Longshot

by Dick Francis

  The carbon copy said to Mackie crossly, “Why didn’t you go round the long way? You ought to have more sense than to take that shortcut.”

  “It was all right this morning,” Mackie said, “and I always go that way. It was the horse . . .”

  Tremayne’s gaze fastened on me. “So you got here. Good. You’ve met everyone? My son, Perkin. His wife, Mackie.”

  I’d assumed, I realized, that Mackie had been either Tremayne’s own wife or perhaps his daughter; hadn’t thought of daughter-in-law.

  “Why on earth are you wearing a dinner jacket?” Tremayne asked, staring.

  “We got wet in the ditch,” Harry said briefly. “Your friend the writer lent us dry clothes. He issued his dinner jacket to himself. Didn’t trust me with it, smart fellow. What I’ve got on is his bathrobe. Ingrid has his ski suit. Fiona is his from head to foot.”

  Tremayne looked briefly bewildered but decided not to sort things out. Instead he asked Fiona if she’d been hurt in the crash. “Fiona, my dear . . .”

  Fiona, his dear, assured him otherwise. He behaved to her with a hint of roguishness, she to him with easy response. She aroused in all men, I supposed, the desire to flirt.

  Perkin belatedly asked Mackie about her head, awkwardly producing anxiety after his ungracious criticism. Mackie gave him a tired understanding smile, and I had a swift impression that she was the one in that marriage who made allowances, who did the looking after, who was the adult to her good-looking husband-child.

  “But,” he said, “I do think you were silly to go down that road.” His reaction to her injury was still to blame her for it, but I wondered if it weren’t really a reaction to fright, like a parent clouting a much-loved lost-but-found infant. “And there was supposed to be a police notice at the turnoff saying it was closed. It’s been closed since those cars slid into each other at lunchtime.”

  “There wasn’t any police notice,” Mackie said.

  “Well, there must have been. You just didn’t see it.”

  “There was no police notice in sight,” Harry said, and we all agreed, we hadn’t seen one.

  “All the same . . .” Perkin wouldn’t leave it.

  “Look,” Mackie said, “if I could go back and do it again then I wouldn’t go along there, but it looked all right and I’d come up in the morning, so I just did, and that’s that.”

  “We all saw the horse,” Harry said, drawling, and from the dry humor lurking in his voice one could read his private opinion of Perkin’s behavior.

  Perkin gave him a confused glance and stopped picking on Mackie.

  Tremayne said, “What’s done’s done,” as if announcing his life’s philosophy, and added that he would “give the police a ring” when he got home, which would be very soon now.

  “About your clothes,” Fiona said to me, “shall I send them to the cleaners with all our wet things?”

  “No, don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll come and collect them tomorrow.”

  “All right.” She smiled slightly. “I do realize we have to thank you. Don’t think we don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” Perkin demanded.

  Harry said in his way, “Fellow saved us from ice-cubery.” “From what?”

  Ingrid giggled. Everyone looked at her. “Sorry,” she whispered, subsiding.

  “Quite likely from death,” Mackie said plainly. “Let’s go home.” She stood up, clearly much better for the warmth and the stiffly laced coffee and also, it seemed to me, relieved that her father-in-law hadn’t added his weight to her husband’s bawling-out. “Tomorrow,” she added slowly, “which of us is going back to Reading?”

  “Oh, God,” Fiona said. “For a minute I’d forgotten.”

  “Some of us will have to go,” Mackie said, and it was clear that no one wanted to.

  After a pause Harry stirred. “I’ll go. I’ll take Bob. Fiona doesn’t have to go, nor does Ingrid. Mackie ...” He stopped.

  “I’ll come with you,” she said. “I owe him that.”

  Fiona said, “So will I. He’s my cousin, after all. He deserves us to support him. Though after what Harry did today I don’t know if I can look him in the face.”

  “What did Harry do?” Perkin asked.

  Fiona shrugged and retreated. “Mackie can tell you.” Fiona, it seemed, could attack Harry all she liked herself, but she wasn’t throwing him to other wolves. Harry was no doubt due for further tongue-lashing after we’d gone, and in fact was glancing at his wife in a mixture of apprehension and resignation.

  “Let’s be off,” Tremayne said. “Come along, Bob.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bob Watson, I remembered, was Tremayne’s head lad. He and his Ingrid went over to the door, followed by Mackie and Perkin. I put down my mug, thanking Harry for the reviver.

  “Come this time tomorrow to fetch your clothes,” he said. “Come for a drink. An ordinary drink, not an emergency.”

  “Thank you. I’d like that.”

  He nodded amiably, and Fiona also, and I picked up my dry-clothes bag and the camera case and followed Tremayne and the others out again into the snow. The six of us squeezed into a large Volvo, Tremayne driving, Perkin sitting beside him, Ingrid sitting on Bob’s lap in the back with Mackie and me. At the end of the village Tremayne stopped to let Bob and Ingrid get out, Ingrid giving me a sketchy smile and saying Bob would bring my suit and boots along in the morning, if that would be all right. Of course, I said.

  They turned away to walk through a garden gate towards a small shadowy house, and Tremayne started off again towards open country, grousing that the trial would take his head lad away for yet another day. Neither Mackie nor Perkin said anything, and I still had no idea what the trial was all about. I didn’t know them well enough to ask, I felt.

  “Not much of a welcome for you, John, eh?” Tremayne said over his shoulder. “Did you bring a typewriter?”

  “No. A pencil, actually. And a tape recorder.”

  “I expect you know what you’re doing.” He sounded cheerfully more sure of that than I was. “We can start in the morning.”

  After about a mile of cautious crawling along a surface much like the one we’d come to grief on, he turned in through a pair of imposing gateposts and stopped outside a very large house where many lights showed dimly through curtains. As inhabitants of large houses seldom used their front doors, we went into this one also at the side, not directly into the kitchen this time but into a warm carpeted hall leading to doorways in all directions.

  Tremayne, saying, “Bloody cold night,” walked through a doorway to the left, looking back for me to follow. “Come on in. Make yourself at home. This is the family room, where you’ll find newspapers, telephone, drinks, things like that. Help yourself to whatever you want while you’re here.”

  The big room looked comfortable in a sprawling way, not tidy, not planned. There was a mixture of patterns and colors, a great many photographs, a few poinsettias left over from Christmas and a glowing log fire in a wide stone fire-place.

  Tremayne picked up a telephone and briefly told the local police that his jeep was in the ditch in the lane, not to worry, no one had been hurt, he would get it picked up in the morning. Duty done, he went across to the fire and held out his hands to warm them.

  “Perkin and Mackie have their own part of the house, but this room is where we all meet,” he said. “If you want to leave a message for anybody, pin it to that board over there.” He pointed to a chair on which was propped a cork-board much like the one in Ronnie’s office. Red drawing pins were stuck into it at random, one of them anchoring a note which in large letters announced briefly, BACK FOR GRUB.

  “That’s my other son,” Tremayne said, reading the message from a distance. “He’s fifteen. Unmanageable.” He spoke however with indulgence. “I expect you’ll soon get the hang of the household.”

  “Er . . . Mrs. Vickers?” I said tentatively.

  “Mackie?” He sounded puzzled.

  �
�No . . . Your wife?”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. No, my wife took a hike. Can’t say I minded. There’s just me and Gareth, the boy. I’ve a daughter, married a frog, lives outside Paris, has three children, they come here sometimes, turn the place upside down. She’s the eldest, then Perkin. Gareth came later.”

  He was feeding me facts without feelings, I thought. I’d have to change that, if I were to do any good: but maybe it was too soon for feelings. He was glad I was there, but jerky, almost nervous, almost—now we were alone—shy. Now that he had got what he wanted, now that he had secured his writer, a lot of the agitation and anxiety he’d displayed in Ronnie’s office seemed to have abated. The Tremayne of today was running on only half-stress.

  Mackie, coming into the room, restored him to his confident self. Carrying an ice bucket, she glanced quickly at her father-in-law as if to assess his mood, to find out if his tolerance in Fiona and Harry’s kitchen was still in operation. Reassured in some way, she took the ice over to a table bearing a tray of bottles and glasses and began mixing a drink.

  She had taken off her padded coat and woolly hat, and was wearing a blue jersey dress over knee-high narrow black boots. Her red-brown hair, cut short, curled neatly on a well-shaped head and she was still pale, without lipstick or vivacity.

  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 a
re 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.