Uselessly, I followed him to the road itself, but he was nowhere to be seen. It was a country road, unfenced, with open gateways to other houses. Trees and bushes by the hundred, hiding places unlimited. It would have taken half an army to find him.
Puzzled and dispirited I retraced my way back to the box. The driver’s door stood wide open, as he’d left it. I climbed up clumsily and stood behind the seat, as he had, looking into the storage shelf, switching on the cabin light for a better view.
The shelf was empty except for the mattress and a plastic carrier-bag which proved on inspection to contain remains of Brett-type sustenance; screwed up wrappers from chocolate bars, an empty sandwich-shaped casing bearing a label announcing ‘Beef and Tomato,’ with the price underneath, and two empty Coke cans.
I put the bag back where it had been. It was each driver’s business to keep his own box clean and I didn’t feel like picking up after Brett. Whatever he and Dave had been doing that day, giving lifts to moribund businessmen seemed just the start of it. Those two would have a lot of explaining to do in the morning.
I carefully locked the doors again, and again walked back to the house, but once inside felt far from reassured. The agile visitor had got into the box the first time without breaking a window or other observable force and presumably could get in again the same way.
Without knowing in the least what he wanted, I still didn’t like the idea of his returning a third time. It also occurred to me disturbingly that perhaps he intended to leave something, or destroy something, or disable the box altogether. In alarm and doubt I shed the gumboots and raincoat and ran upstairs for substitutes in the shape of two sweaters, jeans, socks, and shoes I could run in. I pulled my own old sleeping bag from a cupboard and with a last check through the window to see if a third visitation was in progress — no sign of it — I went downstairs for a padded jacket and gloves.
With all these aids to warmth, I crossed yet again to the box and settled myself in the front passenger seats, moderately comfortable in body if not in mind.
Time slid by.
I dozed.
No one came.
Chapter 2
Predictably, I woke stiff and cold as soon as nature’s lighting system began creeping into the electric stuff, and I trailed yawning across to the kitchen for warmth and coffee. The newspapers and the post arrived. I sorted through the bills, read the headlines and turned to the racing pages, ate some cornflakes and answered the first phone calls of the new day.
My routine working hours started at six or seven and normally ended at midnight, Sundays included, but it was a way of life, not a hardship. It was the same for trainers, all of whom seemed to believe that if they were up and caring for their horses by or before dawn, everyone who worked for them should be available likewise.
Plans tended to change overnight. The first call on that day, a Friday, was from the trainer of a horse that had got cast in its stable and injured himself by thrashing about on the floor, trying to get himself back onto his feet.
‘The bugger’s twisted his off-hind. My head lad found him, hopping lame.’ The big healthy voice reverberated into my ear. ‘He can’t run at Southwell, sod it. Strike him off your list, will you?’
I said I would. ‘Thanks for letting me know.’
‘I know you run tight schedules,’ he boomed. ‘The four for Sandown are OK. Don’t send that Brett for them, he’s a whiner, he upsets my lads.’
I assured him he wouldn’t get Brett.
‘Right, Freddie. See you at the sports.’
Without wasting time, I buzzed my head driver and asked if the boxes for Southwell had already left.
‘Warming up,’ he assured me.
‘Miss out Larry Dell. Their horse got cast.’
‘Got you.’
I put down the kitchen receiver and went through to the sitting room where most of the desk top was taken up by the week’s comprehensive chart indicating which box was going where with whose horses. I wrote it always in pencil because of the constant changes.
On an adjacent table, easily reached by swivelling the green leather chair, stood a computer, monitor and keyboard. Theoretically, it was easier to call each box to the screen to enter or rearrange its journeys, and actually I did keep the details of the journeys recorded there permanently once they’d been completed, but for an advance overview I still clung to my pencil and rubber.
Along at the farm, in the main office, my two bright secretaries, Isobel and Rose, kept the computer competently accurate and up to the minute, and despaired of my old-fashioned methods. The terminal in my sitting-room was a sort of sub-station upon which appeared all the changes they’d made on the main computer, and that was what I chiefly used it for: checking what had been organised in my absence.
In return, I typed in any changes which came in before or after their office hours and, one way or another, we had not so far left any expectant runner waiting in vain for the coach to take it to the ball.
I checked down the list on what looked like a typical Friday for the first week of March. Two boxes going north to Southwell, where the all-weather track held both flat and jumping races all winter. Four boxes collecting runners for that afternoon’s programme of steeplechasing at Sandown, south of London. One nine-horsebox taking broodmares to Ireland. One six-box taking broodmares to Newmarket, one taking broodmares to Gloucestershire, another taking mares to a stud down in Surrey: the thoroughbred breeding season in full flood.
One box was out of action, scheduled for maintenance. One was going to France. One would be taking Jericho Rich’s fillies to Newmarket. Brett and his nine-horser, standing outside my window in the strengthening dawn, were due to spend the day shuttling a whole string for a trainer moving to Pixhill from out on Salisbury Plain: not long journeys but multiple and, from my point of view, good profit.
The following week would see the Cheltenham Festival, peak of the steeplechasing year, with the Flat season proper getting into gear the week after, its crowded programme bringing me six months of good business. March was sigh-of-relief time, the fogs and freezes of winter relaxing their paralysing menace: there was no income to be made from a row of boxes standing silent in the snow, but the drivers had to be paid all the same.
My head driver phoned back. Harve by name, short for Harvey.
‘Pat’s got flu,’ he said. ‘She’s in bed.’
‘Shit.’
‘It’s a bugger, the flu this year. Knocks you out. It’s not her fault.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘How’s Gerry?’
‘Still bad. We could put those broodmares off till Monday.’
‘No, they’re near to foaling. I promised they’d go to Surrey today. I’ll sort something out.’
Pat and Gerry were reliable drivers: if they said they were too ill to work, then they were. Reshuffle required.
‘Dave can do the Gloucestershire broodmares, instead of Pat,’ I said. Dave was a slow driver, and I didn’t send him out behind the wheel unless I had to. ‘Those mares have no deadline.’
‘Yeah. OK.’
‘I want him here first though. When he turns up at the farm, send him along here. Brett too.’
‘Will do,’ he said. ‘Is it about the dead man?’
‘It is.’
‘Silly sods.’
‘And tell Jogger I need him p.d.q. Tell him to bring his slider.’
‘He won’t be in for half an hour.’
‘That will do.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Sure to be, in five minutes.’
He laughed and went away, leaving me thinking, as I often did, that I was lucky to have him. When I’d been a jockey Harve had been my weighing-room valet, bringing my cleaned saddles and fresh breeches to the races every day. Valets were a bit like theatrical dressers, although one valet would ‘do’ ten or so jockeys regularly. It was a close personal service: one could keep few physical secrets from one’s valet.