Longshot

Chapter 4

In the morning I went downstairs to find the family room dark but lights on in the kitchen.

It wasn’t a palatial kitchen like Fiona’s but did contain a big table with chairs all round it as well as a solid fuel cooker whose warmth easily defeated the pre-dawn refrigeration. I had been hoping to borrow a coat from Tremayne to go out to watch the horses, but on a chair I found my boots, gloves and ski-suit with a note attached by a safety pin, ‘Thanks ever so much.’

Smiling, I unpinned the note and put on the suit and boots and Tremayne, in a padded jacket, cloth cap and yellow scarf came in blowing on his bare hands and generally bringing the arctic indoors.

‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, puffing. ‘Good. Bob Watson brought up your clothes when he came to feed. Ready?’

I nodded.

‘I’ll just get my gloves.’ He checked also that I had gloves. ‘It’s as cold as I’ve ever known it. We won’t stay out long, the wind’s terrible. Come along.’

As we went through the hall I asked him about the feeding.

‘Bob Watson comes at six,’ he said briefly. ‘All horses in training get an early-morning feed. High protein. Keeps them warm. Gives them energy. A thoroughbred on a high-protein diet generates a lot of heat. Just as well in weather like this. You rarely find a bucket of water frozen over in a horse’s box, however cold it is outside. Mind you,’ he said, ‘we do our best to stop draughts round the doors, but you have to give them fresh air. If you don’t, if you molly-coddle them too much, you get viruses flourishing.’

As we stepped out into the open, the wind pulled his last words away and sucked the breath out of our lungs and I reckoned we were still dealing with perhaps ten degrees of frost, plus chill factor, the same as the evening before. It wouldn’t go on freezing for as long as in 1963, I thought: that had been the coldest winter since 1740.

A short walk took us straight into the stable-yard, dark the night before and dimly seen, now lit comprehensively and bustling with activity.

‘Bob Watson,’ Tremayne said, ‘is no ordinary head lad. He has all sorts of skills, and takes pride in them. Any odd job, carpentering, plumbing, laying concrete, anything to improve the yard and working conditions, he suggests it and mostly does it himself.’

The object of this eulogy came to meet us, noticing I wore the ski-suit, acknowledging my thanks.

‘All ready, guv’nor,’ he said to Tremayne.

‘Good. Bring them out, Bob. Then you’d better be off, if you’re going to Reading.’

Bob nodded and gave some sort of signal and from many open doors came figures leading horses; riders in hard helmets, horses in rugs. In the lights and the dark, with plumes of steam swirling as they breathed, with the circling movements and the scrunching of icy gravel underfoot, the great elemental creatures raised in me such a sense of enjoyment and excitement that I felt for the first time truly enthusiastic about what I’d set my hand to. I wished I could paint, but no canvas, and not even film, could catch the feeling of primitive life or the tingle and smell of the frosty yard.

Bob moved through the scene giving a leg-up to each lad and they resolved themselves into a line, perhaps twenty of them, and processed away through a far exit, horses stalking on long strong legs, riders hunched on top, heads bobbing.

‘Splendid,’ I said to Tremayne, almost sighing.

He glanced at me. ‘Horses get to you, don’t they?’

‘To you too? Still?’

He nodded and said, ‘I love them,’ as if such a statement were no more than normal, and in the same tone of voice went on,’ As the jeep’s in the ditch we’ll have to go up to the gallops on the tractor. All right with you?’

‘Sure,’ I said, and got my introduction to the training of steeplechasers perched high in a cab over chain-wrapped wheels which Tremayne told me had been up to the Downs with his groundsman once already that morning to harrow the tracks and make them safe for the horses to walk on. He drove the tractor himself with the facility of long custom, spending most of his time not looking where he was going but at anything else visible around him.

His house and stables, I discovered, were right on the edge of the grassy uplands so that the horses had merely to cross one public road to be already on a downland track, and the road surface itself had been thinly covered with unidentified muck to make the icy crossing easier.

Tremayne waited until his whole string was safely over before following them at enough distance not to alarm them, then they peeled off to the right while we lumbered onwards and upwards over frozen rutted mud, making for a horizon that slowly defined itself out of shadows as the firmament grew lighter.

Through the wind Tremayne remarked that perfectly still mornings on the long east-west sweep of downland across Berkshire and Wiltshire were as rare as honest beggars. Apart from that the day broke clear and high with a pale grey washed sky that slowly turned blue over the rolling snow-dusted hills. When Tremayne stopped the tractor and the silence and isolation crept into the senses, it was easy to see that this was what it had looked like up here for thousands of years, that this primordial scene before our present eyes had also been there before man.

Tremayne prosaically told me that if we had continued up over the next brow we would have been close to the fences and hurdles of his schooling ground where his horses learned to jump. Today, he said, they would be doing only half-speed gallops on the all-weather track, and he led the way on foot from the tractor across a stretch of powdery snow to a low mound from where we could see a long dark ribbon of ground winding away down the hill and curving out of sight at the bottom.

‘They’ll come up here towards us,’ he said. ‘The all-weather surface is wood chips. Am I telling you what you already know?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Tell me everything.’

He grunted noncommittally and raised a pair of binoculars powerful enough to see into the riders’ minds. I looked where he was looking, but it took me much longer to spot the three dark shapes moving over the dark track. They seemed to be taking a long time to come up head-on towards us but the slowness was an illusion merely. Once they drew near and passed us their speed was vivid, stirring, a matter of muscles stretching and hooves thudding urgently on the quiet surface.

Two or three times they all came up in their turn. ‘Both of those are Fiona’s,’ Tremayne said from behind the binoculars, giving me a commentary as a pair of chestnuts scurried past, and, ‘The one on the left of this next three is my Grand National winner, Top Spin Lob.’

With interest I watched the pride of the stable go past us and begin to pull up as he reached the prow of the rise, but beside me Tremayne was stiffening in dismay and saying, ‘What the hell—?’

I looked back down the hill in the direction of his binoculars but could see only three more horses coming up the track, two in front, one behind. It wasn’t until they were almost upon us that I realised that the one at the rear had no rider.

The three horses passed us and began to slow down and Tremayne said ‘Shit’ with fervour.

‘Did the lad fall off?’ I asked inanely.

‘No doubt he did,’ Tremayne said forcefully, watching through his glasses, ‘but he’s not one of mine.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ Tremayne said, ‘that’s not my horse. Just look at him. That’s not my rug. That horse isn’t saddled and has no bridle. Can’t you see?’

When I looked, when he’d told me what to look for, then I could see. Tremayne’s horses had fawn rugs with horizontal red and blue stripes; rugs which covered the ribs and hindquarters but left the legs free for full movement. The rug of the riderless horse was brownish grey, much thicker, and fastened by straps running under the belly and round in front of the shoulders.

‘I suppose you’ll think me crazy,’ I said to Tremayne, ‘but maybe that’s the horse that was loose in the lane last night when we crashed. I mean, I saw it for only a split second, really, but it looked like that. Dark, with that sort of rug.’

‘Almost every racehorse wears that sort of rug at night in the winter,’ Tremayne said. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong, though. In a minute, I’ll find out.’

He swung his binoculars back to where another couple of his string were putting on their show and calmly watched them before referring again to the stranger.

‘They’re the last,’ he said as they sped past us. ‘Now let’s see what’s what.’

He began to walk up beside the gallop in the direction of the horses and I followed, and we soon came over the brow to where his whole string was circling on snowy grass, steam swelling in clouds from their breath after their exertions. They were silhouetted against the eastern sun, their shapes now black, now gleaming. Brilliant, freezing, moving; unforgettable morning.

Away to the left, apart from the string, the riderless horse made his own white sun-splashed plume, his nervousness apparent, his herding instincts propelling him towards his kin, his wild nature urging flight.

Tremayne reached his horses and spoke to his lads.

‘Anyone know whose horse that is?’

They shook their heads.

‘Walk on back to the yard then. Go back down the all-weather track. No one else is using it this morning. Take care crossing the road.’

They nodded and began to form into a line as they had in the stables, walking off in self-generated mist towards the end of the gallop.

Tremayne said to me, ‘Go back to the tractor, will you? Don’t make any sudden moves. Don’t alarm this fellow.’ His eyes slid in the direction of the loose horse. ‘In the tractor’s cab you’ll find a rope. Bring it back here. Move slowly when you’re coming into sight.’

‘Right,’ I said.

He nodded briefly and as I turned to go on the errand he reached into a pocket and produced a few horse-feed cubes which he held out to the runaway, speaking to him directly.

‘Come on, now, fella. Nice and easy. Come along now, you must be hungry...’ His voice was calm and cajoling, absolutely without threat.

I walked away without haste and retrieved the rope from the cab, and by the time I cautiously returned over the brow into Tremayne’s sight he was standing close to the horse feeding him cubes with his left hand and holding a bunch of mane with his right.

I stopped, then went forward again slowly. The horse quivered, his head turning my way, his alarm transmitting like electricity. With small movements I made a big loop in one end of the supple old rope and tied a running bowline, then went slowly forward holding the rope open, not in a small circle that might frighten the horse more but in a big loop drooping almost to my knees.

Tremayne watched and continued to talk soothingly, feeding horse cubes one by one. I walked cautiously forward suppressing anything that could seem like doubt or anxiety and paused again a step or two away from the horse.

‘There’s a good fella,’ Tremayne said to him, and to me in the same tone, ‘If you can put the rope over his head, do it.’

I took the last two paces and without stopping walked alongside the horse on the far side from Tremayne so that the horse’s head came as if naturally into and through the dangling loop. Tremayne moved his hand with the horse cubes away from the black muzzle just long enough for the rope to pass, and then still without abruptness I pulled the slack through the bowline until the noose was snug but not tight round the horse’s neck.

‘Good,’ Tremayne said. ‘Give me the rope. I’ll walk him down to my yard. Can you drive the tractor?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wait until I’m out of sight at the bottom. We don’t want him bolting from fright. I couldn’t hold him if he did.’

‘Right.’

Tremayne fished a few more cubes out of his pocket and offered them as before but tugged gently on the rope at the same time. Almost as if making up his mind, as if settling for food and captivity, the great creature moved off with him peacefully, and the two of them trailed down to the dark strip of wood chips and plodded towards home.

Food and warmth, I thought. Maybe I had a lot in common with that horse. What had I settled for, but a form of captivity?

I shrugged. What was done was done, as Tremayne would say. I went down to the tractor and in due course drove it back and parked it where it had been before we started out.

In the now sunlit kitchen Tremayne was standing by the table talking crossly into a telephone.

‘You’d have thought someone would have noticed by now that they’re missing a horse?’ He listened a bit, then said, ‘Well, I’ve one here that’s surplus to requirements, so let me know.’ He put the receiver down with destructive force. ‘No one’s told the police, would you believe it?’

He took off his coat, scarf and cap and hung them on a single peg, revealing a big diamond-patterned golfing sweater over a boldly checked open-necked shirt. The same eye-clutter as in the family room; same taste.

‘Coffee?’ he said, going towards the Aga. ‘You won’t mind getting your own breakfast, will you? Look around, take anything you want.’ He slid the heavy kettle on to the hotplate and went along to a refrigerator which disgorged sliced bread, a tub of yellowish spread and a pot of marmalade. ‘Toast?’ he said, putting two slices in a wire mesh holder which he slid under the second hotplate lid of the cooker. ‘There’s cornflakes, if you’d rather. Or cook an egg.’

Toast would be fine, I said, and found myself delegated to making sure it didn’t burn while he put through two more phone calls, both fairly incomprehensible to my ears.

‘Plates,’ he said, pointing to a cupboard, and I found those and mugs also and, in a drawer, knives, forks and spoons. ‘Hang your jacket in the cloakroom, next door.’

He went on talking; positive, decisive. I hung my jacket, made the coffee and more toast. He put the receiver down with another crash and went out into the hall.

‘Dee-Dee,’ he shouted. ‘Coffee.’

He came back and sat down to eat, waving to me to join him, which I did, and presently in the doorway appeared a slight brown-haired woman who wore jeans and a huge grey sweater reaching to her knees.

‘Dee-Dee,’ Tremayne said round a mouthful of toast,’ this is John Kendall, my writer.’ To me he added, ‘Dee-Dee’s my secretary.’

I stood up politely and she told me unsmilingly to sit down. My first impression of her as she went across to the Aga to make her own coffee was that she was like a cat, ultra soft-footed, fluid in movement and totally self-contained.

Tremayne watched me watching her and smiled with amusement. ‘You’ll get used to Dee-Dee,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t manage without her.’

She took the compliment without acknowledgement and sat half on a chair as if temporarily, as if about to retreat.

‘Phone up a few people to see if they’ve lost a horse,’ Tremayne told her. ‘If anyone’s panicking, he’s here. Unhurt. We’ve given him water and feed. He was out all night on the Downs, it seems. Someone’s in for a bollocking.’

Dee-Dee nodded.

‘The jeep’s in a ditch on the south road to the A34. Skidded last evening with Mackie. No one hurt. Get the garage to fish it out.’

Dee-Dee nodded.

‘John, here, will be working in the dining-room. Anything he wants, give it to him. Anything he wants to know, tell him.’

Dee-Dee nodded.

‘Get the blacksmith over for two of the string who lost shoes on the gallop this morning. The lads found the shoes, we don’t need new ones.’

Dee-Dee nodded.

‘If I’m not here when the vet comes, ask him to take a look at Waterbourne after he’s cut the colt. She’s got some heat in her near-fore fetlock.’

Dee-Dee nodded.

‘Check that the haulage people will be on time delivering the hay. We’re running low. Don’t take snow for an answer.’

Dee-Dee smiled, which in a triangular way looked feline also, although far from kittenish. I wondered fleetingly about claws.

Tremayne ate his toast and went on giving sporadic instructions which Dee-Dee seemed to have no trouble remembering. When the spate slowed she stood, picked up her mug and said she would finish her coffee in the office while she got on with things.

‘Utterly reliable,’ Tremayne remarked to her departing back. ‘There’s always ten damned trainers trying to poach her.’ He lowered his voice. ‘A shit of an amateur jockey treated her like muck. She’s not over it yet. I make allowances. If you find her crying, that’s it.’

I was amazed by his compassion and felt I should have recognised earlier how many unexpected layers there were to Tremayne below the loud executive exterior: not just his love of horses, not just his need to be recorded, not even just his disguised delight in Gareth, but other, secret, unrevealed privacies which maybe I would come to in time, and maybe not.

He spent the next half-hour on the telephone both making and receiving calls: it was the time of day, I later discovered, when trainers could most reliably be found at home. Toast eaten, coffee drunk, he reached for a cigarette from a packet on the table and brought a throw-away lighter out of his pocket.

‘Do you smoke?’ he asked, pushing the pack my way.

‘Never started,’ I said.

‘Good for the nerves,’ he commented, inhaling deeply. ‘I hope you’re not an anti fanatic.’

‘I quite like the smell.’

‘Good.’ He seemed pleased enough. ‘We’ll get on well.’

He told me that at ten o’clock, by which time the first lot would have been given hay and water and the lads would have had their own breakfasts, he would drive the tractor back to the gallops to watch his second lot work. He said I needn’t bother with that: I could set things up in the dining-room, arrange things however I liked working. As all racing was off from frost he could, if I agreed, spend the afternoon telling me about his childhood. When racing began again, he wouldn’t have so much time.

‘Good idea,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Come along, then, and I’ll show you where things are.’

We went out into the carpeted hall and he pointed to the doorway opposite.

‘That’s the family room, as you know. Next to the kitchen...’ he walked along and opened a closed door, ‘...is my dining-room. We don’t use it much. You’ll have to turn the heating up, I dare say.’

I looked into the room I was to get to know well; a spacious room with mahogany furniture, swagged crimson curtains, formal cream-and-gold striped walls and a plain dark green carpet. Not Tremayne’s own choice, I thought. Much too coordinated.

‘That’ll be great,’ I said obligingly.

‘Good.’ He closed the door again and looked up the stairs we had climbed to bed the night before. ‘We put those stairs in when we divided the house. This passage beside them, this leads to Perkin and Mackie’s half. Come along, I’ll show you.’ He walked along a wide pale-green-carpeted corridor with pictures of horses on both walls and opened double white-painted doors at the end.

‘Through here,’ he said, ‘is the main entrance hall of the house. The oldest part.’

We passed onto a big wood-blocked expanse of polished floor from which two graceful wings of staircase rose to an upper gallery. Under the gallery, between the staircases, was another pair of doors which Tremayne, crossing, opened without flourish, revealing a vista of gold and pale blue furnishings in the same formal style as the dining-room.

‘This is the main drawing room,’ he said. ‘We share it. We hardly use it. We used it last for that damned party...’ He paused. ‘Well, as Mackie said, I don’t know when we’ll have another.’

A pity, I thought. It looked a house made for parties. Tremayne closed the drawing-room door, and pointed straight across the hall.

‘That’s the front entrance, and those double doors on the right open into Perkin and Mackie’s half. We built a new kitchen for them and another new staircase. We planned it as two separate houses, you see, with this big common section between us.’

‘It’s great,’ I said to please him, but also meaning it.

He nodded. ‘It divided quite well. No one needs houses this size these days. Take too much heating.’ Indeed, it was cold in the hall. ‘Most of this was built about nineteen six. Edwardian. Country house of the Windberry family, don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of them.’

‘No,’ I agreed.

‘My father bought the place for peanuts during the Depression. I’ve lived here all my life.’

‘Was your father a trainer also?’ I asked.

Tremayne laughed. ‘God, no. He inherited a fortune. Never did a day’s work. He liked going racing, so he bought a few jumpers, put them in the stables that hadn’t been used since cars replaced the carriages and engaged a trainer for them. When I grew up, I just took over the horses. Built another yard, eventually. I’ve fifty boxes at present, all full.’

He led the way back through the doors to his own domain and closed them behind us.

‘That’s more or less all,’ he said, ‘except for the office.’

Once back in his own hall he veered through the last of the doorways there and I followed him into yet another big room in which Dee-Dee looked lost behind a vast desk.

‘This used to be the Windberrys’ billiards room,’ Tremayne said. ‘When I was a child, it was our playroom.’

‘You had brothers and sisters?’

‘One sister,’ he said briefly, looking at his watch. ‘I’ll leave you to Dee-Dee. See you later.’

He went away purposefully, and, after the time it would have taken him to replace coat, cap and scarf, the door out to the yard slammed behind him. He was a natural slammer, I thought; there seemed to be no ingredient of ire.

Dee-Dee said, ‘How can I help you?’ without any great enthusiasm.

‘Don’t you approve of the biography project?’ I asked.

She blinked. ‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You looked it.’

She fiddled lengthily with some papers, eyes down.

‘He’s been on about it for months,’ she said finally. ‘It’s important to him. I think... if you must know... that he should have held out for someone better...’ She hesitated. ‘Better known, anyway. He met you one day and the next day you’re here, and I think it’s too fast. I suggested that we should at least run a check on you but he said Ronnie Curzon’s word was good enough. So you’re here.’ She looked up, suddenly fierce. ‘He deserves the best,’ she said.

‘Ah.’

‘What do you mean by Ah?’

I didn’t answer at once but looked round the jumbo office, seeing the remains of the classical decorative style overlaid by a host of modern bookshelves, filing cabinets, cupboards, copier, fax, computer, telephones, floor safe, television, tapes by the dozen, cardboard boxes, knee-high stack of newspapers and another corkboard with red drawing-pinned memos. There was an antique kneehole desk with an outsize leather chair, clearly Tremayne’s own territory, and on the floor a splatter of overlapping Persian rugs in haphazard patterns and colours covering most of an old grey carpet. Pictures of horses passing winning posts inhabited the walls alongside a bright row of racing silks hanging on pegs.

I ended the visual tour where I’d begun, on Dee-Dee’s face.

‘The more you help,’ I said, ‘the more chance he has.’

She compressed her mouth obstinately. ‘That doesn’t follow.’

‘Then the more you obstruct, the less chance he has.’

She stared at me, her antagonism still clear, while logic made hardly a dent in emotion.

She was about forty, I supposed. Thin but not emaciated, from what one could see via the sweater. Good skin, bobbed straight hair, unremarkable features, pink lipstick, no jewellery, small, strong-looking hands. General air of reserve, of holding back. Perhaps that was habitual; perhaps the work of the shit of an amateur jockey who had treated her like muck.

‘How long have you worked here?’ I asked, voice neutral, merely enquiring.

‘Eight years, about.’ Straightforward answer.

‘What I chiefly need,’ I said,’ are cuttings books.’

She almost smiled. ‘There aren’t any.’

With dismay I protested, ‘There must be. He mentioned cuttings.’

‘They’re not in books, they’re in boxes.’ She turned her head, nodding directions. ‘In that cupboard over there. Help yourself.’

I went across and opened a white-painted door and inside found stacked on shelves from floor to head height a whole array of uniform white cardboard boxes, all like shirt-boxes but about eight inches deep, all with dates written on their ends in black marker ink.

‘I re-boxed all the cuttings three or four years ago,’ Dee-Dee said. ‘Some of the old boxes were falling to bits. The newspaper is yellow and brittle. You’ll see.’

‘Can I take them all into the dining-room?’

‘Be my guest.’

I loaded up four of the boxes and set off with them, and in a minute found her following me.

‘Wait,’ she said inside the dining-room door,’ mahogany gets scratched easily.’

She went over to a large sideboard and from a drawer drew out a vast green baize cloth which she draped over the whole expanse of the large oval table.

‘You can work on that,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

I put down the boxes and went to fetch another load, ferrying them until the whole lot was transferred. Dee-Dee meanwhile went back to her desk and her work, which largely consisted of the telephone. I could hear her still talking on and off while I arranged the boxes of cuttings chronologically and took the lid off the first, realising from the date on its end that it had to go back beyond Tremayne; that he hadn’t started training when he was a baby. Tattered yellow pieces of newsprint informed me that Mr Loxley Vickers, of Shellerton House, Berkshire, had bought Triple Subject, a six-year-old gelding, for the record sum for a steeplechaser of twelve hundred guineas. A house, an astonished reporter wrote, could be bought for less.

I looked up, smiling, and found Dee-Dee standing in the doorway, hesitantly hovering.

‘I’ve been talking to Fiona Goodhaven,’ she said abruptly.

‘How is she?’

‘All right. Thanks to you, it seems. Why didn’t you tell me about your rescue job?’

‘It didn’t seem important.’

‘Are you mad?’

‘Well, it didn’t seem important in the context of whether I could or couldn’t do justice to Tremayne’s biography.’

‘God Almighty.’ She went away but shortly came back. ‘If you turn that thermostat,’ she said, pointing, ‘it will get warmer in here.’

She whisked away again before I could thank her, but I understood that peace had been declared, or, at the very least, hostilities temporarily suspended.

Tremayne returned in time. I heard him talking forcefully into an office telephone and presently he strode into the dining-room to tell me that someone had finally found they had a horse missing.

‘It came over the hill from the next village. They’re sending a box to pick it up. How are you doing?’

‘Reading about your father.’

‘A lunatic. Had an obsession about how things would look in his stomach after he’d eaten them. He used to make his butler put an extra serving of everything he was going to eat into a bucket and stir it round. If my father didn’t like the look of it, he wouldn’t eat his dinner. Drove the cook mad.’

I laughed. ‘What about your mother?’

‘She’d fallen off the perch by then. He wasn’t so bad when she was alive. He went screwy after.’

‘How old were you when she... er... fell off the perch?’

‘Ten. Same age as Gareth when his mother finally hopped it. You might say I know what it’s like to be Gareth. Except his mother’s still alive and he sees her sometimes. I can’t remember mine very clearly, to be honest.’

After a moment I said, ‘How much can I ask you?’

‘Ask anything. If I don’t want to answer, I’ll say so.’

‘Well... you said your father inherited a fortune. Did he... er... leave it to you?’

Tremayne laughed in his throat. ‘A fortune seventy or eighty years ago is not a fortune now. But yes, in a way he did. Left me this house. Taught me the principles of landowning which he’d learnt from his father but hardly practised. My father spent; my grandfather accumulated. I’m more like my grandfather, though I never knew him. I tell Gareth sometimes that we can’t afford things even if we can. I don’t want him to turn out a spender.’

‘What about Perkin?’

‘Perkin?’ For a second Tremayne looked blank. ‘Perkin has no money sense at all. Lives in a world of his own. It’s no use talking to Perkin about money.’

‘What does he do,’ I asked, ‘in his world?’

Tremayne looked as if his elder son’s motivations were a mystery, but somewhere also I sensed a sort of exasperated pride.

‘He makes furniture,’ he said. ‘Designs it. Makes it himself, piece by piece. Chests, tables, screens, anything. Two hundred years from now they will be valuable antiques. That’s Perkin’s money sense for you.’ He sighed. ‘Best thing he ever did was marry a smart girl like Mackie. She sells his pieces, makes sure he makes a profit. He used to sell thing sometimes for less than they cost to make. Absolutely hopeless.’

‘As long as he’s happy.’

Tremayne made no comment on his son’s state of happiness but asked about my tape recorder.

‘Didn’t it get wet last night? Won’t it be ruined?’

‘No. I keep everything in waterproof bags. Sort of habit.’

‘Jungles and deserts?’ he asked, remembering.

‘Mm.’

‘Then you go and fetch it, and we’ll start. And I’ll move the office television in here with the video player so you can watch the races I’ve won. And if you want any lunch,’ he added as an afterthought, ‘I nearly always have beef sandwiches; buy them by the fifty, ready-made from the supermarket, and put them in the freezer.’

We both ate mostly-thawed uninteresting beef sandwiches in due course and I thought that even if Tremayne’s housekeeping were slightly eccentric, at least he hadn’t stirred his food up first in a bucket.