‘Consider your position,’ they all wailed, more or less in chorus.
I considered my position and left for Yardman’s and Gatwick three hours after returning from Milan.
Mother had again brought up the subject of my early marriage to a suitable heiress. I refrained from telling her I was more or less engaged to a comparatively penniless Italian girl who worked in a gift shop, smuggled birth control pills, and couldn’t speak English. It wasn’t exactly the moment.
The outward trip went without a hitch. Timmie and Conker were along, together with a pair of grooms with four Anglia Bloodstock horses, and in consequence the work went quickly and easily. We were held up for thirty-six hours in New York by an engine fault, and when I rang up Yardman to report our safe return on the Friday morning he asked me to stay at Gatwick, as another bunch of brood mares was to leave that afternoon.
‘Where for?’
‘New York again,’ he said briskly. ‘I’ll come down with the papers myself, early in the afternoon. You can send Timms and Chestnut home. I’m bringing Billy and two others to replace them.’
‘Mr Yardman...’ I said.
‘Yes?’
‘If Billy tries to pick a fight, or molests me at all on the way, my employment with you ceases the instant we touch down in New York, and I will not help unload the horses or accept any responsibility for them.’
There was a short shocked silence. He couldn’t afford to have me do what I threatened, in the present sticky state of the business.
‘My dear boy...’ he protested sighing. ‘I don’t want you to have troubles. I’ll speak to Billy. He’s a thoughtless boy. I’ll tell him not everyone is happy about his little practical jokes.’
‘I’d appreciate it,’ I said with irony at his view of Billy’s behaviour.
Whatever Yardman said to him worked. Billy was sullen, unhelpful, and calculatingly offensive, but for once I completed a return trip with him without a bruise to show for it.
On the way over I sat for a time on a hay bale beside Alf and asked him about Simon’s last trip to Milan. It was hard going, as the old man’s deafness was as impenetrable as seven eighths cloud.
‘Mr Searle,’ I shouted. ‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘Eh?’
After about ten shots the message got through, and he nodded.
‘He came to Milan with us.’
‘That’s right, Alf. Where did he go then?’
‘Eh?’
‘Where did he go then?’
‘I don’t rightly know,’ he said. ‘He didn’t come back.’
‘Did he say where he was going?’
‘Eh?’
I yelled again.
‘No. He didn’t say. Perhaps he told Billy. He was talking to Billy, see?’
I saw. I also saw that it was no use my ever asking Billy anything about anything. Yardman would have asked him, anyway, so if Simon had told Billy where he was going Yardman would have known. Unless, of course, Simon had asked Billy not to tell, and he hadn’t. But Simon didn’t like Billy and would never trust him with a secret.
‘Where did Mr Searle go, when you left the plane?’
I was getting hoarse before he answered.
‘I don’t know where he went. He was with Billy and the others. I went across on my own, like, to get a beer. Billy said they were just coming. But they never came.’
‘None of them came?’
There had been the two grooms from the stud beside Simon and Billy, on that trip.
Eventually Alf shook his head. ‘I finished my beer and went back to the plane. There was no one there as I ate my lunch.’
I left it at that because my throat couldn’t stand any more.
Coming back we were joined by some extra help in the shape of a large pallid man who didn’t know what to do with his hands and kept rubbing them over the wings of his jodhpurs as if he expected to find pockets there. He was ostensibly accompanying a two-year-old, but I guessed tolerantly he was some relation of the owner or trainer travelling like that to avoid a transatlantic fare. I didn’t get around to checking on it, because the double journey had been very tiring, and I slept soundly nearly all the way back. Alf had to shake me awake as we approached Gatwick. Yawning I set about the unloading — it was by then well into Sunday morning — and still feeling unusually tired, drove home afterwards in a bee line to bed. A letter from Gabriella stopped me in the hall, and I went slowly upstairs reading it.
She had, she said, asked every single taxi driver and all the airport bus drivers if they had taken anywhere a big fat Englishman who couldn’t speak Italian, had no luggage, and was wearing a green corduroy jacket. None of them could remember anyone like that. Also, she said, she had checked with the car hire firms which had agencies at the airport, but none of them had dealt with Simon. She had checked with all the airlines’ passenger lists for the day he went to Milan, and the days after: he had not flown off to anywhere.
I lay in a hot bath and thought about whether I should go on trying to find him. Bringing in any professional help, even private detectives, would only set them searching in England for a reason for his disappearance, and they’d all too soon dig it up. A warrant out for his arrest was not what I wanted. It would effectively stop him coming back at all. Very likely he didn’t want to be found in the first place, or he wouldn’t have disappeared so thoroughly, or stayed away so long. But supposing something had happened to him... though what, I couldn’t imagine. And I wouldn’t have thought anything could have happened at all, were it not for Peters and Ballard.
There were Simon’s partners in the fraud. His cousin, and the man in France. Perhaps I could ask them if they had heard from him... I couldn’t ask them, I thought confusedly: I didn’t know their names. Simon had an elderly aunt somewhere, but I didn’t know her name either... the whole thing was too much... and I was going to sleep in the bath.
I went to the wharf building the next morning at nine thirty to collect my previous week’s pay and see what was on the schedule for the future. True to his word, Yardman had arranged no air trips for the following three days of Cheltenham races. There was a big question mark beside a trip for six circus horses for Spain that same afternoon, but no question mark, I was glad to see, about a flight to Milan with brood mares on Friday.
Yardman, when I went down to see him, said the circus horses were postponed until the following Monday owing to their trainer having read in his stars that it was a bad week to travel. Yardman was disgusted. Astrology was bad for business.
‘Milan on Friday, now,’ he said, sliding a pencil to and fro through his fingers. ‘I might come on that trip myself, if I can get away. It’s most awkward, with Searle’s work to be done. I’ve advertised for someone to fill his place... anyway, as I was saying, if I can get away I think I’d better go and see our opposite numbers out there. It always pays you know, my dear boy. I go to all the countries we export to. About once a year. Keeps us in touch, you know.’
I nodded. Good for business, no doubt.
‘Will you ask them... our opposite numbers... if they saw Simon Searle any time after he landed?’
He looked surprised, the taut skin stretched over his jaw.
‘I could, yes. But I shouldn’t think he told them where he was going, if he didn’t have the courtesy to tell me.’
‘It’s only an outside chance,’ I agreed.
‘I’ll ask, though.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll certainly ask.’
I went upstairs again to Simon’s room, shut his door, sat in his chair, and looked out of his window. His room, directly over Yardman’s, had the same panoramic view of the river, from a higher angle. I would like to live there, I thought idly. I liked the shipping, the noise of the docks, the smell of the river, the coming and going. Quite simply, I supposed, I liked the business of transport.