'Barney? Hi, Linc Tremayne here,' he said when the greyhound trainer answered the phone.
'Ah, hello, Linc. Yes, I was just calling to follow up your visit the other day, and to see if you were interested in coming to Ledworth on Thursday night. You know, to see what goes on from an insider's point of view.'
'Thursday?' Linc repeated, stalling for time. It seemed the decision about his further involvement couldn't be postponed after all. To be seen at the dog track with Barney, albeit in all innocence, could easily be misconstrued as continued snooping, if the greyhound connection was indeed the right one.
Damn!
'Yes, I'd love to,' he heard himself saying.
'Great.' Barney sounded really enthusiastic. 'I've got two dogs running and they're both in with a chance. Should be a good night.'
He arranged to meet Barney at his kennels and travel with him rather than trying to find each other amidst the hustle and bustle of a busy meet, then put the phone down and sat, deep in thought. He had a strong suspicion that Detective Inspector Rockley would give him a severe raking down if he ever found out and, looking at it from his side, Linc couldn't blame the man at all.
'Sorry to interrupt,' Mary ventured diffidently, 'but don't forget you've got an appointment with Dr Small in less than half an hour.'
'Oh, bugger!' Linc muttered.
Mary looked at him with a certain wistfulness. 'He didn't do it to annoy you, you know. He worries about you.'
'Got to look after the succession.'
'That's a bit hard,' she responded.
'Yeah, I know. I'm sorry, I'm not feeling my best this morning.'
Dr Small turned out to be not some doddery white-haired, ex- Harley Street GP, as Linc had feared, but a young man not much older than himself who was, he confided to Linc, off to play rugby when he'd seen his last Sunday patient off the premises.
Linc apologised for his own presence, but Dr Small assured him that the surgery usually had to open for an hour or so every Sunday morning.
'There are always a handful of people who are convinced they won't see the weekend out if they don't get their symptoms checked straight away,' he said, cheerfully inspecting Linc's multi-coloured person. 'You, on the other hand, have some really quite interesting bruising.'
'It might be interesting to you, it's a bloody nuisance to me!' Linc said with feeling.
'Mmm. I expect it is. Still, there's no concussion and no broken bones – but no miracle cure either, I'm afraid. I can only advise rest, and paracetamol if you want it, and time will do the rest. Oh, and I wouldn't go picking on any teenage thugs for a day or two.'
Almost opposite the entrance to the surgery car park was the Silver Pine health and fitness club. As Linc was waiting to pull out into the traffic, the smoked glass front doors opened and his sister-in-law Nikki came out dressed in a pink and silver tracksuit. She was carrying a sports hold-all and wore her blonde curls in a ponytail under a pink baseball cap.
Linc was idly wondering whether she was a member and how much the subscription was costing Crispin when a large, tanned, bald-headed man in a tracksuit joined Nikki on the steps. As Linc looked on, momentarily forgetting to watch for a gap in the traffic, Nikki turned to the newcomer and, standing on tiptoe to reach, put her arms round his neck and kissed him. Laughing, the man extricated himself from her grasp and stepped back, glancing around as he did so. Then he looked down at his watch, showed Nikki, and after dropping a kiss on the top of her head, disappeared back through the smoky doors.
The toot of a car horn behind him recalled Linc sharply to attention. Out on the road, a man in a sports saloon was flashing his headlights urgently, and he realised that a space had been left for him to move into. With a grateful wave he put his foot down, pulled out and drove back to Farthingscourt in a very thoughtful frame of mind.
Nikki's mother, Beverley Pike, was a forceful and ambitious woman.
She arrived on Monday evening, leaving behind her spacious detached house in Surrey where she lived for the most part separately from her wealthy, night-club-owning husband, to stay in Farthingscourt's North Lodge with Crispin and her daughter.
She had visited her daughter and son-in-law the previous summer but at that time Linc was still working away from home and so it was the first time he had met her, apart from briefly at the wedding. Brief though it had been, that one meeting had been enough to make it perfectly clear to him that theirs would be a relationship built on mutual antipathy.
Coming from a well-connected but not so well-to-do family, Beverley had married Eddy Pike for his money, as Nikki had unashamedly told Linc when they were dating. Having sacrificed her own position – as she saw it – for financial comfort, she was a determined social climber on her daughter's behalf, and although on the one hand she was patently delighted that Nikki had married into a titled family, she was just as obviously disappointed that her daughter had missed out on the prospect of the actual title. She held Linc entirely to blame for this, even though Nikki had apparently put their stormy break-up well behind her.
Any hope that time would have resigned the woman to the unalterable was banished by the coolness of the reception she gave Linc when he came down from his rooms to dinner on the Wednesday evening.
The first thing that he noticed, on entering the drawing room, was the presence of Mary, whose inclusion in the party, though not unprecedented, gave the lie to his father's attempt to even up the numbers. Wearing a simple but classic tan jersey dress, she appeared perfectly at ease chatting to Crispin, and Linc had an unworthy suspicion that his father had invited her solely to put Beverley's nose out of joint. He was well aware that the fondness his father had developed for Crispin's wife did not in any degree extend to her mother.
Crispin himself was looking devastatingly handsome, as he always did when he made the effort. Linc had long accepted, without a shred of rancour, that his younger brother would invariably cast his own less flamboyant looks into the shade.
Nikki, standing next to her mother, was sparklingly pretty in an evening dress of pale, shimmering blue that accentuated the colour of her eyes and clung invitingly to her curves. Beverley, in her late-forties, was still well able to attract the opposite sex in her own right but made the mistake of trying to hang on to her youth. The 'little black dress' she wore was just a few inches too short to be flattering, and her hair just a little too improbably golden.
The bell at the front door jangled, and Linc went to answer it, waving away the family's part-time butler who appeared on the same errand. He had offered to pick Josie up from the Vicarage but she'd assured him that it wasn't necessary, her only concern about the evening being what to wear. His efforts to describe the fairly liberal dress code that applied to such family gatherings at Farthingscourt had obviously been reasonably successful because as he kissed her cheek and took her coat he could see that, in a long slim dress of amber silk, Josie had got it just right.
'Wow! You look stunning!' he said, and she smiled and thanked him.
His opinion was clearly echoed by each of the occupants of the drawing room as he showed Josie in, but while Mary and Crispin looked warmly appreciative, Nikki looked pensive and her mother, for one unguarded moment, downright venomous. It was the expression of deep satisfaction on the Viscount's aristocratic features, however, that struck Linc. He guessed then that Josie too was being used as a pawn in a little game his father had orchestrated to amuse himself.
Linc was silently furious.
The conversation round the dinner table drifted from one subject to another as it does on such occasions, but it wasn't long before it got round to the attack on Linc and Josie. Nikki had exhibited a certain ghoulish interest in Linc's battle scars when she first ran into him on Monday morning, but the bruises had, after four days, faded to not much more than dark shadows and he'd somewhat naively hoped that the matter would be forgotten.
It was in fact Beverley who started the ball rolling. Perhaps sensing that Linc was uncomfortable
talking about it, she took advantage of a pause during the discussion of an entirely different topic to say loudly, 'You must have been terrified the other night, Josie.'
Josie appeared momentarily startled by this completely unheralded comment, and after darting a look at Linc replied, 'Er, yes . . . I was. But it was much worse for Linc. They didn't really threaten me at all, just wouldn't let me go.'
'So, what exactly happened?' Nikki's mother asked. 'How did it all start? I know Linc won't tell me anything.'
'Well, I don't think . . .' Josie shot another unhappy glance at him.
'Surely we've got better things to talk about,' he interjected in bored tones. 'It was just a bunch of young thugs looking for trouble. All in the past now, and hardly a pleasant subject for a mealtime.'
'Did he take them all on single-handed?' Nikki had plainly had a little too much wine. Eyes shining, she looked from Josie to Linc, and back again. 'Did he fight for your honour?'
'Oh, for goodness' sake.' Linc was exasperated. 'I didn't fight anyone. They attacked me and, if anything, Josie was the heroine. She set a car alarm off and frightened them away.'
'Oh, well done, my dear,' Mary said warmly. 'It always annoys me when the women in films are portrayed as helpless creatures who can do nothing except stand and scream in a crisis. Most of us are just as resourceful as men, given the chance.'
'I know what you mean,' Josie agreed, grateful to have the spotlight taken off her. 'In a film, if they're being chased, the girl always has to fall and twist her ankle at the crucial moment and slow the hero up.'
'I wonder how far they'd have gone if Josie hadn't set the alarm off.' Beverley was like a terrier at a rat hole. 'You could have been badly hurt, you know. Even killed.'
The prospect didn't appear to disturb her unduly, as far as Linc could see.
'Shall we change the subject?' Sylvester suggested from the head of the table.
'Presumably they wouldn't have done any serious harm if they were just trying to warn you off, though,' Crispin remarked, looking thoughtfully across at his brother.
Linc frowned and shook his head slightly but the damage had been done.
'Warn you off? What do you mean?' Beverley demanded.
'Oh, Lord, Linc. Sorry!' Crispin said. 'But surely it doesn't matter? I mean, family . . .'
While explaining his bruises, Linc had given Crispin the gist of recent events, requesting that he keep the knowledge to himself. He should have known better, he reflected with hindsight. Part of his brother's charm had always been his openness. He was a very adept practical joker, but in serious matters was the sort who would blush if he told a lie.
'No, it doesn't really matter,' Linc told him. And hesitated, wondering how to close the subject without seeming rude.
His father had no such scruples.
'Linc has foolishly been dabbling in such matters as would be infinitely better left to the police,' he stated from the head of the table. 'I trust he's now learned his lesson, and I think the matter is best left there. We will talk about something else.' He bent one of his most quelling looks on Nikki's mother, who flushed and pursed her lips.
'I was only concerned for his safety,' she protested in injured tones.
'Yes, I'm sure you were,' Sylvester replied.
The ever-reliable Mary cleared her throat and diffidently introduced a non-contentious topic of conversation and, apart from a slight sulkiness on Beverley's part, the uncomfortable interlude appeared forgotten.
Much as he often deplored his father's high-handedness, Linc had to concede that it came in useful at times.
When the meal was over the younger members of the party left the dining room on a mission to acquaint Josie with the rest of the house. Linc would have preferred to show her around on his own but when Nikki declared, 'We'll come too, won't we, Cris?' there was little he could do about it, save for resorting to the kind of rudeness his father employed.
Crispin, indolent by nature, looked as though he would just as soon drink coffee with the others in the drawing room but obligingly got to his feet and followed his wife instead.
'I can't wait to see Josie's face when she sees the chandelier in the ballroom,' Nikki said excitedly as they made their way across the hall, and Linc suppressed his uncharitable feelings towards her. After all, he still enjoyed the reactions of visitors to the house, and it was all much more of a novelty to Nikki.
Josie's exclamations of delight were enough to satisfy any guide; she took great interest in everything she was shown, especially the Long Gallery with its ranks of past Tremaynes gazing down from the walls.
'Wow!' she breathed. 'This beats the normal family photo album into a cocked hat! Doesn't it feel weird, having all your relations looking down at you? They all look so stern, too. Except your mother, of course, she looks a sweetie! And your father looks . . . Well, you can see they were very much in love.'
'My father was very different in those days,' Linc told her, divining her thoughts. 'My mother's death shattered him. He's never really got over it.'
'Oh, poor man!' Josie said with quick and very genuine sympathy, and watching the play of emotions across her face, Linc wished more than ever that Crispin and Nikki had stayed downstairs.
'This is my favourite,' Nikki called from a little further along. 'The Third Viscount, St John Tremayne. The black sheep of the family.'
Josie moved along and Linc smiled at her shock as she registered the strong likeness.
'Oh! For a moment I thought . . . Obviously it isn't, because of the costume, but doesn't he look like you?' she exclaimed, turning to him. 'Why is he the black sheep? What did he do?'
'He nearly gambled the family fortunes away,' Nikki answered, gazing up at the portrait. 'He's very handsome, don't you think?'
'Hey, no! That's not fair!' Linc protested. 'You're putting her in an impossible position. Don't answer, Josie.'
Josie turned a little pink but looked up critically at the devil-may- care face on the canvas. 'Yes, he is handsome,' she admitted after a moment. 'But I'm not sure he'd be an easy man to know.'
Crispin gave a shout of laughter. 'Take that as you will!' he told his brother.
'Well, I think he's gorgeous,' Nikki reiterated. She stepped over the ropes and reached up to caress the frame of the picture.
Crispin went after her, gently removing her hands. 'And I think you've had too much to drink.'
'Maybe I have,' she agreed with a sigh, allowing herself to be guided back on to the central runner.
'So, what happened to the black sheep?' Josie enquired. 'Did he see the error of his ways and settle down to raise a huge family?'
'Not exactly,' Linc said. 'He was wild to the end and – according to the records – died when a wheel came off his curricle during a race from London to Brighton.'
'I've often wondered whether someone loosened that wheel,' Crispin remarked thoughtfully. 'Before old St John gambled the house out from under them.'
Linc shook his head. 'Oh, no, you don't! I don't mind admitting to a ne'er-do-well, or even a womaniser – like the Fifth Viscount – but I won't have it said that we Tremaynes ever stooped so low as to bump off one of our own!'
'When are you going to sit for your portrait?' Josie asked.
'Cris and I had one done together as kids but the official one's not usually done until the title is handed on.'
The tour of the house continued, finishing with a look at the servants' quarters, part of which had been restored to their original state for the benefit of the paying visitors, and ending back in the main hall where it had started. Here Josie demurely expressed a wish to powder her nose and was directed to the cloakroom, and Crispin went ahead to the drawing room saying that he would bespeak more coffee.
Deadfall Page 15
