by Dick Francis
“Dead, do you mean?” he asked cautiously, after a pause.
“I mean dead. As in not breathing.”
He cleared his throat. “You’re not having me on?”
“Sorry, no.”
“Well, all right. Ten minutes.”
Pixhill’s token police force consisted of Sandy alone, a Wild West outpost on the frontiers of law and order. Pixhill’s police station consisted of an office-room in Sandy’s house, where his chief activity was writing up records of his daily patrols. Out of hours, like now, he would be watching television in scruffy clothes, drinking beer and casually cuddling his children’s mother, a plump lady perennially in bedroom slippers.
In the ten promised minutes before he sped importantly onto my tarmac in his official car with every available light flashing, I learned not much more about our unwelcome deceased guest.
“How was I to know he’d die on us?” Dave said aggrievedly as I put down the receiver. “Do someone a favor . . . Yeah, well, I know you told us not to. But he was going on something chronic about how he had to get to Bristol for his daughter’s wedding or something . . .”
I looked at him in disbelief.
“Yeah, well,” Dave said defensively, “how was I to know?”
“It was all Dave’s idea,” Brett assured me.
“Did you talk to him?” I asked them.
“Not that much,” Dave said. “He chose that seat behind us, anyway. Didn’t seem to want to talk.”
“I told Dave it was all wrong,” Brett complained.
“Shut up,” Dave said angrily. “You could have refused to drive him. I didn’t notice you saying you wouldn’t.”
“And neither of you noticed him dying, either?” I suggested with irony.
The idea discomfited them, but no, it appeared, they hadn’t.
“Thought he was asleep,” Dave said, and Brett nodded. “So then,” Dave went on, “when we couldn’t wake him . . . I mean, you saw how he looks . . . well, we’d just pulled off the motorway at the Newbury junction . . . we were going to drop him at the Chieveley service station there so he could get another lift on to Bristol . . . well . . . there he was, dead, and we couldn’t roll him out onto the ground, could we?”
They couldn’t, I agreed. So they’d brought him to my doorstep, like cats bringing home a dead bird.
“Dave wanted to dump him somewhere,” Brett whined virtuously. “Dave wanted to. It was me said we couldn’t.”
Dave glared at him. “We discussed it,” he said, “that’s all we did.”
“You’d have been in real trouble if you’d dumped him,” I said, “and not just from me.”
Sandy, still buttoning himself hastily into his dark blue uniform, arrived at that moment to take charge in the slightly pompous manner he’d developed over the years. One look at the corpse set him summoning help over his radio, resulting presently in a doctor and a host of unanswerable questions.
The dead man did, it seemed, at least have a name, discovered via a walletful of addresses and credit cards. Sandy brought the wallet down from the cab and showed it to me, where I waited on the ground outside.
“K. K. Ogden. Kevin Keith Ogden,” he said, picking his way through the contents with stubby fingers. “Lives in Nottingham. Mean anything to you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Never heard of him.”
He hadn’t expected anything else.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“A stroke maybe. Doc won’t say before the postmortem. No sign of foul play if that’s what you mean.”
The archaic words “foul play” had always seemed faintly ridiculous to me, but in this case I was grateful to hear them.
“I can use the van tomorrow, then?” I asked.
“Don’t see why not.” He thought it over judiciously. “You might want to clean it, like.”
“Yup,” I said. “Always do.”
He looked at me sideways. “I thought you had a rule never to give lifts.”
“Dave and Brett are in big trouble.”
With a glimmer of sympathy for the two men, he looked across to where they waited by the house door and said, “You didn’t get your iron fist reputation for nothing, Freddie.”
“What about the velvet glove bit?”
“Uh huh. That too.”
Sandy at forty had thickened round the waist and softened to puffiness of cheek and jaw, but the resulting air of rustic unintelligence was misleading. His superiors at one time had posted him away from Pixhill, in accordance with their belief that a policeman became too cozy and forgiving if left too long in one small neighborhood, and had sent cruising cars in from outside to do his rounds. In Sandy’s absence, however, the petty crime rate of Pixhill had soared while the detection rate plummeted, and after a while P.C. Sandy Smith had been quietly reinstated, to the overall dismay of the mildly wicked.
Smart young Dr. Bruce Farway, a recent Pixhill arrival who had already alienated half his patients by patronizing them insufferably, climbed down with agility from the cab and told me brusquely not to disturb the body before he could arrange for its removal.
“I can’t imagine why I should want to,” I said mildly.
He eyed me with disfavor. We’d disliked each other on sight a few months ago and he’d not forgiven me for disagreeing with his diagnosis on one of my drivers and paying for a private second opinion that had proved him wrong. No humility and precious little humanity could be diagnosed in Bruce Farway, though he could be nice to sick children, I’d heard.
Leaving him issuing brisk instructions over his car phone, Sandy and I went across to the house where he took brief statements from Dave and Brett. There was bound to be an inquest, he informed them, but it shouldn’t take up much of their time.
Too much, I thought crossly, and they both unerringly read my expression. I told them I’d see them in the morning. They weren’t comforted, it seemed.
Not much later Sandy freed them to walk away down to the pub where they would spread their news item through the local lightning grapevine. Sandy shut his notebook, gave me an insouciant grin and drove back to his house to phone the hitchhiker’s hometown police force. Only Bruce Farway remained, impatiently waiting out by his car for the arrival of Kevin Keith Ogden’s onward transport. I went out to him, for an update.
“They wanted to leave him here until tomorrow,” he exclaimed, affronted. “I insisted they come tonight.”
Grateful for that, I asked if he’d like to wait in the house and, with a hesitant shrug, he accepted. In the big sitting room, I offered him alcohol, Coke or coffee. Nothing, he said.
He looked with a down-turned mouth at the row of framed racing photographs along one wall, mostly pictures of myself in my jockey days sitting on the backs of high-leaping horses. In a village dedicated to thoroughbred racing, where the four-footed aristocrats brought more jobs and more prosperity to the area than all other industries put together, Bruce Farway had been overheard to say that lives lived in racing were wasted. Only selfless service given to others, as for example by doctors and nurses, was praiseworthy. Jockeys’ injuries, he considered, were self-inflicted. No one understood why such a man had come to Pixhill.
I thought I might as well ask him, so I did. He gave me a surprised glance and went over to the window to cast his gaze briefly at the cooling immobile horse van.
“I believe in general practice,” he said. “I believe in a continuing service to a rural community. I believe in treating the family, not the illness.”
All marvelous, I thought, if he hadn’t looked at me superciliously down his nose in a conscious glow of superiority while he spoke.
“What did our body die of?” I asked.
He compressed his already thin lips. “Obesity and smoking, I daresay.”
In another century, I thought, he would have condemned witches to the stake. For the good of their souls, of course.
Thin, fervent, bigoted, he fidgeted impatiently by the window and final
ly asked a question of his own.
“Why were you a jockey?”
The answer was too complicated. I said merely, “I was born to it. My father trained steeplechasers.”
“Does that make it inevitable?”
“No,” I said. “My brother captains cruise ships and my sister’s a physicist.”
He removed his attention wholly from the horse van with his mouth opening in astonishment. “Are you serious?”
“Certainly. Why not?”
He couldn’t think why not and was saved from fishing for a reply by the telephone’s ringing. I answered and found Sandy on the line, slightly out of breath and fluttering notebook pages.
“The Nottingham police,” he said, “will want to know where South Mimms is, exactly.”
“They’ve surely got a map!”
“Mm. Well, tell me, like, then I can make a better r eport.”
“You’ve surely got a map as well.”
“Oh, come on, Freddie.”
I relented, smiling. “The South Mimms service station is north of London on M25. And I’ll tell you something, Sandy, our friend Kevin Keith was not taking a direct route from Nottingham to Bristol. In fact, from Nottingham to Bristol you’d never go near South Mimms in a million years, so just tell the Nottingham police to go easy on the relatives because whatever our corpse was doing in South Mimms he wasn’t going straight from home to any daughter’s wedding.”
He digested the information. “Ta,” he said, “I’ll tell them.”
I put down the receiver and Bruce Farway asked, “What daughter’s wedding?”
I explained how Dave had been persuaded to give the lift, even against express orders.
Frowning, Farway said, “You don’t believe in the daughter, then?”
“Not all that much.”
“I don’t suppose it matters why he was in . . . where did you say . . . South Mimms?”
“Not to him, anymore,” I agreed, “but it’ll waste my drivers’ time. The inquest, and so on.”
“He couldn’t help dying!” the doctor protested.
“He’s a damn nuisance.”
With plain disapproval Farway went back to watching the horse van. A boringly long time elapsed during which I drank scotch and water (“Not for me,” Farway said), thought hungrily of my recongealing stew and answered two more phone calls.
The news had traveled at warp speed. The first voice demanding facts was that of the owner whose two-year-olds had gone to Newmarket, the second that of the trainer who was having to see them leave his stable.
Jericho Rich, the owner, never wasted time on polite opening chat, saying without ceremony, “What’s this about a dead man in your van?” His voice, like his personality, was loud, aggressive and impatient. His name, on official documents, was Jerry Colin Rich. Jericho suited him better, if only for the noise.
While I told him what had happened, I pictured him as I’d very often seen him in parade rings at the races, a stocky gray-haired bully given to poking holes in the air with a jabbing finger.
“You listen to me, fella,” he said now, shouting down the line. “You pick up no hitchhikers while you work for me, understand? That’s what you’ve always said and that’s how I like it. When you take my horses you don’t take anyone else’s. That’s the way we’ve always done business and I don’t want any changes.”
I reflected that once his whole string had gone to Newmarket I wouldn’t be doing much more business for him anyway, but alienating the cantankerous old beggar would all the same be unwise. Give him a year or two and I might be ferrying him back.
“What’s more,” he was saying, “when you take my fillies across tomorrow, take them in a different van. Horses can smell death, you know, and I don’t want those fillies upset.”
I assured him they would go in a different van, even though, as I didn’t bother to tell him, the cab would be reeking of disinfectant, not death, come pickup time in the morning.
“And don’t send the same driver.”
It wasn’t worth arguing about. “All right,” I said.
He began to run out of steam, which is to say, to repeat himself. I offered him always a soft cushion of agreement as being the fastest way to blunt the sword of his anger, especially when his grievances reached the third or fourth recycle. We went through the same conversation twice more. I promised yet again to send a different van and a different driver and finally, though muttering away and still not satisfied, he clicked himself off.
He’d owned five or six hurdlers in the past, which I’d ridden for him regularly. I’d had a lot of practice in absorbing the Jericho tantrums with my own temper intact.
Thanks to the Rich decibels, Farway appeared to have heard the whole repetitious exchange because he gave me his unexpected opinion.
“It wasn’t your fault your drivers picked the man up.”
“Maybe.” I paused. “The captain goes down with the ship, my brother says.”
He stared. “Do you mean you think it was your fault?”
I thought chiefly that it wasn’t a good time to discuss ultimate responsibility in the abstract. I wished more simply that Kevin Keith had given up the ghost in someone else’s cab. A pity, I thought, that the oil tanker had been going to Southampton.
Michael Watermead, in striking contrast to Jericho Rich, spoke in soft hesitant super-educated tones over the telephone and started by asking if the nine two-year-olds that had left his care that morning had arrived safely in Newmarket.
I was certain he already knew, but I assured him that they had.
Resentment at having had to part with them would have been natural, but Michael seemed to have his feelings well in control. Tall, fair and fiftyish, his habitual air of dither fronted an effective, above middle-rank operation of sixty good stables in three attractive quadrangles, usually healthily full. His horses liked him, always a good character reference. They nuzzled his neck if he were near enough: they came to look out of their stalls at the sound of his step in the yard. I’d never ridden for him, as he trained only Flat horses, but since I’d acquired the transport business and had grown to know him, we’d become, on a business level at least, good friends.
The third son of a baron, he trained for a distantly royal personage thirty-somethingth from the throne, a snob-value combination that had brought him Rich’s custom in the first place. The deterioration in the first flush of gratification on both sides—there were no longer many owner-strings as big as Rich’s nor as talented in depth—had been complete, both men throwing me asides along the way from euphoria to disillusion.
“The man’s impossible!” Michael had exclaimed over some particular transport demand from Jericho. “Totally unreasonable.”
“My horse lost the race on the journey to Scotland,” Rich complained. “Why does he send them so far? It costs too much and they arrive tired.” He overlooked entirely Michael’s successful forays to France with the same animals.
I remained strictly neutral and nonpartisan through all owner-trainer differences out of a strong sense of self-preservation, starting right back in my early racing days over fences when an incautious criticism had got back to its target and very nearly cost me my job. I’d become adept at sympathetic noises with the minimum of actual comment, even to friends.
Getting my own way softly had eased my whole path through life and in business had served me well. I was better at placating than confronting, at persuading than commanding; and I wasn’t defeated much.
Michael said slowly, “Is it true your van brought back . . . a dead man?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“Who?”
I explained yet again about Kevin Keith Ogden, and I told him that Jericho Rich had already demanded a different van and driver for his fillies on the morrow.
“That man,” Michael said bitterly. “Despite the hole it makes in my yard, I’ll be glad to see the last of him. Vile-tempered oaf.”
“Will you fill up the hole?”
>
“Oh sure, in time. I’ve got ten boarded out that I can bring in now, for a start. Losing Jericho’s a blight, but not a disaster.”
“Great.”
“Lunch on Sunday? Maudie will call you.”
“Fine.”
“ ’Bye.”
A man could drown in Maudie Watermead’s blue eyes. Her Sunday lunches were legendary.
Farway, still by the window, was growing impatient, repeatedly consulting his watch as if the constant checking would make time go faster.
“Scotch?” I offered again.
“I don’t drink.”
Dislike or addiction? I wondered. Probably plain disapproval, on the whole.
I looked round my spacious familiar room, wondering how he would see it. Gray carpet with a scattering of rugs. Cream walls, racing photographs, my mother’s china parrot collection in an alcove. Edwardian mahogany desk, green leather swiveling chair. Sofas with ancient fading chintz, tray of drinks on a side table, padded cream curtains, table lamps everywhere, bookshelves and a potted plant, all leaves, no flowers. A lived-in room, not excessively tidy, not a decorator’s triumph.
Home.
An unenthusiastic black van at long last crawled onto the tarmac and parked between the horse van and my door. It had long black windowless sides and black windowless rear doors, and I realized it was, in fact, a hearse. Sandy in his official car returned in its wake.
Farway, exclaiming, hurried out to meet him and the three men who emerged phlegmatically from the hearse to set about their task. I followed in Farway’s wake and watched the unloading of a narrow stretcher which seemed to be covered on the upper surface with a lot of dark canvas and several sinewy straps.
The man who seemed to be in charge of things said he was from the coroner’s office and produced paperwork for Farway to deal with.
The other two climbed with the stretcher up into the cab, followed by Sandy, who soon descended again bringing with him a grip and a briefcase. Both bags were of leather, battered but originally good.
“Belongings of the deceased?” Sandy asked.
Farway thought so.
“They are not my men’s,” I agreed.
Sandy put the bags on the tarmac and then went aloft again to return with a plastic bag containing booty collected from the body—a watch, a cigarette lighter, a packet of cigarettes, a pen, a comb, a nail file, a handkerchief, glasses and the onyx and gold ring. He itemized them aloud to the coroner’s officer who wrote at his dictation, then attached a label saying, “Property of K. K. Ogden,” and stowed them in his car.