Longshot

Chapter 11

Tremayne came home and frightened Ingrid away like Miss Muffet and the spider.

‘What did she want?’ he asked, watching her scuttling exit. ‘She always seems scared of me. She’s a real mouse.’

‘She came to tell me something she thinks should be known,’ I said reflectively. ‘I suppose she thought I could do the telling, in her place.’

‘Typical,’ Tremayne said. ‘What was it?’

‘Angela Brickell was perhaps pregnant.’

‘What?’ He stared at me blankly. ‘Pregnant?’

I explained about the used test. ‘You don’t buy or use one of those tests unless you have good reason to.’

He said thoughtfully, ‘No, I suppose not.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘there are about twenty lusty males connected with this stable and dozens more in Shellerton and throughout the racing industry; and even if she were pregnant, and from what Doone said about bones I don’t see how they can tell yes or no, even if she were, it still might have nothing to do with her death.’

‘But it might.’

‘She was a Roman Catholic, Ingrid says.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘They’re against abortion.’

He stared into space.

I said, ‘Harry’s in trouble. Have you heard?’

‘No, what trouble?’

I told him about Doone’s accusations, and also about duckweed’s way of winning and about Lewis’s more or less explicit admission of perjury. Tremayne poured himself a gin and tonic of suitably gargantuan proportions and told me in his turn that he’d had a rotten day at Chepstow. ‘One of my runners broke down and another went crashing down arse over tip at the last fence with the race in his pocket. Sam dislocated his thumb, which swelled like a balloon, and although he’s OK he won’t realistically be fit again until Tuesday, which means I have to scratch around for a replacement for Monday. And one lot of owners groused and groaned until I could have knocked their heads together and all I can do is be nice to them and sometimes it all drives me up the bloody wall, to tell you the truth.’

He flopped his weight into an armchair, stretched out his legs and rested his gaze on his toecaps, thinking things over.

‘Are you going to tell Doone about the pregnancy test?’ he asked finally.

‘I suppose so. It’s on Ingrid’s conscience. If I don’t pass on what she’s said, she’ll find another mouthpiece.’

He sighed. ‘It won’t do Harry much good.’

‘Nor harm.’

‘It’s a motive. Juries believe in motives.’

I grunted. ‘Harry won’t come to trial.’

‘Nolan did. And a good motive would have jailed him, you can’t say it wouldn’t.’

‘The pregnancy test is a non-starter,’ I said. ‘Ingrid threw the empty box away; there’s no proof it really existed; there’s no saying if Angela used it or when; there’s no certainty about the result; there’s no knowing who she’d been sleeping with.’

‘You should have been a lawyer.’

Mackie and Perkin came through for their usual drink and news-exchange and even Chickweed’s win couldn’t disperse the general gloom.

‘Angela pregnant?’ Mackie shook her head, almost bewildered. ‘She didn’t say anything about it.’

‘She might have done, given time,’ Tremayne said, ‘if the test was positive.’

‘Damned careless of her,’ Perkin said. ‘That bloody girl’s nothing but trouble. It’s all upsetting Mackie just when she should be feeling relaxed and happy, and I don’t like it.’

Mackie stretched out a hand and squeezed her husband’s in gratitude, the underlying joy resurfacing, as persistent as pregnancy itself. Perhaps Angela Brickell too, I speculated, had been delighted to be needing her test. Who could tell?’

Gareth gusted in full of plans for an expedition I’d forgotten about, a fact he unerringly read on my face.

‘But you said you would teach us things, and we could light a fire.’ His voice rose high with disappointment. ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Ask your father.’

Tremayne listened to Gareth’s request for a patch of land for a camp fire and raised his eyebrows my way.

‘Do you really want to bother with all this?’

‘Actually, I suggested it, in a rash moment.’

Gareth nodded vigorously. ‘Coconut’s coming at ten.’

Mackie said, ‘Fiona asked us to go down in the morning to toast Chickweed and cheer Harry up.’

‘But John promised,’ Gareth said anxiously.

Mackie smiled at him indulgently. ‘I’ll make John’s excuses.

Sunday morning crept in greyly on a near-freezing drizzle, enough to test the spirits of all would-be survivors. Tremayne, drinking coffee in the kitchen with the lights on at nine-thirty, suggested scrubbing the whole idea. His son would vehemently have none of it. They compromised on a promise from me to bring everyone home at the first sneeze, and Coconut arrived on his bicycle in brilliant yellow oilskins with a grin to match.

It was easy to see how he’d got his name. He stood in the kitchen dripping and pulled off a sou’wester to reveal a wiry tuft of light brown hair sticking straight up from the top of his head. (It would never lie down properly, Gareth later explained.)

Coconut was nearly fifteen. Below the top-knot he had bright intelligent eyes, a big nose and a sloppy loose-lipped mouth, as if his face hadn’t yet synthesised with his emerging character. Give him a year, I thought, maybe two, then the shell would firm to define the man.

‘There’s a bit of wasteland at the top of the apple orchard,’ Tremayne said. ‘You can have that.’

‘But, Dad...’ Gareth began, raising objections.

‘It sounds fine,’ I said firmly. ‘Survivors can’t choose.’

Tremayne looked at me and then at Gareth thoughtfully and nodded as if to confirm a private thought.

‘But February’s a bad month for food,’ I said, ‘and I suppose we’d better not steal a pheasant, so we’ll cheat a bit and take some bacon with us. Bring gloves and a penknife each. We’ll go in ten minutes.’

The boys scurried to collect waterproofs for Gareth, and Tremayne asked what exactly I planned to do with them.

‘Build a shelter,’ I said. ‘Light a fire, gather some lunch and cook it. That’ll be enough, I should think. Everything takes forever when you start with nothing.’

‘Teach them they’re lucky.’

‘Mm.’

He came to the door to see off the intrepid expedition, all of us unequipped except for the survival kit (with added bacon) that I wore round my waist and the penknives in their pockets. The cold drizzle fell relentlessly but no one seemed to mind. I waved briefly to Tremayne and went where Gareth led; which was through a gate in a wall, through a patch of long-deserted garden, through another gate and up a slow gradient through about fifty bare-branched apple trees, fetching up on a small bedraggled plateau roughly fenced with ruined dry-stone walling on one side and a few trees in the remains of a hawthorn hedge full of gaps round the rest. Beyond that untidy boundary lay neat prosperous open acres of winter ploughing, the domain of the farmer next door.

Gareth looked at our terrain disgustedly and even Coconut was dismayed, but I thought Tremayne had chosen pretty well, on the whole. Whatever we did, we couldn’t make things worse.

‘First of all,’ I said, ‘we build a shelter for the fire.’

‘Nothing will burn in this rain,’ Gareth said critically.

‘Perhaps we’d better go back indoors, then.’

They stared in faint shock.

‘No,’ Gareth said.

‘Right.’ I brought the basic survival tin out of my pocket and gave him the coil of flexible saw. ‘We passed at least four dead apple trees on the way up here. Slide a couple of sticks through the loops at the ends of this saw, and you and Coconut go and cut down one of those dead trees and bring it up here. Cut it as near the ground as you can manage.’

It took them roughly three seconds to bounce off with renewed enthusiasm, and I wandered round the decrepit piece of what Tremayne had truly described as wasteland, seeing everywhere possibilities of a satisfactory camp. The whole place, for instance, was pale brown with the dead stalks of last year’s unmown grass; an absolute gift.

By the time the boys returned, puffing, red-faced and dragging the results of their exertions, I’d wrenched out a few rusty old metal fence posts, cut a lot of living hawthorn switches from the hedge and harvested a pile of the dead grass stalks from a patch near the last row of apple trees. We made a short trip down to the deserted garden to reap a patch of old stinging nettles for bindings, and about an hour after setting off were admiring a free-standing four-foot-square shelter made of a metal frame with a slightly sloping roof of closely latticed hawthorn switches thickly thatched on top with endless piled-on bundles of dried grass. While we watched, the drizzle trickled down the top layer of brownish stalks and dripped off to one side, leaving a small rain-free area underneath.

After that, by themselves, the boys made a simple square frame lashed with thickly criss-crossed hawthorn which we could lean against any one side of the fire shelter to prevent the rain from blowing straight in. Gareth understood without being told and explained it to Coconut matter-of-factly.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Next, we find some flat dry stones from that broken-down wall to make a floor for the fire. Don’t bring very wet stones, they can explode when they get hot. Then we go around looking for anything very small and dry that will burn. Dead leaves. Bits of fluff caught on fences. Anything inside that wrecked old greenhouse in the garden. When you find something, keep it dry in your pockets. When we’ve got enough tinder, we’ll feather some kindling sticks. We also need enough dry wood, if you can find any. And bring any old cowpats you come across: they burn like peat.’

After another hour’s labour we had stacked under the fire shelter the remains of an old cucumber frame from the greenhouse and enough dry tinder to take kindly to a flame. Then, working with my hands under the shelter, I showed them how to strip the bark off a wet stick and make shallow lengthwise cuts in the dry dead wood underneath so that fine shavings curled outwards and the stick looked feathered all over. They each made one with their knives: Gareth quick and neat, Coconut all thumbs.

Finally with a match, a piece of candle, the tinder of dead leaves and flower heads, the feather kindling sticks, the cucumber frame and a good deal of luck (but no cowpats) a bright little fire burned healthily against the drizzly odds and Gareth and Coconut looked as if the sun had risen where they didn’t expect it.

The smoke curled up and out over the edges of the thatched roofing. I remarked that if we’d had to live there for months we could hang spare meat and fish under the roof to smoke it. Apple wood made sweet smoke. Oak would smoke some meats better.

‘We couldn’t live out here for months.’ Coconut couldn’t imagine it.

‘It wasn’t always sunny in Sherwood Forest,’ I said.

We snapped all the smaller twigs off the felled apple tree and added them gradually to the blaze, then made the beginnings of a human-sized shelter by wedging the dead tree as a roof and rear wall between two live trees, bringing more hawthorn to weave through the branches, heaping onto the top and rear surface any boughs, dead plants and turves we could cut and thickly laying a floor below of grass stalks, the nearest thing to straw. Apart from a few drips, we were out of the rain.

Lunch, when we finally ate it after a long forage, consisted mainly of finds from the old garden: some tubers of wild parsley, comfrey and Jerusalem artichoke, a handful of very small Brussels sprouts (ugh, Gareth said) and a rather bitter green leaf salad of plantain, dock and dandelion (double ugh). Never eat poisonous buttercups, I said, be grateful for dandelions. Coconut flatly refused to contemplate worms, the only things plentiful. Both boys fell on the bacon, threaded and grilled on sharpened peeled sticks, and such was their hunger that they afterwards chewed for ages on strips of the inner sweet bark of a young birch tree that was struggling away in the hedge. Birch bark was good nourishing food, I said. Gareth said they would take my word for it.

We drank rather scummy rainwater found in an old watering can and boiled in a Coke can that Gareth collected from the Shellerton House dustbin. They declined my offer to make coffee from roast dandelion root. Next time they went camping they would take tea bags, they said.

We were sitting in the shelter, the fire burning red with embers on its stone base a few feet away, the drizzle almost a permanence, the odd foods eaten, the end of the experiment not far ahead.

‘How about staying out here all night?’ I asked.

They both looked horrified.

‘You’d survive,’ I said, ‘with shelter and a fire.’

‘It would be miserable,’ Gareth said. ‘It’s freezing cold.’

‘Yes.’

There was a pause, then Gareth added, ‘Survival isn’t really much fun, is it?’

‘Often not,’ I agreed. ‘Just a matter of life or death.’

‘If we were outlaws in Sherwood Forest,’ he said, ‘the Sheriffs men would be hunting us.’

‘Nasty.’

Coconut involuntarily looked around for enemies, shivering at the thought.

‘We can’t stay out all night. We have to go to school tomorrow,’ he said.

The relief on both their faces was comical, and I thought that perhaps for a second or two they’d had a vision of a much older, more brutal world where every tomorrow was a struggle, where hunger and cold were normal and danger ever present and cruel. A primitive world, far back from Robin Hood, back from the Druids who’d walked the ancient Berksire Downs, back where laws hadn’t been invented or rights thought of, back before organisation, before tribes, before ritual, before duty. Back where the strong ate and the weak died, the bedrock and everlasting design of nature.

When a dark shade of iron seeped into the slate-grey light, we pulled the fire to pieces and dowsed the hot ends in wet grass. Then we stacked the remaining pile of apple wood neatly under the fire’s roofing and started for home, carrying as little away as we’d brought.

Gareth looked back at the intertwined tree shelter and the dead fireplace and seemed for a moment wistful, but it was with leaps and whoops that he and Coconut ran down from there to re-embrace the familiar constraints of civilisation.

‘God,’ Gareth said, barging in through the back door, ‘lead me to a pizza. To two pizzas, maybe three.’

Laughing, I peeled off my long-suffering ski-suit and left them to it in the kitchen, heading myself for warmth in the family room; and there I found a whole bunch of depressed souls sprawling in armchairs contemplating a different sort of disastrous tomorrow where food was no problem but danger abounded.

Harry, Fiona, Nolan, Lewis, Perkin, Mackie and Tremayne, all silent, as if everything useful had been said already. Tight-knit, interlocked, they looked at me vaguely, at the stranger within their gates, the unexpected character in their play.

‘Ah... John,’ Tremayne said, stirring, remembering, ‘are both boys still living?’

‘More or less.’

I poured myself some wine and sat on an unoccupied footstool, feeling the oppression of their collective thoughts and guessing that they all now knew everything I did, and perhaps more.

‘If Harry didn’t do it, who did?’ It was Lewis’s question, which got no specific reply, as if it had been asked over and over before.

‘Doone will find out,’ I murmured.

Fiona said indignantly, ‘He’s not trying. He’s not looking beyond Harry. It’s disgraceful.’

Proof that Doone was still casting about, however, arrived noisily at that point in the shape of Sam Yaeger, who hooted his horn outside as a preliminary and swept into the house in a high state of indignation.

‘Tremayne!’ he said in the doorway, and then stopped abruptly at the sight of the gathered clan. ‘Oh. You’re all here.’

‘You’re supposed to be resting,’ Tremayne said repressively.

‘To hell with bloody resting. There I was, quietly nursing my bruises according to orders, when this Policeman Plod turns up on my doorstep. Sunday afternoon! Doesn’t the bugger ever sleep? And d’you know what little gem he tossed at me? Your bloody stable girls told him I’d had a bit of how’s-your-father with Angela effing Brickell.’

The brief silence which greeted this announcement wasn’t exactly packed with disbelief.

‘Well, did you?’ Tremayne asked.

‘That’s not the point. The point is that it wasn’t any Tuesday last June. So this Doone fellow asks me what I was doing that day, as if I could remember. Working on my boat, I expect. He asked if I logged the hours I worked on it. Is this man for real? I said I hadn’t a bloody clue what I was doing, maybe it was a couple of willing maidens, and he has no sense of humour, it’s in a permanent state of collapse, he said it wasn’t a joking matter.’

‘He has three daughters,’ I said. ‘It worries him.’

‘I can’t help his effing hang-ups,’ Sam said. ‘He said he had to check every possibility, so I told him he’d have a long job considering old Angle’s opportunities, not to mention willingness.’ He paused. ‘She was even making goo-goo eyes at Bob Watson at one time.’

‘She wouldn’t have got past Ingrid,’ Mackie said. ‘Ingrid looks meek and mild but you should see her angry. She keeps Bob in her sight. She doesn’t trust any girl in the yard. I doubt if Angela got anywhere with Bob.’

‘You never know,’ Sam said darkly. ‘Can I have a drink? Coke?’

‘In the fridge in the kitchen,’ Perkin said, not stirring to fetch it.

Sam nodded, went out and came back carrying a glass, followed by Gareth and Coconut busily stoking their furnaces with pizza wedges.

Tremayne raised his eyebrows at the food.

‘We’re starving,’ explained his younger son. ‘We ate roots, and birch bark and dandelion leaves, and no one in their right mind would live in Sherwood Forest being chased by the Sheriff.’

Sam looked bewildered. ‘What are you on about?’ he demanded.

‘Survival,’ Gareth said. He marched over to a table, picked up Return Safe from the Wilderness and thrust it into Sam’s hands. ‘John wrote it,’ he said, ‘and five other books like it. So we built a shelter and made a fire and cooked roots and boiled water to drink...’

‘What about Sherwood Forest?’ Harry drawled, smiling but looking strained notwithstanding.

Coconut explained, ‘We might be cold and hungry but there weren’t any enemies lurking behind the apple trees.’

‘Er...’ Sam said.

Tremayne, amused, enlightened everyone about our day.

‘Tell you what,’ Gareth said thoughtfully, ‘it makes you realise how lucky you are to have a bed and a pizza to come home to.’

Tremayne looked at me from under lowered lids, his mouth curving with contentment. ‘Teach them they’re lucky,’ he’d said.

‘Next time,’ Coconut enquired, ‘why don’t we make some bows and arrows?’

‘What for?’ asked Perkin.

‘To shoot the Sheriffs men, of course.’

‘You’d wind up hanged in Nottingham,’ Tremayne said. ‘Better stick to dandelion leaves.’ He looked at me. ‘Is there going to be a next time?’

Before I could answer, Gareth said ‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘Well, it wasn’t all a laugh a minute, but we did do something. I could do it again. I could live out in the cold and the rain... I feel good about it, that’s all.’

‘Well done!’ Fiona exclaimed sincerely. ‘Gareth, you’re a great boy.’

It embarrassed him, of course, but I agreed with her.

‘How about it?’ Tremayne asked me.

‘Next Sunday,’ I said, ‘we could go out again, do something else.’

‘Do what?’ Gareth demanded. ‘Don’t know yet.’

The vague promise seemed enough for both boys who drifted back to the kitchen for further supplies, and Sam, leafing through the book, remarked that some of my more ingenious traps looked as if they would kill actual people, not only big animals like deer.

‘Eating venison in Sherwood Forest was a hanging matter too,’ Harry observed.

I said, agreeing with Sam, ‘Some traps aren’t safe to set unless you know you’re alone.’

‘If Gareth’s confident after one day,’ Nolan said to me without much friendliness from the depths of an armchair, ‘what does that make you? Superman?’

‘Humble,’ I said, with irony.

‘How very goody-goody,’ he said sarcastically, with added obscenities. ‘I’d like to see you ride in a steeplechase.’

‘So would I,’ Tremayne said heartily, taking the sneering words at face value. ‘We might apply for a permit for you, John.’

No one took him seriously. Nolan took offence. He didn’t like even a semi-humorous 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 travelling 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 travelling head lad, sir,’ Doone said with sing-song 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 travelling 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 have 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 unconcerned 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 had 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 sombre 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 mid-career. 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 grey, the blue eyes altogether without humour, 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 glanced 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 pin-prick, 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 organised 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 marvellous, 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 to 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 turned down a mostly uninhabited lane, through some broken gateposts into a rutted drive; this led 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 grey 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 tailed 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 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 side walls 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 inwards, 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 enquired 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 coloured 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 sky full of stars. It was a warm night. Everything perfect.’ He sighed. ‘Perkin and Mackie were with us, smooching away in newly-wedded bliss. It all seems so long ago, when everyone was happy, everything simple. Nothing could go wrong... Then 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.