by Dick Francis
“As long as you’re happy.”
I checked the map with her, marking the road clearly, made sure she had the right paperwork and then drove ahead of her to Benjy’s yard, not the easiest of places to find.
He was leaning out of his upstairs window when we arrived, issuing a stream of invective and instructions to his luckless grooms and greeting me personally with, “Don’t let your driver go without the jockeys’ colors.”
Nina helped the grooms load the two young upset hurdlers, who were reacting with trembles and rolling eyes to the general scramble. Nina, I saw, had a calming effect as powerful and natural as Dave’s, so that in the end the nervous creatures walked docilely up the ramp without needing blindfolds or brute force. Benjy stopped complaining, Nina and the head lad closed the ramp, the jockeys’ colors were put on board, a couple of scurrying grooms climbed into the passenger seats to accompany their charges and the circus was ready to roll.
Nina gave me a laugh through the window. “They say there’s a new head traveling lad in Lewis’s van ahead of us, and he doesn’t know these other two horses are coming. He has to declare them, and saddle them. What a to-do.”
“Phone Isobel and ask her to tell Lewis,” I said.
“Yes, boss.”
She went on her way in good humor and I found myself regretting her stay would be temporary. Highly competent and good company, Nina Young.
Benjy withdrew and closed his window like one of the characters exiting in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. I half expected him to reappear on his doorstep but when he didn’t I drifted off in the Fourtrak to go home.
A short way along the road I slowed before passing a man leading a horse, hardly an unusual sight in Pixhill. The horse was swinging from side to side with his attendant yanking down again and again on the leading rein in a sharp manner guaranteed to produce more skittering, not less. I passed the pair with caution, stopped ahead, and walked back to meet them.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“No, you can’t.” He was brusque, if not downright rude. Young, belligerent, surly.
I realized with minor shock that the badly behaved horse was my old friend Peterman, his name plain on his head-collar.
“Would you like me to lead him?” I asked. “I know him.”
“No, I wouldn’t. It’s none of your effing business.”
I shrugged, went back to the Fourtrak and sat watching the erratic and potentially dangerous progress along the road. When he passed me, the groom raised two fingers in my direction with a jerk.
A fool, I thought him. I watched him turn right a good way ahead, taking the road towards Marigold English’s yard. I followed slowly to the turning, stopping on the main road but watching until horse and man turned off the side road and in through Marigold’s gates. At least, I thought, old Peterman had reached his new home safely, and I would check with Marigold to make sure he was all right.
Outside my own house, when I reached it, there seemed to have sprouted a well-filled car park. Clustered around the Jaguar and the Robinson 22 were cars in all directions with their drivers in chatting groups. These, on my arrival, attempted to introduce themselves all at once.
“Hey,” I protested, “who got here first?”
The simple order of precedence identified the crowd into various insurance assessors, air-accident inspectors, a transport firm surveying the possibility of shipping the helicopter to Scotland, a salesman hoping I would order a new Jaguar and the man to open the safe.
I took the last one pronto into the house, even though he was apparently the latest on the scene. He looked at the hatchet job, scratched his head, asked if there was anything fragile inside (yes, I said, computer disks) and said he thought it a case for a drill.
“Drill away,” I said.
The rest of the men outside had sprouted notebooks and were discussing the mechanics of bricks-on-sticks on accelerators. By no means impossible, they agreed. Very dicey, but possible. The helicopter-shipper asked questions about fuel in the tanks. Not much there, I told him. My sister had said she would have to refuel at Oxford. Full, the tank and auxiliary tank held about 130 liters, she’d said, but she’d flown from Carlisle on that. The shipper began discussing technical ways to disassemble the tri-hinge rotor, and lost me.
The air-accident inspector produced a letter from Lizzie which he asked me to read and confirm. Neither of us had seen the collision, she wrote. I confirmed it.
Insurance assessors, hers and mine, said they’d never seen anything like it, not right outside someone’s back door, that was. They’d studied Sandy’s report. They asked me to sign various forms. I signed.
The Jaguar salesman told me about the Jaguar XJ220. Made in Bloxham, near Banbury, he said. Only 350 of them built, costing four hundred and eighty thousand pounds each.
“Each?” I repeated. “Four hundred and eighty thousand pounds each?”
Did I want to order one?
“No,” I said.
“Just as well. They’re all sold.”
I wondered if it were I who was surreal and whether my concussion was worse than I suspected.
“Actually,” the salesman said, “I came to see if your XJS could be salvaged.”
“And can it?”
Shaking his head, he looked with regret at the whole-looking white rear end of my pride and joy. “I might find you another one like it. That same year. Advertise for one, secondhand. And they’re still in production. I could get you a new one.”
I shook my head. “I’ll let you know.”
I wouldn’t seek a twin, I thought. Life had changed. I was changing. I would buy a different car.
The flock of notebooks returned to their vehicles and drove away, leaving only the workmanlike van of the safecracker beside the wreck on the tarmac. I went in to check on his progress and found my safe door open but minus its lock mechanism, which lay bent on the floor.
We discussed the possibility of mending the safe but he advised me to take the insurance money and buy a newer and better model which he would be happy to sell me. It would not, he assured me, have a lock that could be assaulted by an ax.
He went out to the van for a pamphlet with illustrations and an order form, and I signed my name again. He shook my hand. He asked me to check that the contents of the old safe were untouched and, when I’d done that, to sign his work sheet. I signed.
When he’d gone, I retrieved the packet of money and the backup floppy disks and went into the kitchen to phone the computer wizard. Sure, he agreed, bring the disks in for a check as soon as I liked; he would be in his workshop all afternoon and would wash Michelangelo out of my hair with his little virus scrubbers. Did all computer wizards talk like that? I wondered.
“Great,” I said.
I made coffee and drank it and thought a bit, and after a while telephoned the local Customs and Excise office.
I explained who I was. They knew of me, they said. I explained that as my horse vans went fairly regularly across the Channel, I wanted an up-to-date list of what could and could not be carried in them, in view of the ever-changing European regulations. My drivers were confused, I said.
Ah, they said understandingly. They didn’t themselves deal with import and export, but mostly with tax. If I wanted the up-to-the-minute info on international movement of goods I would need to see their Single Market Liaison Officer in the regional office.
“Which regional office?” I asked.
“Southampton,” they said.
I almost laughed. They enlarged. The Southampton regional office was actually in Portsmouth. The Single Market Liaison Officer there would answer all my questions and give me the latest copy of the Single Market report. If I wanted to go there in person, they suggested I should arrive well before four o’clock. It was Friday, they explained.
I thanked them and looked at my watch. Plenty of time. I drove to Newbury, shopped for a week’s food and ran the wizard to earth in his workshop, which proved to be a smallish room half lined with l
arge brown cardboard boxes bearing words like “Fragile” or “This way up ALWAYS.” A busy desk bore piles of papers—letters, invoices, pamphlets—held down by public-house ashtrays used as paperweights. Ceiling-high bookshelves supported instruction manuals and catalogues by the score. Plastic-covered leads snaked everywhere. A table along one wall bore a keyboard, two or three computers, a laser printer and a live color monitor showing a bright row of miniature playing cards apparently halfway through a game of solitaire.
“Black jack on red queen,” I said, looking.
“Yeah.” He grinned, ran his hand through his hair, and with a mouse moved the cards around on the screen. “It’s not coming out,” he observed, and switched it all off. “Did you bring your disks?”
I handed them to him in an envelope. “There are four,” I said. “A new one for each calendar year since I took over the business.”
He nodded. “I’ll start with the latest.” He fed it into a drive slot in one of the computers on the table and called up onto the monitor the directory of the files stored for the current year.
Muttering under his breath, he pressed a series of keys on the keyboard and in a while the screen was flickering rapidly with letters and numbers as he scanned my disk for deadly strangers.
Lone rangers, I thought. Aliens everywhere.
“There we are,” he said, when the flickering steadied to a single message. “Scan complete. No virus found.” He grinned at me. “No Michelangelo. You’re safe.”
“That’s . . . er . . . rather more than extremely interesting,” I said.
“How?”
“I used the disk last to back up the work entered on the main office computer a week ago yesterday,” I said. “That was March 3rd.”
His eyes savored the knowledge.
“On March 3rd, then,” he said, “I’d say there was no Michelangelo in your office. Right?”
“Right.”
“So you caught it on the Friday or Saturday . . .” He pondered. “Ask your secretaries if they fed anyone else’s disks into your machine. Say, for instance, someone lent them a game disk, like the solitaire game, which no one should do, really, it’s an infringement of copyright, but say they did, well, Michelangelo could have been lurking in the game disk and it would leap across to your machine instantly.”
“The monitor in the office is black-and-white,” I said.
“Kids would play solitaire in black-and-white,” he replied. “Like Nintendo. No problem. Did you have any kids in the office?”
“Isobel’s brother, Paul,” I said, remembering his name on the list. “He’s fifteen. Always cadging money from his sister.”
“Ask him, then. I’ll bet that’s where your trouble lies.”
“Thank you very much.”
“I may as well scan your other disks, just to be safe.” He fed the three others through the scanning process, all with nil results. “There you are, then. At present they’re clean. But, like I said, you have to patrol your defenses all the time.”
I thanked him and paid him, took my clean disks out to the car and set off on the drive south to Portsmouth, giving Southampton Docks a wide berth.
Customs and Excise were fortunately helpful, extending the impression that talking to the general public made a change from regular bureaucracy. The near-top man I was finally steered to, who introduced himself briefly as “Collins,” offered me a seat, a cup of tea and a willing expression. An office around us: desk, green plant, second-generation Scandinavian decor.
“What may your drivers carry and what may they not?” Collins repeated.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes. As you know, it’s all different from the old cut-and-dried days.”
“Mm.”
“We’re positively forbidden to make spot checks on anything coming in from the E.C.” He paused. “European Community,” he said.
“Mm.”
“Even drugs.” He spread his hands in what looked like a long-standing frustration. “We can act—search—only on specific information. The stuff floods in, I’ve no doubt, but we can’t do anything about it. Customs checks on goods are now allowed only at the point of entry into the Community. Once inside, movement is free.”
“I expect it saves a lot of paperwork,” I said.
“Tons of it. Hundreds of tons. Sixty million fewer forms.” The plus side lightened his scowl. “Saves time too, saves days and months.” He searched briefly for a booklet, found it and slid it towards me across the desk. “Most of the present regulations are listed in there. There’s very little restriction on alcohol, tobacco and personal goods. One day there’ll be none. But of course there’ll still be duty and restrictions of goods entering from outside the E.C.”
I picked up the booklet and thanked him.
“We spend a good deal of our time juggling with tax,” he said. “Different rates, you see, in different E.C. countries.”
“I was wondering,” I murmured, “what one may still not bring into this country from Europe, and . . . er . . . what one may not take out.”
His eyebrows rose. “Not take out?”
“Anything that doesn’t have free movement.”
He pursed his lips. “Some things need licenses,” he said. “Are your drivers breaking the law?”
“I came to find out.”
His interest sharpened as if he’d suddenly realized I was there from more than normal curiosity.
“Your horse vans come and go through Portsmouth, don’t they?”
“Sometimes.”
“And they’re never searched.”
“No.”
“And you have the necessary permissions, of course, to move live animals across the Channel.”
“All that’s done for us by a specialist firm.”
He nodded. He thought. “I suppose if your vans carried other animals than horses, we’d never know. Your drivers haven’t been bringing in cats or dogs, have they?” His voice was censorious and alarmed. “We maintain the quarantine laws, of course. The threat of rabies is always with us.”
I said calmingly, “I’ve never heard of them bringing in cats or dogs, and if they had it would be common knowledge in my village, where news travels faster than lightning.”
He relaxed slightly; a fortyish man with receding hair and white careful hands.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “thanks to vaccines, no one has died of rabies contracted in Europe for the past thirty years, but we still don’t want the disease here.”
“Um,” I said, “what do you need a license for?”
“Dozens of things. From your point of view I suppose veterinary medicines would be interesting. You’d need to get a separate license for each movement, a Therapeutic Substance license from the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Veterinary Medicines Directorate. But there would be no check on the substance here on entry through Portsmouth. Enforcement of licensing would be a matter for MAFF itself.”
MAFF? Oh, Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Shades of Jogger.
“Well,” I said, “what else isn’t one supposed to bring in and out?”
“Guns,” he said. “There are still exit checks, of course, for firearms in baggage at airports. No import checks here. You could bring in a vanful of guns, and we’d never know. Smuggling in the old sense has vanished within the E.C.”
“So it seems.”
“There are intellectual property rights,” he said. “That’s about the infringement of existing patents between member states.”
“I don’t think my drivers are into intellectual property rights.”
He smiled briefly, a quick movement of lips. “I’m afraid I haven’t been of much help.”
“Indeed you’ve been most kind,” I assured him, rising to go. “Negative results are often as helpful as positive.”
I thought, however, as I drove back to Pixhill with the Single Market booklet on the seat beside me, that I was as far as ever from understanding why anyone should ne
ed or want to fix hiding places under my lorries. If smuggling was out, what were they for?
AT HOME I sat in my poor green leather chair with the stuffing coming out of the ax holes and one by one fed my clean disks and their information into my new computer. Then, feeling rusty and all thumbs and impatient to begin my lessons with the wizard, I looked up my original computer manuals and worked out how to organize all the data now inside the machine into various categories, both chronological and geographic.
I studied in turn each driver’s work over the past three years, looking for I knew not what. A pattern? Something worth destroying my records for, if that should happen not to be the work of Isobel’s brother. I tended to doubt it was Paul’s doing as, first, he was more idle than bright and, second, Isobel would never let him play games in the office.
The patterns I was looking for were definitely there, but told me nothing I didn’t know. Each driver went most often to the racecourses favored by the trainers they mostly drove for. Lewis, for instance, drove most regularly each summer to Newbury, Sandown, Goodwood, Epsom, Salisbury and Newmarket, Michael Watermead’s preferred prestigious destinations. At other times he went where Benjy Usher sent his jumpers, Lingfield, Fontwell, Chepstow, Cheltenham, Warwick and Worcester. Most of his overseas journeys had been for Michael, all to Italy, Ireland or France.
Although there was horse racing all over Europe, British trainers rarely sent horses anywhere but Italy, Ireland and France. Often British runners traveled by air (and had to be taken to the airports), but Michael much preferred to go all the way by road; all the better for me.
Nigel had made the most overseas journeys, but that was my doing, owing to his long-distance stamina. Harve had made few, both my choice and his. Dave had made dozens as relief driver and horses handler, often with broodmares rather than racers.
All in all, the categories were informative but told me nothing surprising, and after about an hour I switched off, as puzzled as ever.
I phoned Nina, reckoning she would be in her horse van on the way back from Lingfield, and she answered immediately.
“Phone me when you get to Pixhill,” I said briefly.
