He retrieved his rusty bike from the wood pile and squeaked away down the drive, wobbling aside for Jogger who was returning in his van.
Jogger had brought with him a book-sized piece of wood with a cluster of nails driven into it. The nail-heads would stick to the magnet, he said, but not so firmly that he wouldn’t be able to get the whole thing off at the next overhaul. The wood would prevent the magnet from picking up anything else.
I took his word for it, and watched him roll expertly under the chassis without using the slider, taking only seconds to put the insulating wood in place. He was up on his feet giving me a sideways yellow smile in an instant.
‘That didn’t take long,’ I said thoughtfully.
‘If you know where to look, it’s a piece of cake.’
Harve arrived at that moment, crossing with Jogger’s departure. We walked together to the house and I showed him the grime-laden cash box, explaining where Jogger had found it. He looked as puzzled as I felt.
‘But what’s it for?’ he said.
‘Jogger thinks we’ve been entertaining drugs unawares.’
‘What?’
‘Smuggling cocaine, perhaps?’
‘No.’ Harve was adamant. ‘No one could do that without us knowing.’
Ruefully I said, ‘Maybe one of us does know.’
Harve didn’t agree. Our drivers were saints, he implied.
I told him about the night visitor, who’d come in black disguise and entered the horsebox.
‘He had a key to the grooms’ door,’ I said. ‘He must have done. There’s no damage to the locks.’
‘Yes,’ Harve said, thinking, ‘but you know those groom-door keys don’t open just one box. I mean, I know for a certainty that my own box has the same key as Brett’s, here. Quite a lot of them are duplicated.’
I nodded. The ignition keys were individually special and couldn’t be copied, but the grooms’ door locks came from a different smaller range, and several of the boxes had keys that fitted others.
‘What was he doing inside the cab?’ Harve asked, ‘if this thing... this hiding place... was underneath?’
‘I don’t know. He had dirt on his clothes. Maybe he’d already looked underneath and found the hiding place empty.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’ Harve said. ‘Tell Sandy Smith?’
‘Maybe. Sometime. I don’t want to run us into trouble if I don’t have to.’
Harve was happy with that. ‘We don’t want the Customs to hear of it,’ he said, nodding. ‘They’d hold us up for hours, every crossing. They’d treat it as specific information received, I wouldn’t wonder.’
His pleasant face was only lightly anxious; and the unwelcome discovery, I supposed, didn’t merit the instant pushing of panic buttons.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘let’s get on. I’ll come along to the farm for fuel and start the shuttle.’
I locked the house while Harvey left, then followed along to the farmyard, less than a mile away, nearer to the heart of Pixhill.
Harve, his wife and four tow-headed children lived next door to the farmyard in what had been the old farmhouse. The old farm barn was now Jogger’s domain, a workshop with inspection pit and every aid to mechanical perfection that he could cajole me into buying.
What had once been a cowshed was now a small canteen and a suite of three offices with windows looking into the farmyard, from where one could watch the horseboxes come and go, each to and from its own allocated parking space. A small stable block with room for three horses was sited in the space between the end of the stretch of offices and the high wall of the barn. We sometimes housed our passengers there temporarily if they were due to leave or arrive in the middle of the night.
Several of the day’s sorties had already begun. The other nine-box had already left to collect the broodmares bound for Ireland. The two Southwell boxes’ spaces were empty also. Jogger was driving Phil’s box over to the barn for its overhaul.
I drew to a halt by the diesel pump and topped up the tanks.
Normally we refuelled on return in the evenings to avoid water problems from air condensing overnight in quarter-full tanks, a tip I’d learned from a pilot friend. We also hosed down the boxes at that point and cleaned the insides with disinfectant so they were fresh and ready to go in the mornings.
Brett, I noticed, had removed the remains of his picnic, but his solution to the stain on the bench-seat had been not to clean it off but to fold the horse rug and lay it along the seat to cover it. Typical, I thought.
In the offices, Isobel and Rose were consulting their machines, turning up the heaters and drinking coffee from the canteen next door. Rose said she had already given Brett his P45 and taken his mother’s address and was glad to be rid of him.
Rose, plumply middle-aged, kept the financial records, seeing to the pay packets, sending out bills, preparing cheques for my signature, keeping track of the pennies. Isobel, gentle, young, clearheaded, answered the telephone, took the bookings and chatted usefully with many trainers’ secretaries, harvesting advance notice of their stables’ requirements.
Rose and Isobel had an office each, in which they worked from eight-thirty to four. The third office, less busy-looking, less personal, was technically my own but was used just as much by Harve. The documentation of the boxes was kept in there, and also duplicates of the ignition keys, in a locked drawer.
In spite of the flu, in spite of Brett, in spite of Kevin Keith Ogden, that Friday’s work seemed to be going smoothly.
The driver due to transfer Jericho Rich’s six fillies to Newmarket had already arrived in the farmyard, as for some unspecified reason Michael Watermead had wanted them to leave his stable earlier in the morning than the load of two-year-olds the day before.
I explained to Nigel, the driver, that Michael wouldn’t be sending any of his own lads to care for the fillies (‘Jericho can whistle for favours, bloody man’) but that a car with a couple of lads would be coming over from the destination trainer in Newmarket.
‘They did the same yesterday with Brett and the day before with Harve, so you shouldn’t have any trouble,’ I said.
Nigel nodded.
‘And don’t pick up any corpses on the way home.’
He laughed. He was twenty-four, insatiably heterosexual, found life a joke and could call on inexhaustible stamina, his chief virtue in my eyes. Any time we needed long night-driving I sent him, if I could.
Trainers often had a favourite among the drivers, a particular man they knew and trusted. In Michael Watermead’s case, there was a driver called Lewis, at that moment warming his hands round a mug of tea and listening to Dave’s self-justifying account of the last ride of K. K. Ogden.
‘Didn’t he say anything?’ Lewis asked interestedly. ‘Just snuffed it?’
‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
Lewis agreed about that, nodding his close-cropped head. In his twenties, like the majority of the drivers, he was willing, resourceful and strong, with a tattoo of a dragon on one forearm and a reputed past as a biker. The rave-up history had raised my doubts to begin with, but he’d proved thoroughly reliable at the wheel of his glossy super-six box, and Michael, who had exacting standards, had taken to him firmly.
In consequence, Lewis drove prestigious horses to big meetings. The Watermead stable at that moment housed ‘Classic’ contenders, with representative runners in both the Guineas and Oaks; and all of the drivers had already put their money on the Watermead star three-year-old colt, Irkab Alhawa which, if all went well, Lewis would be driving to Epsom, in June, for the Derby.
He was, that morning, setting off to France to collect two two-year-olds that an owner had bought to be trained in Michael’s yard. As he was going alone, without a relief driver — agreed with Michael — he would have to take rest stops on the way and wouldn’t be back until Monday evening. He would sleep as usual in his cab, which he preferred.