Longshot (10 page)

We both ate mostly thawed uninteresting beef sandwiches in due course and I thought that even if Tremayne’s house-keeping was slightly eccentric, at least he hadn’t stirred his food up first in a bucket.

A
t about six-thirty that day I walked down to Shellerton to collect my clothes from the Goodhavens, Fiona and Harry. Darkness had fallen but it seemed to me that the air temperature hadn’t, and there was less energy in the wind than in the morning.

I had by that time taped three hours’ worth of Tremayne’s extraordinary childhood and walked around with him to inspect his horses at evening stables. At every one of the fifty doors, he had stopped to check on the inmate’s welfare, discussing it briefly with the lad and dispensing carrots to inquiring muzzles with little pats and murmurs of affection.

In between times as we moved along the rows he explained that the horses would now be rugged up against the frost in wool blankets and duvets, then covered with jute rugs (like sacking) securely buckled on. They would be given their main feed of the day and be shut up for the night to remain undisturbed until morning.

“One of us walks round last thing at night,” he said, “Bob or Mackie or I, to make sure they’re all right. Not kicking their boxes and so on. If they’re quiet they’re all right, and I don’t disturb them.”

Like fifty children, I thought, tucked up in bed.

I’d asked him how many lads he had. Twenty-one, he said, plus Bob Watson, who was worth six, and the traveling head lad and a box driver and a groundsman. With Mackie and Dee-Dee, twenty-seven full-time employees. The economics of training racehorses, he remarked, put the book trade’s problems in the shade.

When I reminded him that I was going down to Fiona and Harry’s to fetch my belongings he offered me his car.

“I quite like walking,” I said.

“Good God.”

“I’ll cook when I get back.”

“You don’t have to,” he protested. “Don’t let Gareth talk you into it.”

“I said I would, though.”

“I don’t care much what I eat.”

I grinned. “Maybe that will be just as well. I’ll be back soon after Gareth, I expect.”

I’d discovered that the younger son rode his bicycle each morning to the house of his friend Coconut, from where both of them were driven to and from a town ten miles away, as day boys in a mainly boarding school. The hours were long, as always with that type of school: Gareth was never home much before seven, often later. His notice BACK FOR GRUB seemed to be a fixture. He removed it, Tremayne said, only when he knew in the morning that he would be out until bedtime. Then he would leave another message instead, to say where he was going.

“Organized,” I commented.

“Always has been.”

I reached the main street of Shellerton and tramped along to the Goodhavens’ house, passing three or four cars in their driveway and walking around to the kitchen door to ring the bell.

After an interval the door was opened by Harry, whose expression changed from inhospitable to welcoming by visible degrees.

“Oh, hello, come in. Forgot about you. Fact is, we’ve had another lousy day in Reading. But home without crashing, best you can say.”

I stepped into the house and he closed the door behind us, at the same time putting a restraining hand on my arm.

“Let me tell you first,” he said. “Nolan and Lewis are both here. Nolan got convicted of manslaughter. Six months’ jail suspended for two years. He won’t go behind bars but no one’s happy.”

“I don’t need to stay,” I said. “Don’t want to intrude.”

“Do me a favor, dilute the atmosphere.”

“If it’s like that ... ”

He nodded, removed his hand and walked me through the kitchen into a warm red hallway and on into a pink and green chintzy sitting room beyond.

Fiona, turning her silver-blond head said, “Who was it?” and saw me following Harry. “Oh, good heavens, I’d forgotten.” She came over, holding out a hand, which I shook, an odd formality after our previous meeting.

“These are my cousins,” she said. “Nolan and Lewis Everard.” She gave me a wide don‘t-say-anything stare, so I didn’t. “A friend of Tremayne’s,” she said to them briefly. “John Kendall.”

Mackie, sitting exhaustedly in an armchair, waggled acknowledging fingers. Everyone else was standing and holding a glass. Harry pressed a pale-gold drink into my hand and left me to discover for myself what lay under the floating ice. Whisky, I found, tasting it.

I had had no mental picture of either Nolan or Lewis, but their appearance all the same was a surprise. They were both short, Nolan handsome and hard, Lewis swollen and soft. Late thirties, both of them. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark jaws. I supposed I had perhaps expected them to be like Harry in character if not in appearance, but it was immediately clear that they weren’t. In place of Harry’s amused urbanity, Nolan’s aristocratic-sounding speech was essentially violent and consisted of fifty percent obscenity. The gist of his first sentence was that he wasn’t in the mood for guests.

Neither Fiona nor Harry showed embarrassment, only weary tolerance. If Nolan had spoken like that in court, I thought, it was no wonder he’d been found guilty. One could quite easily imagine him throttling a nymph.

Harry said calmly, “John is writing Tremayne’s biography. He knows about the trial and the Top Spin Lob party. He’s a friend of ours, and he stays.”

Nolan gave Harry a combative stare which Harry returned with blandness.

“Anyone can know about the trial,” Mackie said. “It was in all the papers this morning, after all.”

Harry nodded. “To be continued in reel two.”

“It’s not an expletive joke,” Lewis said. “They took photos of us when we were leaving.” His peevish voice was like his brother’s though a shade higher in pitch and, as I progressively discovered, instead of truly offensive obscene words he had a habit of using euphemisms like “expletive,” “bleep” and “deleted.” In Harry’s mouth it might have been funny; in Lewis’s it seemed a form of cowardice.

“Gird up such loins as you have,” Harry told him peaceably. “The public won’t remember by next week.”

Nolan said between four-letter words that everyone that mattered would remember, including the Jockey Club.

“I doubt if they’ll actually warn you off,” Harry said. “It wasn’t as if you hadn’t paid your bookmaker.”

“Harry!” Fiona said sharply.

“Sorry, m’dear,” murmured her husband, though his lids half veiled his eyes like blinds drawn over his true feelings.

Tremayne and I had each read two accounts of the previous day’s proceedings while dealing with the sandwiches, one in a racing paper, another in a tabloid. Tremayne’s comments had been grunts of disapproval, while I had learned a few facts left out by the Vickers family the evening before.

Fiona’s cousin Nolan, for starters, was an amateur jockey (“well-known,” in both papers) who often raced on Fiona’s horses, trained by Tremayne Vickers. Nolan Everard had once briefly been engaged to Magdalene Mackenzie (Mackie), who had subsequently married Perkin Vickers, Tremayne’s son. “Sources” had insisted that the three families, Vickerses, Goodhavens and Everards, were on friendly terms. The prosecution, not disputing this, had suggested that indeed they had all closed ranks to shield Nolan from his just deserts.

A demure photograph of Olympia (provided by her father) showed a fair-haired schoolgirl, immature, an innocent victim. No one seemed to have explained why Nolan had said he would strangle the bitch, and now that I’d heard him talk I was certain those had not been his only words.

“The question really is,” Fiona said, “not whether the Jockey Club will warn him off racecourses altogether, because I’m sure they won’t, they let real villains go racing, but whether they’ll stop him riding as an amatem.”

Harry said, as if sympathetically, to Nolan, “It’s rather put paid to your ambitions to be made a
member
of the Jockey Club, though, hasn’t it, old lad?”

Nolan looked blackly furious and remarked with venom that Harry hadn’t helped the case by not swearing to hell and back that Lewis had been comprehensively pissed.

Harry didn’t reply except to shrug gently and refill Lewis’s glass, which was unquestionably comprehensively empty.

If one made every possible allowance for Nolan, I thought, if one counted the long, character-withering ordeal of waiting to know if he were going to prison, if one threw in the stress of having undoubtedly killed a young woman, even by accident, if one added the humiliations he would forever face because of his conviction, if one granted all that, he was still unattractively, viciously ungrateful.

His family and friends had done their best for him. I thought it highly likely that Lewis had in fact perjured himself, and that Harry had also, very nearly, in the matter of the alcoholic blackout. Harry had at the last minute shrunk from either a positive opinion or from an outright lie, and I’d have put my money on the second. They had all gone again to court to support Nolan when they would much rather have stayed away.

“I still think you ought to appeal,” Lewis said.

Nolan’s pornographic reply was to the effect that his lawyer had advised him not to push his luck, as Lewis very well knew.

“Bleep the lawyer,” Lewis said.

“Appeal courts can
increase
sentences, I believe,” Fiona said warningly. “They might cancel the suspension. Doesn’t bear thinking about.”

“Olympia’s father was incandescent afterwards,” Mackie said gloomily, nodding. “He wanted Nolan put away for life. Life for a life, that’s what he was shouting.”

“You can’t just appeal against a sentence because you don’t happen to like it,” Harry pointed out. “There has to be some point of law that was conducted wrongly at the trial.”

Lewis said obstinately, “If Nolan doesn’t appeal it’s as good as admitting he’s expletive guilty as charged.”

There was a sharp silence all around. They all did think him guilty, though maybe to different degrees. Don’t push your luck seemed good pragmatic advice.

I looked speculatively at Mackie, wondering about her sometime engagement to Nolan. She showed nothing for him now but concerned friendship: no lingering love and no hard feelings. Nolan showed nothing but concern for himself.

Fiona said to me, “Stay to dinner?” and Harry said, “Do,” but I shook my head.

“I promised to cook for Gareth and Tremayne.”

“Good God,” Harry said.

Fiona said, “That’ll make a change from pizza! They have pizza nine nights out of ten. Gareth just puts one in the microwave, regular as clockwork.”

Mackie put down her glass and stood up tiredly. “I think I’ll go too. Perkin will be waiting to hear the news.”

Nolan, between words beginning with
f
, remarked tartly that if Perkin had bothered to put in an appearance at Reading he would know the news already.

“He wasn’t needed,” Harry said mildly.

“Olympia died in his half of the house,” Lewis said. “You’d have thought he’d have taken an interest”

Nolan remembered with below-the-waist indelicacies that Tremayne hadn’t supported him either.

“They were both busy,” Mackie said gamely. “They both work, you know.”

“Meaning we don’t?” Lewis asked waspishly.

Mackie sighed. “Meaning whatever you like.” To me she said, “Did you come in Tremayne’s car?”

“No, walked.”

“Oh! Then ... do you want a lift home?”

I thanked her and accepted and Harry came with us to see us off.

“Here are your clothes in your bag,” he said, handing it to me. “Can’t thank you enough, you know.”

“Any time.”

“God forbid.”

Harry and I looked at each other briefly in the sort of appreciation that’s the beginning of friendship, and I wondered whether he, of all of them, would have been least sorry to see Nolan in the cells.

“He’s not always like that,” Mackie said as she steered out of the drive. “Nolan, I mean. He can be enormously good fun. Or rather, he used to be, before all this.”

“I read in today’s paper that you were once engaged to him.”

She half laughed. “Yes, I was. For about three months, five years ago.”

“What happened?”

“We met in February at a Hunt Ball. I knew who he was. Fiona’s cousin, the amateur jockey. I’d been brought up in eventing. Had ponies before I could walk. I told him I sometimes went to stay with Fiona. Small world, he said. We spent the whole evening together and ... well ... the whole night. It was sudden, like lightning. Don’t tell Perkin. Why does one tell total strangers things one never tells anyone else? Sorry, forget it.”

“Mm,” I said. “What happened when you woke up?”

“It was like a roller-coaster. We spent all our time together. After two weeks he asked me to marry him and I said yes. Blissful. My feet never touched the ground. I went to the races to watch him ... he was spellbinding. Kept winning, saying I’d brought him luck.” She stopped, but she was smiling.

“Then what?”

“Then the jumping season finished. We began planning the wedding ... I don’t know. Maybe we just got to know each other. I can’t say which day I realized it was a mistake. He was getting irritable. Flashes of rage, really. I just said one day, “It won’t work, will it?” and he said, “No” so we fell into each other’s arms and had a few tears and I gave him his ring back.”

“You were lucky,” I commented.

“Yes. How do you mean?”

“To come out of it without a fighting marriage and a spiteful divorce.”

“You’re so right.” She turned into Tremayne’s drive and came to a halt. “We’ve been friends ever since, but Perkin has always been uncomfortable with him. See, Nolan is brilliant and brave on horses and Perkin doesn’t ride all that well. We don’t talk about horses much, when we’re alone. It’s restful, actually. I tell Perkin he ought to be grateful to Nolan that I was free for
him,
but I suppose he can’t help how he feels.”