‘Er, no, Jogger. What about Pat’s box?’
Pat’s box, smaller, took four horses. Five of the fleet were that size, handy, less thirsty, the runabouts. In the Flat racing season, Pat’s box was retained full time by another Pixhill trainer with a phobia about sharing journeys with other trainers’ horses. Pat’s box went often to France, though not with her driving.
‘Under there,’ Jogger said, ‘is another tube, the same size. It’s empty. It has a screw-on cap, too, and the cap is there, on that one.’
‘Been there awhile?’ I asked. ‘Dirty?’
‘Natch.’
‘I’ll maybe take a look in the morning. And Jogger, keep it to yourself, will you? If you spread it around the boozer you’ll frighten off whoever stuck the things there, and we’ll never have a chance of finding out what’s going on.’
He could see the point of that. He said he’d be as silent as the wash (wash and shave; grave) and again I wondered if his reticence would outlast the evening’s pints.
On Saturday morning early, I drove one of the four-boxes to Salisbury Plain, collected Marigold’s oddment horses and delivered them to her by nine, realising along the way that I’d forgotten to take with me her lads’ lunch carrier bag. When I mentioned it to her, she enquired loudly of her employees about ownership but received no claims.
‘Throw it away,’ she counselled. ‘I’m sending horses to Doncaster. You can take them, I hope?’
Doncaster races, twelve days ahead, represented the prestigious opening of the Flat season. I assured her I’d be delighted to take anything she wanted.
‘In a box on their own,’ she added. ‘I don’t want them picking up other stables’ germs. My horses never share transport.’
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Good.’ She brought forth a smile, more a matter of eyes than of lips: as good a pledge as shaking hands on a contract.
Home again I drank coffee, ate cornflakes, talked to Harve, talked to Jogger (‘Didn’t say a dicky bird down the boozer’.) and checked the day’s list, again juggling the dearth of drivers and pressing Dave and Jogger again into behind-the-wheel service.
Rather against his will, I redrafted Phil into the nine-box and took his super-six myself, picking up jumpers from three different stables and delivering them and their lads to Sandown racecourse for the afternoon’s sport.
Over Sandown’s fences I’d ridden more winners than I could remember, its testing course so imprinted in my subconscious that I could probably have ridden it blindfold and had certainly navigated its intricacies familiarly in countless dreams. Of all courses, it evoked in me the strongest nostalgia for the close world I’d lost, the intimate body-to-body blending with a non-human powerhouse, the mind-into-mind flowing of courage and intent. One could speak to strangers of race-riding as being a ‘job like any other’ but the slightest introspection gave that the lie. Racing on horses over jumps at thirty or more miles an hour was, to me at least, a spiritual exaltation never achieved or even envisioned in any other way. To each his religion, I supposed. Big horses over big fences had been mine.
Nowadays at Sandown I felt excommunicated; no doubt a blasphemy, but a deep truth nevertheless.
I met Patrick Venables outside the weighing-room, as he’d promised.
The head of racing’s Security Service, a tall thin man with suitably hawk-like eyes, had in his time, one understood, been ‘something in counter-espionage,’ no details ever supplied. Racecourse wits said he’d been sired by a lie-detector out of a leech, in that one couldn’t fool him or shake him off.
Like others in his job before him, he ran the comparatively small Security section with brisk efficiency and was largely responsible for the reasonably honest state of racing, sniffing out new scams almost before they were invented.
He greeted me with the usual skin-deep friendliness, never to be mistaken for trust. Looking at his watch he said, ‘Five minutes, Freddie. Is that enough?’
Condense it, he meant, and, faced with his deadline and obvious lack of time, I began to retreat from asking his advice.
‘Well, it doesn’t matter really,’ I said lamely.
My hesitancy, instead of releasing him, seemed to switch on his attention. He told me to follow him into the weighing-room and led me through to a small inner office containing a table, two chairs and very little else.
He closed the door. ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and fire away.’
I told him about the three containers Jogger had so far found under the boxes. ‘I don’t know how long they’ve been there or what they contained. My mechanic says he can’t swear he won’t find more, as they’re pretty well camouflaged.’ I paused briefly. ‘Has anyone else come across anything like this?’
He shook his head. ‘Not that I know of. Have you told the police?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Curiosity, I suppose. I want to find out who’s been using me, and what for.’
He pondered, studying my face. ‘You’re using me as insurance,’ he said eventually, ‘in case one of your boxes is caught smuggling.’
I didn’t deny it. ‘I’d like to catch them myself, though.’
‘Mm.’ He pursed his mouth. ‘I’d have to advise you not to.’
I protested, ‘I can’t just do nothing.’
‘Let me think about it.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘I suppose,’ he frowned, ‘this hasn’t anything to do with the man who died in one of your boxes? I heard about that.’
‘I don’t really know.’ I told him about the masked searcher. ‘I don’t know what he was looking for. If it was the dead man’s belongings, he wouldn’t have had any success because the police had them all. But then I wondered if he’d been leaving anything. And he had dirt and dust on his clothes, which was why I wondered if he’d been on the ground, and why I asked my mechanic to see if he’d stuck anything on the box underneath.’
‘And you think he had?’
‘No. The container under there had been in place for some time. It was filthy, with layers of grime.’
I told him that the box I had driven to Sandown that day had a capacious tube stuck above the fuel tank. ‘You can’t see it at all easily even if you’re looking for it, up from underneath,’ I explained. ‘Horseboxes are all coach built so that the sides are nearer the ground than the chassis. For aerodynamics and good looks. I expect you know that. Mine are built in Lambourn. They’re very good. Anyway, the sides hide and shield the underside mechanisms, same as cars. Bombs can be hidden there.’
‘I do understand,’ he assured me. ‘Are bombs what you fear?’
‘I suppose drugs are more likely.’
Patrick Venables looked at his watch and stood up. ‘Have to go,’ he said. ‘Come back to the weighing-room after the last race.’
My nod of agreement was made to his departing back. I wondered what he would make of it; shrug it off or take a look. Sometime during the afternoon he would decide, but in telling him I’d come to my own conclusion, that I really did need and mean to find out what was going on, with or without his help.
I went outside and spent a good deal of the afternoon in conversation, useful sometimes for business but a far cry from the urgency of race-riding, changing colours, weighing out and in, hurrying, racing, changing colours... Oh, well. On the good side, I no longer starved to remain artificially thin, no longer broke my bones and hid large bruises, no longer feared losing big races, good owners, my nerve or my job. I was now free in a way I’d never been and reflected that if I still had to please owners and trainers, then to prosper almost everyone had to please someone; performers, the paying public, presidents and prime ministers, their population.