by Dick Francis
Brett’s cab was consistent with how little of himself he’d committed to the job; devoid of anything personal. I would be glad to see the back of him even though it compounded the driver shortage.
Saying he’d fetch something for the magnet and that he’d better get on with things if he was going to Surrey with the broodmares, Jogger joggled his way back to his truck, loaded the slider and drove off. Dave hosed down the outside of the horse van and cleaned the windows with a squeegee. Brett swept internal debris carelessly out through the grooms’ doors onto the tarmac.
The inside plan of the thirty-five-foot-long horse van made provision for three sets of three stalls, with spaces between the sets. The horses’ heads protruded forward into these spaces, where often sat an attendant traveling near them.
The width of the van allowed for three stalls only if the horses traveling were of average build. Heavily muscled horses, like older steeplechasers, needed more room and could travel only two side by side. The same for broodmares. When we took mares with foals, the three stalls across converted to one single large one. So nine two-year-olds or three mares with foals could be accommodated.
These versatile arrangements are easily achieved by many cleverly designed swinging partitions, all of them of wood, covered with soft padding, to avoid injuries and bruising. We loaded the horses and bolted the stalls as needed around them.
The floors of the stalls were of thick black rubber to stop the horses sliding about, and sometimes we sprinkled the surface with shavings to catch the droppings, especially on long journeys. At each destination, the attendants or the driver would sweep the stalls clean of the muck: the nine-horse van had therefore arrived home reasonably clean already, having come back empty from Newmarket.
A narrow cupboard at the rear of each van contained brooms, a shovel, hose, squeegees and mop. We also took a bucket or two, feed sometimes for the horses, and several plastic jerrycans of drinking water. The locker under the attendants’ bench seat—where Ogden had died—housed spare tack in the form of head-collars, ropes, straps, a horse blanket or two and a first-aid kit. Behind the driver’s seat lay an efficient fire extinguisher; and that was about all we carried except for the attendants’ own belongings up on the shelf with the mattress. The grooms mostly took with them clean tidy clothes to change into for leading their charges round the parade ring, changing back into working things for the return home.
Day after day, all over the country, fleets of horse vans like mine ferried all the runners to the races, most days about a hundred runners to each meeting, on bad days, down to, perhaps, thirty. Most of the runners that were trained in Pixhill traveled, luckily, in my vans, and as at least twenty-five trainers were in business in the district, I was making money, if not a fortune.
For all steeplechase jockeys in their early thirties the urgent question arose, what next?” One life lay behind, unfilled time lay ahead. I’d been driving horse vans by the age of eighteen for my father, who had owned his own transport; driving some of his horses to the races, looking after them, riding them in amateur races, driving home. By twenty, turning professional, I’d been retained by a top stable, and for twelve years after that I’d finished each season around second to sixth in the jockeys’ list, riding upwards of 400 jump races a year. Few jump jockeys lasted longer than that near the top owing to the physical battering of falls, and at thirty-two time and injuries had caught up with me, as they’d been bound to do in the end.
From jockey to full-time horse transporter had been a jolting change of outlook in some ways, but familiar territory in others. Three years into the new life, it seemed as if it had been inevitable all along.
I made up Brett’s pay packet with cash from my safe as promised and typed the information into the computer, so that along in the office Rose could incorporate it into the P45, the leaving-employment form that showed pay earned and taxes deducted for the fiscal year. One way and another she hadn’t had much practice at P45s, as the turnover in drivers had proved small.
Brett’s envelope in hand, I went out to the horse van where he and Dave were now standing on the tarmac glaring at each other. Having removed the hose from the outside faucet beyond the woodpile, Dave stood with its green flabby plastic loops over his arm, apparently childishly arguing that it was Brett’s job to put it away in its cupboard.
Give me strength, I thought, and asked Dave nicely to put it away himself. With bad grace he climbed with it into the van and Brett watched him spitefully.
“That’s not the only time Dave’s picked up a hitchhiker,” he said.
I listened but didn’t reply.
Brett said, “It’s him you ought to sack, not me.”
“I didn’t sack you.”
“As good as.”
His sharp young face lacked any sort of humor and I felt sorry for him that he should go through life making himself disliked. There seemed to be no way of changing him; he would go whining to the grave.
“You’ll have to leave a forwarding address with Isobel,” I said conversationally. “You might be called on for the inquest on yesterday’s passenger.”
“It’s Dave they’ll want.”
“All the same, leave an address.”
He grunted, accepted his pay packet without thanks and drove off, Dave coming to earth again by my side and looking after him balefully.
“What did he say?” he asked.
“That you’d picked up other hitchhikers.”
Dave looked furious. “He would.”
“Don’t do it, Dave.”
He listened to the weight I put into the words and, unsuccessfully trying to joke, said, “Is that some sort of threat?”
“A warning.”
“It don’t seem fair to leave people standing by the roadside.”
“It may not seem fair to you,” I said, “but just grit your teeth and do it.”
“Well . . . OK.” He gave me a halfhearted grin and promised not to give any lifts on his way back from leaving the broodmares in Gloucestershire that afternoon.
“I’m serious, Dave.”
He sighed. “Yeah. I know it.”
He retrieved his rusty bike from the woodpile and squeaked away down the drive, wobbling aside for Jogger, who was returning in his truck.
Jogger had brought with him a book-sized piece of wood with a cluster of nails driven into it. The nailheads would stick to the magnet, he said, but not so firmly that he wouldn’t be able to get the whole thing off at the next overhaul. The wood would prevent the magnet from picking up anything else.
I took his word for it, and watched him roll expertly under the chassis without using the slider, taking only seconds to put the insulating wood in place. He was up on his feet giving me a sideways yellow smile in an instant.
“That didn’t take long,” I said thoughtfully.
“If you know where to look, it’s a piece of cake.” Harve arrived at that moment, crossing with Jogger’s departure. We walked together to the house and I showed him the grime-laden cash box, explaining where Jogger had found it. He looked as puzzled as I felt.
“But what’s it for?” he said.
“Jogger thinks we’ve been entertaining drugs unawares.”
“What?”
“Smuggling cocaine, perhaps?”
“No.” Harve was adamant. “No one could do that without us knowing.”
Ruefully I said, “Maybe one of us does know.”
Harve didn’t agree. Our drivers were saints, he implied.
I told him about the night visitor, who’d come in black disguise and entered the horse van.
“He had a key to the grooms’ door,” I said. “He must have done. There’s no damage to the locks.”
“Yes,” Harve said, thinking, “but you know those groom’s-door keys don’t open just one van. I mean, I know for a certainty that my own van has the same key as Brett’s, here. Quite a lot of them are duplicated.”
I nodded. The ignition keys were individually
special and couldn’t be copied, but the grooms’s-door locks came from a different, smaller range, and several of the vans had keys that fitted others.
“What was he doing inside the cab?” Harve asked, “if this thing . . . this hiding place . . . was underneath?”
“I don’t know. He had dirt on his clothes. Maybe he’d already looked underneath and found the hiding place empty.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Harve said. “Tell Sandy Smith?”
“Maybe. Sometime. I don’t want to run us into trouble if I don’t have to.”
Harve was happy with that. “We don’t want the Customs to hear of it,” he said, nodding. “They’d hold us up for hours, every crossing. They’d treat it as specific information received, I wouldn’t wonder.”
His pleasant face was only lightly anxious, and the unwelcome discovery, I supposed, didn’t merit the instant pushing of panic buttons.
“OK,” I said, “let’s get on. I’ll come along to the farm for fuel and start the shuttle.”
I locked the house while Harvey left, then followed along to the farmyard, less than a mile away, nearer to the heart of Pixhill.
Harve, his wife and four towheaded children lived next door to the farmyard in what had been the old farmhouse. The old farm barn was now Jogger’s domain, a workshop with inspection pit and every aid to mechanical perfection that he could cajole me into buying.
What had once been a cowshed was now a small canteen and a suite of three offices with windows looking into the farmyard, from where one could watch the horse vans come and go, each to and from its own allocated parking space. A small stable block with room for three horses was sited in the space between the end of the stretch of offices and the high wall of the barn. We sometimes housed our passengers there temporarily if they were due to leave or arrive in the middle of the night.
Several of the day’s sorties had already begun. The other nine-van had already left to collect the broodmares bound for Ireland. The two Southwell vans’ spaces were empty also. Jogger was driving Phil’s van over to the barn for its overhaul.
I drew to a halt by the diesel pump and topped up the tanks.
Normally we refueled on return in the evenings to avoid water problems from air condensing overnight in quarter-full tanks, a tip I’d learned from a pilot friend. We also hosed down the vans at that point and cleaned the insides with disinfectant so they were fresh and ready to go in the mornings.
Brett, I noticed, had removed the remains of his picnic, but his solution to the stain on the bench seat had been not to clean it off but to fold the horse rug and lay it along the seat to cover it. Typical, I thought.
In the offices Isobel and Rose were consulting their machines, turning up the heaters and drinking coffee from the canteen next door. Rose said she had already given Brett his P45 and taken his mother’s address and was glad to be rid of him.
Rose, plumply middle-aged, kept the financial records, seeing to the pay packets, sending out bills, preparing checks for my signature, keeping track of the pennies. Isobel, gentle, young, clearheaded, answered the telephone, took the bookings and chatted usefully with many trainers’ secretaries, harvesting advance notice of their stables’ requirements.
Rose and Isobel had an office each, in which they worked from eight-thirty to four. The third office, less busy-looking, less personal, was technically my own but was used just as much by Harve. The documentation of the vans was kept in there, and also duplicates of the ignition keys, in a locked drawer.
In spite of the flu, in spite of Brett, in spite of Kevin Keith Ogden, that Friday’s work seemed to be going smoothly.
The driver due to transfer Jericho Rich’s six fillies to Newmarket had already arrived in the farmyard, as for some unspecified reason Michael Watermead had wanted them to leave his stable earlier in the morning than the load of two-year-olds the day before.
I explained to Nigel, the driver, that Michael wouldn’t be sending any of his own grooms to care for the fillies (“Jericho can whistle for favors, bloody man”) but that a car with a couple of grooms would be coming over from the destination trainer in Newmarket.
“They did the same yesterday with Brett and the day before with Harve, so you shouldn’t have any trouble,” I said.
Nigel nodded.
“And don’t pick up any corpses on the way home.”
He laughed. He was twenty-four, insatiably heterosexual, found life a joke and could call on inexhaustible stamina, his chief virtue in my eyes. Any time we needed long night-driving I sent him, if I could.
Trainers often had a favorite among the drivers, a particular man they knew and trusted. In Michael Watermead’s case there was a driver called Lewis, at that moment warming his hands round a mug of tea and listening to Dave’s self-justifying account of the last ride of K. K. Ogden.
“Didn’t he say anything?” Lewis asked interestedly. “Just snuffed it?”
“Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Lewis agreed about that, nodding his close-cropped head. In his twenties, like the majority of the drivers, he was willing, resourceful and strong, with a tattoo of a dragon on one forearm and a reputed past as a biker. The rave-up history had raised my doubts to begin with, but he’d proved thoroughly reliable at the wheel of his glossy super-six van, and Michael, who had exacting standards, had taken to him firmly.
In consequence, Lewis drove prestigious horses to big meetings. The Watermead stable at that moment housed “Classic” contenders, with representative runners in both the Guineas and Oaks; and all of the drivers had already put their money on the Watermead star three-year-old colt, Irkab Alhawa, which, if all went well, Lewis would be driving to Epsom, in June, for the Derby.
He was, that morning, setting off to France to collect two two-year-olds that an owner had bought to be trained in Michael’s yard. As he was going alone, without a relief driver—agreed with Michael—he would have to take rest stops on the way and wouldn’t be back until Monday evening. He would sleep as usual in his cab, which he preferred.
I checked with him that he had the right documents and food and water for the two-year-olds, and watched him set off cheerfully on the errand.
Harve having gone through the rest of the day’s program again with me, I set off myself towards chilly gale-swept Salisbury Plain to get to grips with the yo-yo shuttle which could take until evening and give me a headache. The headache would result from the voice and personality of the trainer on the move, a forceful lady in her fifties with the intonation and occasionally the vocabulary of a barrack room parrot. I wanted nevertheless to please her, aiming for all her future business.
She strode across to the van when I pulled up in her yard and produced the first squawk of the day.
“The boss himself!” she proclaimed ironically, seeing my face. “Why the honor?”
“Flu,” I said succinctly. “Morning, Marigold.”
She peered beyond me to the empty passenger seats. “Didn’t you bring a handler? Your secretary said there would be two of you.”
“He’s had to drive today. Sorry.”
She clicked her tongue in irritation. “Half my grooms have got the bug. It’s a pest.”
I jumped down from the cab and lowered the two ramps while she watched and grumbled, a wiry figure in a padded jacket and woolly hat, her nose blue with cold. She was moving to Pixhill, she’d told the racing press, because it was warmer for the horses.
She’d made lists laying out the order in which her string was to travel. Her depleted force of grooms led the horses up the ramps into the van and I bolted the partitions round them until the first nine were installed.
Marigold—Mrs. English, as the grooms called her—encouraged the loading with various raucous epithets and an overall air of impatience. I certainly could have done with Dave’s knack of imparting confidence to horses while leading them up ramps: Marigold’s method tended to frighten them upwards so that I bolted several of them quivering and wild-ey
ed into their stalls.
She had decided to drive herself in her car to Pixhill to be ready in the new yard when I and the horses arrived. Four of her grooms traveled with me in the cab, all of them apparently enthusiastic over the move, the nightlife of Pixhill being seen as hotly wicked when compared with the winds of Stonehenge.
Her new yard was an old yard in Pixhill, now modernized and enlarged. Its first nine inhabitants clattered down the ramps and were directed loudly to their new homes by Marigold with a list. I shoveled the droppings onto muck sacks supplied by her grooms and put the van shipshape for the second foray.
Pleased, Marigold told me that as I was doing the work myself she wouldn’t need to travel backwards and forwards all day to supervise and would entrust the next loading to me entirely. She gave me the list. I thanked her. She looked on me kindly. I thought with satisfaction that I would glue her to me as a permanent customer by nightfall.
With such profitable thoughts I set off back to Salisbury Plain and had my complacence shattered by Jogger on the phone.
“Hi ho Silver,” he said cheerfully, “we’ve got another couple of lone rangers.”
“Jogger . . . you’ve lost me.”
“Limpets,” he said helpfully. “Barnacles. Stuck to the ships’ bottoms.”
“Where are you, exactly?” I asked.
“In your office.”
“Is there someone else with you?”
“Nothing wrong with your uptake, is there? Do you want to talk to Constable Smith? He’s here now.”
“Wait,” I said, “do you mean what I think you mean? For lone rangers, do I understand . . . strangers?”
“You got it.”
“Like the cash box?”
“Like, but not twins.” Jogger paused, letting me hear a rumble from Sandy Smith’s familiar voice. “Constable Smith,” Jogger said, “wants to know when you’ll be back. He says there was a warrant out for that stiff.”
3
I spoke to Sandy.
“What warrant? What for?”
“Fraud. Dud checks. Skipping hotels without paying. Petty stuff, mostly, it seems. The Nottingham police wanted him.”