Driving Force

by Dick Francis

  “There must be a simpler way,” I said. “No one would risk their life like that.”

  “You’re not dealing with common sense,” Aziz said. “Your sister showed me the havoc in your sitting room. You’ve got a gold-plated wrecker on the loose. Can’t you hear him? He’s shouting at you. ‘Look at me, look at what I can do, see how clever I am.’ That sort of character likes taking risks. It’s life’s blood. It gives him his buzz.”

  I said flatly, “How do you know?”

  The shining eyes flickered. “Observation,” he said. “Observation of who?”

  “Oh, this person and that.” He flapped a hand vaguely. “No one particular.”

  I didn’t pursue it. He wasn’t going to tell me. I was interested all the same in his assessment. It matched pretty faithfully what the expert had said about the pattern of computer-virus writers, the look-at-clever-me syndrome. The overpowering self-regard that could express itself only in destruction.

  “Does one wrecker,” I asked slowly, “egg on another?”

  His expression was street-smart beyond any other I’d met. “Ever heard of football yobbos?”

  Murderous, I thought.

  I thanked Aziz for driving Lizzie.

  “Nice lady,” he said. “Any old time.”

  I rubbed a hand over my face, asked Aziz to check with Harve about jobs for the next day and told Isobel and Rose I’d be back in the morning.

  On the short way home I noticed that my neighbor had a small pile of bricks beside his gate. The bricks had been there for weeks, I realized. I’d never paid them any attention.

  I stopped the jalopy by the wreck of the Jaguar and looked through the space that had once been the driver’s-side window. There was indeed a brick—or the remains of one—jumbled in the squeezed space. The brick had broken into three pieces. Bricks were brittle. Brick dust was reddish, like rust.

  I’m delirious, I thought.

  I let myself into the house with the keys Aziz had brought from Lizzie and switched on the television in my bedroom to watch the racing at Cheltenham.

  I sat in an armchair and then lay on the bed and then fell inexorably asleep as if brain dead and stayed that way until long after the last horse had passed the winning post.

  THURSDAY MORNING, CHELTENHAM Gold Cup day, once greeted with raised pulse and thudding hope, found me that particular week with a creaking stiffness in my limbs and a craving to curl up and let the world pass by.

  Instead, driven by curiosity more than a sense of duty, I put on shirt and tie and drove to Winchester, pausing for five minutes on the way with Isobel and Rose. They could fill in the time before the arrival of the computer-reviver, I suggested, by making a list of everyone they could think of who’d set foot in their offices the previous week.

  They looked at me blankly. Dozens of people had crossed their doorstep, it seemed, starting with all the drivers. I would take the drivers for granted, I said. Just list everyone else, and put a star against those that had been in on Friday. They were doubtful if they could remember. Try, I said.

  I collected Dave from the canteen and took him with me to Winchester, though he was reluctant to go and spent the whole twenty-minute journey in unaccustomed silence.

  The inquest on Kevin Keith Ogden proved, as Sandy had promised, to be a comparatively simple affair. The coroner, quiet and businesslike, had read the paperwork before coming to the proceedings and, though thorough, saw no benefit in wasting time.

  He spoke with kindness to a thin, miserable woman in black, who agreed that yes, she was Lynn Melissa Ogden, and yes, she had identified the dead man as her husband, Kevin Keith.

  Bruce Farway, consulted, reported that he’d been called to the house of Frederick Croft on the previous Thursday evening and had determined Kevin Keith to be deceased. The coroner, reading aloud from a paper, accepted the postmortem report that death had resulted from heart failure caused by a string of abstruse medical conditions that probably no one in the room understood except Farway, who was nodding.

  The coroner had received a letter from Kevin Keith’s own doctor detailing the patient’s history and the pills he had been advised to keep taking. He asked the widow if the pills had been faithfully swallowed. Not always, she said.

  “Mr. . . . er . . . Yates?” asked the coroner, looking around for a response.

  “Here, sir,” Dave answered hoarsely.

  “You gave a lift to Mr. Ogden in one of Mr. Croft’s horse vans, is that right? Tell us about it.”

  Dave made it as short as he could, sweating and uncomfortable.

  “We couldn’t wake him, like, at Chieveley . . .”

  The coroner asked if Kevin Keith had shown any physical distress before that.

  “No, sir. He never said a word. We thought he was asleep, like.”

  “Mr. Croft?” the coroner said, identifying me easily. “You called Police Constable Smith when you’d seen Mr. Ogden?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Constable Smith, you called Dr. Farway?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The coroner shuffled the papers together and looked neutrally at those present. “The finding of this court is that Mr. Kevin Ogden died of natural causes.” After a pause, when no one moved, he said, “That’s all, everyone. Thank you for your attendance. You have each behaved with commendable promptness and common sense in this sad occurrence.”

  He gave Mrs. Ogden one last sympathetic smile, and that was that. We trooped out onto the sidewalk and I heard Mrs. Ogden inquiring forlornly about cabs.

  “Mrs. Ogden,” I said, “can I give you a lift?”

  She focused weak-looking gray eyes on my face and indecisively fluttered her hands. “It’s only to the railway . . .”

  “I’ll take you . . . if you don’t mind a Fourtrak?”

  She looked as if she’d never heard of a Fourtrak but would have settled for an elephant if all else failed.

  I persuaded Sandy to take Dave back to Pixhill and set off with Mrs. Ogden, who was not exactly crying but in a definite state of shock.

  “It didn’t take long, did it?” she said defeatedly. “It didn’t seem much of a thing, did it? I mean, not at the end of someone’s life.”

  “Not a great thing,” I agreed. “But you’ll have a service of thanksgiving, perhaps.”

  She didn’t look cheered. She said, “Are you Freddie Croft?”

  “That’s right.” I glanced at her, thinking. “When does your train leave?” I asked.

  “Not for ages.”

  “How about some coffee, then?”

  She said wanly that it would be nice and settled apathetically into an armchair in the empty front lounge of a mock-Tudor hotel. Coffee took its time coming but was fresh in a Cafetiere pot, with cream and rosebudded china on a silvery tray.

  Mrs. Ogden, until then huddled palely into her black shapeless overcoat, began to loosen a little by undoing the buttons. Under the coat, more black. Black shoes, black handbag, black gloves, black scarf. An overstatement.

  “A terrible shock for you,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Your daughter must be a comfort.”

  “We never had a daughter. He made that up, to get lifts.”

  “Did he?”

  “He had to make things up.” She gave me a sudden look of panic, the first crack in the ice. “He lost his job, you see.”

  “He was . . . a salesman?” I guessed.

  “No. He was in sales. Under-manager. The firm got taken over. Most of the management were made redundant.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “He couldn’t get another job, you see. Not at fifty-four, with a bad heart.”

  “Life’s unfair.”

  “He’s been unemployed for four years. We’ve spent the redundancy money and our savings . . . the building society’s repossessing the house . . . and . . . and . . . it’s all too much.”

  And he’d bounced checks, I thought, and failed to pay hotel bills, and tried to live
on scraps gleaned from a feeble transport scheme, traveling around free by lifts cadged on the basis of a sob story about a nonexistent daughter’s wedding.

  Lynn Melissa Ogden looked as hammered into the ground as a tent peg. She had graying straight brown hair tied back in the nape of her neck with a narrow black ribbon. No cosmetics. Pinched lines round her mouth. The cords of age in her neck.

  I asked sympathetically, “Do you yourself have a job?”

  “I used to.” The grayness in her skin looked like despair.

  “I worked in a greengrocer’s but Kev . . . well, he’s gone now, it can’t hurt to say it . . . Kev took some money out of their till, and they were pretty good about it, they didn’t get the police but they said I’d have to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “We were eating on that money.” She trembled with futile anger. “Feeding ourselves on my wages and the things like rotting fruit and veggies that the shop couldn’t sell. How could he?”

  “He could have sold that ring, perhaps,” I suggested. “I saw it on his finger . . . gold and onyx.”

  “That was a fake,” she said dully. “He sold the real one months ago. He missed it so much . . . He cried, you know. So I bought him that one . . . it was rubbish, but he wore it.”

  I refilled her coffee cup. She drank absently, the cup clattering on the saucer when she put it down.

  “Why did your husband want to go to the Chieveley service station?” I asked.

  “He had to . . .” She stopped and considered, then said, “I don’t suppose it matters anymore. He can’t get into any more trouble . . . I told him I couldn’t bear any more of it, but I did, of course. We’d been married thirty-three years . . . I loved him once but then . . . for a long time . . . I’ve been sorry for him, you see, and I couldn’t kick him out, could I? Because where would he go? And he hadn’t been home for weeks because the police had been round . . . I don’t know why I’m telling you . . .”

  “Because you need to tell someone.”

  “Oh, yes. And appearances, you see? I can’t tell our neighbors and we hardly have any friends left because Kev borrowed money from them . . .”

  And never repaid. The words were as stark as if she’d actually said them.

  “So why was he going to Chieveley?” I asked again.

  “People used to phone the house and ask him to take things for them from one place to another. I said he’d get into trouble doing that. I mean, he could have been carrying bits to make bombs, or drugs, or anything. Quite often he took dogs or cats . . . he quite liked that. He put an ad in Horse and Hound sometimes. People would pay his train fare to take their animals but he’d cash in the tickets and go thumbing. I mean, he hadn’t any pride left, you see. Everything had come apart.”

  “Wretched,” I said.

  “We paid the phone bill,” she said. “We always paid the phone bill. And I’d take the messages for him and he would phone me whenever he could use someone’s phone for nothing. But we couldn’t have gone on much longer . . .”

  “No.”

  “It’s a blessing for him, really, that he died.”

  “Mrs. Ogden . . .”

  “Well, it is. He was ashamed, you see, my poor old boy.”

  I thought of all their awful shared misery and judged that Kevin Keith had been undeservedly lucky to have had Lynn Melissa.

  “He wasn’t carrying an animal in my horse van, though,” I said.

  “No.” She looked doubtful. “It was something to do with animals, though. It was an answer to the Horse and Hound ad. A woman phoned. She wanted Kev to meet someone at Pontefract service station and go to South Mimms service station and then go in your horse van to Chieveley.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  She didn’t understand the depth of comprehension in my voice, but looked simply surprised by it.

  “Who was he going to meet at Chieveley?” I asked.

  “She didn’t say. She just said someone would meet him when he got out of the horse van. Someone would meet him and pay him and take what he was carrying, and that would be the end of it.”

  “And you agreed to that?”

  “Well, yes, of course I did. We lived on it, you see.”

  “Who was he meeting at Pontefract?”

  “She just said ‘someone’ would meet him and give him a small carrier bag.”

  “Did she say what would be in it?”

  “Yes, she said a thermos flask but he wasn’t to open it.”

  “Mm. Would he have opened it?”

  “Oh, no.” She was definite. “He’d be afraid of not being paid. And he always said what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.”

  A recipe for disaster if ever I heard one.

  She looked at her watch, thanked me for the coffee and said she’d better get along to the station, if I didn’t mind.

  “How about the train fare?” I asked.

  “Oh . . . they gave me a voucher. The police or the court or someone. They gave me one to come down last Saturday, too, to identify him.” She sighed heavily. “Everyone’s been kind.”

  Poor Mrs. Ogden. I drove her to the station and waited with her until her train came, though she said I needn’t. I would have liked to give her money to see her through some of her present troubles, but I didn’t think she would take it. I would get her address from Sandy, I thought, and send her something in remembrance of Kevin Keith, her poor old boy who seemed to have precipitated me into a maelstrom.

  9

  As I was leaving Winchester the car phone rang. Isobel’s voice said, “Oh, good, I’ve been trying to reach you. The police are here about Jogger.”

  “Which police?”

  “Not Sandy Smith. Two others. They want to know when you’ll be back.”

  “Tell them twenty minutes. Did the computer man come?”

  “He’s here now. Another half hour, he says.”

  “Fine.”

  “Nina Young phoned. She and Nigel have picked up the Jericho Rich show jumper and they’re on their way back. No incidents, she said to tell you.”

  “OK.”

  I completed the journey and kept the police waiting while I checked with the young computer expert in Isobel’s office. Yes, he confirmed, he had brought with him a replacement computer for my house, as requested, and he would come straightaway to fix it up.

  After I’d talked to the police, I said.

  He looked at his watch and ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m due at Michael Watermead’s stables. Same job as this. I’ll do him first, then come to you.”

  “Michael?” I asked, surprised.

  He smiled. “Rather apt, I thought, being Michelangelo, but he didn’t think it funny.”

  “No, he wouldn’t.”

  Barely digesting the news, let alone the significance, of the failure of the Watermead hard disk, I went along to where the policemen waited in my own office.

  They proved to be the two whose manner had so easily raised my antagonism on their Monday visit. I resolved for Sandy’s sake to be cooperative and answered their questions truthfully, politely and briefly. They exuded suspicion and hostility, for which I could see no reason, and they asked most of Monday’s questions over again.

  They needed, they announced, to take scrapings of the dirt surrounding and inside the inspection pit. Go right ahead, I said. They told me they were in the process of asking my staff what had brought Jogger to the farmyard on the Sunday morning.

  Fine.

  Had I instructed him to go to the farmyard on that morning?

  No, I hadn’t.

  Did I object to his going there on a Sunday morning?

  “No. As I mentioned before, all the staff could go in and out of the farmyard whenever they liked.”

  Why was that?

  “Company policy,” I said, and didn’t feel like explaining that the drivers’ pride in their vehicles led them to make them more personal, which they did chiefly on Sundays. Curtains were hung on Sundays. Seat and matt
ress covers were fitted. Bits of carpet appeared underfoot. Wives helped with the home-away-from-homes. Metal and furniture polish accompanied pride. Loyalty and contentment were the products of Sundays.

  Did Jogger normally go to the farmyard on Sundays?

  I said that the horse transport business was always working on Sundays, though usually not as busily as on all other days. Jogger would certainly consider it normal to go to the farmyard on a Sunday.

  They asked, as Sandy had predicted, what I had been doing on that Sunday morning. I told them. They wrote it down dubiously. You say you picked daffodils from your garden and put them on your parents’ grave? Yes, I did. Was I in the habit of doing that? I took flowers there from time to time, I said. How often? Five or six times a year.

  I gathered, both from their general attitude and the limitations of their questions, that there was still in the collective police mind a basic indecision as to how to view Jogger’s death; accident or worse.

  Rust, I thought, would decide for them.

  I went with them and watched them take scrapings from all round the pit. They fed the patches of dirt into small plastic bags, closing and labeling each with its area of provenance. North end of pit floor . . . east, west, south. North interior wall of pit. East, west, south. North rim of pit . . . east, west, south.

  They were thorough and fair. One way or another, rust would tell.

  They drove away finally, leaving me to my ambivalent feelings and two alarmed secretaries.

  Isobel said, scandalized, “They asked us how you and Jogger got along! Why did they ask that? Jogger fell into the pit, didn’t he?”

  “They have to find out.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “Mm,” I said, “let’s hope he fell.”

  “All the drivers say he must have. They’ve been saying so all week.”

  Trying to convince themselves, I thought.