Driving Force

Chapter 5

She was, as usual, hard to find. I left messages for her all over the physics department of Edinburgh University and in the administrative section there and the affiliated research laboratories and in an observatory, and tried the Rector’s wife’s private line, all numbers left over from former searches. No results.

Waiting until she went home in the evenings was fruitless as she spent all her time in inaccessible meetings and committees, and catching her between waking and departure in the mornings fine-tuned things to a variable five minutes. ‘Please ask her to phone Freddie’: after six attempts I gave up and went back to raising the computer people a dozen or so miles up the road.

From that effort I got the number-unobtainable noise and also presently a voice assuring me that the line had been disconnected. Trying again produced the same result. Irritated, I phoned my barber who operated four shops along from the computers, and asked what was going on.

‘They vanished overnight one day last week,’ he told me in carefree tones. ‘Did a bunk. Just upped and scarpered. Took everything, left the place bare. We’re all struggling along here since they put our rents up diabolically and I shouldn’t wonder if the shoeshop doesn’t go next.’

‘Dammit,’ I said.

‘Sorry, mate.’

I did a bit of yellow-fingers walking and secured a shaky promise from a stranger to ‘put me on the list.’ ‘Can’t come tomorrow, sorry, not a chance.’

Sighing, I flicked again over the yellow pages, as I had them in my hand, and tracked down a rhyming dictionary in one of the bookshops. The last one they had, I was warned, but they would keep it for me.

When I put the receiver down this time, the phone rang immediately. I snatched the receiver up again and said ‘Lizzie?’ hopefully.

‘Expecting a lady friend, are you?’ Sandy Smith teased heavily. ‘Sorry, can’t oblige.’

‘My sister.’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘How can I help you?’

‘Other way round,’ he said. ‘I said I’d let you know about your hitchhiker. They did the post-mortem and he died of a heart attack. Myocardial infarction. Ticker stopped working. They’ve scheduled the inquest for Thursday. A half-hour job, evidence of identity, that sort of thing. Dr Farway’s report. That driver of yours might be wanted. That Brett.’

‘He’s left. Won’t Dave do?’

‘Oh aye, I dare say.’ Not his responsibility, I gathered.

‘Thanks, Sandy,’ I said sincerely. ‘How about Jogger?’

‘That’s a bit different.’ He sounded cautious suddenly. ‘There’s no report yet on him. As far as I know, they haven’t cut him up so far, like. They’re always busy on Mondays.’

‘Will you let me know when you hear?’

‘Can’t promise.’

‘Well, do your best.’

He said doubtfully that he would, and I wondered if he’d been subverted by my two plain-clothes visitors into casting me as opposition. All the same, he’d kept his word over Kevin Keith Ogden, and maybe our long acquaintanceship would remain a durable bridge.

I sat for a while thinking of everything that had happened over the past five days, until eventually the phone rang again and this time it was indeed my sister.

‘Who did you leave unturned?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve been deluged by a veritable flood of “Phone Freddie’s.” So what’s up?’

‘First of all, where are you and how are you doing?’

‘You surely didn’t send all those SOS’s just for a fireside chat!’

‘Er, no. But if we should get cut off, where are you?’

She read out a number, which I added to the list. ‘Professor Quipp’s lodgings,’ she said crisply.

I wondered if everyone except me had known where to find her. She’d had several lovers, nearly all bearded, all academics, not always scientists. Professor Quipp sounded the latest. I didn’t make the mistake, however, of uttering aloud an unretractable guess.

‘I was wondering,’ I said diffidently, ‘if you could get something analysed for me. In the chemistry school, perhaps.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Some unknown liquid in a 10 cc tube.’

‘Are you serious?’ She sounded as if she thought me crazy. ‘What is it? Where did you get it?’

‘If I knew what it was I wouldn’t need to find out.’

‘Oh brother...’ She sounded suddenly more friendly. ‘Tell me all.’

I told her about the carrier found in one of my boxes and the six tubes in the thermos.

‘Quite a lot of weird things have happened,’ I said. ‘I want to know what my horsebox was carrying and, apart from you, the only person I could ask would be the local vet or else the Jockey Club. Actually, I’ll give the Jockey Club a tube or two to be fair, but I want to know the answer myself, and if I entrust it all to any sort of authority I’ve lost control of it.’

She understood very well about losing control of research results. It had happened to her once, and she’d never stopped resenting it.

‘I thought,’ I went on, ‘that you’d be sure to know someone with a gas chromatograph or whatever it’s called, and could get the job done for me privately.’

She said slowly, ‘Yes, I could do it, but are you sure it’s necessary? I don’t want to waste a favour I’m owed. What else has happened?’

‘Two dead men and some empty containers stuck to the undersides of at least three of my lorries.’

‘What dead men?’

‘A hitchhiker and my mechanic. He found the containers.’

‘What sort of containers?’

‘For smuggling, maybe.’

She was silent, evaluating. ‘There’s a chance,’ she said slowly, ‘that you could be thought guilty of whatever’s gone on.’

‘Yeah. A certainty, given the attitude of the two policemen who came here today.’

‘And you love the police, of course.’

‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘that there are any number of civilised intelligent cultured policemen doing brilliantly compassionate jobs all over the place. I just seem to have met those who’ve had the laugh kicked out of them.’

She remembered, as I did, a time in the past when I’d begged the police (not Sandy, and not in Pixhill) to preserve a young woman from her violent husband. Domestic affairs weren’t their business, I’d been told sniffily, and a week later she’d died from a beating. It had been the subsequently shrugged police shoulders which had infuriated me, not any sort of blighted passion, as she’d been barely more than an acquaintance. Official indifference had been literally deadly. Too late that years afterwards a new directive had decreed ‘domestics’ to be worthy of action: in me, the damage had been done when I’d been idealistic and twenty.

‘How are things in general?’ Lizzie said.

‘The business is busy.’

‘And the love life?’

‘On hold.’

‘And how long since you delivered flowers to the forebears?’

‘Yesterday, actually.’

‘Really?’ She didn’t know whether to be impressed or disbelieving. ‘I mean... truly?’

‘Truly. The first time since Christmas, mind you.’

‘There goes your fatal honesty again. I tell you, it gets you into more trouble...’ She broke off, pondering. ‘How do you propose to get these mysterious tubes up here to me?’

‘Post, I suppose. Courier, better.’

‘Hm.’ A pause. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

‘Going to Cheltenham. It’s Champion Hurdle Day.’

‘Is it? Since you stopped hurling your soul over those fences I’ve lost touch with racing. What if I fly down? I’m due a couple of days off. We could watch the races on TV, you could tell me all and take me out to dinner and I’ll fly back on Wednesday morning. Get my old room ready. What do you say?’

‘Will you come to the house or the farm?’

‘The house,’ she said with decision. ‘It’s easier.’

‘Noon?’

‘As near as dammit.’

‘Lizzie,’ I said gratefully, ‘thanks.’

Her voice was dry. ‘You’re one tough cookie, brother dear, so less of the sob-stuff.’

‘Wherever did you hear such language?’

‘In the cinema.’

Smiling, I said a temporary goodbye and put down the receiver. She would come, as she always had, driven by an inbuilt compulsion to hurry to the aid of her brothers. The eldest of the family by a gap of five years, she had mothered first our brother Roger and then six years later myself, a fierce hen with chicks. Had she had children of her own, those instincts might have died naturally on my account, as they had for Roger, who’d achieved a cosy wife and three boys of his own, but as I, like her, had never married — or not so far — I seemed still to be not only brother but surrogate son.

Shortish and thin, her bobbed dark hair lately peppered with grey, she whisked around her own habitat either in black academic gowns or white laboratory overalls, her darting mind engaged with parsecs, quantum leaps and black and white dwarfs. She published papers, she taught intensely, she’d made a name; she was, in or out of bed with the latest beard, as far as I could see, fulfilled.

It was a good six months since I’d taken the train to her Scottish door to spend two days with her. Two days compressed six months’ conversation into a span she preferred. Her one-night trip to Pixhill was typical; she would never sit still for a week.

Thinking about her, I sat on at the farmyard until Nina came back, her box empty, the runners safely returned to their stable. She parked by the pumps and filled the tanks and came yawning over to the office to put the day’s log through the letter-box, as she’d been asked.

I went out to meet her. ‘How did it go?’ I asked.

‘Utterly uneventful in any meaningful way. Fascinating in others. Has anything happened here?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. The police came again about Jogger. I arranged his memorial at the pub, we should get a good list of names tomorrow. The computer’s acting up. And after you’ve cleaned that horsebox I’ve something to show you.’

She glanced in disfavour at the dusty vehicle. ‘Do you really mean I should clean it?’

‘Harve will expect it. Inside and out.’

She gave me an old-fashioned sideways look of irony. ‘I don’t think Patrick Venables intended this at all.’

‘Under cover is under cover,’ I said mildly. ‘If I do it for you and Harve comes back in the middle, my authority in this place is down the drain with the disinfectant.’

To do her justice, she complained no more but drove the box to the cleaning area and attacked it with the pressurised water, squeegeeing until the windows shone.

Harve did in fact return while she was busy and took her industry for granted. While he filled his tanks and waited his turn with the water I returned to my office and slightly rearranged the items on the canteen tray, removing four of the puzzling little tubes from sight and stowing them deep in a desk drawer. With time to spare, I picked up the unopened packet of sandwiches and read the label on it: ‘Beef and Tomato.’ There was also a price sticker label and a sell-by date, which identified the Friday just past.

Friday was the day I’d done Marigold’s shuttle and found the carrier with the thermos. Friday’s sandwiches. But I hadn’t stopped anywhere for the lads to buy sandwiches or anything else.

I frowned. ‘Beef and Tomato.’ I’d seen a ‘Beef and Tomato’ sandwich wrapper, empty, only a day or two ago, but where exactly? The answer arrived slowly. In Brett’s rubbish in the nine-box, of course.

Nina came into the office and sprawled in the chair across from mine, the desk between us.

‘What do I do tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘I learned a lot about racing today but damn all about smuggling. I think Patrick believed I would instantly spot what’s going on, but I could be here a month and see nothing if today’s anything to go by.’

‘No one,’ I reminded her, ‘has seen anything going on. Perhaps you’re here to see how anything could.’

‘Which you could see better than me.’

‘No, I don’t think so. I’d say nothing much happens when I’m around simply because I’m around. I’d like to send you on a trip to France or Italy or Ireland, but there we hit a bit of a snag.’

‘What snag? I don’t mind going. I’d quite like it, in fact.’

‘I have to send two drivers because of the hours.’

‘That’s OK.’

I smiled. ‘Not really. The wives of the married drivers take exception to me sending their husbands abroad with a woman. My usual woman driver, Pat, consequently never goes abroad, to her disgust. I could of course send you with Nigel, who’s not married, but Pat herself won’t go with him, he’d seduce a nun.’

‘Not me, he wouldn’t.’ She was definite, but I wondered.

‘We’ll see if a trip comes up,’ I said. ‘As for tomorrow, we won’t be very busy here, we never are in Cheltenham Festival week because there aren’t many other meetings held on those three days. We’ll be busy again on Friday and it’ll be hectic again on Saturday, if we’re lucky. Can you work Saturday?’

‘It looks as if I’d better.’

‘Mm.’ I leaned forward, picked up one of the remaining two tubes lying on the paper plate and asked her if she’d seen anything like it before.

‘I don’t think so. Why?’

‘They were being carried in one of my horseboxes, hidden inside this thermos flask.’

She came to full alertness, all the tired lines shed.

‘What are they?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s possible — possible’s the strongest I’d put it — that they might be what the masked intruder was looking for in the cab of my nine-box, because that’s where they were, in the cab. In a carrier with these uneaten sandwiches, in this thermos full of undrunk coffee.’

She took the tube from me and held it up to the light.

‘What’s inside?’

‘I don’t know. I thought Patrick Venables might be able to find out.’

She lowered the tube and looked at me, smothering excitement and saying, ‘They’re the first concrete piece of evidence that anything’s going on.’

I picked up the packet of sandwiches and showed her the labels.

‘Brett, the driver who took the nine-box to Newmarket last Thursday with the two-year-olds...’

‘And who has left?’

I nodded. ‘Brett — I think probably Brett because Dave had diarrhoea — anyway, one of them bought sandwiches like these on that journey, because there was an empty packet just like this in some rubbish that came back in the cab. They threw the rubbish away on Friday morning when they cleaned out the box. Anyway, suppose Brett’s sandwiches came from the shop in the South Mimms service station, and suppose... well, why not suppose... that these sandwiches here came from the same place...?’ I paused, but she simply listened, not commenting or disagreeing. I went on, ‘Dave picked up our hitchhiker at South Mimms. So... well... what if these sandwiches and this thermos were travelling with Kevin Keith Ogden?’

Given the supposition, her reasoning followed the same path that mine had and came up with the same observations.

‘If the tubes belonged to the dead passenger, they can’t be relevant to the containers under the lorries. They might well not have anything to do with you at all. The man didn’t know he was going to die. He probably meant to take these tubes with him.’

‘I was afraid you’d say that.’

‘All the same, very interesting. And...’ She stopped pensively.

‘Yes?’

She told me her emerging conclusions, and I nodded. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’

‘You don’t need me, really, do you?’ she said.

‘I need your eyes.’

Harve finished his chores and joined us in the office, asking Nina how she’d fared and whether she had any questions. She thanked him, cutting down, I noticed, on the purity of her blue-blooded vowels, but not to an insulting extent. I wondered how often and how regularly she transformed herself for Patrick Venables.

The phone rang and I answered it, finding Sandy on the line.

‘Inquest on Jogger,’ he said. ‘It’s just come through. Wednesday, ten a.m., Winchester Coroner’s Court. All they’ll do is open the inquest and adjourn it pending results of enquiries. Normal for accident cases. I asked if they’d need you but they said not yet. They’ll want Harve, as he found him, and Dr Farway, of course. Also the inquest on Kevin Keith Ogden, they want Dave to attend. I’ll brief him about where to go. OK?’

‘Yes, thanks, Sandy.’

I put down the receiver and told Harve he’d be needed briefly on Wednesday. Harve made a face of disinclination and shrugged. The phone rang again at once as if in continuation of the same conversation, but in fact there was a strange nasal voice in my ear, full of self-importance and busy-busy.

‘John Tigwood here,’ he said.

‘Oh. Yes?’

‘Maudie Watermead told me to get in touch.’

‘John Tigwood. Friend of Maudie’s sister, Lorna?’

He corrected me briskly. ‘Director of Centaur Care.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘John Tigwood,’ Harve muttered disapprovingly. ‘Potty little pipsqueak. Always on the cadge.’

‘What can I do for you?’ I asked the phone temperately.

‘Collect some horses for me,’ Tigwood said.

‘Certainly,’ I agreed with warmth. ‘Any time.’ Business was business after all. Whatever I thought of John Tigwood personally, I was all for taking his money.

‘A retirement farm is closing in Yorkshire,’ he told me gravely, making it sound portentous. ‘We’ve agreed to take the horses and find new homes for them. The Watermeads have agreed to put two in their bottom paddock. Benjy Usher’s taking two others. I’m on to Marigold English, even though she’s new here. How about you, yourself? Can I rope you in?’

‘Sorry, no,’ I said firmly. ‘When do you want them transported?’

‘Tomorrow do you?’

‘Certainly,’ I said.

‘Good. Lorna herself wants to go with your box, acting as groom.’

‘All right, fine.’

He gave me directions and I told him the fee.

‘Oh, look here, I was hoping you’d do it for charity.’

‘Sorry, no.’ I was friendly and apologetic as far as it went.

‘But it’s for Lorna!’ he insisted.

‘I don’t expect Maudie said I would do the job for nothing.’

After a pause he said grudgingly, ‘She did warn me.’

‘Mm. So do you want me to fetch them, or not?’

A shade huffily he said, ‘You’ll get paid. Though I do think you might be more generous. After all, it’s a good cause.’

‘You could ask someone else to fetch them,’ I suggested. ‘You might get someone else to do it for nothing.’

His silence suggested that he’d already tried someone else. Several someones, perhaps. It was a long way from Pixhill to the place in Yorkshire from where he wanted me to collect seven geriatric cases, shaky on their old legs, to deliver them to their new homes.

When Tigwood had gone off the line I handed the directions to Harve. Nina, having listened to my side of the exchange, asked what it had been about.

Harve told her disgustedly, ‘There’s this wacky home for very old horses. This John Tigwood, he boards them out all over the place. He charges the owners of the old horses for looking after them, but he doesn’t pay the people who give the horses homes. It’s a racket! And then he has the cheek to ask Freddie for free transport, in the name of charity.’

I smiled. ‘It’s one of the local good causes. People organise fund raisers. They twist a lot of arms. I daresay I ought to have offered the transport for nothing but to be honest I don’t like being pressured or conned, and as I’ll bet the owners of the horses will have to pay Tigwood to get their old pensioners brought down here, I don’t see why he shouldn’t pay me.’

‘The point is,’ Harve said, ‘who’s doing the job?’

‘Whoever goes, takes Lorna Lipton, Mrs Watermead’s sister, as groom,’ I told him, looking over the chart. ‘We’ll have to send a nine-box. The new driver, Aziz what’s his name, will be driving Brett’s nine-box from now on. He may as well start with the geriatrics.’

‘What new driver?’ Harve said.

‘I engaged him this morning, after you’d gone. Best of five who came for interviews.’

I wrote Centaur Care in the chart square for the nine-box, and put ‘Aziz’ at the head of the column.

Centaur Care, the name of Tigwood’s outfit, sounded so like Centre Care that for years I’d thought that was how it was spelled. A tiny institution of its kind, the Centaur Care office occupied a small one-storey economically built hut, for want of a grander word, on the edge of a two-acre paddock on the outskirts of Pixhill. Adjoining ramshackle wooden stables, capable of holding six pathetic customers with low expectations, just about passed county regulation inspections, the charitable status of the enterprise shielding it from blasts of ill authoritarian will. John Tigwood’s public manner elevated this set-up in Pixhill’s collective consciousness to major good works: I was sure that many who gave to the noble cause hadn’t set eyes on its headquarters.

There were ‘Centaur Care’ collecting boxes scattered throughout Pixhill, round tins with slots into which one was exhorted to pour ‘long life for old friends.’ John Tigwood came round regularly to empty the containers and write fulsome receipts. He’d left one tin in our canteen but had fumed to find gifts in it of buttons, biscuits and an out-of-date condom. ‘Be glad it hasn’t been used,’ I’d said, which he hadn’t seen as funny.

Harve was looking over the whole chart, and shrugging philosophically at the news that the computer wasn’t working. Like me, he still preferred a written chart, though he inclined to the blackboard on a wall we’d had until I got rid of it. Too much chalk dust in the air, once we’d installed the computer.

I told Harve that all the tools had been stolen from Jogger’s van. He swore briefly but saw no great significance in it. We would need, I said, another slider for inspecting the undersides of the boxes and Harve, nodding, suggested I ask Nigel to make one.

‘All he needs is a bit of plasterboard and some casters,’ Harve said. ‘He’s good with his hands, I’ll say that for him.’

I smothered a smile. ‘He can do it tomorrow, then,’ I said. I pondered briefly and came to a decision. ‘On Wednesday Nigel can go to France to collect the showjumper for Jericho Rich’s daughter. Nina, here, will go with him as a second driver.’

Harve gave her a startled sideways glance and raised his eyebrows to me comically.

‘I did warn her,’ I said. ‘She says she’s Nigel-proof.’

‘She doesn’t know him!’

‘She’s experienced with horses,’ I explained. ‘Jericho’s daughter wants us to send an attendant to travel back with the horse. Nina can double that with driving.’

‘But you said Dave was to go, with Phil driving his six-box,’ Harve protested.

‘I’ve changed my mind. Nina’s going with Nigel. They can take the four-box Nina was driving today. It will be better, more economical.’ To her I said, ‘You’ll need overnight things. OK?’

She nodded and, when Harve had gone out to meet the other incoming box, said, ‘You’ll want one of us to sleep in the box, won’t you?’

‘It has that tube on its underside,’ I said, agreeing.

‘Yes. Well, hang out the bait. Let everyone know that that particular box is going to France. Someone might bite.’

‘Um,’ I said hesitantly. ‘No one expects you to do anything dangerous.’

She smiled slightly. ‘Don’t be too sure. Patrick can be bloody demanding.’ She seemed unconcerned. ‘And I won’t exactly be parachuting into occupied France behind German lines.’

She was, I saw, exactly the type of woman who had done just that in World War II and, as if reading my thoughts, she nodded and said, ‘My mother did it, and survived to have me afterwards.’

‘That takes a bit of living up to.’

‘It’s in the blood.’

‘Do you have any children?’ I asked.

She wiggled long fingers in the dismissive gesture of unsentimental nanny-assisted mothers. ‘Three. All grown out of Pony Club age, all flown the nest. Husband long dead. Life suddenly empty, boring, no further point in showing or eventing. So... Patrick to the rescue. Need any more?’

‘No.’

I understood her deeply, and she realised it, moved despite herself to an internal wave of emotion and self-knowledge. She shook her head as if to disown the moment and got to her feet, tall and competent, a horsewoman for whom horses ultimately were not enough.

‘If you don’t need me tomorrow,’ she said, ‘I’ll deliver the tubes to Patrick in London and discuss things with him, and be back on Wednesday. What time?’

‘You’ll need to set off from here at seven. You’ll cross from Dover to Calais and reach your French destination at about six. Returning on Thursday, you’ll have to go to Jericho Rich’s daughter’s place, of course, to deliver the horse. You’ll be back here late, perhaps ten o’clock.’

‘Right.’

She wrapped the two amber tubes carefully in a handkerchief and stowed them in her handbag. Then with a brief nod of farewell she walked out to her car and inconspicuously departed.

Retrieving the four other tubes from the desk drawer, I wrapped each one in a tissue and put them in my jacket pocket. Then I poured the mug’s contents back into the thermos, screwed on the inner stopper and the outer cap and restored it with the sandwiches to the carrier for onward transport to my house.

The work day was ending. There were still boxes out on the road, though I wouldn’t wait for their return. The drivers never expected it and might have taken too much close checking as a lack of trust. There had, however, been phone messages during the day both from the nine-box I’d sent to Ireland with broodmares and from the box in France that was bringing the two two-year-olds over to join Michael Watermead’s stable, all the calls to the effect that neither box would be arriving back until two or three in the morning.

For us, that was quite normal. For Michael Watermead, it was bound to be an intolerable inconvenience. I had already arranged with the driver to come straight back to home base and to keep the two young horses in the farmyard’s stables until morning, but remembered I’d forgotten to tell Michael himself.

Stifling a yawn, I pressed his numbers and found him at home.

‘Two in the morning!’ he protested. ‘You know I don’t like it. It disturbs the whole yard, noise and lights when the other horses are asleep. They do need a good sleep, you know.’

‘If you like, we could keep your two-year-olds here in the farmyard stables until morning.’ I suggested it as if I’d just thought of it. ‘They’d come to no harm. They’re travelling well, my driver says. They’re calm and eating.’

‘You might have organised it better,’ Michael grumbled, gently reproving, as usual converting any strong feeling into good-mannered restraint.

‘There’s been a hold-up with the ferry in Calais,’ I explained. ‘Your horses won’t reach Dover until about ten tonight, they say. I’m very sorry, Michael, but it’s out of our hands.’

‘Yes, yes, of course, I do see. But blast it, it’s bloody irritating. Still, yes, I suppose those two-year-olds won’t come to much harm. Bring them over first thing, though. Six-thirty or soon after, when my lads come to work. Eh?’

‘First thing,’ I confirmed.

‘All right then.’ He paused for a change of subject. ‘Any... er... more news of your mechanic, poor fellow?’

‘The police were asking accident-type questions.’

‘Too bad he fell.’

‘Rotten.’

‘Let me know if I can do anything.’

‘Thanks, Michael.’

‘Maudie sends her love.’

I put the receiver down with a sigh, wishing Maudie meant it, and after a moment’s thought got through to the stud farm that was expecting the delivery from Ireland.

‘Your four mares with foals,’ I said soothingly, ‘are on the ferry right now but they won’t get to Fishguard until eleven tonight and if we bring them straight on to you they’ll be with you sometime after three. Is that all right with you?’

‘Fine. We’ll be up all night anyway, with mares foaling.’

Jobs done, I stood up tiredly, picked up the carrier, locked the outer office door, leaving the canteen open for the drivers, and went out to shift gears in the Fourtrak, my workhorse buggy. I sometimes felt, climbing behind that practical wheel, as if the Jaguar XJS persona was leaving me altogether; but somewhere below the businessman the jockey still had a pulse, and I now saw that it was essential to keep him alive, not to let him slip away, to be still willing for him to risk his neck daily, even if he no longer did.

I drove home, ate, went to bed.

I would unleash the Jaguar more often, I thought.

Soon after six-thirty in the morning I was up, dressed and breakfasted, and driving along in the strengthening daylight to the farmyard to see what was what.

The box from France with Michael Watermead’s two-year-olds stood quietly in its accustomed place, its cargo dozing in the stable, its driver nowhere about. There was a folded note from him, however, tucked under the windscreen wiper. I opened it and read, ‘Can someone else take them to Watermead’s? I’m bushed, I’m out of hours, and I think I’ve got flu. Sorry, Freddie.’ It was signed ‘Lewis’ and dated 2.30 a.m., Tuesday.

Damn the flu, I thought forcefully. Damn all invisible enemies, in fact.

I unlocked the outer office door and went along to my own room to fetch the duplicate keys of Lewis’s box, deciding that it was easier to drive it along to Michael’s yard myself rather than wait for another driver to be ready. Accordingly, I unlocked the horsebox, loaded the patient untroubled guests from my stable and took them the scant mile to their destination.

Michael was already out in his yard, looking pointedly at his watch, which stood nearer to seven than the appointed six-thirty.

When I climbed down from the cab his displeasure lessened a little but not altogether. He was, for him, in a comprehensively bad mood.

‘Freddie! Where’s Lewis?’ he said.

‘Lewis came back with flu,’ I said ruefully.

‘Dammit!’ Michael did some arithmetic. ‘What about Doncaster? This flu takes so long.’

‘I’ll give you a good driver,’ I promised.

‘It’s not the same. Lewis is helpful with saddling and so on. Some of those lazy buggers get to the races and sleep in their cabs until it’s time to go home. That Brett was one of those. I couldn’t stand him.’

Making sympathetic noises, I lowered the ramp for access to the two-year-olds and untied the nearest one to lead him out.

‘I thought the bloody French were sending a lad with them,’ Michael grumbled, his fair head back, his mild voice plaintive.

In anyone else, the displeasure level would have come roaring out in full-blown anger. In Jericho Rich, for example, intemperate man.

‘Lewis told us yesterday on the phone that the French lad went back home from Calais,’ I explained. ‘He apparently thought he would be sea-sick on the crossing. Lewis assured me he could manage on his own, so we decided not to lose even more time in finding a substitute attendant. Where do you want me to put this fellow?’

The two-year-old was skittering around playfully at the end of his rope. Michael’s head lad, half running, came to take him into custody and lead him away to his new home.

With the second import safely unloaded, Michael’s irritation subsided into his normal bonhomie and he suggested a cup of coffee before I went on my way. We walked together into his house, into the bright warm welcoming kitchen where frequent visitors sat unceremoniously round a long pine table and helped themselves to juices and toast.

Maudie was there in jeans and sweat-shirt, blond hair still tousled from sleep, face bare of make-up. She received my hello kiss absentmindedly and asked for Lewis.

‘Flu,’ Michael said succinctly.

‘But he helps the children with the rabbits! Bother and damn. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.’

‘Do what?’ I incautiously asked.

‘Clean out the run and the hutches.’

‘Be careful,’ Michael teased, ‘or she’ll have you mucking out the wretched bunnies. Let the children do it, Maudie. They’re quite old enough.’

‘They’ll be dressed for school,’ she objected, and indeed her two younger children, boy and girl in tidy grey, came bouncing in with gleeful appetites and good morning hugs for their father. They were followed, to my severe surprise, by my own daughter, Cinders.

She wore the same grey clothes. I gathered from the chatter that she went to the same school and had stayed with the Watermeads overnight. Hugo, I reflected, couldn’t have reckoned on my coming to breakfast.

She said ‘Hi’ to me nonchalantly as someone she’d met in passing at lunch two days ago, as someone who knew her parents. Her attention reverted at once to the other children with whom she giggled, at ease.

I tried not to watch her, but I was as conscious of her as if I’d grown new antennae. She sat opposite me, dark haired, neat and vivacious, secure and loved. Not mine. Never mine. I ate toast and wished things were different.

Maudie’s daughter said, ‘If Lewis has flu, who’s doing the rabbits?’

‘Why not Ed?’ Maudie said, suggesting her elder son.

‘Mother! You know he won’t. He’s a dead loss as a brother. Lewis loves the bunnies. He strokes them, strokes their fur. They hop all over his hands. There’s no one as good with them as Lewis. I wish Lewis was my brother.’

Michael raised his eyebrows at Maudie, neither of them relishing the promotion of Lewis to son.

‘Who’s Lewis?’ Cinders asked.

‘One of Freddie’s drivers,’ the children told her, explaining the fleet of boxes, explaining they were mine.

‘Oh,’ she said, lacking much interest.

Michael said he would get one of the stable-lads to clean the hutches that afternoon and Maudie chivvied the three children like a flock of sparrows to finish their breakfast, bundle up in coats and scramble out to the car for her to drive them miles to reach school by eight-thirty.

The kitchen seemed quiet and empty after they’d gone. I finished my coffee and rose to my feet, thanking Michael for the company.

‘Any time,’ he said amiably.

My glance fell on one of John Tigwood’s ubiquitous round collecting tins standing on the window sill.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘One of my boxes is fetching a load of ancient steeplechasers from Yorkshire today. John Tigwood says you’re taking two of them in your bottom paddock. What shall I do about them? Do you want the whole lot to come here first? I mean, which two do you want?’

Not surprisingly he looked faintly exasperated. ‘Lorna talked me into it again. Let her and that wretched little man sort them out at that awful little place. But see if you can bring me two here that aren’t on the point of expiring. I told Tigwood to take the last two to the knackers to put them out of their misery. It’s a lot of sentimental rubbish, keeping those poor tottering wrecks on their feet, but of course I can’t say that in front of the children. They don’t understand the need for death.’

He came out into the stable yard to drive up to the Downs to watch his horses complete their morning exercise, and on an impulse asked if I would like to go with him, as Irkab Alhawa would be up there doing fast work.

I accepted at once, intensely pleased at what I knew to be a compliment and a gift. He drove us in his high-wheelbased Shogun and pulled up at a vantage point near the end of his upland all-weather exercise track. From there we had a clear view of horses galloping uphill towards us three abreast, and a closer look as they swept past us, to pull up a hundred yards further on.

I’d spent innumerable mornings most of my life riding training-gallops. I still did it, given the chance. There wasn’t going to be any chance I would exercise Watermead horses, though, as steeplechase jockeys of my size, whether retired or not, tended to be too heavy and too strong for young flat-racers.

‘How’s Irkab coming along?’ I asked tentatively.

‘Doing just great.’

Michael’s voice was full of satisfaction, the anxiety of training a horse fancied to win the Derby hovering well below sweat-level so early in the year. Come June he’d be insomniac.

We watched three or four trios of his string come past us in a prearranged order, and Michael said, ‘Irkab will be in the next three, on this side nearest to us. You’ll see the white blaze down his nose.’

‘Great.’

The three horses came into sight, moving easily, fast shadows on the brown track. Irkab Alhawa, with his awkward Arab name, had been a late-developing two-year-old, not revealing the extent of his athletic ability until the Middle Park Stakes in October the previous year. Lewis had driven him to Newmarket that autumn day as merely another Watermead runner and had returned with a revelation that had attracted newsmen to Pixhill like a flock of starlings.

The promise of the Middle Park had been confirmed two weeks later by a scintillating six-length victory in the Dewhurst Stakes, the final top two-year-old event of the season, slaughtering the best that Newmarket could muster on its own turf, with the result that during the peaceful inactive winter Irkab Alhawa had become almost a cult, the odd-sounding syllables part of his mystique. The press had translated the words into English as ‘Ride the Wind,’ which had caught the public’s imagination, though somewhere I’d heard that that rendering wasn’t quite right. Never mind; Irkab Alhawa was good news for Michael, for Pixhill, for Lewis, and not least for Freddie Croft.

The brown sensation with the narrow white blaze, recognisable afar off, swept effortlessly up the track towards us in the smooth coordination of muscle and mass that was nature’s gift to the lucky few, horses and humans, in whom grace of movement equalled speed.

I felt, as always in the presence of great horses, an odd sort of envy: not to be on their backs, but to be them, riding the wind. In rational terms it was nonsense, but after so many years of closeness with the marvellous creatures they were in a way extensions of myself, always hovering in the back of consciousness.

Not everyone had rejoiced with Michael over the emergence of a prodigy in his stable. Human nature being what it was, a certain portion of the racing world would have been happy to hear that ill had befallen the horse. Michael shrugged it off. ‘There will always be spite and envy. Look how some politicians encourage it! It’s not my problem if people grudge and bitch, it’s theirs.’ Michael, easy going and civilised, couldn’t understand the force of unprovoked hate.

Irkab Alhawa galloped past us, majestically strong. Michael turned to me with a glimmering smile and saw he needed to make no comment. For a horse like that, comment was inadequate, banal.

We drove back to the stables. I thanked him. He nodded, and in an odd way, because of that gallop, we’d come closer to a positive friendship, not just friendly business relations.

I took Lewis’s super-six back to the farmyard, its daily bustle embracing me, bringing my feet back to earth.

Aziz had reported for work, his vitality and flashing smile having already produced a sort of glaze in Harve’s less shiny eyes. Harve greeted my arrival with relief and told me he’d been trying to explain to Aziz, disappointed with his first assignment, that a job was a job was a job.

‘There’s a whole lot of no glamour in this business,’ I assured Aziz. ‘Some days you take seven terminal has-beens. One day, maybe, a Derby winner. Getting the cargo alive and well to journey’s end is all that matters.’

‘OK.’

‘And do remember that all horses doze off and dream while you’re driving at a constant speed on the motorway, but when you leave the motorway and slow down and come to a roundabout they’ll wake up and not know where they are and judder about trying to stay on their feet. All horses are like that but these very old ones will be shaky on their pins to start with, so be extra careful or you’ll come back with all seven thrashing about on the floor and, even if they survive, at the very least we will not get paid for our efforts.’

Aziz listened to this homily at first with a disbelieving grin and latterly with thoughtful attention. He should, though, have been nodding throughout.

I said slowly, ‘You have been driving racehorses, haven’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he replied instantly. ‘Of course. But local, round Newmarket. And to Yarmouth races. No motorways, really.’

Harve frowned but didn’t pursue it, and question marks rose like a prickly hawthorn hedge in my own mind. It was true there were few if any long motorways in East Anglia, but it passed credibility that a Newmarket stable would never have sent runners further afield.

I might have asked Aziz a few searching questions but at that moment Maudie’s sister, Lorna, swept through the gates in her expensive crimson Range Rover, the aristocrat of safari cars, built to withstand raw African veldt and the smooth roads of Pixhill.

Lorna, concerned and intense, hopped down from behind the wheel and strode across to give me a peck on the cheek. Blonde, blue-eyed, long-legged, richly divorced and thirty, lovely Lorna looked me firmly in the eye and told me I was a pig to charge for fetching the pensioners.

‘Um,’ I said, ‘is John Tigwood charging the pensioners’ owners?’

‘That’s entirely different.’

‘No, that’s getting it both ways, or trying to.’

‘Centaur Care needs the money.’

I smiled a usefully bland smile and introduced Aziz as the day’s driver. Lorna blinked. Aziz, shaking her hand, gave her a white blinding smile and a flash of dark eyes. Lorna forgot about my meanness and told Aziz animatedly that they were going on a wonderful Errand of Mercy and that it was a Privilege to be involved in Saving Old Friends.

‘Yes, I agree,’ Aziz said.

He gave me the ghost of a sideways grin as if daring me to denounce his hypocrisy. Aziz was a rogue, I thought, but rogues were good for the spirits, up to a point.

John Tigwood chose that moment to give us the benefit of his company, which I could certainly have done without. The potty little pipsqueak, as Harve had called him, emerged from a coffee-coloured van emblazoned all over with ‘Centaur Care for Aged Horses’ in titanium white letters, and strode in our direction with thrusting important steps. He wore grey corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt and a heavy-knit sweater and was carrying an anorak.

‘Good morning, Freddie.’

His voice tried hard, but the self-important fruitiness couldn’t disguise the lack of substance beneath. Tigwood was essentially an inadequate man inventing a role for himself: not, I supposed, an unusual phenomenon or even one necessarily reprehensible. What else could he do? Slink along, wringing Uriah Heep hands?

I’d always taken the Centaur Care charity to be a long-established facet of the local community. That Tuesday morning I wondered whether Tigwood himself had set it up, and whether he lived off the collecting boxes, and whether, if he did, should Pixhill object? There were always old horses around dozing in sunshine. Such a cause had to be worthy, if compassion meant anything.

‘Morning, Lorna,’ the charity man said.

‘John, dear.’ Lorna pecked his thin cheek somewhere above the sparse beard that straggled round his pointed chin. Even the beard, I thought, trying to stifle my impatience, was inadequate. So in a way was his thin neck with the sharp larynx, neither of which he could help.

‘What can I do for you, John?’ I asked, welcoming him.

‘Thought I’d go with Lorna,’ he announced. ‘Seven horses... two pairs of hands will be better than one. Is this our driver?’

Lorna gave a quick glance at Aziz, not sure that she wanted John with her after all, but the potty little pipsqueak had made up his mind, had come dressed for the journey and would stick obstinately to his plan, it was clear.

‘How nice,’ Lorna said insincerely.

‘You’ve a long way to go,’ I told them in general, ‘you may as well get started.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Tigwood said, taking bustling charge. ‘Come along, driver.’

‘His name is Aziz,’ I remarked mildly.

‘Oh? Come along then, Aziz.’

I watched them climb aboard, two totally incompatible men with the well-intentioned Cause-embracer between them. Aziz looked grimly out of the window in my direction, all relish for the day, small at best, evaporating. I couldn’t blame him. I’d have hated to have taken his place.

Under that nine-box, I reflected, as Aziz turned competently out of the gate, was the magnet Jogger had found. I’d taken it on trust that the nails in the insulating block of wood were still holding fast. I hadn’t warned Aziz it was there. I hadn’t told him to look out for strangers trying to roll under the fuel tank section of the chassis. I couldn’t envisage anyone seeking to transport anything in such awkward secrecy between Yorkshire and Pixhill, when all they’d have to do was drive down in a car.

Harve left in Aziz’s wake, setting out five minutes after, in time to pick up two runners for the later races at Cheltenham. Another box had already left for the same destination, two had gone to Bristol airport to collect Irish horses flying over for Gold Cup day and three were out with broodmares. Not bad, considering.

I went into the offices where Isobel and Rose were looking in frustration at blank computer screens and asking what they should do with the day.

‘Type letters on the old-fashioned typewriter?’ I suggested.

‘I suppose we’ll have to,’ Rose said, disgusted.

‘The man promised he’d come tomorrow,’ I assured her.

‘Not before time.’

Tigwood’s collecting box stood on Isobel’s desk and I picked it up and shook it. The result was a hollow rattle, three or four coins at most.

‘Mr Tigwood came to empty it last week,’ Isobel said. ‘There wasn’t much in there. He thinks we should try harder.’

‘Perhaps we should.’

I went out to my jalopy and drove to Newbury to leave my film of Jogger with a one-hour developing outfit and to collect the ordered, reserved and ready rhyming dictionary. I hadn’t actually seen one of these before and sat in the car park flicking over the pages to pass the hour’s wait, finding that the rhymes were listed not in regular alphabetical fashion but all starting with vowels.

‘Amely,’ I read. ‘Gamely, lamely, namely, tamely.’

‘Etter — better, debtor, fetter, getter, letter, setter, sweater, wetter...’

‘Oard — board, floored, ford, gourd, hoard, horde, oared, pored, sword, toward, aboard, afford...’

Hundreds and thousands of rhymes, available but useless. I realised I needed to have Jogger’s cryptic statements under my eyes, not just in my memory. Maybe if I could simultaneously see what he’d said, some spark might fly out of entries like ‘unch — brunch, bunch, crunch, hunch, lunch, munch, punch, scrunch...’

Always remembering, I thought in depression, that in Jogger’s cockney accent bike became boike and lady, lidey, and ts and ds could be swallowed and not heard.

Closing the book, I collected the sharp sad pictures of his death and drove home to tidy the house and get my sister’s room ready, which meant making the bed and opening the windows to let in whatever March cared to deliver.

I picked more daffodils and put them in a vase, and punctually at noon my sister Lizzie arrived.

She flew in literally, from on high, in a helicopter.