Longshot (7 page)

The drink she mixed was gin and tonic, which she gave to Tremayne. He nodded his thanks, as for something done often.

“For you?” Mackie said to me. “John?”

“The coffee was fine,” I said.

She smiled faintly. “Yes.”

Truth to tell I was hungry, not thirsty. Thanks to no water in the friend’s aunt’s house, all I had had that day apart from the coffee was some bread and Marmite and two glasses of milk, and even that had been half frozen in its carton. I began to hope that Gareth’s return, “back for grub,” was imminent.

Perkin appeared carrying an already full glass of brown liquid that looked like Coca-Cola. He sank into one of the armchairs and began complaining again about the loss of the jeep, not seeing that he was lucky not to have lost his wife.

“The damned thing’s insured,” Tremayne said robustly. “The garage can tow it out of the ditch in the morning and tell us if it can be salvaged. Either way, it’s not the end of the world.”

“How will we manage without it?” Perkin grumbled.

“Buy another,” Tremayne said.

This simple solution silenced Perkin, and Mackie looked grateful. She sat on a sofa and took her boots off, saying they were damp from snow and her feet were freezing. She massaged her toes and looked across at my black shoes.

“Those shoes of yours are meant for dancing,” she said, “and not for carrying females across ice. I’m sorry, I really am.”

“Carrying?”
Tremayne said, eyebrows rising.

“Yes, didn’t I tell you? John and Harry carried me for about a mile, I think. I can remember the crash, then I sort of passed out and I woke up just outside the village. I do vaguely remember them carrying me ... it’s a bit of a blur ... I was sitting on their wrists ... I knew I mustn’t fall off ... it was like dreaming.”

Perkin stared, first at her, then at me. Not pleased, I thought.

“I’ll be damned,” Tremayne said.

I smiled at Mackie and she smiled back, and Perkin very obviously didn’t like that. I’d have to be careful, I thought. I was not there to stir family waters but simply to do a job, to stay uninvolved and leave everything as I’d found it.

Thankful for the heat of the fire, I shed the dinner jacket, laying it on a chair and feeling less like the decadent remains of an orgy. I wondered how soon I could decently mention food. If it hadn’t been for the bus fare I might have bought something sustaining like chocolate. I wondered if I could ask Tremayne to reimburse the bus fare. Frivolous thoughts, mental rubbish.

“Sit down, John,” Tremayne said, waving to an armchair. I sat as instructed. “What happened in court?” he asked Mackie. “How did it go?”

“It was awful.” She shuddered. “Nolan looked so ... so
vulnerable.
The jury think he’s guilty, I’m sure they do. And Harry wouldn’t swear after all that Lewis was drunk ...” She closed her eyes and sighed deeply. “I wish to God we’d never had that damned party.”

“What’s done is done,” Tremayne said heavily, and I wondered how many times they’d each repeated those regrets.

Tremayne glanced at me and asked Mackie, “Have you told John what’s going on?” She shook her head and he enlightened me a little. “We gave a party here last year in April to celebrate winning the Grand National with Top Spin Lob. Celebrate! There were a lot of people here, well over a hundred, including of course Fiona and Harry, who you met. I train horses for them. And Fiona’s cousins were here, Nolan and Lewis. They’re brothers. No one knows for sure what happened, but at the end of the party, when most people had gone home, a girl died. Nolan swears it was an accident. Lewis was there ... He should have been able to settle it one way or the other, but he says he was drunk and can’t remember.”

“He
was
drunk,” Mackie protested. “Bob testified he was drunk. Bob said he served him getting on for a dozen drinks during the evening.”

“Bob Watson acted as barman,” Tremayne told me. “He always does, at our parties.”

“We’ll never have another,” Mackie said.

“Is Nolan being tried for murder?” I asked, into a pause.

“For assault resulting in death,” Tremayne said. “The prosecution are trying to prove intent, which would make it murder. Nolan’s lawyers say the charge means manslaughter but they are pressing hard for involuntary manslaughter, which could be called negligence or plain accident. The case has been dragging on for months. At least tomorrow it will end.”

“He’ll appeal,” Perkin said.

“They haven’t found him guilty yet,” Mackie protested.

Tremayne told me, “Mackie and Harry walked together into Mackie and Perkin’s sitting room and found Nolan standing over the girl, who was lying on the floor. Lewis was sitting in an armchair. Nolan said he’d put his hands round the girl’s neck to give her a shaking, and she just went limp and fell down, and when Mackie and Harry tried to revive her, they found she was dead.”

“The pathologist said in court today that she died from strangulation,” Mackie said, “but that sometimes it takes very little pressure to kill someone. He said she died of vagal inhibition, which means the vagus nerve stops working, which it apparently can do fairly easily. The vagus nerve keeps the heart beating. The pathologist said it’s always dangerous to clasp people suddenly round the neck, even in fun. But there’s no doubt Nolan was furious with Olympia—that’s the girl—and he had been furious all the evening, and the prosecution produced someone who’d heard him say, ‘I’ll strangle the bitch,’ so that he had it in his mind to put his hands round her neck...” She broke off and sighed again. “There wouldn’t have been a trial at all except for Olympia’s father. The pathologist’s original report said it could so easily have been an accident that there wasn’t going to be a prosecution, but Olympia’s father insisted on bringing a private case against Nolan. He won’t let up. He’s obsessed. He was sitting there in court glaring at us.”

“If he’d had his way,” Tremayne confirmed, “Nolan would have been behind bars all this time, not out on bail.”

Mackie nodded. “The prosecution—and that’s Olympia’s father talking through his lawyers—wanted Nolan to be remanded in jail tonight, but the judge said no. So Nolan and Lewis have gone back to Lewis’s house, and God knows what state they’re in after the mauling they got in court. It’s Olympia’s father who deserves to be strangled for all the trouble he’s caused.”

It seemed to me that on the whole it was Nolan who had caused the trouble, but I didn’t say so.

“Well,” Tremayne said, shrugging, “it happened in this house but it doesn’t directly concern my family, thank God.”

Mackie looked as if she weren’t so sure. “They are our friends,” she said.

“Hardly even that,” Perkin said, looking my way. “Fiona and Mackie are friends. That’s where it starts. Mackie came to stay with Fiona, and I met her in Fiona’s house”—he smiled briefly—“and so, as they say, we were married.”

“And lived happily ever after,” Mackie finished loyally, though I reckoned if she were happy she worked at it. “We’ve been married two years now. Two and a half, almost.”

“You won’t put all this Nolan business in my book, will you?” Tremayne asked.

“I shouldn’t think so,” I said, “not if you don’t want me to.”

“No, I don’t. I was saying good-bye to some guests when that girl died. Perkin came to tell me, and I had to deal with it, but I didn’t know her, she’d come with Nolan and I’d never met her before. She isn’t part of my life.”

“All right,” I said.

Tremayne showed no particular relief, but just nodded. Seen in his own home, standing by his own fire, he was a big-bodied man of substantial presence, long accustomed to taking charge and ruling his kingdom. This was the persona, no doubt, that the book was to be about: the face of control, of worldly wisdom and success.

So be it, I thought. If I were to sing for my supper I’d sing the songs he chose. But meanwhile,
where
was the supper?

“In the morning,” Tremayne said to me, changing the subject and apparently tired of the trial and its tribulations, “I thought you might come out with me to see my string at morning exercise.”

“I’d like to,” I said.

“Good. I’ll wake you at seven. The first lot pulls out at seven-thirty, just before dawn. Of course, at present, with this freeze we can’t do any schooling but we’ve got an all-weather gallop. You’ll see it in the morning. If it should be snowing hard, we won’t go.”

“Right.”

He turned his head to Mackie. “I suppose you won’t be out for first lot?”

“No, sorry. We’ll have to leave early again to get to Reading.”

He nodded, and to me he said, “Mackie’s my assistant.”

I glanced at Mackie and then at Perkin.

“That’s right,” Tremayne said, reading my thought. “Perkin doesn’t work for me. Mackie does. Perkin never wanted to be a trainer and he has his own life. Gareth ... well ... Gareth might take over from me one day, but he’s too young to know what he’ll want. But when Perkin married Mackie he brought me a damned smart assistant, and it’s worked out very well.”

Mackie looked pleased at his audible sincerity and it seemed the arrangement was to Perkin’s liking also.

“This house is huge,” Tremayne said, “and as Perkin and Mackie couldn’t afford much of a place of their own yet, we divided it, and they have their private half. You’ll soon get the hang of it.” He finished his drink and went to pour himself another. “You can have the dining room to work in,” he said to me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow I’ll show you where to find the cuttings, videotapes and form books, and you can take what you like into the dining room. We’ll fix up the video player there.”

“Fine,” I said. Food in the dining room would be better, I thought.

Tremayne said, “As soon as it thaws I’ll take you racing. You’ll soon pick it up.”

“Pick it up?” Perkin repeated, surprised. “Doesn’t he
know
about racing?”

“Not a lot,” I said.

Perkin raised ironic eyebrows. “It’s going to be some book.”

“He’s a writer,” Tremayne said, a touch defensively. “He can learn.”

I nodded to back him up. It was true that I had learned the habits and ways of life of dwellers in far places, and didn’t doubt I could do the same to the racing fraternity at home in England. To listen, to see, to ask, to understand, to check; I would use the same method that I’d used six times before, and this time without needing an interpreter. Whether I could present Tremayne’s life and times in a shape others would enjoy, that was the real, nagging, doubtful question.

Gareth at long last blew in with a gust of cold air and, stripping off an eye-dazzling psychedelic padded jacket, asked his father, “What’s for supper?”

“Anything you like,” Tremayne said, not minding.

“Pizza, then.” His gaze stopped on me. “Hello, I’m Gareth.”

Tremayne told him my name and that I would be writing the biography and staying in the house.

“Straight up?” the boy said, his eyes widening. “Do you want some pizza?”

“Yes, please.”

“Ten minutes,” he said. He turned to Mackie. “Do you two want some?”

Mackie and Perkin simultaneously shook their heads and murmured that they’d be off to their own quarters, which appeared to be what Gareth and Tremayne expected.

Gareth was perhaps five foot six with a strong echo of his father’s self-confidence and a voice still half broken, coming out hoarse and uneven. He gave me an all-over glance as if assessing what he’d got to put up with for the length of my visit and seemed neither depressed nor elated.

“I heard the weather news at Coconut’s,” he told his father. “Today’s been the coldest for twenty-five years. Coconut’s father’s horses have their duvet rugs on under the jute.”

“So have ours,” Tremayne said. “Did they forecast more snow?”

“No, just cold for a few more days. East winds from Siberia. Have you remembered to send my school fees?”

Tremayne clearly hadn’t.

“If you’ll just sign the check,” his son said, “I’ll give it to them myself. They’re getting a bit fussed.”

“The checkbook’s in the office,” Tremayne said.

“Right.” Gareth took his Joseph’s coat with him out of the door and almost immediately returned. “I suppose there isn’t the faintest chance,” he said to me, “that you can cook?”

I
n the morning I went downstairs to find the family room dark but lights on in the kitchen.

It wasn’t a palatial kitchen like Fiona’s but did contain a big table with chairs all around it as well as a solid-fuel cooker whose warmth easily defeated the pre-dawn refrigeration. I had been hoping to borrow a coat from Tremayne to go out to watch the horses, but on a chair I found my boots, gloves and ski suit with a note attached by a safety pin, “Thanks ever so much.”

Smiling, I unpinned the note and put on the suit and boots, and Tremayne, in a padded jacket, cloth cap and yellow scarf came in blowing on his bare hands and generally bringing the arctic indoors.

“Ah, there you are,” he said, puffing. “Good. Bob Watson brought up your clothes when he came to feed. Ready?” I nodded.

“I’ll just get my gloves.” He checked also that I had gloves. “It’s as cold as I’ve ever known it. We won’t stay out long, the wind’s terrible. Come along.”

As we went through the hall I asked him about the feeding.

“Bob Watson comes at six,” he said briefly. “All horses in training get an early-morning feed. High protein. Keeps them warm. Gives them energy. A thoroughbred on a high-protein diet generates a lot of heat. Just as well in weather like this. You rarely find a bucket of water frozen over in a horse’s box, however cold it is outside. Mind you,” he said, “we do our best to stop draughts round the doors, but you have to give them fresh air. If you don’t, if you mollycoddle them too much, you get viruses flourishing.”

As we stepped out into the open, the wind pulled his last words away and sucked the breath out of our lungs and I reckoned we were still dealing with perhaps ten degrees of frost, plus chill factor, the same as the evening before. It wouldn’t go on freezing for as long as in nineteen sixty-three, I thought: that had been the coldest winter since seventeen forty.