Longshot (30 page)

My thoughts ran too much on death.

Bob Watson was there, dapper in a dark-gray suit, with Ingrid shyly pretty in pale blue.

“Couldn’t let down the guv’nor,” Bob said cheerfully. “Anyway, he gave us the tickets.”

“Jolly good,” I said inanely.

“You’re riding Fringe tomorrow,” he said, halfway between announcement and question. “Schooling. The guv’nor just told me.”

“Yes.”

“Fringe will look after you,” he said inscrutably, looking around. “Done this place up like an Egyptian brothel, haven’t they?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Oh, very funny.”

Ingrid giggled. Bob quelled her with a look, but I noticed slightly later and indeed all evening that she stuck very closely to his side, which could have been interpreted as her own insecurity if I hadn’t remembered Mackie saying that meek little Ingrid never gave Bob much chance to stray with the likes of Angela Brickell and God help him if he did.

Sam Yaeger, ever an exhibitionist, had come in a white dinner jacket, having lent Gareth his black. He also had a frilled white shirt, a black shoestring tie and a definite air of strain under the confident exterior. Doone, it appeared, had more or less accused him straight out of sabotaging his own boathouse.

“He says I had the tools, the knowledge, the opportunity and the location, and he looked up those races I rode at Ascot and worked out that I could have had time between the first two and the last to drive to Maidenhead and remove Harry’s car. I asked why should I bother to do that when presumably if I had set the trap I would expect Harry’s car still to be there after the races, and he just wrote down my answer as if I’d made a confession.”

“He’s persistent.”

“He listens to you,” Sam said. “We’ve all noticed. Can’t you tell him I didn’t bloody do it?”

“I could try.”

“And he whistled up his cohorts after you’d gone,” Sam complained, “and they came with wet-suits and grappling irons and a heavy magnet and dredged up a lot of muck from the dock. An old broken bicycle frame, some rusted railings, an old disintegrating metal gate ... it had all been lying here and there on the property. They clammed up after a bit and wouldn’t show me everything, but he thinks I put it all in the water hoping Harry would get tangled in it.”

“Which he did.”

“So I’m asking you how come you didn’t get spiked when you went down there after him?”

“I learned how to jump into shallow water very young. So I didn’t go down far. Put my feet down cautiously after I was floating.”

He stared. “How do you do that?”

“Jump shallow? The second your feet touch the water you raise your knees and crumple into a ball. The water itself acts as a brake. You must have done it yourself sometime or other. And I had the air in my clothes to hold me up, don’t forget.”

“Doone asked me if I’d left your jacket and boots in Harry’s car. Tricky bastard. I know now how Harry’s been feeling. You get that flatfoot looking to tie you in knots and it’s like being squeezed by coils and coils of a sodding boa constrictor. Everything you say, he takes it in the wrong way. And he looks so damned harmless. He got me so riled I lost a race this afternoon I should have won. Don’t say I said that. I don’t bloody know why we all tell you things. You don’t belong here.”

“Perhaps that’s why.”

“Yeah, perhaps.”

He seemed to have let out sufficient steam and resentment for the moment and turned to flirt obligingly with a middle-aged woman who touched his arm in pleased anticipation. Owners, Tremayne had said, either loved or hated Sam’s manner: the women loved, the men put up with it in exchange for winners.

Nolan, glowering routinely at Sam from a few feet away, switched his ill-humor to me.

“I don’t want you treading on my effing toes,” he said forcefully. “Why don’t you clear off out of Shellerton?”

“I will in a while.”

“I told Tremayne there’ll be trouble if he gives you any of my rides.”

“Ah.”

“He has the effing gall to say I suggested it myself and he knows bloody well I was taking the piss.” He glared at me. “I don’t understand what Fiona sees in you. I told her you’re just a bag of shit with a pretty face who needs his arse kicked. You keep away from her horses, understand?”

I understood that he like everyone else was suffering from the atmospheric blight cast by Angela Brickell, he perhaps most because the strain of his own trial and conviction was so recent. There was no way I was ever going to ride as well as he did and he surely knew it. Fiona would never jock him off, in racing’s descriptive phrase.

He stomped away, his place almost immediately taken by his brother, who gave me a malicious imitation of a smile and said, “Nolan doesn’t expletive like you, dear heart.”

“You don’t say.”

Lewis was sober, so far. Also unaccompanied, like Nolan, though Harry had mentioned at one time that Lewis was married: his reclusive wife preferred to stay at home to avoid the fuss and fracas of Lewis drunk.

“Nolan likes to be the center of attention and you’ve usurped his pinnacle,” Lewis said.

“Rubbish.”

“Fiona and Mackie look to you, now, not to him. And as for Tremayne, as for Gareth ...” He gave me a sly leer. “Don’t put your neck within my brother’s reach.”

“Lewis!” His lack of fraternal feeling shocked me more than his suggestion. “You stuck your neck out for him, anyway.”

“Sometimes I hate him,” he said with undoubted truth, and wheeled away as if he had said enough.

Glasses in hand, the chattering groups mixed and mingled, broke and reformed, greeted each other with glad cries as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, not just that afternoon. Tremayne, large smile a permanence, received genuinely warm congratulations with believable modesty and Gareth, appearing eel-like at my elbow, said with gratification, “He deserves it, doesn’t he?”

“He does.”

“It makes you think a bit.”

“What about?”

“I mean, he’s just Dad.” He struggled to get it right. “Everyone’s two people, aren’t they?”

I said with interest, “That’s profound.”

“Get away.” He felt awkward at the compliment. “I’m glad for him, anyway.”

He snaked off again and within minutes the throng began moving towards dinner, dividing into ten to a table, lowering bottoms onto inadequate chairs, fingering menus, peering at the print through candlelight, scanning their allotted neighbors. At table number six I found myself placed between Mackie and Erica Upton, who were already seated.

Erica was inevitable, I supposed, though I suspected Fiona had switched a few place cards before I reached there: a certain bland innocence gave her away.

“I did ask to sit next to you,” Erica remarked, as if reading my thoughts as I sat down, “once I knew you’d be here.”

“Er ... why?”

“Do you have so little self-confidence?”

“It depends who I’m with.”

“And by yourself?.”

“In a desert, plenty. With pencil and paper, little.”

“Quite right.”

“And you?” I asked.

“I don’t answer that sort of question.”

I listened to the starch in her voice, observed it in the straightness of her backbone, recognized the ramrod will that made no concessions to hardship.

“I could take you across a desert,” I said.

She gave me a long piercing inspection. “I hope that’s not an accolade.”

“An assessment,” I said.

“You’ve found your courage since I met you last.”

She had a way of leaving one without an answer. She turned away, satisfied, to talk to Nolan on her other side, and I, abandoned, found Mackie on my right smiling with enjoyment.

“She’s met her match,” she said.

I shook my head regretfully. “If I could write like her ... or ride like Sam or Nolan ... if I could do
anything
that well, I’d be happy.”

Her smile sweetened. “Try cooking.”

“Dammit ...”

She laughed. “I hear the power of your bananas flambé made Gareth oversleep.”

Perkin, on her other side, murmured something to get her attention and for a while I watched Tremayne make the best of our table having been graced by the sponsor’s wife, a gushing froth of a lady in unbecoming lemon. He would clearly have preferred to be talking to Fiona on his other side, but the award was having to be paid for with polite-ness. He glanced across the table, saw me smiling, interpreted my thought and gave me a slow ironic blink.

He soldiered manfully through the salmon soufflé and the beef Wellington while Lewis on the lady’s other side put away a tumblerful of vodka poured from a half-bottle in his pocket. Fiona watched him with a frown: Lewis’s drinking, even to my eyes, was increasingly without shame. Almost as if, having proclaimed himself paralytic in court, he was setting about proving it over and over again.

Glumly fidgeting between Lewis and Perkin, Gareth ate everything fast and looked bored. Perkin with brotherly bossiness told him to stop kicking the table leg and Gareth uncharacteristically sulked. Mackie made a placatory remark and Perkin snapped at her too.

She turned her head my way and with a frown asked, “What’s wrong with everyone?”

“Tension.”

“Because of Harry?” She nodded to herself. “We all pretend, but no one can help
wondering
... This time it’s much worse. Last time at least we knew how Olympia died. Angela Brickell’s on everyone’s nerves. Nothing feels safe anymore.”

“You’re safe,” I said. “You and Perkin. Think about the baby.”

Her face cleared as if automatically: the thought of the baby could diminish to trivia the grimmest forebodings.

Perkin on her other side was saying contritely, “Sorry, darling, sorry,” and she turned to him with ever-ready forgiveness, the adult of the pair. I wondered fleetingly if Perkin, as a father, would be jealous of his child.

Dinner wound to a close: speeches began. Cultured gents, identified for me by Mackie as being the Himalayan peaks of the Jockey Club, paid compliments to Tremayne from an adjacent table and bowed low to the sponsor. He, the lemon lady’s husband, eulogized Tremayne, who winced only slightly over Top Spin Lob being slurred to Topsy Blob, and a minion in the livery of Castle Houses brought forth a tray bearing the award itself, a silver bowl rimmed by a circle of small galloping horses, an award actually worthy of the occasion.

Tremayne was pink with gratification. He accepted the bowl. Everyone cheered. Photos flashed. Tremayne made a brief speech of all-around thanks: thanks to the sponsors, to his friends, his staff, his jockeys, to racing itself. He sat down, overcome. Everyone cheered him again and clapped loudly. I began to wonder how many of them would buy Tremayne’s book. I wondered whether after that night Tremayne would need the book written.

“Wasn’t that great?” Mackie exclaimed, glowing.

“Yes, indeed.”

The background music became dance music. People moved about, flocking around Tremayne, patting his back. Perkin took Mackie to shuffle on the square of dance floor adjoining the table. Nolan took Fiona, Lewis got drunker, Gareth vanished, the sponsor retrieved his lady: Erica and I sat alone.

“Do you dance?” I asked.

“No.” She looked out at the still-alive party. “The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball,” she said.

“Do you expect Waterloo tomorrow?”

“Sometime soon. Who is Napoleon?”

“The enemy?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Use your brains. What about insight through imagination?”

“I thought you didn’t believe in it.”

“For this purpose, I do. Someone tried to kill Harry. That’s extremely disturbing. What’s disturbing about it?”

It seemed she expected an answer, so I gave it. “It was premeditated. Angela Brickell’s death may or may not have been, but the attack on Harry was vastly thought out.”

She seemed minutely to relax.

“My God!” I said, stunned.

“What? What have you thought of?” She was alert again, and intent.

“I’ll have to talk to Doone.”

“Do you know who did it?” she demanded.

“No, but I know what he knew.” I frowned. “Everyone knows it.”

“What? Do explain.”

I looked at her vaguely, thinking.

“I don’t believe it’s very important,” I said in the end.

“Then what is it?” she insisted.

“Wood floats.”

She looked bemused. “Well, of course it does.”

“The floorboards that went down to the water with Harry, they stayed under. They didn’t float.”

“Why not?”

“Have to find out,” I said. “Doone can find out.”

“What does it matter?”

“Well,” I said, “no one could be absolutely certain that Harry would be spiked and drown immediately. So suppose he’s alive and swimming about. He’s been in that place before, at Sam’s party, and he knows there’s a mooring dock along one wall. He knows there’s a door and he has daylight and can see the river through the metal curtain. So how does he get out?”

She shook her head. “Tell me.”

“The door opens outward. If you’re inside, and you’re standing in only six inches of water, not six feet, and you’ve got three or four floorboards floating about, you use one of them as a ram to break the lock or batter the door down. You’re big and strong like Harry and also wet, cold, desperate and angry. How long does it take you to break out?”

“I suppose not long.”

“When Napoleon came to the boathouse,” I said, “there wasn’t any sound of Harry battering his way out. In fact”—I frowned—“there’s no saying how long the enemy had been there, waiting. He might have been hiding ... heard Harry’s car arrive.”

Erica said, “When your book’s published, send me a copy.”

I looked at her openmouthed.

“Then I can tell you the difference between invention and insight.”