by Dick Francis
“The only thing you could do.”
“We didn’t know where you were. In the end we tried Isobel and she said she thought you’d be at the Watermeads’, as Nigel had told her you were going to lunch there when he phoned to say the daughter had mixed up the departure time. It seems Tessa told Nigel. So Sandy said he’d go round and fetch you.”
“Mm.” News traveled in Pixhill in dizzying spirals.
Harve began showing troubled signs of indecision, which from our long proximity I identified immediately as doubt over whether or not he should tell me something I might not want to hear.
“Spit it out,” I said resignedly.
“Oh! Well . . . Nigel said Tessa wanted to go to Newmarket with him, with the fillies. She climbed into the van and sat ready in the passenger seat.”
“I hope he didn’t take her.”
“No, but he was flummoxed. I mean, he had you on one side threatening the sack to anyone giving lifts, and her on the other side, the trainer’s daughter, wanting a ride.” He paused. “She’s a proper little madam, that girl, and Nigel’s a sexy hunk, so my wife says, and . . . don’t take me wrong . . . I thought you’d better know.”
“I’m grateful,” I said with truth. “That’s a mess we can do without. I don’t want to lose Michael Watermead’s work just because his daughter fancies one of our drivers. We’d better not send Nigel there again, though it’s damned annoying, to say the least.”
Lewis, of course, was Michael’s driver of choice, but very often Watermead horses needed more than one van. Not being able to send Nigel cut down my options.
Harve said with humor, “We could put Pat on the extra Watermead runs, when she’s better, and your temporary replacement could do any before that.”
“Good thinking!” I stifled too broad a smile and made a note for Isobel to allocate Nigel chiefly to Marigold English, whose pulses he might race to good effect.
In time a police car crept carefully through the gates, bringing CID investigators, an official doctor and a photographer. Harve and I went out to the barn, where Sandy was showing Jogger to his plainclothes colleagues and Bruce Farway was talking importantly to his police counterpart. The official photographer took bright flash official photographs from the same angles as my own.
A statement from Harve about finding the body was taken down and read out to him in the curiously stilted English such proceedings seemed to incur. Harve signed the result even though the words weren’t his own, and Farway, Sandy and I confirmed that the body was as we’d found it, and that nothing had been added or subtracted from the scene.
Sandy’s colleagues were impersonal, without humor. All fatal accidents had to be thoroughly investigated, they said, and there would be further questions, no doubt, on the morrow.
The same black hearse that had collected Kevin Keith Ogden, or one very like it, arrived in the farmyard, and presently another finished life left my land under canvas and straps in a metal coffin.
The police, unsmiling, followed. Farway, Sandy and I watched them go, I, at least, with relief.
“All very sad,” Farway said with a certain briskness, not caring one way or the other.
“A local character,” Sandy said, nodding.
Not much of an epitaph, I thought. I said, “Sandy, when you drove Jogger home last night, was it in your car or his?”
“Last night? My car. That old wreck of a runabout will still be at the pub.”
“That old wreck is actually mine,” I told him. “I’ll collect it later. Do you still have the keys?”
They were in his house, it seemed, for safekeeping. I said I would pick them up shortly and with a sigh of relief he left to salvage the remains of his Sunday off.
Bruce Farway followed, not wasting on me any of the slightly fawning regard he’d lavished on Michael or the police doctor, merely nodding a cool farewell. Harve walked back to his own house for his long-postponed lunch and I wandered round in the barn, staring into the now empty pit and checking that nothing in the tool storeroom was out of place.
The tool storeroom was a spacious twenty feet by ten, windowless. I unlocked the wide door, switched on the light and stood looking at Jogger’s domain; at the pair of heavy-duty hydraulic jacks, the vast array of spanners and wrenches, the labeled boxes of spare parts, the rolls of cable, the chains, cans of oil, drums of grease, a set of six new Michelin tires waiting for installation.
The floor was filthy but the tools were clean, often the way with Jogger. As far as I could see, nothing had disturbed the general tidiness he miraculously maintained in the storeroom. The truck in contrast would contain a hopeless-looking jumble from which he would nevertheless pluck just the pliers he needed.
I switched off the light, locked the storeroom, and walked out beside the long workbench in the barn, a sturdy shelf which bore nothing at that moment but a small and a large vise, both bolted on. There were no tools anywhere lying about. Nothing a man could trip over, however drunk.
Morosely I left the barn, turning off the lights but as usual not locking the door to the yard. Enough was enough, I’d always thought. We kept the tools locked away and there was the padlock on the outer gate. Security could become an obsession, and anyway I’d been guarding against thieves, not against smugglers.
Not against murder.
I shied painfully away from that word. I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.
Murder couldn’t happen. Not to Jogger. Not because of an empty cash box and two empty tubes. Not because he’d shot his mouth off down at the boozer.
I had a sense of jumping to overdramatic conclusions. It would be best to wait for the postmortem findings.
I sat in the office thinking of Jogger: not of the manner of his death, but of the man he had been.
A loner, an old soldier, a driver of army trucks whose only active service war zone had been the Northern Irish border. He almost never spoke of it, though his mates in a truck ahead of him had been blown apart by a bomb.
I’d acquired his services as a fixture or fitting along with the farmyard and the horse vans, the transaction apparently to his liking: and I’d counted myself lucky to have him and didn’t now know where I would find anyone else as expert, undemanding and committed.
I mourned him also simply, without self-interest. Grieved for him as a man. In his own way he’d been a whole person, not needing what others might think he lacked. No one should impose their own perception of fulfillment on anyone else.
A LITTLE LATER, when the afternoon faded to dark, I walked down to Sandy’s house and collected the keys to Jogger’s truck. Sandy gave them to me without question: I signed for them merely, as Sandy knew the truck belonged to me. It didn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps a couple of keys on the ring were Jogger’s own. Continuing on, I walked to the pub that Jogger favored and duly found the truck in the car park there. At first sight there was nothing wrong with it. On second sight, I found that the two rear doors were slightly ajar, and inside, where there should have been the slider and a jumble of tools in a big red crate, there was nothing but rusty dust on the bare metal floor.
I sighed. A whole pubful of people had seen Sandy take Jogger home, leaving a truckful of easy pickings behind him. I supposed I should be pleased that the truck itself hadn’t gone too, and that it still had wheels, tires, gas and an engine.
I drove it the short distance to Jogger’s quarters, which I so far knew only externally as a rickety-looking garage with an upper story.
In some distant past, the place had been a chauffeur’s lodging, though the house it had served had long gone. Keeping me up to date on developments, for months and months Jogger had conducted a running battle with good souls on the local council who wanted to declare the building unfit for habitation, Jogger maintaining that his home was as it always had been and that it was the council whose ideas had changed. I thought that one could probably defend even a cave on those terms, but Jogger’s strong and quasi-logical indignation h
ad to date won him the day.
I laboriously opened one of the old creaking wooden front garage doors, leaving the truck outside and letting enough streetlamp in to show me the empty space inside. The way to Jogger’s room, he’d said, lay across the garage and up some narrow stairs by the back wall, and up there I came to a flimsy door that opened easily when I tried the handle. No need for keys. I found a light switch and stepped for the first time into Jogger’s private world, feeling both that it was a terrible intrusion and also that he would have wanted someone to care enough to go there, to see it for him one last time and make sure there was no desecration.
Jogger’s home was as he’d left it, a mess untouched by whoever had stolen the tools. He’d earned good money for years yet had evidently chosen to live as if poverty breathed down his neck, his sagging armchair covered with a grubby old tablecloth, the table covered with newspaper, the floor with linoleum. The army might once have coerced him into spit-and-polish in general, but only in his work had that training prevailed over what I guessed might have been the familiar manner of his childhood. This was the way he felt comfortable, this his old shoes.
There was no kitchen, merely a few mugs and plates on top of a chest of drawers with tea, sugar, dried milk and biscuits in packets alongside. The one drawer I opened revealed a tangle of old clothes. The suit and shirt he wore for driving were draped on a hanger on a hook on the back of the door.
His bed, a matter of jumbled khaki-colored blankets on a divan, was by conventional standards unmade. Impossible to tell whether or not he’d slept there during the past night.
I realized that the place wasn’t as cold as the day outside and came across the first sign of luxury, a small convection heater taking the edge off nature. There was also a color television, three crates of beer, a shining electric kettle and a telephone. Against one wall leaned a stack of mildly pornographic magazines, representing one copy a week for a couple of years, and in a shoe box on a shelf I came across his birth certificate, his army discharge papers and the passbook of a building society, the total of his savings raising my eyebrows and showing exactly what he’d done with his pay packets.
I left his papers where I’d found them and looked into a sketchy bathroom which was what I by then expected, hardly spotless but not disgusting, basic with throwaway razors and a gap-toothed comb.
Walking back through his room I left everything as it was, including the heater. The whole place still smelled of him, of oil, earth and dust. While this smell remained, so would he. The worthy council would sweep it all away soon enough.
I locked his door, closed the outer garage door and drove the truck to the farmyard wondering why Jogger had gone to the barn without his keys or his wheels . . . and when . . . and how . . . and who with?
In the offices, Jogger’s logbook lay on Isobel’s desk, ready for her to type the details into the computer. I took the book with me into my own office and sat reading what Jogger had written.
The bare bones of the trip only. No comments. No frills. He’d collected four named steeplechasers from a Pixhill stable and driven them down the M4 to Chepstow races. Time of leaving base, time of pickup, time of arrival, time of departure from racecourse, time of delivery back at stable, time of return to base. Diesel intake recorded in liters. Odometer readings entered. Cleaning completed. Total number of hours worked. Number of those hours spent behind the wheel.
Nothing about aliens or lone rangers.
Depressed, I replaced the logbook on Isobel’s desk and thought I couldn’t do any more there that was useful. Four of the fleet were still out, not counting the one in France and the one in Ireland, but Harve would see them return. I would hear soon enough if anything went wrong. I yawned, locked up and went home.
Revived by the product of Scotland, I sat in my swiveling armchair and rewound the tape of the answering machine on my private line. I’d transferred the business line to Isobel for receiving and making bookings for the fleet, but personal calls came on a different number. On that Sunday, I’d switched the private answering machine on when I went upstairs to shower, left it on while I picked flowers and took them to the cemetery, left it on, of course, for the Watermeads’ lunch, and it had been on ever since. The tape wound busily back.
I pressed the play button and nearly fell out of the chair.
The first voice was Jogger’s, hoarse, cockney, unhurried, unafraid.
“I hate this bloody machine,” he said. “Where have you gone, Freddie? Someone’s half-inched the truck. It’s not in the garage here, some tea-leaf’s bloody nicked it while I was zizzing. You’d better tell Sandy . . . No . . . wait . . . hang about . . .” His voice stopped for a while and then in some embarrassment went on, “Er, um, cancel that, Freddie. I know where it is. It’s down the boozer. Forget I said it, OK?”
The line clicked off, but the second call was also from Jogger. “I remembered, like, about the truck. Sandy’s got the keys. I’ll walk along to the farmyard first for a decko and then I’ll get the keys. Anyway, I want to tell you, take a butcher’s at them nuns. I found a dead one in the pit last August, and it was crawling and Poland had the same five on a horse last summer and it died. What do you think?”
His voice stopped, leaving me with the problem that I didn’t know what he’d been talking about.
Nuns in the pit! Dead, moreover, like himself. Poor old Jogger, poor old exasperating man.
Why couldn’t he ever say things straight out? His rhyming slang hadn’t seriously mattered before this, but now it was infuriating. Half-inched meant pinched, a tea-leaf was a thief, a butcher’s came from butcher’s hook, look. All those were common parlance, part of the general language. But what were nuns and crawling and Poland?
What I needed, I decided, was a rhyming dictionary, and in the morning I would buy one.
I’d switched my private-line answering machine on at about eleven o’clock that morning. Jogger had been alive then. To be “pretty cold” in the pit by three in the afternoon, he must have died not long after his phone calls. I sat for a while simply looking at the machine as if in some stupid way it could bring my mechanic back to life. If I’d been able to speak to him myself, maybe he would have been still alive. I couldn’t hear the phone’s chirrup when I was in the shower or through the buzz of my electric razor. Perhaps he’d phoned then, but I hadn’t noticed the “message received” light shining. More likely he’d tried when I’d left to pick and take the flowers. I must have missed him by seconds.
With unassuageable regret I ran through a couple of other messages on the tape and I told one or two people about Jogger. The whole village, one way or another, would know of it by bedtime.
BY SEVEN-THIRTY THE next morning, after a troubled night’s sleep, I was along at the farmyard talking to the two drivers who were taking runners to Southwell. There was an all-weather track up there, just northeast of Nottingham, giving an underfoot surface which had proved popular because it didn’t crack, freeze or flood like turf. Its only drawback as far as Pixhill trainers were concerned was its distance of a hundred and fifty miles from home: as far as Croft Raceways was concerned, the distance filled the coffers. It was about the farthest the vans went out and back in one day, entailing early starts and late returns. Anything much farther meant overnight stops or two drivers to work in spells.
On that Monday we had six vans going to racecourses, two taking broodmares, two abroad and four standing idle, which in view of the persistent flu situation was just as well.
I was out in the farmyard when a woman drove through the gates in a small Ford runabout that had been a long time out of the showroom. She stopped outside the offices and emerged from behind the wheel stretching to a tall thin height in jeans, padded jacket and dark hair scrapped back into an untidy ponytail. No makeup, no nail polish, no pretense of youth.
She was, as she’d said she’d be, almost unrecognizable.
I went across. “Nina?” I said.
She smiled briskly. “I’
m early, I’m afraid.”
“All the better. I’ll introduce you to the other drivers . . . but I’d better tell you what’s filling their minds.”
She listened to the finding of Jogger with a frown and immediately asked, “Have you told Patrick Venables about this?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll do it. I’ll reach him at home.”
I took her into my office and listened to her make the call. “It could well be an accident,” she told her boss. “Freddie hopes so. The local police have it in hand. What do you want me to do?”
She listened for a while and said “Yes” a few times, and then handed the receiver to me. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Freddie Croft,” I said.
“Let me get this right. This dead man is the one who found the empty containers stuck to your horse vans?”
“Yes. My mechanic.”
“And besides you and me, who knew he’d found them?”
“Everyone who heard him saying so in a pub in Pixhill on Saturday night and understands rhyming slang.” He cursed with feeling and I explained about Jogger’s linguistic habits. “The local policeman heard him but it didn’t make total sense to him. It would have made total sense, though, to anyone who knew the containers were there. Lone rangers and aliens under the vans, Jogger said. By lone rangers he meant strangers. Clear as daylight.”
“I agree.” Patrick Venables paused. “Who was in the pub?”
“It’s a popular place. I’ll ask the landlord. I’ll go in at lunchtime and tell him I’ll stand a pint to everyone who was there on Saturday night, on Jogger’s last visit. In memory, sort of.”
With humor in his voice he said, “It can’t do any harm. Apart from that, I’ll put out feelers towards your local police to see what they’re thinking. This Jogger’s death may be just an unfortunate coincidence.”
“I hope so, indeed,” I said fervently.
He wanted to speak to Nina again and she said “Yes” a few more times, and “Goodbye, Patrick” at the end.