Longshot

Chapter 7

The discovery made no impact on Shellerton on that Sunday because at first no one knew whose bones lay among the dead brambles and the dormant oaks.

The gamekeeper went home to his Sunday lunch and telephoned the local police after he’d eaten, feeling that as the bones were old it wouldn’t matter if they waited one hour longer.

In Tremayne’s house, when the toasts to the future Vickers had been drunk, Gareth showed Fiona a couple of the travel guides and Fiona in astonishment showed Harry. Nolan picked up Safari as if absent-mindedly and said that no one but a bloody fool would go hunting tigers in Africa.

‘There aren’t any tigers in Africa,’ Gareth said.

‘That’s right. He’d be a bloody fool.’

‘Oh... it’s a joke,’ Gareth said, obviously feeling that it was he who’d been made a fool of. ‘Very funny.’

Nolan, though the shortest man there, physically dominated the room, eclipsing even Tremayne. His strong animal vigour and powerful saturnine features seemed to charge the very air with static, as if his presence alone could generate sparks. One could see how Mackie had been struck by lightning. One could see how Olympia might have died by violent accident. One’s reactions to Nolan had little to do with reason, all with instinct.

Harry’s aunt was looking into Ice in a faintly superior way as if confronted with a manifestation of the lower orders.

‘How frightfully rugged,’ she said, her voice as languid as Harry’s but without the God-given amusement.

‘Er,’ Harry said to me. ‘I didn’t introduce you properly. I must present you to my aunt, Erica Goodhaven. She’s a writer.’

There was a subterranean flood of mischief in his eyes. Fiona glanced at me with a hint of a smile and I thought both of them looked as though I were about to be thrown to the lions for their entertainment. Anticipation of enjoyment, loud and clear.

‘Erica,’ Harry said, ‘John wrote these books.’

‘And a novel,’ Tremayne said defensively, coming to an aid I didn’t realise I needed. ‘It’s going to be published. And he’s writing my biography.’

‘A novel,’ Harry’s aunt said, in the same way as before. ‘Going to be published. How interesting. I, also, write novels. Under my unmarried name, Erica Upton.’

Thrown to a literary lion, I perceived. A real one, a lioness. Erica Upton’s five-star prize-winning reputation was for erudition, elegant syntax, esoteric backgrounds, elegiac characters and a profound understanding of incest.

‘Your aunt?’ I said to Harry.

‘By marriage.’

Tremayne refilled my glass with champagne as if I would need it and muttered under his breath, ‘She’ll eat you.’

From across the room she did look faintly predatory at that moment, though was otherwise a slender, intense-looking, grey-haired woman in a grey wool dress with flat shoes and no jewellery. A quintessential aunt, I thought; except that most people’s aunts weren’t Erica Upton.

‘What is your novel about? she enquired of me. Her voice was patronising but I didn’t mind that: she was entitled to it.

The others all waited with her to hear my answer. Incredible, I thought, that nine people in one room weren’t carrying on noisy separate conversations, as usually happened.

‘It’s about survival,’ I said politely.

Everyone listened. Everyone always listened to Erica Upton.

‘What sort of survival?’ she asked. ‘Medical? Economic? Creative?’

‘It’s about some travellers cut off by an earthquake. About how they coped. It’s called Long Way Home.’

‘How quaint,’ she said.

She wasn’t intending to be outright offensive, I thought. She seemed merely to know that her own work was on a summit I would never reach, and in that she was right. All the same I felt again the mild recklessness that I had on Touchy: even if I lacked confidence, relax and have a go.

‘My agent says,’ I said neutrally, ‘that Long Way Home is really about the spiritual consequences of deprivation and fear.’

She knew a gauntlet when she heard one. I saw the stiffening in her body and suspected it in her mind.

She said, ‘You are too young to write with authority of spiritual consequences. Too young for your soul to have been tempered. Too young to have learned the intensity of understanding that comes only through deep adversity.’

Was that true, I wondered? How old was old enough?

I said, ‘Shouldn’t contentment be allowed its insights?’

‘It has none. Insight grows best on stony ground. Unless you have suffered or are poor or can tap into melancholy, you have defective perception.’

I rolled with that one. Sought for a response.

‘I am poor,’ I said. ‘Well, fairly. Poor enough to perceive that poverty is the enemy of moral strength.’

She peered at me as if measuring a prey for the pounce.

‘You are a lightweight person,’ she said, ‘if you have no conception of the moral strength of redemption and atonement in penury.’

I swallowed. ‘I don’t seek sainthood. I seek insight through a combination of imagination and common sense.’

‘You are not a serious writer.’ A dire accusation; her worst.

‘I write to entertain,’ I said.

‘I,’ she said simply, ‘write to enlighten.’

I could find no possible answer. I said wryly, with a bow, ‘I am defeated.’

She laughed with pleasure, her muscles loosening. The lion had devoured the sacrifice and all was well. She turned away to begin talking to Fiona, and Harry made his way to my side, watching me dispatch my champagne with a gulp.

‘You didn’t do too badly,’ he said. ‘Nice brisk duel.’

‘She ran me through.’

‘Oh yes. Never mind. Good sport, though.’

‘You set it up.’

He grinned. ‘She phoned this morning. She comes occasionally for lunch, so I told her to beetle over. Couldn’t resist it.’

‘What a pal.’

‘Be honest. You enjoyed it.’

I sighed. ‘She outguns me by far.’

‘She’s more than twice your age.’

‘That makes it worse.’

‘Seriously,’ he said, as if he thought my ego needed patching, ‘these survival guides are pretty good. Do you mind if we take a few of them home?’

‘They’re Tremayne’s and Gareth’s, really.’

‘I’ll ask them, then.’ He looked at me shrewdly. ‘Nothing wrong with your courage, is there?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You took her on. You didn’t have to.’

I half laughed. ‘My agent calls it impulsive behaviour. He says it will kill me, one day.’

‘You’re older than you look,’ he said cryptically, and went off to talk to Tremayne.

Mackie, her drink all but untouched, took his place as kind blotter of bleeding feelings.

‘It’s not fair of her to call you lightweight,’ she said. ‘Harry shouldn’t have brought her. I know she’s highly revered but she can make people cry. I’ve seen her do it.’

‘My eyes are dry,’ I said. ‘Are you drinking that champagne?’

‘I’d better not, I suppose.’

‘Care to give it to the walking wounded?’

She smiled her brilliant smile and we exchanged glasses.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I didn’t understand all Erica was saying.’

‘She was saying she’s cleverer than me.’

‘I.’

‘I,’ I agreed.

‘I’ll bet she can’t catch people who’re fainting off horses.’

Mackie was, as Tremayne had said, a sweet young woman.

Angela Brickell’s remains lay on the Quillersedge Estate at the western edge of the Chilterns.

The Quillersedge gamekeeper arranged on the telephone for the local police to collect him from his cottage on the estate and drive as near to the bones as possible on the estate’s private roads. From there, everyone would have to go through the woods on foot.

The few policemen on duty on Sunday afternoon thought of cold wet undergrowth and shivered.

In Tremayne’s house, the informal party lingered cheerfully. Fiona and Mackie sat on a sofa, silver-blond head beside dark red-brown, talking about Mackie’s baby. Nolan discussed with Tremayne the horses Nolan hoped still to be riding when racing resumed. Gareth handed round potato crisps while eating most of them himself and Perkin read aloud how to return safely from getting lost.

‘ “Go downhill, not up,” ’ he read. ‘ “People live in valleys. Follow streams in their flow direction. People live beside rivers.” I can’t imagine I’ll ever need this advice. I steer clear of jungles.’

‘You could need it in the Lake District,’ I said mildly.

‘I don’t like walking, period.’

Harry said, ‘John, Erica wants to know why you’ve ignored mountain climbing in your guides.’

‘Never got round to it,’ I said, ‘and there are dozens of mountain climbing books already.’

Erica, the sparkle of victory still in her eyes, asked who was publishing my novel. When I told her she raised her eyebrows thoughtfully and made no disparaging remark.

‘Good publishers, aren’t they?’ Harry asked, his lips twitching.

‘Reputable,’ she allowed.

Fiona, getting to her feet, began to say goodbyes, chiefly with kisses. Gareth ducked his but she stopped beside me and put her cheek on mine.

‘How long are you staying?’ she asked.

Tremayne answered for me forthrightly. ‘Three more weeks. Then we’ll see.’

‘We’ll fix a dinner,’ Fiona said. ‘Come along, Nolan. Ready, Erica? Love you, Mackie, take care of yourself.’

When they’d gone Mackie and Perkin floated off home on cloud nine and Tremayne and I went round collecting glasses and stacking them in the dishwasher.

Gareth said, ‘If we can have beef sandwich pie again, I’ll make it for lunch.’

At about the time we finally ate the pie, two policemen and the gamekeeper reached the pathetic collection of bones and set nemesis in motion. They tied ropes to trees to ring and isolate the area and radioed for more instructions. Slowly the information percolated upwards until it reached Detective Chief Inspector Doone, Thames Valley Police, who was sleeping off his Yorkshire pudding.

He decided, as daylight would die within the hour, that first thing in the morning he would assemble and take a pathologist for an on-site examination and a photographer for the record. He believed the bones would prove to belong to one of the hundreds of teenagers who had infested his patch with all-night parties the summer before. Three others had died on him from drugs.

In Tremayne’s house Gareth and I went up to my bedroom because he wanted to see the survival kit that he knew I’d brought with me.

‘Is it just like the ones in the books?’ he asked as I brought out a black waterproof pouch that one could wear round one’s waist.

‘No, not entirely.’ I paused. ‘I have three survival kits at present. One small one for taking with me all the time. This one here for longer walks and difficult areas. And one that I didn’t bring, which is full camping survival gear for going out into the wilds. That’s a back-pack on a frame.’

‘I wish I could see it,’ Gareth said wistfully.

‘Well, one day, you never know.’

‘I’ll hold you to it.’

‘I’ll show you the smallest kit first,’ I said, ‘but you’ll have to run down and get it. It’s in my ski-suit jacket pocket in the cloakroom.’

He went willingly but presently returned doubtfully with a flat tin, smaller than a paperback book, held shut with black insulating tape.

‘Is this it?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Open it carefully.’

He did as I said, laying out the contents on the white counterpane on the bed and reciting them aloud.

‘Two match-books, a bit of candle, a little coil of thin wire, a piece of jagged wire, some fishhooks, a small pencil and piece of paper, needles and thread, two sticking plasters and a plastic bag folded up small and held by a paperclip.’ He looked disappointed. ‘You couldn’t do much with those.’

‘Just light a fire, cut wood, catch food, collect water, make a map and sew up wounds. That jagged wire is a flexible saw.’

His mouth opened.

‘Then I always carry two things on my belt.’ I unstrapped it and showed it to him. ‘The belt itself has a zipped pocket all along the inside where you can keep money. What’s in there at the moment is your father’s. I don’t often carry a wallet. Those other things on the belt, one is a knife, one is a multi-purpose survival tool.’

‘Can I look?’

‘Yes, sure.’

The knife, in a black canvas sheath with a flap fastened by Velcro, was a strong folding knife with a cunningly serrated blade, very sharp indeed, nine inches overall when open, only five when closed. Gareth opened it until it locked with a snap and stood looking at it in surprise.

‘That’s some knife,’ he said. ‘Were you wearing it while we were having drinks?’

‘All the time. It weighs only four and a half ounces, about one eighth of a kilo. Weight’s important too, don’t forget. Always travel as light as you can if you have to carry everything.’

He opened the other object slotted onto the belt, a small leather case about three inches by two and a half, which contained a flat metal rectangular object a shade smaller in dimension: total weight altogether, three and a half ounces.

‘What’s this?’ he asked, taking it out onto his hand. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’

‘I carry that instead of an ordinary penknife. It has a blade slotted in one side and scissors in the other. That little round thing is a magnifying glass for starting fires if there’s any sun. With those other odd-shaped edges you can make holes in a tin of food, open crown cork bottles, screw in screws, file your nails and sharpen knives. The sides have inches and centimetres marked like a ruler, and the back of it all is polished like a mirror for signalling.’

‘Wow.’ He turned it over and looked at his own face. ‘It’s really brill.’

He began to pack all the small things back into the flat tin and remarked that fishhooks wouldn’t be much good away from rivers.

‘You can catch birds on fishhooks. They take bait like fish.’

He stared at me. ‘Have you eaten birds?’

‘Chickens are birds.’

‘Well, ordinary birds?’

‘Pigeons? Four and twenty blackbirds? You eat anything if you’re hungry enough. All our ancestors lived on whatever they could get hold of. It was normal, once.’

Normal for him was a freezer full of pizzas. He had no idea what it was like to be primevally alone with nature, and it was unlikely he would ever find out, for all his present interest.

I’d spent a month once on an island without any kit or anything modern at all, knowing only that there was water and that I would be collected at the end, and even with those certainties and all the craft I’d ever learned, I’d had a hard job lasting out; and it was then that I’d discovered for myself that survival was a matter of mind rather than body.

The travel agency, on my urgent advice, had decided against offering holidays of that sort.

‘What about a group?’ they said. ‘Not one alone.’

‘A group eats more,’ I pointed out. ‘The tensions are terrible. You’d have a murder.’

‘All right. Full camping kit then, with essential stores and radios.’

‘And choose the leader before they set out.’

Even so, few of the ‘marooned’ holidays had passed off without trouble, and in the end the agency had abandoned them.

Gareth replaced the coil of fine wire in the tin and said, ‘I suppose this wire is for all the traps in the books?’

‘Only the simplest ones.’

‘Some of the traps are really sneaky.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘There you are, a harmless rabbit, hopping along about your business and you don’t see the wire hidden in dead leaves and you trip over it and suddenly pow! you’re all tied up in a net or squashed under logs. Have you done all that?’

‘Yes, lots of times.’

‘I like the idea of the bow and arrows better,’ he said.

‘Yes, well, I put in the instructions of how to make them effectively because our ancestors had them, but it’s not easy to hit anything if it’s moving. Impossible, if it’s small. It’s not the same as using a custom-made bow shooting metal arrows at a nice round stationary target, like in archery competitions. I’ve always preferred traps.’

‘Didn’t you ever hit anything with a bow and arrow?’

I smiled. ‘I shot an apple off a tree in our garden once when I was small because I was only allowed to eat windfalls, and there weren’t any. Bad luck that my mother was looking out of the window.’

‘Mothers!’

‘Tremayne says you see yours sometimes.’

‘Yes, I do.’ He glanced up at me quickly and down again. ‘Did Dad tell you my mother isn’t Perkin’s mother?’

‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘I guess we haven’t come to that bit yet’

‘Perkin and Jane’s mother died yonks ago. Jane’s my sister — well, half-sister really. She’s married to a French trainer and they live in Chantilly, which is a sort of French Newmarket. It’s good fun, staying with Jane. I go summers. Couple of weeks.’

‘Do you speak French?’

He grinned. ‘Some. I always seem to come home just when I’m getting the hang of it. What about you?’

‘French a bit, but Spanish more, only I’m rusty in both now too.’

He nodded and fiddled for a bit putting the insulating tape back on the tin.

I watched him, and in the end he said, ‘My mother’s on television quite a lot. That’s where Dad means I see her.’

‘Television! Is she an actress?’

‘No. She cooks. She does one of those afternoon programmes sometimes.’

‘A cook?’ I could hardly believe it. ‘But your father doesn’t care about food.’

‘Yeah, that’s what he says, but he’s been eating what you’ve made, hasn’t he? But I think she used to drive him barmy always inventing weird fancy things he didn’t like. I didn’t care that much except that I never got what I liked either, so when she left us we sort of relapsed into what we did like, and we stayed like that. Only recently I’ve been wishing I could make custard and I tried but I burned the milk and it tasted awful. Did you know you could burn milk? So, anyway, she’s married to someone else now. I don’t like him though. I don’t bother with them much.’

He sounded as if he’d said all he wanted to on the subject and seemed relieved to go back to simple things like staying alive, asking to see inside kit number two, the black pouch.

‘You’re not bored?’ I said.

‘Can’t wait.’

I handed it to him and let him open its three zipped and velcroed pockets, to lay the contents again on the bed. Although the pouch itself was waterproof, almost every item inside it was further wrapped separately in a small plastic bag, fastened with a twist tie; safe from sand and insects. Gareth undid and emptied some of the bags and frowned over the contents.

‘Explain what they are,’ he said. ‘I mean, twenty matchbooks are for lighting fires, right, so what are the cotton wool balls doing with them?’

‘They burn well. They set fire to dry leaves.’

‘Oh. The candle is for light, right?’

‘And to help light fires. And wax is useful for a lot of things.’

‘What’s this?’ He pointed to a short fat spool of thin yellow thread.

‘That’s kevlar fibre. It’s a sort of plastic, strong as steel. Six hundred yards of it. You can make nets of it, tie anything, fish with it, twist it into fine unbreakable rope. I didn’t come across it in time to put in the books.’

‘And this? This little jar of whitish liquid packed with the sawn-off paintbrush?’

I smiled. ‘That’s in the Wilderness book. It’s luminous paint.’

He stared.

‘Well,’ I said reasonably, ‘if you have a camp and you want to leave it to go and look for food or firewood, you want to be able to find your way back again, don’t you? Essential. So as you go, you paint a slash of this on a tree trunk or a rock, always making sure you can see one slash from another, and then you can find your way back even in the dark.’

‘Cool,’ he said.

‘That little oblong metal thing with the handle,’ I said, ‘that’s a powerful magnet. Useful but not essential. Good for retrieving fishhooks if you lose them in the water. You tie the magnet on a string and dangle it. Fishhooks are precious.’

He held up a small, cylindrical transparent plastic container, one of about six in the pouch. ‘More fishhooks in here,’ he said. ‘Isn’t this what films come in? I thought they were black.’

‘Fuji films come in these clear cases. As you can see what’s inside, I use them all the time. They weigh nothing. They shut tight. They’re everything-proof. Perfect. These other cases contain more fishhooks, needles and thread, safety-pins, aspirins, water purifying tablets, things like that.’

‘What’s this knobbly-looking object? Oh, it’s a telescope!’ He laughed and weighed it in his hand.

‘Two ounces,’ I said, ‘but eight by twenty magnification.’

He passed over as mundane a torch that was also a ball-point pen, the light in the tip for writing, and wasn’t enthralled by a whistle, a Post-it pad, or a thick folded wad of aluminium foil. (‘For wrapping food to cook in the embers,’ I said.) What really fascinated him was a tiny blow-torch which shot out a fierce blue flame hot enough to melt solder.

‘Cool,’ he said again. ‘That’s really ace.’

‘Infallible for lighting fires,’ I said, ‘as long as the butane lasts.’

‘You said in the books that fire comes first.’

I nodded. ‘A fire makes you feel better. Less alone. And you need fire for boiling river water to make it OK to drink, and for cooking, of course. And signalling where you are, if people are looking for you.’

‘And to keep warm.’

‘That too.’

Gareth had come to the last thing, a pair of leather gloves, which he thought were sissy.

‘They give your hands almost double grip,’ I said. ‘They save you from cuts and scratches. And apart from that they’re invaluable for collecting stinging nettles.’

‘I’d hate to collect stinging nettles.’

‘No, you wouldn’t. If you boil the leaves they’re not bad to eat, but the best things are the stalks. Incredibly stringy. You can thrash them until they’re supple enough for lashing branches together, for making shelters and also racks to keep things off the ground away from damp and animals.’

‘You know so much,’ he said.

‘I went camping in my cradle. Literally.’

He methodically packed everything back as he’d found it and asked what it weighed altogether.

‘About two pounds. Less than a kilo.’

A thought struck him. ‘You haven’t got a compass!’

‘It’s not in there,’ I agreed. I opened a drawer in the chest of drawers and found it for him: a slim liquid-filled compass set in a clear oblong of plastic which had inch and centimetre measures along the sides. I showed him how it aligned with maps and made setting a course relatively easy, and told him I always carried it in my shirt pocket to have it handy.

‘But it was in the drawer,’ he objected.

‘I’m not likely to get lost in Shellerton.’

‘You could up on the Downs,’ he said seriously.

I doubted it, but said I would carry it to please him, which earned the sideways look it deserved.

Putting everything on top of the chest of drawers I reflected how little time I’d spent in that room amid the mismatched furniture and faded fabrics. I hadn’t once felt like retreating to be alone there, though for one pretty accustomed to solitude it was odd to find myself living in the lives of all these people, as if I’d stepped into a play that was already in progress and been given a walk-on part in the action. I would spend another three weeks there and exit, and the play would go on without me as if I hadn’t been onstage at all. Meanwhile, I felt drawn in and interested and unwilling to miss any scene.

‘This room used to be Perkin’s,’ Gareth observed, as if catching a swirl of my thought. ‘He took all his own stuff with him when they divided the house. It used to be terrif in here.’ He shrugged. ‘You want to see my room?’

‘I’d love to.’

He nodded and led the way. He and I shared the bathroom which lay between us, and along the hallway lay Tremayne’s suite into which he was liable to vanish with a brisk slam of the door.

Gareth’s room was all pre-adolescent. He slept on a platform with a pull-out desk below and there were a good many white space-age fitments liberally plastered with posters of pop stars and sportsmen. Prized objects filled shelves. Clothes adorned the floor.

I murmured something encouraging but he swept his lair with a disparaging scrutiny and said he was going to do the whole thing over, Dad willing, in the summer.

‘Dad got this room done for me after Mum left, and it was top ace at the time. Guess I’m getting too old for it now.’

‘Life’s like that,’ I said.

‘Always?’

‘It looks like it.’

He nodded as if he’d already discovered that changes were inevitable and not always bad, and in undemanding accord we shut the door on his passing phase and went down to the family room, where we found Tremayne asleep.

Gareth retreated without disturbing him and beckoned me to follow him through to the central hall. There he walked across and knocked briefly on Mackie and Perkin’s door, which after an interval was opened slowly by Perkin.

‘Can we come in for five mins?’ Gareth said. ‘Dad’s asleep in his chair. You know what he’s like if I wake him.’

Perkin yawned and opened his door wider though without excessive willingness, particularly on my account. He led the way into his sitting-room where it was clear he and Mackie had been spending a lazy afternoon reading the Sunday newspapers.

Mackie started to get up when she saw me and then relaxed again as if to say I was now family, not a visitor, and could fend for myself. Perkin told Gareth there was Coke in the fridge if he wanted some. Gareth didn’t.

I remembered with a small jerk that it was in this room, Perkin and Mackie’s sitting-room, that Olympia had died. I couldn’t help but glance around wondering just where it had happened; where Mackie and Henry had found Nolan standing over the girl without underclothes in a scarlet dress, with Lewis — drunk or not — in a chair.

There was nothing left of that violent scene now in the pleasant big room, no residual shudder in the comfortable atmosphere, no regrets or grief. The trial was over, Nolan was free, Olympia was ashes.

Gareth, unconcerned, asked Perkin. ‘Can I show John your workroom?’

‘Don’t touch anything. I mean anything.’

‘Cross my heart.’

With me still obediently in tow he crossed Perkin and Mackie’s inner hall and opened a door which led into a completely different world, one incredibly fragrant with the scent of untreated wood.

The room where Perkin created his future antiques was of generous size, like all the rooms in the entire big house, but also no larger than the others. It was extremely tidy, which in a way I wouldn’t have expected, with a polished wood-block floor swept spotless, not a shaving or speck of sawdust in sight.

When I commented on it Gareth said it was always like that. Perkin would use one tool at a time and put it away before he used another. Chisels, spokeshaves, things like that.

‘Dead methodical,’ Gareth said. ‘Very fussy.’

There was surprisingly a gas cooker standing against one wall. ‘He heats glue on that,’ Gareth said, seeing me looking, ‘and other sorts of muck like linseed oil.’ He pointed across the room. ‘That’s his lathe, that’s his saw-bench, that’s his sanding machine. I haven’t seen him working much. He doesn’t like people watching him, says it interferes with the feeling for what he’s doing.’

Gareth’s voice held disbelief, but I thought if I had to write with people watching I’d get nothing worthwhile done either.

‘What’s he making at the moment?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know.’

He swanned round the room looking at sheets of veneer stacked against a wall and at little orderly piles of square-cut lengths from exotic black to golden walnut. ‘He makes legs with those,’ Gareth said, pointing.

He stopped by a long solid worktop like a butcher’s block and said to me over his shoulder, ‘I should think he’s just started on this.’

I went across to look and saw a pencil drawing of a display cabinet of sharply spare and unusual lines, a piece designed to draw the eye to its contents, not itself.

The drawing was held down by two blocks of wood, one, I thought, cherry, the other bleached oak, though I was better at living trees than dead.

‘He often slats one sort of wood into the other,’ Gareth said. ‘Makes a sort of stripe. His things don’t actually look bad. People buy them all the time.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.

‘Aren’t you?’ He seemed pleased, as if he’d been afraid I wouldn’t be impressed, but I was, considerably.

As we turned to leave I said, ‘Was it in their sitting-room that that poor girl died?’

‘Gruesome,’ Gareth said, nodding. ‘I didn’t see her. Perkin did, though. He went in just after Mackie and Harry and found it all happening. And, I mean, disgusting... there was a mess on the carpet where she’d been lying and by the time they were allowed to clean it up, they couldn’t. So they got a new carpet from insurance but Perkin acts as if the mess is still there and he’s moved a sofa to cover the place. Bonkers, I think.’

I thought I might easily have done the same. Whoever would want to walk every day over a deathbed? We went back to the sitting-room and one could see, if one knew, just which of the three chintz-covered sofas wasn’t in a logical place.

We stayed only a short while before returning to the family room where Tremayne was safely awake and yawning, getting ready to walk round his yard at evening stables. He invited me to go with him, which I did with pleasure, and afterwards I made cauliflower cheese for supper which Tremayne ate without a tremor.

When he went out at bedtime for a last look round, he came back blowing on his hands cheerfully and smiling broadly.

‘It’s thawing,’ he said. ‘Everything’s dripping. Thank God.’

The world indeed turned from white to green during the night, bringing renewed life to Shellerton and racing.

Out in the melting woodlands, Angela Brickell spent her last night in the quiet undergrowth among the small scavenging creatures that had blessedly cleaned her bones. She was without odour and without horror, weather-scrubbed, long gone into everlasting peace.