Longshot (29 page)

I listened with fascination to this insider viewpoint, and the moody Miss Brickell suddenly became a real person, not a pathetic collection of dry bones, but a mixed-up pulsating young woman full of strong urges and stronger guilts who’d piled on too much pressure, loaded her need of penitence and her heavy desires and perhaps finally her pregnancy onto someone who couldn’t bear it all, and who’d seen a violent way to escape her.

Someone, I thought with illumination, who knew how easily Olympia had died from hands around the neck.

Angela Brickell had to have invited her own death. Doone, I supposed, had known that all along.

“What are you thinking?” Sam asked, uncertainly for him.

“What did she look like?” I said.

“Angie?”

“Mm.”

“Not bad,” he said. “Brown hair. Thin figure, small tits, round bottom. She agonized about having breast implants. I told her to forget the implants, what would her babies think? That turned on the taps, I’ll tell you. She bawled for ages. She wasn’t much fun, old Angie, but bloody good on a mattress.”

What an epitaph, I thought. Chisel it in stone.

Sam looked out over the flooding river and breathed in the damp smell of the morning as if testing wine for bouquet, and I thought that he lived through his senses to a much greater degree than I did and was intensely alive in his direct approach to sex and his disregard of danger.

He said cheerfully, as if shaking off murder as a passing inconvenience, “Are you going to this do of Tremayne’s tonight?”

“Yes. Are you?”

He grinned. “Are you kidding? I’d be shot if I wasn’t there to cheer. And anyway”—he shrugged as if to disclaim sentiment—“the old bugger deserves it. He’s not all bad, you know.”

“I’ll see you there, then,” I said, agreeing with him.

“If I don’t break my neck.” It was flippantly said, but an insurance against fate, like crossed fingers. “I’d better tell this sodding policeman where the main electric switch is. I’ve got it rigged so no one can find it but me, as I don’t want people being able to walk in here after dark and turn the lights on. Inviting vandalism, that is. When the force have finished here, they can turn the electric off.”

He bounced off towards Doone, who was writing in his notebook, and they were walking together to the big boat-shed as I drove away.

 

 

EVEN AFTER HAVING done the week’s shopping en route, I was back at Shellerton House as promised in good time for Tremayne to drive his Volvo to Newbury races. He had sent three runners off in the horse box and was taking Mackie to assist, leaving me to my slowly growing first chapter in the dining room.

When they’d gone Dee-Dee came in, as she often did now, to drink coffee over the sorted clippings.

I said, “I hope Tremayne won’t mind my taking all these with me when I go home.”

“Home ...” Dee-Dee smiled. “He doesn’t want you to go home, didn’t you know? He wants you to write the whole book here. Any day now he’ll probably make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

“I came for a month. That’s what he said.”

“He didn’t know you then.” She took a few mouthfuls of coffee. “He wants you for Gareth, I think.”

That made sense, I thought; and I wasn’t sure which I would choose, to go or to stay, if Dee-Dee was right.

When she’d returned to the office I tried to get on with the writing but couldn’t concentrate. The trap in Sam’s boathouse kept intruding and so did Angela Brickell; the cold threat of khaki water that could rush into aching lungs to bring oblivion and the earthy girl who’d been claimed back by the earth, eaten clean by earth creatures, become earth-digested dust.

Under the day-to-day surface of ordinary life in Shellerton the fish of murder swam like a shark, silent, unknown, growing new teeth. I hoped Doone would net him soon, but I hadn’t much faith.

Fiona telephoned during the afternoon to say that she’d brought Harry home and he wanted to see me, so with a sigh but little reluctance I abandoned the empty page and walked down to the village.

Fiona hugged me like a long-lost brother and said Harry still couldn’t be quite clear in his mind as he was saying now that he remembered drowning. However could one remember drowning?

“Quite hard to forget, I should think.”

“But he didn’t drown!”

“He came close.”

She led me into the pink and green chintzy sitting-room where Harry, pale with blue shadows below the eyes, sat in an armchair with his bandaged leg elevated on a large upholstered footstool.

“Hello,” he said, raising a phantom smile. “Do you know a cure for nightmares?”

“I have them awake,” I said.

“Dear God.” He swallowed. “What’s true, and what isn’t?”

“What you remember is true.”

“Drowning?”

“Mm.”

“So I’m not mad.”

“No. Lucky.”

“I told you,” he said to Fiona. “I tried not to breathe, but in the end I just did. I didn’t mean to. Couldn’t help it.”

“No one can,” I said.

“Sit down,” Fiona said to me, kissing Harry’s head. “What’s lucky is that Harry had the sense to take you with him. And what’s more, everyone’s apologizing all over the place except for one vile journalist who says it’s possible a misguided vigilante thought getting rid of Harry the only path to real justice, and I want Harry to sue him, it’s truly vicious.”

“I can’t be bothered,” Harry said in his easygoing way. “Doone was quite nice to me! That’s enough.”

“How’s the leg?” I asked.

“Lousy. Weighs a couple of tons. Still, no gangrene as yet.”

He meant it as a joke but Fiona looked alarmed.

“Darling,” he said placatingly, “I’m bloated with antibiotics, punctured with tetanus jabs and immunized against cholera, yellow spotted mountain fever and athlete’s foot. I have it on good authority that I’m likely to live. How about a stiff whisky?”

“No. It’ll curdle the drugs.”

“For John, then.”

I shook my head.

“Take Cinderella to the ball,” he said.

“What?”

“Fiona to Tremayne’s party. You’re going, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“I’m not leaving you,” Fiona protested.

“Of course you are, love. It wouldn’t be the same for Tremayne if you weren’t there. He dotes on you. John can take you. And”—his eyes brightened mischievously with reawakening energy—“I know who’d love to use my ticket.”

“Who?” his wife demanded.

“Erica. My sainted aunt.”

T
he Lifetime Award to Tremayne was the work of a taken-over revitalized hotel chain aiming to crash the racing scene with sponsorship in a big way. They, Castle Houses, had put up the prize for a steeplechase and had also taken over a prestigious handicap hurdle race already in the program for Saturday.

The cash on offer for the hurdle race had stretched the racing world’s eyes wide and excited owners into twisting their trainers’ arms so that the entries had been phenomenal (Dee-Dee said). The field would be the maximum allowed on the course for safety, and several lightweights had had to be balloted out.

As a preliminary to their blockbuster, Castle Houses had arranged the award dinner and subsidized the tickets so that more or less everyone could afford them. The dinner was being held on the racecourse, in the grandstand with its almost limitless capacity; and the whole affair, Mackie had told me, was frankly only a giant advertisement, but everyone might as well enjoy it.

Before we went we met in the family room, Tremayne pretending nonchalance and looking unexpectedly sophisticated in his dinner jacket: gray hair smooth in wings, strong features composed, bulky body slimmed by ample expert tailoring. Perkin’s jacket by contrast looked a shade too small for him and in hugging his incipient curves diminished the difference between the sizes of father and son.

Gareth’s appearance surprised everyone, especially Tremayne: he made a bravado entrance to cover shyness in a dinner jacket no one knew he had, and he looked neat, personable and much older than fifteen.

“Where did you get that?” his father asked, marveling.

“Picked it off a raspberry bush.” He smiled widely. “Well, actually, Sam said I was the same height as him now and he happened to have two. So he’s lent it to me. OK?”

“It’s great,” Mackie said warmly, herself shapely in a shimmering black dress edged with velvet. “And John’s jacket, I see, survived the plunge into the ditch.”

The ditch seemed a long time ago: two weeks and three days back to the lonely silent abandoned struggle in the attic, to the life that seemed now to be the dream, with Shellerton the reality. Shellerton the brightly lit stage, Chiswick the darkened amphitheater where one sat watching from the balcony.

“Don’t get plastered tonight, John,” Tremayne said. “I’ve a job for you in the morning.”

“Do you know how to avoid a hangover forever?” Gareth asked me.

“How?” I said.

“Stay drunk.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, laughing.

Tremayne, happy with life, said, “You feel confident riding Drifter now, don’t you?”

“More or less,” I agreed.

“Tomorrow you can ride Fringe. I own a half-share in him. He’s that five-year-old in the corner box. You can school him over hurdles.”

I must have looked as astonished as I felt. I glanced at Mackie, saw her smiling, and knew she and Tremayne must have discussed it.

“Second lot,” Tremayne said. “Ride Drifter first lot as usual.”

“If you think so,” I said a shade weakly.

“If you stay here a bit longer,” Tremayne said, “and if you ride schooling satisfactorily, I don’t see why you shouldn’t eventually have a mount in an amateur race, if you put your mind to it.”

“Cool,” Gareth said fervently.

“I shouldn’t think he wants to,” Perkin remarked as I hadn’t answered in a rush. “You can’t make him.”

An offer I couldn’t refuse, Dee-Dee had said; and I’d thought only of money. Instead he was holding out like a carrot a heart-stopping headlong plunge into a new dimension of existence.

“Say you will,” Gareth begged.

Here goes impulse again, I thought. To hell with the helium balloon, it could wait a bit longer.

“I will.” I looked at Tremayne. “Thank you.”

He nodded, beaming and satisfied, saying, “We’ll apply for your permit next week.”

We all loaded into the Volvo and went down to Shellerton Manor where everyone trooped in to see Harry. Tired but cheerful, he held court from his chair and accepted Mackie’s heartfelt kiss with appreciative good humor.

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” she said, with a suspicion of tears, and he stroked her arm and said lightly that he was too, on the whole.

“What did it feel like?” Perkin said curiously, glancing at the bandaged leg.

“It happened too fast to feel much,” Harry said, smiling lopsidedly. “If John hadn’t been there I’d have died without knowing it, I dare say.”

“Don’t!” Fiona exclaimed. “I can’t bear even to think of it. Tremayne, off you go or you’ll be late. John and I will pick up Erica and see you soon.” She swept them out, following them, fearing perhaps that they would add to Harry’s fatigue, and he and I looked at each other across the suddenly empty room in a shared fundamental awareness.

“Do you know who did it?” he asked, weariness and perhaps despair returning, stress visible.

I shook my head.

“Couldn’t be someone I know.” He meant that he didn’t want it to be. “They meant to
kill
me, dammit.”

“Dreary thought.”

“I don’t want to guess. I try not to. It’s pretty awful to know someone hates me enough ...” He swallowed. “That hurts more than my leg.”

“Yes.” I hesitated. “It was maybe not hate. More like a move in a chess game. And it went wrong, don’t forget. The strong presumption of guilt has changed to a stronger presumption of innocence. Entirely and diametrically the wrong result. That can’t be bad.”

“I’ll hang on to that.”

I nodded. “Better than a funeral.”

“Anything is.” He dredged up a smile. “I’ve got a neighbor coming in to be with me tonight while you’re all out. I feel a bit of a coward.”

“Rubbish. Bodyguards make good sense.”

“Do you want a permanent job?”

Fiona returned, pulling on a fluffy white wrap over her red silk dress, saying she really didn’t want to go to the dinner and being persuaded again by her husband. He would be fine, he said, his friend would be there in a moment and good-bye, have a good time, give Tremayne the evening of his life.

Fiona drove her own car, the twin of Harry’s (still lost) and settled Erica Upton in the front beside her when we collected her on a westerly detour. The five-star novelist gave me an unfathomable glimmer when I closed the car door for her and remarked that she’d had a long chat with Harry that afternoon on the telephone.

“He told me to lay off you, as you’d saved his life,” she announced baldly. “A proper spoilsport.”

I said in amusement, “I don’t suppose you’ll obey him.”

I heard the beginning of a chuckle from the front seat, quickly stifled. The battle lines, it seemed, had already been drawn. Hostilities however were in abeyance during arrival at the racecourse, disrobing, hair tidying and first drinks. Half the racing world seemed to have embraced the occasion, for which after the last race that afternoon there had been much speedy unrolling of glittering black and silver ceiling-to-floor curtaining, transforming the workaday interior of the grandstand into something ephemerally magnificent.

“Theatrical,” Erica said disapprovingly of the decor, and so it was, but none the worse for that. It lifted the spirits, caused conversation, got the party going. Background music made a change from bookies’ cries. Fiona looked at the seating plan and said to meet at table six. People came and surrounded her and Erica, and I drifted away from them and around, seeing a few people I knew by sight and hundreds I didn’t. Like being at a gravediggers’ convention, I thought, when one had marked out one’s first plot.