Longshot

Chapter 5

At about six-thirty that day I walked down to Shellerton to collect my clothes from the Goodhavens, Fiona and Harry. Darkness had fallen but it seemed to me that the air temperature hadn’t, and there was less energy in the wind than in the morning.

I had by that time taped three hours’ worth of Tremayne’s extraordinary childhood and walked round with him to inspect his horses at evening stables. At every one of the fifty doors he had stopped to check on the inmate’s welfare, discussing it briefly with the lad and dispensing carrots to enquiring muzzles with little pats and murmurs of affection.

In between times as we moved along the rows he explained that the horses would now be rugged up against the frost in wool blankets and duvets, then covered with jute rugs (like sacking) securely buckled on. They would be given their main feed of the day and be shut up for the night to remain undisturbed until morning.

‘One of us walks round last thing at night,’ he said, ‘Bob or Mackie or I, to make sure they’re all right. Not kicking their boxes and so on. If they’re quiet they’re all right, and I don’t disturb them.’

Like fifty children, I thought, tucked up in bed.

I’d asked him how many lads he had. Twenty-one, he said, plus Bob Watson, who was worth six, and the travelling head lad and a box driver and a groundsman. With Mackie and Dee-Dee, twenty-seven full-time employees. The economics of training racehorses, he remarked, put the book trade’s problems in the shade.

When I reminded him that I was going down to Fiona and Harry’s to fetch my belongings he offered me his car.

‘I quite like walking,’ I said.

‘Good God.’

‘I’ll cook when I get back.’

‘You don’t have to,’ he protested. ‘Don’t let Gareth talk you into it.’

‘I said I would, though.’

‘I don’t care much what I eat.’

I grinned. ‘Maybe that will be just as well. I’ll be back soon after Gareth, I expect.’

I’d discovered that the younger son rode his bicycle each morning to the house of his friend Coconut, from where both of them were driven to and from a town ten miles away, as day boys in a mainly boarding school. The hours were long, as always with that type of school: Gareth was never home much before seven, often later. His notice ‘BACK FOR GRUB’ seemed to be a fixture. He removed it, Tremayne said, only when he knew in the morning that he would be out until bedtime. Then he would leave another message instead, to say where he was going.

‘Organised,’ I commented.

‘Always has been.’

I reached the main street of Shellerton and tramped along to the Goodhavens’ house, passing three or four cars in their driveway and walking round to the kitchen door to ring the bell.

After an interval the door was opened by Harry whose expression changed from inhospitable to welcoming by visible degrees.

‘Oh, hello, come in. Forgot about you. Fact is, we’ve had another lousy day in Reading. But home without crashing, best you can say.’

I stepped into the house and he closed the door behind us, at the same time putting a restraining hand on my arm.

‘Let me tell you first,’ he said. ‘Nolan and Lewis are both here. Nolan got convicted of manslaughter. Six months’ jail suspended for two years. He won’t go behind bars but no one’s happy.’

‘I don’t need to stay,’ I said. ‘Don’t want to intrude.’

‘Do me a favour, dilute the atmosphere.’

‘If it’s like that...’

He nodded, removed his hand and walked me through the kitchen into a warm red hallway and on into a pink-and-green chintzy sitting-room beyond.

Fiona, turning her silver-blond head said, ‘Who was it?’ and saw me following Harry. ‘Oh, good heavens, I’d forgotten.’ She came over, holding out a hand, which I shook, an odd formality after our previous meeting.

‘These are my cousins,’ she said. ‘Nolan and Lewis Everard.’ She gave me a wide don’t-say-anything stare, so I didn’t. ‘A friend of Tremayne’s,’ she said to them briefly. John Kendall.’

Mackie, sitting exhaustedly in an armchair, waggled acknowledging fingers. Everyone else was standing and holding a glass. Harry pressed a pale gold drink into my hand and left me to discover for myself what lay under the floating ice. Whisky, I found, tasting it.

I had had no mental picture of either Nolan or Lewis but their appearance all the same was a surprise. They were both short, Nolan handsome and hard, Lewis swollen and soft. Late thirties, both of them. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark jaws. I supposed I had perhaps expected them to be like Harry in character if not in appearance, but it was immediately clear that they weren’t. In place of Harry’s amused urbanity, Nolan’s aristocratic-sounding speech was essentially violent and consisted of fifty per cent obscenity. The gist of his first sentence was that he wasn’t in the mood for guests.

Neither Fiona nor Harry showed embarrassment, only weary tolerance. If Nolan had spoken like that in court, I thought, it was no wonder he’d been found guilty. One could quite easily imagine him throttling a nymph.

Harry said calmly, ‘John is writing Tremayne’s biography. He knows about the trial and the Top Spin Lob party. He’s a friend of ours, and he stays.’

Nolan gave Harry a combative stare which Harry returned with blandness.

‘Anyone can know about the trial,’ Mackie said. ‘It was in all the papers this morning, after all.’

Harry nodded. ‘To be continued in reel two.’

‘It’s not an expletive joke,’ Lewis said. ‘They took photos of us when we were leaving.’ His peevish voice was like his brother’s though a shade higher in pitch and, as I progressively discovered, instead of truly offensive obscene words he had a habit of using euphemisms like ‘expletive’, ‘bleep’ and ‘deleted’. In Harry’s mouth it might have been funny; in Lewis’s it seemed a form of cowardice.

‘Gird up such loins as you have,’ Harry told him peaceably. ‘The public won’t remember by next week.’

Nolan said between four-letter words that everyone that mattered would remember, including the Jockey Club.

‘I doubt if they’ll actually warn you off,’ Harry said. ‘It wasn’t as if you hadn’t paid your bookmaker.’

‘Harry!’ Fiona said sharply.

‘Sorry, m’dear,’ murmured her husband, though his lids half veiled his eyes like blinds drawn over his true feelings.

Tremayne and I had each read two accounts of the previous day’s proceedings while dealing with the sandwiches, one in a racing paper, another in a tabloid. Tremayne’s comments had been grunts of disapproval, while I had learned a few facts left out by the Vickers family the evening before.

Fiona’s cousin Nolan, for starters, was an amateur jockey (‘well-known’, in both papers) who often raced on Fiona’s horses, trained by Tremayne Vickers. Nolan Everard had once briefly been engaged to Magdalene Mackenzie (Mackie) who had subsequently married Perkin Vickers, Tremayne’s son. ‘Sources’ had insisted that the three families, Vickers, Goodhavens and Everards were on friendly terms. The prosecution, not disputing this, had suggested that indeed they had all closed ranks to shield Nolan from his just deserts.

A demure photograph of Olympia (provided by her father) showed a fair-haired schoolgirl, immature, an innocent victim. No one seemed to have explained why Nolan had said he would strangle the bitch, and now that I’d heard him talk I was certain those had not been his only words.

‘The question really is,’ Fiona said, ‘not whether the Jockey Club will warn him off racecourses altogether, because I’m sure they won’t, they let real villains go racing, but whether they’ll stop him riding as an amateur.’

Harry said, as if sympathetically, to Nolan, ‘It’s rather put paid to your ambitions to be made a member of the Jockey Club, though, hasn’t it, old lad?’

Nolan looked blackly furious and remarked with venom that Harry hadn’t helped the case by not swearing to hell and back that Lewis had been comprehensively pissed.

Harry didn’t reply except to shrug gently and refill Lewis’s glass, which was unquestionably comprehensively empty.

If one made every possible allowance for Nolan, I thought; if one counted the long character-withering ordeal of waiting to know if he were going to prison; if one threw in the stress of having undoubtedly killed a young woman, even by accident; if one added the humiliations he would forever face because of his conviction; if one granted all that, he was still unattractively, viciously ungrateful.

His family and friends had done their best for him. I thought it highly likely that Lewis had in fact perjured himself and that Harry had also, very nearly, in the matter of the alcoholic blackout. Harry had at the last minute shrunk from either a positive opinion or from an outright lie, and I’d have put my money on the second. They had all gone again to court to support Nolan when they would much rather have stayed away.

‘I still think you ought to appeal,’ Lewis said.

Nolan’s pornographic reply was to the effect that his lawyer had advised him not to push his luck, as Lewis very well knew.

‘Bleep the lawyer,’ Lewis said.

‘Appeal courts can increase sentences, I believe,’ Fiona said warningly. ‘They might cancel the suspension. Doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Olympia’s father was incandescent afterwards,’ Mackie said gloomily, nodding. ‘He wanted Nolan put away for life. Life for a life, that’s what he was shouting.’

‘You can’t just appeal against a sentence because you don’t happen to like it,’ Harry pointed out. ‘There has to be some point of law that was conducted wrongly at the trial.’

Lewis said obstinately, ‘If Nolan doesn’t appeal it’s as good as admitting he’s expletive guilty as charged.’

There was a sharp silence all round. They all did think him guilty, though maybe to different degrees. Don’t push your luck seemed good pragmatic advice.

I looked speculatively at Mackie, wondering about her sometime engagement to Nolan. She showed nothing for him now but concerned friendship: no lingering love and no hard feelings. Nolan showed nothing but concern for himself.

Fiona said to me, ‘Stay to dinner?’ and Harry said, ‘Do,’ but I shook my head.

‘I promised to cook for Gareth and Tremayne.’

‘Good God,’ Harry said.

Fiona said, ‘That’ll make a change from pizza! They have pizza nine nights out of ten. Gareth just puts one in the microwave, regular as clockwork.’

Mackie put down her glass and stood up tiredly. ‘I think I’ll go too. Perkin will be waiting to hear the news.’

Nolan remarked tartly between ‘f’s that if Perkin had bothered to put in an appearance at Reading he would know the news already.

‘He wasn’t needed,’ Harry said mildly.

‘Olympia died in his half of the house,’ Lewis said. ‘You’d have thought he’d have taken an interest.’

Nolan remembered with below-the-waist indelicacies that Tremayne hadn’t supported him either.

‘They were both busy,’ Mackie said gamely. ‘They both work, you know.’

‘Meaning we don’t?’ Lewis asked waspishly.

Mackie sighed. ‘Meaning whatever you like.’ To me she said, ‘Did you come in Tremayne’s car?’

‘No, walked.’

‘Oh! Then... do you want a lift home?’

I thanked her and accepted and Harry came with us to see us off.

‘Here are your clothes in your bag,’ he said, handing it to me. ‘Can’t thank you enough, you know.’

‘Any time.’

‘God forbid.’

Harry and I looked at each other briefly in the sort of appreciation that’s the beginning of friendship, and I wondered whether he, of all of them, would have been least sorry to see Nolan in the cells.

‘He’s not always like that,’ Mackie said as she steered out of the drive. ‘Nolan, I mean. He can be enormously good fun. Or rather, he used to be, before all this.’

‘I read in today’s paper that you were once engaged to him.’

She half laughed. ‘Yes, I was. For about three months, five years ago.’

‘What happened?’

‘We met in February at a Hunt Ball. I knew who he was. Fiona’s cousin, the amateur jockey. I’d been brought up in eventing. Had ponies before I could walk. I told him I sometimes went to stay with Fiona. Small world, he said. We spent the whole evening together and... well... the whole night. It was sudden, like lightning. Don’t tell Perkin. Why does one tell total strangers things one never tells anyone else? Sorry, forget it’

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘What happened when you woke up?’

‘It was like a roller-coaster. We spent all our time together. After two weeks he asked me to marry him and I said yes. Blissful. My feet never touched the ground. I went to the races to watch him... he was spell-binding. Kept winning, saying I’d brought him luck.’ She stopped, but she was smiling.

‘Then what?’

‘Then the jumping season finished. We began planning the wedding... I don’t know. Maybe we just got to know each other. I can’t say which day I realised it was a mistake. He was getting irritable. Flashes of rage, really. I just said one day, ‘It won’t work, will it?’ and he said, ‘No,’ so we fell into each other’s arms and had a few tears and I gave him his ring back.’

‘You were lucky,’ I commented.

‘Yes. How do you mean?’

‘To come out of it without a fighting marriage and a spiteful divorce.’

‘You’re so right.’ She turned into Tremayne’s drive and came to a halt. ‘We’ve been friends ever since, but Perkin has always been uncomfortable with him. See, Nolan is brilliant and brave on horses and Perkin doesn’t ride all that well. We don’t talk about horses much, when we’re alone. It’s restful, actually. I tell Perkin he ought to be grateful to Nolan that I was free for him, but I suppose he can’t help how he feels.’

She sighed, unbuckled her seat belt and stood up out of the car.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I like you, but Perkin does tend to be jealous.’

‘I’ll ignore you,’ I promised.

She smiled vividly. ‘A touch of old-fashioned formality should do the trick.’ She began to turn away, and then stopped. ‘I’m going in through our own entrance, Perkin’s and mine. I’ll see how he’s doing. See if he’s stopped work. We’ll probably be along for a drink. We often do, at this time of day.’

‘OK.’

She nodded and walked off, and I went round and into Tremayne’s side of the house as if I’d lived there for ever. Yesterday morning, I thought incredulously, I awoke to Aunty’s freeze.

Tremayne in the family room had lit the log fire and poured his gin and tonic and, standing within heating range of the flames, he listened with disillusion to the outcome of Nolan’s trial.

‘Guilty but unpunished,’ he observed. ‘New-fangled escape clause.’

‘Should the guilty always be punished?’

He looked at me broodingly. ‘Is that a character assessment question?’

‘I guess so.’

‘It’s unanswerable, anyway. The answer is, I don’t know.’ He turned and with a foot pushed a log further into the fire. ‘Help yourself to a drink.’

‘Thanks. Mackie said they might be along.’

Tremayne nodded, taking it for granted, and in fact she and Perkin came through from the central hall while I was dithering between the available choices of whisky or gin, neither of which I much liked. Perkin solved the liquid question for himself by detouring into the kitchen and reappearing with a glass of Coke.

‘What do you actually like?’ Mackie asked, seeing my hesitation as she poured tonic into gin for herself.

‘Wine, I suppose. Red for preference.’

‘There will be some in the office. Tremayne keeps it for owners, when they come to see their horses. I’ll get it.’

She went without haste and returned with a Bordeaux-shaped bottle and a sensible corkscrew, both of which she handed over.

Tremayne said, as I liberated the Château Kirwan, ‘Is that stuff any good?’

‘Very,’ I said, smelling the healthy cork.

‘It’s all grape-juice as far as I’m concerned. If you like the stuff, put it on the shopping list.’

‘The shopping list,’ Mackie explained, ‘is a running affair pinned to the kitchen corkboard. Whoever does the shopping takes the list with him. Or her.’

Perkin, slouching in an armchair, said I might as well get used to the idea of doing the shopping myself, particularly if I liked eating.

‘Tremayne takes Gareth to the supermarket sometimes,’ he said, ‘and that’s about it. Or Dee-Dee goes, if there’s no milk for the coffee three days running.’ He looked from me to Mackie. ‘I used to think it quite normal until I married a sensible housekeeper.’

Perkin, I thought, as he reaped a smile from his wife, was a great deal more relaxed than on the evening before, though the faint hostility he’d shown towards me was still there. Tremayne asked him his opinion of the verdict on Nolan and Perkin consulted his glass lengthily as if seeking illumination.

‘I suppose,’ he said finally, ‘that I’m glad he isn’t in jail.’

It was a pretty ambiguous statement after so much thought, but Mackie looked pleasantly relieved. Only she of the three, it was clear, cared much for Nolan the man. To father and son, having Nolan in jail would have been an inconvenience and an embarrassment which they were happy to avoid.

Looking at the two of them, the differences were as powerful as the likenesses. If one discounted Tremayne’s hair, which was grey where Perkin’s was brown, and the thickness in Tremayne’s neck and body that had come with age, then physically they were of one cloth; but where Tremayne radiated strength, Perkin was soggy; where Tremayne was a leader, Perkin retreated. Tremayne’s love was for living horses, Perkin’s was for passive wood.

It came as a shock to me to wonder if Tremayne wanted his own achievements written in an inheritable book because Perkin’s work would be valuable in two hundred years. Wondered if the strong father felt he had to equal his weaker son. I dismissed the idea as altogether too subtle and as anyway tactless in an employed biographer.

Gareth came home with his usual air of a life lived on the run and eyed me with disapproval as I sat in an armchair drinking wine.

‘I thought you said—’ he began, and stopped, shrugging, an onset of good manners vying with disappointment.

‘I will,’ I said.

‘Oh, really? Now?’

I nodded.

‘Good. Come on, then, I’ll show you the freezers.’

‘Let him alone,’ Mackie said mildly. ‘Let him finish his drink.’

Perkin reacted to this harmless remark with irritation. ‘As he said he’d cook, let him do it.’

‘Of course,’ I said cheerfully, getting up. I glanced at Tremayne. ‘All right with you?’

‘You’re all right with me until further notice,’ he said, and Perkin didn’t like that testimony of approval either, but Gareth did.

‘You’re home and dry with Dad,’ he told me happily, steering me through the kitchen. ‘What did you do to him?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What did you do to me?’ he asked himself comically, and answered himself, ‘Nothing. I guess that’s it. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just the way you are. The freezers are through here, in the utility room. If you go straight on through the utility room you get to the garage. Through that door there.’ He pointed ahead to a heavy-looking door furnished with business-like bolts. ‘I keep my bike through there.’

There were two freezers, both upright, both with incredible contents.

‘This one,’ Gareth said, opening the door, ‘is what Dad calls the peezer freezer.’

‘Or the pizza frizza?’ I suggested.

‘Yes, that too.’

It was stacked with pizzas and nothing else, though only half full.

‘We eat our way down to the bottom,’ Gareth said reasonably, ‘then fill up again every two or three months.’

‘Sensible,’ I commented.

‘Most people think we’re mad.’

He shut that freezer and opened the other, which proved to contain four packs of beef sandwiches, fifty to a pack. There were also about ten sliced loaves (for toast, Gareth explained), one large turkey (someone gave it to Tremayne for Christmas), pints galore of chocolate ripple ice-cream (Gareth liked it) and a whole lot of bags of ice-cubes for gins and tonic.

Was it for this, I surmised wildly, that I’d sold my soul?

‘Well,’ I said in amusement, ‘what do we have in the larder?’

‘What larder?’

‘Cupboards, then.’

‘You’d better look,’ Gareth said, closing the second freezer’s door. ‘What are you going to make?’

I hadn’t the faintest idea; but what Tremayne, Gareth and I ate not very much later was a hot pie made of beef extracted from twenty defrosted sandwiches and chopped small, then mixed with undiluted condensed mushroom soup (a find) and topped with an inch-thick layer of sandwich breadcrumbs fried crisp.

Gareth watched the simple cooking with fascination and I found myself telling him about the techniques I’d been taught of how to live off the countryside without benefit of shops.

‘Fried worms aren’t bad,’ I said.

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘They’re packed with protein. Birds thrive on them. And what’s so different from eating snails?’

‘Could you really live off the land? You yourself?’

‘Yes, sure,’ I said. ‘But you can die of malnutrition eating just rabbits.’

‘How do you know these things?’

‘It’s my business, really. My trade.’ I told him about the six travel guides. ‘The company used to send me to all those places to set up holiday expeditions for real rugged types. I had to learn how to get them out of all sorts of local trouble, especially if they struck disasters like losing all their equipment in raging torrents. I wrote the books and the customers weren’t allowed to set off without them. Mind you, I always thought the book on how to survive would have been lost in the raging torrent with everything else, but maybe they would remember some of it, you never know.’

Gareth, helping make breadcrumbs in a blender, said a shade wistfully, ‘How did you ever start on something like that?’

‘My father was a camping nut. A naturalist. He worked in a bank, really, and still does, but every spare second he would head for the wilds, dragging me and my mother along. Actually I took it for granted, as just a fact of life. Then after college I found it was all pretty useful in the travel trade. So bingo.’

‘Does he still go camping? Your father, I mean?’

‘No. My mother got arthritis and refused to go any more, and he didn’t have much fun without her. He’s worked in a bank in the Cayman Islands for three or four years now. It’s good for my mother’s health.’

Gareth asked simply, ‘Where are the Cayman Islands?’

‘In the Caribbean, south of Cuba, west of Jamaica.’

‘What do you want me to do with these breadcrumbs?’

‘Put them in the frying pan.’

‘Have you ever been to the Cayman Islands?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I went for Christmas. They sent me the fare as a present.’

‘You are lucky,’ Gareth said.

I paused from cutting up the beef. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, thinking about it. ‘Yes, I am. And grateful. And you’ve got a good father, too.’

He seemed extraordinarily pleased that I should say so, but it seemed to me, unconventional housekeeping or not, that Tremayne was making a good job of his younger son.

Notwithstanding Tremayne’s professed lack of interest in food he clearly enjoyed the pie, which three healthy appetites polished off to the last fried crumb. I got promoted instantly to resident chef, which suited me fine. Tomorrow I could do the shopping, Tremayne said, and without ado pulled out his wallet and gave me enough to feed the three of us for a month, though he said it was for a week. I protested it was too much and he kindly told me I had no idea how much things cost. I thought wryly that I knew how much things cost to the last anxious penny, but there was no point in arguing. I stowed the money away and asked them what they didn’t like.

‘Broccoli,’ Gareth said instantly. ‘Yuk.’

‘Lettuce,’ said Tremayne.

Gareth told his father about fried worms and asked me if I had any of the travel guides with me.

‘No, sorry, I didn’t think of bringing them.’

‘Couldn’t we possibly get some? I mean, I’d buy them with my pocket money. I’d like to keep them. Are they in the shops?’

‘Sometimes, but I could ask the travel company to send a set,’ I suggested.

‘Yes, do that,’ Tremayne said, ‘and I’ll pay for them. We’d all like to look at them, I expect.’

‘But Dad...’ Gareth protested.

‘All right,’ Tremayne said, ‘get two sets.’

I began to appreciate Tremayne’s simple way of solving problems and in the morning, after I’d driven him on the tractor up to the Downs to see the horses exercise, and after orange juice, coffee and toast, I phoned my friend in the travel agency and asked him to organise the books.

‘Today?’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes, please,’ and he said he would Red-Star-parcel them by train, if I liked. I consulted Tremayne who thought it a good idea and told me to get them sent to Didcot station where I could go to pick them up when I went in to do the shopping.

‘Fair enough,’ the friend said. ‘You’ll get them this afternoon.’

‘My love to your aunt,’ I said, ‘and thanks.’

‘She’ll swoon.’ He laughed. ‘See you.’

Tremayne began reading the day’s papers, both of which carried the results of the trial. Neither paper took any particular stance either for or against Nolan, though both quoted Olympia’s father at length. He came over as a sad, obsessed man whose natural grief had turned to self-destructive anger and one could feel sorry for him on many counts. Tremayne read and grunted and passed no opinion.

The day slowly drifted into a repetition of the one before. Dee-Dee came into the kitchen for coffee and instructions and when Tremayne had gone out again with his second lot of horses I returned to the boxes of clippings in the dining-room.

I decided to reverse yesterday’s order; to start at the most recent clippings and work backwards.

It was Dee-Dee, I had discovered, who cut the sections out of the newspapers and magazines, and certainly she had been more zealous than whoever had done it before her, as the boxes for the last eight years were much fuller.

I laid aside the current box as it was still almost empty and worked through from January to December of the previous year, which had been a good one for Tremayne, embracing not only his Grand National win with Top Spin Lob but many other successes important enough to get the racing hacks excited. Tremayne’s face smiled steadily from clipping after clipping including, inappropriately, those dealing with the death of the girl, Olympia.

Drawn irresistibly, I read a whole batch of accounts of that death from a good many different papers, the number of them suggesting that someone had gone out and bought an armful of everything available. In total, they told me not much more than I already knew, except that Olympia was twice described as a ‘jockette’, a word I somehow found repulsive. It appeared that she had ridden in several ladies’ races at point-to-point meetings which one paper, to help the ignorant, described as ‘the days the hunting classes stop chasing the fox and chase each other instead’. Olympia the jockette had been twenty-three, had come from a ‘secure suburban background and had worked as an instructor in a riding-school in Surrey. Her parents, not surprisingly, were said to be ‘distraught’.

Dee-Dee came into the dining-room offering more coffee and saw what I was reading.

‘That Olympia was a sex-pot bimbo,’ she remarked flatly. ‘I was there at the party and you could practically smell it. Secure little suburban riding instructor, my foot.’

‘Really?’

‘Her father made her out to be a sweet innocent little saint. Perhaps he even believes it. Nolan never said any different because it wouldn’t have helped him, so no one told the truth.’

‘What was the truth?’

‘She had no underclothes on,’ Dee-Dee said calmly. ‘She wore only a long scarlet strapless dress slit halfway up her thigh. You ask Mackie. She knows, she tried to revive her.’

‘Er... quite a lot of women don’t wear underclothes,’ I said.

‘Is that a fact?’ She gave me an ironic look.

‘My blushing days are over.’

‘Well, do you or don’t you want any coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

She went out to the kitchen and I continued reading clippings, progressing from ‘no action on the death at Shellerton House’ to ‘Olympia’s father brings private prosecution’ and ‘Magistrates refer Nolan Everard case to Crown Court’. A sub judice silence then descended and the clippings stopped.

It was after a bunch of end-of-jumping-season statistics that I came across an oddity from a Reading paper published on a Friday in June.

‘Girl groom missing’, read the headline, and there was an accompanying photo of Tremayne, still looking cheerful.

Angela Brickell’s parents, like Olympia’s, were reported to be ‘distraught’.