I walked back to my office and wondered how much of my hovering nausea was due to the blow on my own head or the imagined scrunch of a rusty tyre iron into Jogger’s.
You’d have to get up early to hit Jogger...
He’d died about noon in broad daylight.
It had to have been an accident. I didn’t want him to have died simply because he’d worked for me. I could deal with attacks on myself. I didn’t want to bear the guilt of someone else’s death.
Aziz came back from Heathrow, his irrepressible good spirits hovering in a liquid smile even while he commiserated with me over the Jaguar.
‘It can’t have been easy to get a car to run at that speed into a helicopter. Not on flat land. Not without risking your neck.’
‘That’s no comfort,’ I pointed out.
‘I took a quick decko into the wreck,’ he said, bright-eyed. ‘I’d say the accelerator pedal was wedged down with a brick.’
‘A brick? I haven’t any bricks.’
‘What’s a brick doing there, then?’
I shook my head.
‘You’d have to be nippy,’ he said. ‘You’d have only seconds to get clear once you’d got up enough speed.’
‘It has automatic gears,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘It sets... set... off slowly, left to itself.’
He nodded happily. ‘Nice little problem.’
‘How would you solve it, then?’
He had already been thinking about it, as he answered without hesitation, ‘I’d wind down the driver’s window, for a start. I’d have a brick lashed to one end of a stick with the other end through the window. I’d slide into the driver’s seat, start the engine, put the gear lever in drive, slide out again at slow speed and shut the door, then through the window I’d push the accelerator down hard with the brick and jump away just before impact.’ He grinned. ‘Mind you, it would take nerve. And you’d have to start a good way back from the helicopter to get up enough speed for that amount of damage. You’d have to be running by the end.’
‘There must be a simpler way,’ I said. ‘No one would risk their life like that.’
‘You’re not dealing with common sense,’ Aziz said. ‘Your sister showed me the havoc in your sitting room. You’ve got a gold-plated wrecker on the loose. Can’t you hear him? He’s shouting at you. “Look at me, look at what I can do, see how clever I am.” That sort of character likes taking risks. It’s life’s blood. It gives him his buzz.’
I said flatly, ‘How do you know?’
The shining eyes flickered. ‘Observation,’ he said.
‘Observation of who?’
‘Oh, this person and that.’ He flapped a hand vaguely. ‘No one particular.’
I didn’t pursue it. He wasn’t going to tell me. I was interested, all the same, in his assessment. It matched pretty faithfully what the expert had said about the pattern of computer virus writers, the look-at-clever-me syndrome. The overpowering self-regard that could express itself only in destruction.
‘Does one wrecker,’ I asked slowly, ‘egg on another?’
His expression was street-smart beyond any other I’d met. ‘Ever heard of football yobbos?’
Murderous, I thought.
I thanked Aziz for driving Lizzie.
‘Nice lady,’ he said. ‘Any old time.’
I rubbed a hand over my face, asked Aziz to check with Harve about jobs for the next day and told Isobel and Rose I’d be back in the morning.
On the short way home I noticed that my neighbour had a small pile of bricks beside his gate. The bricks had been there for weeks, I realised. I’d never paid them any attention.
I stopped the jalopy by the wreck of the Jaguar and looked through the space that had once been the driver’s side window. There was indeed a brick — or the remains of one — jumbled in the squeezed space. The brick had broken into three pieces. Bricks were brittle. Brick dust was reddish, like rust.
I’m delirious, I thought.
I let myself into the house with the keys Aziz had brought from Lizzie and switched on the television in my bedroom to watch the racing at Cheltenham.
I sat in the armchair and then lay on the bed and then fell inexorably asleep as if brain-dead and stayed that way until long after the last horse had passed the winning post.
Thursday morning, Cheltenham Gold Cup day, once greeted with raised pulse and thudding hope, found me that particular week with a creaking stiffness in my limbs and a craving to curl up and let the world pass by.
Instead, driven by curiosity more than a sense of duty, I put on shirt and tie and drove to Winchester, pausing for five minutes on the way with Isobel and Rose. They could fill in the time before the arrival of the computer-reviver, I suggested, by making a list of everyone they could think of who’d set foot in their offices the previous week.
They looked at me blankly. Dozens of people had crossed their doorstep, it seemed, starting with all the drivers. I would take the drivers for granted, I said. Just list everyone else, and put a star against those that had been in on Friday. They were doubtful if they could remember. Try, I said.
I collected Dave from the canteen and took him with me to Winchester, though he was reluctant to go and spent the whole twenty-minute journey in unaccustomed silence.
The inquest on Kevin Keith Ogden, proved, as Sandy had promised, to be a comparatively simple affair. The coroner, quiet and businesslike, had read the paperwork before coming to the proceedings and, though thorough, saw no benefit in wasting time.
He spoke with kindness to a thin, miserable woman in black, who agreed that yes, she was Lynn Melissa Ogden, and yes, she had identified the dead man as her husband, Kevin Keith.
Bruce Farway, consulted, reported that he’d been called to the house of Frederick Croft on the previous Thursday evening and had determined Kevin Keith to be deceased. The coroner, reading aloud from a paper, accepted the post-mortem report that death had resulted from heart failure caused by a string of abstruse medical conditions that probably no one in the room understood except Farway, who was nodding.
The coroner had received a letter from Kevin Keith’s own doctor detailing the patient’s history and the pills he had been advised to keep taking. He asked the widow if the pills had been faithfully swallowed. Not always, she said.
‘Mr... er... Yates?’ asked the coroner, looking around for a response.
‘Here, sir,’ Dave answered hoarsely.
‘You gave a lift to Mr Ogden in one of Mr Croft’s horseboxes, is that right? Tell us about it.’
Dave made it as short as he could, sweating and uncomfortable.
‘We couldn’t wake him, like, at Chieveley...’
The coroner asked if Kevin Keith had shown any physical distress before that.
‘No, sir. He never said a word. We thought he was asleep, like.’
‘Mr Croft?’ the coroner said, identifying me easily. ‘You called Police Constable Smith when you’d seen Mr Ogden?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Constable Smith, you called Dr Farway?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The coroner shuffled the papers together and looked neutrally at those present. ‘The finding of this court is that Mr Kevin Ogden died of natural causes.’ After a pause, when no one moved, he said, ‘That’s all, everyone. Thank you for your attendance. You have each behaved with commendable promptness and commonsense in this sad occurrence.’
He gave Mrs Ogden one last sympathetic smile, and that was that. We trooped out onto the pavement and I heard Mrs Ogden enquiring forlornly about taxis.
‘Mrs Ogden,’ I said, ‘can I give you a lift?’