10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [27]
I waited for over an hour until Basil Rudd appeared at the window beside me. I opened the door, stepped down to the ground and met the man accompanying the garage owner, who announced with a glint of irony that he had come to solve the mystery of the missing sump plug. His name, he said, was Foster Fordham. He looked more like a lawyer than a mechanic: no blue collar to his gray-and-white pin-striped shirt or his neat dark suit. He had straight, dark, well-brushed hair, light-framed glasses and polished black shoes.
Basil Rudd, turning away, asked Foster Fordham to report to him in the office before leaving and, watching Rudd’s departing back, Fordham, apparently bored to inertia, informed me that he was here to do my father a big favor, as normally he was a consultant engineer, not a hands-on minion.
I began to explain about the gunshot, but he interrupted that he knew all about it, and all about the missing plug.
“I work in car-racing circles,” he said. “My field is sabotage.”
I no doubt looked as inadequate as I felt in the face of his quiet assurance.
He said, “I understand that yesterday you were going to drive this vehicle from here to Quindle. How far is that?”
“About twelve miles.”
“Dual carriageway? Flat, straight roads?”
“Mostly single lane, a lot of sharp corners, and some of it uphill.”
He nodded. He said we would now take the road to Quindle and he would drive.
Perplexed but trusting, I climbed into the passenger seat beside him and listened to the healthy purr of the engine as he started up and drove off out of the garage compound onto the ring road around Hoopwestern, bound for Quindle. He drove fast in silence, watching the instrument panel as intently as the road, and said nothing until we had reached the top of the long steep incline halfway to what I thought was our destination. He stopped up there however and, still without explaining, did a U-turn and drove straight back to Rudd’s garage.
Cars flashed past, appearing fast towards us from blind comers, as they had the day before. Fordham drove faster than I’d felt safe doing in Crystal’s car, but if his field was racing, that was hardly surprising.
At the garage he told Terry to drain the engine oil into a clean container. Terry said the oil was too hot to handle. Fordham agreed to wait a little, but insisted that the oil should still be hot when it was drained.
“Why?” Terry asked. “It’s clean. I did the oil change yesterday.”
Fordham didn’t answer. Eventually, wearing heavy gloves, Terry unscrewed the sump plug and let the hot oil drain out as requested into a clean plastic five-gallon container. Fordham had him put the five-gallon container into the luggage space at the back of the Range Rover and then suggested he should screw the sump plug back into place and refill the engine with fresh, cool oil.
Terry signaled exasperation with his eyebrows but did as he was asked. Mr. Fordham, calm throughout, then told me that he had finished his investigation and suggested we say farewell to Basil Rudd and return in the Range Rover to my father’s headquarters. Basil Rudd, of course, wanted to know reasons. Fordham told him with great politeness that he would receive a written report, and meanwhile not to worry, all was well.
Fordham drove composedly to the parking lot outside of my father’s headquarters, and with me faithfully following, walked into the offices, where my father was sitting with Mervyn Teck discussing tactics.
My father stood at the sight of us and limped outside with Fordham to the Range Rover. Through the window I watched them talking earnestly, then Fordham took the plastic container