Longshot

by Dick Francis

  Tremayne watched me watching her and smiled with amusement. “You’ll get used to Dee-Dee,” he said. “I couldn’t manage without her.”

  She took the compliment without acknowledgment and sat half on a chair as if temporarily, as if about to retreat.

  “Phone up a few people to see if they’ve lost a horse,” Tremayne told her. “If anyone’s panicking, he’s here. Unhurt. We’ve given him water and feed. He was out all night on the Downs, it seems. Someone’s in for a bollocking.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “The jeep’s in a ditch on the south road to the A34. Skidded last evening with Mackie. No one hurt. Get the garage to fish it out.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “John, here, will be working in the dining room. Anything he wants, give it to him. Anything he wants to know, tell him.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “Get the blacksmith over for two of the string who lost shoes on the gallop this morning. The lads found the shoes, we don’t need new ones.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “If I’m not here when the vet comes, ask him to take a look at Waterbourne after he’s cut the colt. She’s got some heat in her near-fore fetlock.”

  Dee-Dee nodded.

  “Check that the haulage people will be on time delivering the hay. We’re running low. Don’t take snow for an answer.”

  Dee-Dee smiled, which in a triangular way looked feline also, although far from kittenish. I wondered fleetingly about claws.

  Tremayne ate his toast and went on giving sporadic instructions which Dee-Dee seemed to have no trouble remembering. When the spate slowed she stood, picked up her mug and said she would finish her coffee in the office while she got on with things.

  “Utterly reliable,” Tremayne remarked to her departing back. “There’s always ten damned trainers trying to poach her.” He lowered his voice. “A shit of an amateur jockey treated her like muck. She’s not over it yet. I make allowances. If you find her crying, that’s it.”

  I was amazed by his compassion and felt I should have recognized earlier how many unexpected layers there were to Tremayne below the loud executive exterior: not just his love of horses, not just his need to be recorded, not even just his disguised delight in Gareth, but other, secret, unrevealed privacies which maybe I would come to in time, and maybe not.

  He spent the next half hour on the telephone both making and receiving calls: it was the time of day, I later discovered, when trainers could most reliably be found at home. Toast eaten, coffee drunk, he reached for a cigarette from a packet on the table and brought a throwaway lighter out of his pocket.

  “Do you smoke?” he asked, pushing the pack my way.

  “Never started,” I said.

  “Good for the nerves,” he commented, inhaling deeply. “I hope you’re not an anti fanatic.”

  “I quite like the smell.”

  “Good.” He seemed pleased enough. “We’ll get on well.”

  He told me that at ten o’clock, by which time the first lot would have been given hay and water and the lads would have had their own breakfasts, he would drive the tractor back to the gallops to watch his second lot work. He said I needn’t bother with that: I could set things up in the dining room, arrange things however I liked working. As all racing was off from frost, he could, if I agreed, spend the afternoon telling me about his childhood. When racing began again, he wouldn’t have so much time.

  “Good idea,” I said.

  He nodded. “Come along, then, and I’ll show you where things are.”

  We went out into the carpeted hall and he pointed to the doorway opposite.

  “That’s the family room, as you know. Next to the kitchen ...” he walked along and opened a closed door, “... is my dining room. We don’t use it much. You’ll have to turn the heating up, I dare say.”

  I looked into the room I was to get to know well: a spacious room with mahogany furniture, swagged crimson curtains, formal cream-and-gold-striped walls and a plain dark-green carpet. Not Tremayne’s own choice, I thought. Much too coordinated.

  “That’ll be great,” I said obligingly.

  “Good.” He closed the door again and looked up the stairs we had climbed to bed the night before. “We put those stairs in when we divided the house. This passage beside them, this leads to Perkin and Mackie’s half. Come along, I’ll show you.” He walked along a wide, pale-green-carpeted corridor with pictures of horses on both walls and opened double white-painted doors at the end.

  “Through here,” he said, “is the main entrance hall of the house. The oldest part.”

  We passed onto a big wood-blocked expanse of polished floor from which two graceful wings of staircase rose to an upper gallery. Under the gallery, between the staircases, was another pair of doors, which Tremayne, crossing, opened without flourish, revealing a vista of gold and pale-blue furnishings in the same formal style as the dining room.

  “This is the main drawing room,” he said. “We share it. We hardly use it. We used it last for that damned party ...” He paused. “Well, as Mackie said, I don’t know when we’ll have another.”

  A pity, I thought. It looked a house made for parties. Tremayne closed the drawing-room door and pointed straight across the hall.

  “That’s the front entrance, and those double doors on the right open into Perkin and Mackie’s half. We built a new kitchen for them and another new staircase. We planned it as two separate houses, you see, with this big common section between us.”

  “It’s great,” I said to please him, but also meaning it.

  He nodded. “It divided quite well. No one needs houses this size these days. Take too much heating.” Indeed, it was cold in the hall. “Most of this was built about nineteen six. Edwardian. Country house of the Windberry family, don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “My father bought the place for peanuts during the Depression. I’ve lived here all my life.”

  “Was your father a trainer also?” I asked.

  Tremayne laughed. “God, no. He inherited a fortune. Never did a day’s work. He liked going racing, so he bought a few jumpers, put them in the stables that hadn’t been used since cars replaced the carriages and engaged a trainer for them. When I grew up, I just took over the horses. Built another yard, eventually. I’ve fifty boxes at present, all full.”

  He led the way back through the doors to his own domain and closed them behind us.

  “That’s more or less all,” he said, “except for the office.”

  Once back in his own hall he veered through the last of the doorways there and I followed him into yet another big room in which Dee-Dee looked lost behind a vast desk.

  “This used to be the Windberrys’ billiards room,” Tremayne said. “When I was a child, it was our playroom.”

  “You had brothers and sisters?”

  “One sister,” he said briefly, looking at his watch. “I’ll leave you to Dee-Dee. See you later.”

  He went away purposefully, and after the time it would have taken him to replace coat, cap and scarf, the door out to the yard slammed behind him. He was a natural slammer, I thought; there seemed to be no ingredient of ire.

  Dee-Dee said, “How can I help you?” without any great enthusiasm.

  “Don’t you approve of the biography project?” I asked.

  She blinked. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You looked it.”

  She fiddled lengthily with some papers, eyes down.

  “He’s been on about it for months,” she said finally. “It’s important to him. I. think ... if you must know ... that he should have held out for someone better...” She hesitated. “Better known, anyway. He met you one day and the next day you’re here, and I think it’s too fast. I suggested that we should at least run a check on you but he said Ronnie Curzon’s word was good enough. So you’re here.” She looked up, suddenly fierce. “He deserves the best,” she said.

  “Ah.�
��

  “What do you mean by ‘Ah?’”

  I didn’t answer at once but looked around the jumbo office, seeing the remains of the classical decorative style overlaid by a host of modem bookshelves, filing cabinets, cupboards, copier, fax, computer, telephones, floor safe, television, tapes by the dozen, cardboard boxes, knee-high stack of newspapers and another corkboard with red drawing-pinned memos. There was an antique kneehole desk with an outsize leather chair, clearly Tremayne’s own territory, and on the floor a splatter of overlapping Persian rugs in haphazard patterns and colors covering most of an old gray carpet. Pictures of horses passing winning posts inhabited the walls alongside a bright row of racing silks hanging on pegs.

  I ended the visual tour where I’d begun, on Dee-Dee’s face.

  “The more you help,” I said, “the more chance he has.”

  She compressed her mouth obstinately. “That doesn’t follow.”

  “Then the more you obstruct, the less chance he has.”

  She stared at me, her antagonism still clear, while logic made hardly a dent in emotion.

  She was about forty, I supposed. Thin but not emaciated, from what one could see via the sweater. Good skin, bobbed straight hair, unremarkable features, pink lipstick, no jewelry, small, strong-looking hands. General air of reserve, of holding back. Perhaps that was habitual; perhaps the work of the shit of an amateur jockey who had treated her like muck.

  “How long have you worked here?” I asked, voice neutral, merely inquiring.

  “Eight years, about.” Straightforward answer.

  “What I chiefly need,” I said, “are cuttings books.”

  She almost smiled. “There aren’t any.”

  With dismay I protested, “There must be. He mentioned cuttings.”

  “They’re not in books, they’re in boxes.” She turned her head, nodding directions. “In that cupboard over there. Help yourself.”

  I went across and opened a white-painted door and inside found stacked on shelves from floor to head height a whole array of uniform white-cardboard boxes, all like shirt boxes but about eight inches deep, all with dates written on their ends in black marker ink.

  “I reboxed all the cuttings three or four years ago,” Dee-Dee said. “Some of the old boxes were falling to bits. The newspaper is yellow and brittle. You’ll see.”

  “Can I take them all into the dining room?”

  “Be my guest.”

  I loaded up four of the boxes and set off with them, and in a minute found her following me.

  “Wait,” she said inside the dining room door. “Mahogany gets scratched easily.”

  She went over to a large sideboard and from a drawer drew out a vast green baize cloth which she draped over the whole expanse of the large oval table.

  “You can work on that,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  I put down the boxes and went to fetch another load, ferrying them until the whole lot was transferred. Dee-Dee meanwhile went back to her desk and her work, which largely consisted of the telephone. I could hear her still talking on and off while I arranged the boxes of cuttings chronologically and took the lid off the first, realizing from the date on its end that it had to go back beyond Tremayne; that he hadn’t started training when he was a baby. Tattered yellow pieces of newsprint informed me that Mr. Loxley Vickers, of Shellerton House, Berkshire, had bought Triple Subject, a six-year-old gelding, for the record sum for a steeplechaser of twelve hundred guineas. A house, an astonished reporter wrote, could be bought for less.

  I looked up, smiling, and found Dee-Dee standing in the doorway, hesitantly hovering.

  “I’ve been talking to Fiona Goodhaven,” she said abruptly.

  “How is she?”

  “All right. Thanks to you, it seems. Why didn’t you tell me about your rescue job?”

  “It didn’t seem important.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Well, it didn’t seem important in the context of whether I could or couldn’t do justice to Tremayne’s biography.”

  “God Almighty.” She went away but shortly came back. “If you turn that thermostat,” she said, pointing, “it will get warmer in here.”

  She whisked away again before I could thank her, but I understood that peace had been declared, or, at the very least, hostilities temporarily suspended.

  Tremayne returned in time. I heard him talking forcefully into an office telephone and presently he strode into the dining room to tell me that someone had finally found they had a horse missing.

  “It came over the hill from the next village. They’re sending a box to pick it up. How are you doing?”

  “Reading about your father.”

  “A lunatic. Had an obsession about how things would look in his stomach after he’d eaten them. He used to make his butler put an extra serving of everything he was going to eat in a bucket and stir it round. If my father didn’t like the look of it, he wouldn’t eat his dinner. Drove the cook mad.”

  I laughed. “What about your mother?”

  “She’d fallen off the perch by then. He wasn’t so bad when she was alive, He went screwy after.”

  “How old were you when she ... er ... fell off the perch?”

  “Ten. Same age as Gareth when his mother finally hopped it. You might say I know what it’s like to be Gareth. Except his mother’s still alive and he sees her sometimes. I can’t remember mine very clearly, to be honest.”

  After a moment I said, “How much can I ask you?”

  “Ask anything. If I don’t want to answer, I’ll say so.”

  “Well ... you said your father inherited a fortune. Did he ... er ... leave it to you?”

  Tremayne laughed in his throat. “A fortune seventy or eighty years ago is not a fortune now. But yes, in a way he did. Left me this house. Taught me the principles of land-owning which he’d learnt from his father but hardly practiced. My father spent, my grandfather accumulated. I’m more like my grandfather, though I never knew him. I tell Gareth sometimes that we can’t afford things even if we can. I don’t want him to turn out a spender.”

  “What about Perkin?”

  “Perkin?” For a second Tremayne looked blank. “Perkin has no money sense at all. Lives in a world of his own. It’s no use talking to Perkin about money.”

  “What does he do,” I asked, “in his world?”

  Tremayne looked as if his elder son’s motivations were a mystery, but somewhere also I sensed a sort of exasperated pride.

  “He makes furniture,” he said. “Designs it. Makes it himself, piece by piece. Chests, tables, screens, anything. Two hundred years from now they will be valuable antiques. That’s Perkin’s money sense for you.” He sighed. “Best thing he ever did was marry a smart girl like Mackie. She sells his pieces, makes sure he makes a profit. He used to sell things sometimes for less than they cost to make. Absolutely hopeless.”

  “As long as he’s happy.”

  Tremayne made no comment on his son’s state of happiness but asked about my tape recorder.

  “Didn’t it get wet last night? Won’t it be ruined?”

  “No. I keep everything in waterproof bags. Sort of habit.”

  “Jungles and deserts?” he asked, remembering.

  “Mm.”

  “Then you go and fetch it, and we’ll start. And I’ll move the office television in here with the video player so you can watch the races I’ve won. And if you want any lunch,” he added as an afterthought, “I nearly always have beef sandwiches; buy them by the fifty, ready made from the supermarket, and put them in the freezer.”

  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.

  5

  At 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.