Lewis had finished cleaning his box and was positioning it in its usual place. Harve and Phil weren’t back so far from Wolverhampton but except for Aziz’s nine-box, which had gone to Ireland, the broodmare force had returned.
Lewis slid his completed log through the office letter-box, told me briefly that he’d taken his pair safely back to Mr Usher and that he’d had to help the Usher head travelling lad saddle all the runners as their lads were useless and Nina had said she wasn’t dressed for it. He thought little of Nina, I gathered, for letting him do so much work. The approval she’d lavished that morning on the photos of his baby had, I thought in amusement, been wasted.
Nina drove along to the cleaning area and set to work with the pressure hose. Looking at her old jeans, the unsmart sweater and the scraped-back hair escaping in wisps, one could see why she’d backed away from public gaze, quite apart from the fact that someone in the horse world might have recognised her and asked astonished questions.
Lewis left. I went over to Nina and offered to clean her box for her if she would do a different job for me. She agreed with relief, saying, ‘What if Harve comes back?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
‘OK. What do I do?’
‘Fetch the new slider from the barn and look at all the fuel tanks to see if there are any containers stuck on them.’
She was surprised. ‘I thought Jogger looked and there were only the three.’
‘Looking back,’ I said, ‘he told me of three. I don’t know for sure if he’d looked under all the others. I just want to check.’
‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘Don’t you want to do it yourself?’
‘Not particularly.’
She gave me a curious look but made no comment, just fetched the slider from the barn and started methodically along the row. I finished the cleaning, inside and out, and positioned her box where it belonged, joining her afterwards by the office door.
‘Well,’ she said, rubbing dirt off her elbows, ‘There’s one more, and it’s under Lewis’s box, but it’s empty, like the others. Lewis! So we took two hidden containers to Lingfield today, but I stayed with the lorries the whole time, to Lewis’s disgust, but he could perfectly well manage to help the head travelling lad saddle up on his own, he didn’t need me really, but I’m in his bad books.’ The thought hardly upset her. ‘No one came near either box, I’d swear it. No one showed the slightest interest in their undersides.’
I thought back. ‘Lewis’s box was on its way to France when Jogger found the second and third container. Lewis went on Friday, and got back at about two on Tuesday morning.’
‘There you are, then. Jogger didn’t know about Lewis’s box. He was dead before Lewis got back.’
Harve drove into the farmyard, his lights bright in the gathering dusk.
‘Do you want me to check Harve’s?’ Nina asked.
‘If you have a chance. And any others we’ve missed.’
‘OK.’ She yawned again. ‘Am I driving tomorrow?’
‘Isobel’s got you down again for Lingfield.’
‘Oh, well... at least I know the way, now.’
I said penitently, ‘I don’t even know where you live. Do you have a long drive home?’
‘Near Stow-on-the-Wold,’ she said. ‘It takes me an hour.’
‘That’s a fair commute. Um... how about if I give you dinner somewhere on your way home?’
‘I’m hardly dressed for going out to dinner.’
‘A pub, then?’
‘Yes, all right. Thank you.’
I went over to talk to Harve as he filled his tanks and found him happy to have taken a winner to Wolverhampton, as he’d also backed it. The lad with the horse had told him it was a certainty. ‘For once, he was right.’
When his tanks were full I asked him to come over to the office to look at the next day’s schedule. He came as a matter of course while, looking back, I saw Nina taking the opportunity to slide underneath his box for an inspection.
We went through the list, which was healthily busy. He himself was down for Chepstow, one of his favourite runs. ‘Good,’ he said. I told him about Benjy Usher overlooking the hurdlers. ‘How he ever trains a winner I’ll never know,’ he said. ‘Mind you, he has the luck of the devil. Who else had three walkovers last summer? You remember there was that bug going about in Pixhill? All those Classic Trial weight-for-age races, they always cut up to five or six runners every year anyway, and Mr Usher’s always keen to win them. He won the Chester Vase last year against only two opponents. I know, because I drove his winner myself, if you remember.’
I nodded. ‘He’s always tended to enter horses in races that are likely to have very few runners,’ I agreed. ‘I won several two- and three-horse races for him myself, mostly three-mile chases.’
‘He runs the poor buggers on rock-hard going too,’ Harve went on disapprovingly. ‘Doesn’t seem to care if they finish lame.’
‘They limp all the way to the bank.’
‘You can laugh,’ Harve objected, ‘but he’s still a rotten trainer.’
‘We have that colt of his to bring back from Italy next week,’ I reminded him. ‘Isobel’s arranged the paperwork and the ferry for Monday.’
‘A broken down colt,’ Harve said, sniffing.
‘Er... yes.’
‘Who’s going?’
‘Who do you suggest? He asked for Lewis and Dave.’
Harve shrugged. ‘We may as well please him.’
‘I thought so, yes.’
Across the farmyard Nina emerged from her search and shook her head exaggeratedly.
I said to Harve, ‘You remember that cash box container that Jogger found stuck under the nine-box? Has anything occurred to you about what it could be for?’
‘I haven’t thought about it,’ he said frankly. ‘Jogger found two more, didn’t he, and they were all empty? Whatever was in them is history.’ He sounded as unconcerned as ever. ‘Poor old Jogger.’
As Sandy had told me off the record that the Jogger enquiry was veering to murder, I didn’t mention it to Harve. Everyone would find out only too soon. Harve and I went back towards his box and he eyed the backview of Nina, who was disappearing into the barn.
‘This job’s too much for her,’ he observed, not unkindly. ‘She’s a good driver by all accounts, but Nigel says she gets tired easily.’
‘She’s temporary,’ I said. ‘One more week, if we get no one else down with flu.’
The other Wolverhampton box returned. I left Harve to supervise the end of the day and followed Nina’s car as she waved to Harve and drove through the gates. She stopped after half a mile to walk back and suggest I follow her to a place to eat that she passed every day, and half an hour later we both pulled into the busy car park of a restaurant where good cheap food was important and the bar itself secondary.
She had loosed and combed her hair and applied lipstick, so that the Nina I had dinner with looked younger and halfway back to the original. The place was crowded, the tables small and close together. We ate steak, chips and fried onions with a carafe of house red wine and a chunk of cheddar cheese. ‘I get fed up with healthy eating,’ Nina said, secure in her slender body. ‘Did you starve when you were a jockey?’
‘Grilled fish and salads,’ I said, nodding.
‘Have some butter.’ With a smile she passed me a small silver-wrapped packet. ‘I adore junk food. My daughter despises me.’
‘Black forest chocolate cake?’ I suggested, handing her the menu.
‘I’m not that mad.’
Companionably we drank coffee, neither of us in much hurry to be gone.
I told her the police thought Jogger had been murdered and that perhaps I now only had hours to find solutions before we were swamped by heavy boots.