Longshot (27 page)

“What’s that?” Harry asked weakly, trying to make sense of things.

“Rudder.”

“Oh.”

I made a crook of my left elbow on the back of the boat and laid the pole across it, the shorter end in my right hand, the longer end trailing behind in the water. The steering was rudimentary, but enough to keep us traveling bowfirst downstream.

Downstream was always the way to people ...
Bits of the guidebooks floated familiarly to the surface.
Some of your traps are horrific.

Some of the traps described how to arrange for the prey to fall through seemingly firm ground into a pitful of spikes beneath.

Everyone had read the guides.

“John?” Harry said. “Where are we going?”

“Maidenhead, possibly. I’m not quite sure.”

“I’m bloody cold.”

There was some water in the boat now, sloshing about under our feet.

Shit.

Nowhere on the Thames was far from civilization, not even Sam’s boatyard. The wide river narrowed abruptly with a notice on our left saying DANGER in huge letters, and a smaller notice saying lock with an arrow to the right.

I steered the dinghy powerfully to the right. DANGER led to a weir. A lock would do just fine. Locks had keepers.

At about then I took note that there weren’t in fact any other boats moving on the river, and I remembered that often the locks closed for maintenance in winter and maybe the lockkeeper would have gone shopping ...

Never mind. There were houses in sight on the right.

They proved to be summer cottages, all closed.

We floated on as if in a timeless limbo. The water in the bottom of the boat grew deeper. The current, away from the main stream, was much weaker. The lock cut seemed to last forever, narrowing though, with high dark trees on the left; finally, blessedly, on the right, there were moorings for boats wanting passage through the lock to the lower level of the river below. No boats there, of course. No helping hands. Never mind.

I took the dinghy as far as we could go, right up near to the lock gates. Tied the painter to a mooring post and stepped up out of the boat.

“Won’t be long,” I told Harry.

He merely nodded. It was all too much.

I climbed the steps up onto the lock and knocked on the door of the lockkeeper’s house, and through great good fortune found him at home. A lean man; kind eyes.

“Fell in the river, did you?” he asked cheerfully, observing my soaked state. “Want to use the phone?”

I
went with Harry in the ambulance to Maidenhead hospital, both of us swathed in blankets, Harry also in a foil-lined padded wrap used for hypothermia cases; and from then on it was a matter of phoning and reassuring Fiona and waiting to see the extent of Harry’s injuries, which proved to be a pierced calf, entry and exit wounds both clean and clotted, with no dreadful damage in between.

While Fiona was still on her way, the medics stuffed Harry full of antibiotics and other palliatives and put stitches where they were needed, and by the time she’d wept briefly in my arms he was warm and responding nicely in a recovery room somewhere.

“But why,” she asked, half cross, half mystified, “did he go to Sam’s boatyard in the first place?” Like a mother scolding her lost child, I thought, after he’s come back safe: just like Perkin with Mackie.

“He’ll tell you about it,” I said. “They say he’s doing fine.”

“You’re damp!” She disengaged herself and held me at arm’s length. “Did you fall through the floor too?”

“Sort of.” The hospital’s central heating had been doing a fine job of drying everything on me and I felt like one of those old-fashioned clotheshorses, steaming slightly in warm air. Still no shoes or boots; couldn’t be helped.

Fiona looked at my feet dubiously.

“I was going to ask you to drive Harry’s car home,” she said, “but I suppose you can’t.”

I explained that Harry’s car had already been driven away.

“Where is it, then?” she asked, bewildered. “Who took it?”

“Maybe Doone will find out.”

“That man!” She shivered. “I hate him.”

Before I could comment, a nurse came to fetch her to see Harry, and she went anxiously, calling over her shoulder for me to wait for her; and when she returned half an hour later she looked dazed.

“Harry’s sleepy,” she said. “He kept waking up and telling me silly things ... How could you possibly get to this hospital in a
boat
?”

“I’ll tell you on the way home. Would you like me to drive?”

“But ...”

“It’s quite easy with bare feet. I’ll take off my socks.”

She unlocked the car herself and handed me the keys without comment. We arranged ourselves in the seats, and as we headed for Shellerton in the early dark I told her calmly, incompletely and without terrors, the gist of what had befallen us in Sam’s boatyard.

She listened with a frown, adding her own worry.

“Turn right here,” she said once, automatically, and another time, “Sorry, we should have turned left there, we’ll have to go back,” and finally, “Go straight to Shellerton House. I’ll drive home from there. I’m all right, really. It’s just so upsetting. It made me shaky, seeing Harry dopey like that, pumped full of drugs.”

“I know.”

I pulled up outside Tremayne’s house and while I put on my socks again she said she would come in for a while for company, “to cure the trembles.”

Tremayne, Mackie and Perkin were all in the family room for the usual evening drinks. Tremayne made more than his usual fuss over Fiona, sensing some sort of turmoil, telling her comfortably that Mackie had just come back from Ascot races where he’d sent a runner for the three-mile chase which had proved a total waste of time.

The note I’d left for Tremayne, GONE OUT WITH HARRY, BACK FOR GRUB, was still pinned to the corkboard. He took my arrival with Fiona as not needing comment.

“I think someone tried to kill Harry,” Fiona said starkly, cutting abruptly through Tremayne’s continuing Ascot chat.

“What?”

There was an instant silence and general shock on all the faces, including Fiona’s own.

“He went to Sam’s boatyard and fell through some floorboards and was nearly drowned ...” She told it to them much as I’d told her myself. “If John hadn’t been with him to help ...”

Tremayne said robustly, “My dearest girl, it must have been the most dreadful accident. Whoever would want to kill Harry?”

“No one,” Perkin said, his voice an echo of Tremayne’s. “I mean, what for?”

“Harry’s a dear,” Mackie said, nodding.

“You’d never think so to read the papers recently,” Fiona pointed out, lines creasing her forehead. “People can be incredibly vicious. Even people in the village. I went into the shop this morning and everyone stopped talking and stared at me. People I’ve known for years. I told Harry and he was furious, but what can we do? And now this ...”

“Did Harry say someone tried to kill him?” Perkin asked.

Fiona shook her head. “Harry was too dopey.”

“Does John think so?”

Fiona glanced at me. “John didn’t actually say so. It’s what I think myself. What I’m afraid of. It scares me to think of it.”

“Then don’t, darling.” Mackie put an arm around her and kissed her cheek. “It’s a frightening thing to have happened, but Harry
is
all right.”

“But someone stole his car,” Fiona said, hollow-eyed.

“Perhaps he left the key in the ignition,” Tremayne guessed, “and a passerby saw an opportunity.”

Fiona agreed unwillingly. “Yes, he would have left his keys. He trusts people. I’ve told him over and over again that you simply
can’t
these days.”

They all spent time reassuring Fiona until the worst of the worry unwound from her body and I watched the movement of her silver-blond hair in the soft lights and made no attempt to throw doubts because it would have achieved nothing good.

 

 

WITH DOONE, EARLY the next afternoon, it was a different matter. He’d had my bald account of events over the telephone in the morning, his first knowledge of what had happened. Now he came into the dining room where I was working and sat down opposite me at the table.

“I hear you’re a proper little hero,” he said dryly.

“Oh, really? Who says so?”

“Mr. Goodhaven.”

I stared back blandly with the same expression that he was trying on me. The morning’s bulletin on Harry had been good, the prognosis excellent, his memory of events reportedly clarifying fast.

“Accident or attempted murder?” Doone asked, apparently seeking a considered answer.

I gave him one. “The latter, I’d say. Have you found his car?”

“Not yet.” He frowned at me with a long look in which I read nothing. “Where would you search for it?” he asked.

After a pause I said, “At the top of a cliff.”

He blinked.

“Don’t you think so?” I said.

“Beachy Head? Dover?” he suggested. “A long drive to the sea.”

“Maybe a metaphorical cliff,” I said.

“Go on, then.”

“Is it usual,” I asked, “for policemen to ask for theories from the general public?”

“I told you before, I like to hear them. I don’t always agree, but sometimes I do.”

“Fair enough. Then what would you have thought if Harry Goodhaven had disappeared forever yesterday afternoon and you’d found his car later by a cliff, real or metaphorical?”

“Suicide,” he said promptly. “An admission of guilt.”

“End of investigation? Books closed?”

He stared at me somberly. “Perhaps. But unless we eventually found a body, there would also be the possibility of simple flight. We would alert Australia ... look for him round the world. The books would remain open.”

“But you wouldn’t investigate anyone else, because you would definitely consider him guilty.”

“The evidence points to it. His flight or suicide would confirm it.”

“But something about that evidence bothers you.”

I was beginning to learn his expressions, or lack of them. The very stillness of his muscles meant that I’d touched something he’d thought hidden.

“Why do you say so?” he asked eventually.

“Because you’ve made no arrest.”

“That simple.”

“Without your knowledge, I can only guess.”

“Guess away,” he invited.

“Then I’d say perhaps Harry’s sunglasses and pen and belt were with Angela Brickell because she took them there herself.”

“Go on,” he said neutrally. It wasn’t, I saw, a new idea to him.

“Didn’t you say her handbag had been torn open, the contents gone except for the photo in a zipped pocket?”

“I did say so, yes.”

“And you found chocolate wrappings lying about?”

“Yes.”

“And traces of dogs?”

“Yes.”

“And any dog worth his salt would bite open a handbag to get to the chocolate?”

“It’s possible.” He made a decision and a big admission. “There were toothmarks on the handbag.”

“Suppose then,” I said, “that she did in fact have a thing about Harry. He’s a kind and attractive man. Suppose she did carry his photo with the horse, not Fiona‘s, who’s the owner, after all. Suppose she’d managed to acquire personal things of Harry’s, his sunglasses, a pen, even a belt, and wore them or carried them with her, as young people do. They’d only be evidence of her crush on Harry, not of his presence at her death.”

“I considered all that, yes.”

“Suppose someone couldn’t understand why you didn’t arrest Harry, particularly in view of all the hounding in the papers, and decided to remove any doubts you might be showing?”

He sat for a while without speaking, apparently debating how many of his thoughts to share. Not many more, it transpired.

“Whoever took Harry’s car,” I said, “removed my jacket and boots as well. I took them off before I went through the floor into the dock.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” He seemed put out, severe.

“I’m telling you now.” I paused. “I would think that whoever took those things is very worried indeed now to find that I was with Harry and that he is alive. I’d say there wasn’t supposed to be any reason to think Harry had gone to Sam’s boatyard. No one would ever have looked for him there. I’d say it was an attempt to confirm Harry’s guilt that went disastrously wrong, leaving you with bristling new doubts and a whole lot more to investigate.”

He said formally, “I would like you to be present at the boatyard tomorrow morning.”

“What do you think of the place?” I asked.

“I’ve taken statements from Mr. and Mrs. Goodhaven and others,” he said stiffly. “I haven’t been to the boatyard yet. It has, however, been cordoned off. Mr. Yaeger is meeting me there tomorrow at nine A.M. I would have preferred this afternoon but it seems he is riding in three races at Wincanton.”

I nodded. Tremayne had gone there, also Nolan. Another clash of the Titans.

“You know,” Doone said slowly, “I had indeed started to question others besides Mr. Goodhaven.”

I nodded. “Sam Yaeger for one. He told us. Everyone knew you’d begun casting wider.”

“The lass had been indiscriminate,” he said regretfully.

 

 

TREMAYNE LENT ME his Volvo to go to the boatyard in the morning, reminding me before I set off that it was the day of the awards dinner at which he was to be honored.

I’d seen the invitation pinned up prominently by Dee-Dee in the office: most of the racing world, it seemed, would be there to applaud. For Tremayne, though he made a few self-deprecating jokes about it, the event gave proof of the substance of his life, much like the biography.

Sam and Doone were already in the boatyard by the time I’d found my way there, neither of them radiating joy, Sam’s multicolored jacket only emphasizing the personality clash with gray plainclothes. They’d been waiting for me, it seemed, in a mutual absence of civility.