10 lb Penalty

by Dick Francis

  He took his time in answering by starting at the beginning of his involvement. “A man in your party’s headquarters—said his name was Teck or some such—he phones Basil saying there might be something dicey about a fancy Range Rover they’d got there and to send someone over pronto to take a decko, so I went over there and this Mr. Teck gave me the keys and the Range Rover started at first touch, sweet as anything.”

  I looked at him without comment.

  “Yeah, well,” he said, scratching his bald head again. “This Teck guy said something about maybe someone took a potshot at your old man and to check that the Range Rover’s brakes hadn’t been mucked about with or anything, so I looked it all over and could see nothing wrong. No bombs, nothing like that, but anyway this Teck guy said to bring it here and do a thorough service, so I did.”

  He stopped for effect. I said obligingly, “What did you find?”

  “See, it was what I didn’t find.”

  “I wish you’d explain.”

  “No plug on the sump.”

  “What?”

  “Oil change. Routine service. I run the Range Rover over the inspection pit and I take a spanner to unscrew the sump plug to drain out the old oil, and there you are, no plug. No plug, I ask you. But there’s oil there, according to the dipstick. Normal. Full. So I run the engine a bit and the oil-pressure gauge reads normal, like it did on my way ‘round here, so there has to be oil circulating ’round the engine, see, so why, if the sump plug is missing, why hasn’t the oil all emptied out?”

  “Well, why?”

  “Because there’s something else plugging up the hole, that’s why.”

  “A rag?” I suggested. “A wad of tissues?”

  “Nothing like that, I don’t think. Something harder. Anyway, I poked a bit of wire into the hole and freed whatever was there and the oil poured out like it always does. Not filthy oil, mind you. It hadn’t been long since the last oil change.”

  “So the plug, whatever it is, is still in the sump?”

  He shrugged. “I dare say so. It won’t do much harm there. The sump drain hole’s not much bigger than a little finger.” He held up his own grimy hand. “It wasn’t a big plug, see.”

  “Mm.” I hesitated. “Did you tell Basil Rudd about it?”

  He shook his big head. “He’d gone home for the day when I put the work-done sheets in his office, and I didn’t think much of it. I found a new plug that fits the Range Rover and screwed it up tight. Then I filled up with clean oil, same as usual, and put the Range Rover out in the yard, where it is now. It’s all hunkydory. You’ll have no trouble with it.”

  “I’ll take it in a minute,” I said. “I’ll just go back into the office to see about settling up.”

  I went into the office and asked Basil Rudd if I could telephone my father in the party headquarters and he obligingly held out the receiver to me with a be-my-guest invitation.

  I said to my father, “Please, could you ask whoever it was who worked on your Range Rover last, if there was a normal plug on the oil-sump drain.” I relayed Terry’s finding and his solution to the problem.

  Basil Rudd looked up sharply from a paper he was writing on and began to protest, but I smiled, said it was an unimportant inquiry, and waited for my father’s answer. He told me to stay right where I was and five minutes later was back on the line.

  “My mechanic is very annoyed at any suggestion that there was any irregularity at all with any part of the Range Rover. He did a complete overhaul on Monday. So what is going on?”

  “I don’t exactly know. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Bring the Range Rover back. We need it today.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I gave the receiver back to Basil Rudd and thanked him for the call.

  “Just what is this all about?” he said.

  “I don’t know enough,” I replied. “I haven’t been driving long. But I am concerned with keeping my father safe since the episode with the gun”—I waved the newspaper—“so I’m probably being fussy over nothing. But on its last overhaul there was an ordinary plug screwed into the sump drain, and yesterday there wasn’t.”

  Basil Rudd showed first of all impatience and then anxiety, and finally stood up and came with me back to talk to Terry.

  Terry, for a change, was scratching his brownoveralled belly.

  I said, “I’m not complaining about anything here, and please don’t think I am. I do want to know what was plugging the sump, though, because I’m frankly scared of mysteries concerning anything to do with my father. So, please, how would you put a substitute plug in the drain hole, and most of all, why?”

  The two motor men stood in silence, not knowing the answers.

  “The oil was quite clean,” Terry said.

  Another silence.

  Basil Rudd said, “If you drain the new oil out again, and take the engine apart, you’ll find whatever the stopper was that Terry pushed through the sump, but that’s a very expensive procedure and not justified, I don’t think.”

  Another silence.

  “I’ll ask my father,” I said.

  We trooped back to the office and I reported the last-resort expensive solution of dismantling the engine.

  “Do nothing. Stay where you are,” my father commanded. “Just do nothing, and wait. Let me speak to Basil Rudd.”

  The chitchat went on for several minutes. Basil Rudd said he thought the boy—meaning me—was making a hullabaloo over nothing much, but in the end he shrugged and said, “Yes, yes, all right.” He put down the receiver and said to me, “Your father is sending someone for the Range Rover. He wants you to stay here for now.”

  Terry muttered that he had done a proper service on the Range Rover and no one could tell him different. Basil Rudd gave me a look of disfavor and said he couldn’t waste any more time, he had mountains of paperwork to see to. I didn’t exactly apologize, but I said I would wait outside in the Range Rover and walked peacefully across to where it stood in the wire-fenced compound. I disarmed the alarms, opened the door and sat behind the driving wheel, going through the systems and reading the instruction book.

  I waited for over an hour until Basil Rudd appeared at the window beside me. I opened the door, stepped down to the ground and met the man accompanying the garage owner, who announced with a glint of irony that he had come to solve the mystery of the missing sump plug. His name, he said, was Foster Fordham. He looked more like a lawyer than a mechanic: no blue collar to his gray-and-white pin-striped shirt or his neat dark suit. He had straight, dark, well-brushed hair, light-framed glasses and polished black shoes.

  Basil Rudd, turning away, asked Foster Fordham to report to him in the office before leaving and, watching Rudd’s departing back, Fordham, apparently bored to inertia, informed me that he was here to do my father a big favor, as normally he was a consultant engineer, not a hands-on minion.

  I began to explain about the gunshot, but he interrupted that he knew all about it, and all about the missing plug.

  “I work in car-racing circles,” he said. “My field is sabotage.”

  I no doubt looked as inadequate as I felt in the face of his quiet assurance.

  He said, “I understand that yesterday you were going to drive this vehicle from here to Quindle. How far is that?”

  “About twelve miles.”

  “Dual carriageway? Flat, straight roads?”

  “Mostly single lane, a lot of sharp corners, and some of it uphill.”

  He nodded. He said we would now take the road to Quindle and he would drive.

  Perplexed but trusting, I climbed into the passenger seat beside him and listened to the healthy purr of the engine as he started up and drove off out of the garage compound onto the ring road around Hoopwestern, bound for Quindle. He drove fast in silence, watching the instrument panel as intently as the road, and said nothing until we had reached the top of the long steep incline halfway to what I thought was our destination. He stopped up there however an
d, still without explaining, did a U-turn and drove straight back to Rudd’s garage.

  Cars flashed past, appearing fast towards us from blind comers, as they had the day before. Fordham drove faster than I’d felt safe doing in Crystal’s car, but if his field was racing, that was hardly surprising.

  At the garage he told Terry to drain the engine oil into a clean container. Terry said the oil was too hot to handle. Fordham agreed to wait a little, but insisted that the oil should still be hot when it was drained.

  “Why?” Terry asked. “It’s clean. I did the oil change yesterday.”

  Fordham didn’t answer. Eventually, wearing heavy gloves, Terry unscrewed the sump plug and let the hot oil drain out as requested into a clean plastic five-gallon container. Fordham had him put the five-gallon container into the luggage space at the back of the Range Rover and then suggested he should screw the sump plug back into place and refill the engine with fresh, cool oil.

  Terry signaled exasperation with his eyebrows but did as he was asked. Mr. Fordham, calm throughout, then told me that he had finished his investigation and suggested we say farewell to Basil Rudd and return in the Range Rover to my father’s headquarters. Basil Rudd, of course, wanted to know reasons. Fordham told him with great politeness that he would receive a written report, and meanwhile not to worry, all was well.

  Fordham drove composedly to the parking lot outside of my father’s headquarters, and with me faithfully following, walked into the offices, where my father was sitting with Mervyn Teck discussing tactics.

  My father stood at the sight of us and limped outside with Fordham to the Range Rover. Through the window I watched them talking earnestly, then Fordham took the plastic container of oil out of the Range Rover, put it into the trunk of a Mercedes standing nearby, climbed into the driver’s seat and neatly departed.

  My father, returning, told Mervyn cheerfully that there was now nothing wrong with the Range Rover and it could safely be driven all around the town.

  We finally set off. I drove, feeling my way cautiously through the gears, learning the positive message of the four-wheel drive. My father sat beside me, accompanied by his walking stick. Mervyn Teck, carrying a megaphone, sat in the rear seat, squeezing his lumpy knees together to allow more space for two volunteer helpers, thin bittersweet Lavender and motherly Faith.

  The rear-seaters knew their drill from much past practice, and I with eye-opening wonderment became acquainted with the hardest graft in politics, the door-to-door begging for a “yes” vote.

  The first chosen residential street consisted of identical semi-detached houses with clipped garden-defining hedges and short concrete drives up to firmly closed garage doors. Some of the front windows were adorned with stickers simply announcing BETHUNE: he had worked this land before us.

  “This road is awash with floaters,” Mervyn said with rare amusement. “Let’s see what we can do about turning the tide our way.”

  Directing me to stop the vehicle, he untucked himself from his seat belt and, standing in the open air, began to exhort the invisible residents through the reverberating megaphone, to vote JULIARD, JULIARD, JULIARD.

  I found it odd to have my name bouncing off the house fronts, but the candidate himself nodded with smiling approval.

  Lavender and Faith followed Mervyn out of the car, each of them carrying a bundle of stickers printed JULIARD in slightly larger letters than BETHUNE. Taking one side of the road each, they began ringing front-door bells and knocking knockers and, where they got no response, tucking a sticker through the letter box.

  If a door was opened to them they smiled and pointed to the Range Rover from where my father would limp bravely up the garden path to put on his act, at which he was clearly terrific. I crawled up the road in low gear, my father limped uncomplainingly, Mervyn activated his megaphone and Lavender and Faith wasted not a leaflet. In our slow wake we left friendly waves and a few JULIARDs in windows. By the end of the street I was bored to death, but it seemed Lavender and Faith both reveled in persuasion tactics and were counting the road a victory for their side.

  After two more long sweeps through suburbia (in which at least one baby got kissed) we respited for a late sandwich lunch in a pub.

  “If ever you get invited into someone’s home,” my father said (as he had been invited five or six times that morning), “you go into the sitting room and you say ‘Oh, what an attractive room!’ even if you think it’s hideous.”

  Lavender, Faith and Mervyn all nodded, and I said, “That’s cynical.”

  “You’ve a lot to learn.”

  We were sitting by a window. I looked through it to the Range Rover parked outside in plain view and reckoned that one way or another I actually had learned a lot that morning, and that what I’d learned had probably saved a good many votes.

  My father, as if following my thoughts, said lightly, “We’ll talk about it later,” but it wasn’t until we were changing before going to the Town Hall debate that he would discuss Foster Fordham.

  By then I’d persuaded Mervyn to arrange a securely locked overnight garage for the Range Rover, backed by my casual parent who said mildly, “The boy’s got a point, Mervyn. It might be more satisfactory for us all. No harm, anyway, in keeping it safe from thieves,” and as the car belonged to my father himself and not to the party, he had his way.

  “Foster Fordham wasn’t sure how much you understood,” he said, combing through his tightly curled dark hair and leaving it much as it had been before. “He was surprised you didn’t ask him questions.”

  “Terry—the mechanic—did ask. Fordham wouldn’t answer.”

  “So what do you conclude it was all about?”

  “Well ... if you or I or anyone else had driven the Range Rover yesterday towards Quindle, it would quite likely have crashed. Or, at least, I think so.”

  My father put down his comb and with stillness said, “Go on.”

  I said, “I do think the bullet that came so near us was deliberately aimed at you, and even if it hadn’t killed you, it would have stopped your campaign if you’d been badly injured. But all the town could see that all you’d done was twist your ankle. So if anyone was looking around for another way to put a stopper on you, there was the Range Rover, just standing there unguarded all night in the parking lot, conspicuously yours and painted with silver and gold to attract attention.”

  “Yes.”

  “When I was taking driving lessons, which was mostly in the Easter holidays, I read a lot of motoring magazines . . ..”

  “I thought you were supposed to be revising for your A levels, your university entrance exams.”

  “Um . . . I was riding for Sir Vivian, too. I mean, I can think in algebra. I just had to make sure I understood all the exam questions that have been set before, set in the past. I don’t mean to sound big-headed, really I don’t, but I had sort of a lot of spare mental time, so I read the motor magazines. I didn’t know you had a Range Rover—but I read about them. I read about their anti-thief devices. So when your Range Rover had stood quiet in the parking lot all night, and you had the only keys to disarm the screech alarms, then if anyone had done any harm it had to have been from outside... or underneath....” I tapered off, feeling silly, but he waved for me to go on.

  “I thought the brake fluid might have been drained so that the brakes wouldn’t work,” I said. “I thought the tires might have been slashed so that you’d have a blowout when you were going fast. Things come whizzing ’round comers on that road to Quindle ... you wouldn’t have much chance in a car out of control, but a Range Rover is pretty well built, like a tank—so you might be unhurt in a crash, but you might kill the people you crashed into ... or at least injure them badly ... and that would stop you being elected, wouldn’t it?”

  My father took his time in moving, and in answering. “It wasn’t the brakes or the tires,” he said.

  “It was the engine oil.”

  He nodded. “Tell me what you think.”


  I said, “I think Fordham knew what was wrong before he came. He said he was an expert in sabotage in motor racing, and nothing about the Range Rover surprised him. It must have seemed pretty elementary to him.”

  My father, smiling, said, “I’ve known him a long time. So, what did he tell me?”

  This is some sort of test, I thought. I could only guess at answers; but anyhow, I guessed. “Someone unscrewed the sump plug and removed it, and stuffed up the hole so that the oil couldn’t all run out.”

  “Go on.”

  “The stopper was something that would fall out later, so the oil would all drain out of the engine when it was going along, and the engine would seize up solid, and as it’s a four-wheel drive you wouldn’t be able to steer and you would be like a block of stone in the middle of the road.”

  “Not bad.”

  “But Terry—the mechanic—pushed the substitute plug right through into the sump like a cork in a bottle, which I honestly don’t think he should have done, and screwed in a new plug before he refilled with clean oil ... like I told you on the phone.”

  “Mm. So what was the substitute plug made of?” I’d been thinking about it while we drove around the suburbs. I said hesitantly, “To begin with,. I thought it would be something chemical that could react with the oil and make it like jelly, or something, so that it couldn’t be pumped ’round the pistons and they would seize up in the cylinders, but that can’t have been right as the plug was in the sump when Foster Fordham drove fast towards Quindle and deliberately made the engine very hot, and he insisted on Terry draining out the clean oil again when it was still hot, so I thought that perhaps the temporary stopper had melted, and Fordham has taken the oil away to see what was in it.”

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “Because if it had melted away in the sump drain hole when we were on our way to Quindle yesterday, it would have taken only about a minute for all the oil to drain out and ruin the engine. When the oil was hot this morning, when Terry drained it, it ran out as thin as water.”

  “Fordham says it’s an old trick. So old, it’s never attempted now in motor racing.”