Longshot

by Dick Francis

  “Where were you on that day?” I asked. “I mean you might have a perfect alibi.”

  “I might have,” he said, “but I don’t know where I was. Could you say for certain what you were doing on the Tuesday afternoon of the second week of June last year?”

  “Not for sure,” I said.

  “If it had been the third week,” Harry said, “we’d have been at Ascot races. Royal Ascot. Tarted up in top hats and things.”

  “We keep a big appointments diary,” Fiona said fiercely. “I dug up last year’s. There’s nothing listed at all on that second Tuesday. Neither of us can remember what we were doing.”

  “No work?” I suggested. “No meetings?”

  Harry and Fiona simultaneously said no. Fiona was on a couple of committees for good causes, but there’d been no meetings that day. Harry, whose personal fortune seemed to equal Fiona’s in robust good health, had in the past negotiated the brilliant sale of an inherited tire-making company (so Tremayne had told me) and now passed his time lucratively as occasional consultant to other private firms looking for a golden corporate whale to swallow them. He couldn’t remember any consultations for most of June.

  “We went to see Nolan ride Chickweed at Uttoxeter near the end of May,” Fiona said worriedly. “Angela was there looking after the horse. That was the day someone fed him theobromine and caffeine, and if she didn’t give Chickweed chocolate herself then she must have let someone else do it. Sheer negligence, probably. Anyway, Chickweed won and Angela went back to Shellerton with him and we saw her a few days later and gave her an extra present, as we were so pleased with the way she looked after the horse. I mean, a horse’s success is always partly due to whoever cares for it and grooms it. And I can’t remember seeing the wretched girl again after that.”

  “Nor can I,” Harry said.

  They went over and over the same old ground all the way to Sandown and it was clear they had spoken of little else since Doone’s devastating identification of Harry’s belongings.

  “Someone must have put those things there to incriminate Harry,” Mackie said unhappily.

  Fiona agreed with her, but it appeared that Doone didn’t.

  Harry said, “Doone believes it was an unpremeditated murder. I asked him why and he just said that most murders were unpremeditated. Useless. He said people who commit unpremeditated murder often drop things from extreme agitation and don’t know they’ve dropped them. I said I couldn’t even remember ever talking to the girl except in the company of my wife and he simply stared at me, not believing me. I’ll tell you, pals, it was unnerving.”

  “Awful,” Mackie said vehemently. “Wicked.”

  Harry, trying to sound balanced, was clearly horribly disconcerted and was driving without concentration, braking and accelerating jerkily. Fiona said they had thought of not going to Sandown as they weren’t in a fun-day mood, but they had agreed not to let Doone’s suspicions ruin everything. Doone’s suspicions were nevertheless conspicuously wrecking their equilibrium and it was a subdued little group that stood in the parade ring watching Fiona’s tough hunter, the famous Chickweed, walk around before the Wilfred Johnstone Hunter ’Chase.

  No one, one hoped, had given him chocolate.

  Fiona had told Nolan about Doone’s accusations. Nolan told Harry that now he, Harry, knew what it was like to have a charge of murder hanging over him he would in retrospect have more sympathy for him, Nolan. Harry didn’t like it. With only vestiges of friendliness he protested that he, Harry, had not been found with a dead girl at his feet.

  “As good as, by the sound of things,” Nolan said, rattled.

  “Nolan!” Fiona wasn’t amused. “Everyone, stop talking about it. Nolan, put your mind on the race. Harry, not another word about that bloody girl. Everything will be sorted out. We’ll just have to be patient.”

  Harry gave her a fond but rueful glance and over her shoulder caught my eye. There was something more in his expression, I thought, and after a moment identified it as fear: maybe faint, but definitely present. Harry and fear hadn’t, until then, gone together in my mind, particularly not since his controlled behavior in a frozen ditch.

  Mackie, in loco Tremayne, saw Nolan into the saddle and the four of us walked towards the stands to see the race. With Mackie and Fiona in front, Harry fell into step beside me.

  “I want to tell you something,” he said, “but not Fiona.”

  “Fire away.”

  He looked quickly around him, checking no one could hear.

  “Doone said ... Christ ... he said the girl had no clothes on when she died.”

  “God, Harry.” I felt my mouth still open, and closed it consciously.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “Doone asked what I was doing there with my belt off.”

  The shock still trembled in his voice.

  “The innocent aren’t found guilty,” I protested.

  He said miserably, “Oh, yes, they are. You know they are.”

  “But not on such flimsy evidence.”

  “I haven’t been able to tell Fiona. I mean, we’ve always been fine together, but she might start wondering ... I don’t honestly know how I’d bear that.”

  We reached the stands and went up to watch, Harry falling silent in his torturing troubles amid the raucous calls of bookmakers and the enfolding hubbub of the gathering crowd. The runners cantered past on their way to the starting gate, Nolan looking professional as usual on the muscly chestnut that Fiona had ridden all autumn out hunting. Chickweed, Mackie had told me, was Fiona’s special pet: her friend as much as her property. Chickweed, circling and lining up, running in the first hunter ’chase of the spring season, was going to win three or four times before June, Tremayne hoped.

  We were joined at that point by pudgy unfit Lewis, who panted that he had only just arrived in time and asked if the Jockey Club had said anything about Nolan going on riding.

  “Not a word,” Fiona said. “Fingers crossed.”

  “If they were going to stop him,” Lewis opined judiciously, taking deep breaths, “they’d surely have let him know by today, so perhaps the expletive sod’s got away with it.”

  “Brotherly love,” Fiona remarked ironically.

  “He owes me,” Lewis said darkly and with such growling intensity that all of us, I thought, recognized the nature of the debt, even if some hadn’t wanted to believe it earlier.

  “And will you collect?” Harry asked, his sarcasm showing.

  “No, thanks to you,” Lewis replied sharply.

  “Perjury’s not my best act.”

  Lewis smiled like a snake, all fangs.

  “I,” he said, “am the best bleep bleep actor of you all.”

  Fiona starkly faced the certainty that Lewis had not after all been too drunk to see straight when Olympia died. Mackie’s clear face was pinched with dismay. Harry, who had known all along, would have shrugged off Lewis’s admission philosophically were it not for his own ominous future.

  “What would you have had me do?” Lewis demanded, seeing the general disapproval. “Say he called her every filthy name in the book and shook her by the neck until her eyes popped out?”

  “Lewis!” Fiona exclaimed, not believing him. “Shut up.” Lewis gave me a mediumly hostile glance and wanted to know why I was always hanging around. No one answered him, me included.

  Fiona said, “They’re off’ a split second before the official announcement and concentrated through her raceglasses.

  “I asked you an expletive question,” Lewis said to me brusquely.

  “You know why,” I replied, watching the race.

  “Tremayne isn’t here,” he objected.

  “He sent me to see Sandown.”

  Chickweed was easy to spot, I discovered, with the white blaze down his chestnut face that so clearly distinguished him in the photograph nodding away on the rails at every galloping step. The overall pace seemed slower to me
than the other races I’d watched, the jumping more deliberate, but it wasn’t, as Tremayne had warned me, an easy track even for the sport’s top performers, and for hunters a searching test. “Watch them jump the seven fences down the far side,” he’d said. “If a horse meets the first one right, the others come in his stride. Miss the first, get it wrong, legs in a tangle, you might as well forget the whole race. Nolan is an artist at meeting that first fence right.”

  I watched particularly. Chickweed flew the first fence and all the next six down the far side, gaining effortless lengths. “There’s nothing like the hunting field for teaching a horse to jump,” Tremayne had said. “The trouble is, hunters aren’t necessarily fast. Chickweed is, though. So was Oxo, who won the Grand National years back.”

  Chickweed repeated the feat on the second circuit and then, a length in front of his nearest pursuer, swept around the long bend at the bottom end of the course and straightened himself for the third fence from home—the Pond fence, so called because the small hollow beside it had once been wet, though now held mostly reeds and bushes.

  “Oh, come on,” Fiona said explosively, the tension too much. “Chicky Chickweed ... jump it.”

  Chicky Chickweed rose to it as if he’d heard her, his white blaze showing straight on to us before he veered right towards the second-last fence and the uphill pull to home.

  “A lot of races are lost on the hill,” Tremayne had told me. “It’s where stamina counts, where you need the reserves. Any horse that has enough left to accelerate there is going to win. Same at Cheltenham. A race at either place can change dramatically after the last fence. Tired horses just fade away, even if they’re in the lead.”

  Chickweed made short work of the second-last fence but didn’t shake off his pursuer.

  “I can’t bear it,” Fiona said.

  Mackie put down her raceglasses to watch the finish, anxiety digging lines on her forehead.

  It was only a race, I thought. What did it matter? I answered my own question astringently: I’d written a novel; what did it matter if it won or lost on its own terms? It mattered because I cared, because it was where I’d invested all thought, all effort. It mattered to Tremayne and Mackie the same way. Only a race ... but also their skill laid on the line.

  Chickweed’s pursuer closed the gap coming to the last fence.

  “Oh, no,” Fiona groaned, lowering her own glasses. “Oh, Nolan, come on.”

  Chickweed made a spectacular leap, leaving unnecessary space between himself and the birch, wasting precious time in the air. His pursuer, jumping lower in a flatter trajectory, landed first and was fastest away.

  “Damn,” Harry said.

  Fiona was silent, beginning to accept defeat.

  Nolan had no such thoughts. Nolan, aggressive instincts in full flood, was crouching like a demon over Chickweed’s withers delivering the message that losing was unacceptable. Nolan’s whip rose and fell twice, his arm swinging hard. Chickweed, as if galvanized, reversed his decision to slow down now that he’d been passed and took up the struggle again. The jockey and horse in front, judging the battle won, eased up fractionally too soon. Chickweed caught them napping a stride from the winning post and put his head in front just where it mattered, the crowd cheering for him, the favorite, the fighter who never gave up.

  It was Nolan, I saw, who had won that race. Nolan himself, not the horse. Nolan’s ability, Nolan’s character acting on Chickweed’s. Through Nolan I began to understand how much more there was to riding races than fearlessness and being able to stay in the saddle. More than tactics, more than experience, more than ambition. Winning races, like survival, began in the mind.

  Fiona, triumphant where all had looked lost, breathless and shiny-eyed, hurried ahead with Mackie to meet the returning warriors. Lewis, Harry and I pressed along in their wake.

  “Nolan’s a genius,” Harry was saying.

  “The other expletive jockey threw it away,” Lewis had it.

  Never assume, I thought, thinking of Doone. Never assume you’ve won until you hold the prize in your hand.

  Doone was assuming things, I thought. Not taking his own advice. Or so it seemed.

  We all went for a celebratory drink, though in Mackie’s case it was ginger ale. Harry ordered the obligatory bubbles, his heart in his boots. Nolan was as high as Fiona, Lewis a grudging applauder. I, I supposed, an observer, still on the outside looking in. Six of us in a racecourse bar smiling in unison while the cobweb ghosts of two young women set traps for the flies.

  WE ARRIVED BACK at Shellerton before Tremayne returned from Chepstow. Fiona dropped Mackie off at her side of the house and I walked round to Tremayne’s, unlocking the door with the key he’d given me and switching on lights.

  There was a message from Gareth on the family-room corkboard: GONE TO MOVIE. BACK FOR GRUB. Smiling, I kicked the hot logs together and blew some kindling sticks to life with the bellows to revive the fire and poured some wine and felt at home.

  A knock on the back door drew me from comfort to see who it was, and I didn’t at first recognize the young woman looking at me with a shy inquiring smile. She was pretty in a small way, brown-haired, self-effacing ... Bob Watson’s wife, Ingrid.

  “Come in,” I said warmly, relieved to have identified her. “But I’m the only one home.”

  “I thought maybe Mackie. Mrs. Vickers. . .”

  “She’s round in her own house.”

  “Oh. Well...” She came over the threshold tentatively and I encouraged her into the family room, where she stood nervously and wouldn’t sit down.

  “Bob doesn’t know I’m here,” she said anxiously.

  “Never mind. Have a drink?”

  “Oh, no. Better not.”

  She seemed to be screwing herself up to something, and out it all finally came in a rush.

  “You were ever so kind to me that night. Bob reckons you saved me from frostbite at the least ... and pneumonia, he said. Giving me your own clothes. I’ll never forget it. Never.”

  “You looked so cold,” I said. “Are you sure you won’t sit down?”

  “I was hurting with cold.” She again ignored the chair suggestion. “I knew you’d come back just now ... I saw Mrs. Goodhaven’s car come up the road ... I came to talk to you, really. I’ve got to tell someone, I think, and you’re ... well ... easiest.”

  “Go on then. Talk. I’m listening.”

  She said in a small burst, unexpectedly, “Angela Brickell was a Roman Catholic, like I am.”

  “Was she?” The news meant very little.

  Ingrid nodded. “It said on the local radio news tonight that Angela’s body was found last Sunday by a gamekeeper on the Quillersedge Estate. There was quite a bit about her on the news, about how the police were proceeding with their inquiries and all that. And it said foul play was suspected. They’re such stupid words, foul play. Why don’t they just say someone probably did her in? Anyway, after she’d vanished last year Mrs. Vickers asked me to clear all her things out of the hostel and send them to her parents, and I did.”

  She stopped, staring searchingly at my face for understanding.

  “What,” I asked, feeling the way, “did you find in her belongings? Something that worries you ... because she’s dead?”

  Ingrid’s face showed relief at being invited to tell me.

  “I threw it away,” she said. “It was a do-it-yourself home kit for a pregnancy test. She’d used it. All I found was the empty box.”

  11

  Tremayne came home and frightened Ingrid away like Miss Muffet and the spider.

  “What did she want?” he asked, watching her scuttling exit. “She always seems scared of me. She’s a real mouse.”

  “She came to tell me something she thinks should be known,” I said reflectively. “I suppose she thought I could do the telling, in her place.”

  “Typical,” Tremayne said. “What was it?”

  “Angela Brickell was perhaps pregnant.”

  “Wh
at?” He stared at me blankly. “Pregnant?”

  I explained about the used test. “You don’t buy or use one of those tests unless you have good reason to.”

  He said thoughtfully, “No, I suppose not.”

  “So,” I said, “there are about twenty lusty males connected with this stable and dozens more in Shellerton and throughout the racing industry, and even if she were pregnant, and from what Doone said about bones I don’t see how they can tell yes or no, even if she were, it still might have nothing to do with her death.”

  “But it might.”

  “She was a Roman Catholic, Ingrid says.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “They’re against abortion.”

  He stared into space.

  I said, “Harry’s in trouble. Have you heard?”

  “No, what trouble?”

  I told him about Doone’s accusations, and also about Chickweed’s way of winning and about Lewis’s more or less explicit admission of perjury. Tremayne poured himself a gin and tonic of suitably gargantuan proportions and told me in his turn that he’d had a rotten day at Chepstow. “One of my runners broke down and another went crashing down arse over tip at the last fence with the race in his pocket. Sam dislocated his thumb, which swelled like a balloon, and although he’s OK he won’t realistically be fit until Tuesday, which means I have to scratch around for a replacement for Monday. And one lot of owners groused and groaned until I could have knocked their heads together and all I can do is be nice to them and sometimes it all drives me up the bloody wall, to tell you the truth.”

  He flopped his weight into an armchair, stretched out his legs and rested his gaze on his toecaps, thinking things over.

  “Are you going to tell Doone about the pregnancy test?” he asked finally.

  “I suppose so. It’s on Ingrid’s conscience. If I don’t pass on what she’s said, she’ll find another mouthpiece.”

  He sighed. “It won’t do Harry much good.”

  “Nor harm.”

  “It’s a motive. Juries believe in motives.”

  I grunted. “Harry won’t come to trial.”