The Force wanted to inspect them. Go ahead, I agreed, though Phil wouldn’t be back with his own horsebox until evening.
Lewis had reached the ferry in good time, Isobel reported, and was now in France. I metaphorically bit my nails.
The police interviewed everyone they could reach and spent time sliding in and out under the boxes. Rather them than me. When Phil returned they removed the tube from above the fuel tanks (with my permission) and brought it out to where it could be easily inspected. Four feet long, eight inches in diameter, empty except for dust, small holes punched through it, screw cap missing.
They took it away for examination. I wondered if they would find rabbit hairs in it.
I drove home. The little helicopter had gone. My poor crunched car stood alone and forlorn, awaiting a tow-truck on the morrow. I patted it. Silly, really. The end of a big part of my life. Saying goodbye.
I went early to bed and tossed and turned.
In the morning Lewis reported to Isobel that he had cleared the Mont Blanc tunnel and would collect the colt before noon.
The police asked more questions. Half the fleet set off to take merchandise to Doncaster sales, Nigel driving for Marigold. I progressed from metaphorical nail biting to actual.
At noon Lewis reported that Benjy Usher’s colt was unmanageable.
I talked to him myself.
‘I’m not driving it,’ he said. ‘It’s a wild animal. It’ll damage the box. It’ll have to stay here.’
‘Is Nina around?’
‘She’s trying to pacify it. No chance.’
‘Let me talk to her.’
She came on the line. ‘The colt’s scared,’ she agreed. ‘He keeps trying to lie down and thrash about. Give me an hour.’
‘If he’s really unmanageable, come back without him.’
‘OK.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘No. Nothing.’
I sat watching the clock.
After an hour, Lewis phoned back. ‘Nina reckons the colt suffers from claustrophobia,’ he said. ‘He goes berserk if we try to shut him in a single stall in the horsebox, and also if we try to tie him up. She’s got him quiet, like, but he’s loose in a big stall, like we arrange it for a mare and foal. You know. Room for three, all to himself. And she’s opened all the windows. The colt’s standing with his nose out of one of them at the moment. What do you reckon?’
‘It’s up to you,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell Mr Usher we can’t bring his colt out, if you like.’
‘No.’ He sounded indecisive but finally said, ‘OK, I’ll give it a try. But if he goes mad again when we start off, I’ll scrub it.’
‘Right.’
A claustrophobic horse. We did sometimes come across animals that no amount of persuasion or brute force would get them up a ramp into a horsebox. I sympathised with them, especially after the previous night, but I could have done, this time, with a dozy docile passenger giving Lewis no trouble.
I waited. Another hour crawled by.
‘They must be on their way,’ Isobel said, unconcerned.
‘I hope so.’
Another hour. No news.
‘I’m going to Michael Watermead’s,’ I told Isobel. ‘Call me on the mobile phone if Lewis reports.’
She nodded, busy with other things, and I trundled down to Michael’s trying to work out how best to tell him something he wouldn’t want to hear.
He was surprised to see me in the hour of afternoon doldrums before the lads arrived to feed and water the horses and prepare them for the night.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘What can I do for you? Come along in.’
He took me into a small friendly sitting-room, not the big imposing room of Sunday-lunch champagne cocktails. He’d been reading newspapers, which lay scattered over a low table and nearby armchair, and he roughly gathered them together to make a space for me to sit.
‘Maudie’s out,’ he said. ‘I’ll make some tea in a minute.’
He waved for me to sit down, obviously waiting for me to begin. And where to begin... that was the problem.
‘You remember,’ I said, ‘the man who died in one of my horseboxes?’
‘Died? Oh yes, of course. On the way back from taking Jericho’s two-year-olds, wretched man.’
‘Mm.’ I paused. ‘Look,’ I said awkwardly, ‘I wouldn’t bother you with this, but I do want to clear something up.’
‘Carry on, then.’ He sounded receptive, not impatient, simply interested.
I told him that Dave had picked the man up not casually but by arrangement. Michael frowned. I explained about the carrier-bag with the thermos flask that I’d found in the nine-box the next evening, and I showed him the last two tubes that had been carried in the thermos, that I’d had in my safe.
‘What are they?’ he asked curiously, holding one up to the light. ‘What’s in them?’
‘Viral transport medium,’ I said. ‘For transporting a virus.’
‘Virus...’ He was shocked. ‘Did you say virus?’
Virus, to all trainers, meant ‘the virus,’ the dreaded respiratory infection that made horses cough and run at the nose. The virus could put a stable out of winners for most of a year. The worst news possible, that was ‘the virus.’
Michael handed the tubes back as if they’d stung him.
‘They came from Pontefract,’ I said. ‘From Yorkshire.’
He stared. ‘They’ve got the virus up there. Two or three yards have it.’ He looked worried. ‘You haven’t mixed any of my horses in with horses from up north, have you? Because, if so...’
‘No,’ I said positively. ‘Your horses always travel alone, unless you give specific permission otherwise. I’d never ever put your horses in danger of infection in my transport.’
He marginally relaxed. ‘I didn’t think you would.’ He was eyeing the tubes as if they were snakes. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because I think... er... if the hitchhiker hadn’t died, the virus that was in these tubes might have found its way into the last of Jericho Rich’s string — the fillies — on the last day of the transfer to Newmarket.’
He stared some more. He thought it over. ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘That’s criminal.’
‘Mm.’
‘Why?’ he said again.
‘To get even with Jericho Rich.’
‘Oh no,’ he said protestingly, standing up sharply, striding away from me, anger rising. ‘I would never, never do a thing like that.’
‘I know you wouldn’t.’
He swung round furiously. ‘Then who?’
‘Um... I think... you might ask Tessa.’
‘Tessa!’ His anger increased; at me, not at her. ‘She wouldn’t. What’s more she couldn’t. This is utter rubbish, Freddie, and I’m not listening to any more of it.’
I sighed. ‘All right.’ I stood up to go. ‘Sorry, Michael.’
I went out of his house and over to my Fourtrak and he followed me indecisively as far as his door.
‘Come back,’ he said.
I retraced a few steps in his direction.
‘You can’t make accusations like that and simply bugger off,’ he said. ‘Do you or don’t you want to go on driving my horses?’
‘Very badly,’ I admitted.
‘Then this is not the way to go about it.’
‘I can’t let my business be used for carrying viruses from place to place and do nothing to stop it.’
‘Huh,’ he said on a low breath. ‘When you think of it like that... but Tessa? It’s preposterous. She wouldn’t know how to do it, for a start.’
‘I’d like to ask her,’ I said reasonably. ‘Is she at home?’
He looked at his watch. ‘She ought to be here at any minute. She only went shopping.’