But I, listening to her, inwardly pitied poor dead Art on his choice of wife.
On the following day, Tuesday, I again appropriated the Mini-Cooper, much to Tick-Tock’s disgust. This time I went towards Cheltenham, and called at Peter Cloony’s neat, new bungalow, turning down the narrow, winding lane from the high main road to the village in the hollow.
Peter’s wife opened the door to me and asked me in with a strained smile. She no longer looked happy and rosily content. She was too thin, and her hair hung straight and wispy round her neck. It was very nearly as cold inside the house at it was outside, and she wore some tattered fur boots, thick stockings, bulky clothes, and gloves. With no lipstick and no life in her eyes, she was almost unrecognisable as the loving girl who had put me up for the night four months ago.
‘Come in,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid Peter isn’t here. He was given a lift to Birmingham races... perhaps he’ll get a spare ride...’ She spoke without hope.
‘Of course he will,’ I said. ‘He’s a good jockey.’
‘The trainers don’t seem to think so,’ she said despairingly. ‘Ever since he lost his regular job, he’s barely had one ride a week. We can’t live on it, how could we? If things don’t change very soon, he’s going to give up racing and try something else. But he only cares for horses and racing... it will break his heart if he has to leave it.’
She had taken me into the sitting-room. It was as bare as before. Barer. The rented television set had gone. In its place stood a baby’s cot, a wickerwork basket affair on a metal stand. I went over and looked down at the tiny baby, only a small bump under the mound of blankets. He was asleep. I made admiring remarks about what I could see of him, and his mother’s face momentarily livened up with pleasure.
She insisted on making us a cup of tea, and I had to wait until the question of no milk, no sugar, no biscuits had all been settled before asking her what I really wanted to know.
I said, ‘That Jaguar — the one which blocked the lane and made Peter late — who did it belong to?’
‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘It was very odd. No one came to move it away and it stayed across the lane all that morning. In the end the police arranged for it to be towed away. I know Peter asked the police who owned it, because he wanted to tell the man just what his filthy Jaguar had cost him, but they said they hadn’t yet traced him.’
‘You don’t happen to know where the Jaguar is now?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know if it is still there,’ she said, ‘but it used to be outside the big garage beside Timberley Station. They’re the only garage round here with a breakdown truck, and they were the ones who towed it away.’
I thanked her and stood up, and she came out to the car with me to say good-bye. I had spent some time going through the form book adding up the number of races Peter had ridden during the past few weeks, and I knew how little he had earned. I had brought with me a big box of groceries, butter, eggs, cheese, and so on, and a stack of tins, and also a string of plastic ducks for the baby. This collection I carried back into the bungalow and dumped on the kitchen table, ignoring her surprised protest as she followed me in.
I grinned. ‘They are too heavy to take back. You’ll have to make the best of it.’
She began to cry.
‘Cheer up,’ I said, ‘things will get better soon. But meanwhile, don’t you think the bungalow is too cold for a baby? I read somewhere that some babies die every winter from breathing freezing air, even though they may be as warmly wrapped up as yours is.’
She looked at me aghast, tears trickling down her cheeks.
‘You ought to heat that room a little, and especially keep it warm all night too, if he sleeps in there,’ I said.
‘But I can’t,’ she said jerkily, ‘the payments on the bungalow take nearly all we have... we can’t afford a fire, except just in the evenings. Is it really true about the babies dying?’
She was frightened.
‘Yes, quite true,’ I said. I took a sealed envelope out of my pocket and gave it to her. ‘This is a present for the baby. Warmth. It’s not a fortune, but it will pay your electricity bills for a while, and buy some coal if you want it. There’s likely to be a lot of cold weather coming, so you must promise to spend most of it on keeping warm.’
‘I promise,’ she said faintly.
‘Good.’ I smiled at her as she wiped her eyes, and I went back to the car and drove away up the lane.
The garage at Timberley Station was a modernised affair with the front all snowy plaster and the back, when I walked round there, of badly pointed cheap brickwork. The elderly abandoned Jaguar stood there, tucked away between the burnt-out remains of a Standard 8 and a pile of old tyres. I went back to the front of the garage to talk to the man in charge, and I asked him if I could buy the car.
‘Sorry, sir, no can do,’ he said breezily. He was a dapper thirtyish man with no oil on his hands.
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t look good for anything but the scrap heap.’
‘I can’t sell it to you because I don’t know who it belongs to,’ he said regretfully, ‘but,’ he brightened, ‘it’s been here so long now that it might be mine after all... like unclaimed lost property. I’ll ask the police.’
With a bit of prompting he told me all about the Jaguar being stuck across the lane and how his firm had fetched it.
I said, ‘But someone must have seen the driver after he left the car?’
‘The police think he must have got a lift, and then decided the car wasn’t worth coming back for. But it’s in good enough order. And it wasn’t hot... stolen, I mean.’
‘What’s it worth,’ I asked.
‘To you, sir,’ he smiled glossily, ‘I’d have let it go for a hundred pounds.’
A hundred. I parted from him and strolled out on to the forecourt. Was it worth a hundred to Kemp-Lore I wondered, to ruin Peter Cloony? Was his obsessive hatred of jockeys so fierce? But then a hundred to Kemp-Lore, I reflected, was probably a lot less than a hundred to me.
Timberley railway station (six stopping trains a day and twenty-two expresses) lay on my left. I stood and considered it. The station was nearly four miles from the top of the lane leading to Peter’s village; say an hour’s quick walk. Peter had found the Jaguar across the lane at eleven o’clock, and it had to have been jammed in position only seconds before he came up the hill, as his had been the first car to be obstructed. I had a vivid mental picture of Kemp-Lore parked in the gateway where the lane began to curve downwards, watching Peter’s house through binoculars, seeing him go out and get into his car and start on his way to the races. There wouldn’t have been much time to force the Jaguar into position, lock its door and disappear before Peter got there. Not much time: but enough.
And then? The one tremendous disadvantage Kemp-Lore had to overcome, I thought, was his own fame. His face was so well known to almost the entire British population that he could not hope to move about the country inconspicuously, and wherever he went he would be noticed and remembered. Surely, I thought, in this sparsely populated area, it should be possible to find someone who had seen him.
As I was there anyway, I started with the station. Outside, I looked up the times of the stopping trains. There was, I found, a down train at twelve-thirty but no up train until five o’clock. The only other trains ran early in the morning and later in the evening. The booking office was shut. I found the clerk-ticket-collector-porter nodding over a hot stove and a racing paper in the parcels office. A large basket of hens squawked noisily in a corner as I walked in, and he woke with a jerk and told me the next train was due in one hour and ten minutes.
I got him talking via the racing news, but there was nothing to learn. Maurice Kemp-Lore had never (more’s the pity he said) caught a train at Timberley. If it had happened when he was off-duty, he’d have heard about it all right. And yes, he said, he’d been on duty the day they’d fetched the Jaguar down to the garage. Disgusting that. Shouldn’t be allowed, people being rich enough to chuck their old cars in the ditch like cigarette ends.
I asked him if the station had been busy that day: if there had been a lot of passengers catching the midday train.
‘A lot of passengers?’ he repeated scornfully. ‘Never more than three or four, excepting Cheltenham race days...’
‘I was just wondering,’ I said idly, ‘whether the chap who left his Jaguar behind could have caught a train from here that morning?’
‘Not from here, he didn’t,’ the railway man said positively. ‘Because, same as usual, all the people who caught the train were ladies.’
‘Ladies?’
‘Yeh, women. Shopping in Cheltenham. We haven’t had a man catch the midday — excepting race days of course — since young Simpkins from the garage got sent home with chickenpox last summer. Bit of a joke it is round here, see, the midday.’
I gave him a hot tip for Birmingham that afternoon (which won, I was glad to see later) and left him busily putting a call through to his bookmaker on the government’s telephone bill.
Timberley village pub, nearly empty, had never been stirred, they told me regretfully, by the flashing presence of Maurice Kemp-Lore.
The two transport cafés along the main road hadn’t heard of any of their chaps giving him a lift.
None of the garages within ten miles had seen him ever.
The local taxi service had never driven him. He had never caught a bus on the country route.
It wasn’t hard at each place to work conversation round to Kemp-Lore, but it was never quick. By the time a friendly bus conductor had told me, over a cigarette at the Cheltenham terminus, that none of his mates had ever had such a famous man on board because they’d never have kept quiet about it (look how Bill went on for days and days when Dennis Compton took a tenpenny single), it was seven o’clock in the evening.
If I hadn’t been so utterly, unreasonably sure that it was Kemp-Lore who had abandoned the Jaguar, I would have admitted that if no one had seen him, then he hadn’t been there. As it was, I was depressed by the failure of my search, but not convinced that there was nothing to search for.
The army tank carrier that had blocked Peter’s and my way to Cheltenham was there accidentally: that much was clear. But Peter had got into such trouble for being late that a weapon was put straight into the hand of his enemy. He had only had to make Peter late again, and to spread his little rumours, and the deed was done. No confidence, no rides, no career for Cloony.
I found I still hoped by perseverance to dig something up, so I booked a room in a hotel in Cheltenham, and spent the evening in a cinema to take my mind off food. On the telephone Tick-Tock sounded more resigned than angry to hear that he would be car-less yet again. He asked how I was getting on, and when I reported no progress, he said, ‘If you’re right about our friend, he’s as sly and cunning as all get out. You won’t find his tracks too easily.’
Without much hope I went down in the morning to the Cheltenham railway station and sorted out, after a little difficulty with old time-sheets and the passing of a pound note, the man who had collected the tickets from the passengers on the stopping train from Timberley on the day the Jaguar was abandoned.
He was willing enough, but he too had never seen Kemp-Lore, except on television; though he hesitated while he said so.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Well, sir, I’ve never seen him, but I think I’ve seen his sister.’
‘What was she like?’ I asked.
‘Very like him, of course, sir, or I wouldn’t have known who she was. And she had riding clothes on. You know — jodhpurs, I think they’re called. And a scarf over her head. Pretty she looked, very pretty. I couldn’t think who she was for a bit, and then it came to me, afterwards like. I didn’t talk to her, see? I just took her ticket when she went through the barrier, that’s all. I remember taking her ticket.’
‘When was it that you saw her?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I couldn’t say. I don’t rightly know when it was. Before Christmas though, some time before Christmas, I’m certain of that.’
He flipped the pound I gave him expertly into an inner pocket. ‘Thank you, sir, thank you indeed,’ he said.