They were in his house, it seemed, for safekeeping. I said I would pick them up shortly and with a sigh of relief he left to salvage the remains of his Sunday off.
Bruce Farway followed, not wasting on me any of the slightly fawning regard he’d lavished on Michael or the police doctor, merely nodding a cool farewell. Harve walked back to his own house for his long-postponed lunch and I wandered round in the barn, staring into the now empty pit and checking that nothing in the tool store was out of place.
The tool store was a spacious twenty feet by ten, windowless. I unlocked the wide door, switched on the light and stood looking at Jogger’s domain; at the pair of heavy-duty hydraulic jacks, the vast array of spanners and wrenches, the labelled boxes of spare parts, the rolls of cable, the chains, cans of oil, drums of grease, a set of six new Michelin tyres waiting for installation.
The floor was filthy but the tools were clean, often the way with Jogger. As far as I could see, nothing had disturbed the general tidiness he miraculously maintained in the storeroom. The truck in contrast would contain a hopeless-looking jumble from which he would nevertheless pluck just the pliers he needed.
I switched off the light, locked the store, and walked out beside the long workbench in the barn, a sturdy shelf which bore nothing at that moment but a small and a large vice, both bolted on. There were no tools anywhere lying about. Nothing a man could trip over, however drunk.
Morosely I left the barn, turning off the lights but as usual not locking the door to the yard. Enough was enough, I’d always thought. We kept the tools locked away and there was the padlock on the outer gate. Security could become an obsession, and anyway I’d been guarding against thieves, not against smugglers.
Not against murder.
I shied painfully away from that word. I couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.
Murder couldn’t happen. Not to Jogger. Not because of an empty cash box and two empty tubes. Not because he’d shot his mouth off down at the boozer.
I had a sense of jumping to over-dramatic conclusions. It would be best to wait for the post-mortem findings.
I sat in the office thinking of Jogger: not of the manner of his death, but of the man he had been.
A loner, an old soldier, a driver of army trucks whose only active service war zone had been the Northern Irish border. He almost never spoke of it, though his mates in a truck ahead of him had been blown apart by a bomb.
I’d acquired his services as a fixture or fitting along with the farmyard and the horseboxes, the transaction apparently to his liking: and I’d counted myself lucky to have him and didn’t now know where I would find anyone else as expert, undemanding and committed.
I mourned him also simply, without self interest. Grieved for him as a man. In his own way he’d been a whole person, not needing what others might think he lacked. No one should impose their own perception of fulfilment on anyone else.
A little later, when the afternoon faded to dark, I walked down to Sandy’s house and collected the keys of Jogger’s van. Sandy gave them to me without question: I signed for them merely, as Sandy knew the van belonged to me. It didn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps a couple of keys on the ring were Jogger’s own. Continuing on, I walked to the pub that Jogger favoured and duly found the van in the car park there. At first sight there was nothing wrong with it. On second sight, I found that the two rear doors were slightly ajar, and inside, where there should have been the slider and a jumble of tools in a big red plastic crate, there was nothing but rusty dust on the bare metal floor.
I sighed. A whole pubful of people had seen Sandy take Jogger home, leaving a vanful of easy pickings behind him. I supposed I should be pleased that the van itself hadn’t gone too, and that it still had wheels, tyres, petrol and an engine.
I drove it the short distance to Jogger’s quarters, which I so far knew only externally as a rickety looking garage with an upper storey.
In some distant past, the place had been a chauffeur’s lodging, although the house it had served had long gone. Keeping me up to date on developments, for months and months Jogger had conducted a running battle with good souls on the local council who wanted to declare the building unfit for habitation, Jogger maintaining that his home was as it always had been and that it was the council whose ideas had changed. I thought that one could probably defend even a cave on those terms, but Jogger’s strong and quasi-logical indignation had to date won him the day.
I laboriously opened one of the old creaking wooden front garage doors, leaving the van outside and letting enough street-lamp in to show me the empty space inside. The way to Jogger’s room, he’d said, lay across the garage and up some narrow stairs by the back wall, and up there I came to a flimsy door that opened easily when I tried the handle. No need for keys. I found a light switch and stepped for the first time into Jogger’s private world, feeling both that it was a terrible intrusion and also that he would have wanted someone to care enough to go there, to see it for him one last time and make sure there was no desecration.
Jogger’s home was as he’d left it, a mess untouched by whoever had stolen the tools. He’d earned good money for years yet had evidently chosen to live as if poverty breathed down his neck, his sagging armchair covered with a grubby old tablecloth, the table covered with newspaper, the floor with linoleum. The army might once have coerced him into spit-and-polish in general, but only in his work had that training prevailed over what I guessed might have been the familiar manner of his childhood. This was the way he felt comfortable, this his old shoes.
There was no kitchen, merely a few mugs and plates on top of a chest of drawers with tea, sugar, dried milk and biscuits in packets alongside. The one drawer I opened revealed a tangle of old clothes. The suit and shirt he wore for driving were draped on a hanger on a hook on the back of the door.
His bed, a matter of jumbled khaki-coloured blankets on a divan, was by conventional standards unmade. Impossible to tell whether or not he’d slept there during the past night.
I realised that the place wasn’t as cold as the day outside and came across the first sign of luxury, a small convection heater taking the edge off nature. There was also a colour television, three crates of beer, a shining electric kettle and a telephone. Against one wall leaned a stack of mildly pornographic magazines, representing one copy a week for a couple of years, and in a shoebox on a shelf I came across his birth certificate, his army discharge papers and the pass-book of a building society, the total of his savings raising my eyebrows and showing exactly what he’d done with his pay packets.
I left his papers where I’d found them and looked into a sketchy bathroom which was what I by then expected, hardly spotless but not disgusting, basic with throwaway razors and a gap-toothed comb.
Walking back through his room I left everything as it was, including the heater. The whole place still smelled of him, of oil, earth and dust. While his smell remained, so would he. The worthy council would sweep it all away soon enough.
I locked his door, closed the outer garage door and drove the van to the farmyard wondering why Jogger had gone to the barn without keys or his wheels... and when... and how... and who with?
In the offices, Jogger’s log-book lay on Isobel’s desk, ready for her to type the details into the computer. I took the book with me into my own office and sat reading what Jogger had written.
The bare bones of the trip only. No comments. No frills. He’d collected four named steeplechasers from a Pixhill stable and driven them down the M4 to Chepstow races. Time of leaving base, time of pick-up, time of arrival, time of departure from racecourse, time of delivery back at stable, time of return to base. Diesel intake recorded in litres. Odometer readings entered. Cleaning completed. Total number of hours worked. Number of those hours spent behind the wheel.