Longshot

by Dick Francis

  “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 micr
owave, 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.”

  She sighed, unbuckled her seat belt and stood up out of the car.

  “Look,” she said, “I like you, but Perkin does tend to be jealous.”

  “I’ll ignore you,” I promised.

  She smiled vividly. “A touch of old-fashioned formality should do the trick.” She began to turn away, and then stopped. “I’m going in through our own entrance, Perkin’s and mine. I’ll see how he’s doing. See if he’s stopped work. We’ll probably be along for a drink. We often do, at this time of day.”

  “OK.”

  She nodded and walked off, and I went around and into Tremayne’s side of the house as if I’d lived there forever. Yesterday morning, I thought incredulously, I awoke to Aunty’s freeze.

  Tremayne had lit the log fire in the family room and poured his gin and tonic and, standing within heating range of the flames, he listened with disillusion to the outcome of Nolan’s trial.

  “Guilty but unpunished,” he observed. “Newfangled escape clause.”

  “Should the guilty always be punished?”

  He looked at me broodingly. “Is that a character-assessment question?”

  “I guess so.”

  “It’s unanswerable, anyway. The answer is, I don’t know.” He turned and with a foot pushed a log farther into the fire. “Help yourself to a drink.”

  “Thanks. Mackie said they might be along.”

  Tremayne nodded, taking it for granted, and in fact she and Perkin came through from the central hall while I was dithering between the available choices of whisky or gin, neither of which I much liked. Perkin solved the liquid question for himself by detouring into the kitchen and reappearing with a glass of Coke.

  “What do you actually like?” Mackie asked, seeing my hesitation as she poured tonic into gin for herself.

  “Wine, I suppose. Red for preference.”

  “There will be some in the office. Tremayne keeps it for owners when they come to see their horses. I’ll get it.”

  She went without haste and returned with a Bordeaux-shaped bottle and a sensible corkscrew, both of which she handed over.

  Tremayne said, as I liberated the Château Kirwan, “Is that stuff any good?”

  “Very,” I said, smelling the healthy cork.

  “It’s all grape juice as far as I’m concerned. If you like the stuff, put it on the shopping list.”

  “The shopping list,” Mackie explained, “is a running affair pinned to the kitchen corkboard. Whoever does the shopping takes the list with him. Or her.”

  Perkin, slouching in an armchair, said I might as well get used to the idea of doing the shopping myself, particularly if I like eating.

  “Tremayne takes Gareth to the supermarket sometimes,” he said, “and that’s about it. Or Dee-Dee goes, if there’s no milk for the coffee three days running.” He looked from me to Mackie. “I used to think it quite normal until I married a sensible housekeeper.”

  Perkin, I thought, as he reaped a smile from his wife, was a great deal more relaxed than on the evening before, though the faint hostility he’d shown towards me was still there. Tremayne asked him his opinion of the verdict on Nolan, and Perkin consulted his glass lengthily as if seeking illumination.

  “I suppose,” he said finally, “that I’m glad he isn’t in jail.”

  It was a pretty ambiguous statement after so much thought, but Mackie looked pleasantly relieved. Only she of the three, it was clear, cared much for Nolan the man. To father and son, having Nolan in jail would have been an inconvenience and an embarrassment which they were happy to avoid.

  Looking at the two of them, the differences were as powerful as the likenesses. If one discounted Tremayne’s hair, which was gray where Perkin’s was brown, and the thickness in Tremayne’s neck and body that had come with age, then physically they were of one cloth; but where Tremayne radiated strength, Perkin was soggy, where Tremayne was a leader, Perkin retreated. Tremayne’s love was for living horses, Perkin’s was for passive wood.

  It came as a shock to me to wonder if Tremayne wanted his own achievements written in an inheritable book because Perkin’s work would be valuable in two hundred years. Wondered if the strong father felt he had to equal his weaker son. I dismissed the idea as altogether too subtle and as anyway tactless in an employed biographer.

  Gareth came home with his usual air of a life lived on the run and eyed me with disapproval as I sat in an armchair drinking wine.

  “I thought you said—” he began, and stopped
, shrugging, an onset of good manners vying with disappointment.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Oh, really? Now?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Come on, then, I’ll show you the freezers.”

  “Let him alone,” Mackie said mildly. “Let him finish his drink.”

  Perkin reacted to this harmless remark with irritation. “As he said he’d cook, let him do it.”

  “Of course,” I said cheerfully, getting up. I glanced at Tremayne. “All right with you?”

  “You’re all right with me until further notice,” he said, and Perkin didn’t like that testimony of approval either, but Gareth did.

  “You’re home and dried with Dad,” he told me happily, steering me through the kitchen. “What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you do to me?” he asked himself comically, and answered himself. “Nothing. I guess that’s it. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just the way you are. The freezers are through here, in the utility room. If you go straight on through the utility room you get to the garage. Through that door there.” He pointed ahead to a heavy-looking door furnished with businesslike bolts. “I keep my bike through there.”

  There were two freezers, both upright, both with incredible contents.

  “This one,” Gareth said, opening the door, “is what Dad calls the peezer freezer.”

  “Or the pizza frizza?” I suggested.

  “Yes, that too.”

  It was stacked with pizzas and nothing else, though only half full.

  “We eat our way down to the bottom,” Gareth said reasonably, “then fill up again every two or three months.”

  “Sensible,” I commented.

  “Most people think we’re mad.”

  He shut that freezer and opened the other, which proved to contain four packs of beef sandwiches, fifty to a pack. There were also about ten sliced loaves (for toast, Gareth explained), one large turkey (someone gave it to Tremayne for Christmas), pints galore of chocolate ripple ice cream (Gareth liked it) and a whole lot of bags of ice cubes for gins and tonic.