Longshot

by Dick Francis

  “Do you play them off against each other on purpose?” I asked.

  Tremayne gave me a flickering glance. “I do the best for my owners,” he said. “Like a drink?”

  It appeared he had arranged to meet the owners of Telebiddy in the Club bar and when we arrived they were already celebrating with a bottle of champagne. Nolan, too, was there, being incredibly nice to them but without financial results.

  When the two women had left in a state of euphoria, Nolan asked belligerently whether Tremayne had told them to give him a present.

  “I suggested it,” Tremayne said calmly, “but you’ll be lucky. Better settle for what you took from the bookmakers yourself.”

  “Damn little,” Nolan said, or words to that effect, “and the bloodsucking lawyers will get the lot.” He shouldered his way out of the bar in self-righteous outrage, which seemed to be his uppermost state of mind oftener than not.

  With noncommittal half-lowered eyelids Tremayne watched him go, then transferred his gaze to me.

  “Well,” he asked, “what have you learned?”

  “What you intended me to, I expect.”

  He smiled. “And a bit more than I intended. I’ve noticed you do that all the time.” With a contented sigh he put down his empty glass. “Two winners,” he said. “A better-than-average day at the races. Let’s go home.”

  AT ABOUT THE time we were driving home with Tremayne’s winnings safely stowed in his own pockets, not mine, Detective Chief Inspector Doone was poring over the increased pickings from the woodland.

  The detective chief inspector could be said to be purring. Among some insignificant long-rusted detritus lay the star of the whole collection, a woman’s handbag. Total satisfaction had been denied him, as the prize had been torn open on one side, probably by a dog, whose toothmarks still showed, so that most of the contents had been lost. All the same, he was left with a shoulder strap, a corroded buckle and at least half of a brown plastic school-style bag which still held, in an intact inner zipped pocket, a small mirror and a folded photograph frame.

  With careful movements Doone opened the frame and found inside, waterstained along one edge but otherwise sharply clear, a colored snapshot of a man standing beside a horse.

  Disappointed that there was still no easy identification of the handbag’s past owner, Doone took a telephone call from the pathologist.

  “You were asking about teeth,” the pathologist said. “The dental records you gave me are definitely not those of our bones. Our girl had good teeth. One or two missing, but no fillings. Sorry.”

  Doone’s disappointment deepened. The politician’s daughter had just been ruled out. He mentally reviewed his lists again, skipped the prostitutes and provisionally paused on Angela Brickell, stable lad. Angela Brickell ... horse.

  THE BOMBSHELL BURST on Shellerton on Thursday.

  Tremayne was upstairs showering and dressing before going to Towcester races when the doorbell rang. Dee-Dee went to answer it and presently came into the dining room looking mystified.

  “It’s two men,” she said. “They say they’re policemen. They flashed some sort of identity cards, but they won’t say what they want. I’ve put them in the family room until Tremayne comes down. Go and keep an eye on them, would you mind?”

  “Sure,” I said, already on the move.

  “Thanks,” she said, returning to the office. “Whatever they want, it looks boring.”

  I could see why she thought so. The two men might have invented the word gray, so characterless did they appear at first sight. Ultimate plainclothes, I thought.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “Are you Tremayne Vickers?” one of them asked.

  “No. He’ll be down soon. Can I help?”

  “No, thank you, sir. Can you fetch him?”

  “He’s in the shower.”

  The policeman raised his eyebrows. Trainers, however, didn’t shower before morning exercise, they showered after, before going racing. That was Tremayne’s habit, anyway. Dee-Dee had told me.

  “He’s been up since six,” I said.

  The policeman’s eyes widened, as if I’d read his mind. “I am Detective Chief Inspector Doone, Thames Valley Police,” he said. “This is Detective Constable Rich.”

  “How do you do,” I said politely. “I’m John Kendall. Would you care to sit down?”

  They perched gingerly on chairs and said no to an offer of coffee.

  “Will he be long, sir?” Doone asked. “We must see him soon.”

  “No, not long.”

  Doone, on further inspection, appeared to be about fifty, with gray-dusted light-brown hair and a heavy medium-brown mustache. He had light-brown eyes, big bony hands and, as we all slowly discovered, a habit of talking a lot in a light Berkshire accent.

  This chattiness wasn’t at all apparent in the first ten minutes before Tremayne came downstairs buttoning the blue-and-white-striped cuffs of his shirt and carrying his jacket gripped between forearm and chest.

  ‘Hello,” he said, “who’s this?”

  Dee-Dee appeared behind him, apparently to tell him, but Doone introduced himself before either she or I could do so.

  “Police?” Tremayne said, unworried. “What about?”

  “We’d like to speak to you alone, sir.”

  “What? Oh, very well.”

  He asked me with his eyes to leave with Dee-Dee, shutting the door behind us. I returned to the dining room but presently heard the family-room door open and Tremayne’s voice calling.

  “John, come back here, would you.”

  I went back. Doone was protesting about my presence, saying it was unnecessary and inadvisable.

  Tremayne said stubbornly, “I want him to hear it. Will you repeat what you said?”

  Doone shrugged. “I came to inform Mr. Vickers that some remains have been found which may prove to be those of a young woman who was once employed here.”

  “Angela Brickell,” Tremayne said resignedly.

  “Oh.”

  “What does ‘Oh’ mean, sir?” Doone inquired sharply.

  “It means just oh,” I said. “Poor girl. Everyone thought she’d just done a bunk.”

  “They have a photograph,” Tremayne said. “They’re trying to identify the man.” He turned to Doone. “Show it to him.” He nodded in my direction. “Don’t take my word for it.”

  Unwillingly Doone handed me a photograph enclosed in a plastic holder.

  “Do you know this man, sir?” he asked.

  I glanced at Tremayne, who was not looking concerned.

  “You may as well tell him,” he said.

  “Harry Goodhaven?”

  Tremayne nodded. “That’s Fiona’s horse, Chickweed, the one they said was doped.”

  “How can you recognize a horse?” Doone asked.

  Tremayne stared at him. “Horses have faces, like people. I’d know Chickweed anywhere. He’s still here, out in the yard.”

  “Who is this man, this Harry Goodhaven?” Doone demanded.

  “The husband of the owner of the horse.”

  “Why would Angela Brickell be carrying his photograph?”

  “She wasn’t,” Tremayne said. “Well, I suppose she was, but it was the horse’s photograph she was carrying. She looked after it.”

  Doone looked completely unconvinced.

  “To a lad,” I said, “the horses they look after are like children. They love them. They defend them. It makes sense that she carried Chickweed’s picture.”

  Tremayne glanced at me with half-stifled surprise, but I’d been listening to the lads for a week.

  “What John says,” Tremayne nodded, “is absolutely true.”

  The attendant policeman, Constable Rich, was all the time taking notes, though not at high speed: not shorthand.

  Doone said, “Sir, can you give me the address of this Harry Goodhaven?”

  With slight irritation Tremayne answered, “This Harry Goodhaven, as you call him, is Mr. Henry Go
odhaven, who owns the Manor House, Shellerton.”

  Doone very nearly said “Oh” in his turn, and made a visible readjustment in his mind.

  “I’m already running late,” Tremayne said, making moves to leave.

  “But, sir ...”

  “Stay as long as you like,” Tremayne said, going. “Talk to John, talk to my secretary, talk to whoever you want.”

  “I don’t think you understand, sir,” Doone said with a touch of desperation. “Angela Brickell was strangled.”

  “What?” Tremayne stopped dead, stunned. “I thought you said ...”

  “I said we’d found some remains. Now that you’ve recognized the ... er ... horse, sir, we’re pretty sure of her identity. Everything else fits: height, age, possible time of death. And, sir”—he hesitated briefly as if to summon courage—“only last week, sir, we had a Crown Court case about another young woman who was strangled ... strangled here in this house.”

  There was silence.

  Tremayne said finally, “There can’t be any connection. The death that occurred in this house was an accident, whatever the jury thought.”

  Doone said doggedly, “Did Mr. Nolan Everard have any connections with Angela Brickell?”

  “Yes, of course he did. He rides Chickweed, the horse in that photograph. He saw Angela Brickell quite often in the course of her work.” He paused for thought. “Where did you say her ... remains ... were found?”

  “I don’t think I said, sir.”

  “Well, where?”

  Doone said, “All in good time, sir,” a shade uncomfortably, and it occurred to me that he was hoping someone would know, and anyone who knew would very likely have strangled her.

  “Poor girl,” Tremayne said. “But all the same, Chief Inspector, I do now have to go to the races. Stay as long as you like, ask whatever you want. John here will explain to my assistant and head lad. John, tell Mackie and Bob what’s happened, will you? Phone the car if you need me. Right, I’m off.”

  He continued purposefully and at good speed on his way and one could see and hear the Volvo start up and depart. In some bemusement Doone watched him go: his first taste of the difficulty of deflecting Tremayne from a chosen course.

  “Well, Chief Inspector,” I said neutrally, “where do you want to begin?”

  “Your name, sir?”

  I gave it. He was a good deal more confident with me, I noticed: I didn’t have a personality that overshadowed his own.

  “And your ... er ... position here?”

  “I’m writing a history of the stables.”

  He seemed vaguely surprised that anyone should be engaged on such an enterprise and said lamely, “Very interesting, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “And ... er ... did you know the deceased?”

  “Angela Brickell? No, I didn’t. She vanished last summer, I believe, and I’ve been here only a short time, roughly ten days.”

  “But you knew about her, sir,” he said shrewdly.

  “Let me show you how I knew,” I said. “Come and look.”

  I led him into the dining room and showed him the piles of clippings, explaining they were the raw materials of my future book.

  “This is my workroom,” I said. “Somewhere in that pile of cuttings,” I pointed, “is an account of Angela Brickell’s disappearance. That’s how I know about her, and that’s all I know. No one has mentioned her outside of this room since I’ve been here.”

  He looked through the past year’s cuttings and found the pieces about the girl. He nodded a few times and laid them back carefully where he’d found them, and seemed reassured about me personally. I got the first hint of the garrulity to come.

  “Well, sir,” he said, relaxing, “you can start introducing me to all the people here and explain why I’m asking questions and, as I’ve found on other cases when only remains are found that people tend to think the worst and imagine all sorts of horrors so that it makes them feel sick and wastes a good deal of time altogether, I’ll tell you, sir, and you can pass it on, that what was found was bones, sir, quite clean and no smell, nothing horrible, you can assure people of that.”

  “Thank you,” I said, a shade numbly.

  “Animals and insects had cleaned her, you see.”

  “Don’t you think that fact alone will make people feel sick?”

  “Then don’t stress it, sir.”

  “No.”

  “We have her clothes and shoes and her handbag and lipstick back at the police station ... they were scattered around her and I’ve had my men searching ...” He stopped, not telling me then where the search had occurred; except that if she’d been scavenged it had to have been out of doors. Which for a stable girl, in a way, made sense.

  “And, if you don’t mind, sir, will you please just tell everyone she’s been found, not that she was strangled.”

  “How do you know that she was strangled if there’s nothing much left?”

  “The hyoid bone, sir. In the throat. Fractured. Only a direct blow or manual pressure does that. Fingers, usually, from behind.”

  “Oh, I see. All right, I’ll leave it to you. We’d better start with Mr. Vickers’s secretary, Dee-Dee.”

  I steered him into the office and introduced him. Detective Constable Rich followed everywhere like a shadow, a non-speaking taker of notes. I explained to Dee-Dee that Angela Brickell had probably been found.

  “Oh, good,” she said spontaneously, and then, seeing it wasn’t good at all, “Oh, dear.”

  Doone asked to use the telephone, Dee-Dee at once assenting. Doone called his people back at base.

  “Mr. Vickers identified the horse as one that Angela Brickell tended in his stable, and the man as the owner of the horse, or rather the owner’s husband. I’d say it’s fairly sure we have Angela Brickell in the mortuary. Can you arrange to send round a woman police constable to her parents? They live out Wokingham way. The address is in my office. Do it pronto. We don’t want anyone from Shellerton upsetting them first. Break it to them kindly, see? Ask if they could recognize any clothes of hers, or handbag. Ask Mollie to go to them, if she’s on duty. She makes it more bearable for people. She mops up their grief. Get Mollie. Tell her to take another constable with her if she wants.”

  He listened for a moment or two and put down the receiver.

  “The poor lass has been dead six months or more,” he said to Dee-Dee. “All that’s left is sweet clean bones.”

  Dee-Dee looked as if that thought were sick-making enough, but I could see that Doone’s rough humanity would comfort in the end. He was like a stubby-fingered surgeon, I thought: delicate in his handiwork against the odds.

  He asked Dee-Dee if she knew of any reason for Angela Brickell’s disappearance. Had the girl been unhappy? Having rows with a boyfriend?

  “I’ve no idea, We didn’t find out until after she’d gone that she must have given chocolate to Chickweed. Stupid thing to do.”

  Doone looked lost. I explained about the theobromine. “That’s in those clippings, too,” I said.

  “We found some chocolate bar wrappers with the lass,” Doone said. “No chocolate. Is that what was meant in our notes by ‘possibly doped a horse in her charge’?”

  “Spot on,” I said.

  “Chocolate!” he said disgustedly. “Not worth dying for.”

  I said, enlightened, “Were you looking for a big conspiracy? A doping ring?”

  “Have to consider everything.”

  Dee-Dee said positively, “Angela Brickell wouldn’t have been in a doping ring. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Doone didn’t pursue it but said he’d like to talk to the rest of the stable staff, asking Dee-Dee meanwhile not to break the news to anyone else as he would prefer to do it himself. Also he didn’t want anyone springing the tragedy prematurely onto the poor parents.

  “Surely I can tell Fiona,” she protested.

  “Who’s Fiona?” He frowned, perhaps trying to re
member.

  “Fiona Goodhaven, who owns Chickweed.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, not her either. Especially not her. I like to get people’s first thoughts, first impressions, not hear what they think after they’ve spent hours discussing something with all their friends. First thoughts are dearer and more valuable, I’ve found.”

  He said it with more persuasion than command, with the result that Dee-Dee agreed to stay off the grapevine. She didn’t ask how the girl had died. If she realized Doone’s remarks best fitted a murder scenario, she didn’t say so. Perhaps she simply shied away from having to know.

  Doone asked to be taken out to the stables. On the way I asked him to remember, if he met Mackie, Tremayne’s daughter-in-law and assistant trainer, that she was newly pregnant.

  He gave me a sharp glance.

  “You’re considerate,” I said mildly. “I thought you might want to modify the shocks.”

  He looked disconcerted but made no promise either way and, as it happened, by the time we reached the yard, Mackie had gone home and Bob Watson was alone there, beavering away with saw, hammer and nails, making a new saddle horse to hold the saddles in the tack room. We found him outside the tack-room door, not too pleased to be interrupted.

  I introduced Bob to Doone, Doone to Bob. Doone told him that some human remains discovered by chance were thought to be those of Angela Brickell.

  “No!” Bob said. “Straight up? Poor little bitch. What did she do, fall down a quarry?” He looked absentmindedly at a piece of wood he held, as if he’d temporarily forgotten its purpose.

  “Why should you say that, sir?” Doone asked attentively.

  “Manner of speaking,” Bob said, shrugging. “I always thought she’d just scarpered. The guv’nor swore she’d given Chickweed chocolate, but I reckon she didn’t. I mean, we all know you mustn’t. Anyway, who found her? Where did she go?”

  “She was found by chance,” Doone said again. “Was she unhappy over a boyfriend?”

  “Not that I know of. But there’s twenty lads and girls here, and they come and go all the time. Truth to tell, I can’t remember much about her, except she was sexy. Ask Mrs. Goodhaven, she was always kind to her. Ask the other girls here, some of them lived in a hostel with her. Why do you want to know about a boyfriend? She didn’t take a high jump, did she? Is that what she did?”