

‘We’ll wait for the cause-of-death report,’ I said. ‘If it’s proved he skidded on a patch of oil and fell and hit his neck on the edge of the pit — which is possible — we’ll decide then what to do.’

‘But that cash box hiding place was empty,’ Harve insisted. ‘No one would kill Jogger just because he’d found an empty thing like that. They wouldn’t. It can’t be anything like that.’

‘No,’ I said.

Harve stared worriedly out at the row of horseboxes.

‘When I found him,’ he said, ‘I went back home and phoned your personal line from there, but I got your answering machine saying you’d phone back soon, like it does when you’re only going to be away an hour or two. But, well, I didn’t think it could wait, so I phoned Sandy. Was that all right?’

‘The only thing you could do.’

‘We didn’t know where you were. In the end we tried Isobel and she said she thought you’d be at the Watermeads’, as Nigel had told her you were going to lunch there when he phoned to say the daughter had mixed up the departure time. It seems Tessa told Nigel. So Sandy said he’d go round and fetch you.’

‘Mm.’ News travelled in Pixhill in dizzying spirals.

Harve began showing troubled signs of indecision, which from our long proximity I identified immediately as doubt over whether or not he should tell me something I might not want to hear.

‘Spit it out,’ I said resignedly.

‘Oh! Well... Nigel said Tessa wanted to go to Newmarket with him, with the fillies. She climbed into the box and sat ready in the passenger seat.’

‘I hope he didn’t take her.’

‘No, but he was flummoxed. I mean, he had you on one side threatening the sack to anyone giving lifts, and her on the other side, the trainer’s daughter, wanting a ride.’ He paused. ‘She’s a proper little madam, that girl, and Nigel’s a sexy hunk, so my wife says, and... don’t take me wrong... I thought you’d better know.’

‘I’m grateful,’ I said with truth. ‘That’s a mess we can do without. I don’t want to lose Michael Watermead’s work just because his daughter fancies one of our drivers. We’d better not send Nigel there again, though it’s damned annoying, to say the least.’

Lewis, of course, was Michael’s driver of choice, but very often Watermead horses needed more than one box. Not being able to send Nigel cut down my options.

Harve said with humour, ‘We could put Pat on the extra Watermead runs, when she’s better, and your temporary replacement could do any before that.’

‘Good thinking!’ I stifled too broad a smile and made a note for Isobel to allocate Nigel chiefly to Marigold English, whose pulses he might race to good effect.

In time, a police car crept carefully through the gates, bringing CID investigators, an official doctor and a photographer. Harve and I went out to the barn, where Sandy was showing Jogger to his plain-clothes colleagues and Bruce Farway was talking importantly to his police counterpart. The official photographer took bright flash official photographs from the same angles as my own.

A statement from Harve about finding the body was taken down and read out to him in the curiously stilted English such proceedings seemed to incur. Harve signed the result even though the words weren’t his own, and Farway, Sandy and I confirmed that the body was as we’d found it, and that nothing had been added or subtracted from the scene.

Sandy’s colleagues were impersonal, without humour. All fatal accidents had to be thoroughly investigated, they said, and there would be further questions, no doubt, on the morrow.

The same black hearse that had collected Kevin Keith Ogden, or one very like it, arrived in the farmyard, and presently another finished life left my land under canvas and straps in a metal coffin.

The police, unsmiling, followed. Farway, Sandy and I watched them go, I, at least, with relief.

‘All very sad,’ Farway said with a certain briskness, not caring one way or the other.

‘A local character,’ Sandy said, nodding.

Not much of an epitaph, I thought. I said, ‘Sandy, when you drove Jogger home last night, was it in your car or his?’

‘Last night? My car. That old wreck of a van will still be at the pub.’

‘That old wreck is actually mine,’ I told him. ‘I’ll collect it later. Do you still have the keys?’

They were in his house, it seemed, for safekeeping. I said I would pick them up shortly and with a sigh of relief he left to salvage the remains of his Sunday off.

Bruce Farway followed, not wasting on me any of the slightly fawning regard he’d lavished on Michael or the police doctor, merely nodding a cool farewell. Harve walked back to his own house for his long-postponed lunch and I wandered round in the barn, staring into the now empty pit and checking that nothing in the tool store was out of place.

The tool store was a spacious twenty feet by ten, windowless. I unlocked the wide door, switched on the light and stood looking at Jogger’s domain; at the pair of heavy-duty hydraulic jacks, the vast array of spanners and wrenches, the labelled boxes of spare parts, the rolls of cable, the chains, cans of oil, drums of grease, a set of six new Michelin tyres waiting for installation.

The floor was filthy but the tools were clean, often the way with Jogger. As far as I could see, nothing had disturbed the general tidiness he miraculously maintained in the storeroom. The truck in contrast would contain a hopeless-looking jumble from which he would nevertheless pluck just the pliers he needed.

I switched off the light, locked the store, and walked out beside the long workbench in the barn, a sturdy shelf which bore nothing at that moment but a small and a large vice, both bolted on. There were no tools anywhere lying about. Nothing a man could trip over, however drunk.

Morosely I left the barn, turning off the lights but as usual not locking the door to the yard. Enough was enough, I’d always thought. We kept the tools locked away and there was the padlock on the outer gate. Security could become an obsession, and anyway I’d been guarding against thieves, not against smugglers.

Not against murder.

I shied painfully away from that word. I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.

Murder couldn’t happen. Not to Jogger. Not because of an empty cash box and two empty tubes. Not because he’d shot his mouth off down at the boozer.

I had a sense of jumping to over-dramatic conclusions. It would be best to wait for the post-mortem findings.

I sat in the office thinking of Jogger: not of the manner of his death, but of the man he had been.

A loner, an old soldier, a driver of army trucks whose only active service war zone had been the Northern Irish border. He almost never spoke of it, though his mates in a truck ahead of him had been blown apart by a bomb.

I’d acquired his services as a fixture or fitting along with the farmyard and the horseboxes, the transaction apparently to his liking: and I’d counted myself lucky to have him and didn’t now know where I would find anyone else as expert, undemanding and committed.

I mourned him also simply, without self interest. Grieved for him as a man. In his own way he’d been a whole person, not needing what others might think he lacked. No one should impose their own perception of fulfilment on anyone else.

A little later, when the afternoon faded to dark, I walked down to Sandy’s house and collected the keys of Jogger’s van. Sandy gave them to me without question: I signed for them merely, as Sandy knew the van belonged to me. It didn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps a couple of keys on the ring were Jogger’s own. Continuing on, I walked to the pub that Jogger favoured and duly found the van in the car park there. At first sight there was nothing wrong with it. On second sight, I found that the two rear doors were slightly ajar, and inside, where there should have been the slider and a jumble of tools in a big red plastic crate, there was nothing but rusty dust on the bare metal floor.

I sighed. A whole pubful of people had seen Sandy take Jogger home, leaving a vanful of easy pickings behind him. I supposed I should be pleased that the van itself hadn’t gone too, and that it still had wheels, tyres, petrol and an engine.

I drove it the short distance to Jogger’s quarters, which I so far knew only externally as a rickety looking garage with an upper storey.

In some distant past, the place had been a chauffeur’s lodging, although the house it had served had long gone. Keeping me up to date on developments, for months and months Jogger had conducted a running battle with good souls on the local council who wanted to declare the building unfit for habitation, Jogger maintaining that his home was as it always had been and that it was the council whose ideas had changed. I thought that one could probably defend even a cave on those terms, but Jogger’s strong and quasi-logical indignation had to date won him the day.

I laboriously opened one of the old creaking wooden front garage doors, leaving the van outside and letting enough street-lamp in to show me the empty space inside. The way to Jogger’s room, he’d said, lay across the garage and up some narrow stairs by the back wall, and up there I came to a flimsy door that opened easily when I tried the handle. No need for keys. I found a light switch and stepped for the first time into Jogger’s private world, feeling both that it was a terrible intrusion and also that he would have wanted someone to care enough to go there, to see it for him one last time and make sure there was no desecration.

Jogger’s home was as he’d left it, a mess untouched by whoever had stolen the tools. He’d earned good money for years yet had evidently chosen to live as if poverty breathed down his neck, his sagging armchair covered with a grubby old tablecloth, the table covered with newspaper, the floor with linoleum. The army might once have coerced him into spit-and-polish in general, but only in his work had that training prevailed over what I guessed might have been the familiar manner of his childhood. This was the way he felt comfortable, this his old shoes.

There was no kitchen, merely a few mugs and plates on top of a chest of drawers with tea, sugar, dried milk and biscuits in packets alongside. The one drawer I opened revealed a tangle of old clothes. The suit and shirt he wore for driving were draped on a hanger on a hook on the back of the door.

His bed, a matter of jumbled khaki-coloured blankets on a divan, was by conventional standards unmade. Impossible to tell whether or not he’d slept there during the past night.

I realised that the place wasn’t as cold as the day outside and came across the first sign of luxury, a small convection heater taking the edge off nature. There was also a colour television, three crates of beer, a shining electric kettle and a telephone. Against one wall leaned a stack of mildly pornographic magazines, representing one copy a week for a couple of years, and in a shoebox on a shelf I came across his birth certificate, his army discharge papers and the pass-book of a building society, the total of his savings raising my eyebrows and showing exactly what he’d done with his pay packets.

I left his papers where I’d found them and looked into a sketchy bathroom which was what I by then expected, hardly spotless but not disgusting, basic with throwaway razors and a gap-toothed comb.

Walking back through his room I left everything as it was, including the heater. The whole place still smelled of him, of oil, earth and dust. While his smell remained, so would he. The worthy council would sweep it all away soon enough.

I locked his door, closed the outer garage door and drove the van to the farmyard wondering why Jogger had gone to the barn without keys or his wheels... and when... and how... and who with?

In the offices, Jogger’s log-book lay on Isobel’s desk, ready for her to type the details into the computer. I took the book with me into my own office and sat reading what Jogger had written.

The bare bones of the trip only. No comments. No frills. He’d collected four named steeplechasers from a Pixhill stable and driven them down the M4 to Chepstow races. Time of leaving base, time of pick-up, time of arrival, time of departure from racecourse, time of delivery back at stable, time of return to base. Diesel intake recorded in litres. Odometer readings entered. Cleaning completed. Total number of hours worked. Number of those hours spent behind the wheel.

Nothing about aliens or lone rangers.

Depressed, I replaced the log-book on Isobel’s desk and thought I couldn’t do any more there that was useful. Four of the fleet were still out, not counting the one in France and the one in Ireland, but Harve would see them return. I would hear soon enough if anything went wrong. I yawned, locked up and went home.

Revived by the product of Scotland I sat in my swivelling armchair and rewound the tape of the answering machine on my private line. I’d transferred the business line to Isobel for receiving and making bookings for the fleet, but personal calls came in on a different number. On that Sunday, I’d switched the private answering machine on when I went upstairs to shower, left it on while I picked flowers and took them to the cemetery, left it on of course for the Watermeads’ lunch, and it had been on ever since. The tape wound busily back.

I pressed the play button and nearly fell out of the chair.

The first voice was Jogger’s, hoarse, cockney, unhurried, unafraid.

‘I hate this bloody machine,’ he said. ‘Where have you gone, Freddie? Someone’s half-inched the van. It’s not in the garage here, some tea-leaf’s bloody nicked it while I was zizzing. You’d better tell Sandy— No... wait... hang about...’ His voice stopped for a while and then in some embarrassment went on, ‘Er, um, cancel that, Freddie. I know where it is. It’s down the boozer. Forget I said it, OK?’

The line clicked off, but the second call was also from Jogger. ‘I remembered, like, about the van. Sandy’s got the keys. I’ll walk along to the farmyard first for a decko and then I’ll get the keys. Anyway, I want to tell you, take a butcher’s at them nuns. I found a dead one in the pit last August, and it was crawling and Poland had the same five on a horse last summer and it died. What do you think?’

His voice stopped, leaving me with the problem that I didn’t know what he’d been talking about.

Nuns in the pit! Dead, moreover, like himself. Poor old Jogger, poor old exasperating man.

Why couldn’t he ever say things straight out? His rhyming slang hadn’t seriously mattered before this, but now it was infuriating. Half-inched meant pinched, a tea-leaf was a thief, a butcher’s came from butcher’s hook, look. All those were common parlance, part of the general language. But what were nuns and crawling and Poland?

What I needed, I decided, was a rhyming dictionary, and in the morning I would buy one.

I’d switched my private-line answering machine on at about eleven o’clock that morning. Jogger had been alive then. To be ‘pretty cold’ in the pit by three in the afternoon, he must have died not long after his phone calls. I sat for a while simply looking at the machine as if in some stupid way it could bring my mechanic back to life. If I’d been able to speak to him myself, maybe he would have been still alive. I couldn’t hear the phone’s chirrup when I was in the shower or through the buzz of my electric razor. Perhaps he’d phoned then, but I hadn’t noticed the ‘message received’ light shining. More likely he’d tried when I’d left to pick and take the flowers. I must have missed him by seconds.

With unassuageable regret I ran through a couple of other messages on the tape and I told one or two people about Jogger. The whole village, one way or another, would know of it by bedtime.

By seven-thirty the next morning, after a troubled night’s sleep, I was along at the farmyard talking to the two drivers who were taking runners to Southwell. There was an all-weather track up there, just north-east of Nottingham, giving an underfoot surface which had proved popular because it didn’t crack, freeze or flood like turf. Its only drawback as far as Pixhill trainers were concerned was its distance of a hundred and fifty miles from home: as far as Croft Raceways was concerned, the distance filled the coffers. It was about the furthest the boxes went out and back in one day, entailing early starts and late returns. Anything much further meant overnight stops or two drivers to work in spells.

On that Monday, we had six boxes going to racecourses, two taking broodmares, two abroad and four standing idle, which in view of the persistent flu situation was just as well.

I was out in the farmyard when a woman drove through the gates in a small Ford runabout that had been a long time out of the showroom. She stopped outside the offices and emerged from behind the wheel stretching to a tall thin height in jeans, padded jacket and dark hair scraped back into an untidy pony tail. No make-up, no nail varnish, no pretence at youth.

She was, as she’d said she’d be, almost unrecognisable.

I went across. ‘Nina?’ I said.

She smiled briskly. ‘I’m early, I’m afraid.’

‘All the better. I’ll introduce you to the other drivers... but first I’d better tell you what’s filling their minds.’

She listened to the finding of Jogger with a frown and immediately asked, ‘Have you told Patrick Venables about this?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’ll do it. I’ll reach him at home.’

I took her into my office and listened to her make the call. ‘It could well be an accident,’ she told her boss. ‘Freddie hopes so. The local police have it in hand. What do you want me to do?’

She listened for a while and said ‘Yes’ a few times, and then handed the receiver to me. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

‘Freddie Croft,’ I said.

‘Let me get this right. This dead man is the one who found the empty containers stuck to your horseboxes?’

‘Yes. My mechanic.’

‘And besides you and me, who knew he’d found them?’

‘Everyone who heard him saying so in a pub in Pixhill on Saturday night and understands rhyming slang.’ He cursed with feeling and I explained about Jogger’s linguistic habits. ‘The local policeman heard him but it didn’t make total sense to him. It would have made total sense, though, to anyone who knew the containers were there. Lone rangers and aliens under the lorries, Jogger said. By lone rangers he meant strangers. Clear as daylight.’

‘I agree.’ Patrick Venables paused. ‘Who was in the pub?’

‘It’s a popular place. I’ll ask the landlord. I’ll go in at lunchtime and tell him I’ll stand a pint to everyone who was there on Saturday night, on Jogger’s last visit. In memory, sort of.’

With humour in his voice, he said, ‘It can’t do any harm. Apart from that, I’ll put out feelers towards your local police to see what they’re thinking. This Jogger’s death may be just an unfortunate coincidence.’

‘I hope so, indeed,’ I said fervently.

He wanted to speak to Nina again and she said ‘Yes’ a few more times, and ‘Goodbye Patrick’ at the end.

‘He wants me to phone him later,’ she said. ‘And on second thoughts, he advises you to be careful in the pub.’

I told her about Jogger’s last message on the answering machine.

‘I’ll write it down for you when I go home,’ I said, ‘but it’s pretty incomprehensible. He used to make up his own rhymes and I’ve never heard him use these before.’

She gazed at me. ‘You’ve had more practice than most.’

‘Mm. I thought of buying a rhyming dictionary, though it’s more a matter of guessing. I mean, when he said carpets he meant drugs. Carpets and rugs. You don’t have to just find the rhyme, you have to find the word that goes with the rhyme, and that association arose solely in Jogger’s own brain.’

‘And if he hadn’t died,’ she said, nodding, ‘you could simply have asked him what he meant.’

‘Yes. He just liked to play games, to challenge me, I suppose, in a quiet sort of way. But don’t get me wrong, he thought naturally in that rhyming fashion. It was no sort of effort. It would come out spontaneously. The trouble is that I don’t know if what he said yesterday morning was of desperate importance or only a passing comment. I don’t know if desperate importance would come out in rhyme. Passing comments did often.’

Harve came into the office at that moment and I introduced Nina as the new temporary driver. Harve tried not to look dubious, knowing I preferred younger drivers because of their relative tirelessness and seeing the present substitute as half way to granny-hood.

‘We have to give Pat at least two weeks to recover from this sort of flu,’ I pointed out, having discovered from past experience that too early a return to such a physical job caused further days off in the end. ‘Nina’s very experienced with horses and with driving horseboxes and we’ll give her good help with directions.’

He listened to the firmness in my voice and made the best of it. I asked him to show her the canteen and then how to fill out a temporary log and also to explain to her the refuelling and cleaning routines. She followed him meekly out of the office, a shadow of yesterday’s woman and not half as interesting.

The day’s work began. The two Southwell boxes set off to pick up their loads and the other drivers began arriving, most of them making straight for the tea and toast in the canteen. Dave creaked along on his rusty bicycle. Nigel came running, keeping fit. All of them already knew about Jogger, as did Isobel and Rose, who drove to work in small cars, collecting milk and newspapers on the way.

Out in the yard I had a quick private word with Nina before she set off with Dave to collect her horses for Taunton.

I said, ‘The box you’re driving is one with an empty container stuck on the bottom. You’d better know, though I can’t think it will be used for anything today.’

‘Thanks,’ she said dryly, ‘I’ll keep a look out.’

I watched her start up and drive off. She certainly managed the horsebox competently, manoeuvring through the gates easily and turning economically into the road. Harve, watching her departure with his head on one side, could find nothing to criticise. He gave me a shrug and raised eyebrows, judgement deferred.

Half an hour later, when she returned, pausing outside the gate, Dave jumped down from the cab and with a grin reported to Harve and me that, ‘The old girl can twiddle a horsebox on a penny and the horses are purring all over her. Where did you find her?’

‘She applied for Brett’s job,’ I said. ‘So did four others by phone yesterday. I’ve two coming for interviews this morning. The word’s flown around that we’re short of a driver.’

‘Isn’t this Nina bird staying then?’ Dave asked, disappointed.

‘We’ll see how it goes.’

The second box bound for Taunton rumbled past Nina, hooting, and she set off after it, following in convoy.

‘Could do worse,’ Harve said generously. ‘She seems sensible so far.’

I told Dave that once the paperwork was fixed he would be going to France to collect Jericho Rich’s daughter’s new showjumper. Phil would drive, and they would stay overnight. Dave looked pleased, as he liked such excursions, but when he’d ambled off Harve queried my choice of Phil.

‘Do you mean Phil in his super-six? Just for one showjumper?’

I nodded. ‘He’s experienced. It’s best he goes. It’s a valuable horse and I don’t want anything going wrong with any other journey to do with Jericho Rich. Phil will come back without hitchhikers, dead or alive.’

Harve winced, smiled and agreed.

Back in the office, I urged Isobel to chase the agents for documentation for that trip. We used the services of specialists for overseas paperwork, as they understood the needs, worked fast and seldom made errors.

‘Prompt and perfect,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Croft Raceways motto.’

‘Er... prompt and passable will do.’

I took the day’s newspapers along to my own office and flicked through them. There was never much hard racing news on Mondays. Jogger wasn’t mentioned. The lead story in one paper was about the equine flu plaguing several racing stables in the north, virtually putting whole yards out of action for months. There was speculation that the virus might spread to Newmarket. Trainers, the writer said, were unwilling to share transport with horses from other stables in case of infection.

Hooray for that. I was all for separate journeys. Just as long, of course, as Pixhill itself stayed free. It was bad enough having drivers home sick, but the equine version of flu could hang around much longer, severely depleting the number of runners needing my services.

Equine flu, an infection of the upper respiratory tract, the paper said, had been known in the past as ‘the cough.’ There was no cure but time. So what else was new?

I turned to another paper. This one, still on the gloom and doom trail, discussed the previous summer’s outbreak of debilitating fever and diarrhoea in horses in mainland Europe. No one had satisfactorily identified the cause and trainers feared there might be a recurrence.

Diesel prices might rise again, I read. I hated ‘might’ stories; non-stories. Like ‘Doctors warn,’ I put ‘might’ stories bottom of my list. Anxiety raisers, all of them. Doctors should warn against ‘Doctors warn.’

It was a ‘might’ sort of morning. Sunny Drifter might not run in the next day’s Champion Hurdle. There might be an increase in betting tax in the Budget. Michael Watermead might run the brilliant Irkab Alhawa in a warm-up race before the 2,000 Guineas.

Marigold English, I read open-eyed, reported that she had successfully completed her move to Pixhill, ‘Owing to Freddie Croft’s personal services, the transfer went smoothly in all respects.’ Bully for the old trout, I thought, and phoned her on the spot to thank her.

‘You did a good job,’ she said, pleased.

By nine-thirty the phone was ringing almost continuously as it always did on Mondays, the trainers making transport plans for the week ahead.

Isobel answered everything, coming along to my door at one point and saying, ‘There’s someone enquiring for Brett’s job. He sounds all right. What shall I do?’

‘Ask him if he can come for an interview this morning.’

She went away and returned to say that he would. Ten minutes later we had another applicant, and then another. We would have a line of them round the farmyard if it went on.

I started the interviews at about ten o’clock. Four men had already arrived and a fifth appeared within an hour. All of them had the necessary licences, all had experience, all said they’d worked in racing before. The fifth one said he was also a mechanic.

Most drivers were mechanics to some extent. This one gave me a reference from a Mercedes garage in London.

His name was Aziz Nader. Age, twenty-eight. He had curly black hair, olive skin, shining black eyes. Confident and outgoing in manner, he was looking for a job but not offering subservience. He spoke with a Canadian accent but didn’t look as if he should.

‘Where do you come from?’ I said neutrally.

‘Lebanon.’ He paused a second and amplified his answer. ‘My parents are Lebanese but they went to Canada when the trouble started. I was raised in Quebec mostly and I’m still a Canadian citizen, but we’ve been here eight years now. I’ve a resident’s work permit, if that’s what’s worrying you.’

I looked at him thoughtfully. ‘What language do you speak with your parents?’

‘Arabic.’

‘And... um... how about French?’

He smiled with white teeth and spoke to me rapidly in that language. The French I knew was racecourse stuff; he was too fast for me.

In the summer I shipped many horses for Arab clients, most of whose employees fumbled along in hopelessly tongue-tied or nonexistent English. A driver who could converse with them, and could also feel at home in France, seemed too good to be true.

‘How good are you with horses?’ I asked.

He seemed uncertain. ‘I thought you wanted a driver-mechanic.’

No one after all was perfect. ‘Horsebox drivers are better if they can handle horses.’

‘I’d... er... learn.’

It wasn’t as easy as he thought, but it didn’t rule him out.

‘I’ve told everyone I’ll go with them on a test drive before deciding who gets the job,’ I said. ‘You came last, can you wait?’

‘All day,’ he said.

The test drives were important because the cargo had to go steadily on its feet. Two of the applicants were jerky with brakes and gears, one was very slow, the fourth I would have engaged if he’d been the only remaining choice.

I found, as I climbed into the super-six cab beside Aziz, that I already intended to give him the job on the strength of his languages and his mechanical experience, just as long as he was half-way proficient at driving. He proved in fact not dazzling but at least smooth and careful, and my mind was made up long before we returned to the farmyard.

‘When can you start?’ I asked, as he braked to a halt.

‘Tomorrow.’ He gave me another flashing smile, all eyes and teeth, and said he would work hard.

I thanked the other applicants who were waiting hopefully and got them to give their names to Isobel, in case. They went away disappointed. Isobel and Rose met Aziz with fascination and a visible increase in femininity, and Nigel, it was plain, had found strong competition.

Three months’ trial, subject to his references being OK, I suggested, offering appropriate pay and conditions. Rose said she would put him into her computer, asking for his address. He would rent a room in the village, he said, and let her know later. Rose tentatively told him where Brett had stayed: the room might still be available. Aziz thanked her, listened to her directions, and drove off cheerfully, as he’d come, in a very old, well-tended small-sized Peugeot.

I wondered how much one could really tell of a person by the car they drove. Sunday’s Nina matched her Mercedes; Monday’s Nina, her old runabout. Aziz seemed too strong a character for his wheels. I, on the other hand, owned a Jaguar XJS, loved and left over from the jockey days. I took it still to race meetings but moved around Pixhill in a workhorse four-wheel drive Fourtrak. Perhaps everyone, I thought in passing, had a two-car personality, and wondered what Aziz would drive from choice.

To be prudent, I checked his references. The London garage he’d worked for said he knew his job but had left some time ago. The trainer whose private horsebox he had driven proved to have gone out of business recently in financial difficulties. Aziz Nader had been a satisfactory employee but everyone on the payroll had lost their jobs.

While I was on the phone two cars arrived together, not, as it transpired, in tandem but both on fact-finding missions. The first disgorged the press in the shape of a spindly young man with a large nose and a spiral notebook; the second, the area bloodhounds in plain clothes, different men from the day before. I went out without enthusiasm to greet them. There were no smiles, no handshakes, merely minimal introductions, badges flapped in my face. No one seemed intent on overfriendliness or engaging my best help trustingly. Both press and police subsequently asked invasive and borderline-rude questions with visible scepticism at my answers.

Apart from Sandy, my experiences with the larger police world had been few but enough to show me one should never say a word to them that one didn’t have to, on the probability of being adjudged guilty of any old thing before conclusively proved innocent, and very likely after. One should also never, ever, on any account, make jokes. Not even to Sandy. The police, to my mind, had only themselves to blame for the public’s prevalent mistrust of them, great chaps though no doubt most of them were. Pouncing, however, came as a natural instinct to them all: they wouldn’t have been effective without it. No one that I knew of, particularly if innocent, cared to be prey.

The pressman seemed to see his role as being Washington Post-type investigative journalism. The police, to my quiet amusement, saw him as a nuisance who would do no investigating at all if they could help it. I listened to them match verbal swords until the young man retreated discomfited to wait in his motor and the force produced notebooks of their own.

‘Now, sir,’ they began, an opener full of menace if ever there was one, ‘you will hand over the house keys of the man found dead here yesterday, if you please.’

I would have given them Jogger’s keys willingly. The brusqueness of their demand reinforced my hovering antagonism and ensured I didn’t help them as I might have done, as I should have done, no doubt.

Without a word, though, I went back to the office, finding them following me with sharp suspicious eyes as if I were planning to destroy evidence, given half a chance. Isobel and Rose both watched the procession with open mouths. I didn’t bother with introductions.

The two plain-clothes men drew up beside my desk. I opened a drawer, brought out Jogger’s keys and removed his house keys from the ring.

They took the keys without comment and asked what Jogger had been doing in the farmyard on a Sunday morning. I replied that all my employees could come and go in the farmyard on any errand they cared to, Sundays included, as it was a workday.

They asked me about Jogger’s drinking habits. I said he had never turned up drunk for work. Apart from that, it was his own affair.

If Jogger had been drunk when he fell into the pit, I thought, the post-mortem would show it. Speculation was pointless, really.

The elder of the two policemen next asked if anyone had been present with Jogger when he fell. Not that I knew of, I said. Had I, personally, been there? No. Had I been to the farmyard on Saturday night after ten o’clock or on Sunday morning at any time? No.

I asked why they were asking such questions and was told that all accidents had to be investigated, of course. The coroner would want answers at the inquest. In police experience, he chillingly added, people with information could remain silent so as not to become involved. I refrained from asking whose fault he thought that might be.

The interview proceeded for several more minutes without fruit to either side, as far as I could see. They watched me keenly while telling me they would be making enquiries from my employees. I nodded neutrally, taking it for granted.

They asked for a list of all drivers who had been working on Saturday or Sunday. I took them along to Isobel’s office and asked her for a computer print-out of the times everyone had left and returned.

She shook her head disgustedly.

‘Look, Freddie,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I can’t get a thing out of the computer today. When I’ve sorted it out, I’ll do the records straight away.’ She picked up a pile of log-books. ‘The information is all in here, it’s just a matter of typing it.’

‘Sure,’ I said, easily. ‘Can you just write down the names, for a start? Using old-fashioned pencil and paper?’

Obligingly she wrote the names from the log-book covers and handed the list to the policeman who took it stolidly. When they’d gone Isobel made a face after them. ‘They might have said thanks, even if I did balls up the computer.’

‘Yes, they might.’

The spindly pressman came out of his car like a rabbit from his hole once the police car had driven away and I spent the next ten minutes assuring him that Jogger had been a great mechanic, his loss would be sorely felt, the police had been investigating the accident, we would have to wait the result of their enquiries, and so on and so on, a whole lot of platitudes but the truth as far as it went. He drove away finally in dissatisfaction, but I couldn’t help that.

A quick look at my watch showed I’d drifted through much of lunchtime without remembering my intention of organising the Jogger memorial pints in the pub, so I scooted down there at once to talk to the landlord.

He, comfortably fat with a beer belly of his own, presided over a no-frills house geared to the psychological comfort of those made uneasy by too much luxury. He pleased a clientele of both stable workers and austere local intellects, talking easily with both groups.

‘Old Jogger was harmless,’ he pronounced. ‘Got pissed regular on Saturdays. Not the first time Sandy’s driven him home. Sandy’s a good fellow, I’ll say that for him. What can I do for you?’

Make a list, I said, of everyone who had been in the pub with Jogger on his last night and give each of them two or three pints in his memory.

‘Very decent of you, Freddie,’ he said, and began his list there and then, starting off with Sandy Smith and adding Dave and Nigel and two others of my drivers and proceeding to lads from almost every stable in Pixhill, including a new bunch from Marigold English’s yard, individual names unknown. ‘They’d asked in the village for the best pub,’ he told me complacently, ‘and were steered here to me.’

‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘Get their names and we’ll make a sort of memorial scroll and frame it and hang it here on your wall for a bit.’

The landlord became enthusiastic. ‘We’ll do old Jogger proud,’ he said. ‘He’d be tickled pink.’

‘Um,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose he didn’t leave any famous last words?’

‘ “Same again!” ’ the landlord said, smiling broadly. ‘Same again’ were his favourite words. ‘He’d been rambling on about aliens under your lorries, I ask you, but by the time he left, “same again” was about all he could manage. But always the gentleman, that Jogger, never any trouble when he’d had a skinful, never fighting drunk like that Dave.’

‘Dave?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘Do you mean my Dave?’

‘Sure. He’ll take a swing at anyone, given enough ale on board. He never connects, mind you, he can’t see straight by then. I stop serving him then, of course, and tell him to go home. Sandy takes him home too, sometimes, when he’s too far gone even to balance on that bike. A good lad, Sandy. Pretty good for a copper.’

‘Yes,’ I said, and gave him a cash advance for the memorial pints, promising the rest after the list had been drawn up and everyone served.

‘How about it if we get their own signatures, then? Make it more personal. Start tonight, shall I?’

‘Great idea,’ I said, ‘but put their full names beside the signatures, so everyone will know who was here.’

‘Will do.’

I bought a home-made Cornish pasty from him for a take-away lunch and left him as he began to seek out a sheet of paper worthy of the roll of honour.

During the afternoon I went through the latest print-out of the accounts with Rose and then with Isobel’s input drew up my own sort of pencil-and-paper chart for the week. While Isobel was still in my office I inadvertently kicked the carrier left by Marigold English’s lads, and, picking it up, I asked Isobel to throw it away.

She took it out of the office but in a few minutes came back, undecided.

‘There’s quite a good thermos flask in that carrier. I thought it was too good to throw away so I took it into the canteen in case one of the drivers would like it. And... well... would you come and look?’

She seemed puzzled enough for me to follow her along to the canteen to see what was on her mind. She’d taken out the packet of sandwiches and laid them on the draining-board of the sink there, and she’d unscrewed the flask and removed the top from the vacuum bottle inside. She’s poured most of the contents away into the sink, and found more in the flask than liquid.

I looked where she pointed, though there was no missing what was worrying her. Lying in the sink were four glass containers, each a small tube three and a half inches long, more than a centimetre in diameter, amber in colour with a black stopper fastened on with what looked like waterproof adhesive tape.

‘They fell out when I poured,’ Isobel said. ‘What are they?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

The tubes were covered with the opaque milky liquid that had been in the flask. I picked up the flask and looked into it and, finding some of the liquid still inside, poured it into a canteen mug.

Two more tubes fell into the mug.

The liquid was cold and smelled faintly of milky coffee.

‘Don’t drink it!’ Isobel exclaimed in alarm as I raised the mug to my nose.

‘Just smelling it,’ I said.

‘It’s coffee, isn’t it?’

‘I’d think so.’

I took a paper plate from the stack always ready to hand and put the four tubes from the sink onto it. Then onto a canteen tray I put the plate, the mug, the thermos, its screw-on top and the packet of sandwiches, and with the carrier itself under my arm took the whole lot along to my desk in my office, Isobel following.

‘Whatever can they be?’ she asked for about the fourth time, and all I could say was that I would find out.

With a paper towel, I cleared the milky residue off one of the tubes. There were a few numbers etched into the glass which at first raised expectations, but all they announced was the containers’ capacity, 10 cc.

I held the tube up to the light and tipped it up and down. Its contents were liquid and transparent but moved more sluggishly than water.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Isobel asked, agog.

I shook my head. ‘Not just now.’ I put the tube back on the plate and pushed the tray away as if it weren’t important. ‘Let’s get back to work and I’ll decide about this stuff later.’

The tray to one side and with Isobel gradually losing interest in it, we finished my preliminary pencil-and-paper chart and Isobel went back to her office to bring it up to date in the computer.

She was back in my doorway within five minutes, looking very frustrated, dressed for going home at the end of her shift.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

‘The computer is totally on the blink. I can’t do a thing with it, nor can Rose. Can you get that man to fix it?’

‘OK,’ I said, stretching a hand to the phone book. ‘Thanks for everything and see you in the morning.’

Before I could find the number, my glance fell on the small glass phials on the tray, and instead of summoning the computer man, I phoned my sister.