It was a good six months since I’d taken the train to her Scottish door to spend two days with her. Two days compressed six months’ conversation into a span she preferred. Her one-night trip to Pixhill was typical; she would never sit still for a week.
Thinking about her, I sat on at the farmyard until Nina came back, her box empty, the runners safely returned to their stable. She parked by the pumps and filled the tanks and came yawning over to the office to put the day’s log through the letter-box, as she’d been asked.
I went out to meet her. ‘How did it go?’ I asked.
‘Utterly uneventful in any meaningful way. Fascinating in others. Has anything happened here?’
I shook my head. ‘Not really. The police came again about Jogger. I arranged his memorial at the pub, we should get a good list of names tomorrow. The computer’s acting up. And after you’ve cleaned that horsebox I’ve something to show you.’
She glanced in disfavour at the dusty vehicle. ‘Do you really mean I should clean it?’
‘Harve will expect it. Inside and out.’
She gave me an old-fashioned sideways look of irony. ‘I don’t think Patrick Venables intended this at all.’
‘Under cover is under cover,’ I said mildly. ‘If I do it for you and Harve comes back in the middle, my authority in this place is down the drain with the disinfectant.’
To do her justice, she complained no more but drove the box to the cleaning area and attacked it with the pressurised water, squeegeeing until the windows shone.
Harve did in fact return while she was busy and took her industry for granted. While he filled his tanks and waited his turn with the water I returned to my office and slightly rearranged the items on the canteen tray, removing four of the puzzling little tubes from sight and stowing them deep in a desk drawer. With time to spare, I picked up the unopened packet of sandwiches and read the label on it: ‘Beef and Tomato.’ There was also a price sticker label and a sell-by date, which identified the Friday just past.
Friday was the day I’d done Marigold’s shuttle and found the carrier with the thermos. Friday’s sandwiches. But I hadn’t stopped anywhere for the lads to buy sandwiches or anything else.
I frowned. ‘Beef and Tomato.’ I’d seen a ‘Beef and Tomato’ sandwich wrapper, empty, only a day or two ago, but where exactly? The answer arrived slowly. In Brett’s rubbish in the nine-box, of course.
Nina came into the office and sprawled in the chair across from mine, the desk between us.
‘What do I do tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘I learned a lot about racing today but damn all about smuggling. I think Patrick believed I would instantly spot what’s going on, but I could be here a month and see nothing if today’s anything to go by.’
‘No one,’ I reminded her, ‘has seen anything going on. Perhaps you’re here to see how anything could.’
‘Which you could see better than me.’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’d say nothing much happens when I’m around simply because I’m around. I’d like to send you on a trip to France or Italy or Ireland, but there we hit a bit of a snag.’
‘What snag? I don’t mind going. I’d quite like it, in fact.’
‘I have to send two drivers because of the hours.’
‘That’s OK.’
I smiled. ‘Not really. The wives of the married drivers take exception to me sending their husbands abroad with a woman. My usual woman driver, Pat, consequently never goes abroad, to her disgust. I could of course send you with Nigel, who’s not married, but Pat herself won’t go with him, he’d seduce a nun.’
‘Not me, he wouldn’t.’ She was definite, but I wondered.
‘We’ll see if a trip comes up,’ I said. ‘As for tomorrow, we won’t be very busy here, we never are in Cheltenham Festival week because there aren’t many other meetings held on those three days. We’ll be busy again on Friday and it’ll be hectic again on Saturday, if we’re lucky. Can you work Saturday?’
‘It looks as if I’d better.’
‘Mm.’ I leaned forward, picked up one of the remaining two tubes lying on the paper plate and asked her if she’d seen anything like it before.
‘I don’t think so. Why?’
‘They were being carried in one of my horseboxes, hidden inside this thermos flask.’
She came to full alertness, all the tired lines shed.
‘What are they?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s possible — possible’s the strongest I’d put it — that they might be what the masked intruder was looking for in the cab of my nine-box, because that’s where they were, in the cab. In a carrier with these uneaten sandwiches, in this thermos full of undrunk coffee.’
She took the tube from me and held it up to the light.
‘What’s inside?’
‘I don’t know. I thought Patrick Venables might be able to find out.’
She lowered the tube and looked at me, smothering excitement and saying, ‘They’re the first concrete piece of evidence that anything’s going on.’
I picked up the packet of sandwiches and showed her the labels.
‘Brett, the driver who took the nine-box to Newmarket last Thursday with the two-year-olds...’
‘And who has left?’
I nodded. ‘Brett — I think probably Brett because Dave had diarrhoea — anyway, one of them bought sandwiches like these on that journey, because there was an empty packet just like this in some rubbish that came back in the cab. They threw the rubbish away on Friday morning when they cleaned out the box. Anyway, suppose Brett’s sandwiches came from the shop in the South Mimms service station, and suppose... well, why not suppose... that these sandwiches here came from the same place...?’ I paused, but she simply listened, not commenting or disagreeing. I went on, ‘Dave picked up our hitchhiker at South Mimms. So... well... what if these sandwiches and this thermos were travelling with Kevin Keith Ogden?’
Given the supposition, her reasoning followed the same path that mine had and came up with the same observations.
‘If the tubes belonged to the dead passenger, they can’t be relevant to the containers under the lorries. They might well not have anything to do with you at all. The man didn’t know he was going to die. He probably meant to take these tubes with him.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that.’
‘All the same, very interesting. And...’ She stopped pensively.
‘Yes?’
She told me her emerging conclusions, and I nodded. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’
‘You don’t need me, really, do you?’ she said.
‘I need your eyes.’
Harve finished his chores and joined us in the office, asking Nina how she’d fared and whether she had any questions. She thanked him, cutting down, I noticed, on the purity of her blue-blooded vowels, but not to an insulting extent. I wondered how often and how regularly she transformed herself for Patrick Venables.
The phone rang and I answered it, finding Sandy on the line.
‘Inquest on Jogger,’ he said. ‘It’s just come through. Wednesday, ten a.m., Winchester Coroner’s Court. All they’ll do is open the inquest and adjourn it pending results of enquiries. Normal for accident cases. I asked if they’d need you but they said not yet. They’ll want Harve, as he found him, and Dr Farway, of course. Also the inquest on Kevin Keith Ogden, they want Dave to attend. I’ll brief him about where to go. OK?’
‘Yes, thanks, Sandy.’