I checked with him that he had the right documents and food and water for the two-year-olds, and watched him set off cheerfully on the errand.
Harve having gone through the rest of the day’s programme again with me, I set off myself towards chilly gale-swept Salisbury Plain to get to grips with the yo-yo shuttle which could take until evening and give me a headache. The headache would result from the voice and personality of the trainer on the move, a forceful lady in her fifties with the intonation and occasionally the vocabulary of a barrack-room parrot. I wanted nevertheless to please her, aiming for all her future business.
She strode across to the box when I pulled up in her yard and produced the first squawk of the day.
‘The boss himself!’ she proclaimed ironically, seeing my face. ‘Why the honour?’
‘Flu,’ I said succinctly. ‘Morning, Marigold.’
She peered beyond me to the empty passenger seats. ‘Didn’t you bring a handler? Your secretary said there would be two of you.’
‘He’s had to drive today. Sorry.’
She clicked her tongue in irritation. ‘Half my lads have got the bug. It’s a pest.’
I jumped down from the cab and lowered the two ramps while she watched and grumbled, a wiry figure in a padded jacket and woolly hat, her nose blue with cold. She was moving to Pixhill, she’d told the racing press, because it was warmer for the horses.
She’d made lists laying out the order in which her string was to travel. Her depleted force of lads led the horses up the ramps into the box and I bolted the partitions round them until the first nine were installed.
Marigold — Mrs English, as the lads called her — encouraged the loading with various raucous epithets and an overall air of impatience. I certainly could have done with Dave’s knack of imparting confidence to horses while leading them up ramps: Marigold’s method tended to frighten them upwards so that I bolted several of them quivering and wild-eyed into their stalls.
She had decided to drive herself in her car to Pixhill to be ready in the new yard when I and the horses arrived. Four of her lads travelled with me in the cab, all of them apparently enthusiastic over the move, the night-life of Pixhill being seen as hotly wicked when compared with the winds of Stonehenge.
Her new yard was an old yard in Pixhill, now modernised and enlarged. Its first nine inhabitants clattered down the ramps and were directed loudly to their new homes by Marigold with a list. I shovelled the droppings onto muck sacks supplied by her lads and put the wagon ship-shape for the second foray.
Pleased, Marigold told me that as I was doing the work myself she wouldn’t need to travel backwards and forwards all day to supervise and would entrust the next loading to me entirely. She gave me the list. I thanked her. She looked on me kindly. I thought with satisfaction that I would glue her to me as a permanent customer by nightfall.
With such profitable thoughts I set off back to Salisbury Plain and had my complacence shattered by Jogger on the phone.
‘Hi ho Silver,’ he said cheerfully, ‘we’ve got another couple of Lone Rangers.’
‘Jogger... you’ve lost me.’
‘Limpets,’ he said helpfully. ‘Barnacles. Stuck to the ships’ bottoms.’
‘Where are you, exactly?’ I asked.
‘In your office.’
‘Is there someone else with you?’
‘Nothing wrong with your uptake, is there? Do you want to talk to Constable Smith? He’s here now.’
‘Wait,’ I said, ‘do you mean what I think you mean? For Lone Rangers, do I understand... strangers?’
‘You got it.’
‘Like the cash box?’
‘Like, but not twins.’ Jogger paused, letting me hear a rumble from Sandy Smith’s familiar voice. ‘Constable Smith,’ Jogger said, ‘wants to know when you’ll be back. He says there was a warrant out for that stiff.’
Chapter 3
I spoke to Sandy.
‘What warrant? What for?’
‘Fraud. Dud cheques. Skipping hotels without paying. Petty stuff, mostly, it seems. The Nottingham police wanted him.’
‘Too bad,’ I said.
‘Had you ever seen him before, Freddie?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘He’d welshed on a bookie or two.’
People who failed to pay bookmakers weren’t necessarily my best buddies, as I pointed out.
‘No,’ Sandy agreed, ‘but he must have had something to do with racing if he asked for a lift in a horsebox.’
‘Dave said he was propositioning a tanker driver first. Maybe he had something to do with oil.’
‘Oh, very funny.’
‘Let me know the result of the post-mortem, will you?’
‘Well, all right, but I don’t expect I’ll get it today.’
‘Any time,’ I said. ‘Come in for a drink.’
He liked to do that, because sometimes I would keep him up to date with any local villainy I didn’t like the look of. On the other hand, the villainy going on on the undersides of my boxes needed more understanding before, or if ever, I told Sandy about it.
I spoke to Jogger again briefly, asking him to phone me without fail when he returned from Surrey.
‘Won’t hammer or bucket.’
With a sigh I heard him disconnect and reached Marigold’s old yard again before it clicked. Hammer and nail or bucket and pail.
Fail.
Most of the way I thought instead of the limpets and wondered what to do about them. I thought I might usefully set up an opportunity for advice without committing myself, so I pulled the horsebox into a roadside parking space, fished out my diary for the number and got through to the Security section of the Jockey Club in Portman Square in London, asking for the head man.
Everyone professionally engaged in racing knew Patrick Venables by name and most of them by sight. Transgressors wished they didn’t. Such sins as I’d been guilty of having luckily escaped his notice, I could go to him for help when I needed it and probably be believed.
Fortunately I found him in his office. I asked him if he would by any chance be going to Sandown races the next day.
‘Yes, but I’m also going this afternoon,’ he said. ‘If it’s urgent, come today.’
I explained about the flu and the driver shortage. ‘But I can drive one of my boxes to Sandown tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Right. Outside the weighing-room.’
‘Thanks very much.’
I resumed the journey, loaded the appointed horses, drove them and the two lads to join Marigold. She told me loudly I should have brought more than two lads with nine horses and I explained that her head lad had said two only, he’d had another one go home sick and he wasn’t feeling too well himself.
‘Blast the man,’ she screeched.
‘You can’t argue with a virus,’ I said pacifyingly.
‘I’ve got to get all the horses over here today,’ she yelled.
‘Yes, well, we will.’
I cleaned out the box, smiled reassuringly, shut up the ramps and made the third leg of the shuttle. Twenty-seven deliveries, I thought, seeing the third load rattle down the ramps into their new home, and supposedly two more trips to make, though the head lad had ominously told me Mrs English hadn’t counted right, she’d overlooked her own hack and two unbroken two-year-olds.
The yards were approximately thirty miles apart and each shuttle, with loading and unloading, was taking me two hours. By dusk at seven in the evening all but the oddments were safely settled in and Marigold for once looked tired. Her head lad had given best to the flu and gone home to bed and my own muscles were aching. When I suggested finishing the job early the next morning, the lady resignedly agreed. I tentatively kissed her cheek, an intimacy I would normally not have attempted, and to my utter astonishment her eyes filled with tears, instantly repudiated with a shake of her woolly-hatted head.