A quick look at my watch showed I’d drifted through much of lunchtime without remembering my intention of organising the Jogger memorial pints in the pub, so I scooted down there at once to talk to the landlord.
He, comfortably fat with a beer belly of his own, presided over a no-frills house geared to the psychological comfort of those made uneasy by too much luxury. He pleased a clientele of both stable workers and austere local intellects, talking easily with both groups.
‘Old Jogger was harmless,’ he pronounced. ‘Got pissed regular on Saturdays. Not the first time Sandy’s driven him home. Sandy’s a good fellow, I’ll say that for him. What can I do for you?’
Make a list, I said, of everyone who had been in the pub with Jogger on his last night and give each of them two or three pints in his memory.
‘Very decent of you, Freddie,’ he said, and began his list there and then, starting off with Sandy Smith and adding Dave and Nigel and two others of my drivers and proceeding to lads from almost every stable in Pixhill, including a new bunch from Marigold English’s yard, individual names unknown. ‘They’d asked in the village for the best pub,’ he told me complacently, ‘and were steered here to me.’
‘Quite right,’ I said. ‘Get their names and we’ll make a sort of memorial scroll and frame it and hang it here on your wall for a bit.’
The landlord became enthusiastic. ‘We’ll do old Jogger proud,’ he said. ‘He’d be tickled pink.’
‘Um,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘I suppose he didn’t leave any famous last words?’
‘ “Same again!” ’ the landlord said, smiling broadly. ‘Same again’ were his favourite words. ‘He’d been rambling on about aliens under your lorries, I ask you, but by the time he left, “same again” was about all he could manage. But always the gentleman, that Jogger, never any trouble when he’d had a skinful, never fighting drunk like that Dave.’
‘Dave?’ I asked in astonishment. ‘Do you mean my Dave?’
‘Sure. He’ll take a swing at anyone, given enough ale on board. He never connects, mind you, he can’t see straight by then. I stop serving him then, of course, and tell him to go home. Sandy takes him home too, sometimes, when he’s too far gone even to balance on that bike. A good lad, Sandy. Pretty good for a copper.’
‘Yes,’ I said, and gave him a cash advance for the memorial pints, promising the rest after the list had been drawn up and everyone served.
‘How about it if we get their own signatures, then? Make it more personal. Start tonight, shall I?’
‘Great idea,’ I said, ‘but put their full names beside the signatures, so everyone will know who was here.’
‘Will do.’
I bought a home-made Cornish pasty from him for a take-away lunch and left him as he began to seek out a sheet of paper worthy of the roll of honour.
During the afternoon I went through the latest print-out of the accounts with Rose and then with Isobel’s input drew up my own sort of pencil-and-paper chart for the week. While Isobel was still in my office I inadvertently kicked the carrier left by Marigold English’s lads, and, picking it up, I asked Isobel to throw it away.
She took it out of the office but in a few minutes came back, undecided.
‘There’s quite a good thermos flask in that carrier. I thought it was too good to throw away so I took it into the canteen in case one of the drivers would like it. And... well... would you come and look?’
She seemed puzzled enough for me to follow her along to the canteen to see what was on her mind. She’d taken out the packet of sandwiches and laid them on the draining-board of the sink there, and she’d unscrewed the flask and removed the top from the vacuum bottle inside. She’s poured most of the contents away into the sink, and found more in the flask than liquid.
I looked where she pointed, though there was no missing what was worrying her. Lying in the sink were four glass containers, each a small tube three and a half inches long, more than a centimetre in diameter, amber in colour with a black stopper fastened on with what looked like waterproof adhesive tape.
‘They fell out when I poured,’ Isobel said. ‘What are they?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
The tubes were covered with the opaque milky liquid that had been in the flask. I picked up the flask and looked into it and, finding some of the liquid still inside, poured it into a canteen mug.
Two more tubes fell into the mug.
The liquid was cold and smelled faintly of milky coffee.
‘Don’t drink it!’ Isobel exclaimed in alarm as I raised the mug to my nose.
‘Just smelling it,’ I said.
‘It’s coffee, isn’t it?’
‘I’d think so.’
I took a paper plate from the stack always ready to hand and put the four tubes from the sink onto it. Then onto a canteen tray I put the plate, the mug, the thermos, its screw-on top and the packet of sandwiches, and with the carrier itself under my arm took the whole lot along to my desk in my office, Isobel following.
‘Whatever can they be?’ she asked for about the fourth time, and all I could say was that I would find out.
With a paper towel, I cleared the milky residue off one of the tubes. There were a few numbers etched into the glass which at first raised expectations, but all they announced was the containers’ capacity, 10 cc.
I held the tube up to the light and tipped it up and down. Its contents were liquid and transparent but moved more sluggishly than water.
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Isobel asked, agog.
I shook my head. ‘Not just now.’ I put the tube back on the plate and pushed the tray away as if it weren’t important. ‘Let’s get back to work and I’ll decide about this stuff later.’
The tray to one side and with Isobel gradually losing interest in it, we finished my preliminary pencil-and-paper chart and Isobel went back to her office to bring it up to date in the computer.
She was back in my doorway within five minutes, looking very frustrated, dressed for going home at the end of her shift.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘The computer is totally on the blink. I can’t do a thing with it, nor can Rose. Can you get that man to fix it?’
‘OK,’ I said, stretching a hand to the phone book. ‘Thanks for everything and see you in the morning.’
Before I could find the number, my glance fell on the small glass phials on the tray, and instead of summoning the computer man, I phoned my sister.
Chapter 5
She was, as usual, hard to find. I left messages for her all over the physics department of Edinburgh University and in the administrative section there and the affiliated research laboratories and in an observatory, and tried the Rector’s wife’s private line, all numbers left over from former searches. No results.
Waiting until she went home in the evenings was fruitless as she spent all her time in inaccessible meetings and committees, and catching her between waking and departure in the mornings fine-tuned things to a variable five minutes. ‘Please ask her to phone Freddie’: after six attempts I gave up and went back to raising the computer people a dozen or so miles up the road.
From that effort I got the number-unobtainable noise and also presently a voice assuring me that the line had been disconnected. Trying again produced the same result. Irritated, I phoned my barber who operated four shops along from the computers, and asked what was going on.
‘They vanished overnight one day last week,’ he told me in carefree tones. ‘Did a bunk. Just upped and scarpered. Took everything, left the place bare. We’re all struggling along here since they put our rents up diabolically and I shouldn’t wonder if the shoeshop doesn’t go next.’