Driving Force Page 31

  “Soap,” Michael said, hopelessly lost, “why ever soap?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know? Lewis just says weird things. Just his way.”

  “So . . . er . . .” I said, “did you find any soap under my horse van?”

  “No, of course I didn’t. I was looking for a thermos. There was nothing at all under there. It was all filthy dirty.”

  “When you tried to get Nigel to take you to Newmarket with the fillies,” I said, “were you still hoping to find the virus container and infect the horses on the journey?”

  “What if I was?”

  “It was a different horse van,” I said.

  “It wasn’t . . . well, they all look alike.”

  “Many do.”

  She looked shattered.

  “Did you pay Dave?” I asked mildly.

  “No, I didn’t. I mean, I never got the stuff, did I?”

  “And you didn’t pay Ogden, because he was dead. Did you pay Lewis?”

  After a pause she said sullenly, “He wanted it in advance. So, yes.”

  Michael said, “Tessa,” again, almost wailing.

  “Well, I did it for you, Dad,” she said. “I hate Jericho Rich. Taking his horses away because I slapped his face! I did it for you.”

  Michael was overcome, full of too-easy indulgence. I didn’t believe her, but perhaps Michael needed to.

  13

  I sobel was still in the office when I returned to the farmyard although it was by then nearly five. Rose had gone home.

  Lewis had phoned, Isobel said. I had just missed him. He and Nina were back through the Mont Blanc tunnel and had stopped for a sandwich and refueling. Nina had been driving. The colt had had its head out of the window all the way but had not gone berserk. Lewis would be driving north through the night, though he would stop somewhere to fill the jerrycans with French water for the colt.

  “Right,” I said.

  French water, pure and sweet from springs, was good for horses. Such a stop would be unremarkable.

  “Aziz asked for tomorrow off,” Isobel said. “He doesn’t want to drive tomorrow. Something to do with his religion.”

  “His religion?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “He’s a rogue. Where is he now?”

  “On his way back from taking horses to Doncaster sales.”

  I sighed. Religions were difficult to argue with, but Aziz was still a rogue, if not something worse.

  “Anything else?”

  “Mr. Usher asked if we’d collected the colt. I told him he’d be in Pixhill by six tomorrow evening, if there were no ferry delays.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Fingers crossed,” Isobel said.

  “Mm.”

  “You look awfully worried,” she said.

  “It’s this Jogger business.”

  She nodded in understanding. The police, she said, had been irritated to find so many drivers away out on the road.

  “They don’t seem to realize we’ve a business to run,” she said. “They think we should all down tools. I told them we couldn’t.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Get some sleep,” she said impulsively, young but no fool.

  “Mm.”

  I tried to take her advice. Concussion no longer did the trick. I lay awake thinking of Lewis stopping somewhere to fill the cans with French water. I hoped to hell Nina would keep her head down and her eyes—partially—shut.

  On Wednesday morning I saw off the lorries going out again to Doncaster, where the Flat-racing season would open the next day. The March meeting of Doncaster sales and races were the start of Croft Raceways’ busiest time: we were entering six months of work, work, improvisation and scramble, an atmosphere I usually loved. Juggling the number of vans, the number of drivers, against the prospects of profitability: normally it excited me, but this week so far I could barely concentrate.

  “The whole fleet,” Isobel said, cheeringly, “will be rolling tomorrow.”

  I cared only that Lewis would roll home today.

  At nine, when the telephone rang for the nth time, Isobel answered it, frowning.

  “Aziz?” she said. “Just a moment.” She put her hand over the receiver. “What’s ‘hold on’ in French?”

  “Ne quittez pas,” I said.

  Isobel repeated “Ne quittez pas” into the instrument and rose to her feet. “It’s a Frenchman, for Aziz.”

  “He isn’t here today,” I said.

  She replied over her shoulder as she went through the door, “He’s in the canteen.”

  Aziz came in hurriedly and picked up the receiver from Isobel’s desk.

  “Oui . . . Aziz. Oui.” He listened and spoke rapidly in French, stretching out a hand for a piece of memo paper and a pencil. “Oui. Oui . . . Merci, Monsieur. Merci.” Aziz wrote carefully, thanked his informant profusely and put the phone back in its cradle.

  “A message from France,” he said unnecessarily. He pushed the memo sheet towards me. “It seems Nina asked the man to phone here. She gave him money for the phone call and an address. This is it.”

  I took the paper and read the scant words. “Ecurie Bonne Chance, près de Belley.”

  “Good Luck Stables,” Aziz translated. “Near Belley.”

  He gave me the usual brilliant smile and smartly left the office.

  “I thought Aziz had the day off,” I said to Isobel.

  She shrugged. “He said he didn’t want to drive. He was here already in the canteen when I arrived for work. Reading and drinking tea. He said, ‘Good morning, darlin’.”

  Isobel faintly blushed.

  I looked at the French address and phoned the Jockey Club. Peter Venables must have been sitting there, waiting.

  “Nina sent an address via a Frenchman,” I told him. “Ecurie Bonne Chance, near Belley. Can you ask your equivalents in France for any information about it?”

  “Spell it.”

  I spelled it. “Aziz took the message in French,” I said.

  “Good.” He sounded decisive. “I’ll ask any French colleagues and phone you back.”

  I sat for a few seconds looking at the telephone after he’d disconnected, and then went and found Aziz in the canteen and invited him into the open air.

  “What’s your religion?” I asked, out in the farmyard.

  “Er . . .” He gave me a sideways look with his bright eyes, the smile untroubled.

  “Do you work for the Jockey Club?” I asked flatly.

  The smile simply broadened.

  I turned away from him. Patrick Venables, I thought bitterly, and Nina also, had trusted me so little that they’d sent another undercover man, one I wouldn’t know of, to make sure I wasn’t myself the villain I purported to be looking for. Aziz had turned up the day after Jogger died. I suppose I shouldn’t have minded, but I did.

  “Freddie.” Aziz took a step and grasped my sleeve. “Listen.” The smile had faded. “Patrick wanted Nina to have backup. I suppose we should have told you, but . . .”

  “Stick around,” I said briefly, and returned to my office.

  An hour later, Patrick Venables came on the line.

  “First of all, I think I owe you an apology,” he said. “But I’m curious. How did you suss out Aziz? He phoned to say you’d rumbled him.”

  “Little things,” I explained. “He’s too bright for the job. I’ll bet he never drove for a racing stable. The phone caller from France asked for him specifically, which meant Nina had arranged for Aziz to be available. And you, yourself, didn’t ask who Aziz was, when I mentioned him.”

  “Dear God.”

  “As you say.”

  “Ecurie Bonne Chance,” he said, “is a small stable run by a minor French trainer. The owner of the property is Benjamin Usher.”

  “Ah.”

  “The property is south of Belley and is situated near the River Rhône where the river runs from east to west, before turning south at Lyons.”

  “V
ery thorough,” I commented.

  “The French know nothing against the place. They have had some sick horses there, but none have died.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Nina insisted on going on the journey,” he said, “and she was adamant we don’t intercept your van on its way back.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  I hoped so too.

  I phoned Guggenheim. “I can’t promise,” I said, “but fly down and come to the farmyard today, in a taxi, and bring something to carry a small animal in.”

  “Rabbit?” he asked hopefully.

  “Pray,” I said.

  The hours crawled.

  Lewis phoned Isobel eventually in the afternoon and said they had crossed on the ferry and were leaving Dover.

  After another slow hour Isobel and Rose went home and I locked the office and went over to the Fourtrak, starting the engine. The passenger door opened, with Aziz standing there.

  “Can I come with you?” he said. Bright eyes. No smile.

  I didn’t immediately answer.

  “You’ll be safer if I do. No one, anyway, will hit you on the head when you’re not looking.”

  I made a noncommittal gesture and he swung into the seat beside me.

  “You’re going to meet Nina, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you expect will happen?”

  I drove out of the yard, turned out of the village and drove uphill to a place where one could look down on Pixhill below.

  “Lewis,” I said, “should come over the brow of that far hill and drive into Benjy Usher’s yard. If he does, I’ll drive down there to meet them. If he goes anywhere else we can see that from here too.”

  “Where do you think he might go?”

  “I don’t know how much you know.”

  “Nina said the method was complicated but the simple matter is that someone is bringing sickness to Pixhill’s horses.”

  “Roughly, yes.”

  “But why?”

  “Partly to make a certain category of races easier to win by methodically infecting all the horses of that category that can be got at in Pixhill.” I paused. “Halve the runners in the Chester Vase, for instance, and you more or less double your chances of winning. There are seldom more than six or so runners in the Chester Vase, or the Dante Stakes at York. They are nice prestigious races. Winning them puts a trainer in good standing in the profession.”

  Aziz sat digesting the implications. “A blanket illness?” he said.

  “Occurring here and there.” I nodded. “It’s not like nobbling the favorite for the Derby.”

  “Irkab Alhawa,” he said. “Ride the Air.”

  “Ride the Wind.”

  “No,” he said, “in Arabic it means ‘ride the air.’ It’s the way jockeys ride, standing in the stirrups, sitting on air, not the saddle.”

  “Ride the wind’s better,” I said.

  “But you don’t think anyone’s going to make that horse sick?”

  After a pause I said, “Lewis didn’t kill Jogger, he was in France. I don’t think Lewis destroyed my car or took an ax to my house. I’m sure Lewis didn’t crash the hard disk in my computer. As I said, that Sunday he was in France.”

  “He couldn’t have done it,” Aziz agreed.

  “I thought I was up against two forces,” I said. “Muscle and money. But there’s a third.”

  “What is it?”

  “Malice.”

  “The worst,” Aziz said slowly.

  The driving force within you, I thought, leaps out. Under stress, it can’t be hidden.

  Apply the stress.

  “Do you have any reason to think anyone would destroy Irkab Alhawa?” Aziz asked, frowning.

  “No. I just intend to use the thought as a lever.”

  “To do what?”

  “Wait and see, and guard my back.”

  Aziz leaned sideways against the passenger door and assessed me quizzically, the irrepressible smile reappearing.

  “You’re not like you look, are you?” he said.

  “How do I look?”

  “Physical.”

  “So do you,” I said.

  “But then . . . I am.”

  An odd ally, I thought; and unexpectedly, I was glad he was there.

  A Croft Raceways horse van came over the opposite hill. I raised a pair of binoculars and focused, and saw the horse’s head sticking out of the window.

  “That’s them,” I said. “Lewis and Nina.”

  The van turned into the road towards Benjy Usher’s stables, almost next door to Michael’s. I started the Fourtrak and drove down the hill, reaching Benjy’s yard almost before Lewis switched off his engine.

  Benjy’s head appeared in his upstairs window, poking out rather like his colt’s from the van. He issued orders to his grooms below with his customary force, and Lewis and Nina lowered the ramp. I got out of my jalopy and watched them.

  My presence there was taken for granted by everyone. Nina noticed Aziz still sitting in the Fourtrak and threw him an inquiring glance, to which he responded with a quick thumbs-up.

  The colt clattered wild-eyed down the ramp, led by Nina, and limped away in the hands of Benjy’s head groom. Benjy shouted an inquiry to Lewis about the journey: Lewis went nearer to the window and shouted up, “It all went right.” Benjy, relieved, retreated and closed his window.

  I said to Nina, “Did you stop anywhere since Dover?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Go with Aziz now, will you?”

  I went over to Aziz and spoke to him through the Fourtrak’s window.

  “Please take Nina with you and go to the farmyard. There may be a young man wandering about there, carrying a small animal transporter. His name’s Guggenheim. Collect him and in about a quarter of an hour take him on with you.”

  “Where to?”

  “To Centaur Care. That place where you took the old horses. I’ll drive this van and meet you there.”

  “Let me come with you,” he said.

  “No. Look after Nina.”

  “As if she needed it!”

  “Everyone needs their back watched.”

  I left him, walked over to the van while Lewis was lifting the ramp back into place, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Lewis was surprised, but when I waved him towards the passenger side he climbed in there without demur. He’d worked for me for two years; he was accustomed to doing what I said.

  I started the powerful engine and drove carefully out of Benjy’s yard, continuing on down the road towards Michael’s place. Opposite Michael’s gate, where the road temporarily widened and the space allowed it, I pulled the van over to the side, stepped on the foot brake, rolled gently to a stop, applied the hand brake and switched off.

  Lewis looked surprised, but not very. The vagaries of bosses, his manner seemed to imply, had to be tolerated.

  “How’s the rabbit?” I said conversationally.

  His expression gave new meaning to the word “flabbergasted.” He looked for a moment as if his heart had actually stopped beating. His mouth opened and no sound came out.

  Lewis, I thought, with his biker past, his tattooed dragon, his expert fists; Lewis with his bimbo and his ambitions for his baby, Lewis might be a dishonest muscleman out to make money, but he was no actor.

  “I’ll tell you what you’ve been doing,” I said. “Benjy Usher owns a stable in France where he discovered last year by chance that the horses there were falling ill with an unspecified fever. He learned that there was a possibility that the fever was carried by ticks. So he thought it a good wheeze to bring the illness to England and give it to a few horses here so as to clear his path a bit to winners he might not otherwise have. The problem was how to bring the ticks to England; and first of all you tried to bring them on soap which you carried in a cash box stuck to the bottom of one of my nine-vans that you were dr
iving at the time.”

  Lewis went on looking dumbfounded, a pulse throbbing now in a swelled vein on his forehead.

  “The ticks didn’t survive that journey. They don’t, as you now know, survive long enough on soap. A different way of travel had to be found. An animal. A hamster, maybe. Or a rabbit. How are we doing?”

  Silence.

  “You looked after the Watermeads’ rabbits. Perfect. You thought they wouldn’t miss one or two, but they did. Anyway, last year, driving Pat’s four-van, you went to France to the Ecurie Bonne Chance, that’s Benjy Usher’s place outside Belley, down near the River Rhône, and you wiped ticks onto a rabbit. You brought it back here, wiped the ticks from the rabbit onto two old horses that Benjy Usher had in a paddock outside his drawing room window, and although one of them died, there you both were with flourishing live ticks on the other, ready to be transferred to any horse that Benjy decided on, and that you could get close to by driving it to the races.”

  I wondered what incipient heart failure looked like.

  “The ticks are unpredictable,” I continued, “and in the end probably just disappeared, so in August you went again to France, but this time taking the van Phil drives now, which you used to drive regularly at that time. But on that occasion things went wrong. The van was due for maintenance and was driven straight to the barn on your return. The cap had unscrewed itself from the tube, perhaps from vibration. Before you could retrieve the rabbit, it fell into the inspection pit and died, and Jogger threw it away, ticks and all.”

  Strangled silence.

  “So this year,” I said, “you went in the new super-six to fetch the two-year-olds for Michael Watermead, and you took a rabbit with you. The ticks came back alive and were transferred to the old horse, Peterman. But Peterman went to Marigold English, not Benjy Usher, and Peterman died. The ticks died soon after him. So now we have the Flat season about to start and all the Chester Vase and Dante Stakes contestants this year are strong and healthy still, so you set off with the rabbit to fetch Benjy Usher’s colt from Milan, and on the way back you stopped at the Ecurie Bonne Chance, and what will you bet that in the tube container above the fuel tanks of this horse van we’ll find a rabbit with ticks on?”

  Silence.