The pit was five feet deep. Standing upright, my direct line of sight was roughly level with the ankles of Sandy, Harve and Michael. Bruce Farway was behind me. For a petrifying second, a primitive instinct warned me against standing up with my neck sticking out of a hole in the ground and I turned quickly but saw Farway harmlessly writing in a small notebook, and felt foolish.
I hauled myself up the ladder out of the pit and asked Harve how he’d happened to find Jogger at that particular time.
Harve shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just wandered round the yard, like I often do. The boxes working today had all left. I was here earlier checking them out, see, to make sure. Then to waste time, sort of, while I was waiting for lunch to be ready, I walked round again.’
I nodded. Harve liked to be on his feet always, and on the move.
‘So then I noticed the lights were on in the barn,’ he said, ‘and I thought I might save us a bit of electricity so I walked over here thinking that I hadn’t seen anyone come over here earlier. No one needed to. I wasn’t worried, see, only I just came over for a look around and, like I said, to switch the lights off.’ He paused. ‘Don’t ask me why I got as far over as the pit. I don’t know why. I just did it.’
The pit in fact was well over to the far side of the barn, expressly to stop people stepping over its edge unawares. A large roll-back door at one end of the barn made it possible to drive a horsebox straight in over the pit. The small door nearest the farmyard, which people on foot used, opened into a general workshop area, with tools kept in a large locked store in one corner.
I asked, ‘Do you think Jogger was lying here all the time while drivers came in to work and took the boxes out?’
Harve was troubled. ‘I don’t know. He could have been. Gives you the shudders, doesn’t it?’
‘The post-mortem will tell us, eh, Bruce?’ Michael said, and Bruce, preening slightly at the intimacy of the use of his first name, agreed that speculation could be safely left for that event.
Michael caught the satirical glance I gave in his direction and came very close to a wink. The winning over of the doctor was clearly succeeding.
Farway and Sandy between them produced their mobile phones and summoned the necessary cohorts. Michael asked if he could use the phone in my office. Help yourself, I said, it’s open. He sauntered off on his errand and when Harve and I followed, feeling upset and insecure, Michael was saying, ‘Damned shame for poor old Freddie,’ into Isobel’s phone, the first one he’d come to, and ‘Oh, accidental, undoubtedly. Must go now. See you.’
He rang off, said thanks and goodbye and left smiling with universal benignity, happy in the knowledge that he wouldn’t have to feel any personal repercussions from Jogger’s death.
‘What do you reckon?’ Harve asked as we reached our jointly-used sanctum and paused for consideration.
‘Do you believe he fell in?’ I asked.
‘Don’t want to think of the alternative.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘But if he didn’t fall...’
He left the words hanging, and so did I.
I said, ‘Who was in the pub last night with Jogger?’
Harve began answering automatically, ‘Sandy, of course. Dave was bound to be... I wasn’t...’ He broke off, aghast. ‘Do you mean... who was in the pub to hear him talking about aliens under the lorries? You can’t mean... you can’t...’
I shook my head, though how could one help wondering?
‘We’ll wait for the cause-of-death report,’ I said. ‘If it’s proved he skidded on a patch of oil and fell and hit his neck on the edge of the pit — which is possible — we’ll decide then what to do.’
‘But that cash box hiding place was empty,’ Harve insisted. ‘No one would kill Jogger just because he’d found an empty thing like that. They wouldn’t. It can’t be anything like that.’
‘No,’ I said.
Harve stared worriedly out at the row of horseboxes.
‘When I found him,’ he said, ‘I went back home and phoned your personal line from there, but I got your answering machine saying you’d phone back soon, like it does when you’re only going to be away an hour or two. But, well, I didn’t think it could wait, so I phoned Sandy. Was that all right?’
‘The only thing you could do.’
‘We didn’t know where you were. In the end we tried Isobel and she said she thought you’d be at the Watermeads’, as Nigel had told her you were going to lunch there when he phoned to say the daughter had mixed up the departure time. It seems Tessa told Nigel. So Sandy said he’d go round and fetch you.’
‘Mm.’ News travelled in Pixhill in dizzying spirals.
Harve began showing troubled signs of indecision, which from our long proximity I identified immediately as doubt over whether or not he should tell me something I might not want to hear.
‘Spit it out,’ I said resignedly.
‘Oh! Well... Nigel said Tessa wanted to go to Newmarket with him, with the fillies. She climbed into the box and sat ready in the passenger seat.’
‘I hope he didn’t take her.’
‘No, but he was flummoxed. I mean, he had you on one side threatening the sack to anyone giving lifts, and her on the other side, the trainer’s daughter, wanting a ride.’ He paused. ‘She’s a proper little madam, that girl, and Nigel’s a sexy hunk, so my wife says, and... don’t take me wrong... I thought you’d better know.’
‘I’m grateful,’ I said with truth. ‘That’s a mess we can do without. I don’t want to lose Michael Watermead’s work just because his daughter fancies one of our drivers. We’d better not send Nigel there again, though it’s damned annoying, to say the least.’
Lewis, of course, was Michael’s driver of choice, but very often Watermead horses needed more than one box. Not being able to send Nigel cut down my options.
Harve said with humour, ‘We could put Pat on the extra Watermead runs, when she’s better, and your temporary replacement could do any before that.’
‘Good thinking!’ I stifled too broad a smile and made a note for Isobel to allocate Nigel chiefly to Marigold English, whose pulses he might race to good effect.
In time, a police car crept carefully through the gates, bringing CID investigators, an official doctor and a photographer. Harve and I went out to the barn, where Sandy was showing Jogger to his plain-clothes colleagues and Bruce Farway was talking importantly to his police counterpart. The official photographer took bright flash official photographs from the same angles as my own.
A statement from Harve about finding the body was taken down and read out to him in the curiously stilted English such proceedings seemed to incur. Harve signed the result even though the words weren’t his own, and Farway, Sandy and I confirmed that the body was as we’d found it, and that nothing had been added or subtracted from the scene.
Sandy’s colleagues were impersonal, without humour. All fatal accidents had to be thoroughly investigated, they said, and there would be further questions, no doubt, on the morrow.
The same black hearse that had collected Kevin Keith Ogden, or one very like it, arrived in the farmyard, and presently another finished life left my land under canvas and straps in a metal coffin.
The police, unsmiling, followed. Farway, Sandy and I watched them go, I, at least, with relief.
‘All very sad,’ Farway said with a certain briskness, not caring one way or the other.
‘A local character,’ Sandy said, nodding.
Not much of an epitaph, I thought. I said, ‘Sandy, when you drove Jogger home last night, was it in your car or his?’
‘Last night? My car. That old wreck of a van will still be at the pub.’
‘That old wreck is actually mine,’ I told him. ‘I’ll collect it later. Do you still have the keys?’