Driving Force Page 29

  Accordingly I changed direction and drove west and north to arrive an hour and a half later at a large impersonal old hotel on the A40 main road, which ran across the top of the Cotswold town of Burford. I parked outside the great old-fashioned charming pile, a landmark passed endless times in my life on the way to Cheltenham races.

  She was already there when I arrived, having had by far the shorter journey, and she was the original compelling Nina, not the scrubbed and workaday version.

  She was sitting in a chintz armchair beside a glowing log fire in the entrance hall, a tea tray primly before her on a low table.

  Post-Cheltenham but before the summer tourist season, the place was almost empty. She rose when I came in, and enjoyed my admiration of her appearance. No jeans this time: the long slender legs were covered instead by black tights. No sloppy old sweater but a black skirt, black vest, white silk shirt with big sleeves, large gold cuff links and a long neck-chain of enough half sovereigns to fund a ransom. She smelled, not of horses, but subtly of gardenias. The economical bones of her face were revealed and softened by a dusting of powder. Lips, softly red.

  “I hardly like to ask you . . .” I said, kissing her cheek as if from long close habit, “looking as you do . . .”

  “You sounded serious.”

  “Mm.”

  We sat down near enough to each other to talk, though there was no one to overhear.

  “First of all,” I said, “I found out what’s been carried under my lorries, and it is not as simple as drugs.” She waited while I paused, her interest sharpening to acute. “I went to see a top Customs man in Portsmouth,” I said, “to ask what couldn’t move freely in and out of Britain under the E.C. regulations. I expect you know the Customs men never search any traffic nowadays unless they have specific information that drugs will be found in a certain vehicle. In practice, it means that anything—guns, cocaine, whatever, coming here from Europe—has untroubled entry. But he got very excited about cats and dogs, and rabies . . . and it seems the quarantine rules apply, and also one needs a license for things like veterinary medicines. Anyway, my vans have been carrying extra livestock, though not cats and dogs, I don’t think, because they would both make a noise.”

  “Make a noise?”

  “Sure. If you carried a cat in one of those containers, someone would hear it complaining.”

  “But why? You’ve lost me. Why take livestock in those containers?”

  “So that the grooms with the horses wouldn’t know about it. If any horse van carried anything in public out of the ordinary, half the village would hear about it in the pub.”

  “Then who’s been carrying secret livestock?”

  “One of my drivers.”

  “Which one?”

  “Lewis.”

  “Oh no, Freddie. He has that baby!”

  “One can love one’s offspring and be a villain.”

  “You don’t mean it . . .”

  “Yeah. And I don’t like it.”

  “Do you mean . . . you can’t mean . . . that Lewis had been deliberately trying to bring rabies into England?”

  “No, not rabies, thank God. Just a fever that makes horses temporarily ill, but takes the edge off their speed so drastically that they don’t win again.”

  I told her that Jogger’s dead nun had been a rabbit.

  “Nun—rabbit—habit.” She sighed. “How did you find out?”

  “I asked Isobel what Jogger found dead in the pit, and she told me.”

  “So simple!”

  “Then I looked at the computer files for last August, for the time when I was away, and there it was. August 10th. Jogger reported a dead rabbit fell into the pit from a van he was servicing, and it was on the day after Lewis brought that van back from France.”

  She frowned. “But the computer files were lost.”

  I told her about the backups in my safe.

  “You didn’t tell anyone! You didn’t tell me. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Mostly,” I said.

  She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I said, “Jogger told Isobel the rabbit had ticks on it and she put a note about that in the computer. The computer also lists each van’s journeys individually, and two of those vans that have hidden containers, Pat’s van, that you drove, and Phil’s van, both of those were driven to France by Lewis last year. This year he’s driving my newest super-six, and it too, as you found, has a container under it. Last weekend, the Watermead children missed one of the tame rabbits that Lewis looks after for them, cleaning their runs and so on, and also last weekend Lewis drove the super-six to France, and this weekend a horse has died in Pixhill of a tick-borne fever.”

  She listened wide-eyed, her mouth opening. I went over it all again, slowly, telling her about Benjy’s training habits, about Lewis’s shorn ringlets, about Peterman and finally about Guggenheim.

  Once an old horse had come through the fever stage, I said, he could live with ticks on him all summer. A continual source of potential illness for other designated recipients. An Ehrlichiae farm, in fact. A quick wipe over an old horse with a wet bar of soap and, within an hour, a wipe of the same soap onto a new host. Tick-transfer completed. Enough of the ticks would survive. The transfer, I said gloomily, might even have been done by Lewis when he drove the unfortunate victims to the races in my vans.

  When the weather grew cold, the ticks would die. A new lot had to be brought in by a temporary host for the new year, and then, without much delay, transferred to their natural host, a horse. Peterman hadn’t survived it.

  Whatever doubts she had at the beginning, they had gone by the end.

  “When we first found the containers,” I said, “I begged Jogger not to talk about them. But he did, of course, down at the pub on Saturday night. I reckon he’d been thinking a lot about them. Turning them over in his mind, I’d think he remembered the rabbit, which must have seemed to him at the time to appear from nowhere, and perhaps he’d worked out that it might have fallen out of one of those containers, the one under what is now Phil’s van, because that container had lost its screw-on end. I don’t know if anyone understood Jogger plainly in the pub. They might have done. Anyway, in the morning he left me the message . . . and he told me, Jogger told me . . . about rabbits and ticks and Benjy Usher’s horse that died.”

  She was silent for a while and then asked, “Was it Lewis who wrecked your car and the house?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sure he was one of the people who dropped me into the water at Southampton. The one who said, ‘If this doesn’t give him flu, nothing will.’ His voice was hoarse because he had a cold, and in my memory, that voice reverberated a bit, as I was half unconscious, but yes, I’m sure that was him. Whether he hates me enough for the rest . . . I don’t know.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Mm.”

  “So what next?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said, “Lewis is driving the super-six to Milan, in Italy, to fetch home Benjy Usher’s colt that has a dicky leg. It’s a three-day trip, mostly through France.”

  She grew still. Then she said, “I’ll go. Have parachute, will travel.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything,” I explained. “I don’t want you to alarm him. I want him to have every opportunity to pick up another rabbitful of ticks, because if all of last weekend’s cargo were on Peterman and have died with him, and if no other horses are ill, then perhaps this is a chance for them to get some replacements. Those ticks are highly perishable, and also hard to find. I’d think they’d need some more. All I want you to do is to note where you go. The route Lewis will take to Italy is down to the Rhône Valley, which is where he went last weekend also. He should be going through the Mont Blanc tunnel from France to Italy but if he takes another route, don’t remark on it. If he wants to stop anywhere at all, let him stop. Don’t ask questions. Agree to whatever he suggests. Notice nothing. Don’t watch him. Yawn, sleep, act dumb.”

  “He won’t want me with him, you know.”
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  “I know he thinks you tire easily. So tire. This time, he may be glad of it.”

  “And don’t, I suppose, look under the van?”

  “No, don’t. If the place is littered with lettuce leaves and rabbit droppings, ignore it.”

  She smiled.

  “Be careful,” I begged. “I’d go myself, except that if I did, nothing would happen. All I want to know is where Lewis goes.”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Nor did my mother.”

  “Lewis might be just as dangerous.”

  “I promise,” she said emphatically, “that I’ll be as blind as a bat.” She paused. “There’s only one thing.”

  “What?”

  “I want to tell Patrick Venables where I’m going.”

  “Would he stop you?”

  “Probably the opposite.”

  “Don’t let him do anything,” I said anxiously. “Don’t let him frighten them off.” My instinct was against the Jockey Club knowing too much, too soon, but perhaps also for this possibly risky mission I might need the insurance of Venables’s foreknowledge.

  “I don’t want to be prosecuted,” she said, half playfully,

  “for trying to nobble half of Pixhill’s best colts.”

  “You won’t be. I—” I stopped dead, a revelation presenting itself to me with breath-thieving force. “Bloody hell!”

  “What is it?”

  “Um. Nothing. When you get back on Wednesday you’ll be met. Don’t worry about anything except not frightening Lewis.”

  We ate dinner in the dining room, discussing the trip to begin with but passing pretty soon to our lives in general. I enjoyed being with her. I was growing unfaithful to Maudie, I thought ironically. I asked Nina how old her eldest child was.

  “Twenty-three.” She smiled down at her pasta. “Much younger than you.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “You’re no toy-boy,” she said.

  “Your children might think so.”

  “Your sister is older than her professor, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, she is,” I said, mildly surprised. “Who told you?”

  “Aziz told me.”

  “Aziz?”

  “Your sister told him. He told me. We drivers hang together, you know.”

  “Wipe that demure smile off your face.”

  The smile, however, deepened. I thought of all the empty bedrooms upstairs in the hotel. I thought of the year-long celibacy and felt a strong desire to end it. She must have known what was in my mind. She simply waited.

  I sighed. “It’s not what I’d prefer,” I said, “but I’m going home.”

  She said passively, “All right.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “When this is over . . .”

  “Yes. We’ll see.”

  We went out together, as before, to our separate cars. She had come in her Mercedes.

  I kissed her mouth, not her cheek. She drew her head away, her eyes gleaming in the car-park lights. I saw that I didn’t displease her. I could so easily . . . so easily . . .

  “Freddie . . .” Her voice was soft, noncommittal, leaving it to me.

  “I have to . . . I really do have to go,” I said almost desperately. “I’m not sending you off to France without sensible preparations. Bring your overnight things in the morning and pick up a travel kit from the office. It will hold money and phone numbers and a precaution or two against thieves. Lewis always takes a similar kit.” I stopped. Travel kits were not what I wanted to talk about. I kissed her again and felt resolution draining away.

  “Do the kit in the morning,” she suggested.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Freddie . . .”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow why I have to go.”

  I kissed her hard, then turned away and went over to the Fourtrak, feeling clumsy and annoyed with myself for going so far and inexplicably retreating. She didn’t seem to mind. There were no hurt rejected feelings in the smile she gave me as she shut herself into the red car.

  “See you,” she said through the opening window, starting the engine.

  “Good night.”

  With a wave she drove away, as self-possessed as ever. I watched her taillights into the distance and strove to quieten my pulse. The basic drives of nature were so bloody powerful after all. And I’d thought I had the turmoil licked, which only showed that dormant volcanos were simply that: fires temporarily asleep.

  Eight and a half years. Did they matter I didn’t know, and I understood that she didn’t know either. She was attracted to me; I had to believe it. She was also, I thought, in an odd way shy, not wanting me to think she had rushed me. She was making me decide whether what I felt was a passing arousal or a longer commitment.

  I belted the Fourtrak back to my house, pushing decisions away for the night, and changed into soft black shoes and the darkest of clothes I could find. Then, with my eyes adjusting to night vision, I walked in the shadows along to the farmyard and unlocked the padlock on the gates to let myself in, locking it again behind me.

  It was after midnight. The sky was clear and cold, stars blazing. All those distant suns, I thought; as mysterious and inaccessible as Ehrlichia risticii.

  All the horse vans were home in the roost, subduedly shining in the light of the night bulb over the canteen door. A quiet Sunday evening, peace after bustle. I had not, this time, walked into a mortal situation.

  Harve, I imagined, had done his last rounds, and was watching video football. I unlocked the offices and, without switching on the interior lights, went along to my own room, enough glow creeping in through the windows for me to locate the flashlight I kept in the desk there and to check that its batteries were functioning. Then, relocking the office door on my way out, I padded across the farmyard to Jogger’s old truck from whose front seats I could see all my monsters partially, and one or two of them clearly.

  The super-six Lewis would drive to Milan was one of those. I settled into the dark interior of Jogger’s truck and tried resolutely to stay awake.

  I managed it for an hour.

  Dozed.

  Woke with a jerk. Two o’clock. Sentries could be courtmartialed for sleeping on duty. No one could help going to sleep. When the brain wanted to switch off, it did.

  I tried reciting old verses. Nursery rhymes. One two, buckle my shoe.

  Went to sleep.

  Three o’clock. Four. Half the night passed across my shut eyes. Absolutely no good. Waste of time sitting there.

  When he came, the padlock clicked and rattled on its chain, and I was fully alert instantly.

  I held my breath, not moving.

  Lewis’s unmistakable short haircut passed in silhouette between me and the outside light. Lewis, carrying a shapeless bag, moved unhesitatingly towards his own lorry, where he lay down on the ground and disappeared from my sight.

  He remained out of sight for what seemed a long time, until I began to think he must have left without my noticing. But then, there he was, standing up, moving away, returning with his bag to the main gate and fastening the padlock with an almost inaudible click.

  Gone.

  I sat for another half hour, not entirely from wanting to be sure he wouldn’t come back but from reluctance to face the next bit.

  Phobias were irrational and stupid. Phobias were paralyzing, petrifying and all too real. I slowly emerged from the lorry, took the flashlight, tried to think of race-riding . . . anything . . . and lay down on my back beside Lewis’s van in the location of the fuel tanks.

  The cold stars up there didn’t care that my skin sweated and my courage shrank to the size of a nut.

  The horse van would not collapse on me. It obviously would not.

  For fuck’s sake, do it, I told myself. Don’t be so fucking stupid

  I shifted my shoulders and hips over the ground and wriggled sideways until I was totally under the tons of steel, and of course they did not collapse on me, they hun
g over me immobile and impassive, a threat unfulfilled. I stopped under the fuel tanks and felt the stupid sweat wet on my face and came near to complete panic when I tried to raise my hand to wipe the sweat away and hit metal instead.

  Fuck, I thought. No word was bad enough. I didn’t habitually think in that casual expletive universal on the racecourse, but there were times when no other word would do.

  I’d chosen to lie where I was. Stop bloody trembling, I told myself, and get on with the matter in hand.

  Yes, Freddie.

  I felt for, and found, the round end of the container above the rear fuel tank. I unscrewed it and laid it on the ground beside me. I switched on the flashlight and raised my head to look into the container.

  My hair brushed against the metal. Tons of steel. Shut up. My hands were slippery with sweat and I could hardly breathe and my heart pounded, and I’d risked death in racing thousands of times over fourteen years and I hadn’t cared . . . it had been nothing like this.

  Inside the tubular container there lay what seemed to be a long flat narrow plywood tray stretching away into shadow. Standing on the plywood was an oblong plastic kitchen food-box very like the one I’d taken to Scotland, except that this one had no lid.

  Gripping the flashlight convulsively, I stuck my arm with the flashlight into the tube for a deeper look.

  The kitchen food-box held water.

  Little stars appeared above the tubular container, showing on the underside of the horse van floor above. The stars were from the light inside the tube. The stars were the result of holes in the tube.

  “There would have to be airholes in the containers,” Guggenheim had said.

  There were airholes.

  I peered straight into the tube, my head hard against the metal above, arms constricted by metal on both sides, nerves shot to pathetic crumbs.

  Deep along in the tube something moved. An eye shone brightly. In his metal burrow, the rabbit seemed at ease.

  I switched off the flashlight, screwed the end back onto the tube and wriggled out again into the free night air.

  I lay on the hard ground, regrouping, heart thudding, ashamed of myself. Nothing, I thought, nothing would get me to do anything like that ever again.