Longshot

by Dick Francis

  He looked at what he’d written, shrugged and changed the question mark to a negative. Then he made a question mark way to the right on the same line. “My assessments,” he said.

  I smiled a little ruefully and said reflectively, “Have you worked out when the trap was set? Raising the floorboards, finding the marble and sticking it on, cutting out the bit of beam—and I bet that went floating down the river—remembering to lock the lower door . . . It would all have taken a fair time.”

  “When would you say it was done, then?” he asked, giving nothing away.

  “Any time Tuesday, or Wednesday morning, I suppose.”

  “Why, exactly?”

  “Anti-Harry fever was publicly at its height on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but by the Sunday before, at least, you’d begun to spread your investigation outward... which must horribly have alarmed our man. Sam Yaeger spent Monday at the boatyard because he’d been medically stood down from racing as a result of a fall, but by Tuesday he was racing again, and on Wednesday he rode at Ascot, so the boathouse was vulnerable all day Tuesday and again Wednesday morning.”

  Doone looked at me from under his eyelids.

  “You’re forgetting something,” he said, and added Sam Yaeger to his list.

  17

  Put a cross,” I said.

  Doone shook his head. “You admire him. You could be blinded.”

  I thought it over. “I do in many ways admire him, I admit. I admire his riding, his professionalism. He’s courageous. He’s a realist.” I paused. “I’ll agree that on the For side you could put the things you listed the other day, that he has all the skills to set the trap and the perfect place to do it.”

  Doone nodded. “Go on.”

  “You’d begun actively investigating him,” I said.

  “Yes, I had.”

  “He’d rolled around a bit with Angela Brickell,” I said, “and that’s where we come to the biggest Against.”

  “You’re not saying he couldn’t have had the irritation, the nerve, the strength to strangle her?”

  “No, I’m not, though I don’t think he did it. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have taken her out into the woods. He told you himself he moves a mattress into the boathouse on such occasions. If he’d strangled her on impulse it would have been there, and he could have slid her weighted body into the river, no one the wiser.”

  Doone listened with his head on one side. “But what if he’d deliberately planned it? What if he’d suggested the woods as being far away from his own territory?”

  “I wouldn’t think he’d need to cover his sins with strangulation,” I said. “Everyone knows he seduces anything that moves. He would pass off an Angela Brickell sort of scandal with a laugh.”

  Doone disapproved, saying “Unsavory,” and maybe thinking of his assailable daughters.

  “We haven’t got very far,” I said, looking at his list. All my own assessments were a cross except the question mark against Nolan. Not awfully helpful, I thought.

  Doone clicked his pen a few times, then at the bottom wrote Lewis Everard.

  “That’s a longshot,” I said.

  “Give me some Fors and Againsts.”

  I pondered. “Against first. I don’t think he’s bold enough to have set that trap, but then”—I hesitated—“there’s no doubt he’s both clever and cunning. I wouldn’t have thought he would have gone into the woods with Angela Brickell. Can’t exactly say why, but I’d think he’d be too fastidious, especially when he’s sober.”

  “For?” Doone prompted, when I stopped.

  “He gets drunk . . . I don’t know if he’d tumble Angela Brickell in that state or not.”

  “But he knew her.”

  “Even if not in the biblical sense,” I agreed.

  “Sir!” he said with mock reproach.

  “He would have seen her at the races,” I said, smiling. “And For... he is a good liar. According to him, he’s the best actor of the lot.”

  “A question mark, then?” Doone’s pen hovered.

  I slowly shook my head. “A cross.”

  “The trouble with you,” Doone said with disillusion, looking at the column of negatives, “is that you haven’t met enough murderers.”

  “None,” I agreed. “You can’t exactly count Nolan Everard.”

  “And you wouldn’t know a murderer if you tripped over one.”

  “Your list is too short,” I said.

  “It seems so.” He put away the notebook and stood up. “Well, Mr. Kendall, thank you for your time. I don’t discount your impressions. You’ve helped clarify my thoughts. Now we’ll have to step up our inquiries. We’ll get there in the end.”

  The singsong accent came to a stop and he shook my hand and let himself out, a gray man in gray clothes following his own informal idiosyncratic path towards the truth.

  I sat for a while thinking of what I’d said and of what he’d told me, and I still couldn’t believe that any of the people I’d come to know so well was really a murderer. No one was a villain, not even Nolan. There had to be someone else, someone we hadn’t begun to consider.

  I WORKED ON and off on Tremayne’s book for the rest of the morning but found it hard to concentrate.

  Dee-Dee drifted in and out, offering coffee and company, and Tremayne put his head in to say he was going to Oxford to see his tailor, and to ask if I wanted an opportunity to shop.

  I thanked him and declined. I would probably have liked to replace my boots and ski jacket, but I still hadn’t much personal money. It was easy at Shellerton House to get by without any. Tremayne would doubtless have lent me some of the quarter-advance due at the end of the month, but my lack was my own choice, and as long as I could survive as I was, I wouldn’t ask. It was all part of the game.

  Mackie came through from her side to keep company with Dee-Dee, saying Perkin had gone to Newbury to collect some supplies, and presently the two women went off to lunch together, leaving me alone in the great sprawling house.

  I tried again and harder to work and felt restless and uneasy. Stupid, I thought. Being alone never bothered me: in fact, I liked it. That day, I found the size of the silent house oppressive.

  I went upstairs, showered and changed out of riding clothes into the more comfortable jeans and shirt I’d worn the day before and pulled on sneakers and the red sweater for warmth. After that I went down to the kitchen and made a cheese sandwich for lunch and wished I’d gone with Tremayne if only for the ride. It was all part of the usual pattern of finding something to do—anything—rather than sit down and face the empty page, except that that day the uneasiness was extra.

  I wandered in a desultory fashion into the family room, which looked dead without the fire blazing and began to wonder what I could make for dinner. Gareth’s BACK FOR GRUB message was still pinned to the corkboard, and it was with a distinct sense of release that I remembered I’d said that I would go back for his camera.

  The unease vanished. I found a piece of paper and left my own message: I’VE BORROWED THE LAND-ROVER TO FETCH GARETH’S CAMERA. BACK FOR COOKING THE GRUB! I pinned it to the corkboard with a red drawing pin and a light heart, and went upstairs again to change back into jodhpur boots to deal with the terrain and to pick up the map and the compass in case I couldn’t find the trail. Then I skipped downstairs and went out to the wheels, locking the back door behind me.

  It was a good day, sunny like the day before but with more wind. With a feeling of having been unexpectedly let out of school, I drove over the hills on the road to Reading and coasted along the unfenced part of the Quillersedge Estate until I thought I’d come more or less to where Gareth had dropped the paint: parked off the road there and searched more closely for the place on foot.

  No one had driven the paint away on their tires. The splash was dusty but still visible and, without much trouble, I found the beginning of the trail about twenty feet straight ahead in the wood and followed it as easily through the tangled trees and undergro
wth as on the day before.

  Gareth a murderer . . . I smiled to myself at the absurdity of it. As well suspect Coconut.

  The pale paint splashes, the next one ahead visible all the time, weren’t all that marked the trail: it showed signs in broken twigs and scuffed ground of our passage the day before. By the time I came back with the camera it would be almost a beaten track.

  Wind rattled and swayed the trees and filled my ears with the old songs of the land, and the sun shone through the moving boughs in shimmering ever-changing patterns. I wound my slow way through the maze of unpruned growth and felt at one with things there and inexpressibly happy.

  The trail strayed around and eventually reached the small clearing. Our improvised seats were frayed by the wind but still identified the place with certainty, and almost at once I spotted Gareth’s camera, prominently hanging, as he’d said, from a branch.

  I walked across to collect it and something hit me very hard indeed in the back.

  Moments of disaster are disorientating. I didn’t know what had happened. The world had changed. I was falling. I was lying facedown on the ground. There was something wrong with my breathing.

  I had heard nothing but the wind, seen nothing but the moving trees but, I thought incredulously, someone had shot me.

  From total instinct as much as from injury I lay as dead. There was a zipping noise beside my ear as something sped past it. I shut my eyes. There was another jolting thud in my back.

  So this was death, I thought numbly; and I didn’t even know who was killing me, and I didn’t know why.

  Breathing was terrible. My chest was on fire. A wave of clammy perspiration broke out on my skin.

  I lay unmoving.

  My face was on dead leaves and dried grass and pieces of twig. I could smell the musty earth. Earth-digested, come to dust.

  Someone, I thought dimly, was waiting to see if I moved: and if I moved there would be a third thud and my heart would stop. If I didn’t move someone would come and feel for a pulse and, finding one, finish me off. Either way, everything that had been beginning was now ending, ebbing away without hope.

  I lay still. Not a twitch.

  I couldn’t hear anything but the wind in the trees. Could hear no one moving. Hadn’t heard even the shots.

  Breathing was dreadful. A shaft of pain. Minimum air could go in, trickle out. Too little. In a while ... I would go to sleep.

  A long time seemed to pass, and I was still alive.

  I had a vision of someone standing not far behind me with a gun, waiting for me to move. He was shadowy and had no face, and his patience was forever.

  Clammy nausea came again, enveloping and ominous. My skin sweated. I felt cold.

  I didn’t exactly try to imagine what was happening in my body.

  Lying still was anyway easier than moving. I would slide unmoving into eternity. The man with a gun could wait forever, but I would be gone. I would cheat him that way.

  That’s delirium, I thought.

  Nothing happened in the clearing. I lay still. Time drifted.

  After countless ages I seemed to come back to a real realization that I was continuing to breathe, even if with difficulty, and didn’t seem in immediate danger of stopping. However ghastly I might feel, however feeble, I wasn’t drowning in blood. Wasn’t coughing it up. Coughing was a bleak thought, the way my chest hurt.

  My certainty of the waiting gun began to fade. He wouldn’t be there after all this time. He wouldn’t stand forever doing nothing. He hadn’t felt my pulse. He must have thought it unnecessary.

  He believed I was dead.

  He had gone. I was alone.

  It took me a while to believe those three things utterly and another while to risk acting on the belief.

  If I didn’t move I would die where I lay.

  With dread but in the end inevitability, I moved my left arm.

  Christ, I thought, that hurt.

  Hurt it might, but nothing else happened.

  I moved my right arm. Just as bad. Even worse.

  No more thuds in the back, though. No quick steps, no pounce, no final curtain.

  Perhaps I really was alone. I let the thought lie there for comfort. Wouldn’t contemplate a cat-and-mouse cruelty.

  I put both palms flat on the decaying undergrowth and tried to heave myself up onto my knees.

  Practically fainted. Not only could I not do it, but the effort was so excruciating that I opened my mouth to scream and couldn’t breathe enough for that either. My weight settled back on the earth and I felt nothing but staggering agony and couldn’t think connectedly until it abated.

  Something was odd, I thought finally. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t lift myself off the ground but that I was stuck to it in some way.

  Cautiously, sweating, with fiery stabs in every inch, I wormed my right hand between my body and the earth, and came to what seemed like a rod between the two.

  I must have fallen onto a sharp stick, I thought. Perhaps I hadn’t been shot. But yes, I had. Hit in the back. Couldn’t mistake it.

  Slowly, trying to ration the pain into manageable portions, I slid my hand out again, and then after a while, hardly believing it, I bent my arm and felt around my back and came to the rod there also, and faced the grim certainty that someone had shot me not with a bullet but an arrow.

  I LAY FOR a while simply wrestling with the enormity of it.

  I had an arrow right through my body from back to front, somewhere in the region of my lower ribs. Through my right lung, which was why I was breathing oddly. Not, miraculously, through any major blood vessels, or I would by now have bled internally to death. About level with my heart, but to one side.

  Bad enough. Awful. But I was still alive. Survival begins in the mind.

  I’d written that, and knew it to be true. But to survive an arrow a mile from a road with a killer around to make sure I didn’t make it... where in one’s mind did one search for will to survive that? Where, when just getting to one’s knees loomed as an unavoidable torture and to lie and wait to be rescued appeared to be merely common sense.

  I thought about rescue. A long long way off. No one would start looking for me for hours; not until after dark. The sun on my back was warm, but the February nights were still near zero and I was wearing only a sweater. Theoretically the luminous trail should lead rescuers to the clearing even at night... but any sensible murderer would have obliterated the road end of it after he’d found his own way out.

  I couldn’t realistically be rescued before tomorrow. I thought I might die while I waited: might die in the night. People died of injuries sometimes because their bodies went into shock. General trauma, not just the wound, could kill.

  One thought, one decision at a time.

  Better die trying.

  All right. Next decision.

  Which way to go.

  The trail seemed obvious enough, but my intended killer had come and gone that way—must have done—and if he should return for any reason I wouldn’t want to meet him.

  I had a compass in my pocket.

  The distant road lay almost due north of the clearing and the straightest line to the road lay well to the left of the paint trail.

  I waited for energy, but it didn’t materialize.

  Next decision: get up anyway.

  The tip of the arrow couldn’t be far into the earth, I thought. I’d fallen with it already through me. It could be only an inch or so in. No more than a centimeter, maybe.

  I shut my mind to the consequences, positioned my hands, and pushed.

  The arrow tip came free and I lay on my side in frightful suffering weakness, looking down at a sharp black point sticking out from scarlet wool.

  Black. The length of a finger. Hard and sharp. I touched the needle tip of it and wished I hadn’t.

  Only one arrow. Only one all the way through, at least. Not much blood, surprisingly. Or perhaps I couldn’t tell, blood being the same color as the jersey, but there wa
s no great wet patch.

  A mile to the road seemed an impossible distance. Moving an inch was taxing. Still, inches added up. Better get started.

  First catch your compass ...

  With an inward smile and a mental sigh I retrieved the compass carefully from my pocket and took a bearing on north. North, it seemed, was where my feet were.

  I rolled with effort to my knees and felt desperately, appallingly, overwhelmingly ill. The flicker of humor died fast. The waves of protest were so strong that I almost gave up there and then. Outraged tissues, invaded lungs, an overall warning.

  I stayed on my knees, sitting back on my heels, head bowed, breathing as little as possible, staring at the protruding arrow, thinking the survival program was too much.

  There was a pale slim rod sticking into the ground beside me. I looked at it vaguely and then with more attention, remembering the thing that had sung past my ear.

  An arrow that had missed me.

  It was about as long as an arm. A peeled fine-grained stick, dead straight. A notch in its visible end, for slotting onto a bowstring. No feather to make a flight.

  The guidebooks all gave instructions for making arrows. “Char the tips in hot embers to shrink and toughen the fibers for better penetration . . .”

  The charred black tip had penetrated all right.

  “Cut two slots in the other end, one shallow one for the bowstring, one deep one to push a shaped feather into, to make a flight so that the arrow will travel straighter to the target.”

  Illustrations thoughtfully provided.

  If the three arrows had all had flights... if there’d been no wind . . .

  I closed my eyes weakly. Even without flights, the aim had been deadly enough.

  Gingerly, sweating, I curled my left hand behind my back and felt for the third arrow, and found it sticking out of my jersey though fairly loose in my hand. With trepidation I took a stronger hold of it and it came away altogether but with a sharp dagger of soreness, like digging out a splinter.

  The black tip of that arrow was scarlet with blood, but I reckoned it hadn’t gone in farther than a rib or my spine. I only had the first one to worry about.