She sped back to the jeep, revved up the engine and tore another millimetre off the tyre treads. Out of where there might once have been a window she yelled as she rolled forward, ‘My secretary will contact yours about Doncaster.’
I shouted thanks which she probably didn’t hear above the whine of ancient gears. I thought she would be good for Pixhill and hoped she would prosper.
Various drivers came to work and went into the canteen. Harve’s account of my nocturnal experiences had them all coming outdoors again, gaping, carrying coffee mugs and inspecting me as if I were somehow unreal.
One of the drivers was the Watermead family’s favourite, Lewis, the whizz with the rabbits, supposedly nursing his woes in bed.
‘What happened to the flu?’ I asked him.
He sniffed and with a hoarse throat said, ‘Reckon it’s just a cold after all. No temperature, see?’ He coughed and sneezed, spraying infections regardless.
‘It’s better you don’t scatter your germs anyway,’ I said. ‘We’ve too many sick drivers as it is. Take another day off.’
‘Straight up?’
‘Come back on Friday, work Saturday too.’
‘OK,’ he wheezed nonchalantly. ‘I’ll sit and watch Cheltenham. Thanks.’
Phil, obliging, phlegmatic, unobservant, incurious and unimaginatively reliable, said to me, ‘Is it true your house got trashed?’
‘ ’Fraid so.’
‘And that Jag?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’d kill the bugger,’ he said.
‘Just give me the chance.’
The others nodded, understanding the feeling. No one, in their collective ethos, no one messed with their belongings without reprisals.
‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that none of you came past the farmyard after eleven last night?’
No one had, it seemed.
Lewis said, ‘Didn’t you see who had a go at you?’
‘Didn’t even hear anyone. Ask around, will you?’
They said they would, dubious and willing.
Many of the drivers looked superficially alike, I thought, surveying the group. All under forty, none of them fat. Mostly dark haired, all with good eyesight, none very short or over six feet: the physique that went best with the job. In character... different matter.
Lewis had joined the force two years ago with ringlets. When the other drivers called him ‘girlie,’ he’d grown a slab of moustache and thrown his fists about to silence sarcastic tongues. He’d then produced a blonde bimbo in scarlet stilettos and again thrown his fists about to silence wolf whistles. During the last past summer he’d cut the hair and shaved off the moustache and the bimbo had brought forth a son over which both parents drooled. Lewis couldn’t wait, he often said, to play football with his infant. The complete instant father, transformed.
‘Don’t sneeze on the baby,’ I told him, and, alarmed, he said ‘No way.’
Dave creaked in through the gates on his rusty bicycle, cheeky and cheery and as irresponsible as ever. His grin and his freckles gave an impression of eternal youth, the Peter Pan syndrome. Dave’s wife mothered him along with their two daughters, putting up large-heartedly with his pub-haunting habits and his betting on greyhounds.
Aziz arrived also, dark eyes and white teeth a-flashing. Harve detailed the day’s jobs, checking with a list, making sure each driver knew exactly where to go, which horses to collect and when they had to arrive.
I left them all telling Dave and Aziz of my night’s adventures, hearing mistakes creeping into the retelling but not bothering to interrupt and put them right.
‘Portsmouth Docks,’ Phil was erroneously saying, with Dave understandingly nodding. Although we never used Southampton for horses we did occasionally ship them by ferry from Portsmouth to Le Havre. The drivers all knew Portsmouth Docks, even though I preferred to send horses by the Dover-Calais route, because the sea-crossing was shorter. Many horses suffered from sea-sickness on long crossings, made all the worse through being unable to vomit. A horse had died once of sea-sickness in one of my boxes, which made me especially aware of the danger.
‘Portsmouth Docks.’ The drivers were all nodding. Portsmouth, just along the coast from Southampton, sounded more familiar. ‘Bull-dozed his Jaguar...’ ‘Broke all the glass in the house...’
Down the boozer, as Jogger would have said, they’d have me dropped over the side of the Portsmouth-Le Havre ferry by nightfall, with my car through the window in the sitting-room.
Isobel and Rose arrived and complained again about the defunct state of the computer. I thought of the even more defunct state of the terminal in my sitting-room and with an effort remembered that this was the day appointed for the man to fix it. Isobel and Rose took the shrouds off the superseded mechanical typewriters and looked pathetically martyred.
I phoned the central agency that kept my credit card numbers and asked them to get busy putting a stop on my accounts, and I got through to the insurance company who said they would send a form. Would they be sending a man, I asked, or of course a woman, who would verify the write-off of the Jaguar and so much else of my property? They said a copy of a police report would probably be enough.
After that I sat and listened to my head aching while Harve finished getting the day’s work organised. Aziz came into the office with his double ration of vitality and asked if there were any personal errands he could run for me. I considered it thoughtful of him, particularly as his manner was casual and, as far as I could see, not self-serving.
‘Harve says there isn’t a driving job for me today,’ he said. ‘He said to ask if you wanted me to do maintenance, as you’ve lost your mechanic. He said two of the boxes need oil changes.’
‘It would be helpful.’ I picked the tool store keys out of the desk and handed them to him. ‘You’ll find all you need in there. Get a check list from Isobel and return it to her when you’ve filled it in and signed it.’
‘Right.’
‘And Aziz...’ My aching head came up with a therapeutic idea. ‘Would you mind driving my Fourtrak to Heathrow, to take my sister to catch the shuttle to Edinburgh?’
‘Be glad to,’ he said willingly.
‘Eleven o’clock at my house.’
‘On the dot,’ he agreed.
With Aziz driving Lewis’s box along to the barn for its oil change and with the others thinning out as they left on the day’s missions, I drove home to say goodbye to Lizzie and beg her forgiveness for sending her with Aziz.
‘You’re more concussed than you want to say,’ she accused me. ‘You should be in bed, resting.’
‘Oh, sure.’
She shook her head in older-sisterly disapproval and rubbed her hand down my back in the gesture she’d always used to show affection for two little brothers who’d thought kissing was sissy.
‘Look after yourself,’ she said.
‘Mm. You too.’
The phone rang: Isobel’s agitated voice. ‘The computer man’s here,’ she said. ‘He says someone’s killed off our machine with a virus.’
Chapter 8
The computer man, perhaps twenty, with long light brown hair through which he ran his fingers in artistic affectation every few seconds, had given up trying to resuscitate our hardware by the time I got back to the office.
‘What virus?’ I asked, coming to a halt by Isobel’s desk and feeling overly beleaguered. We had flu, we had aliens, we had bodies, we had vandals, we had concussion. A virus in the computer could take the camel to its knees.
‘All our records,’ Isobel mourned.
‘And our accounts,’ chimed Rose.
‘It’s prudent to make back-ups,’ the computer man told them mock-sorrowfully, his young face more honestly full of scorn. ‘Always make back-ups, ladies.’