Longshot

by Dick Francis

  After a short thoughtful silence Doone said, “You’re out on the bank. What next?”

  “I saw the car had gone. I went to collect my boots and jacket, but they’d gone too. I called to Harry to reassure him, then I went over to that big shed to find a telephone, but I couldn’t.”

  Sam shook his head. “There isn’t one. When I’m here I use the portable phone from my car.”

  “I couldn’t find any decent tools, either.”

  Sam smiled. “I hide them.”

  “So I used a rusty tire lever and a mallet, and I’m sorry about your woodwork.”

  Sam shrugged.

  “Then what?” Doone asked.

  “Then I got Harry out here and put him in a dinghy and we ... er ... floated down to the lock.”

  “My dinghy!” Sam exclaimed, looking at the imitation scrapyard. “It’s gone!”

  “I’m sure it’s safe down at the lock,” I said. “I told the lockkeeper it was yours. He said he’d look after it.”

  “It’ll sink,” Sam said. “It leaks.”

  “It’s out on the bank.”

  “You’ll never make a writer,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Too bloody sensible.”

  He read my amusement and gave me a twisted grin.

  I said, “What happens to the rubbish lying in the dock when you roll up the curtain?”

  “Bloody sodding hell!”

  “What are you talking about?” Doone asked us.

  “The bed of this dock is mud, and it slopes downwards towards the river,” I said. “When the curtain’s rolled up, there’s nothing to stop things drifting out by gravity into the river and being moved downstream by the current. Bodies often float to the surface, but you of all people must know that those who drown in the Thames can disappear altogether and are probably taken by undercurrents down through London and out to sea.” Sometimes from my high Chiswick window I’d thought about horrors down below the surface, out of sight. Like hidden motives, running deadly, running deep.

  “Everyone in the Thames Valley knows they disappear.” Doone nodded. “We lose a few holidaymakers every year. Very upsetting.”

  “Harry’s leg was impaled on something,” I said mildly. “He was stuck underwater. He’d have been dead in a very few minutes. Next time Sam rolled the curtain up, Harry would have drifted quietly out of here, I should think, and no one would ever have known he’d been here. If his body were found anywhere downstream, well then, it could be suicide. If it wasn’t found, then he’d escaped justice.” I paused, and asked Sam directly, “How soon would you have rolled up the curtain?”

  He answered at once. “Whenever I’d found the hole in the floor. I’d have gone to take a look from beneath. Like we’re going to now. But I hardly ever come over here. Only in summer.” He gave Doone a sly look. “In the summer I bring a mattress.”

  “And Angela Brickell?” Doone asked.

  Sam, silenced, stood with his mouth open. A bull’s-eye, I thought, for the detective chief inspector.

  I asked Sam, “What’s under the water in the dock?”

  “Huh?”

  “What did Harry get stuck on?”

  He brought his mind back from Angela Brickell and said vaguely, “Haven’t a clue.”

  “If you raise the curtain,” I said, “we may never know.”

  “Ah.” Doone stared judiciously at Sam, all three of us still clustered around the open door. “It’s a matter for grappling irons, then. Can we get a light inside there?”

  “The main switch for here is over in the shed,” Sam said as if automatically, his mind’s attention elsewhere. “There’s nothing in the dock except maybe a couple of beer cans and a radio some clumsy bimbo dropped when she was teetering out of a punt in high heels. I ask you ...”

  “Harry wasn’t impaled on a radio,” I said.

  Sam turned away abruptly and walked along the path to his workshop. Doone made as if to go after him, then stopped indecisively and came back.

  “This could have been an accident, sir,” he said uneasily.

  I nodded. “A good trap never looks like one.”

  “Are you quoting someone?”

  “Yes. Me. I’ve written a good deal about traps. How to set them. How to catch game. The books are lying about all over the place in Shellerton. Everyone’s dipped into them. Follow the instructions and kill your man.”

  “You’re not joking by any chance, are you, sir?”

  I said regretfully, “No, I’m not.”

  “I’ll have to see those books.”

  “Yes.”

  Sam came back frowning and, stretching inside without stepping into the water, pressed the three switches that had been unresponsive two days earlier. The lights in the ceiling came on without fuss and illuminated the ancient brick walls and the weathered old gray beams which crossed from side to side, holding up the planks of the floor above: holding up the planks, except where the hole was.

  Doone looked in briefly and made some remark about returning with assistance. Sam looked longer and said to me challengingly, “Well?”

  “There’s a bit of beam missing,” I said, “isn’t there?”

  He nodded unwillingly. “Looks like it. But I didn’t know about it. How could I?”

  Doone, in his quiet way a pouncer, said meaningfully, “You yourself, sir, have all the knowledge and the tools for tampering with your boathouse.”

  “I didn’t.” Sam’s response was belligerence, not fear. “Everyone knows this place. Everyone’s been here. Everyone could cut out a beam that small, it’s child’s play.”

  “Who, precisely?” Doone asked. “Besides you?”

  “Well ... anybody. Perkin! He could. Nolan ... I mean, most people can use a saw, can’t they? Can’t you?”

  Doone’s expression assented but he merely said, “I’ll take another look upstairs now, if you please, sir.”

  We went in gingerly, but as far as one could tell the floor was solid except for the one strip over the missing bit of beam. The floorboards themselves were gray with age, and dusty, but not worm-eaten, not rotten.

  Sam said, “The floorboards aren’t nailed down much. Just here and there. They fit tightly most of the time because of the damp, but when we have a hot dry summer they shrink and you can lift them up easily. You can check the beams for rot.”

  “Why are they like that?” Doone asked.

  “Ask the people who built it,” Sam said, shrugging. “It was like this when I bought it. The last time I took the floorboards up was for the party, installing colored spotlights and strobes in the ceiling underneath.”

  “Who knew you took the floorboards up?” Doone asked.

  Sam looked at him as if he were retarded. “How do I know?” he demanded. “Everyone who asked how I’d done the lighting, I told them.”

  I went down on my knees and edged towards the hole. “Don’t do that,” Doone exclaimed.

  “Just having a look.”

  The way the floorboards had been laid, I saw, had meant that the doctored beam had been a main load-bearer. Several of the planks, including those that had given way under Harry’s weight, had without that beam’s support simply been hanging out in space, resting like a seesaw over the previous beam but otherwise supported only by the tight fit of each plank against the next. The floorboards hadn’t snapped, as I’d originally thought: they’d gone down into the dock with Harry.

  I tested a few planks carefully with the weight of my hand, then retreated and stood up on safer ground.

  “Well?” Doone said.

  “It’s still lethal just each side of the hole.”

  “Right.” He turned to Sam. “I’ll have to know, sir, when this tampering could have been carried out.”

  Sam looked as if he’d had too much of the whole thing. With exasperation he said, “Since when? Since Christmas?”

  Doone said stolidly, “Since ten days ago.”

  Sam briefly gave it some thought. “A wee
k last Wednesday I dropped off a load of wood here on my way to Windsor races. Thursday I raced at Towcester. Friday I spent some time here, half a day. Saturday I raced at Chepstow and had a fall and couldn’t ride again until Tuesday. So Sunday I spent nursing myself until you came knocking on my door, and Monday I spent here, pottering about. Tuesday I was back racing at Warwick. Wednesday I went to Ascot, yesterday Wincanton, today Newbury . . .” He paused. “I’ve never been here at nights.”

  “What races did you ride in on Wednesday afternoon?” Doone asked. “At Ascot.”

  “What races?”

  “Yes.”

  “The two-mile hurdle, novice hurdle, novice chase.”

  I gathered from Doone’s face that it wasn’t the type of answer he’d expected, but he pulled out a notebook and wrote down the reply as given, checking that he’d got it right.

  Sam, upon whom understanding had dawned, said, “I wasn’t here driving Harry’s bloody car away, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “I’ll need to ascertain a good many people’s whereabouts on Wednesday afternoon,” Doone said placidly in a flourish of jargon. “But as for now, sir, we can proceed with our investigations without taking any more of the time of either of you two gentlemen, for the present.”

  “Class dismissed?” Sam said with irony.

  Doone, unruffled, said we would be hearing from him later.

  Sam came with me to where I’d parked Tremayne’s car on stone-strewn grass. The natural jauntiness remained in his step but there was less confidence in his thoughts, it seemed.

  “I like Harry,” he said, as we reached the Volvo.

  “So do I.”

  “Do you think I set that trap?”

  “You certainly could have.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Dead easy. But I didn’t.”

  He looked up into my face, partly anxious, partly still full of his usual machismo.

  “Unless you killed Angela Brickell,” I said, “you wouldn’t have tried to kill Harry. Wouldn’t make sense.”

  “I didn’t do the silly little bimbo any harm.” He shook his head as if to free her from his memory. “She was too intense for me, if you want to know. I like a bit of a giggle, not remorse and tears afterwards. Old Angie took everything seriously, always going on about mortal sin, and I got bloody damned tired of it, and of her, tell the truth. She wanted me to marry her!” His voice was full of the enormity of such a thought. “I told her I’d got my sights set on a high-born heiress and she damned near scratched my eyes out. A bit of a hellcat, she could be, old Angie. And hungry for it! I mean, she’d whip her clothes off before you’d finished the question.”

  I listened with fascination to this insider viewpoint, and the moody Miss Brickell suddenly became a real person, not a pathetic collection of dry bones, but a mixed-up pulsating young woman full of strong urges and stronger guilts who’d piled on too much pressure, loaded her need of penitence and her heavy desires and perhaps finally her pregnancy onto someone who couldn’t bear it all, and who’d seen a violent way to escape her.

  Someone, I thought with illumination, who knew how easily Olympia had died from hands around the neck.

  Angela Brickell had to have invited her own death. Doone, I supposed, had known that all along.

  “What are you thinking?” Sam asked, uncertainly for him.

  “What did she look like?” I said.

  “Angie?”

  “Mm.”

  “Not bad,” he said. “Brown hair. Thin figure, small tits, round bottom. She agonized about having breast implants. I told her to forget the implants, what would her babies think? That turned on the taps, I’ll tell you. She bawled for ages. She wasn’t much fun, old Angie, but bloody good on a mattress.”

  What an epitaph, I thought. Chisel it in stone.

  Sam looked out over the flooding river and breathed in the damp smell of the morning as if testing wine for bouquet, and I thought that he lived through his senses to a much greater degree than I did and was intensely alive in his direct approach to sex and his disregard of danger.

  He said cheerfully, as if shaking off murder as a passing inconvenience, “Are you going to this do of Tremayne’s tonight?”

  “Yes. Are you?”

  He grinned. “Are you kidding? I’d be shot if I wasn’t there to cheer. And anyway”—he shrugged as if to disclaim sentiment—“the old bugger deserves it. He’s not all bad, you know.”

  “I’ll see you there, then,” I said, agreeing with him.

  “If I don’t break my neck.” It was flippantly said, but an insurance against fate, like crossed fingers. “I’d better tell this sodding policeman where the main electric switch is. I’ve got it rigged so no one can find it but me, as I don’t want people being able to walk in here after dark and turn the lights on. Inviting vandalism, that is. When the force have finished here, they can turn the electric off.”

  He bounced off towards Doone, who was writing in his notebook, and they were walking together to the big boat-shed as I drove away.

  EVEN AFTER HAVING done the week’s shopping en route, I was back at Shellerton House as promised in good time for Tremayne to drive his Volvo to Newbury races. He had sent three runners off in the horse box and was taking Mackie to assist, leaving me to my slowly growing first chapter in the dining room.

  When they’d gone Dee-Dee came in, as she often did now, to drink coffee over the sorted clippings.

  I said, “I hope Tremayne won’t mind my taking all these with me when I go home.”

  “Home ...” Dee-Dee smiled. “He doesn’t want you to go home, didn’t you know? He wants you to write the whole book here. Any day now he’ll probably make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

  “I came for a month. That’s what he said.”

  “He didn’t know you then.” She took a few mouthfuls of coffee. “He wants you for Gareth, I think.”

  That made sense, I thought; and I wasn’t sure which I would choose, to go or to stay, if Dee-Dee was right.

  When she’d returned to the office I tried to get on with the writing but couldn’t concentrate. The trap in Sam’s boathouse kept intruding and so did Angela Brickell; the cold threat of khaki water that could rush into aching lungs to bring oblivion and the earthy girl who’d been claimed back by the earth, eaten clean by earth creatures, become earth-digested dust.

  Under the day-to-day surface of ordinary life in Shellerton the fish of murder swam like a shark, silent, unknown, growing new teeth. I hoped Doone would net him soon, but I hadn’t much faith.

  Fiona telephoned during the afternoon to say that she’d brought Harry home and he wanted to see me, so with a sigh but little reluctance I abandoned the empty page and walked down to the village.

  Fiona hugged me like a long-lost brother and said Harry still couldn’t be quite clear in his mind as he was saying now that he remembered drowning. However could one remember drowning?

  “Quite hard to forget, I should think.”

  “But he didn’t drown!”

  “He came close.”

  She led me into the pink and green chintzy sitting-room where Harry, pale with blue shadows below the eyes, sat in an armchair with his bandaged leg elevated on a large upholstered footstool.

  “Hello,” he said, raising a phantom smile. “Do you know a cure for nightmares?”

  “I have them awake,” I said.

  “Dear God.” He swallowed. “What’s true, and what isn’t?”

  “What you remember is true.”

  “Drowning?”

  “Mm.”

  “So I’m not mad.”

  “No. Lucky.”

  “I told you,” he said to Fiona. “I tried not to breathe, but in the end I just did. I didn’t mean to. Couldn’t help it.”

  “No one can,” I said.

  “Sit down,” Fiona said to me, kissing Harry’s head. “What’s lucky is that Harry had the sense to take you with him. And what’s more, everyone’s apologizing all over t
he place except for one vile journalist who says it’s possible a misguided vigilante thought getting rid of Harry the only path to real justice, and I want Harry to sue him, it’s truly vicious.”

  “I can’t be bothered,” Harry said in his easygoing way. “Doone was quite nice to me! That’s enough.”

  “How’s the leg?” I asked.

  “Lousy. Weighs a couple of tons. Still, no gangrene as yet.”

  He meant it as a joke but Fiona looked alarmed.

  “Darling,” he said placatingly, “I’m bloated with antibiotics, punctured with tetanus jabs and immunized against cholera, yellow spotted mountain fever and athlete’s foot. I have it on good authority that I’m likely to live. How about a stiff whisky?”

  “No. It’ll curdle the drugs.”

  “For John, then.”

  I shook my head.

  “Take Cinderella to the ball,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Fiona to Tremayne’s party. You’re going, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m not leaving you,” Fiona protested.

  “Of course you are, love. It wouldn’t be the same for Tremayne if you weren’t there. He dotes on you. John can take you. And”—his eyes brightened mischievously with reawakening energy—“I know who’d love to use my ticket.”

  “Who?” his wife demanded.

  “Erica. My sainted aunt.”

  14

  The Lifetime Award to Tremayne was the work of a taken-over revitalized hotel chain aiming to crash the racing scene with sponsorship in a big way. They, Castle Houses, had put up the prize for a steeplechase and had also taken over a prestigious handicap hurdle race already in the program for Saturday.

  The cash on offer for the hurdle race had stretched the racing world’s eyes wide and excited owners into twisting their trainers’ arms so that the entries had been phenomenal (Dee-Dee said). The field would be the maximum allowed on the course for safety, and several lightweights had had to be balloted out.

  As a preliminary to their blockbuster, Castle Houses had arranged the award dinner and subsidized the tickets so that more or less everyone could afford them. The dinner was being held on the racecourse, in the grandstand with its almost limitless capacity; and the whole affair, Mackie had told me, was frankly only a giant advertisement, but everyone might as well enjoy it.