Driving Force

Chapter 7

Lizzie, true to form, came to rescue her little brother.

The nightwatchman let me spend most of the wait in his under-heated guard room, even going so far as to brew me a cup of tea to alleviate my shivers, all under the baleful eyes of his attentive dog. When the hands of the clock on his wall stood at two, he said I’d have to leave as it was time for his rounds, so I thanked him and walked... well, shambled... along the road to the ferry terminal and sat in shadow on the pavement there at one end of the building, my spine against the wall, my arms hugging my knees. I’d known worse conditions, just.

Not far away, on the other side of an openwork metal fence, light glinted on water. I looked at the scene vaguely, then with speculation. I suppose there were many places like that, where in darkness semi-conscious people could be slid into the briny with nobody noticing. There were miles of available shoreline in Southampton Docks.

The Fourtrak came, slowed, moved hesitantly into the parking area and stopped. I stood up, pressing against the wall for support, and took a few paces forward into the light. Lizzie saw me and came running from the vehicle, stopping dead a few feet from me, wide-eyed and shocked.

‘Freddie!’

‘I can’t look as bad as all that,’ I protested.

She didn’t tell me how I looked. She came and draped one of my arms over her shoulders and walked with me to the Fourtrak.

‘Take off that wet jacket,’ she commanded. ‘You’ll die of exposure.’

Marginally better than drowning, I thought, though I didn’t say so.

Once inside the butty little vehicle I struggled out of all the wet things and put on the dry substitutes, including fleece-lined boots and the warmest padded jacket I owned. When Lizzie coped she did nothing by halves.

I got her to drive as near the guardroom as we could manage. The nightwatchman and his dog were at home again and issued forth suspiciously. When I offered him money for the first telephone call and for his trouble and kindness he at first refused it with indignation, raising one’s regard for the salt of the British earth.

‘Take it,’ I urged, ‘I owe you. Drink to my health.’

He took the note dubiously, only half concealing his pleasure.

‘You’ll get pneumonia anyway, shouldn’t wonder,’ he said.

The way I felt, he might well be right.

Lizzie drove back home the way she’d come, darting glances at me every few seconds. The cold-induced shudders and shakes gradually abated in my body until eventually even my guts felt warmed again, but conversely along with warmth came overwhelming tiredness so that all I wanted was to lie down and sleep.

‘But what happened?’ Lizzie asked.

‘I went to the farmyard.’

‘You said you were going to close the gates,’ she said, nodding.

‘Did I? Well... someone hit me on the head.’

‘Freddie! Who?’

‘Don’t know. When I woke up I was being dropped into water. Just as well I did wake up, really.’

She was predictably horrified. ‘They meant you to drown!’

‘I don’t know about that.’ I’d been puzzled ever since I’d been conscious. ‘If they wanted me dead, why not finish the job on my head? Why take me all the way to Southampton Docks? If they wanted particularly to drown me, there’s a perfectly good pond in Pixhill.’

‘Don’t joke about it.’

‘May as well,’ I said. ‘All I remember about them is someone saying, “If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.” ’

‘But that’s nonsensical!’

‘Mm.’

‘How many of them?’

‘There had to be two at least. If not, why bother to talk?’

‘Are you sure that’s what they said?’

‘Pretty sure.’

‘What sort of accent? Did you know the voice?’

‘No.’ I answered the second first. ‘Not an Eton accent. Rough, sort of.’

Lizzie said, ‘You’ll have to tell the police.’

I was silent, and she glanced at me too lengthily, even for light traffic.

‘You’ll have to,’ she said.

‘Keep your eyes on the road.’

‘You’re a shit.’

‘Yep.’

She drove, however, with more attention to getting us home safely and I wondered what good it might really do if I bothered to tell the police.

They would take a statement. They might check with the nightwatchman that I had in fact crawled out of Southampton Water. I could tell them that as I hadn’t known until five minutes beforehand that I was going along to the farmyard, there hadn’t been any sort of premeditated ambush. I’d walked in when I was unexpected and been smartly prevented from finding out who was there and what they were doing.

Taking me to Southampton must equally have been impulsive. Throwing me in alive but apparently unconscious meant they hadn’t much cared if I lived or died... almost as if they hadn’t made up their minds on that point and were leaving it to fate.

Nonsensical, as Lizzie’d said. Anyone, especially the police, would be sceptical. And what would the force do about it? They couldn’t and wouldn’t guard me day and night against illogical possible attempted murder. If I didn’t walk unexpectedly into shadows at night, why should anyone attack me again?

Probably a lot of that creaky reasoning was the result of concussion. More likely it stemmed from the usual aversion to less than friendly questioning, where crime was seen to be the fault of the victim.

I gingerly felt the back of my by then mutedly-throbbing head, wincing at the actual contact. Any blood that had been there had been washed away. My hair had dried. There was a lump and a soreness, but no gaping cut and no dent in my skull. As injuries went, compared with the assaults of steeplechasing, it was of the ‘it’ll be all right tomorrow’ kind. To have been knocked out racing meant to be grounded by the doctors for up to three weeks. I would ground myself for the rest of the night, I thought, and maybe I wouldn’t go to Cheltenham until Thursday. That should do it.

The Fourtrak hummed us home, the road direct. Southampton Docks was the nearest deep water to Pixhill: the nearest tidal place where unseen bodies could wash out on the ebb before dawn.

Stop thinking about it, I told myself. I was alive and dry and nightmares could wait.

Lizzie turned into the driveway and curled round the house and we found something absolutely rotten had happened while we’d been away.

My Jaguar XJS, my beautiful car, had been run at full tilt into Lizzie’s Robinson 22. The two sweet machines were tangled together, locked in deep metallic embrace, both twisted and crushed, the Jaguar’s buckled bonnet rising into the helicopter’s cab, whose round bubble front had been smashed into jagged pieces. The landing struts had buckled so that the aircraft’s weight sank into the car’s roof; the rotor blades were tilted at a crazy angle, one of them snapped off on the ground.

All one could say was that nothing had caught fire or exploded. In every other way, the two fast engines, our pleasure, our soul-mates, were dead.

The house’s outside lights were on, raising gleams on the double wreck. It was spectacular, in a macabre sort of way; a shining union.

Lizzie braked the Fourtrak to a jolting halt and sat hand over mouth, disbelievingly stunned. I slowly stepped down from the passenger’s seat and walked towards the mess, but there was nothing to be done. It would take a crane and a tow-truck to tear that marriage apart.

I walked back towards Lizzie who was standing on the tarmac saying ‘Oh, my God, oh my God...’ and trying not to weep.

I put my arms round her. She sobbed dryly against my chest.

‘Why?’ She choked on the word. ‘Why?’

I had no answer, just an ache, for her, for me, for the wanton destruction of efficiency.

In Lizzie the grief turned quickly to rage and to hatred and to hunger for revenge.

‘I’ll kill the bastard. I’ll kill him. I’ll cut his throat.’

She walked round the helicopter banging it with her fist.

‘I love this bloody machine. I love it. I’ll kill the bastard...’

I felt much the same. I thought mutely that at least we ourselves were alive, even though in my case only just, and that perhaps, that was enough.

I said, ‘Lizzie, come away, there’s fuel in the tanks.’

‘I can’t smell any.’ She came to my side, however. ‘I’m so furious I could burst.’

‘Come inside and have a drink.’

She walked jerkily with me to the back door.

The door had a pane of glass broken.

‘Oh no!’ Lizzie said.

I tried the handle. Open.

‘I locked it,’ she said.

‘Mm.’

It had to be faced. I went into the big room and tried to switch on a light. The switch had been hacked out of the wall. It was only by moonlight that one could see the devastation.

At a guess, it had been done in a frenzy, with an axe. Things weren’t just broken, but sliced open. There was light enough to see the slashes in the furniture, the smashed table lamps, the ruin of the television set, the computer monitor sliced in two, the rips in my leather chair, the raw pieces gouged out of my antique desk.

Everything, it seemed, had been attacked. Books and papers lay ripped on the floor. The daffodils I’d picked for Lizzie had been stamped on, the Waterford vase that had held them crushed to slivers.

The framed photographs of my racing days were off the walls and beyond repair. Our mother’s rare collection of china birds was history.

It was the birds that seemed to upset Lizzie most. She sat on the floor with tears running into her mouth, holding the pathetic irreplaceable pieces to her lips as if to comfort them. Grieving for our childhood, for our parents, for life gone by.

I went on a wander round the rest of the house but no other rooms had been invaded: only the heart of things, where I lived.

The telephone on my desk would never ring again. The answering machine had been hacked in two. I went out to the phone in the Fourtrak and woke Sandy Smith.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

He came in his car with his uniform pulled on over his pyjamas, the navy blue jacket unbuttoned, hairy chest visible. He stood looking in awe at the amalgam of Jaguar and helicopter, and brought a torch with him into the house.

The beam shone on Lizzie, the birds, the tears.

‘Done you proper,’ Sandy said to me, and I nodded.

‘Morning, miss,’ he said to Lizzie, the polite greeting bizarre but the intention kind enough.

To me he said, ‘Do you know who did it?’

‘No.’

‘Vandalism,’ he said. ‘Nasty.’

I felt the most appalling, heart-bumping apprehension and asked him to drive down with me to the farmyard.

He understood my fear and agreed to go at once. Lizzie stood up, still holding a wing and a bird’s head and said she would come with us, we couldn’t leave her alone in the house.

We went in Sandy’s car, its lights flashing but its siren silent. The farmyard gates still stood open, but to my almost sick relief the horseboxes themselves were untouched.

The offices were locked. My keys had long vanished but, seen dimly through windows, the three rooms looked as orderly as usual. The canteen, door open, had been left alone.

I went along to the barn. The tool store was secure. Nothing looked out of place. I went back to Sandy and Lizzie and reported: no damage and no one about.

Sandy stared at me strangely.

‘Miss Croft,’ he said, ‘tells me someone tried to kill you.’

‘Lizzie!’ I protested.

Lizzie said, ‘Constable Smith wanted to know where we were when all that... that wicked destruction... was going on at the house. I had to tell him. I couldn’t avoid it.’

‘I don’t know that anyone actually meant to kill me,’ I said. I told Sandy briefly about waking up in Southampton. ‘Maybe the reason for taking me there was to give time for attacking my house.’

Sandy thought things over, buttoned his tunic absent-mindedly and announced that all things considered he had better report to his headquarters.

‘Can’t it wait till later this morning?’ I said. ‘I could do with some sleep.’

‘You’ve had two dead men on your premises since last Thursday,’ Sandy pointed out. ‘And now this. I’ll be in trouble, Freddie, if I don’t report it at once.’

‘The two dead men were accidental.’

‘Your house isn’t.’

I shrugged and leaned on his car while he telephoned. No, he was saying, no one was dead, no one was injured, the damage was to property. He gave the address of my house and listened to instructions, relaying them to me after. In effect, two plain clothes detectives would come in due course.

‘How long is due course?’ Lizzie asked.

‘There’s a major flap on in Winchester,’ Sandy said. ‘So... whenever they can.’

‘Why do you say no one was injured?’ Lizzie sounded indignant. ‘Freddie was injured.’

Sandy eyed me with long knowledge. ‘Injured to him means both legs broken and his guts hanging out.’

‘Men!’ Lizzie said.

Sandy said to me, ‘Do you want me to call out Doc Farway?’

‘No, I don’t.’

He listened to my emphatic reply and smiled at Lizzie. ‘See?’

‘What time is it?’ I asked.

Sandy and Lizzie both looked at their watches. ‘Three thirty-two,’ Sandy said with precision. ‘My message to headquarters was timed at three twenty-six.’

Still leaning on Sandy’s car, I couldn’t decide which to guard, my business or my home. The damage already done might not be all. With such wanton pointless behaviour as stamping on daffodils, logical prediction could get nowhere. The graffiti mind, the urge to throw stones at windows, looting, destruction for its own sake, they were the natural glee of untamed humanity. It was civilisation and social conscience that were artificial.

The side door of Harve’s house opened directly into the farmyard. He came hurrying out in jeans, shrugging his arms into an anorak, anxiety plain.

‘Freddie! Sandy!’ His relief was partial. ‘One of my kids got up for a pee and woke me to say there was a police car by the horseboxes. What’s happened?’ He looked along the intact row of vehicles and repeated, puzzled, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Some vandals broke into my house,’ I explained. ‘We came to see if they’d been here too, but they haven’t.’

Harve looked more worried, not less.

‘I walked round late,’ he said. ‘It was all OK.’

‘What time?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’d say about ten.’

‘Um,’ I said, ‘you weren’t out here by any chance an hour or so later? You didn’t hear anything?’

He shook his head. ‘When I went in I watched a video of a football match for a while, and went to bed.’ He still looked anxious. ‘Why?’

‘I came here at roughly half-eleven. The gates were open and someone was moving about. I thought it was you.’

‘No, not that late. I shut the gate at ten. Everyone was back by then, see?’

‘Thanks, Harve.’

‘Who was here at half-eleven?’ he demanded.

‘That’s rather the point, I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone close enough to recognise whether I knew them or not.’

‘But if they didn’t do any damage...’ Harve frowned, ‘what were they here for?’

It was a question worth answering but I was not at that moment going to put forward the one reason I could think of. It was logical, besides: perhaps too logical for the poltergeist-type irrationality of so much that had happened that night.

Sandy and Lizzie between them told Harve about my bit of seaside bathing, Harve looking increasingly horrified.

‘You might have drowned!’ he said, exclaiming.

‘Mm. But there we are, I didn’t.’ I belatedly asked Harve to keep watch in the farmyard for what was left of the night. ‘Doze in your own box,’ I suggested, ‘and phone me the minute you see anything odd.’

With his promise to do that once he’d told his wife and brought a hot drink and a blanket, I went back to my house with Sandy and Lizzie and left them in the kitchen tut-tutting at life over steaming tea. As for me, I went wearily upstairs, decided to shower, lay down instead on top of the duvet for a minute still in fleecy boots and padded jacket, felt the world whirl briefly and fell instantly and comprehensively asleep.

I didn’t wake until Lizzie shook me, her voice urgent.

‘Freddie! Freddie, are you all right?’

‘Mm.’ I struggled from the depths. ‘What is it?’

‘The police are here.’

‘What?’

Realisation and remembrance came back with unwelcome clarity. I groaned. I felt unwell. I inconsequentially thought of Alfred, King of Wessex, who delivered his country from Danish invaders although suffering from half the diseases known to the ninth century. Such fortitude! And he could write and translate Latin as well.

‘Freddie, the police want to talk to you.’

King Alfred had had haemorrhoids, I’d read once. With all that on his mind, no wonder he’d let the cakes burn.

‘Freddie!’

‘Tell them I’ll be down in five minutes.’

When she’d gone I took off the night’s clothes, showered, shaved, dressed again in fresh things, combed my hair carefully and, at least on the outside, began to look like F. Croft Esquire, master of a few things he would rather not have surveyed.

The sitting-room looked no better in the opal light of dawn, and the soul had gone out of the tangled heap of metal that had been my precious car. I walked from one disaster to the other with the policemen, who weren’t the two who had come to Jogger. These were older, wearier, hard worked and unimpressed by my troubles, which they seemed to suggest I had brought on myself. I answered their questions monosyllabically, partly from malaise, chiefly from ignorance.

No, I didn’t know who had done all the damage.

No, I couldn’t guess.

No, I knew of no one who held a business grudge against me.

Had I dismissed a worker? No. One had recently left of his own choice.

Had I had any personal enemies? None that I knew of.

I must have some, they said. Everyone had enemies.

Well, I thought privately, reflecting on Hugo Palmerstone, I had no personal enemy who could be sure my house would be empty at two a.m. on the Wednesday morning of Cheltenham races. Not unless, of course, they’d tapped me on the head...

Who hated me this much? If I knew, I said, I would certainly tell.

Had anything been stolen?

That question stopped me short. So many things had been smashed that I hadn’t thought of theft. My car could have been stolen. My television, my computer, the china birds, the Waterford vase, all had had value. I hadn’t, I said lamely, inspected my safe.

They accompanied me indoors again, looking as if they couldn’t believe I hadn’t checked the safe first.

‘There isn’t much in there,’ I said.

‘Money?’

‘Yes, money.’

How much was not much? Less than a thousand, I said.

The safe stood in the corner behind my desk, its fireproof metal casing camouflaged inside a polished wooden cabinet. The unharmed cabinet doors opened easily but the combination lock inside had been chopped about with the same heavy cutting edge as everything else. The lock had withstood the assault, but its mechanism proved to be jammed.

‘Nothing’s been stolen,’ I said. ‘The safe won’t open.’

The fax machine on top of the safe’s cabinet would send no more messages. The copier on the table alongside had copied its last. A simple blow to each had ended their lives.

My own anger, not blazing, immediate and tearful like Lizzie’s, but a slow inner burn of fury, increased sharply at the spiteful splitting of two machines I — and the insurance — could easily replace. The cruelty got to me. Whoever had done all this, whoever had thrown me into the water, had meant me to suffer, had meant me to feel as I felt. I would give no one the extra pleasure, I resolved, of hearing me scream and moan. I would find out who and why, and even the score.

The police asked about my trip to Southampton but I could tell them very little: I’d been dropped into water, I’d swum, I’d climbed out, I’d phoned my sister to collect me.

No, I hadn’t seen who hit me.

No, I hadn’t seen a doctor. No need.

In the middle of telling them I didn’t remember anything at all of the journey to Southampton, I began to know that at some point or other I had had my eyes open. I’d seen the moonlight. I’d even spoken. I’d said, ‘Beautiful night for flying.’ Delirious.

‘If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will...’

They had known, I thought, that I was at least semi-conscious when they tipped me in.

Concussion was unpredictable, as I’d found at other times. Bits of memory could surface long after the impact. One could also appear to be conscious — people would say one had walked and talked — but afterwards one couldn’t remember that. Total recall could happen hours, days or weeks after the event, or sometimes remain blank for ever. I could remember the grass hitting my face one time; I could remember the fence I’d fallen at in the second race of the day and I could remember which horse I’d been riding. I still had no memory of driving to the racecourse that morning, or of the first race which, the record books told me, I had won by seven lengths half an hour before the fall.

I had travelled to Southampton in the boot of an ordinary car. The knowledge drifted in. I didn’t know how I knew, but I was sure.

The police had brought a photographer who took a few flash shots and departed, and a fingerprinter who stayed longer but gave his opinion in one succinct word, ‘Gloves.’

Lizzie mooned round her helicopter, stroking it now and then and muttering ‘Bastards’ under her breath. She said she would have to fly back to Edinburgh on the shuttle, as she had a lecture to give that afternoon. She vowed her partners in the helicopter would strangle whoever had crunched it.

Find him first, I thought.

The morning seemed disjointed. The police wrote a statement which put what they’d found and what I’d told them into police-force language, and I signed it in the kitchen. Sandy made tea. The other policemen, sipping, said ‘Ta.’

‘Ta,’ I said too. Lightheaded, I thought.

One of the policemen said he believed the damage to my property to be a personal vendetta. He suggested I should think about it. He thought I might know who had attacked me. He cautioned me against taking a personal revenge.

‘I don’t know who did it,’ I said truthfully. ‘I would tell you if I did.’

He looked as if he didn’t believe me. ‘Think it over, sir,’ he said.

I stifled a spurt of irritation and thanked him for coming. Lizzie walked into the kitchen saying ‘Bastards’ quite loudly. I wanted to laugh. She took a mug of tea and walked out.

When his colleagues had gone, Sandy said awkwardly, ‘They’re good lads, you know.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘They’ve seen too much,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen too much myself. It’s hard to feel sympathy over and over. We end up not feeling it. See what I mean?’

‘You’re a good lad yourself, Sandy,’ I said.

He looked gratified and gave me his own commendation in return.

‘You’re well-liked in Pixhill,’ he said. ‘I never heard anyone bad-mouth you. I reckon if you’d had enemies this bad, I’d have heard of it.’

‘I’d have thought I’d have heard of it, too.’

‘I reckon this was destruction for its own sake. They enjoyed it.’

I sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘Three times this last week,’ he said, ‘someone’s run a supermarket trolley straight into the side of a car in the car park in Newbury. Smashed the sides of the cars right in, all crumpled and scratched. Not for any reason except just to do damage. People come back to find it and it’s their frustration that’s the worst. The supermarket employs a guard, but no one’s caught the vandal yet. You can’t deal with that sort of vandalism. And if he’s caught red-handed one day, all he’ll get is probation.’

‘He’s probably a teenager.’

Sandy nodded. ‘They’re the worst. But arsonists, remember, are usually a bit older. And it wasn’t no teenager, I’d reckon, that got into this house.’

‘What age, then?’

Sandy pursed his lips. ‘Twenties. Thirties, perhaps. Not much older than forty. After that the driving force weakens. You don’t get sixty-year-olds doing this sort of thing. It’s fraud that sees them in court.’

I pondered a few things and said, ‘You know Jogger’s tools were stolen from his van?’

‘Aye. I heard.’

‘He had an axe in the van.’

Sandy stared. ‘I thought it was mechanic’s tools.’

‘There was a slider, and in a big open red plastic crate he had a hydraulic jack, spanners, tyre levers, jump leads, pliers, wiring, a grease gun, cleaning rags, all sorts of oddments... and an axe, like firemen use, that he’d carried ever since a tree fell across one of the boxes. Before I owned the business, that was.’

Sandy nodded. ‘I remember. In one of those hurricane-like winds.’

‘You might keep an eye out for Jogger’s stuff, in the village.’

‘I’ll put the word around,’ he said earnestly.

‘Say there would be a reward. Nothing fancy, but worthwhile for good information.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘It’ll be Jogger’s inquest at any minute,’ I said.

Sandy looked at his watch in alarm. ‘I’ll have to be going. I’ve not shaved yet, or dressed.’

‘I expect you’ll phone later.’

He promised he would, and drove away. Lizzie yawned into the kitchen and announced that if I needed her she would be upstairs asleep. I would wake her, please, at eleven, and drive her to Heathrow to catch the shuttle. She had just on my bedroom phone told one of her partners of the demise of the Robinson 22. He was speechless, she said. He would inform the insurers when he got his voice back and probably I would be hearing from them, as they were bound to send an inspector. Did I mind leaving my car where it was until after that? No, I supposed I didn’t.

She gave me an absent-minded kiss on the cheek and advised me to go back to bed.

‘I’m going to the farmyard,’ I said. ‘Too much to do.’

‘Then lock the door behind you, there’s a dear.’

I locked the back door and drove to the farmyard, finding Nina there drinking coffee in the canteen with Nigel. They were discussing the journey to fetch Jericho Rich’s daughter’s showjumper from France, Nina seeming oblivious of Nigel’s dark-lashed eyes and sultry mouth. They had heard from Harve all about the night’s alarms and were glad, they said, to find me functioning.

Nina brought her coffee and followed me into the office.

‘Are you really all right?’ she enquired.

‘More or less.’

‘I’ve some news for you,’ she said, and paused, ‘but...’

‘Fire away. Is it the little glass tubes?’

‘What? No, not those, there hasn’t been a report on those yet. No, this is that advertisement in Horse and Hound.’

I thought back. So much seemed to have crowded in since Sunday. ‘Oh yes... the transport ad. “Anything considered.” ’

‘Yes, that’s right. Patrick got the magazine to tell him who had inserted it. And it’s rather extraordinary...’

‘Do go on.’

‘It was a Mr K. Ogden of Nottingham.’

‘No!’ My eyebrows shot up. ‘Well, well, that really is extraordinary.’

‘I thought you’d think so. The magazine said they checked him out the first time he ran the ad. They wanted to make sure there was nothing criminal in it. Seems they were satisfied Mr Ogden was harmlessly offering his services as an adviser or personal courier, rather on the lines of a universal aunt. The phone number in the advertisement is that of his own house. The magazine checked it. They supposed he must be getting work from the ad, as he’s kept on paying for the insertions.’

‘Wow,’ I said blankly. ‘He can’t have been doing too well, though. He was wanted for bouncing cheques and other pathetic bits of fraud. He might have seemed bona-fide to Horse and Hound — and maybe he was once — but I’d guess he’d stopped worrying about the legality of every transaction, as long as he was being paid.’

‘You can’t assume that,’ she protested primly.

‘Stands to reason.’ I shrugged. ‘But I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he didn’t know there were six tubes in the thermos. Just maybe. I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Cynic.’

‘I’d be cynical about anything after last night.’

‘What do the police think about last night?’

‘They didn’t say much. They said it was a wise man who knew his own enemies, or words to that effect.’

‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘And do you?’

‘I think Sandy Smith’s right. Smashing up my things was out-of-control vandalism, done on the pleasure principle. I think I walked into the farmyard when I wasn’t expected, and the rest was embroidery. Infantile glee. Sly childish impulse to hurt.’

‘Some child, by the sound of things.’

‘An immature adult, then.’

‘Or a psychotic.’

‘A better word for it.’

She finished her coffee. ‘I suppose we’d better get on if we’re to catch that ferry. Realistically, is anything odd likely to happen on this trip?’

‘I don’t know. Did I tell you exactly where the container is, under your lorry?’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘It’s a metal tube fixed fore and aft in a space that runs beneath the floorboards and above the fuel tanks. That space is outside the main longitudinal struts of the chassis, but hidden by the coachwork sides. You can’t see the space from the outside or from underneath, but if you know the tube’s there, it’s easily accessible. You can screw the end of it on and off without trouble, Jogger said.’

‘I might go under and take a look.’

Rather her than me. ‘Nigel was going to make a new slider for rolling underneath,’ I said.

‘Yes, he made it. He was showing it to Harve.’

‘If you want to look, use the slider. Tell Harve and Nigel I told you there’s a diesel inspection sort of glass bowl screwed on underneath, on the fuel line between the tanks and engine. You can check by that that the diesel’s clean. If it is, the bowl will look clear. Any dirt in the diesel drops into the bowl and one can unscrew it and clean it out. We had a filthy lot of fuel delivered once. The inspection globe was black with muck. Anyway, tell Harve you want to see it.’

‘I had an inspection arrangement in my own box.’

‘Sorry, I forgot.’

She smiled. ‘I’ll take a look.’

She went out and did so. Harve and Nigel thought her fussy, she said, coming back and brushing off dust. ‘And you could smuggle anything in that tube,’ she added. ‘I’ll keep an eye on it.’ She looked at the telephone. ‘A quick word with Patrick, do you mind?’

‘Go ahead.’

She phoned him at home because of the early hour and told him Harve’s version of the night’s events, checking each statement with me with her eyebrows. I nodded a few times. The gist was right; the omissions had been my own.

‘Patrick,’ she said to me, ‘wants to know what it was you walked in on.’

‘When I find out, I’ll tell him.’

‘He says to be careful.’

‘Mm.’

Harve rapped on the window, pointing at his watch.

‘Got to go,’ Nina said. ‘Bye Patrick. Bye Freddie. I’m on my way.’

I was sorry to see her depart. Except for Sandy and Lizzie, she was the only person around that I found I trusted. Suspicion was a nasty, unaccustomed companion.

Nigel drove out of the farmyard. From the cab Nina waved back to me as I watched from the window.

Reckoning that all good horse people by that time would be up and about I phoned Jericho Rich’s daughter and told her that her transport was rolling and she should have her new horse with her by the next evening, soon after eight o’clock, if that would suit her.

‘So soon? What service!’ she exclaimed. ‘Did you send that groom — Dave, is it? — that my father suggested?’

‘Not Dave, but someone as good.’

‘Oh, well, great. Thank you.’

‘A pleasure,’ I said, meaning it. And that’s what it was: a pleasure to get a neat job done and more than satisfy customers.

Another more-than-satisfied customer at that moment drove into the farmyard in a jeep from which every comfort had been stripped by time and hard usage. Marigold English, again in basic clothes and woolly hat, jumped out of her vehicle almost before it had stopped rolling and looked about her for signs of life.

I went out to meet her.

‘Morning Marigold. How are you settling in?’

‘Hello Freddie. Feel as if I’ve lived here for centuries.’ Her smile came and went. Her voice, as always, was geared to the deaf. ‘I’m on my way up to the Downs but I thought I’d just call in for a brief word. I phoned your house but some female said you were here.’

‘My sister,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes? Well, look, what do you know about this John Tigwood and some sort of ancient horse retirement scheme? The fellow wants to rope me in. What do I do? Tell me frankly. No one can overhear you. Give!’

I gave it to her as frankly as seemed prudent. ‘He’s a dedicated sort of man who persuades a lot of people round here to give old horses good homes. Michael Watermead’s taking two of the new batch we brought to Pixhill yesterday. So is Benjy Usher, unless Dot puts her considerable foot down. There’s no harm in it, if you’ve got room and grass.’

‘Would you say yes to him, then?’

‘It’s a regular charity in Pixhill.’ I thought for a moment and said, ‘Actually, one of this new lot is a horse I used to ride long ago. A great performer. A great buddy. Could you ask John Tigwood to let you have that particular horse? His name’s Peterman. If you’d feed him oats regularly to keep him healthy and warm, I’ll pay for them.’

‘So there’s a soft heart inside there!’ she teased me.

‘Well... he won races for me.’

‘OK, I’ll phone this Tigwood and offer the deal. Peterman, did you say?’

I nodded. ‘Don’t mention the oats.’

She gave me a slanted glance of friendly amusement. ‘One of these days your good deeds will find you out.’

She sped back to the jeep, revved up the engine and tore another millimetre off the tyre treads. Out of where there might once have been a window she yelled as she rolled forward, ‘My secretary will contact yours about Doncaster.’

I shouted thanks which she probably didn’t hear above the whine of ancient gears. I thought she would be good for Pixhill and hoped she would prosper.

Various drivers came to work and went into the canteen. Harve’s account of my nocturnal experiences had them all coming outdoors again, gaping, carrying coffee mugs and inspecting me as if I were somehow unreal.

One of the drivers was the Watermead family’s favourite, Lewis, the whizz with the rabbits, supposedly nursing his woes in bed.

‘What happened to the flu?’ I asked him.

He sniffed and with a hoarse throat said, ‘Reckon it’s just a cold after all. No temperature, see?’ He coughed and sneezed, spraying infections regardless.

‘It’s better you don’t scatter your germs anyway,’ I said. ‘We’ve too many sick drivers as it is. Take another day off.’

‘Straight up?’

‘Come back on Friday, work Saturday too.’

‘OK,’ he wheezed nonchalantly. ‘I’ll sit and watch Cheltenham. Thanks.’

Phil, obliging, phlegmatic, unobservant, incurious and unimaginatively reliable, said to me, ‘Is it true your house got trashed?’

‘ ’Fraid so.’

‘And that Jag?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’d kill the bugger,’ he said.

‘Just give me the chance.’

The others nodded, understanding the feeling. No one, in their collective ethos, no one messed with their belongings without reprisals.

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that none of you came past the farmyard after eleven last night?’

No one had, it seemed.

Lewis said, ‘Didn’t you see who had a go at you?’

‘Didn’t even hear anyone. Ask around, will you?’

They said they would, dubious and willing.

Many of the drivers looked superficially alike, I thought, surveying the group. All under forty, none of them fat. Mostly dark haired, all with good eyesight, none very short or over six feet: the physique that went best with the job. In character... different matter.

Lewis had joined the force two years ago with ringlets. When the other drivers called him ‘girlie,’ he’d grown a slab of moustache and thrown his fists about to silence sarcastic tongues. He’d then produced a blonde bimbo in scarlet stilettos and again thrown his fists about to silence wolf whistles. During the last past summer he’d cut the hair and shaved off the moustache and the bimbo had brought forth a son over which both parents drooled. Lewis couldn’t wait, he often said, to play football with his infant. The complete instant father, transformed.

‘Don’t sneeze on the baby,’ I told him, and, alarmed, he said ‘No way.’

Dave creaked in through the gates on his rusty bicycle, cheeky and cheery and as irresponsible as ever. His grin and his freckles gave an impression of eternal youth, the Peter Pan syndrome. Dave’s wife mothered him along with their two daughters, putting up large-heartedly with his pub-haunting habits and his betting on greyhounds.

Aziz arrived also, dark eyes and white teeth a-flashing. Harve detailed the day’s jobs, checking with a list, making sure each driver knew exactly where to go, which horses to collect and when they had to arrive.

I left them all telling Dave and Aziz of my night’s adventures, hearing mistakes creeping into the retelling but not bothering to interrupt and put them right.

‘Portsmouth Docks,’ Phil was erroneously saying, with Dave understandingly nodding. Although we never used Southampton for horses we did occasionally ship them by ferry from Portsmouth to Le Havre. The drivers all knew Portsmouth Docks, even though I preferred to send horses by the Dover-Calais route, because the sea-crossing was shorter. Many horses suffered from sea-sickness on long crossings, made all the worse through being unable to vomit. A horse had died once of sea-sickness in one of my boxes, which made me especially aware of the danger.

‘Portsmouth Docks.’ The drivers were all nodding. Portsmouth, just along the coast from Southampton, sounded more familiar. ‘Bull-dozed his Jaguar...’ ‘Broke all the glass in the house...’

Down the boozer, as Jogger would have said, they’d have me dropped over the side of the Portsmouth-Le Havre ferry by nightfall, with my car through the window in the sitting-room.

Isobel and Rose arrived and complained again about the defunct state of the computer. I thought of the even more defunct state of the terminal in my sitting-room and with an effort remembered that this was the day appointed for the man to fix it. Isobel and Rose took the shrouds off the superseded mechanical typewriters and looked pathetically martyred.

I phoned the central agency that kept my credit card numbers and asked them to get busy putting a stop on my accounts, and I got through to the insurance company who said they would send a form. Would they be sending a man, I asked, or of course a woman, who would verify the write-off of the Jaguar and so much else of my property? They said a copy of a police report would probably be enough.

After that I sat and listened to my head aching while Harve finished getting the day’s work organised. Aziz came into the office with his double ration of vitality and asked if there were any personal errands he could run for me. I considered it thoughtful of him, particularly as his manner was casual and, as far as I could see, not self-serving.

‘Harve says there isn’t a driving job for me today,’ he said. ‘He said to ask if you wanted me to do maintenance, as you’ve lost your mechanic. He said two of the boxes need oil changes.’

‘It would be helpful.’ I picked the tool store keys out of the desk and handed them to him. ‘You’ll find all you need in there. Get a check list from Isobel and return it to her when you’ve filled it in and signed it.’

‘Right.’

‘And Aziz...’ My aching head came up with a therapeutic idea. ‘Would you mind driving my Fourtrak to Heathrow, to take my sister to catch the shuttle to Edinburgh?’

‘Be glad to,’ he said willingly.

‘Eleven o’clock at my house.’

‘On the dot,’ he agreed.

With Aziz driving Lewis’s box along to the barn for its oil change and with the others thinning out as they left on the day’s missions, I drove home to say goodbye to Lizzie and beg her forgiveness for sending her with Aziz.

‘You’re more concussed than you want to say,’ she accused me. ‘You should be in bed, resting.’

‘Oh, sure.’

She shook her head in older-sisterly disapproval and rubbed her hand down my back in the gesture she’d always used to show affection for two little brothers who’d thought kissing was sissy.

‘Look after yourself,’ she said.

‘Mm. You too.’

The phone rang: Isobel’s agitated voice. ‘The computer man’s here,’ she said. ‘He says someone’s killed off our machine with a virus.’