by Dick Francis
Actually, I never minded the errand. The grave was high on the hill but the view was worth the walk up there, and as I had no sense of their being around in any way, I tended to leave the flowers as thanks for my own satisfactory childhood, their gift.
The flowers would die, of course. It was delivering them that mattered.
MAUDIE WATERMEAD’S LUNCH began in spring sunshine in the garden, with her younger children and guests bouncing on a trampoline and their elders playing tennis. Still too chilly for standing around in, the March air drove fainthearts back through the garden door to the sitting room to enjoy the bright log fire and Maudie’s idea of champagne cocktails, which began with angostura bitters on sugar lumps and fizzed to the brim with cold pink bubbles.
Benjy and Dot Usher were playing in long trousers on the hard court, arguing about balls being in or out. We engaged in unathletic mixed doubles, Dot and I being outargued by Benjy and the Watermeads’ daughter, Tessa. Benjy and Tessa were enjoying their partnership in a way that had Dot hissing, to my private amusement and our public defeat.
Benjy and Tessa, as victors, took on the Watermeads’ son, Ed, and Maudie’s sister, Lorna. Dot glowered until I persuaded her into the sitting room, where the numbers had swelled and the chatter level risen to the point where individual voices were lost in conglomerate noise.
Maudie handed me a glass and gave me a smile with the friendly blue eyes that as usual set me thinking powerfully adulterous thoughts. Thoroughly aware of my dilemma, she was forever trying to transfer my feelings to her sister, Lorna, who, while alike in platinum hair, shapely waist and endless legs, simply lacked for me anything but physical attraction. Maudie was fun, Lorna was troubled. Maudie laughed, Lorna earnestly championed praiseworthy causes. Maudie cooked roast potatoes, Lorna worried about her weight. Maudie thought I would be good for Lorna but I had no intention of becoming her therapist: that way threatened boredom and disaster. I thought Lorna would be perfect for Bruce Farway.
The worthy doctor himself was at that moment standing near the fire with Maudie’s husband. The bubbles in the Farway glass were colorless. Mineral water, I surmised.
Maudie followed my gaze and answered my unexpressed surprise.
“Michael thought that as it looks as if he intends to stay in Pixhill, we’d better teach the good doctor that we’re not all rogues and fools.”
I smiled. “He’ll have trouble being supercilious with Michael, that’s for sure.”
“Don’t you believe it.”
My attention moved on towards the woman now talking to Dot, a younger woman, blond like Maudie, blue-eyed like Maudie, lighthearted, left-handed, a pianist and thirty-eight.
“Do you know her?” Maudie asked, again following my gaze. “Susan Palmerstone. Her family are all here somewhere.”
I nodded. “I used to ride her father’s horses.”
“Did you? It’s easy to forget you were a jockey.”
Like many Flat-racing trainers’ wives, Maudie seldom went to jump meetings. I’d come to know her only through the transport.
From across the room Susan Palmerstone looked in my direction and finally walked over.
“Hello,” she said. “Hugo and the children are here.”
“I saw the children on the trampoline.”
“Yes.”
Maudie, making nothing much of the exchange, wandered over to Dot.
Susan said, “I didn’t realize you’d be here. We don’t know the Watermeads very well. I would have said we couldn’t come.”
“Of course not. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, but . . . someone told Hugo he couldn’t have a brown-eyed child and he’s been fussing about it for weeks.”
“Hugo’s a green-eyed redhead. He can have anything as a throwback.”
“I thought I’d better warn you. He’s halfway to obsessed.”
“OK.”
The tennis players came in from the garden and also Hugo Palmerstone, who’d been watching the children. Through the window I could see my daughter standing on the grass, arms akimbo, disparagingly critical of her straight-haired blond brothers’ bouncing. Cinders, my daughter, had brown eyes and dark curly hair like mine and was nine years old.
I would have married Susan. I’d loved her and been devastated when she chose Hugo, but it had been a long time ago. Nothing remained of the emotion. It was difficult, even, to remember how I’d felt. I didn’t want the long-buried past casting a shadow over that child’s life.
Susan moved from my side the moment Hugo entered the room, but not before he realized we’d been together. His expression as he made his way directly to me was not promising.
“Come outside,” he said curtly, stopping a yard away. “Now.”
I could have refused him but I thought, perhaps wrongly, that if I didn’t give him the opportunity to say what he clearly intended to say it could fester in his mind and do harm to his family. Accordingly I quietly parked my glass and followed him out onto the lawn.
“I could kill you,” he said.
It was a remark to which there seemed to be no answer. When I said nothing he added bitterly, “My bloody aunt told me to open my eyes. My father-in-law’s ex-jockey! Take a look at him, she said. Do some sums. Cinders was born seven months after your marriage. Open your eyes.”
“Your aunt has done you no service.”
He could see, of course, that she hadn’t, but his anger was all for me.
“She’s my daughter,” he insisted.
I glanced over towards Cinders, now somersaulting high with exuberance.
“Of course,” I said.
“I saw her born. She’s mine, and I love her.”
I looked regretfully at Hugo’s furious green eyes. He and I were almost totally unalike in nature as in looks. A middle-rank City executive, he had an incandescent temper as fiery as his hair, allied to a strong streak of sentimentality. Our lack of affinity with each other had proved, until now, a natural barrier to my getting too close and too fond of my daughter, and I saw clearly, even if he didn’t, that allowing myself to be drawn into a fight with him would destroy what should never be touched.
He was clenching and unclenching his fists but with still a degree of control.
I said, “You won the girl I wanted. You’ve a daughter and two sons. You’re lucky. You’d be a fool to light a bonfire. What good would it do?”
“But you . . . you.” He spluttered with hurt incoherent rage, wanting me dead.
“Hate me if you like,” I said, “but don’t take it out on your family.”
I turned away from him, more than half expecting him to haul me back and hit me, but to his credit he didn’t. I thought uneasily, all the same, that if he came across a less direct and physical way of doing me harm, he might take it.
I walked back through the garden door and Maudie, by the window, said, “What was that about?”
“Nothing.”
“Susan Palmerstone looks scared.”
“Yes, well, I had a disagreement with Hugo, but forget it. Introduce Lorna to Bruce Farway and don’t put me next to her at lunch.”
“What?” She laughed, then looked thoughtful. “If I do, in return you can detach Tessa from Benjy Usher. I don’t like her flirting with him, and Dot is livid.”
“Why did you ask them?”
“They live practically next door, dammit. We always have Benjy and Dot.”
I did my best for her, but detaching Tessa from Benjy proved impossible. Tessa was a great whisperer and thought nothing of turning her back to prevent people hearing what she was spilling in Benjy’s ear. I got the turned-back treatment a couple of times and left Benjy alone to his foolishness.
Bruce Farway was taking an interest in Lorna, the delectably pretty sister full of good works. Susan stood with her arm through Hugo’s, talking brightly to Michael about horses. Intrigue and woven threads, typical of racing villages. Change partners and dance.
We ate Maudie’s splendid ribs of beef wit
h the crunching roast potatoes and honey-walnut ice cream after. I sat between Maudie and Dot and behaved with propriety.
The younger children chattered about the rabbit run in the garden where the family pets had doubled themselves in number within the past year. “They’ll go to the butcher one of these days,” Maudie muttered to me darkly. “They get out and eat my dahlias.”
“One of the bunnies is missing,” her younger daughter was insisting.
“How can you possibly tell?” Michael asked. “There are so many of them.”
“There were fifteen last week and today there are only fourteen. I counted them.”
“Probably the dogs ate one.”
“Daddy!”
Lorna talked to Bruce Farway about pensioned-off steeplechasers, one of her current charities, and he listened with interest. Unbelievable.
The talk turned to Jericho Rich and his desertion of Michael’s stable.
“Ungrateful beast,” Maudie said vehemently. “After all those winners!”
“I hate him,” Tessa said with enough intensity to earn a sharp glance from her father.
“Why especially?” he asked.
She shrugged, tight mouthed, denying him an answer. Seventeen, full of unspecified resentments, she was one of those children who’d never lacked for anything but couldn’t settle for being one of life’s favored mortals. She was a head-tosser besides a whisperer and she didn’t like me any more than I liked her.
Ed, her brother, sixteen and pretty stupid, said, “Jericho Rich wanted sex with Tessa and she wouldn’t, and that’s why he took his horses away.”
As a conversation stopper it was of Oscar-earning caliber, and in the breath-held aghast silence the front doorbell rang.
Constable Sandy Smith had called. Apologetically he told Michael that he needed Dr. Farway and also Freddie Croft.
“What’s happened?” Michael asked.
Sandy told Michael, Bruce Farway and myself privately out in the front entrance hall.
“That mechanic of yours, Freddie. That Jogger. He’s just been found along at your farmyard. He’s in the inspection pit. And he’s dead.”
4
Jogger’s neck was broken.
We stood looking down at him, the sideways angle of his head to his body impossible in life.
“He must have fallen in,” Farway said as if stating the obvious.
From the other side of the pit Harve met my eyes, clearly thinking, as I was, that for Jogger to have fallen accidentally into an inspection pit he would have to have been reeling drunk, and even then I would have bet on his instincts to save him.
As if catching the thought, or at least the first half of it, Sandy Smith sighed. “He had a right skinful last night in the pub. Raving on about aliens under the trucks. Lone rangers, stuff like that. I took his car keys off him and drove him home in the end. I’d’ve had to arrest him for being drunk in charge, otherwise.”
Bruce Farway asked him officiously, “Have you informed his wife of this?”
“Not married,” Sandy said.
“No next-of-kin at all,” I amplified. “I have next-of-kin listed for all my employees, and Jogger said he hadn’t any.”
Farway shrugged, climbed down the metal ladder bolted to the inspection pit wall and bent clinically over the crooked body, lightly touching the bent neck. Then, standing upright, nodding, he reported to me almost accusingly, “Yes, this one’s dead as well.”
Two corpses found on my property in four days, he seemed to imply, were suspiciously excessive.
Michael Watermead, who had deserted the tail end of his lunch party to follow me along to the disaster in the farmyard, asked curiously, “As well as what?”
“The hitchhiker,” I said. “Thursday.”
“Oh yes. Of course. I was forgetting. On the way back from taking Jericho’s two-year-olds.” The thought of Jericho brought a scowl to the naturally patrician features, his son Ed’s appallingly casual revelation as yet undigested, unprocessed.
Michael, I guessed, had been prompted to be present now in my barn by a mixture of straightforward morbid interest, supportive friendliness and the typical fuzzy overall sense of responsibility in the community which kept much of rural English life within sane parameters. He brought anyway a weight of authority to the proceedings which Harve, Sandy, Farway and myself might have lacked.
“How long has he been dead?” I asked. “I mean . . . hours? Last night?”
Bruce Farway said hesitantly, “He’s pretty cold, but I’d say fairly late this morning.”
We understood, all of us, that a closer guess was impossible at that point. The pit itself and the air temperature were cold also. The doctor climbed up the ladder and suggested that he and Sandy should again call for the ultimate in removers.
“How about photographs?” I said. “I’ve a camera in the office.”
Everyone solemnly agreed on photographs. I walked through the yard, unlocked the offices, collected my Nikon and returned to the barn. The others were still where I’d left them, standing round the pit looking down at Jogger with unreadable thoughts.
Although there was a certain amount of daylight in the barn from a window looking into the farmyard, we always had to top it up with electricity for work. The overhead lights were all on, but even so I used flash for the pictures, taking several shots from round the rim of the pit and several others from its floor, down beside my poor mechanic.
I didn’t touch him, though I bent near to photograph his head. He lay in the angle between wall and floor; rough grease-streaked concrete walls, oil-blackened floor. He seemed to be looking at the wall six inches from his nose; his eyes, like those of so many suddenly dead, still open. The yellow teeth showed in two uneven rows within his mouth. He wore the old army jersey, the dirt-clogged trousers, the old cracked boots. He still smelled, extraordinarily, of oil and dust; of earth, not death.
The pit was five feet deep. Standing upright, my direct line of sight was roughly level with the ankles of Sandy, Harve and Michael. Bruce Farway was behind me. For a petrifying second a primitive instinct warned me against standing up with my neck sticking out of a hole in the ground and I turned quickly but saw Farway harmlessly writing in a small notebook, and felt foolish.
I hauled myself up the ladder out of the pit and asked Harve how he’d happened to find Jogger at that particular time.
Harve shrugged. “I don’t know. I just wandered round the yard, like I often do. The vans working today had all left. I was here earlier checking them out, see, to make sure. Then to waste time, sort of, while I was waiting for lunch to be ready, I walked round again.”
I nodded. Harve liked to be on his feet always, and on the move.
“So then I noticed the lights were on in the barn,” he said, “and I thought I might save us a bit of electricity so I walked over here thinking that I hadn’t seen anyone come over here earlier. No one needed to. I wasn’t worried, see, only I just came over for a look around and, like I said, to switch the lights off.” He paused. “Don’t ask me why I got as far over as the pit. I don’t know why. I just did it.”
The pit in fact was well over to the far side of the barn, expressly to stop people stepping over its edge unawares. A large rollback door at one end of the barn made it possible to drive a horse van straight in over the pit. The small door nearest the farmyard, which people on foot used, opened onto a general workshop area, with tools kept in a large locked storeroom in one corner.
I asked, “Do you think Jogger was lying here all the time while drivers came in to work and took the vans out?”
Harve was troubled. “I don’t know. He could have been. Gives you the shudders, doesn’t it?”
“The postmortem will tell us, eh, Bruce?” Michael said, and Bruce, preening slightly at the intimacy of the use of his first name, agreed that speculation could be safely left for that event.
Michael caught the satirical glance I gave in his direction and came very close to a wink. The win
ning over of the doctor was clearly succeeding.
Farway and Sandy between them produced their mobile phones and summoned the necessary cohorts. Michael asked if he could use the phone in my office. Help yourself, I said, it’s open. He sauntered off on his errand and when Harve and I followed, feeling upset and insecure, Michael was saying, “Damned shame for poor old Freddie,” into Isobel’s phone, the first one he’d come to, and “Oh, accidental, undoubtedly. Must go now. See you.”
He rang off, said thanks and goodbye and left smiling with universal benignity, happy in the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to feel any personal repercussions from Jogger’s death.
“What do you reckon?” Harve asked as we reached our jointly used sanctum and paused for consideration.
“Do you believe he fell in?” I asked.
“Don’t want to think of the alternative.”
“No,” I agreed.
“But if he didn’t fall . . .”
He left the words hanging, and so did I.
I said, “Who was in the pub last night with Jogger?”
Harve began answering automatically, “Sandy, of course. Dave was bound to be . . . I wasn’t . . .” He broke off, aghast.
“Do you mean . . . who was in the pub to hear him talking about aliens under the vans? You can’t mean . . . you can’t . . .”
I shook my head, though how could one help wondering?
“We’ll wait for the cause-of-death report,” I said. “If it’s proved he skidded on a patch of oil and fell and hit his neck on the edge of the pit . . . which is possible . . . we’ll decide then what to do.”
“But the cash-box hiding place was empty,” Harve insisted. “No one would kill Jogger just because he’d found an empty thing like that. They wouldn’t. It can’t be anything like that.”
“No,” I said.
Harve stared worriedly out at the row of vans. “When I found him,” he said, “I went back home and phoned your personal line from there, but I got your answering machine saying you’d phone back soon, like it does when you’re only going to be away an hour or two. But, well, I didn’t think it could wait, so I phoned Sandy. Was that all right?”