‘They wanted to leave him here until tomorrow,’ he exclaimed, affronted. ‘Sandy and I insisted they came tonight.’
Grateful for that, I asked if he’d like to wait in the house and, with a hesitant shrug, he accepted. In the big sitting-room, I offered him alcohol, Coke or coffee. Nothing, he said.
He looked with a downturned mouth at the row of framed racing photographs along one wall, mostly pictures of myself in my jockey days sitting on the backs of high-leaping horses. In a village dedicated to thoroughbred racing, where the four-footed aristocrats brought more jobs and more prosperity to the area than all other industries put together, Bruce Farway had been overheard to say that lives lived in racing were wasted. Only selfless service given to others, as for example by doctors and nurses, was praiseworthy. Jockeys’ injuries, he considered, were self-inflicted. No one understood why such a man had come to Pixhill.
I thought I might as well ask him, so I did. He gave me a surprised glance and went over to the window to cast his gaze briefly at the cooling immobile horsebox.
‘I believe in general practice,’ he said. ‘I believe in a continuing service to a rural community. I believe in treating the family, not the illness.’
All marvellous, I thought, if he hadn’t looked at me superciliously down his nose in a conscious glow of superiority while he spoke.
‘What did our body die of?’ I asked.
He compressed his already thin lips. ‘Obesity and smoking, I dare say.’
In another century, I thought, he would have condemned witches to the stake. For the good of their souls, of course.
Thin, fervent, bigoted, he fidgeted impatiently by the window and finally asked a question of his own.
‘Why were you a jockey?’
The answer was too complicated. I said merely, ‘I was born to it. My father trained steeplechasers.’
‘Does that make it inevitable?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘My brother captains cruise ships and my sister’s a physicist.’
He removed his attention wholly from the horsebox with his mouth opening in astonishment. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Certainly. Why not?’
He couldn’t think why not and was saved from fishing for a reply by the telephone’s ringing. I answered and found Sandy on the line, slightly out of breath and fluttering notebook pages.
‘The Nottingham police,’ he said, ‘will want to know where South Mimms is, exactly.’
‘They’ve surely got a map!’
‘Mm. Well, tell me, like, then I can make a better report.’
‘You’ve surely got a map as well.’
‘Oh, come on, Freddie.’
I relented, smiling. ‘The South Mimms service station is north of London on the M25. And I’ll tell you something, Sandy, our friend Kevin Keith was not taking a direct route from Nottingham to Bristol. In fact, from Nottingham to Bristol you’d never go near South Mimms in a million years, so just tell the Nottingham police to go easy on the relatives because whatever our corpse was doing in South Mimms he wasn’t going straight from home to any daughter’s wedding.’
He digested the information. ‘Ta,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell them.’
I put down the receiver and Bruce Farway asked, ‘What daughter’s wedding?’
I explained how Dave had been persuaded to give the lift, even against express orders.
Frowning, Farway said, ‘You don’t believe in the daughter, then?’
‘Not all that much.’
‘I don’t suppose it matters why he was in... where did you say... South Mimms?’
‘Not to him, any more,’ I agreed, ‘but it’ll waste my drivers’ time. The inquest, and so on.’
‘He couldn’t help dying!’ the doctor protested.
‘He’s a damn nuisance.’
With plain disapproval Farway went back to watching the horsebox. A boringly long time elapsed during which I drank scotch and water (‘Not for me,’ Farway said), thought hungrily of my recongealing stew and answered two more phone calls.
The news had travelled at warp speed. The first voice demanding facts was that of the owner whose two-year-olds had gone to Newmarket, the second that of the trainer who was having to see them leave his stable.
Jericho Rich, the owner, never wasted time on polite opening chat, saying without ceremony, ‘What’s this about a dead man in your box?’ His voice, like his personality, was loud, aggressive and impatient. His name, on official documents, was Jerry Colin Rich. Jericho suited him better, if only for the noise.
While I told him what had happened, I pictured him as I’d very often seen him in parade rings at the races, a stocky grey-haired bully given to poking holes in the air with a jabbing finger.
‘You listen to me, fella,’ he said now, shouting down the line. ‘You pick up no hitchhikers while you work for me, understand? That’s what you’ve always said and that’s how I like it. When you take my horses, you don’t take anyone else’s. That’s the way we’ve always done business and I don’t want any changes.’
I reflected that once his whole string had gone to Newmarket I wouldn’t be doing much more business for him anyway, but alienating the cantankerous old beggar would all the same be unwise. Give him a year or two and I might be ferrying him back.
‘What’s more,’ he was saying, ‘when you take my fillies across tomorrow, take them in a different box. Horses can smell death, you know, and I don’t want those fillies upset.’
I assured him they would go in a different box, even though, as I didn’t bother to tell him, the cab would be reeking of disinfectant, not death, come pick-up time in the morning.
‘And don’t send the same driver.’
It wasn’t worth arguing about. ‘All right,’ I said.
He began to run out of steam, which is to say, to repeat himself. I offered him always a soft cushion of agreement as being the fastest way to blunt the sword of his anger, especially when his grievances reached the third or fourth recycle. We went through the same conversation twice more. I promised yet again to send a different box and a different driver and finally, though muttering away and still not satisfied, he clicked himself off.
He’d owned five or six hurdlers in the past, which I’d ridden for him regularly. I’d had a lot of practice in absorbing the Jericho tantrums with my own temper intact.
Thanks to the Rich decibels, Farway appeared to have heard the whole repetitious exchange because he gave me his unexpected opinion.
‘It wasn’t your fault your drivers picked the man up.’
‘Maybe.’ I paused. ‘The captain goes down with the ship, my brother says.’
He stared. ‘Do you mean you think it was your fault?’
I thought chiefly that it wasn’t a good time to discuss ultimate responsibility in the abstract. I wished more simply that Kevin Keith had given up the ghost in someone else’s cab. A pity, I thought, that the oil tanker had been going to Southampton.
Michael Watermead, in striking contrast to Jericho Rich, spoke in soft hesitant super-educated tones over the telephone and started by asking if the nine two-year-olds that had left his care that morning had arrived safely in Newmarket.
I was certain he already knew, but I assured him that they had.
Resentment at having had to part with them would have been natural, but Michael seemed to have his feelings well in control. Tall, fair and fiftyish, his habitual air of dither fronted an effective, above middle-rank operation of sixty good stables in three attractive quadrangles, usually healthily full. His horses liked him, always a good character reference. They nuzzled his neck if he were near enough: they came to look out of their boxes at the sound of his step in the yard. I’d never ridden for him, as he trained only Flat horses, but since I’d acquired the transport business and had grown to know him, we’d become, on a business level at least, good friends.