In the summer I shipped many horses for Arab clients, most of whose employees fumbled along in hopelessly tongue-tied or nonexistent English. A driver who could converse with them, and could also feel at home in France, seemed too good to be true.
‘How good are you with horses?’ I asked.
He seemed uncertain. ‘I thought you wanted a driver-mechanic.’
No one after all was perfect. ‘Horsebox drivers are better if they can handle horses.’
‘I’d... er... learn.’
It wasn’t as easy as he thought, but it didn’t rule him out.
‘I’ve told everyone I’ll go with them on a test drive before deciding who gets the job,’ I said. ‘You came last, can you wait?’
‘All day,’ he said.
The test drives were important because the cargo had to go steadily on its feet. Two of the applicants were jerky with brakes and gears, one was very slow, the fourth I would have engaged if he’d been the only remaining choice.
I found, as I climbed into the super-six cab beside Aziz, that I already intended to give him the job on the strength of his languages and his mechanical experience, just as long as he was half-way proficient at driving. He proved in fact not dazzling but at least smooth and careful, and my mind was made up long before we returned to the farmyard.
‘When can you start?’ I asked, as he braked to a halt.
‘Tomorrow.’ He gave me another flashing smile, all eyes and teeth, and said he would work hard.
I thanked the other applicants who were waiting hopefully and got them to give their names to Isobel, in case. They went away disappointed. Isobel and Rose met Aziz with fascination and a visible increase in femininity, and Nigel, it was plain, had found strong competition.
Three months’ trial, subject to his references being OK, I suggested, offering appropriate pay and conditions. Rose said she would put him into her computer, asking for his address. He would rent a room in the village, he said, and let her know later. Rose tentatively told him where Brett had stayed: the room might still be available. Aziz thanked her, listened to her directions, and drove off cheerfully, as he’d come, in a very old, well-tended small-sized Peugeot.
I wondered how much one could really tell of a person by the car they drove. Sunday’s Nina matched her Mercedes; Monday’s Nina, her old runabout. Aziz seemed too strong a character for his wheels. I, on the other hand, owned a Jaguar XJS, loved and left over from the jockey days. I took it still to race meetings but moved around Pixhill in a workhorse four-wheel drive Fourtrak. Perhaps everyone, I thought in passing, had a two-car personality, and wondered what Aziz would drive from choice.
To be prudent, I checked his references. The London garage he’d worked for said he knew his job but had left some time ago. The trainer whose private horsebox he had driven proved to have gone out of business recently in financial difficulties. Aziz Nader had been a satisfactory employee but everyone on the payroll had lost their jobs.
While I was on the phone two cars arrived together, not, as it transpired, in tandem but both on fact-finding missions. The first disgorged the press in the shape of a spindly young man with a large nose and a spiral notebook; the second, the area bloodhounds in plain clothes, different men from the day before. I went out without enthusiasm to greet them. There were no smiles, no handshakes, merely minimal introductions, badges flapped in my face. No one seemed intent on overfriendliness or engaging my best help trustingly. Both press and police subsequently asked invasive and borderline-rude questions with visible scepticism at my answers.
Apart from Sandy, my experiences with the larger police world had been few but enough to show me one should never say a word to them that one didn’t have to, on the probability of being adjudged guilty of any old thing before conclusively proved innocent, and very likely after. One should also never, ever, on any account, make jokes. Not even to Sandy. The police, to my mind, had only themselves to blame for the public’s prevalent mistrust of them, great chaps though no doubt most of them were. Pouncing, however, came as a natural instinct to them alclass="underline" they wouldn’t have been effective without it. No one that I knew of, particularly if innocent, cared to be prey.
The pressman seemed to see his role as being Washington Post-type investigative journalism. The police, to my quiet amusement, saw him as a nuisance who would do no investigating at all if they could help it. I listened to them match verbal swords until the young man retreated discomfited to wait in his motor and the force produced notebooks of their own.
‘Now, sir,’ they began, an opener full of menace if ever there was one, ‘you will hand over the house keys of the man found dead here yesterday, if you please.’
I would have given them Jogger’s keys willingly. The brusqueness of their demand reinforced my hovering antagonism and ensured I didn’t help them as I might have done, as I should have done, no doubt.
Without a word, though, I went back to the office, finding them following me with sharp suspicious eyes as if I were planning to destroy evidence, given half a chance. Isobel and Rose both watched the procession with open mouths. I didn’t bother with introductions.
The two plain-clothes men drew up beside my desk. I opened a drawer, brought out Jogger’s keys and removed his house keys from the ring.
They took the keys without comment and asked what Jogger had been doing in the farmyard on a Sunday morning. I replied that all my employees could come and go in the farmyard on any errand they cared to, Sundays included, as it was a workday.
They asked me about Jogger’s drinking habits. I said he had never turned up drunk for work. Apart from that, it was his own affair.
If Jogger had been drunk when he fell into the pit, I thought, the post-mortem would show it. Speculation was pointless, really.
The elder of the two policemen next asked if anyone had been present with Jogger when he fell. Not that I knew of, I said. Had I, personally, been there? No. Had I been to the farmyard on Saturday night after ten o’clock or on Sunday morning at any time? No.
I asked why they were asking such questions and was told that all accidents had to be investigated, of course. The coroner would want answers at the inquest. In police experience, he chillingly added, people with information could remain silent so as not to become involved. I refrained from asking whose fault he thought that might be.
The interview proceeded for several more minutes without fruit to either side, as far as I could see. They watched me keenly while telling me they would be making enquiries from my employees. I nodded neutrally, taking it for granted.
They asked for a list of all drivers who had been working on Saturday or Sunday. I took them along to Isobel’s office and asked her for a computer print-out of the times everyone had left and returned.
She shook her head disgustedly.
‘Look, Freddie,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I can’t get a thing out of the computer today. When I’ve sorted it out, I’ll do the records straight away.’ She picked up a pile of log-books. ‘The information is all in here, it’s just a matter of typing it.’
‘Sure,’ I said, easily. ‘Can you just write down the names, for a start? Using old-fashioned pencil and paper?’
Obligingly she wrote the names from the log-book covers and handed the list to the policeman who took it stolidly. When they’d gone Isobel made a face after them. ‘They might have said thanks, even if I did balls up the computer.’
‘Yes, they might.’
The spindly pressman came out of his car like a rabbit from his hole once the police car had driven away and I spent the next ten minutes assuring him that Jogger had been a great mechanic, his loss would be sorely felt, the police had been investigating the accident, we would have to wait the result of their enquiries, and so on and so on, a whole lot of platitudes but the truth as far as it went. He drove away finally in dissatisfaction, but I couldn’t help that.