Various thoughts had been popping into my mind, almost as if a couple of sleeping cylinders had resumed firing. I sat down at the computer in my battered room and looked up the instruction manuals again for a renewed expedition through the old information on the healthy disks.
In surveying the drivers’ journeys I had not, I’d remembered, pulled out Jogger’s own. Even when I did, I learned little, as he’d driven very seldom; barely half a dozen times the previous year and nearly all on Bank Holiday Mondays, the days when with all the holiday race meetings countrywide, we were always scraping the barrel for chauffeurs.
I rubbed my nose, thought a bit more, and began to bring to the screen the horseboxes themselves, one by one, identifying them by registration number.
The columns on the screen came up looking completely different: the same information as before but illuminated from the side, like Marigold’s view of otherwise invisible ticks.
Identified by registration number, each box’s history now gave me dates, journeys, purpose of journey, drivers, engine hours logged, odometer readings, maintenance schedules, repairs, licensing, roadworthy certificates, unladen weights, fuel capacity, fuel actually used day by day.
After some taxing cerebration, much consultation with the manuals and a few false starts, I came up next with details of all maintenance work performed by Jogger the previous August. This time I’d sorted the work by chronology, and had provided myself more simply with the date, the horsebox registration number and the work done.
Day by summer day I looked back through that one month in Jogger’s life, and there I found her, the dead nun.
August 10th. The registration number of the horsebox regularly driven by Phil. Oil change over the inspection pit. Tanks of air for the air brakes drained. Air brake compressor checked. All grease nipples filled. At the end, a note entered on the day by Isobel and forgotten: ‘Jogger says a dead rabbit fell out of the horsebox into the pit. Crawling with ticks, he said. Disposed of in skip.’
I sat looking vaguely into space.
After a while I went back to the beginning and called Phil’s records to the screen, to find out where he’d been on August 10th or 9th or 8th.
Phil, my faithful aid told me, had not been driving that particular horsebox on any of those days. He’d been driving another box, an older one, which I had, I remembered, subsequently sold.
Back to the drawing board: back to registration numbers, the sideways illumination.
On August 7th the horsebox Phil nowadays drove had gone to France with two runners for Benjy Usher. They had run on the 8th at Cagnes-sur-Mer, down on the Mediterranean, and returned to Pixhill on the 9th.
That horsebox, on that journey, had been driven by Lewis.
Lewis had actually driven that particular box most of the previous year, as I knew perfectly well once I’d thought about it. I’d transferred Lewis to the sparkling new super-six I’d bought in the autumn to replace the old one; transferred him so that the Usher and Watermead horses should go in my best style to their destinies. Lewis had driven one of Michael’s horses to Doncaster in September in the new super-six to win the last Classic race of the year, the St Leger.
At about ten-fifteen I telephoned Edinburgh.
‘Quipp here,’ a pleasant voice said. English, not a Scot.
‘Um... excuse me phoning you,’ I said, ‘but do you happen to know where I could find my sister, Lizzie?’
After the briefest of pauses he said, ‘Which are you, Robin or Freddie?’
‘Freddie.’
‘Hold on.’
I held, and heard his voice yelling, ‘Liz, your brother Fred...’ and then she was, moderately startled, saying, ‘Is it your head?’
‘What? No. Except it’s been slow and stupid. Look, um... Lizzie, do you know anyone who knows anything about ticks?’
‘Ticks?’
‘Yeah. Little biters.’
‘For God’s sake...’
She told Professor Quipp what I wanted and he came back on the line.
‘What sort of ticks?’ he asked.
‘That’s what I want to find out. The sort that live on horses and... er... rabbits.’
‘Do you have any specimens?’
‘I’ve got a horse in the garden which probably has some.’
After a silence Lizzie came back. ‘I’ve tried to explain to Quipp that you’re concussed.’
‘Far from it, at last.’
‘What horse in the garden?’
‘Peterman. One of the geriatrics from last Tuesday. Seriously, Lizzie, ask your professor how I get information about ticks. There are too many multi-million animals in Pixhill for messing about if ticks could make them ill.’
‘Ye Gods.’
I listened to three full minutes of silence, then Professor Quipp said, ‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve a friend who’s a tick expert. He says can you bring him some specimens?’
‘Do you mean... put the horse in a horsebox and drive it to Edinburgh?’
‘That’s one way, I suppose.’
‘The horse is terribly old and shaky. Lizzie knows, she saw him. He might not last the journey.’
‘I’ll phone you back,’ he said.
I waited. My Jaguar and Lizzie’s helicopter sat uselessly on the tarmac. Lovely fast transport at a standstill.
Quipp came back quite soon.
‘Lizzie says if you say this is urgent, it’s urgent.’
‘It’s urgent,’ I said.
‘Right. In that case, fly up here on the shuttle. We’ll meet you at Edinburgh Airport. Say... one o’clock? Soon after?’
‘Er...’ I began.
‘Of course you can’t bring the horse with you,’ Quipp said, ‘just bring some ticks.’
‘But I can’t actually see them.’
‘Quite normal. They’re very small. Use soap.’
Surreal.
‘Wet a bar of soap until it’s sticky,’ he said. ‘Rub it over the horse. If you find any round brown specks on the soap, you’ve got ticks.’
‘But won’t they die?’
‘My friend says perhaps not, if you don’t waste time on the way here, and anyway, it might not matter. Oh, yes, bring a blood sample from the horse.’
I opened my mouth to say it would take an hour or more to get the vet but Lizzie’s voice in my ear forestalled me.
‘There’s a hypodermic needle and a syringe in my bathroom cupboard,’ she said. ‘Left over from my wasp allergy days when I lived at home. I saw it the other day. Use that.’
‘But Lizzie...’
‘Get on and do it,’ she commanded, and Quipp’s voice said ‘See you on the lunchtime shuttle. Phone if you’re going to be later.’
‘Yes,’ I said dazed, and heard the disconnecting click at the other end. A far from absent-minded don, I reflected. A good match for my sister.
What Peterman himself would think about my sticking needles into him I dreaded to think. I went upstairs to the little pink and gold bathroom off Lizzie’s bedroom and found the syringe, as she’d said, in the mirror-fronted cabinet there. The syringe, disposable, instructions ‘for single use only,’ was inside an opaque white plastic envelope and looked much too small for anything equine. Still, Lizzie had said to use it, so I took it downstairs along with her cake of soap, moistened to stickiness, and approached the old fellow in the garden.
His apathy seemed complete. I merely held his forelock while I traced the visible vein running along his lower jaw, sticking the fine needle into it gently. His head remained still, as if he’d felt nothing. I found I needed two hands, in my inexperience, to pull back the plunger in order to draw blood into the syringe, and even then he remained unmoving, as if half asleep. The little syringe filled easily with the red stuff. I pulled the needle out again, laid the syringe aside, picked up the bar of soap and wiped it around Peterman’s head and down his neck. Despite my doubts and disbelief there were, after three or four passes, a few discernible dark brown pinhead dots on the soft white surface.