‘Like,’ Lewis said, ‘how did you know about the journeys?’
‘They’re in the computer.’
‘He said he’d wiped out your records on the Sunday with a Michelangelo or something, and not to worry.’
‘I had copies,’ I said succinctly.
Tigwood had been in the pub the night everyone heard Jogger say he’d found the secret containers. From spite he must have stolen Jogger’s tools. Then if Jogger found Tigwood tampering with my computer on the Sunday... I could see Tigwood going to his car for Jogger’s own tyre lever, walking along to the barn after him and aiming just one lethal blow. Jogger wouldn’t have expected it. He knew of no reason to fear.
I released the brakes and started down the road.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that it was Tigwood with all his medical journals who understood about ticks? And who knew what you needed for bringing the virus from Yorkshire for Tessa Watermead to infect Jericho Rich’s horses? You couldn’t give the Jericho Rich horses tick fever, because by then you hadn’t been over to collect this year’s ticks.’
He was again speechless. I glanced at him.
I said, ‘You haven’t much chance if you’re not willing to be a witness. Tessa told me and her father what you did.’
I phoned Sandy Smith’s number and, finding him at home, invited him to drive along to Centaur Care. ‘Bring your handcuffs,’ I said.
It took Lewis a slow painful mile to make up his mind, but as I turned through the gates of the crumbling headquarters of a disgraced charity, he said, mumbling, ‘All right. A witness.’
The decrepit place was alive with people.
Lorna Lipton’s Range Rover stood in the driveway. Lorna was talking to Tigwood and there were children — children — running about. Maudie’s two youngest children... and Cinders.
Aziz was out of the Fourtrak, also Nina, also Guggenheim. They stood indeterminately, not knowing what to expect.
John Tigwood looked bewildered.
I stopped the horsebox and jumped to the ground. Sandy Smith joined the crowd, lights flashing, uniform buttoned, no siren.
‘What’s going on?’ Tigwood asked.
I wasn’t sure how he would react. The trail he’d left with his axe on my property urged any defence I could think of. Keeping the children safe was a first priority.
I said to Maudie’s young ones, ‘Take Cinders and wriggle under the horsebox and play being in a pirate’s cave there, or something.’
They giggled.
‘Go on,’ I said, urging them. ‘Crawl in there.’
They did, all three of them. Lorna, watching, said merely, ‘Won’t they get dirty?’
‘They’ll clean.’
Tigwood said, ‘Why are you here?’
I answered him. ‘We brought back your rabbit.’
‘What?’
‘Lewis and I,’ I said, ‘have brought back the rabbit — with ticks.’
Tigwood strode to the passenger seat side and yanked open the door.
‘Lewis!’ he yelled. It came out as a screech, all fruitiness gone.
Lewis shrank away from him. ‘He knows it all,’ he said desperately. ‘Freddie knows everything.’
Tigwood stretched an arm into the cab and pulled Lewis out. Tigwood’s weedy-looking appearance was misleading. Everyone could see the stringy power that tweaked the bigger man out onto the ground with a crash. Lewis’s shoulders landed first, then his head, then his legs.
Lewis, rolling in pain, took a rough swing at Tigwood. Tigwood kicked him in the face and turned his attention to me.
‘You bastard,’ he said, white faced, intent. ‘I’ll kill you.’
He meant it. He tried. He rushed me, smashing me by sheer speed against the side of the horsebox.
He hadn’t an axe, however, or a tyre lever, but only his hands; and they, had we been alone, might have indeed been enough.
Aziz came up behind him and hauled him off. Aziz displayed a timely and useful skill in twisting a man’s arm up behind his back until it reached the point of cracking.
Tigwood screamed. Sandy produced his handcuffs portentously and with help from Aziz locked Tigwood’s wrists together behind his back.
Sandy said to me out of the side of his mouth, ‘What’s going on?’
‘I think you’ll find that John Tigwood axed my house.’
‘Bastard,’ Tigwood said, his voice a snarl.
I asked Sandy, ‘I don’t suppose you have a search warrant handy?’
He shook his head bemusedly.
‘I don’t need one,’ Aziz said. ‘What am I looking for?’
‘An axe. A rusty tyre lever. A thing for sliding under lorries. A bunch of tools in a red plastic crate. And perhaps a grey metal cash box with a round bright patch amid the dirt. They might be in his car. If you find them, don’t touch them.’
His smile shone out, bright, white and happy. ‘Got you,’ he said. He left Tigwood to Sandy and bounced away out of sight.
Lorna bleated in bafflement, ‘John? I don’t understand...’
‘Shut up,’ he said furiously.
‘What’ve you done?’ Lorna wailed.
No one told her.
Tigwood stared at me with unnerving naked hatred and in a taut white rage called me a bastard again, among other things, repeating what Lewis had told me. I’d never imagined the overpowering strength of his murderous corrosive loathing, not even with his axe’s handiwork all around me. I felt shriveled by it, and weak. Sandy, who had seen so many dreadful things, looked deeply shocked.
Lorna swung round at me with loathing of her own. ‘What did you do to him?’ she accused me.
‘Nothing.’
She didn’t believe me, and never would.
Aziz reappeared from the direction of the ramshackle stables.
‘Everything’s there,’ he reported, beaming. ‘They’re in one of the stalls, under a horse rug.’
Sandy smiled at me briefly, pushing Tigwood hard against the horsebox. ‘Reckon it’s time to call my colleagues.’
‘Reckon it is,’ I agreed. ‘They can take it from here on.’
‘And the Jockey Club can take on Benjy Usher,’ said Aziz.
Another car joined the mêlée. Not the colleagues yet, but Susan and Hugo Palmerstone, with Maudie. Michael had told them that the children were here with Lorna, they said. They’d come to take them home.
Tigwood in handcuffs appalled them. Lorna told them it was all my fault. Hugo believed her easily.
‘Where are the children?’ Susan asked. ‘Where’s Cinders?’
‘They’re safe.’ I bent down and looked under the horsebox. ‘You can come out now,’ I said.
Guggenheim touched my arm as I straightened. ‘Did you... I mean...’ he said. ‘Is the rabbit there?’
‘I think so.’
He, at least, looked happy. He was carrying a white plastic small-animal carrier and wearing protective gloves.
Maudie’s two children wriggled out on their backs and stood up, brushing off dirt. One of them said to me, in a quiet little voice, ‘Cinders doesn’t like it under there. She’s crying.’
‘Is she?’ I went down on my knees and looked underneath. She was lying flat on her stomach, her face pressed to the ground, her whole body quivering. ‘Come on out,’ I said.
She didn’t move.
I lay down on the ground on my back and put my head under the side of the horsebox. I shuffled backwards on heels, hips and shoulders, until I reached her. I found there were things I would go under tons of steel for without a second thought.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll go out together.’
She said, shivering, ‘I’m frightened.’
‘Mm. But there’s nothing to be afraid of.’ I looked up at the steel of the chassis not far above my face. ‘Turn onto your back,’ I said. ‘Hold my hand and we’ll wriggle out together.’