Longshot

by Dick Francis

  No one took him seriously. Nolan took offense. He didn’t like even a semihumorous suggestion that anyone else should muscle in on his territory.

  MONDAY FOUND DEE-DEE in tears over Angela Brickell’s pregnancy test. Not tears of sympathy, it seemed, but of envy.

  Monday also found Doone on our doorstep, wanting to check up on the dates when Chickweed had won and Harry had been there to watch.

  “Mr. Goodhaven?” Tremayne echoed. “It’s Mrs. Goodhaven’s horse.”

  “Yes, sir, but it was Mr. Goodhaven’s photo the dead lass was carrying.”

  “It was the horse’s photo,” Tremayne protested. “I told you before.”

  “Yes, sir,” Doone agreed blandly. “Now, about those dates . . .”

  In suppressed fury, Tremayne sorted the way through the form book and his memory, saying finally that there had been no occasion that he could think of when Harry had been at the races without Fiona.

  “How about the fourth Saturday in April?” Doone asked slyly.

  “The what?” Tremayne looked it up again. “What about it?”

  “Your traveling head lad thinks Mrs. Goodhaven had flu that day. He remembers her saying later at Stratford, when the horse won but failed the dope test later, that she was glad to be there, having missed his last win at Uttoxeter.”

  Tremayne absorbed the information in silence.

  “If Mr. Goodhaven went alone to Uttoxeter,” Doone insinuated, “and Mrs. Goodhaven was at home tucked up in bed feeling ill . . .”

  “You really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tremayne interrupted. “Angela Brickell was in charge of a horse. She couldn’t just go off and leave it. And she came back here with it in the horse box. I’d have known if she hadn’t, and I’d have sacked her for negligence.”

  “But I understood from your traveling head lad, sir,” Doone said with singsong deadliness, “that they had to wait for Angela Brickell that day at Uttoxeter because when they were all ready to go home she couldn’t be found. She did leave her horse unattended, sir. Your traveling head lad decided to wait another half hour for her, and she turned up just in time, and wouldn’t say where she’d been.”

  Tremayne said blankly, “I don’t remember any of this.”

  “No doubt they didn’t trouble you, sir. After all, no harm had been done... had it?”

  Doone left one of his silences hovering, in which it was quite easy to imagine the specific harm that could have been done by Harry.

  “There’s no privacy for anything odd on racecourses,” Tremayne said, betraying the path his own thoughts had taken. “I don’t believe a word of what you’re hinting.”

  “Angela Brickell died about six weeks after that,” Doone said, “by which time she’d used a pregnancy test.”

  “Stop it,” Tremayne said. “This is supposition of the vilest kind, aimed at a good intelligent man who loves his wife.”

  “Good intelligent men who love their wives, sir, aren’t immune to sudden passions.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” Tremayne said doggedly.

  Doone rested a glance on him for a long time and then transferred it to me.

  “What do you think, sir?” he asked.

  “I don’t think Mr. Goodhaven did anything.”

  “Based on your ten days’ knowledge of him?”

  “Twelve days now. Yes.”

  He ruminated, then asked me slowly, “Do you yourself have any feeling as to who killed the lassie? I ask about feeling, sir, because if it were solid knowledge you would have given it to me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I would. And no, I have no feeling, no intuition, unless it is that it was someone unconnected with this stable.”

  “She worked here,” he said flatly. “Most murders are close to home.” He gave me a long assessing look. “Your loyalties, sir,” he said, “are being sucked into this group, and I’m sorry about that. You’re the only man here who couldn’t have any hand in the lassie’s death, and I’ll listen to you and be glad to, but only if you go on seeing straight, do you get me?”

  “I get you,” I said, surprised.

  “Have you asked Mr. Goodhaven about the day he went racing without his wife?” Tremayne demanded.

  Doone nodded. “He denies anything improper took place. But then, he would.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Tremayne announced. “You’re inventing a load of rubbish.”

  “Mr. Goodhaven’s belongings were found with the lassie,” Doone said without heat, “and she carried his photograph, and that’s not rubbish.”

  In the silence after this somber reminder he took his quiet leave and Tremayne, very troubled, said he would go down to the Goodhavens’ house to give them support.

  Fiona however telephoned while he was on his way, and I answered the call because Dee-Dee had already gone home, feeling unwell.

  “John!” she exclaimed. “Where’s Tremayne?”

  “On his way down to you.”

  “Oh. Good. I can’t tell you how awful this is. Doone thinks ... he says ...”

  “He’s been here,” I said. “He told us.”

  “He’s like a bulldog.” Her voice shook with distress. “Harry’s strong, but this ... this barrage is wearing him down.”

  “He’s desperately afraid you’ll doubt him,” I said.

  “What?” She sounded overthrown. “I don’t, for a minute.”

  “Then tell him.”

  “Yes, I will.” She paused briefly. “Who did it, John?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’ll see. You’ll see what we’re too close to see. Tremayne says you understand things without being told, more than most people do. Harry says it comes of all those qualities his Aunt Erica wouldn’t allow you, insight through imagination and all that.”

  They’d been discussing me; odd feeling.

  I said, “You might not want to know.”

  “Oh.” It was a cry of admission, of revelation. “John . . . save us all.”

  She put the phone down without waiting for a response to her extraordinary plea, and I wondered seriously what they expected of me, what they saw me to be: the stranger in their midst who would solve all problems as in old-fashioned westerns, or an eminently ordinary middling writer who was there by accident and would listen to everyone but in the end be ineffectual. Given a choice, I would without question have opted for the latter.

  BY TUESDAY THE press had been drenched with leaks from all quarters. Trial by public opinion was in full swing, the libel laws studiously skirted by a profligate scattering of the word “alleged” but the underlying meaning plain: Harry Goodhaven had allegedly bedded a stable girl, got her pregnant and throttled her to save his marriage to a “wealthy heiress,” without whose money he would be penniless.

  Wednesday’s papers, from Harry’s point of view, were even worse, akin to the public pillory.

  He phoned me soon after lunch.

  “Did you see the bloody tabloids?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “If I come and pick you up, will you just come out driving with me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Fine. Ten minutes.”

  Without many twinges of conscience I laid aside my notes on Tremayne’s midcareer. With two weeks already gone of my four-week allocation I was feeling fairly well prepared to get going on the page, but as usual any good reason for postponing it was welcome.

  Harry came in his BMW, twin of Fiona’s, and I climbed in beside him, seeing more new lines of strain in his face and also rigidity in his neck muscles and fingers. His fair hair looked almost gray, the blue eyes altogether without humor, the social patina wearing thin.

  “John, good of you,” he said. “Life’s bloody.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing.” I tried a shot at comfort. “Doone knows there’s something wrong with his case, otherwise he would have arrested you already.” I settled into the seat beside him, fastening the belt.

  He glan
ced my way as he put the car into gear and started forward. “Do you think so? He keeps coming back. He’s on our doorstep every day. Every day, a new pinprick, a new awkward bloody circumstance. He’s building a cage round me, bar by bar.”

  “He’s trying to break your nerve,” I said, guessing. “Once he’d arrested and charged you, the papers would have to leave you alone. He’s letting them have a field day, waiting for someone to remember something and waiting for you to crack and incriminate yourself. I shouldn’t think he’s tried to stop any of the leaks since the press found out where the girl was lying and he had to make an official statement. Maybe he’s even organized a leak or two himself; I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  Harry turned the nose of the car towards Reading to travel by the hilly route that would take us through the Quillersedge Estate. I wondered why he’d gone that way but I didn’t directly ask him.

  “Yesterday,” he said bitterly, “Doone asked me what Angela Brickell had been wearing. It’s been in all the papers. He asked me if she’d undressed willingly. I could have strangled him ... Oh, God, what am I saying?”

  “Shall I drive?” I asked.

  “What? Oh, yes—we nearly hit that post . . . I didn’t see it. No, I’m all right. Really I am. Fiona says not to let him rattle me, she’s being splendid, absolutely marvelous, but he does rattle me, I can’t help it. He tosses out these lethal questions as if they were harmless afterthoughts ... ‘Did she undress willingly?’ How can I answer? I wasn’t there.”

  “That’s the answer.”

  “He doesn’t believe me.”

  “He isn’t sure,” I said. “Something’s bothering him.”

  “I wish it would bother him into an early grave.”

  “His successor might be worse. Might prefer a conviction to the truth. Doone does at least seek the truth.”

  “You can’t mean you like him!” The idea was an enormity.

  “Be grateful for him. Be glad you’re still free.” I paused. “Why are we going this way?”

  The question surprised him. “To get to where we’re going, of course.”

  “So we’re not just out for a drive?”

  “Well, no.”

  “All around you,” I said, “is the Quillersedge Estate.”

  “I suppose so,” he said vaguely. Then: “Dear God, we go along this road all the time. I mean, everyone in Shellerton goes to Reading this way unless it’s snowing.”

  A long stretch of the road was bordered on each side by mixed woodland, dripping now with yesterday’s rain and looking bare-branched and bedraggled in the scrag end of winter. Part of the woodland was thinned and tamed and fenced neatly with posts and wire, policed with no-trespassing notices; part was wild and open to anyone caring to push through the tangle of trees, saplings and their assorted undergrowth. Five yards into that, I thought, and one would be invisible from the road. Only the strongly motivated, though, would try to go through it: it was no easy afternoon stroll.

  “Anyway,” Harry said, “the Quillersedge Estate goes on for miles. This is just the western end of it. The place where they found Angela was much nearer Bucklebury.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Dammit, it was in the papers. Are you doubting me now?” He was angered and disconcerted by my question, then shook his head in resignation. “That was a Doone question. How do I know? Because the Reading papers printed a map, that’s how. The gamekeeper put his X on the spot.”

  “I don’t doubt you,” I said. “If I doubted you I would doubt my own judgment too, and in your case I don’t.”

  “I suppose that’s a vote of confidence.”

  “Yes.”

  We drove a fair way along the roads and through villages unknown to me, going across country to heaven knew where. Harry, however, knew where, and down a mostly uninhabited lane turned through some broken gateposts into a rutted drive leading to a large sagging barn, an extensive dump of tangled metal and wood and a smaller barn to one side. Beyond this unprepossessing mess lay a wide expanse of muddy gray water sliding sluggishly by with dark wooded hills on the far side.

  “Where are we?” I asked, as the car rolled to a stop, the only bright new thing in the general dilapidation.

  “That’s the Thames,” Harry said. “Almost breaking its banks, by the look of things, after all that rain and melted snow. This is Sam’s boatyard, where we are now.”

  “This?” I remembered what Sam had said about useful squalor: it had been an understatement.

  “He keeps it this way on purpose,” Harry confirmed. “We all came here for a huge barbecue party he gave to celebrate being champion jockey ... eighteen months ago, I suppose. It looked different that night. One of the best parties we’ve been to ...” His voice trailed off as if his thoughts had moved away from what his mouth was saying; and there was sweat on his forehead.

  “What’s making you nervous?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” It was clearly a lie. “Come with me,” he said jerkily. “I want someone with me.”

  “All right. Where are we going?”

  “Into the boathouse.” He pointed to the smaller of the barns. “That big place on the left is Sam’s workshop and dock where he works on his boats. The boathouse isn’t used much, I don’t think, though Sam made it into a grotto the night of the party. I’m going to meet someone there.” He looked at his watch. “I’m a bit early. Don’t suppose it will matter.”

  “Who are you going to meet?”

  “Someone,” he said, and got out of the car. “I don’t know who. Look,” he went on, as I followed him, “someone’s going to tell me something which may clear me with Doone. I just ... I wanted support ... a witness, even. I suppose you think that’s stupid?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, then.”

  “I’ll come, but don’t put too much hope on anyone keeping the appointment. People can be pretty spiteful, and you’ve had a rotten press.”

  “You think it’s a hoax?” The idea bothered him, but he’d obviously considered it.

  “How was the meeting arranged?”

  “On the telephone,” he said. “This morning. I didn’t know the voice. Don’t even know if it was a man or a woman. It was low. Sort of careful, I suppose, looking back.”

  “Why here,” I asked, “of all places?”

  He frowned. “I’ve no idea. But I can’t afford not to listen, if it’s something which will clear me. I can’t, can I?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I don’t really like it either,” he confessed. “That’s why I wanted company.”

  “All right.” I shrugged. “Let’s wait and see.”

  With relief he smiled wanly and led the way across some rough ground of stones and gnarled old weeds, joining a path of sorts that ran from the big barn to the boathouse and following that to our destination.

  Close to, the boathouse was if anything less attractive than from a distance, though there were carved broken eaves that had once been decorative in an Edwardian way and could have been again, given the will. The construction was mostly of weathered old brick, the long sidewalls going down to the water’s edge, the whole built on and into the river’s sloping bank.

  True to Sam’s philosophy, the ramshackle wooden door had no latch, let alone a padlock, and pushed inward, opening at a touch.

  Windows in the walls gave plenty of light, but inside all one could see was a bare wooden floor stretching to double glass doors leading to a railed balcony overhanging the swollen river.

  “Don’t boathouses have water in them?” I inquired mildly.

  “The water’s underneath,” Harry said. “This room was for entertaining. There’s another door down by the edge of the river for going into the boat dock. That’s where the grotto was. Sam had put colored lights all round and some actually in the water... it looked terrific. There was a bar up here in this room. Fiona and I went out onto the balcony with our drinks and looked at the skyful of stars. It was a warm night. Everyt
hing perfect.” He sighed. “Perkin and Mackie were with us, smooching away in newlywed bliss. It all seems so long ago, when everyone was happy, everything simple. Nothing could go wrong ... And Tremayne had a spectacular year and to crown it Top Spin Lob won the National... and since then not much has gone right.”

  “Did Sam invite Nolan to his party?”

  Harry smiled briefly. “Sam felt good. He asked Dee-Dee, Bob Watson, the lads, everyone. Must have been a hundred and fifty people. Even Angela . . .” He stopped and looked at his watch. “It’s just about time.”

  He turned and took a step towards the far-end balcony, the ancient floorboards creaking underfoot.

  There was a white envelope lying on the floor about halfway to the balcony and, saying perhaps it was a message, he went towards it and bent to pick it up, and with a fearsome crack a whole section of the floor gave way under his weight and shot him, shouting, into the dock beneath.

  12

  It happened so fast and so drastically that I nearly slid after him, managing only instinctively to pivot on one foot and throw myself headlong back onto the boards still remaining solid behind the hole.

  Harry, I thought ridiculously, was dead unlucky with cold dirty water. I wriggled until I could peer over the edge into the wet depths below and I couldn’t see him at all.

  Shit, I thought, peeling off my jacket. Come up, for God’s sake, Harry, so I can pull you out.

  No sign of him. Nothing. I yelled to him. No reply.

  I kicked off my boots and swung down below, holding on to a bared crossbeam that creaked with threat, swinging from one hand while I tried to see Harry and not land on top of him.

  All that was visible was brownish opaque muddy water. No time for anything except getting him out. I let go of the beam and dropped with bent legs so as to splash down softly and felt the breath rush out of my lungs from the iciness of the river. Letting the water buoy up my weight, I stretched my feet down to touch bottom and found the water came up to my ears; took a deep breath, put the rest of my head under and reached around for Harry, unable to see him, unable with open eyes to see anything at all.