Driving Force Read online

  “ ‘Same again!’ ” the landlord said, smiling broadly. “ ‘Same again’ were his favorite words. He’d been rambling on about aliens under your trucks, I ask you, but by the time he left, ‘same again’ was about all he could manage. But always the gentleman, that Jogger, never any trouble when he’d had a skinful, never fighting drunk like that Dave.”

  “Dave?” I asked in astonishment. “Do you mean my Dave?”

  “Sure. He’ll take a swing at anyone, given enough ale on board. He never connects, mind you, he can’t see straight by then. I stop serving him then, of course, and tell him to go home. Sandy takes him home too, sometimes, when he’s too far gone even to balance on that bike. A good lad, Sandy. Pretty good for a copper.”

  “Yes,” I said, and gave him a cash advance for the memorial pints, promising the rest after the list had been drawn up and everyone served.

  “How about it if we get their own signatures, then? Make it more personal. Start tonight, shall I?”

  “Great idea,” I said, “but put their full names beside the signatures, so everyone will know who was here.”

  “Will do.”

  I bought a homemade Cornish pasty from him for a takeaway lunch and left him as he began to seek out a sheet of paper worthy of the roll of honor.

  During the afternoon I went through the latest printout of the accounts with Rose and then with Isobel’s input drew up my own sort of pencil and paper chart for the week. While Isobel was still in my office I inadvertently kicked the carrier left by Marigold English’s grooms, and, picking it up, I asked Isobel to throw it away.

  She took it out of the office but in a few minutes came back, undecided.

  “There’s quite a good thermos flask in that carrier. I thought it was too good to throw away so I took it into the canteen in case one of the drivers would like it. And . . . well . . . would you come and look?”

  She seemed puzzled enough for me to follow her along to the canteen to see what was on her mind. She’d taken out the packet of sandwiches and laid them on the draining board of the sink there, and she’d unscrewed the flask and removed the top from the vacuum bottle inside. She’d poured most of the contents away into the sink, and found more in the flask than liquid.

  I looked where she pointed, though there was no missing what was worrying her. Lying in the sink were four glass containers, each a small tube three and a half inches long, more than a half inch in diameter, amber in color, with a black stopper fastened on with what looked like waterproof adhesive tape.

  “They fell out when I poured,” Isobel said. “What are they?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The tubes were covered with the opaque milky liquid that had been in the flask. I picked up the flask and looked into it and, finding some of the liquid still inside, poured it into a canteen mug.

  Two more tubes fell into the mug.

  The liquid was cold and smelled faintly of milky coffee. “Don’t drink it!” Isobel exclaimed in alarm as I raised the mug to my nose.

  “Just smelling it,” I said.

  “It’s coffee, isn’t it?”

  “I’d think so.”

  I took a paper plate from the stack always ready to hand and put the four tubes from the sink onto it. Then, onto a canteen tray I put the plate, the mug, the thermos, its screw-on top and the packet of sandwiches, and with the carrier itself under my arm took the whole lot along to my desk in my office, Isobel following.

  “Whatever can they be?” she asked for about the fourth time, and all I could say was that I would find out.

  With a paper towel I cleared the milky residue off one of the tubes. There were a few numbers etched into the glass, which at first raised expectations, but all they announced was the containers’ capacity, 10 cc.

  I held the tube up to the light and tipped it up and down. Its contents were liquid and transparent but moved more sluggishly than water.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Isobel asked, agog.

  I shook my head. “Not just now.” I put the tube back on the plate and pushed the tray away as if it weren’t important. “Let’s get back to work and I’ll decide about this stuff later.”

  The tray to one side and with Isobel gradually losing interest in it, we finished my preliminary pencil and paper chart and Isobel went back to her office to bring it up to date in the computer.

  She was back in my doorway within five minutes, looking very frustrated, dressed for going home at the end of her shift.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “The computer is totally on the blink. I can’t do a thing with it, nor can Rose. Can you get that man to fix it?”

  “OK,” I said, stretching a hand to the phone book. “Thanks for everything and see you in the morning.”

  Before I could find the number, my glance fell on the small glass vials on the tray, and instead of summoning the computer man, I phoned my sister.

  5

  She was, as usual, hard to find. I left messages for her all over the physics department of Edinburgh University and in the administrative section there and the affiliated research laboratories and in an observatory, and tried the Rector’s wife’s private line, all numbers left over from former searches. No results.

  Waiting until she went home in the evenings was fruitless as she spent all her time in inaccessible meetings and committees, and catching her between waking and departure in the mornings fine-tuned things to a variable five minutes. “Please ask her to phone Freddie”: after six attempts I gave up and went back to raising the computer people a dozen or so miles up the road.

  From that effort I got the number-unobtainable noise and also presently a voice assuring me that the line had been disconnected. Trying again produced the same result. Irritated, I phoned my barber, who operated four shops along from the computers, and asked what was going on.

  “They vanished overnight one day last week,” he told me in carefree tones. “Did a bunk. Just upped and scarpered. Took everything, left the place bare. We’re all struggling along here since they put our rents up diabolically and I shouldn’t wonder if the shoe shop doesn’t go next.”

  “Dammit,” I said.

  “Sorry, mate.”

  I did a bit of yellow-fingers walking and secured a shaky promise from a stranger to “put me on the list.” “Can’t come tomorrow, sorry, not a chance.”

  Sighing, I flicked again over the Yellow Pages, as I had them in my hand, and tracked down a rhyming dictionary in one of the bookshops. The last one they had, I was warned, but they would keep it for me.

  When I put the receiver down this time, the phone rang immediately. I snatched the receiver up again and said “Lizzie?” hopefully.

  “Expecting a lady friend, are you?” Sandy Smith teased heavily. “Sorry, can’t oblige.”

  “My sister.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Other way round,” he said. “I said I’d let you know about your hitchhiker. They did the postmortem and he died of a heart attack. Myocardial infarction. Ticker stopped working. They’ve scheduled the inquest for Thursday. A half-hour job, evidence of identity, that sort of thing. Bruce Farway’s report. That driver of yours might be wanted. That Brett.”

  “He’s left. Won’t Dave do?”

  “Oh aye, I daresay.” Not his responsibility, I gathered.

  “Thanks, Sandy,” I said sincerely. “How about Jogger?”

  “That’s a bit different.” He sounded cautious suddenly. “There’s no report on him so far, like. They’re always busy on Mondays.”

  “Will you let me know when you hear?”

  “Can’t promise.”

  “Well, do your best.”

  He said doubtfully that he would, and I wondered if he’d been subverted by my two plainclothes visitors into casting me as opposition. All the same, he’d kept his word over Kevin Keith Ogden, and maybe our long acquaintanceship would remain a durable bridge.

&
nbsp; I sat for a while thinking of everything that had happened over the past five days, until eventually the phone rang again and this time it was indeed my sister.

  “Who did you leave unturned?” she demanded. “I’ve been deluged by a veritable flood of ‘Phone Freddie’s.’ So what’s up?”

  “First of all, where are you and how are you doing?”

  “You surely didn’t send all those SOS’s just for a fireside chat!”

  “Er, no. But if we should get cut off, where are you?”

  She read out a number, which I added to the list. “Professor Quipp’s lodgings,” she said crisply.

  I wondered if everyone except me had known where to find her. She’d had several lovers, nearly all bearded, all academics, not always scientists. Professor Quipp sounded the latest. I didn’t make the mistake, however, of uttering aloud an unretractable guess.

  “I was wondering,” I said diffidently, “if you could get something analyzed for me. In the chemistry school, perhaps.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Some unknown liquid in a 10 cc tube.”

  “Are you serious?” She sounded as if she thought me crazy. “What is it? Where did you get it?”

  “If I knew what it was I wouldn’t need to find out.”

  “Oh brother . . .” She sounded suddenly more friendly. “Tell me all.”

  I told her about the carrier found in one of my vans and the six tubes in the thermos.

  “Quite a lot of weird things have happened,” I said. “I want to know what my horse van was carrying and, apart from you, the only person I could ask would be the local veterinarian or else the Jockey Club. Actually, I’ll give the Jockey Club a tube or two to be fair, but I want to know the answer myself, and if I entrust it all to any sort of authority I’ve lost control of it.”

  She understood very well about losing control of research results. It had happened to her once, and she’d never stopped resenting it.

  “I thought,” I went on, “that you’d be sure to know someone with a gas chromatograph or whatever it’s called, and could get the job done for me privately.”

  She said slowly, “Yes, I could do it, but are you sure it’s necessary? I don’t want to waste a favor I’m owed. What else has happened?”

  “Two dead men and some empty containers stuck to the undersides of at least three of my vans.”

  “What dead men?”

  “A hitchhiker and my mechanic. He found the containers.”

  “What sort of containers?”

  “For smuggling, maybe.”

  She was silent, evaluating. “There’s a chance,” she said slowly, “that you could be thought guilty of whatever’s gone on.”

  “Yeah. A certainty, given the attitude of the two policemen who came here today.”

  “And you love the police, of course.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, “that there are any number of civilized intelligent cultured policemen doing brilliantly compassionate jobs all over the place. I just seem to have met those who’ve had the laugh kicked out of them.”

  She remembered, as I did, a time in the past when I’d begged the police (not Sandy, and not in Pixhill) to preserve a young woman from her violent husband. Domestic affairs weren’t their business, I’d been told sniffily, and a week later she’d died from a beating. It had been the subsequently shrugged police shoulders which had infuriated me, not any sort of blighted passion, as she’d been barely more than an acquaintance. Official indifference had been literally deadly. Too late that years afterwards a new directive had decreed “domestics” to be worthy of action: in me the damage had been done when I’d been idealistic and twenty.

  “How are things in general?” Lizzie asked.

  “The business is busy.”

  “And the love life?”

  “On hold.”

  “And how long since you delivered flowers to the forebears?”

  “Yesterday, actually.”

  “Really?” She didn’t know whether to be impressed or disbelieving. “I mean . . . truly?”

  “Truly. The first time since Christmas, mind you.”

  “There goes your fatal honesty again. I tell you, it gets you into more trouble . . .” She broke off, pondering.

  “How do you purpose to get these mysterious tubes up here to me?”

  “Post, I suppose. Courier, better.”

  “Hm.” A pause. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Going to Cheltenham races. It’s Champion Hurdle day.”

  “Is it? Since you stopped hurling your soul over those fences I’ve lost touch with racing. What if I fly down? I’m due a couple of days off. We could watch the races on TV, you could tell me all and take me out to dinner and I’ll fly back on Wednesday morning. Get my old room ready. What do you say?”

  “Will you come to the house or the farm?”

  “The house,” she said with decision. “It’s easier.”

  “Noon?”

  “As near as dammit.”

  “Lizzie,” I said gratefully, “thanks.”

  Her voice was dry. “You’re one tough cookie, brother dear, so less of the sob stuff.”

  “Wherever did you hear such language?”

  “In the cinema.”

  Smiling, I said a temporary goodbye and put down the receiver. She would come, as she always had, driven by an inbuilt compulsion to hurry to the aid of her brothers. The eldest of the family by a gap of five years, she had mothered first our brother Roger and then six years later myself, a fierce hen with chicks. Had she had children of her own, those instincts might have died naturally on my account, as they had for Roger, who’d achieved a cozy wife and three boys of his own, but as I, like her, had never married—or not so far—I seemed still to be not only brother but surrogate son.

  Shortish and thin, her bobbed dark hair lately peppered with gray, she whisked around her own habitat either in black academic gowns or white laboratory overalls, her darting mind engaged with parsecs, quantum leaps and black and white dwarfs. She published papers, she taught intensely, she’d made a name; she was, in or out of bed with the latest beard, as far as I could see, fulfilled.

  It was a good six months since I’d taken the train to her Scottish door to spend two days with her. Two days compressed six months’ conversation into a span she preferred. Her one-night trip to Pixhill was typical; she would never sit still for a week.

  Thinking about her, I sat on at the farmyard until Nina came back, her van empty, the runners safely returned to their stable. She parked by the pumps and filled the tanks and came yawning over to the office to put the day’s log through the letter box, as she’d been asked.

  I went out to meet her. “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Utterly uneventful in any meaningful way. Fascinating in others. Has anything happened here?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. The police came again about Jogger. I arranged his memorial at the pub, we should get a good list of names tomorrow. The computer’s acting up. And after you’ve cleaned that horse van I’ve something to show you.”

  She glanced in disfavor at the dusty vehicle. “Do you really mean I should clean it?”

  “Harve will expect it. Inside and out.”

  She gave me an old-fashioned sideways look of irony. “I don’t think Patrick Venables intended this at all.”

  “Undercover is undercover,” I said mildly. “If I do it for you, and Harve comes back in the middle, my authority in this place is down the drain with the disinfectant.”

  To do her justice she complained no more but drove the van to the cleaning area and attacked it with the pressurized water, squeegeeing until the windows shone.

  Harve did in fact return while she was busy and took her industry for granted. While he filled his tanks and waited his turn with the water I returned to my office and slightly rearranged the items on the canteen tray, removing four of the puzzling little tubes from sight and stowing them deep in a desk drawer. With time
to spare, I picked up the unopened packet of sandwiches and read the label on it: “Beef and Tomato.” There was also a price sticker label and a sell-by date, which identified the Friday just past.

  Friday was the day I’d done Marigold’s shuttle and found the carrier with the thermos. Friday’s sandwiches. But I hadn’t stopped anywhere for the grooms to buy sandwiches or anything else.

  I frowned. “Beef and Tomato.” I’d seen a “Beef and Tomato” wrapper, empty, only a day or two ago, but where exactly? The answer arrived slowly. In Brett’s trash in the nine-van, of course.

  Nina came into the office and sprawled in the chair across from mine, the desk between us.

  “What do I do tomorrow?” she asked. “I learned a lot about racing today but damn all about smuggling. I think Patrick believed I would instantly spot what’s going on, but I could be here a month and see nothing if today’s anything to go by.”

  “No one,” I reminded her, “has seen anything going on. Perhaps you’re here to see how anything could.”

  “Which you could see better than me.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’d say nothing much happens when I’m around simply because I’m around. I’d like to send you on a trip to France or Italy or Ireland, but there we hit a bit of a snag.”

  “What snag? I don’t mind going. I’d quite like it, in fact.”

  “I have to send two drivers because of the hours.”

  “That’s OK.”

  I smiled. “Not really. The wives of the married drivers take exception to me sending their husbands abroad with a woman. My usual woman driver, Pat, consequently never goes abroad, to her disgust. I could, of course, send you with Nigel, who’s not married, but Pat herself won’t go with him, he’d seduce a nun.”

  “Not me, he wouldn’t.” She was definite, but I wondered.

  “We’ll see if a trip comes up,” I said. “As for tomorrow, we won’t be very busy here, we never are in Cheltenham Festival week because there aren’t many other meetings held on those three days. We’ll be busy again on Friday and it will be hectic again on Saturday, if we’re lucky. Can you work Saturday?”

  “It looks as if I’d better.”