10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [26]
“Well, why?”
“Because there’s something else plugging up the hole, that’s why.”
“A rag?” I suggested. “A wad of tissues?”
“Nothing like that, I don’t think. Something harder. Anyway, I poked a bit of wire into the hole and freed whatever was there and the oil poured out like it always does. Not filthy oil, mind you. It hadn’t been long since the last oil change.”
“So the plug, whatever it is, is still in the sump?”
He shrugged. “I dare say so. It won’t do much harm there. The sump drain hole’s not much bigger than a little finger.” He held up his own grimy hand. “It wasn’t a big plug, see.”
“Mm.” I hesitated. “Did you tell Basil Rudd about it?”
He shook his big head. “He’d gone home for the day when I put the work-done sheets in his office, and I didn’t think much of it. I found a new plug that fits the Range Rover and screwed it up tight. Then I filled up with clean oil, same as usual, and put the Range Rover out in the yard, where it is now. It’s all hunkydory. You’ll have no trouble with it.”
“I’ll take it in a minute,” I said. “I’ll just go back into the office to see about settling up.”
I went into the office and asked Basil Rudd if I could telephone my father in the party headquarters and he obligingly held out the receiver to me with a be-my-guest invitation.
I said to my father, “Please, could you ask whoever it was who worked on your Range Rover last, if there was a normal plug on the oil-sump drain.” I relayed Terry’s finding and his solution to the problem.
Basil Rudd looked up sharply from a paper he was writing on and began to protest, but I smiled, said it was an unimportant inquiry, and waited for my father’s answer. He told me to stay right where I was and five minutes later was back on the line.
“My mechanic is very annoyed at any suggestion that there was any irregularity at all with any part of the Range Rover. He did a complete overhaul on Monday. So what is going on?”
“I don’t exactly know. It’s probably nothing.”
“Bring the Range Rover back. We need it today.”
“Yes,” I said.
I gave the receiver back to Basil Rudd and thanked him for the call.
“Just what is this all about?” he said.
“I don’t know enough,” I replied. “I haven’t been driving long. But I am concerned with keeping my father safe since the episode with the gun”—I waved the newspaper—“so I’m probably being fussy over nothing. But on its last overhaul there was an ordinary plug screwed into the sump drain, and yesterday there wasn’t.”
Basil Rudd showed first of all impatience and then anxiety, and finally stood up and came with me back to talk to Terry.
Terry, for a change, was scratching his brownoveralled belly.
I said, “I’m not complaining about anything here, and please don’t think I am. I do want to know what was plugging the sump, though, because I’m frankly scared of mysteries concerning anything to do with my father. So, please, how would you put a substitute plug in the drain hole, and most of all, why?”
The two motor men stood in silence, not knowing the answers.
“The oil was quite clean,” Terry said.
Another silence.
Basil Rudd said, “If you drain the new oil out again, and take the engine apart, you’ll find whatever the stopper was that Terry pushed through the sump, but that’s a very expensive procedure and not justified, I don’t think.”
Another silence.
“I’ll ask my father,” I said.
We trooped back to the office and I reported the last-resort expensive solution of dismantling the engine.
“Do nothing. Stay where you are,” my father commanded. “Just do nothing, and wait. Let me speak to Basil Rudd.”
The chitchat went on for several minutes. Basil Rudd said he thought the boy—meaning me—was making a hullabaloo over nothing much, but in the end he shrugged and said, “Yes, yes, all right.” He put down the receiver and said to me, “Your father is sending someone for the Range Rover. He wants you to stay here for now.”
Terry muttered that he had done a proper service on the Range Rover