‘Dammit,’ I said.
‘Sorry, mate.’
I did a bit of yellow-fingers walking and secured a shaky promise from a stranger to ‘put me on the list.’ ‘Can’t come tomorrow, sorry, not a chance.’
Sighing, I flicked again over the yellow pages, as I had them in my hand, and tracked down a rhyming dictionary in one of the bookshops. The last one they had, I was warned, but they would keep it for me.
When I put the receiver down this time, the phone rang immediately. I snatched the receiver up again and said ‘Lizzie?’ hopefully.
‘Expecting a lady friend, are you?’ Sandy Smith teased heavily. ‘Sorry, can’t oblige.’
‘My sister.’
‘Oh, sure.’
‘How can I help you?’
‘Other way round,’ he said. ‘I said I’d let you know about your hitchhiker. They did the post-mortem and he died of a heart attack. Myocardial infarction. Ticker stopped working. They’ve scheduled the inquest for Thursday. A half-hour job, evidence of identity, that sort of thing. Dr Farway’s report. That driver of yours might be wanted. That Brett.’
‘He’s left. Won’t Dave do?’
‘Oh aye, I dare say.’ Not his responsibility, I gathered.
‘Thanks, Sandy,’ I said sincerely. ‘How about Jogger?’
‘That’s a bit different.’ He sounded cautious suddenly. ‘There’s no report yet on him. As far as I know, they haven’t cut him up so far, like. They’re always busy on Mondays.’
‘Will you let me know when you hear?’
‘Can’t promise.’
‘Well, do your best.’
He said doubtfully that he would, and I wondered if he’d been subverted by my two plain-clothes visitors into casting me as opposition. All the same, he’d kept his word over Kevin Keith Ogden, and maybe our long acquaintanceship would remain a durable bridge.
I sat for a while thinking of everything that had happened over the past five days, until eventually the phone rang again and this time it was indeed my sister.
‘Who did you leave unturned?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve been deluged by a veritable flood of “Phone Freddie’s.” So what’s up?’
‘First of all, where are you and how are you doing?’
‘You surely didn’t send all those SOS’s just for a fireside chat!’
‘Er, no. But if we should get cut off, where are you?’
She read out a number, which I added to the list. ‘Professor Quipp’s lodgings,’ she said crisply.
I wondered if everyone except me had known where to find her. She’d had several lovers, nearly all bearded, all academics, not always scientists. Professor Quipp sounded the latest. I didn’t make the mistake, however, of uttering aloud an unretractable guess.
‘I was wondering,’ I said diffidently, ‘if you could get something analysed for me. In the chemistry school, perhaps.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Some unknown liquid in a 10 cc tube.’
‘Are you serious?’ She sounded as if she thought me crazy. ‘What is it? Where did you get it?’
‘If I knew what it was I wouldn’t need to find out.’
‘Oh brother...’ She sounded suddenly more friendly. ‘Tell me all.’
I told her about the carrier found in one of my boxes and the six tubes in the thermos.
‘Quite a lot of weird things have happened,’ I said. ‘I want to know what my horsebox was carrying and, apart from you, the only person I could ask would be the local vet or else the Jockey Club. Actually, I’ll give the Jockey Club a tube or two to be fair, but I want to know the answer myself, and if I entrust it all to any sort of authority I’ve lost control of it.’
She understood very well about losing control of research results. It had happened to her once, and she’d never stopped resenting it.
‘I thought,’ I went on, ‘that you’d be sure to know someone with a gas chromatograph or whatever it’s called, and could get the job done for me privately.’
She said slowly, ‘Yes, I could do it, but are you sure it’s necessary? I don’t want to waste a favour I’m owed. What else has happened?’
‘Two dead men and some empty containers stuck to the undersides of at least three of my lorries.’
‘What dead men?’
‘A hitchhiker and my mechanic. He found the containers.’
‘What sort of containers?’
‘For smuggling, maybe.’
She was silent, evaluating. ‘There’s a chance,’ she said slowly, ‘that you could be thought guilty of whatever’s gone on.’
‘Yeah. A certainty, given the attitude of the two policemen who came here today.’
‘And you love the police, of course.’
‘I’m sure,’ I said, ‘that there are any number of civilised intelligent cultured policemen doing brilliantly compassionate jobs all over the place. I just seem to have met those who’ve had the laugh kicked out of them.’
She remembered, as I did, a time in the past when I’d begged the police (not Sandy, and not in Pixhill) to preserve a young woman from her violent husband. Domestic affairs weren’t their business, I’d been told sniffily, and a week later she’d died from a beating. It had been the subsequently shrugged police shoulders which had infuriated me, not any sort of blighted passion, as she’d been barely more than an acquaintance. Official indifference had been literally deadly. Too late that years afterwards a new directive had decreed ‘domestics’ to be worthy of action: in me, the damage had been done when I’d been idealistic and twenty.
‘How are things in general?’ Lizzie said.
‘The business is busy.’
‘And the love life?’
‘On hold.’
‘And how long since you delivered flowers to the forebears?’
‘Yesterday, actually.’
‘Really?’ She didn’t know whether to be impressed or disbelieving. ‘I mean... truly?’
‘Truly. The first time since Christmas, mind you.’
‘There goes your fatal honesty again. I tell you, it gets you into more trouble...’ She broke off, pondering. ‘How do you propose to get these mysterious tubes up here to me?’
‘Post, I suppose. Courier, better.’
‘Hm.’ A pause. ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’
‘Going to Cheltenham. It’s Champion Hurdle Day.’
‘Is it? Since you stopped hurling your soul over those fences I’ve lost touch with racing. What if I fly down? I’m due a couple of days off. We could watch the races on TV, you could tell me all and take me out to dinner and I’ll fly back on Wednesday morning. Get my old room ready. What do you say?’
‘Will you come to the house or the farm?’
‘The house,’ she said with decision. ‘It’s easier.’
‘Noon?’
‘As near as dammit.’
‘Lizzie,’ I said gratefully, ‘thanks.’
Her voice was dry. ‘You’re one tough cookie, brother dear, so less of the sob-stuff.’
‘Wherever did you hear such language?’
‘In the cinema.’
Smiling, I said a temporary goodbye and put down the receiver. She would come, as she always had, driven by an inbuilt compulsion to hurry to the aid of her brothers. The eldest of the family by a gap of five years, she had mothered first our brother Roger and then six years later myself, a fierce hen with chicks. Had she had children of her own, those instincts might have died naturally on my account, as they had for Roger, who’d achieved a cosy wife and three boys of his own, but as I, like her, had never married — or not so far — I seemed still to be not only brother but surrogate son.
Shortish and thin, her bobbed dark hair lately peppered with grey, she whisked around her own habitat either in black academic gowns or white laboratory overalls, her darting mind engaged with parsecs, quantum leaps and black and white dwarfs. She published papers, she taught intensely, she’d made a name; she was, in or out of bed with the latest beard, as far as I could see, fulfilled.