Longshot

by Dick Francis

  Tremayne said to me, “This is Sam Yaeger, our jockey.” To Sam Yaeger he explained my presence and said I’d been riding out.

  Sam Yaeger nodded to me, visibly assessing what threat or benefit I might represent to him, running a glance over my jodhpurs and measuring my height. I imagined that because of my six feet alone he might put away fears that I could annex any of his racing territory.

  He himself wore jodhpurs also, along with a brilliant yellow sweatshirt. A multicolored anorak, twin of Gareth’s, hung over the back of his chair, and he had brought his own helmet, bright turquoise, with YAEGER painted large in red on the front. Nothing shy or retiring about Sam.

  Dee-Dee, appearing for her coffee, brightened by fifty watts at the sight of him.

  “Morning, lover-boy,” she said.

  Lover-boy made a stab at pinching her bottom as she passed behind him, which she seemed not to mind. Well, well, well, I thought, there was a veritable pussycat lurking somewhere inside that self-contained touch-me-not secretarial exterior. She made her coffee and sat at the table beside the jockey, not overtly flirting but very aware of him.

  I made the toast, which had become my accepted job, and put out the juice, butter, marmalade and so on. Sam Yaeger watched with comically raised eyebrows.

  “Didn’t Tremayne say you were a writer?” he asked.

  “Most of the time. Want some toast?”

  “One piece, light brown. You don’t look like a bloody writer.”

  “So many people aren’t.”

  “Aren’t what?”

  “What they look like,” I said. “Bloody or not.”

  “What do I look like?” he demanded, but with, I thought, genuine curiosity.

  “Like someone who won the Grand National among eighty-nine other races last year and finished third on the jockeys’ list.”

  “You’ve been peeking,” he said, surprised.

  “I’ll be interviewing you soon for your views of your boss as a trainer.”

  Tremayne said with mock severity, “And they’d better be respectful.”

  “They bloody well would be, wouldn’t they?”

  “If you have any sense,” Tremayne agreed, nodding.

  I dealt out the toast and made some more. Sam’s extremely physical presence dominated breakfast throughout and I wondered briefly how he got on with Nolan, the dark side of the same coin.

  I asked Dee-Dee that question after Sam and Tremayne had gone out with the second lot; asked her in the office while I checked some facts in old form books.

  “Get on?” she repeated ironically. “No, they do not.” She paused, considered whether to tell me more, shrugged and continued. “Sam doesn’t like Nolan riding so many of the stable’s horses. Nolan rides most of Fiona’s runners, he accepts that, but Tremayne runs more horses in amateur races than most trainers do. Wins more, too, of course. The owners who bet, they like it, because whatever else you can say about Nolan, no one denies he’s a brilliant jockey. He’s been top of the amateurs’ list for years.”

  “Why doesn’t he turn professional?” I asked.

  “The very idea of that scares Sam rigid,” Dee-Dee said calmly, “but I don’t think it will happen. Especially not now, since the conviction. Nolan prefers his amateur status, anyway. He thinks of Sam as blue collar to his white. That’s why ...” She stopped abruptly as if blocking a revelation that was already on its way from brain to mouth, stopped so sharply that I was immediately interested, but without showing it asked, “Why what?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not fair to them.”

  “Do go on,” I said, not pressing too much. “I won’t repeat it to anyone.”

  “It wouldn’t help you with the book,” she said.

  “It might help me to understand the way the stable works and where its success comes from, besides Tremayne’s skill. It might come partly, for instance, from rivalry between two jockeys who each wants to prove himself better than the other.”

  She gazed at me. “You have a twisty mind. I’d never have thought of that.” She paused for decision and I simply waited. “It isn’t just riding,” she said finally. “It’s women.”

  “Women?”

  “They’re rivals there, too. The night Nolan—I mean, the night Olympia died . . .”

  They all said, I’d noticed, “when Olympia died,” and never “when Nolan killed Olympia,” though Dee-Dee had just come close.

  “Sam set out to seduce Olympia,” Dee-Dee said, as if it were only to be expected. “Nolan brought her to the party and of course Sam made a beeline for her.” Somewhere in her calm voice was indulgence for Sam Yaeger, censure for Nolan, never mind that Nolan seemed to be the loser.

  “Did he... er ... know Olympia?”

  “Never set eyes on her before. None of us knew her. Nolan had been keeping her to himself. Anyway he brought her that night and she took one look at Sam and giggled. I know, I was there. Sam has that effect on females.” She raised her eyebrows. “Don’t say it. I respond to him too. Can’t help it. He’s fun.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “Can you? Olympia did. Putty in his hands, which of course were all over her the minute Nolan went to fetch her a drink. When he came back, she’d gone off with Sam. Like I told you, she had on a low-cut long scarlet dress slit up the thigh ... next-best thing to a written invitation. Nolan seemed to think that Sam and Olympia would have headed for the stables and he went looking for them there, but without results.”

  She stopped again as if doubting the wisdom of telling me these things, but it seemed harder for her to stop than to start.

  “Nolan came back into the house cursing and swearing and telling me he would strangle the ... er ... bitch because, you see, I think he blamed her, not Sam, for making him feel a fool. Him, Nolan, the white-collar amateur. He wasn’t going to make it public and he shut up pretty soon, though he went on being angry. So, anyway, there you are, that’s really what happened.”

  “Which no one,” I said slowly, “brought up at the trial.”

  “Of course not. I mean, not many people knew, and it gave Nolan a motive.”

  “Yes, it did.”

  “But he didn’t mean to kill her. Everyone knows that. If he’d attacked and killed Sam, it would have been a different matter.”

  I said, frowning, “It wasn’t you, though, who said at the trial they’d heard him say he would strangle the bitch.”

  “No, of course not. Some other people heard him before he reached me, and they didn’t know why he was saying it. It didn’t seem important at that time. Of course no one ever asked me if I knew why he’d said it, so no one found out.”

  “But the prosecution must have asked Nolan why he said it?”

  “Yes, sure, but he said it was because he couldn’t find her, nothing else. Extravagant language but not a threat.”

  I sighed. “And Sam wasn’t for saying why, as it would further torpedo his shaky reputation?”

  “Yes. And anyway he didn’t believe Nolan meant to kill her. He told me that. He said it wasn’t the first time he and Nolan had bedded the same girl, and sometimes Nolan had pinched one of his, and it was a bit of a lark on the whole, not a killing matter.”

  “More a lark to Sam than to Nolan,” I suggested.

  “Probably.” She shook herself. “I’m getting no work done.”

  “You’ve done some of mine.”

  “Don’t put it in the book,” she insisted, alarmed.

  “I promise I won’t,” I said.

  I retired to the dining room and, since the shape of Tremayne’s passage through life was more and more becoming clear, I began to map out the book into sections, giving each a tentative title with subheadings. I still hadn’t put an actual sentence on paper and was feeling tyrannized by all the blank pages lying ahead. I’d heard of writers who leaped to their typewriters as to a lover. There were days when I’d do any chore I could think of rather than pick up a pencil, and it was never easy, never, to dig w
ords and ideas from my brain. Half the time I couldn’t believe I’d chosen this occupation; half the time I longed for the easier solitude under the stars.

  I scribbled “Find something you like doing and spend your life doing it” at the end of the outline plan and decided it was enough for one day. If tomorrow it looked all right, maybe I’d let it stand, and go on.

  OUT IN THE woodland Detective Chief Inspector Doone looked morosely at Angela Brickell’s jumbled bones while the pathologist told him they were those of a young female, dead probably less than a year.

  The photographer took photographs. The gamekeeper marked the spot on a large-scale map. The pathologist said it was impossible to determine cause of death without a detailed autopsy, and very likely not even then.

  With sketchy reverence for whoever they had been, the skull and other bones were packed into a coffin-shaped box, carried to a van and driven to the mortuary.

  Detective Chief Inspector Doone, seeing there was no point in looking for tire tracks, footprints or cigarette ends, set two constables to searching the undergrowth for clothes, shoes or anything not rotted by time; and it was in this way that under a blanket of dead leaves they came across some wet filthy jeans, a small-sized bra, a pair of panties and a T-shirt with the remains of a pattern on the front.

  Detective Chief Inspector Doone watched his men pack these sad remnants into a plastic bag and reflected that none of the clothes had been on or even near the bones.

  The girl, he reckoned, had been naked when she died.

  He sighed deeply. He didn’t like these sorts of cases. He had daughters of his own.

  TREMAYNE CAME BACK from second lot in a good mood, whistling between his teeth. He wheeled straight into the office, fired off a fresh barrage of instructions to Dee-Dee and made several rapid phone calls himself. Then he came into the dining room to let me know the state of play and to ask a favor or two, taking it (correctly) for granted that I would oblige.

  The ditched jeep had gone to the big scrap heap in the sky: a replacement had been found in Newbury, a not new but serviceable Land-Rover. If I would go to Newbury in the Volvo with Tremayne, I could drive the substitute home to Shellerton.

  “Of course,” I said.

  The racing industry was scrambling back into action, with Windsor racecourse promising to be operational on Wednesday. Tremayne had horses entered, four of which he proposed to run. He would like me to come with him, he said, to see what his job entailed.

  “Love to,” I said.

  He wished to go out for the evening to play poker with friends, and he’d be back late: would I stay in for Gareth?

  “Sure,” I said.

  “He’s old enough to be safe on his own, but ... well . . .”

  “Company,” I said. “Someone around.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “Dee-Dee thinks we take advantage of you,” he said bluntly. “Do we?”

  “No.” I was surprised. “I like what I’m doing.”

  “Cooking, baby-sitting, spare chauffeur, spare lad?”

  “Sure.”

  “You have the right to say no,” he said uncertainly.

  “I’ll tell you soon enough if I’m affronted. As of now, I’d rather be a part of things, and useful. OK?”

  He nodded.

  “And,” I said, “this way I get to know you better for the book.”

  For the first time he looked faintly apprehensive, as if perhaps after all he didn’t want his whole self publicly laid bare; but I would respect any secrecies I learned, I thought again, if he didn’t want them told. This was not an investigative blast-the-lid-off exercise, this was to be the equivalent of a commissioned portrait, an affirmation of life. It might be fair to include a wart or two, but not to put every last blemish under magnification.

  The day went ahead as planned and, in addition, in the Volvo on the way to Newbury, Tremayne galloped through his late adolescence and his introduction (by his father, naturally) to high-stakes gambling. His father’s advice, he said, was always to wager more than one could afford, otherwise one would get no thrill and feel no despair.

  “He was right, of course,” Tremayne said, “but I’m more prudent. I play poker, I back horses, I bet a little, win a little, lose a little, it doesn’t flutter my pulse. I’ve owners who go white and shake at the races. They look on the point of dying, they stand to lose or win so much. My father would have understood it. I don’t.”

  “All your life’s a gamble,” I said.

  He looked blank for a moment. “You mean training racehorses? True enough, I get thrills like Top Spin Lob, and true enough, great slabs of despair. You might say I wager my heartstrings, but not much cash.”

  I wrote it down. Tremayne, driving conservatively, slanted a glance at my notebook and seemed pleased to be quoted. The man himself, I thought with a stirring of satisfaction, was going to speak clearly from the pages, coming alive with little help from me.

  In the evening, after Tremayne had departed to his card game, Gareth asked me to teach him to cook.

  I was nonplussed. “It’s easy,” I said.

  “How did you learn?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe from watching my mother.” I looked at his face. “Sorry, I forgot.”

  “My mother makes it all difficult, not easy. And she would never let me watch her at home. She said I got under her feet.”

  My own mother, I reflected, had always let me clean out raw cake mixture with my finger, had always liked to talk to me while things bubbled.

  “Well,” I said, “what do you want to eat?”

  We went into the kitchen where Gareth tentatively asked for “real” shepherd’s pie, “not that stuff in supermarket boxes that tastes of cardboard and wouldn’t feed a pygmy.”

  “Real easy shepherd’s pie,” I assented. “First of all, catch your shepherd.”

  He grinned and watched me assemble some minced beef, an onion, gravy powder and a jar of dried herbs.

  “The gravy powder’s sort of cheating,” I said. “Your mother would be horrified, but it thickens the meat and tastes good.”

  I dissolved some powder into a little water, added it to the beef, chopped the onion finely, added that, sprinkled some herbs, stirred it all around in a saucepan, put the lid on and set it to cook on a low heat.

  “Next thing to decide,” I said, “is real potatoes or dried potato granules. How are you with peeling potatoes? No? Granules, then?”

  He nodded.

  “Follow the directions,” I said, giving him the packet.

  “Heat eight fluid ounces of water and four fluid ounces of milk,” he said, reading. He looked up. “Hey, I was going to ask you ... You know you said to boil river water before you drink it? Well, what in?”

  I smiled. “Best thing is a Coca-Cola can. You can usually find an empty one lying about, the litter habits of this nation being what they are. You want to just shake it up with water to wash it out a few times in case there are any spiders or anything inside, but Coke cans are pretty clean.”

  “Ace,” he said emphatically. “Well, for the potatoes we need some butter and salt ... Will you write down all you bought last week, so I can get them again and cook when you’re gone?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I wouldn’t mind if you stayed.”

  Loneliness was an ache in his voice. I said, “I’ll be here another three weeks.” I paused. “Would you like, say perhaps next Sunday if it’s a decent day, to come out with me into some fields and perhaps some woods? I could show you a few of the things in the books ... how to do them in real life.”

  His face shone: my own reward.

  “Could I bring Coconut?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Mega cool.”

  He whipped the potato granules happily into the hot liquid and we piled the fluffy result onto the cooked meat mixture in a round pie dish. Put it under the grill to brown the top. Ate the result with mutual ful
fillment and cleared everything away afterwards.

  “Can we take the survival kit?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And light a fire?”

  “Perhaps on your own land, if your father will let us. You can’t just light fires anywhere in England. Or anyway, you shouldn’t, unless it’s an emergency. People do, actually, but you’re supposed to get the landowner’s permission first.”

  “He’s sure to let us.”

  “Yes. I’d think so.”

  “I really can’t wait,” he said.

  ON TUESDAY MORNING the pathologist made his report to Detective Chief Inspector Doone.

  “The bones are those of a young adult female, probably five foot four or five, possible age, twenty. Could be a year or two younger or older, but not much. There was a small remaining patch of scalp, with a few hairs still adhering: the hairs are medium brown, four inches long, can’t tell what length her hair was overall.”

  “How long since she died?” Doone asked.

  “I’d say last summer.”

  “And cause of death? Drugs? Exposure?”

  “As to drugs, we’ll have to analyze the hairs, see what we can find. But no, you’ve got a problem here.”

  Doone sighed. “What problem?”

  “Her hyoid bone is fractured.”

  Depression settled on Doone. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. She was strangled.”

  AT SHELLERTON TUESDAY passed uneventfully with riding out, breakfast, clippings, lunch, taping, evening drinks and dinner.

  In the morning I came across Dee-Dee weeping quietly into her typewriter and offered a tissue.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, sniffing.

  “Care to unbutton?”

  “I don’t know why I tell you things.”

  “I listen.”

  She blew her nose and gave me a brief apologetic look. “I’m old enough to know better. I’m thirty-six.” She gave her age almost in desperation, as if the figure itself were a disaster.

  “Tremayne told me you’d had a disappointment in the love department,” I said hesitatingly. “He didn’t exactly say who.”