‘No,’ Dave said.
‘Or a reason for wanting a lift?’
‘His car had broken down,’ Dave explained. ‘He was at the South Mimms service station, pacing about and sweating round by the diesel pumps, trying to get the driver of an oil tanker to take him to Bristol.’
‘So?’
‘So, well, he had a fistful of readies but the tanker was going to Southampton.’
‘What were you doing by the diesel pumps anyway?’ I asked.
They’d had no need to take on more fuel, not just going to Newmarket and back.
‘We’d stopped there,’ Dave said vaguely.
‘Dave had a stomach ache,’ Brett enlarged. ‘The squits. We had to stop to get him something for it.’
‘Imodium,’ Dave confirmed, nodding. ‘I was just walking past the pumps on my way back, see?’
Bleakly I led the way into the house, going through the back door into the hall and then wheeling left into the big all-purpose room where I customarily spent much of my time. I drew back the curtains, revealing the horsebox out on the tarmac, and stood looking at it while I phoned the police.
The local constable who answered knew me well, as we’d both spent much of our lives in the racing centre of Pixhill, a big village verging on small town sprawling across a fold of downland in Hampshire, south of Newbury.
‘Sandy?’ I said briefly, when he answered. ‘This is Freddie Croft. I’ve a slight problem... One of my boxes picked up a hitchhiker who seems to have died on the journey. Do you mind coming over? He’s outside my house, not along at the farm.’
‘Dead, do you mean?’ he asked cautiously, after a pause.
‘I mean dead. As in not breathing.’
He cleared his throat. ‘You’re not having me on?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘Well, all right. Ten minutes.’
Pixhill’s token police force consisted of Sandy alone, a Wild West outpost on the frontiers of law and order. Pixhill’s police station consisted of an office-room in Sandy’s house, where his chief activity was writing up records of his daily patrols. Out of hours, like now, he would be watching television in scruffy clothes, drinking beer and casually cuddling his children’s mother, a plump lady perennially in bedroom slippers.
In the ten promised minutes before he sped importantly onto my tarmac in his official car with every available light flashing, I learned not much more about our unwelcome deceased guest.
‘How was I to know he’d die on us?’ Dave said aggrievedly as I put down the receiver. ‘Do someone a favour... Yeah, well I know you told us not to. But he was going on something chronic about how he had to get to Bristol for his daughter’s wedding or something...’
I looked at him in disbelief.
‘Yeah, well,’ Dave said defensively, ‘how was I to know?’
‘It was all Dave’s idea,’ Brett assured me.
‘Did you talk to him?’ I asked them.
‘Not that much,’ Dave said. ‘He chose that seat behind us, anyway. Didn’t seem to want to talk.’
‘I told Dave it was all wrong,’ Brett complained.
‘Shut up,’ Dave said angrily. ‘You could have refused to drive him. I didn’t notice you saying you wouldn’t.’
‘And neither of you noticed him dying, either?’ I suggested with irony.
The idea discomfited them, but no, it appeared, they hadn’t.
‘Thought he was asleep,’ Dave said, and Brett nodded. ‘So then,’ Dave went on, ‘when we couldn’t wake him... I mean, you saw how he looks... well, we’d just pulled off the motorway at the Newbury junction... we were going to drop him at the Chieveley service station there so he could get another lift on to Bristol... well... there he was, dead, and we couldn’t roll him out onto the ground, could we?’
They couldn’t, I agreed. So they’d brought him to my doorstep, like cats bringing home a dead bird.
‘Dave wanted to dump him somewhere,’ Brett whined virtuously. ‘Dave wanted to. It was me said we couldn’t.’
Dave glared at him. ‘We discussed it,’ he said, ‘that’s all we did.’
‘You’d have been in real trouble if you’d dumped him,’ I said, ‘and not just from me.’
Sandy, still buttoning himself hastily into his dark blue uniform, arrived at that moment to take charge in the slightly pompous manner he’d developed over the years. One look at the corpse set him summoning help over his radio, resulting presently in a doctor and a host of unanswerable questions.
The dead man did, it seemed, at least have a name, discovered via a walletful of addresses and credit cards. Sandy brought the wallet down from the cab and showed it to me, where I waited on the ground outside.
‘K. K. Ogden. Kevin Keith Ogden,’ he said, picking his way through the contents with stubby fingers. ‘Lives in Nottingham. Mean anything to you?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Never heard of him.’
He hadn’t expected anything else.
‘What did he die of?’ I asked.
‘A stroke maybe. Doc won’t say before the post-mortem. No sign of foul play, if that’s what you mean.’
The archaic words ‘foul play’ had always seemed faintly ridiculous to me, but in this case I was grateful to hear them.
‘I can use the box tomorrow, then?’ I asked.
‘Don’t see why not.’ He thought it over judiciously. ‘You might want to clean it, like.’
‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Always do.’
He looked at me sideways. ‘I thought you had a rule never to give lifts.’
‘Dave and Brett are in big trouble.’
With a glimmer of sympathy for the two men, he looked across to where they waited by the house door and said, ‘You didn’t get your iron- fist reputation for nothing, Freddie.’
‘What about the velvet glove bit?’
‘Uh huh. That too.’
Sandy at forty had thickened round the waist and softened to puffiness of cheek and jaw, but the resulting air of rustic unintelligence was misleading. His superiors at one time had posted him away from Pixhill, in accordance with their belief that a policeman became too cosy and forgiving if left too long in one small neighbourhood, and had sent cruising cars in from outside to do his rounds. In Sandy’s absence, however, the petty crime rate of Pixhill had soared while the detection rate plummeted, and after a while P.C. Sandy Smith had been quietly reinstated, to the overall dismay of the mildly wicked.
Smart young Dr Bruce Farway, a recent Pixhill arrival who had already alienated half his patients by patronising them insufferably, climbed down with agility from the cab and told me brusquely not to disturb the body before he could arrange for its removal.
‘I can’t imagine why I should want to,’ I said mildly.
He eyed me with disfavour. We’d disliked each other on sight a few months ago and he’d not forgiven me for disagreeing with his diagnosis on one of my drivers and paying for a private second opinion that had proved him wrong. No humility and precious little humanity could be diagnosed in Bruce Farway, though he could be nice to sick children, I’d heard.
Leaving him issuing brisk instructions over his car phone, Sandy and I went across to the house where he took brief statements from Dave and Brett. There was bound to be an inquest, he informed them, but it shouldn’t take up much of their time.
Too much, I thought crossly, and they both unerringly read my expression. I told them I’d see them in the morning. They weren’t comforted, it seemed.
Not much later, Sandy freed them to walk away down to the pub where they would spread their news item through the local lightning grapevine. Sandy shut his notebook, gave me an insouciant grin and drove back to his house to phone the hitchhiker’s home town police force. Only Bruce Farway remained, impatiently waiting out by his car for the arrival of Kevin Keith Ogden’s onward transport. I went out to him, for an update.