Driving Force

by Dick Francis

  IN THE MORNING, life in the farmyard looked normal.

  Lewis, predictably, was annoyed that I’d allocated Nina to go with him instead of Dave.

  “Dave wasn’t well on Saturday,” I said. “I’m not risking him getting flu away in Italy.”

  Dave at the moment creaked into view on his bicycle, obligingly flushed and heavy-eyed. Flu wasn’t going to stop him, he said.

  “Sorry, but it is,” I replied. “Go home to bed.”

  Nina arrived looking the epitome of feminine frailty, yawning artistically and stretching. Lewis regarded her thoughtfully and made no more objections.

  He and she both collected their travel kits from Isobel and went over the paperwork requirements with her. When Lewis went into the washroom I had a private moment to murmur in Nina’s ear.

  “You’re taking a nun with you.”

  Wide-eyed, she said, “How do you know?”

  “I saw her arrive.”

  “When?”

  “Five this morning. About then.”

  “So that’s why . . .”

  Lewis reappeared, saying if they were going to catch the ferry they’d better be off.

  “Phone home,” I said.

  “Sure thing,” he agreed easily.

  He drove out of the gate without a worry in the world. I hoped to hell that Nina would come back safely.

  From the business point of view it was not an overpoweringly busy day, but the plainclothes police swept in with sharp eyes to take over the place before nine, setting up an interview room in my office. Dispossessed, I showed them whatever they wanted, offered them the run of the canteen and sat for a while on a spare chair in Isobel’s office, watching her work.

  Sandy drove in in his uniform, still confused in his lo yalties.

  “Tell them about the containers,” he blurted. “I haven’t.”

  “Thanks, Sandy.”

  “Did you find your answers?”

  “I asked some questions.”

  He knew I wasn’t being open with him, but he seemed to prefer ignorance. In any case, he joined his colleagues and ran errands for them all day.

  The colleagues found out about the containers from the landlord of the pub.

  “Lone rangers?” I repeated when they asked me out in the farmyard. “Yes, Jogger came across three containers under the lorries. All empty. We don’t know how long they’ve been there.”

  The Force wanted to inspect them. Go ahead, I agreed, though Phil wouldn’t be back with his own horse van 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 vans. 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 van. 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 horse van, 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 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 horse van. I sympathized 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 grooms 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 horse vans?”

  “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-van 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 from place to place.”

  “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 horse
s 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.”

  “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 disfavor.

  “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 realized 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 magazine 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 horse van, 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 viral 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?”

&nbs
p; “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 just 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 horse van as well as in it?”

  “Mr. Know-all, aren’t you? Yes, I did.”

  “Er, why?”

  “Lewis told me one day you could carry anything under the horse vans if you wanted to.”

  “Why did he say that?” I asked.

  “Why does anyone say anything? He liked saying things to get you going. He said he’d carried soap in a container under one of your vans, but he’d given it up, it didn’t work.”