‘Interesting, though,’ Farway said.
‘You’ll be involved in Pixhill’s fortunes before you know it,’ the vet teased him, and Farway looked disconcerted.
Maudie’s sister, Lorna, came proprietorially to Farway’s side, taking his arm and eyeing me with the disapproval left over from my not having transported the geriatrics without payment. I found her disapprobation much less alarming than her earlier interest in me. Farway gave her a fond look while sharing her opinions of myself.
I drifted away from them, feeling isolated by how much I had discovered and wondering what else I didn’t know.
Ed, Tessa’s brother, stood alone, looking surly. I talked to him for a bit, trying to cheer him up.
‘You remember your show-stopper last week?’ I asked him. ‘About Jericho Rich making a play for Tessa?’
‘It was true what I said,’ he insisted defensively.
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘He was pawing her. I saw him. She slapped his face.’
‘Really?’
‘Don’t you believe me? No one believes a word I say.’ Self-pity swamped him. ‘Jericho Rich swore at her and told her he would take his horses away and Tessa said if he did she’d get even. Silly little bitch. How could she get even with a man like that? So, anyway, he did take the horses away and what has Tessa done about it? Bloody nothing, of course. And Dad isn’t even angry with her, only with me for telling everyone why Jericho Rich left. It isn’t fair.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘You’re not too bad,’ he said reluctantly.
I sat next to Maudie at lunch but there was little left of the enjoyment I’d found at that table a week ago. Maudie sensed it, trying to dispel my sadness, but I left after the coffee with no great regrets.
There were no feverish horses in Pixhill, I reported to Guggenheim, and drove him in his own depression back to the airport. On the way home I stopped for petrol and, after a bit of thought, phoned Nina’s Stow-on-the-Wold number.
‘Um,’ I said, ‘when you come to work tomorrow, bring a parachute.’
‘What?’
‘For landing behind the enemy lines in occupied France.’
‘Is this the concussion?’
‘It is not. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.’
‘I wish you’d explain.’
‘Can I meet you somewhere? Are you busy?’
‘I’m alone... and bored.’
‘Good. I mean, how about the Cotswold Gateway? I could be there before six.’
‘All right.’
Accordingly I changed direction and drove west and north to arrive an hour and a half later at a large impersonal old hotel on the A40 main road which ran across the top of the Cotswold town of Burford. I parked outside the great old-fashioned charming pile, a landmark passed endless times in my life on the way to Cheltenham races.
She was already there when I arrived, having had by far the shorter journey, and she was the original compelling Nina, not the scrubbed and workaday version.
She was sitting in a chintz armchair beside a glowing log fire in the entrance hall, a tea tray primly before her on a low table.
Post-Cheltenham but before the summer tourist season, the place was almost empty. She rose when I came in, and enjoyed my admiration of her appearance. No jeans, this time: the long slender legs were covered instead by black tights. No sloppy old sweater but a black skirt, black waistcoat, white silk shirt with big sleeves, large gold cufflinks and a long neck-chain of enough half sovereigns to fund a ransom. She smelled, not of horses, but subtly of gardenias. The economical bones of her face were revealed and softened by a dusting of powder. Lips, softly red.
‘I hardly like to ask you...’ I said, kissing her cheek as if from long close habit, ‘looking as you do...’
‘You sounded serious.’
‘Mm.’
We sat down near enough to each other to talk, though there was no one to overhear.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘I found out what’s been carried under my lorries, and it is not as simple as drugs.’ She waited while I paused, her interest sharpening to acute. ‘I went to see a top Customs man in Portsmouth,’ I said, ‘to ask what couldn’t move freely in and out of Britain under the EC regulations. I expect you know, the Customs men never search any traffic nowadays unless they have specific information that drugs will be found in a certain vehicle. In practice, it means that anything — guns, cocaine, whatever, coming here from Europe — has untroubled entry. But he got very excited about cats and dogs, and rabies... and it seems the quarantine rules apply, and also one needs a license for things like veterinary medicines. Anyway, my boxes have been carrying extra livestock, though not cats and dogs, I don’t think, because they would both make a noise.’
‘Make a noise?’
‘Sure. If you carried a cat in one of those containers, someone would hear it complaining.’
‘But why? You’ve lost me. Why take livestock in those containers?’
‘So that the lads with the horses wouldn’t know about it. If any horsebox carried anything in public out of the ordinary, half the village would hear about it in the pub.’
‘Then who’s been carrying secret livestock?’
‘One of my drivers.’
‘Which one?’
‘Lewis.’
‘Oh no, Freddie. He has that baby!’
‘One can love one’s offspring and be a villain.’
‘You don’t mean it...’
‘Yeah. And I don’t like it.’
‘Do you mean... you can’t mean... that Lewis had been deliberately trying to bring rabies into England?’
‘No, not rabies, thank God. Just a fever that makes horses temporarily ill, but takes the edge off their speed so drastically that they don’t win again.’
I told her that Jogger’s dead nun had been a rabbit.
‘Nun — rabbit — habit.’ She sighed. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I asked Isobel what Jogger found dead in the pit, and she told me.’
‘So simple!’
‘Then I looked at the computer files for last August, for the time when I was away, and there it was. August 10th. Jogger reported a dead rabbit fell into the pit from a box he was servicing, and it was on the day after Lewis brought that box back from France.’
She frowned, ‘But the computer files were lost.’
I told her about the back-ups in my safe.
‘You didn’t tell anyone! You didn’t tell me. Don’t you trust me?’
‘Mostly,’ I said.
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I said, ‘Jogger told Isobel the rabbit had ticks on it and she put a note about that in the computer. The computer also lists each box’s journeys individually, and two of those boxes that have hidden containers, Pat’s box, that you drove, and Phil’s box, both of those were driven to France by Lewis last year. This year he’s driving my newest super-six, and it too, as you found, has a container under it. Last weekend, the Watermead children missed one of their tame rabbits that Lewis looks after for them, cleaning their runs and so on, and also last weekend Lewis drove the super-six to France, and this weekend a horse has died in Pixhill of a tick-borne fever.’
She listened wide eyed, her mouth opening. I went over it all again, slowly, telling her about Benjy’s training habits, about Lewis’s shorn ringlets, about Peterman and finally about Guggenheim.
Once an old horse had come through the fever stage, I said, he could live with ticks on him all summer. A continual source of potential illness for other designated recipients. An Ehrlichiae farm, in fact. A quick wipe over an old horse with a wet bar of soap and, within an hour, a wipe of the same soap onto a new host. Tick-transfer completed. Enough of the ticks would survive. The transfer, I said gloomily, might even have been done by Lewis when he drove the unfortunate victims to the races in my boxes.