by Dick Francis
“Will do.”
End of conversation.
I phoned Isobel at her home. Nothing unusual had happened during the day’s work, she assured me. She’d told Lewis that Nina was following him, and all the Usher horses had run in the right races at Lingfield. Aziz and Dave had arrived in Ireland with their mares. Harve and Phil had each taken a winner to Wolverhampton, great rejoicing. None of the other drivers had hit snags.
“Great,” I said. “Um . . . your brother Paul . . .”
“I’ve told him not to bother me at work.” She sounded guiltily apologetic.
“Yes, but, um, how is he with computers?”
“Computers?”
I explained the wizard’s game-virus theory.
“Oh, no,” she said positively. “I’d never let him near your computer and to be honest he wouldn’t know how to load data in our machine.”
“You’re sure?”
“A hundred percent.”
Another good theory down the drain.
“Did anyone else,” I asked, “know enough to get near enough to the computer last Friday to feed any disk into it?”
“I’ve thought and thought . . .” She stopped. “Why last Friday?”
“Or Saturday,” I said. “Our computer wizard thinks we picked up the infection as late as that.”
“Oh golly.”
“Nothing comes to your mind?”
“No.” It was a wail of regret and worry. “I wish I knew.”
“Did you leave any of those people on your list of visitors alone in your office?”
“But . . . but . . . oh dear. I can’t remember. I might have done. I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong in it. I mean, there weren’t any strangers there, not right in my office, and I can’t believe . . .”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t help it.”
I put the phone down just as Sandy Smith rolled onto my tarmac. He came towards the back door, taking off his peaked cap and combing his flattened hair with his fingers.
“Come in,” I said, meeting him. “Whisky?”
“I’m on duty,” he said doubtfully.
“Who’s to know?”
He squared it with his conscience and took the scotch with water. We sat in the kitchen, one on each side of the table, and he relaxed as far as unbuttoning his tunic.
“It’s about Jogger,” he said. He frowned at his glass, his round face troubled. “About rust.”
His gloom spread to me fast. “What did they find?” I asked.
“I’ve heard,” he began, and I reflected that this was Sandy’s semaphore at its best. “I’ve . . . er . . . unofficially heard that they did find rust all round the pit and on the edges. But the rust was everywhere mixed with oil and grease. And there wasn’t any oil or grease in the wound on Jogger’s head.”
“Damn,” I said.
“They’re going to treat it as murder. Don’t say I told you.”
“No. Thanks, Sandy.”
“They’ll be asking you questions.”
“They’ve asked questions already,” I said.
“They’ll want to know who had it in for Jogger.”
“I want to know that too.”
“I knew old Jog for years,” Sandy said. “He wasn’t one to have enemies.”
“I would think,” I said neutrally, “that he may have done what I did on Tuesday night, which was to walk into the farmyard unexpectedly. Maybe both of us were hit on the head to prevent us seeing . . . whatever . . . but Jogger died, and was put into the pit to make it look like an accident.”
Sandy gazed at me thoughtfully.
“What’s going on there, in the farmyard?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I bloody don’t know, and it’s driving me crazy.”
“Did Jogger know?”
“It’s possible he found out. That’s perhaps why he died, and I didn’t want it to be that. I’ve been sort of praying for it to be proved an accident.”
“You’ve thought all along, though, that it was murder.” He scratched his neck absentmindedly. “What did Jogger mean about lone rangers under your lorries? My colleagues will want to know.”
“I’ll show you,” I said. “Come into the sitting room.”
We went into the jumbled wreckage and I led him across to where I’d left the cash box Jogger had prised from under the nine-van a week ago.
I led Sandy to the place, but the cash box wasn’t there.
“That’s odd,” I said. “It was right here on this spot on the newspaper . . .”
“What was?”
I described the cash box: gray metal, ordinary, fresh-smelling inside, empty, unlocked by Jogger, the round mark of where it had been held onto a magnet the only bright section on its filthy grime-laden exterior.
I looked round the room for it and so did Sandy, poking about in the general mess.
No cash box.
“When did you last see it?” Sandy asked.
“Tuesday, I suppose. I showed it to my sister.” I frowned.
“When this room was done over, I didn’t think to look for the cash box.”
He supposed, he said, that he could understand that, and asked if anything else was missing.
“I don’t think so.”
“Jogger said lone rangers. Plural. There must have been more than one.”
“Two of the other vans have been trundling about with containers fixed to their undersides: but the containers are empty, same as the cash box was.”
Sandy said doubtfully, “Everyone in the pub last Saturday heard him talking about it. I mean, he can’t have been killed to stop him telling anyone about them because he’d already done it.”
“What’s more,” I said, “Dave, Harve and Brett, besides Jogger, saw the cash box here in this room, just after Jogger levered it off the nine-van. It was on my desk at that point, in plain sight. I put it down on the floor sometime later.”
“You must have an idea what it was for,” Sandy said, a policemanlike suspicion creeping into his voice despite the nonadversarial status between us.
“We thought of drugs, if that’s what you mean? Harve, Jogger and I discussed that. But drugs don’t just appear out of thin air. Someone had to supply them. Harve and I don’t believe that any of our drivers deal in drugs. I mean, there would be signs, wouldn’t there? And money going around. We would notice.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this last Tuesday?” Still the suspicious tone. “You should have told me, I reckon.”
“I wanted to find out for myself what’s happening. I still do, but I haven’t much chance if there’s a murder investigation going on. You’ll have to admit that once your colleagues get to looking at the containers under the vans, those containers will never be used again. I wanted to leave them in place, to keep quiet about them and to wait. I implored Jogger not to talk about them in the pub, but the beer got the better of him. I’m afraid that he said too much. I’m afraid he blew the whole operation and frightened the fish away. I’ve been hoping he didn’t. But your colleagues will certainly frighten him away forever and I will never find out . . . and that’s why I didn’t tell you, because you’re a policeman first and a friend second, and your conscience wouldn’t have let you keep silent.”
He said slowly, “You’re right about that.”
“It’s Friday evening,” I said. “How long can you sit on what I’ve told you?”
“Freddie . . .” He was unhappy.
“Till Monday?”
“Oh shit. What do you want to do before then?”
“To get some answers.”
“You have to ask the right questions,” he said.
He didn’t promise even temporary silence and I didn’t try to crowd him with a decision. He would do whatever sat comfortably in his own mind.
He buttoned his tunic round his solid waist. He said he’d better be going. On his way out he picked up his peaked cap and put it on, reaching
his car as a fully uniformed and thorough policeman, looking uncompromising in his vocation.
I poured the remains of his whisky down the kitchen sink and hoped our friendship wasn’t sliding away with it down the drain.
11
I drove along to the farmyard when Nina phoned to say she was back, and found her filling her tanks, yawning as before.
Lewis had finished cleaning his van and was positioning it in its usual place. Harve and Phil weren’t back so far from Wolverhampton but except for Aziz’s nine-van, which had gone to Ireland, the broodmare force had returned.
Lewis slid his completed log through the office letter box, told me briefly that he’d taken his pair safely back to Mr. Usher and that he’d had to help the Usher head traveling lad saddle all the runners as their grooms were useless and Nina had said she wasn’t dressed for it. He thought little of Nina, I gathered, for letting him do so much work. The approval she’d lavished that morning on the photos of his baby had, I thought in amusement, been wasted.
Nina drove along to the cleaning area and set to work with the pressure hose. Looking at her old jeans, the unsmart sweater and the scraped-back hair escaping in wisps, one could see why she’d back away from public gaze, quite apart from the fact that someone in the horse world might have recognized her and asked astonished questions.
Lewis left. I went over to Nina and offered to clean her van for her if she would do a small different job for me. She agreed with relief, saying, “What if Harve comes back?”
“I’ll think of something.”
“OK. What do I do?”
“Fetch the new slider from the barn and look at all the fuel tanks to see if there are any containers stuck on them.”
She was surprised. “I thought Jogger looked and there were only the three.”
“Looking back,” I said, “he told me of three. I don’t know for sure if he’d looked under all the others. I just want to check.”
“All right,” she agreed. “Don’t you want to do it yourself?”
“Not particularly.”
She gave me a curious look but made no comment, just fetched the slider from the barn and started methodically along the row. I finished the cleaning, inside and out, and positioned her van where it belonged, joining her afterwards by the office door.
“Well,” she said, rubbing dirt off her elbows, “there’s one more, and it’s under Lewis’s van, but it’s empty, like the others. Lewis! So we took two hidden containers to Lingfield today, but I stayed with the lorries the whole time, to Lewis’s disgust, but he could perfectly well manage to help the head traveling lad saddle up on his own, he didn’t need me really, but I’m in his bad books.” The thought hardly upset her. “No one came near either van, I’d swear it. No one showed the slightest interest in their undersides.”
I thought back. “Lewis’s van was on its way to France when Jogger found the second and third containers. Lewis went on Friday, and got back at about two on Tuesday morning.”
“There you are, then. Jogger didn’t know about Lewis’s van. He was dead before Lewis got back.”
Harve drove into the farmyard, his lights bright in the gathering dusk.
“Do you want me to check Harve’s?” Nina asked.
“If you have a chance. And any others we’ve missed.”
“OK.” She yawned again. “Am I driving tomorrow?”
“Isobel’s got you down again for Lingfield.”
“Oh, well . . . at least I know the way, now.”
I said penitently, “I don’t even know where you live. Do you have a long drive home?”
“Near Stow-on-the-Wold,” she said. “It takes me an hour.”
“That’s a fair commute. Um . . . How about if I give you dinner somewhere on your way home?”
“I’m hardly dressed for going out to dinner.”
“A pub, then?”
“Yes, all right. Thank you.”
I went over to talk to Harve as he filled his tanks and found him happy to have taken a winner to Wolverhampton, as he’d also backed it. The groom with the horse had told him it was a certainty. “For once, he was right.”
When his tanks were full I asked him to come over to the office to look at the next day’s schedule. He came as a matter of course while, looking back, I saw Nina taking the opportunity to slide underneath his van for an inspection.
We went through the list, which was healthily busy. He himself was down for Chepstow, one of his favorite runs.
“Good,” he said. I told him about Benjy Usher overlooking the hurdlers. “How he ever trains a winner I’ll never know,” he said. “Mind you, he has the luck of the devil. Who else had three walkovers last summer? You remember there was that bug going about in Pixhill? All those Classic Trial weight-for-age races, they always cut up to five or six runners every year anyway, and Mr. Usher’s always keen to win them. He won the Chester Vase last year against only two opponents. I know, because I drove his winner myself, if you remember.”
I nodded. “He’s always tended to enter horses in races that are likely to have very few runners,” I agreed. “I won several two- and three-horse races for him myself, mostly three-mile chases.”
“He runs the poor buggers on rock-hard going too,” Harve went on disapprovingly. “Doesn’t seem to care if they finish lame.”
“They limp all the way to the bank.”
“You can laugh,” Harve objected, “but he’s still a rotten trainer.”
“We have that colt of his to bring back from Italy next week,” I reminded him. “Isobel’s arranged the paperwork and the ferry for Monday.”
“A broken-down colt,” Harve said, sniffing.
“Er . . . yes.”
“Who’s going?”
“Who do you suggest? He asked for Lewis and Dave.”
Harve shrugged. “We may as well please him.”
“I thought so, yes.”
Across the farmyard Nina emerged from her search and shook her head exaggeratedly.
I said to Harve, “You remember that cash box container that Jogger found stuck under the nine-van? Has anything occurred to you about what it could be for?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” he said frankly. “Jogger found two more, didn’t he, and they were all empty? Whatever was in them is history.” He sounded as unconcerned as ever. “Poor old Jogger.”
As Sandy had told me off the record that the Jogger inquiry was veering to murder, I didn’t mention it to Harve. Everyone would find out only too soon. Harve and I went back towards his van and he eyed the backview of Nina, who was disappearing into the barn.
“This job’s too much for her,” he observed, not unkindly. “She’s a good driver by all accounts, but Nigel says she gets tired easily.”
“She’s temporary,” I said. “One more week, if we get no one else down with flu.”
The other Wolverhampton van returned. I left Harve to supervise the end of the day and followed Nina’s car as she waved to Harve and drove through the gates. She stopped after half a mile to walk back and suggest I follow her to a place to eat that she passed every day, and half an hour later we both pulled into the busy car park of a restaurant where good cheap food was important and the bar itself secondary.
She had loosed and combed her hair and applied lipstick, so that the Nina I had dinner with looked younger and halfway back to the original. The place was crowded, the tables small and close together. We ate steak, french fries and fried onions with a carafe of house red wine and a chunk of cheddar cheese. “I get fed up with healthy eating,” Nina said, secure in her slender body. “Did you starve when you were a jockey?”
“Grilled fish and salads,” I said, nodding.
“Have some butter.” With a smile she passed me a small silver-wrapped packet. “I adore junk food. My daughter despises me.”
“Black Forest chocolate cake?” I suggested, handing her the menu.
“I’m not that crazy.”
Companionably we
drank coffee, neither of us in much hurry to be gone.
I told her the police thought Jogger had been murdered and that perhaps I now only had hours to find solutions before we were swamped by heavy boots.
“You’re unfair to the police,” she observed.
“I daresay.”
“The solutions, I do agree, seem as far away as ever.”
“Sandy Smith,” I said, “says it’s a matter of asking the right questions.”
“Which are?”
“Yes, well, there’s the rub.”
“Think of one.” She drank her coffee, smiling.
“All right,” I said. “What do you think of Aziz?”
“What?” She was surprised; almost, I would have said, disconcerted.
“He’s odd,” I remarked. “I don’t know how he could have caused any of my troubles, but he turned up in my farmyard the day after Jogger died and I gave him Brett’s job because he speaks French and Arabic and had worked in a Mercedes garage. But my sister says he’s far too bright for what he’s doing and I respect my sister’s insight. So why is Aziz working for me?”
She asked how my sister knew Aziz and I explained about the day he fetched the old horses, and that he’d driven Lizzie to Heathrow the next morning.
“That Tuesday night, when I ended up in Southampton Docks, I don’t know if Aziz helped to put me there.”
“Oh, no,” she said, shocked. “I’m sure he didn’t.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“It’s just . . . he’s so cheerful.”
“One can smile and smile and be a villain.”
“Not Aziz,” she said.
To be honest, my gut reaction to Aziz was the same as Nina’s: he might be a rogue but not a villain. Yet I did have villains about me, and I badly needed to know them.
“Who killed Jogger?” she asked.
I said, “Who would you put your money on?”
“Dave,” she said, without hesitation. “He’s got a violent streak that he never shows you.”
“I’ve heard about it. But not Dave. No, I’ve known him too long.” I could hear the doubts creeping into my own voice, despite my conviction. “Dave didn’t know about the containers under the floorboards.”
“One can grin a little-boy grin and be a villain.” Against all probability I laughed, my cares unaccountably lifting.