‘OK.’
‘And do remember that all horses doze off and dream while you’re driving at a constant speed on the motorway, but when you leave the motorway and slow down and come to a roundabout they’ll wake up and not know where they are and judder about trying to stay on their feet. All horses are like that but these very old ones will be shaky on their pins to start with, so be extra careful or you’ll come back with all seven thrashing about on the floor and, even if they survive, at the very least we will not get paid for our efforts.’
Aziz listened to this homily at first with a disbelieving grin and latterly with thoughtful attention. He should, though, have been nodding throughout.
I said slowly, ‘You have been driving racehorses, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he replied instantly. ‘Of course. But local, round Newmarket. And to Yarmouth races. No motorways, really.’
Harve frowned but didn’t pursue it, and question marks rose like a prickly hawthorn hedge in my own mind. It was true there were few if any long motorways in East Anglia, but it passed credibility that a Newmarket stable would never have sent runners further afield.
I might have asked Aziz a few searching questions but at that moment Maudie’s sister, Lorna, swept through the gates in her expensive crimson Range Rover, the aristocrat of safari cars, built to withstand raw African veldt and the smooth roads of Pixhill.
Lorna, concerned and intense, hopped down from behind the wheel and strode across to give me a peck on the cheek. Blonde, blue-eyed, long-legged, richly divorced and thirty, lovely Lorna looked me firmly in the eye and told me I was a pig to charge for fetching the pensioners.
‘Um,’ I said, ‘is John Tigwood charging the pensioners’ owners?’
‘That’s entirely different.’
‘No, that’s getting it both ways, or trying to.’
‘Centaur Care needs the money.’
I smiled a usefully bland smile and introduced Aziz as the day’s driver. Lorna blinked. Aziz, shaking her hand, gave her a white blinding smile and a flash of dark eyes. Lorna forgot about my meanness and told Aziz animatedly that they were going on a wonderful Errand of Mercy and that it was a Privilege to be involved in Saving Old Friends.
‘Yes, I agree,’ Aziz said.
He gave me the ghost of a sideways grin as if daring me to denounce his hypocrisy. Aziz was a rogue, I thought, but rogues were good for the spirits, up to a point.
John Tigwood chose that moment to give us the benefit of his company, which I could certainly have done without. The potty little pipsqueak, as Harve had called him, emerged from a coffee-coloured van emblazoned all over with ‘Centaur Care for Aged Horses’ in titanium white letters, and strode in our direction with thrusting important steps. He wore grey corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt and a heavy-knit sweater and was carrying an anorak.
‘Good morning, Freddie.’
His voice tried hard, but the self-important fruitiness couldn’t disguise the lack of substance beneath. Tigwood was essentially an inadequate man inventing a role for himself: not, I supposed, an unusual phenomenon or even one necessarily reprehensible. What else could he do? Slink along, wringing Uriah Heep hands?
I’d always taken the Centaur Care charity to be a long-established facet of the local community. That Tuesday morning I wondered whether Tigwood himself had set it up, and whether he lived off the collecting boxes, and whether, if he did, should Pixhill object? There were always old horses around dozing in sunshine. Such a cause had to be worthy, if compassion meant anything.
‘Morning, Lorna,’ the charity man said.
‘John, dear.’ Lorna pecked his thin cheek somewhere above the sparse beard that straggled round his pointed chin. Even the beard, I thought, trying to stifle my impatience, was inadequate. So in a way was his thin neck with the sharp larynx, neither of which he could help.
‘What can I do for you, John?’ I asked, welcoming him.
‘Thought I’d go with Lorna,’ he announced. ‘Seven horses... two pairs of hands will be better than one. Is this our driver?’
Lorna gave a quick glance at Aziz, not sure that she wanted John with her after all, but the potty little pipsqueak had made up his mind, had come dressed for the journey and would stick obstinately to his plan, it was clear.
‘How nice,’ Lorna said insincerely.
‘You’ve a long way to go,’ I told them in general, ‘you may as well get started.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Tigwood said, taking bustling charge. ‘Come along, driver.’
‘His name is Aziz,’ I remarked mildly.
‘Oh? Come along then, Aziz.’
I watched them climb aboard, two totally incompatible men with the well-intentioned Cause-embracer between them. Aziz looked grimly out of the window in my direction, all relish for the day, small at best, evaporating. I couldn’t blame him. I’d have hated to have taken his place.
Under that nine-box, I reflected, as Aziz turned competently out of the gate, was the magnet Jogger had found. I’d taken it on trust that the nails in the insulating block of wood were still holding fast. I hadn’t warned Aziz it was there. I hadn’t told him to look out for strangers trying to roll under the fuel tank section of the chassis. I couldn’t envisage anyone seeking to transport anything in such awkward secrecy between Yorkshire and Pixhill, when all they’d have to do was drive down in a car.
Harve left in Aziz’s wake, setting out five minutes after, in time to pick up two runners for the later races at Cheltenham. Another box had already left for the same destination, two had gone to Bristol airport to collect Irish horses flying over for Gold Cup day and three were out with broodmares. Not bad, considering.
I went into the offices where Isobel and Rose were looking in frustration at blank computer screens and asking what they should do with the day.
‘Type letters on the old-fashioned typewriter?’ I suggested.
‘I suppose we’ll have to,’ Rose said, disgusted.
‘The man promised he’d come tomorrow,’ I assured her.
‘Not before time.’
Tigwood’s collecting box stood on Isobel’s desk and I picked it up and shook it. The result was a hollow rattle, three or four coins at most.
‘Mr Tigwood came to empty it last week,’ Isobel said. ‘There wasn’t much in there. He thinks we should try harder.’
‘Perhaps we should.’
I went out to my jalopy and drove to Newbury to leave my film of Jogger with a one-hour developing outfit and to collect the ordered, reserved and ready rhyming dictionary. I hadn’t actually seen one of these before and sat in the car park flicking over the pages to pass the hour’s wait, finding that the rhymes were listed not in regular alphabetical fashion but all starting with vowels.
‘Amely,’ I read. ‘Gamely, lamely, namely, tamely.’
‘Etter — better, debtor, fetter, getter, letter, setter, sweater, wetter...’
‘Oard — board, floored, ford, gourd, hoard, horde, oared, pored, sword, toward, aboard, afford...’
Hundreds and thousands of rhymes, available but useless. I realised I needed to have Jogger’s cryptic statements under my eyes, not just in my memory. Maybe if I could simultaneously see what he’d said, some spark might fly out of entries like ‘unch — brunch, bunch, crunch, hunch, lunch, munch, punch, scrunch...’
Always remembering, I thought in depression, that in Jogger’s cockney accent bike became boike and lady, lidey, and ts and ds could be swallowed and not heard.
Closing the book, I collected the sharp sad pictures of his death and drove home to tidy the house and get my sister’s room ready, which meant making the bed and opening the windows to let in whatever March cared to deliver.