‘I could come back,’ I said.
He hesitated, then jerked his head towards the inside of the house, bidding me to follow. ‘You might as well wait,’ he said.
I followed him through to the sitting-room.
‘Tessa,’ he said, not believing it. ‘You’ve got it all wrong.’
‘If I have, I’ll grovel.’
He gave me a sharp look. ‘You’ll need to.’
We waited. Michael tried to read a newspaper and put it down crossly, unable to concentrate.
‘Nonsense,’ he said, meaning what I’d said about Tessa. ‘Total nonsense.’
His daughter returned, looking into the sitting-room as she passed, festooned with boutique bags, on her way upstairs. Brown haired, light-eyed, perpetually sulky-looking, she glanced at me with disfavour.
‘Come in, Tessa,’ her father said. ‘Shut the door.’
‘I want to go upstairs.’ She peered into one of the bags. ‘I want to try this dress on.’
‘Come in,’ he said, sharply for him, and frowning, ungraciously, she did so.
‘What is it, then?’ she asked.
‘All right, Freddie,’ her father said to me. ‘Ask her.’
‘Ask me what?’ She was displeased, but not frightened.
‘Um...’ I said, ‘did you arrange for some tubes containing virus to be brought to Pixhill?’
It took a moment for my deliberately casual tone of voice to reach her understanding. When she realised what I’d asked her, she stopped fidgeting with her shopping and grew still with shock, her face stiffening, mouth open, eyes wary. Even to Michael it was plain that she knew what I was talking about.
‘Tessa,’ he said despairingly.
‘Well, what of it?’ she said defiantly. ‘What if I did? It never got here. So what?’
I took the two tubes out of my pocket again and put them on the table. She looked at them vaguely, then worked out what they were. A bad moment for her, I thought.
‘There were six tubes,’ I said. ‘What were you going to do with them? Pour the contents up the noses of six fillies belonging to Jericho Rich?’
‘Dad!’ She turned to him, imploring. ‘Get rid of him.’
‘I can’t,’ Michael said sadly. ‘Is that what you intended?’
‘I didn’t do it.’ She sounded triumphant more than abashed.
‘You didn’t do it,’ I agreed, ‘because your courier died of heart failure on the journey and failed to deliver the thermos.’
‘You don’t know anything,’ she said. ‘You’re making it up.’
‘You wanted to get even with Jericho Rich for taking his horses away because he made a pass at you and you slapped his face. You thought you would make his horses ill so they couldn’t win, serve him right. You saw an advertisement in Horse and Hound saying more or less “anything transported anywhere,” so you phoned the number in the ad and arranged for Kevin Keith Ogden — the man who died — to pick up a thermos at Pontefract service station and bring it down the A1 to the junction with the M25 at South Mimms. You arranged with my driver, Dave, to get Ogden picked up there and to bring him to Chieveley. You phoned Dave late in the evening after he got back from Folkestone, as you knew it was no good trying to reach him earlier because you knew his schedule. You’re always in and out of Isobel’s office and you could see the day’s list. Ogden was supposed to disembark at Chieveley and hand over the thermos, but as he’d died my men brought him all the way to my house. I expect you may have been surprised when Ogden didn’t appear at Chieveley, but it was soon all over the village why not, and certainly your father knew about it almost at once.’ I paused briefly. Neither father nor daughter tried to speak.
‘When you found Ogden was dead,’ I went on, ‘you knew the thermos had to be still in the horsebox, so you came looking for it, Tessa, disguised in dark clothes with a black balaclava over your head, so that if I saw you I wouldn’t know you. I found you in the cab, if you remember, and you ran away.’
It was Michael who said, ‘No.’
‘You couldn’t find the thermos,’ I told Tessa. ‘You tried twice. Then I decided to sleep in the cab, which put an end to it.’
Michael said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ But he did.
‘I’ll make a deal with you,’ I said to Tessa. ‘I won’t tell Jericho Rich what you intended for his fillies if you’ll answer a few questions.’
‘You can’t prove a thing,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. ‘And that’s blackmail.’
‘Maybe. In return for my never mentioning this again to anyone, I want a few answers. It’s not a bad bargain.’
‘How do I know you’ll keep it?’
‘He will,’ Michael said.
‘Why do you trust him so much?’ his daughter demanded.
‘I just do.’
She didn’t like it. She tossed her head. She said tightly, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Chiefly,’ I said, ‘where did the virus transport medium come from?’
‘What?’
I repeated the question. She went on looking blank.
‘The liquid in those tubes,’ I said, ‘is a mixture used for transporting viruses outside a living body.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘If you simply collected the nasal discharge of a horse with the virus,’ I said, ‘the virus would disappear in a very short time. To bring the infection to Pixhill from Yorkshire by road, the way it came, you’d need to combine the nasal discharge with a mixture that would keep the virus active. That’s what’s in these tubes, that mixture. Even in these, a virus won’t survive more than two days. This mixture here is harmless now. But where did it come from?’
She didn’t answer. Michael said, ‘Where, Tessa?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘All you know,’ I suggested, ‘was that if you held a horse’s head up and poured the mixture down his nostril, he would be infected?’
‘Well, probably. Probably be infected.’
‘Who told you?’ I asked. ‘Who got the stuff for you?’
Silence.
‘Tessa?’ Michael said.
‘Was it Benjy Usher?’ I asked.
‘No!’ She was truly astonished. ‘Of course not.’
‘Not Benjy,’ Michael agreed, amused. ‘But who, Tessa?’
‘I’m not saying.’
‘That’s unfortunate,’ I murmured.
A silence lengthened while the head-tosser, the whisperer, thought it over.
‘Oh, all right,’ she burst out. ‘It was Lewis.’
Michael was as surprised as I was not. I would have been astounded if she’d said anyone else.
‘I don’t know where he got it from,’ she said wildly. ‘All he said was he could get a pal up north to collect some snot from a horse with the virus — that’s what he said, snot, not all posh like nasal discharge — and this pal would take it to Pontefract service station if I could get someone to collect it. The pal couldn’t get away to bring it down here and I’d no chance of going to Yorkshire without making endless excuses, so yes, I’d seen the ad in the magazine and suggested to Lewis that I could use it and he said get Dave to pick the man up; Dave was down for the trip to Newmarket and he would do anything for money, and the man would get to Chieveley, where I could meet him easily, and how was I to know he was going to die? I phoned Lewis and told him what had happened and asked him to find the thermos for me but all he would do was give me the key to get into the cab with. And if you want to know, you looked pretty stupid when you caught me searching, when you were trying to run in sleeping shorts and gumboots and a raincoat half off. Pretty silly, you looked.’
‘I expect so,’ I said equably. ‘Did you look under the horsebox as well as in it?’