Chapter 9
As I was leaving Winchester the car phone rang. Isobel’s voice said, ‘Oh, good, I’ve been trying to reach you. The police are here about Jogger.’
‘Which police?’
‘Not Sandy Smith. Two others. They want to know when you’ll be back.’
‘Tell them twenty minutes. Did the computer man come?’
‘He’s here now. Another half-hour, he says.’
‘Fine.’
‘Nina Young phoned. She and Nigel have picked up the Jericho Rich showjumper and they’re on their way back. No incidents, she said to tell you.’
‘OK.’
I completed the journey and kept the police waiting while I checked with the young computer expert in Isobel’s office. Yes, he confirmed, he had brought with him a replacement computer for my house, as requested, and he would come straight away to fix it up.
After I’d talked to the police, I said.
He looked at his watch and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I’m due at Michael Watermead’s stables. Same job as this. I’ll do him first, then come to you.’
‘Michael?’ I asked, surprised.
He smiled. ‘Rather apt, I thought, being Michelangelo, but he didn’t think it funny.’
‘No, he wouldn’t.’
Barely digesting the news, let alone the significance, of the failure of the Watermead hard disk, I went along to where the policemen waited in my own office.
They proved to be the two whose manner had so easily raised my antagonism on their Monday visit. I resolved for Sandy’s sake to be cooperative, and answered their questions truthfully, politely and briefly. They exuded suspicion and hostility, for which I could see no reason, and they asked most of Monday’s questions over again.
They needed, they announced, to take scrapings of the dirt surrounding and inside the inspection pit. Go right ahead, I said. They told me they were in the process of asking my staff what had brought Jogger to the farmyard on the Sunday morning.
Fine.
Had I instructed him to go to the farmyard on that morning?
No, I hadn’t.
Did I object to his going there on a Sunday morning?
‘No. As I mentioned before, all the staff could go in and out of the farmyard whenever they liked.’
Why was that?
‘Company policy,’ I said, and didn’t feel like explaining that the drivers’ pride in their vehicles led them to make them more personal, which they did chiefly on Sundays. Curtains were hung on Sundays. Seat and mattress covers were fitted. Bits of carpet appeared underfoot. Wives helped with the homes-from-homes. Metal and furniture polish accompanied pride. Loyalty and contentment were the products of Sundays.
Did Jogger normally go to the farmyard on Sundays?
I said that the horse transport business was always working on Sundays, though usually not as busily as on all other days. Jogger would certainly consider it normal to go to the farmyard on a Sunday.
They asked, as Sandy had predicted, what I had been doing on that Sunday morning. I told them. They wrote it down dubiously. You say you picked daffodils from your garden and put them on your parents’ grave? Yes, I did. Was I in the habit of doing that? I took flowers there from time to time, I said. How often? Five or six times a year.
I gathered, both from their general attitude and the limitations of their questions, that there was still in the collective police mind a basic indecision as to how to view Jogger’s death; accident or worse.
Rust, I thought, would decide for them.
I went with them and watched them take scrapings from all round the pit. They fed the patches of dirt into small plastic bags, closing and labelling each with its area of provenance. North end of pit floor... east, west, south. North interior wall of pit... east, west, south. North rim of pit... east, west, south.
They were thorough and fair. One way or another, rust would tell.
They drove away finally, leaving me to my ambivalent feelings and two alarmed secretaries.
Isobel said, scandalised, ‘They asked us how you and Jogger got along! Why did they ask that? Jogger fell into the pit, didn’t he?’
‘They have to find out.’
‘But... but...’
‘Mm,’ I said, ‘let’s hope he fell.’
‘All the drivers say he must have. They’ve been saying so all week.’
Trying to convince themselves, I thought.
I drove home, where the computer whizz soon joined me. He stood with his legs apart in the centre of my devastated sitting-room, the hand combing through the hair non-stop.
‘Yes,’ I said to his stunned silence. ‘It took a bit of strength and a lot of pleasure.’
‘Pleasure?’ He thought it over. ‘I guess so.’
He put the wreck of the old computer onto one of the few free areas of carpet and installed the new version in its place, attaching it to its phone line to the computer in Isobel’s room. Although I would still maintain my pencil charts, it was reassuring to see the screen come alive again with the active link to the office.
‘I guarantee that this new disk is clean,’ the expert said. ‘And I’m selling you a disk you can use to check that it stays that way.’ He showed me how to ‘scan’ the disk. ‘If you find any virus on there, please phone me at once.’
‘I certainly will.’ I watched his busy fingers and asked a few questions. ‘If someone fed the Michelangelo virus into the office computer, would it also infect the computer here?’
‘Yes, it would, as soon as you called the office programmes onto your screen. And the other way round. If someone fed the virus into here, the office would catch it. It would then spread to all the computers on the same network.’
‘Like Rose’s?’
‘Is Rose the other secretary? Yes, sure, into hers in a flash.’
‘And... um... if we make back-up floppy disks, would the virus be in those, too?’
He said earnestly, ‘If you do have any back-ups, let me check them before you use them.’
‘Yes.’
‘But your girls said they hadn’t made any for ages.’
‘I know.’ I paused. ‘Did Michael Watermead’s secretary make back-ups?’
He hesitated. ‘Don’t know if I should tell you.’
‘Professional etiquette?’
‘Sort of.’
‘She’ll tell Isobel, anyway.’
‘Then... er... yes, she did, and the back-up floppy she’s been using lately has Michelangelo on it. I’m having to clean up their whole act.’
‘Will you save their records?’
‘Every chance.’
He finished the installation and gave me a cheerful pitying look. ‘You need lessons,’ he said. ‘You need to know about write-protect and boot-up floppy disks, for a start. I could teach you, if you like, though you’re pretty old.’
‘How long have you been in computers?’ I asked.
‘From before I could hold a pen.’
The way I could ride, I thought.
‘I’ll come for lessons,’ I said.
‘Really? Great, then. Really great.’
After he’d gone I managed to stay awake to watch all the racing at Cheltenham and had the bitter-sweet satisfaction of seeing a horse I’d schooled and taught his business win the Gold Cup.
I should have been riding him. I might have been... Well, it had to be enough to remember the first of his triumphs, a scramble of a two-mile hurdle. Enough to remember his first steeplechase, a high-class novice race that he’d won by outjumping the opposition though nearly giving it away by floundering all over the place in the last hundred yards. I’d ridden him eight times in all into first place past the winning post, and now here he was, nine years old and a star, charging up the Cheltenham hill as straight as a die with all the panache and courage a jockey could hope for.