The man himself was somewhere among the scarves, sitting separately because there hadn’t been two seats available together. He had brought with him minimal overnight necessities, a huge amount of hope and a large bag of scientific field instruments. Nothing would have stopped him in his quest for the unnamed vector of E. risticii. He quivered with hunger. He reached out with percipient fingertips, like Handel to Hallelujah, like Newton to calculus, like Ehrlich, no doubt, to arsenic for syphilis. Reached out with genius towards recognition.
‘It’s early in the year for Potomac fever,’ he had said. ‘It’s a warm weather thing, usually...’
‘The ticks came from down south in France,’ I told him. ‘From the Rhône Valley.’
‘A river! But usually May through October.’
‘We had a dead rabbit crawling with ticks in August last year.’
‘Yes. Yes. August.’
‘We had a bug going round locally in Pixhill last summer that put a small number of horses out of action for the season.’
He groaned. With pleasure, as far as I could see.
‘They had the same sort of unspecified feverish illness also in places in France,’ I said. ‘I read it again in the newspaper only this week.’
‘Find the newspaper.’
‘Yes, OK.’
‘No one would have tested for equine ehrlichiosis... it’s still almost an unknown infection. Rare. Sporadic. Not an epidemic. Hard to find. This is wonderful.’
‘Not to the horse owners.’
‘But this is history...’
It was a hopeless disaster, I thought, if I couldn’t clear everything up quickly. ‘Freddie Croft’s horseboxes brought Potomac horse fever to Britain.’ I could just see the headlines. ‘Freddie Croft’s drivers brought fever to Britain.’ Perhaps it would be safer not to employ Freddie Croft’s transport? Sorry and all that, Freddie, but I can’t take the risk.
Confidence was fragile. Loyalty was fickle. Rabbits bringing ticks? No, thanks very much.
Freddie Croft Raceways out of business.
I sweated.
One of the Watermead rabbits had been missing, on the previous Sunday. There were only fourteen, not fifteen, the children had said. Maybe Lewis, the trusted rabbit handler, had taken that one rabbit with him to France. Taken it in a hidden compartment, out of sight above the fuel tanks. Last August it had been Lewis who had brought from France the dead rabbit crawling with ticks... Jogger’s dead nun.
Ticks. Jogger’s voice came distinctly through the roaring rugby songs... ‘Poland had the same five’... A childhood rhyme presented itself in synchronising time with the singing. One, two, buckle my shoe: three, four, knock at the door: five, six, pick up sticks... ‘Poland had the same five, six’... six, sticks, ricks, mix, fix... Poland had the same... ticks.
Poland had the same ticks on a horse last summer, and it died.
Who was Poland?
Oh God, I thought. Not Poland and Waleska. Not Poland and coal or Poland and Danzig or Poland and corridor or Poland and solidarity. No... Poland and Russia.
Russia... Usher.
Benjy Usher had the same ticks...
Dot’s voice, ‘Those old wrecks. They died. I hate it. They were always outside the drawing-room window...’
A well-pinched flight attendant asked if she could fetch me anything, raising her voice above the joyful surrounding din.
‘Treble Scotch... well, no, just one. Got to drive home.’
Pictures crowded my inner eye. Benjy Usher, training through his upstairs window. Benjy never touching his horses. Benjy getting me to saddle his runners at Sandown.
Benjy couldn’t have known, surely, that his old dying lodgers probably carried Ehrlichiae... Could he? Benjy... afraid the microscopic organisms would hop onto himself?
But if he’d feared that, why was he proposing to take two more old horses? Did he know that they, too, might carry ticks?
Lewis drove for him often.
The flight attendant brought my drink.
Benjy entered his horses in small-field races and had had the luck of the devil with walk-overs.
It had to be coincidental. Benjy was rich.
What if what he hankered for were winners, not money? Harve’s voice, Mr Usher’s ‘a rotten trainer...’
It was nonsense. It had to be.
From somewhere, mingled with the rugby songs, a sentence I’d read once surfaced into consciousness: ‘It isn’t necessary to speculate about the driving force within us, it leaps out and reveals itself. Under pressure, it can’t be hidden.’
What if Benjy Usher’s driving force were a hunger for winners, a hunger his own skill wasn’t enough to assuage...?
No. Impossible. Yet winners gave him orgasmic pleasure.
Lewis often drove for Benjy.
Lewis had cut off his ringlets last summer.
Had Lewis been afraid he would get ticks in his long hair?
He’d transported the tick-infested nun in Jogger’s pit.
Jogger.
Benjy hadn’t killed Jogger. Benjy had been playing tennis on the Watermeads’ court at about the time Jogger had died.
Lewis hadn’t killed Jogger. He’d been in France.
Lewis had come back to the farmyard later than intended, at two in the morning on Monday-to-Tuesday night. He’d stabled Michael’s two-year-olds in the farmyard and left me a note to say he had flu. I’d driven his super-six on Tuesday morning with the two-year-olds to Michael’s yard, and I’d had breakfast and watched Irkab Alhawa gallop. Then the super-six had gone racing for the day with one of the fleet’s other drivers.
What if Lewis had in fact taken the missing rabbit to France to pick up its sick-making cargo? What if it had still been there, now tick-infested, in the hidden container, when I’d driven the super-six to Michael’s yard? What if it had still been there until the box returned from the races in the evening? What if Lewis, with only a cold after all, had gone late to the yard to retrieve the rabbit... and what if I had walked in there while this retrieval was in progress?
Did it make sense?
As much sense as anything else.
What had Jogger walked in on, then?
What had occurred on Sunday morning in the farmyard that Jogger had seen, and would tell me about, that it wasn’t intended that he should see?
What had happened in the farmyard on that Sunday morning?
‘Ask the right questions,’ Sandy had said.
That Sunday morning had been March 6th, the day the office computer had been switched on in order to activate the Michelangelo virus. Jogger wouldn’t have understood the computer. It wasn’t what he’d seen in the farmyard office that mattered, but who.
The rugby songs swelled around me.
I had an acute sense of danger.
On the way home from Heathrow I phoned Isobel, apologising for the lateness of the hour.
Think nothing of it, she said. The day had gone well. Harve had taken two winners to Chepstow. Aziz and Dave had returned all right from Ireland but Aziz had said Dave wasn’t in good shape. Dave, Isobel thought, might be developing flu.
‘Bugger,’ I said.
Nina had taken a winner to Lingfield, and so had Nigel. Lewis had driven three of Benjy Usher’s jumpers to Chepstow, and had been reminded to bring his overnight things on Monday for going to Italy. Phil had been phlegmatically to Uttoxeter. Michael Watermead and Marigold English had both booked two boxes for Tuesday to take horses to Doncaster sales.
‘Great,’ I said thankfully. Marigold had disregarded Peterman’s problem: so far, at least.
Jericho Rich had reportedly fallen out already with his new trainer, Isobel said. She thought we might be bringing the whole string back to Pixhill any day soon.