Driving Force Page 10

  “He wants me to phone him later,” she said. “And on second thoughts, he advises you to be careful in the pub.”

  I told her about Jogger’s last message on the answering machine.

  “I’ll write it down for you when I go home,” I said, “but it’s pretty incomprehensible. He used to make up his own rhymes and I’ve never heard him use these before.”

  She gazed at me. “You’ve had more practice than most.”

  “Mm. I thought of buying a rhyming dictionary, though it’s more a matter of guessing. I mean, when he said carpets he meant drugs. Carpets and rugs. You don’t have to just find the rhyme, you have to find the word that goes with the rhyme, and the association arose solely in Jogger’s own brain.”

  “And if he hadn’t died,” she said, nodding, “you could simply have asked him what he meant.”

  “Yes. He just liked to play games, to challenge me, I suppose, in a quiet sort of way. But don’t get me wrong, he thought naturally in that rhyming fashion. It was no sort of effort. It would come out spontaneously. The trouble is that I don’t know if what he said yesterday morning was of desperate importance or only a passing comment. I don’t know if desperate importance would come out in a rhyme. Passing comments did often.”

  Harve came into the office at that moment and I introduced Nina as the new temporary driver. Harve tried not to look dubious, knowing I preferred younger drivers because of their relative tirelessness and seeing the present substitute as older even than I.

  “We have to give Pat at least two weeks to recover from this sort of flu,” I pointed out, having discovered from past experience that too early a return to such a physical job caused further days off in the end. “Nina’s very experienced with horses and with driving horse vans and we’ll give her good help with directions.”

  He listened to the firmness in my voice and made the best of it. I asked him to show her the canteen and then how to fill out a temporary log and also to explain to her the refueling and cleaning routines. She followed him meekly out of the office, a shadow of yesterday’s woman and not half as interesting.

  The day’s work began. The two Southwell vans set off to pick up their loads, and the other drivers began arriving, most of them making straight for the tea and the toast in the canteen. Dave creaked along on his rusty bicycle. Nigel came running, keeping fit. All of them already knew about Jogger, as did Isobel and Rose, who drove to work in small cars, collecting milk and newspapers on the way.

  Out in the yard I had a quick private word with Nina before she set off with Dave to collect her horses for Taunton.

  I said, “The van you’re driving is one with an empty container stuck on the bottom. You’d better know, though I can’t think it will be used for anything today.”

  “Thanks,” she said dryly, “I’ll keep a lookout.”

  I watched her start up and drive off. She certainly managed the horse van competently, maneuvering through the gates easily and turning economically into the road. Harve, watching her departure with his head on one side, could find nothing to criticize. He gave me a shrug and raised eyebrows, judgment deferred.

  Half an hour later, when she returned, pausing outside the gate, Dave jumped down from the cab and with a grin reported to Harve and me that “The old girl can twiddle a horse van on a penny and the horses are purring all over her. Where did you find her?”

  “She applied for Brett’s job,” I said. “So did four others by phone yesterday. I’ve two coming for interviews this morning. The word’s flown around that we’re short of a driver.”

  “Isn’t this Nina bird staying then?” Dave asked, disappointed.

  “We’ll see how it goes.”

  The second van bound for Taunton rumbled past Nina, hooting, and she set off after it, following in convoy.

  “Could do worse,” Harve said generously. “She seems sensible so far.”

  I told Dave that once the paperwork was fixed he would be going to France to collect Jericho Rich’s daughter’s new show jumper. Phil would drive, and they would stay overnight. Dave looked pleased, as he liked such excursions, but when he’d ambled off, Harve queried my choice of Phil.

  “Do you mean Phil in his super-six? Just for one show jumper?”

  I nodded. “He’s experienced. It’s best he goes. It’s a valuable horse and I don’t want anything going wrong with any other journey to do with Jericho Rich. Phil will come back without hitchhikers, dead or alive.”

  Harve winced, smiled and agreed.

  Back in the office I urged Isobel to chase the agents for documentation for that trip. We used the services of specialists for overseas paperwork, as they understood the needs, worked fast and seldom made errors.

  “Prompt and perfect,” she said cheerfully. “Croft Raceways motto.”

  “Er . . . prompt and passable will do.”

  I took the day’s newspapers along to my own office and flicked through them. There was never much hard racing news on Mondays. Jogger wasn’t mentioned. The lead story in one paper was about the equine flu plaguing several racing stables in the north, virtually putting whole yards out of action for months. There was speculation that the virus might spread to Newmarket. Trainers, the writer said, were unwilling to share transport with horses from other stables in case of infection.

  Hooray for that. I was all for separate journeys. Just as long, of course, as Pixhill itself stayed free. It was bad enough having drivers home sick, but the equine version of flu could hang around much longer, severely depleting the number of runners needing my services.

  Equine flu, an infection of the upper respiratory tract, the paper said, had been known in the past as “the cough.” There was no cure but time. So what else was new?

  I turned to another paper. This one, still on the gloom and doom trail, discussed the previous summer’s outbreak of debilitating fever and diarrhea in horses in mainland Europe. No one had satisfactorily identified the cause and trainers feared there might be a recurrence.

  Diesel prices might rise again, I read. I hated “might” stories; nonstories. Like “Doctors warn,” I put “might” stories at the bottom of my list. Anxiety raisers, all of them. Doctors should warn against “Doctors warn.”

  It was a “might” sort of morning. Sunny Drifter might not run in the next day’s Champion Hurdle. There might be an increase in betting tax in the Budget. Michael Watermead might run the brilliant Irkab Alhawa in a warm-up race before the 2000 Guineas.

  Marigold English, I read open-eyed, reported that she had successfully completed her move to Pixhill. “Owing to Freddie Croft’s personal services, the transfer went smoothly in all respects.” Bully for the old trout, I thought, and phoned her on the spot to thank her.

  “You did a good job,” she said, pleased.

  By nine-thirty the phone was ringing almost continuously as it always did on Mondays, the trainers making transport plans for the week ahead.

  Isobel answered everything, coming along to my door at one point and saying, “There’s someone inquiring for Brett’s job. He sounds all right. What shall I do?”

  “Ask him if he can come for an interview this morning.”

  She went away and returned to say that he would. Ten minutes later we had another applicant, and then another. We would have a line of them round the farmyard if it went on.

  I started the interviews at about ten o’clock. Four men had already arrived and a fifth appeared within an hour. All of them had the necessary licenses, all had experience, all said they’d worked in racing before. The fifth one said he was also a mechanic.

  Most drivers were mechanics to some extent. This one gave me a reference from a Mercedes garage in London.

  His name was Aziz Nader. Age, twenty-eight. He had curly black hair, olive skin, shining black eyes. Confident and outgoing in manner, he was looking for a job but not offering subservience. He spoke with a Canadian accent but didn’t look as if he should.

  “Where do you come from?” I said ne
utrally.

  “Lebanon.” He paused a second and amplified his answer. “My parents are Lebanese but they went to Canada when the trouble started. I was raised in Quebec mostly and I’m still a Canadian citizen, but we’ve been here eight years now. I’ve got a resident’s work permit, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  I looked at him thoughtfully. “What language do you speak with your parents?”

  “Arabic.”

  “And . . . um . . . how about French?”

  He smiled with white teeth and spoke to me rapidly in that language. The French I knew was racecourse stuff; he was too fast for me.

  In the summer I shipped many horses for Arab clients, most of whose employees fumbled along in hopelessly tongue-tied or nonexistent English. A driver who could converse with them, and could also feel at home in France, seemed too good to be true.

  “How good are you with horses?” I asked.

  He seemed uncertain. “I thought you wanted a driver-mechanic.”

  No one after all was perfect. “Horse van drivers are better if they can handle horses.”

  “I’d . . . er . . . learn.”

  It wasn’t as easy as he thought, but it didn’t rule him out.

  “I’ve told everyone I’ll go with them on a test drive before deciding who gets the job,” I said. “You came last, can you wait?”

  “All day,” he said.

  The test drives were important because the cargo had to go steadily on its feet. Two of the applicants were jerky with brakes and gears, one was very slow, the fourth I would have engaged if he’d been the only remaining choice.

  I found, as I climbed into the super-six cab beside Aziz, that I already intended to give him the job on the strength of his languages and his mechanical experience, just as long as he was halfway proficient at driving. He proved in fact not dazzling but at least smooth and careful, and my mind was made up long before we returned to the farmyard.

  “When can you start?” I asked, as he braked to a halt.

  “Tomorrow.” He gave me another flashing smile, all eyes and teeth, and said he would work hard.

  I thanked the other applicants who were waiting hopefully and got them to give their names to Isobel, in case. They went away disappointed. Isobel and Rose met Aziz with fascination and a visible increase in femininity, and Nigel, it was plain, had found strong competition.

  Three months’ trial, subject to his references being OK, I suggested, offering appropriate pay and conditions. Rose said she would put him into her computer, asking for his address. He would rent a room in the village, he said, and let her know later. Rose tentatively told him where Brett had stayed: the room might still be available. Aziz thanked her, listened to her directions, and drove off cheerfully, as he’d come, in a very old well-tended small-sized Peugeot.

  I wondered how much one could really tell of a person by the car they drove. Sunday’s Nina matched her Mercedes; Monday’s Nina, her old runabout. Aziz seemed too strong a character for his wheels. I, on the other hand, owned a Jaguar XJS, loved and left over from the jockey days. I took it still to race meetings but moved around Pixhill in a workhorse four-wheel-drive Fourtrak. Everyone, I thought in passing, had a two-car personality, and wondered what Aziz would drive from choice.

  To be prudent, I checked his references. The London garage he’d worked for said he knew his job but had left some time ago. The trainer whose private horse van he had driven proved to have gone out of business recently in financial difficulties. Aziz Nader had been a satisfactory employee but everyone on the payroll had lost their jobs.

  While I was on the phone two cars arrived together, not, as it transpired, in tandem but both on fact-finding missions. The first disgorged the press in the shape of a spindly young man with a large nose and a spiral notebook, the second, the area bloodhounds in plainclothes, different men from the day before. I went out without enthusiasm to greet them. There were no smiles, no handshakes, merely minimal introductions, badges flapped in my face. No one seemed intent on overfriendliness or engaging my best help trustingly. Both press and police subsequently asked invasive and borderline-rude questions with visible skepticism at my answers.

  Apart from Sandy, my experiences with the larger police world had been few but enough to show me one should never say a word to them that one did not have to, on the probability of being adjudged guilty of any old thing before conclusively proved innocent, and very likely after. One should also never, ever, on any account, make jokes. Not even to Sandy. The police, to my mind, had only themselves to blame for the public’s prevalent mistrust of them, great chaps though no doubt most of them were. Pouncing, however, came as a natural instinct to them all: they wouldn’t have been effective without it. No one that I knew of, particularly if innocent, cared to be prey.

  The pressman seemed to see his role as being Washington Post-type investigative journalism. The police, to my quiet amusement, saw him as a nuisance who would do no investigating at all if they could help it. I listened to them match verbal swords until the young man retreated discomfited to wait in his car and the force produced notebooks of their own.

  “Now, sir,” they began, an opener full of menace if ever there was one, “you will hand over the house keys of the man found dead here yesterday, if you please.”

  I would have given them Jogger’s keys willingly. The brusqueness of their demand reinforced my hovering antagonism and ensured I didn’t help them as I might have done, as I should have done, no doubt.

  Without a word, though, I went back to the office, finding them following me with sharp suspicious eyes as if I were planning to destroy evidence, given half a chance. Isobel and Rose watched the procession with open mouths. I didn’t bother with introductions.

  The two plainclothesmen drew up beside my desk. I opened a drawer, brought out Jogger’s keys and removed his house keys from the ring.

  They took the keys without comment and asked what Jogger had been doing in the farmyard on Sunday morning. I replied that all my employees could come and go in the farmyard on any errand they cared to, Sundays included, as it was a workday.

  They asked me about Jogger’s drinking habits. I said he had never turned up drunk for work. Apart from that, it was his own affair.

  If Jogger had been drunk when he fell into the pit, I thought, the postmortem would show it. Speculation was pointless, really.

  The elder of the two policemen next asked if anyone had been present with Jogger when he fell. Not that I knew of, I said. Had I, personally, been there? No. Had I been to the farmyard on Saturday night after ten o’clock or on Sunday morning at any time? No.

  I asked why they were asking such questions and was told that all accidents had to be investigated, of course. The coroner would want answers at the inquest. In police experience, he chillingly added, people with information could remain silent so as not to become involved. I refrained from asking whose fault he thought that might be.

  The interview proceeded for several minutes without fruit to either side, as far as I could see. They watched me keenly while telling me they would be making inquiries of my employees. I nodded neutrally, taking it for granted.

  They asked for a list of all drivers who had been working on Saturday or Sunday. I took them along to Isobel’s office and asked her for a computer printout of the times everyone had left and returned.

  She shook her head disgustedly.

  “Look, Freddie,” she said, “I’m so sorry, but I can’t get a thing out of the computer today. When I’ve sorted it all out, I’ll do the records straightaway.” She picked up a pile of logbooks. “The information is all in here, it’s just a matter of typing it.”

  “Sure,” I said, easily. “Can you just write down the names, for a start? Using old-fashioned pencil and paper?”

  Obligingly she wrote the names from the logbook covers and handed the list to the policemen, who took it stolidly. When they’d gone Isobel made a face after them.

  “They might have sa
id thanks, even if I did balls up the computer.”

  “Yes, they might.”

  The spindly pressman came out of his car like a rabbit from his hole once the police car had driven away and I spent the next ten minutes assuring him that Jogger had been a great mechanic, his loss would be sorely felt, the police had been investigating the accident, we would have to wait the result of their inquiries, and so on and so on, a whole lot of platitudes but the truth as far as it went. He drove away finally in dissatisfaction, but I couldn’t help that.

  A quick look at my watch showed I’d drifted through much of lunchtime without remembering my intention of organizing the Jogger memorial pints in the pub, so I scooted down there at once to talk to the landlord.

  He, comfortably fat with a beer belly of his own, presided over a no-frills house geared to the psychological comfort of those made uneasy by too much luxury. He pleased a clientele of both stable workers and austere local intellects, talking easily with both groups.

  “Old Jogger was harmless,” he pronounced. “Got pissed regular on Saturdays. Not the first time Sandy’s driven him home. Sandy’s a good fellow, I’ll say that for him. What can I do for you?”

  Make a list, I said, of everyone who had been in the pub with Jogger on his last night and give each of them two or three pints in his memory.

  “Very decent of you, Freddie,” he said, and began his list there and then, starting off with Sandy Smith and adding Dave and Nigel and two other of my drivers and proceeding to grooms from almost every stable in Pixhill, including a new bunch from Marigold English’s yard, individual names unknown. “They’d asked in the village for the best pub,” he told me complacently, “and were steered here to me.”

  “Quite right,” I said. “Get their names and we’ll make a sort of memorial scroll and frame it and hang it here on your wall for a bit.”

  The landlord became enthusiastic. “We’ll do old Jogger proud,” he said. “He’d be tickled pink.”

  “Um,” I said thoughtfully, “I suppose he didn’t leave any famous last words?”