Longshot

Chapter 13

I went with Harry in the ambulance to Maidenhead hospital, both of us swathed in blankets, Harry also in a foil-lined padded wrap used for hypothermia cases; and from then on it was a matter of phoning and reassuring Fiona and waiting to see the extent of Harry’s injuries, which proved to be a pierced calf, entry and exit wounds both clean and clotted, with no dreadful damage in between.

While Fiona was still on her way the medics stuffed Harry full of antibiotics and other palliatives and put stitches where they were needed, and by the time she’d wept briefly in my arms he was warm and responding nicely in a recovery room somewhere.

‘But why,’ she asked, half cross, half mystified, ‘did he go to Sam’s boatyard in the first place?’ Like a mother scolding her lost child, I thought, after he’s come back safe: just like Perkin with Mackie.

‘He’ll tell you about it,’ I said. ‘They say he’s doing fine.’

‘You’re damp!’ She disengaged herself and held me at arms’ length. ‘Did you fall through the floor too?’

‘Sort of.’ The hospital’s central heating had been doing a fine job of drying everything on me and I felt like one of those old-fashioned clothes-horses, steaming slightly in warm air. Still no shoes or boots; couldn’t be helped.

Fiona looked at my feet dubiously.

‘I was going to ask you to drive Harry’s car home,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you can’t.’

I explained that Harry’s car had already been driven away.

‘Where is it, then?’ she asked, bewildered. ‘Who took it?’

‘Maybe Doone will find out.’

‘That man!’ She shivered. ‘I hate him.’

Before I could comment, a nurse came to fetch her to see Harry, and she went anxiously, calling over her shoulder for me to wait for her; and when she returned half a hour later she looked dazed.

‘Harry’s sleepy,’ she said. ‘He kept waking up and telling me silly things... How could you possibly get to this hospital in a boat?’

‘I’ll tell you on the way home. Would you like me to drive?’

‘But...’

‘It’s quite easy with bare feet. I’ll take off my socks.’

She unlocked the car herself and handed me the keys without comment. We arranged ourselves in the seats and as we headed for Shellerton in the early dark I told her calmly, incompletely and without terrors, the gist of what had befallen us in Sam’s boatyard.

She listened with a frown, adding her own worry.

‘Turn right here,’ she said once, automatically, and another time, ‘Sorry, we should have turned left there, we’ll have to go back,’ and finally, ‘Go straight to Shellerton House. I’ll drive home from there. I’m all right, really. It’s just so upsetting. It made me shaky, seeing Harry dopey like that, pumped full of drugs.’

‘I know.’

I pulled up outside Tremayne’s house and while I put on my socks again she said she would come in for a while for company, ‘to cure the trembles’.

Tremayne, Mackie and Perkin were all in the family room for the usual evening drinks. Tremayne made more than his usual fuss over Fiona, sensing some sort of turmoil, telling her comfortably that Mackie had just come back from Ascot races where he’d sent a runner for the apprentice race which had proved a total waste of time.

The note I’d left for Tremayne, ‘GONE OUT WITH HARRY. BACK FOR GRUB’ was still pinned to the cork-board. He took my arrival with Fiona as not needing comment.

‘I think someone tried to kill Harry,’ Fiona said starkly, cutting abruptly through Tremayne’s continuing Ascot chat.

‘What?’

There was an instant silence and general shock on all the faces, including Fiona’s own.

‘He went to Sam’s boatyard and fell through some floorboards and was nearly drowned...’ She told it to them much as I’d told her myself. ‘If John hadn’t been with him to help...’

Tremayne said robustly, ‘My dearest girl, it must have been the most dreadful accident. Whoever would want to kill Harry?’

‘No one,’ Perkin said, his voice an echo of Tremayne’s. ‘I mean, what for?’

‘Harry’s a dear,’ Mackie said, nodding.

‘You’d never think so to read the papers recently,’ Fiona pointed out, lines creasing her forehead. ‘People can be incredibly vicious. Even people in the village. I went into the shop this morning and everyone stopped talking and stared at me. People I’ve known for years. I told Harry and he was furious, but what can we do? And now this...’

‘Did Harry say someone tried to kill him?’ Perkin asked.

Fiona shook her head. ‘Harry was too dopey.’

‘Does John think so?’

Fiona glanced at me. ‘John didn’t actually say so. It’s what I think myself. What I’m afraid of. It scares me to think of it.’

‘Then don’t, darling.’ Mackie put an arm round her and kissed her cheek. ‘It’s a frightening thing to have happened, but Harry is all right.’

‘But someone stole his car,’ Fiona said, hollow-eyed.

‘Perhaps he left the key in the ignition,’ Tremayne guessed, ‘and a passer-by saw an opportunity.’

Fiona agreed unwillingly, ‘Yes, he would have left his keys. He trusts people. I’ve told him over and over again that you simply can’t these days.’

They all spent time reassuring Fiona until the worst of the worry unwound from her body and I watched the movement of her silver-blond hair in the soft lights and made no attempt to throw doubts because it would have achieved nothing good.

With Doone, early the next afternoon, it was a different matter. He’d had my bald account of events over the telephone in the morning, his first knowledge of what had happened. Now he came into the dining-room where I was working and sat down opposite me at the table.

‘I hear you’re a proper little hero,’ he said dryly.

‘Oh, really, who says so?’

‘Mr Goodhaven.’

I stared back blandly with the same expression that he was trying on me. The morning’s bulletin on Harry had been good, the prognosis excellent, his memory of events reportedly clarifying fast.

‘Accident or attempted murder?’ Doone asked, apparently seeking a considered answer.

I gave him one. ‘The latter, I’d say. Have you found his car?’

‘Not yet.’ He frowned at me with a long look in which I read nothing. ‘Where would you search for it?’ he asked.

After a pause I said, ‘At the top of a cliff.’

He blinked.

‘Don’t you think so?’ I said.

‘Beachy Head? Dover?’ he suggested. ‘A long drive to the sea.’

‘Maybe a metaphorical cliff,’ I said.

‘Go on, then.’

‘Is it usual,’ I asked, ‘for policemen to ask for theories from the general public?’

‘I told you before, I like to hear them. I don’t always agree, but sometimes I do.’

‘Fair enough. Then what would you have thought if Harry Goodhaven had disappeared for ever yesterday afternoon and you’d found his car later by a cliff, real or metaphorical?’

‘Suicide,’ he said promptly. ‘An admission of guilt.’

‘End of investigation? Books closed?’

He stared at me sombrely. ‘Perhaps. But unless we eventually found a body, there would also be the possibility of simple flight. We would alert Australia... look for him round the world. The books would remain open.’

‘But you wouldn’t investigate anyone else, because you would definitely consider him guilty.’

‘The evidence points to it. His flight or suicide would confirm it.’

‘But something about that evidence bothers you.’

I was beginning to learn about his expressions, or lack of them. The very stillness of his muscles meant that I’d touched something he’d thought hidden.

‘Why do you say so?’ he asked eventually.

‘Because you’ve made no arrest.’

‘That simple.’

‘Without your knowledge, I can only guess.’

‘Guess away,’ he invited.

‘Then I’d say perhaps Harry’s sunglasses and pen and belt were with Angela Brickell because she took them there herself.’

‘Go on,’ he said neutrally. It wasn’t, I saw, a new idea to him.

‘Didn’t you say her handbag had been torn open, the contents gone except for the photo in a zipped pocket?’

‘I did say so, yes.’

‘And you found chocolate wrappings lying about?’

‘Yes.’

‘And traces of dogs?’

‘Yes.’

‘And any dog worth his salt would bite open a handbag to get to the chocolate?’

‘It’s possible.’ He made a decision and a big admission. ‘There were toothmarks on the handbag.’

‘Suppose then,’ I said, ‘that she did in fact have a thing about Harry. He’s a kind and attractive man. Suppose she did carry his photo with the horse, not Fiona’s, who’s the owner after all. Suppose she’d managed to acquire personal things of Harry’s, his sunglasses, a pen, even a belt, and wore them or carried them with her, as young people do. They’d only be evidence of her crush on Harry, not of his presence at her death.’

‘I considered all that, yes.’

‘Suppose someone couldn’t understand why you didn’t arrest Harry, particularly in view of all the hounding in the papers, and decided to remove any doubts you might be showing?’

He sat for a while without speaking, apparently debating how many of his thoughts to share. Not many more, it transpired.

‘Whoever took Harry’s car,’ I said, ‘removed my jacket and boots as well. I took them off before I went through the floor into the dock.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’ He seemed put out, severe.

‘I’m telling you now.’ I paused. ‘I would think that whoever took those things is very worried indeed now to find that I was with Harry and that he is alive. I’d say there wasn’t supposed to be any reason to think Harry had gone to Sam’s boatyard. No one would ever have looked for him there. I’d say it was an attempt to confirm Harry’s guilt that went disastrously wrong, leaving you with bristling new doubts and a whole lot more to investigate.’

He said formally, ‘I would like you to be present at the boatyard tomorrow morning.’

‘What do you think of the place?’ I asked.

‘I’ve taken statements from Mr and Mrs Goodhaven and others,’ he said stiffly. ‘I haven’t been to the boatyard yet. It has, however, been cordoned off. Mr Yaeger is meeting me there tomorrow at nine a.m. I would have preferred this afternoon but it seems he is riding in three races at Wincanton.’

I nodded. Tremayne had gone there, also Nolan. Another clash of the Titans.

‘You know,’ Doone said slowly, ‘I had indeed started to question others besides Mr Goodhaven.’

I nodded. ‘Sam Yaeger for one. He told us. Everyone knew you’d begun casting wider.’

‘The lass had been indiscriminate,’ he said regretfully.

Tremayne lent me his Volvo to go to the boatyard in the morning, reminding me before I set off that it was the day of the awards dinner at which he was to be honoured.

I’d seen the invitation pinned up prominently by Dee-Dee in the office: most of the racing world, it seemed, would be there to applaud. For Tremayne, though he made a few self-deprecating jokes about it, the event gave proof of the substance of his life, much like the biography.

Sam and Doone were already in the boatyard by the time I’d found my way there, neither of them radiating joy, Sam’s multicoloured jacket only emphasising the personality clash with grey plain clothes. They’d been waiting for me, it seemed, in a mutual absence of civility.

‘Right, sir,’ Doone said, as I stood up out of the car, ‘we’ve done nothing here so far. Moved nothing. Please take us through your actions of Wednesday afternoon.’

Sam said crossly, ‘Asking for sodding trouble, coming here.’

‘As it turned out,’ Doone said placidly. ‘Go on, Mr Kendall.’

‘Harry said he was due to meet someone in the boathouse, so we went over there.’ I walked where we’d gone, the others following. ‘We opened this main door. It wasn’t locked.’

‘Never is,’ Sam said.

I pushed open the door and we looked at the hole in the floor.

‘We walked in,’ I said. ‘Just talking.’

‘What about?’ Doone asked.

‘About a great party Sam gave here once. Harry was saying there had been a bar here in the boathouse and a grotto below. He began to walk down to the windows and saw an envelope on the floor and when he bent to pick it up, the floor creaked and gave way.’

Sam looked blank.

‘Is that likely?’ Doone asked him. ‘How long ago was the floor solid enough to hold a party on it?’

‘A year last July,’ Sam said flatly.

‘Quick bit of rot,’ Doone commented, in his sing-song voice.

Sam made no answer, in itself remarkable.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I took off my boots and jacket and left them up here and I dropped into the water, because Harry hadn’t come up for air, like I told you.’

‘Yes,’ Doone said.

‘You can see better from the lower door,’ I remarked, turning to go down the path. ‘This door down here leads into the dock.’

Sam disgustedly fingered the splintered door frame.

‘Did you sodding do this?’ he demanded. ‘It wasn’t locked.’

‘It was,’ I said. ‘With no key in sight.’

‘The key was in the keyhole on the inside.’

‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

Sam pulled the door open and we looked into the scene that was all too familiar to my eyes; an expanse of muddy water, the hole in the ceiling overhead and the curtain of iron mesh across the exit to the river; a dock big enough for a moderate-sized cabin cruiser or three or four smaller boats.

The water smelled dankly of mud and winter, which I hadn’t seemed to notice when I’d been in it.

‘There’s a sort of walkway along this right-hand wall,’ I told Doone. ‘You can’t see it now because of the floodwater.’

Sam nodded. ‘A mooring dock, with bollards.’

‘If you care to walk along there,’ I suggested, deadpan, ‘I’ll show you an interesting fact about that hole.’

They both stared at the water with reluctance stamped all over their faces, then Sam’s cleared as he thought of a more palatable solution.

‘We’ll go and look in a boat.’

‘How about the curtain?’

‘Roll it up, of course.’

‘Now, wait,’ Doone said. ‘The boat can wait. Mr Kendall, you came through the hole, found Mr Goodhaven and brought him to the surface. You sat him on the dock, then dived out under the curtain and climbed onto the bank. Is that right?’

‘Yes, except that while I was pulling Harry along to that far corner to give him better support, someone opened the main door above our heads, like I told you, and then went away without saying anything, and I heard a car drive off, which might have been Harry’s.’

‘Did you hear any car arriving?’ Doone asked.

‘No.’

‘Why didn’t you call out for help?’

‘Harry had been enticed here... It all felt like a trap. People who set traps come back to see what they’ve caught.’

Doone gave me another of his assessments.

Sam said, frowning, ‘You can’t have dived out under the curtain, it goes right down to the river bed.’

‘I sort of slithered under it.’

‘You took a sodding risk.’

‘So do you,’ I said equably, ‘most days of the week. And I didn’t have much choice. If I hadn’t found a way out we’d both eventually have died of cold or drowning, or both. Certainly by now. Most likely Wednesday night.’

After a short thoughtful silence Doone said, ‘You’re out on the bank. What next?’

‘I saw the car had gone. I went to collect my boots and jacket, but they’d gone too. I called to Harry to reassure him, then I went over to that big shed to find a telephone, but I couldn’t.’

Sam shook his head. ‘There isn’t one. When I’m here I use the portable phone from my car.’

‘I couldn’t find any decent tools, either.’

Sam smiled. ‘I hide them.’

‘So I used a rusty tyre lever and a mallet, and I’m sorry about your woodwork.’

Sam shrugged.

‘Then what?’ Doone asked.

‘Then I got Harry out here and put him in a dinghy and we... er... floated down to the lock.’

‘My sodding dinghy!’ Sam exclaimed, looking at the imitation scrapyard. ‘It’s gone!’

‘I’m sure it’s safe down at the lock,’ I said. ‘I told the lock-keeper it was yours. He said he’d look after it.’

‘It’ll sink,’ Sam said. ‘It leaks.’

‘It’s out on the bank.’

‘You’ll never make a writer,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘Too sodding sensible.’

He read my amusement and gave me a twisted grin.

I said, ‘What happens to the rubbish lying in the dock when you roll up the curtain?’

‘Sodding hell!’

‘What are you talking about?’ Doone asked us.

‘The bed of this dock is mud, and it slopes downwards towards the river,’ I said. ‘When the curtain’s rolled up, there’s nothing to stop things drifting out by gravity into the river and being moved downstream by the current. Bodies often float to the surface, but you of all people must know that those who drown in the Thames can disappear altogether and are probably taken by undercurrents down through London and out to sea.’ Sometimes from my high Chiswick window I’d thought about horrors down below the surface, out of sight. Like hidden motives, running deadly, running deep.

‘Everyone in the Thames Valley knows they disappear,’ Doone nodded. ‘We lose a few holidaymakers every year. Very upsetting.’

‘Harry’s leg was impaled on something,’ I said mildly. ‘He was stuck underwater. He’d have been dead in a very few minutes. Next time Sam rolled the curtain up, Harry would have drifted quietly out of here, I should think, and no one would ever have known he’d been here. If his body were found anywhere downstream, well then, it could be suicide. If it wasn’t found, then he’d escaped justice.’ I paused, and asked Sam directly, ‘How soon would you have rolled up the curtain?’

He answered at once, ‘Whenever I’d found the hole in the floor. I’d have gone to take a look from beneath. Like we’re going to now. But I hardly ever come over here. Only in summer.’ He gave Doone a sly look. ‘In the summer I bring a mattress.’

‘And Angela Brickell?’ Doone asked.

Sam, silenced, stood with his mouth open. A bull’s-eye, I thought, for the Detective Chief Inspector.

I asked Sam, ‘What’s under the water in the dock?’

‘Huh?’

‘What did Harry get stuck on?’

He brought his mind back from Angela Brickell and said vaguely, ‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘If you raise the curtain,’ I said, ‘we may never know.’

‘Ah,’ Doone stared judiciously at Sam, all three of us still clustered round the open door. ‘It’s a matter for grappling irons, then. Can we get a light inside there?’

‘The main switch for here is over in the shed,’ Sam said as if automatically, his mind’s attention elsewhere. ‘There’s nothing in the dock except maybe a couple of beer cans and a radio some clumsy bimbo dropped when she was teetering out of a punt in high heels. I ask you...’

‘Harry wasn’t impaled on a radio,’ I said.

Sam turned away abruptly and walked along the path to his workshop. Doone made as if to go after him, then stopped indecisively and came back.

‘This could have been an accident, sir,’ he said uneasily.

I nodded. ‘A good trap never looks like one.’

‘Are you quoting someone?’

‘Yes. Me. I’ve written a good deal about traps. How to set them. How to catch game. The books are lying about all over the place in Shellerton. Everyone’s dipped into them. Follow the instructions and kill your man.’

‘You’re not joking by any chance, are you, sir?’

I said regretfully, ‘No, I’m not.’

‘I’ll have to see those books.’

‘Yes.’

Sam came back frowning and, stretching inside without stepping into the water, pressed the three switches that had been unresponsive two days earlier. The lights in the ceiling came on without fuss and illuminated the ancient brick walls and the weathered old grey beams which crossed from side to side, holding up the planks of the floor above: holding up the planks, except where the hole was.

Doone looked in briefly and made some remark about returning with assistance. Sam looked longer and said to me challengingly, ‘Well?’

‘There’s a bit of beam missing,’ I said, ‘isn’t there?’

He nodded unwillingly. ‘Looks like it. But I didn’t know about it. How could I?’

Doone, in his quiet way a pouncer, said meaningfully, ‘You yourself, sir, have all the knowledge and the tools for tampering with your boathouse.’

‘I didn’t.’ Sam’s response was belligerence, not fear. ‘Everyone knows this place. Everyone’s been here. Everyone could cut out a beam that small, it’s child’s play.’

‘Who, precisely?’ Doone asked. ‘Besides you?’

‘Well... anybody. Perkin! He could. Nolan... I mean, most people can use a saw, can’t they? Can’t you?’

Doone’s expression assented but he said merely, ‘I’ll take another look upstairs now, if you please, sir.’

We went in gingerly but as far as one could tell the floor was solid except for the one strip over the missing bit of beam. The floorboards themselves were grey with age, and dusty, but not worm-eaten, not rotten.

Sam said, ‘The floorboards aren’t nailed down much. Just here and there. They fit tightly most of the time because of the damp, but when we have a hot dry summer they shrink and you can lift them up easily. You can check the beams for rot.’

‘Why are they like that?’ Doone asked.

‘Ask the people who built it,’ Sam said, shrugging. ‘It was like this when I bought it. The last time I took the floorboards up was for the party, installing coloured spotlights and strobes in the ceiling underneath.’

‘Who knew you took the floorboards up?’ Doone asked.

Sam looked at him as if he were retarded. ‘How do I know?’ he demanded. ‘Everyone who asked how I’d done the lighting, I told them.’

I went down on my knees and edged towards the hole.

‘Don’t do that,’ Doone exclaimed.

‘Just having a look.’

The way the floorboards had been laid, I saw, had meant that the doctored beam had been a main load-bearer. Several of the planks, including those that had given way under Harry’s weight, had without that beam’s support simply been hanging out in space, resting like a seesaw over the previous beam but otherwise supported only by the tight fit of each plank against the next. The floorboards hadn’t snapped, as I’d originally thought: they’d gone down into the dock with Harry.

I tested a few planks carefully with the weight of my hand, then retreated and stood up on safer ground.

‘Well?’ Doone said.

‘It’s still lethal just each side of the hole.’

‘Right.’ He turned to Sam. ‘I’ll have to know, sir, when this tampering could have been carried out.’

Sam looked as if he’d had too much of the whole thing. With exasperation, he said, ‘Since when? Since Christmas?’

Doone said stolidly, ‘Since ten days ago.’

Sam briefly gave it some thought. ‘A week last Wednesday I dropped off a load of wood here on my way to Windsor races. Thursday I raced at Towcester. Friday I spent some time here, half a day. Saturday I raced at Chepstow and had a fall and couldn’t ride again until Tuesday. So Sunday I was nursing myself until you came knocking on my door, and Monday I spent here, pottering about. Tuesday I was back racing at Warwick. Wednesday I went to Ascot, yesterday Wincanton, today Newbury...’ He paused. ‘I’ve never been here at night.’

‘What races did you ride in on Wednesday afternoon?’ Doone asked. ‘At Ascot.’

‘What races?’

‘Yes.’

‘The two-mile hurdle, the novice hurdle, novice chase.’

I gathered from Doone’s face that it wasn’t the type of answer he’d expected, but he pulled out a notebook and wrote down the reply as given, checking that he’d got it right.

Sam, upon whom understanding had dawned, said, ‘I wasn’t here driving Harry’s sodding car away, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘I’ll need to ascertain a good many people’s whereabouts on Wednesday afternoon,’ Doone said placidly in a flourish of jargon. ‘But as for now, sir, we can proceed with our investigations without taking any more of the time of either of you two gentlemen, for the present.’

‘Class dismissed?’ Sam said with irony.

Doone, unruffled, said we would be hearing from him later.

Sam came with me to where I’d parked Tremayne’s car on stone-strewn grass. The natural jauntiness remained in his step but there was less confidence in his thoughts, it seemed.

‘I like Harry,’ he said, as we reached the Volvo.

‘So do I.’

‘Do you think I set that trap?’

‘You certainly could have.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Dead easy. But I didn’t.’

He looked up into my face, partly anxious, partly still full of his usual machismo.

‘Unless you killed Angela Brickell,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t have tried to kill Harry. Wouldn’t make sense.’

‘I didn’t do the silly little bimbo any harm.’ He shook his head as if to free her from his memory. ‘She was too intense for me, if you want to know. I like a bit of a giggle, not remorse and tears afterwards. Old Angie took everything seriously, always going on about mortal sin, and I got sodding tired of it, and of her, tell the truth. She wanted me to marry her!’ His voice was full of the enormity of such a thought. ‘I told her I’d got my sights set on a high-born heiress and she damned near scratched my eyes out. A bit of a hell-cat, she could be, old Angie. And hungry for it! I mean, she’d whip her clothes off before you’d finished the question.’

I listened with fascination to this insider viewpoint, and the moody Miss Brickell suddenly became a real person; not a pathetic collection of dry bones, but a mixed-up pulsating young woman full of strong urges and stronger guilts who’d piled on too much pressure, loaded her need of penitence and her heavy desires and perhaps finally her pregnancy onto someone who couldn’t bear it all, and who’d seen a violent way to escape her.

Someone, I thought with illumination, who knew how easily Olympia had died from hands round the neck.

Angela Brickell had to have invited her own death. Doone, I supposed, had known that all along.

‘What are you thinking?’ Sam asked, uncertainly for him.

‘What did she look like?’ I said.

‘Angie?’

‘Mm.’

‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Brown hair. Thin figure, small tits, round bottom. She agonised about having breast implants. I told her to forget bloody implants, what would her babies think? That turned on the taps, I’ll tell you. She bawled for ages. She wasn’t much fun, old Angie, but effing good on a mattress.’

What an epitaph, I thought. Chisel it in stone.

Sam looked out over the flooding river and breathed in the damp smell of the morning as if testing wine for bouquet, and I thought that he lived through his senses to a much greater degree than I did and was intensely alive in his direct approach to sex and his disregard of danger.

He said cheerfully, as if shaking off murder as a passing inconvenience, ‘Are you going to this do of Tremayne’s tonight?’

‘Yes. Are you?’

He grinned. ‘Are you kidding? I’d be shot if I wasn’t there to cheer. And anyway,’ he shrugged as if to disclaim sentiment, ‘the old bugger deserves it. He’s not all bad, you know.’

‘I’ll see you there, then,’ I said, agreeing with him.

‘If I don’t break my neck.’ It was flippantly said, but an insurance against fate, like crossed fingers. ‘I’d better tell this sodding policeman where the main electric switch is. I’ve got it rigged so no one can find it but me, as I don’t want people being able to walk in here after dark and turn the lights on. Inviting vandalism, that is. When the force have finished here, they can turn the electric off.’

He bounced off towards Doone, who was writing in his notebook, and they were walking together to the big boatshed as I drove away.

Even after having done the week’s shopping en route, I was back at Shellerton House as promised in good time for Tremayne to drive his Volvo to Newbury races. He had sent three runners off in the horse-box and was taking Mackie to assist, leaving me to my slowly growing first chapter in the dining-room.

When they’d gone Dee-Dee came in, as she often did now, to drink coffee over the sorted clippings.

I said, ‘I hope Tremayne won’t mind my taking all these with me when I go home.’

‘Home...’ Dee-Dee smiled. ‘He doesn’t want you to go home, didn’t you know? He wants you to write the whole book here. Any day now he’ll probably make you an offer you can’t refuse.’

‘I came for a month. That’s what he said.’

‘He didn’t know you then.’ She took a few mouthfuls of coffee. ‘He wants you for Gareth, I think.’

That made sense, I thought; and I wasn’t sure which I would choose, to go or to stay, if Dee-Dee was right.

When she’d returned to the office I tried to get on with the writing but couldn’t concentrate. The trap in Sam’s boathouse kept intruding and so did Angela Brickell; the cold threat of khaki water that could rush into aching lungs to bring oblivion and the earthy girl who’d been claimed back by the earth, eaten clean by earth creatures, become earth-digested dust.

Under the day-to-day surface of ordinary life in Shellerton the fish of murder swam like a shark, silent, unknown, growing new teeth. I hoped Doone would net him soon, but I hadn’t much faith.

Fiona telephoned during the afternoon to say that she’d brought Harry home and he wanted to see me, so with a sigh but little reluctance I abandoned the empty page and walked down to the village.

Fiona hugged me as a long-lost brother and said Harry still couldn’t be quite clear in his mind as he was saying now that he remembered drowning. However could one remember drowning?

‘Quite hard to forget, I should think.’

‘But he didn’t drown!’

‘He came close.’

She led me into the pink-and-green chintzy sitting-room where Harry, pale with blue shadows below the eyes, sat in an armchair with his bandaged leg elevated on a large upholstered footstool.

‘Hello,’ he said, raising a phantom smile. ‘Do you know a cure for nightmares?’

‘I have them awake,’ I said.

‘Dear God.’ He swallowed. ‘What’s true, and what isn’t?’

‘What you remember is true.’

‘Drowning?’

‘Mm.’

‘So I’m not mad.’

‘No. Lucky.’

‘I told you,’ he said to Fiona. ‘I tried not to breathe, but in the end I just did. I didn’t mean to. Couldn’t help it.’

‘No one can,’ I said.

‘Sit down,’ Fiona said to me, kissing Harry’s head. ‘What’s lucky is that Harry had the sense to take you with him. And what’s more, everyone’s apologising all over the place except for one vile journalist who says it’s possible a misguided vigilante thought getting rid of Harry the only path to real justice, and I want Harry to sue him, it’s truly vicious.’

‘I can’t be bothered,’ Harry said in his easy-going way. ‘Doone was quite nice to me! That’s enough.’

‘How’s the leg?’ I asked.

‘Lousy. Weighs a couple of tons. Still, no gangrene as yet.’

He meant it as a joke but Fiona looked alarmed.

‘Darling,’ he said placatingly, ‘I’m bloated with antibiotics, punctured with tetanus jabs and immunised against cholera, yellow-spotted mountain fever and athlete’s foot. I have it on good authority that I’m likely to live. How about a stiff whisky?’

‘No. It’ll curdle the drugs.’

‘For John, then.’

I shook my head.

‘Take Cinderella to the ball,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Fiona to Tremayne’s party. You’re going, aren’t you?’

I nodded.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ Fiona protested.

‘Of course you are, love. It wouldn’t be the same for Tremayne if you weren’t there. He dotes on you. John can take you. And,’ his eyes brightened mischievously with reawakening energy, ‘I know who’d love to use my ticket.’

‘Who?’ his wife demanded.

‘Erica. My sainted aunt.’