Longshot

by Dick Francis

  One step and another. There was fluid in my lungs, rattling and wheezing at every breath. People lived a long time with fluid... asthma... emphysema ... years. Fluid took up air space... you never saw anyone with emphysema run upstairs.

  Angela Brickell had been small and light; a pushover.

  Harry and I were tall and strong, not easy to attack at close quarters. Half the racing world had seen me pick up Nolan and knew I could defend myself. So, sharp spikes for Harry and arrows for John, and it was only luck in both cases that had saved us. I’d been there for Harry and the arrow had bypassed my heart.

  Luck.

  The clear sky was luck.

  I didn’t want to see the face of the archer.

  The sudden admission was a revelation in itself. Even with his handiwork through me, I thought of the sadness inevitably awaiting the others; yet I would have to pursue him, for someone who had three times seen murder as a solution to problems couldn’t be trusted never to try it again. Murder was habit-forming, so I’d been told.

  Endless night. The moon moved in silver stateliness across the sky behind me. Left foot. Right foot. Hold on to branches. Breathe by fractions.

  Midnight.

  If ever this ended, I thought, I wouldn’t go walking in woodland for a very long time. I would go back to my attic and not be too hard on my characters if they came to pieces on their knees.

  I thought of Fringe and the Downs and wondered if I would ever ride in a race, and I thought of Ronnie Curzon and publishers and American rights and of Erica Upton’s reviews and it all seemed as distant as Ursa Major but not one whit as essential to my continued existence.

  Grapevine around Shellerton. A mass of common knowledge. Yet this time . . . this time . . .

  I stopped.

  The archer had a face.

  Doone would have to juggle with alibis and charts, proving opportunity, searching for footprints. Doone would have to deal with a cunning mind in the best actor of them all.

  Perhaps I was wrong. Doone could find out.

  I tortoised onwards. A mile was sixty-three thousand three hundred and sixty inches. A mile was roughly one point six kilometers or one hundred and sixty thousand centimeters.

  Who cared.

  I might have traveled at almost eight thousand inches an hour if it hadn’t been for the stops. Six hundred and sixty feet. Two hundred and twenty yards.

  A furlong! Brilliant. One furlong an hour. A record for British racing.

  Twinkle twinkle little star...

  No one but a bloody fool would try to walk a mile with an arrow through his chest. Meet J. Kendall, bloody fool.

  Lightheaded.

  One o’clock.

  The moon, I thought briefly, had come down from the sky and was dancing about in the wood not far ahead. Rubbish, it couldn’t be. It certainly was. I could see it shining.

  Lights. I came to sensible awareness; to incredulous understanding. The lights were traveling along the road.

  The road was real, was there, was not some lost myth in a witch-cursed forest. I had actually got there. I would have shouted with joy if I could have spared the oxygen.

  I REACHED THE last tree and leaned feebly against it, wondering what to do next. The road had for so long been the only goal that I’d given no thought to anything beyond. It was dark now: no cars.

  What to do? Crawl out onto the road and risk getting run over? Hitchhike? Give some poor passing motorist a nightmare?

  I felt dreadfully spent. With the trunk’s support I slid down to kneeling, leaning head and left shoulder against the bark. By my reckoning, if I’d steered anything like a true course, the Land-Rover was way along the road to the right, but it was pointless and impossible to reach it.

  Car lights came around a bend from that direction and seemed not to be traveling too fast. I tried waving an arm to attract attention but only a weak flap of a hand was achieved.

  Have to do better.

  The car braked suddenly with screeching wheels, then backed rapidly until it was level with me. It was the Land-Rover itself. How could it be?

  Doors opened. People spilled out. People I knew. Mackie.

  Mackie running, calling, “John, John,” and reaching me and stopping dead and saying, “Oh, my God.”

  Perkin behind her, looking down, his mouth shocked open in speechlessness. Gareth saying, “What’s the matter?” urgently, and then seeing and coming down scared and wide-eyed on his knees beside me.

  “We’ve been looking for you for ages,” he said. “You’ve got an arrow . . .” His voice died.

  I knew.

  “Run and fetch Tremayne,” Mackie told him, and he sprang instantly to his feet and sprinted away along the road to the right, his feet impelled as if by demons.

  “Surely we must take that arrow out,” Perkin said, and put his hand on the shaft and gave it a tug. He hardly moved it in my chest but it felt like liquid fire.

  I yelled ... it came out as a croak only but it was a yell in my mind . . . “Don’t.”

  I tried to move away from him but that made it worse. I shot out a hand and gripped Mackie’s trouser leg and pulled with strength I didn’t know I still had left. Strength of desperation.

  Mackie’s face came down to mine, frightened and caring. “Don’t . . . move ... the arrow,” I said with terrible urgency. “Don’t let him.”

  “Oh, God.” She stood up. “Don’t touch it, Perkin. It’s hurting him dreadfully.”

  “It would hurt less out,” he said obstinately. The vibrations from his hand traveled through me, inducing terror as well.

  “No. No.” Mackie pulled at his arm in a panic. “You must leave it. You’ll kill him. Darling, you must leave it alone.”

  Without her Perkin would have had his way, but he finally took his dangerous hand off the shaft. I wondered if he believed that it would kill me. Wondered if he had any idea what force he would have needed to pull the arrow out, like a wooden skewer out of meat. Wondered if he could imagine the semiasleep furies he’d already reawakened. The furies had claws and merciless teeth. I tried to breathe even less. I could feel the sweat running down my face.

  Mackie leaned down again. “Tremayne will get help.” Her voice was shaky with stress, with the barbarity of things.

  I didn’t answer: no breath.

  A car pulled up behind the Land-Rover and disgorged Gareth and then Tremayne, who moved like a tank across the earthy shoulder and rocked to a halt a yard away.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said blankly. “I didn’t believe Gareth.” He took charge of things then as a natural duty but also, it seemed, with an effort. “Right, I’ll call an ambulance on the car phone. Keep still,” he said to me unnecessarily. “We’ll soon have you out of here.”

  I didn’t answer him either. He sped away back to the car and we could hear his urgent voice, though not the words. He returned shortly, telling me to hang on, it wouldn’t be for long; and the shock had made him breathless too, I noticed.

  “We’ve looked for you for hours,” he said, anxious, I thought, to prove I hadn’t been forgotten. “We telephoned the police and the hospitals and they had no news of a car crash or anything, so then we came out here ...”

  “Because of your message,” Mackie said, “on the corkboard.”

  Oh, yes.

  Gareth’s camera was swinging from Perkin’s hand. Mackie saw me watching it and said, “We found the trail, you know.”

  Gareth chimed in, “The paint by the road had gone but we looked and looked in the woods. I remembered where we’d been.” He was earnest. “I remembered pretty well where it started. And Perkin found it.”

  “He went all the way along it with a torch,” Mackie said, stroking her husband’s arm, “clever thing—and he came back after absolutely ages with Gareth’s camera and said you weren’t there. We didn’t know what to do next.”

  “I wouldn’t let them go home,” Gareth said. A mixture of stubbornness and pride in his voice. Thank God for him, I th
ought.

  “What happened exactly?” Tremayne asked me bluntly. “How did you get like this?”

  “Tell you ... later.” It came out not much above a whisper, lost in the sound of their movements around me.

  “Don’t bother him,” Mackie said. “He can hardly speak.”

  They waited beside me making worried encouragements until the ambulance arrived from the direction of Reading. Tremayne and Mackie went to meet the men in uniform, to tell them, I supposed, what to expect. Gareth took a step or two after them and I called him in an explosive croak, “Gareth,” and he stopped and turned immediately and came back, bending down.

  “Yes? What? What can I do?”

  “Stay with me,” I said.

  It surprised him but he said, “Oh, OK,” and stayed a pace away, looking troubled.

  Perkin said irritably, “Oh, go on, Gareth.”

  I said, “No,” hoarsely. “Stay.”

  After a pause Perkin put his back towards Gareth and his face down near mine and asked with perfect calmness, “Do you know who shot you?” It sounded like a natural question in the circumstances, but it wasn’t.

  I didn’t reply. I looked for the first time straight into his moonlit eyes, and I saw Perkin the son, the husband, the one who worked with wood. I looked deep, but I couldn’t see his soul. Saw the man who thought he’d killed me... saw the archer.

  “Do you really know?” he asked again.

  He showed no feeling, yet my knowledge held the difference between his safety and destruction.

  After a long moment, in which he read the answer for himself, I said, “Yes.”

  Something within him seemed to collapse, but he didn’t outwardly fall to pieces or rant or rave or even again try to pull out the arrow or finish me in any other way. He didn’t explain or show remorse or produce justification. He straightened and looked across to where the men from the ambulance were advancing with his father and his wife. Looked at his brother, a pace away, listening.

  He said to me, “I love Mackie very much.”

  He’d said everything, really.

  I SPENT THE night thankfully unaware of the marathon needlework going on in my chest and drifted back late in the morning to a mass of tubes and machines and techniques I’d never heard of. It seemed I was going to live: the doctors were cheerful, not cautious.

  “Constitution like a horse,” one said. “We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.”

  A nurse told me a policeman wanted to see me, but visitors had been barred until tomorrow.

  By tomorrow, which was Wednesday, I was breathing shallowly but without mechanical help, sitting propped up sideways and drinking soup; talking, attached to drainage tubes and feeling sore. Doing just fine, they said.

  The first person who came to see me wasn’t Doone after all but Tremayne. He came in the afternoon and he looked white, fatigued and many years older.

  He didn’t ask about my health. He went over to the window of the post-operation side ward I was occupying alone and stood looking out for a while, then he turned and said, “Something awful happened yesterday.”

  He was trembling, I saw.

  “What?” I asked apprehensively.

  “Perkin . . .” His throat closed. His distress was overwhelming.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He fumbled his way into the chair provided for visitors and put a hand over his lips so that I shouldn’t see how close he was to tears.

  “Perkin,” he said after a while. “After all these years you’d think he’d be careful.”

  “What happened?” I asked, when he stopped.

  “He was carving part of a cabinet by hand... and he cut his leg open with the knife. He bled . . . he tried to reach the door... there was blood all over the floor... pints of it. He’s had cuts sometimes before but this was an artery... Mackie found him.”

  “Oh, no,” I said in protest.

  “She’s in a terrible state and she won’t let them give her sedatives because of the baby.”

  Despite his efforts, tears filled his eyes. He waited for his face to steady, then took out a handkerchief and fiercely blew his nose.

  “Fiona’s with her,” he said. “She’s been marvelous.” He swallowed. “I didn’t want to burden you with this but you’d soon have wondered why Mackie didn’t come.”

  “That’s the least of things.”

  “I have to go back now, but I wanted to tell you myself.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “There’s so much to see to.” His voice wavered again. “I wish you were there. The horses need to go out. I need your help.”

  I wanted very much to give it but he could see I couldn’t.

  “In a few days,” I said, and he nodded.

  “There has to be an inquest,” he said wretchedly.

  He stayed for a while, sitting exhaustedly as if loath to take up his burdens again, postponing the moment when he would have to go back to supporting everyone else. Eventually he sighed deeply, pushed himself to his feet and with a wan smile departed.

  Admirable man, Tremayne.

  DOONE ARRIVED VERY soon after Tremayne had gone and came straight to the point.

  “Who shot you?”

  “Some kid playing Robin Hood,” I said.

  “Be serious.”

  “Seriously, I didn’t see.”

  He sat in the visitor’s chair and looked at me broodingly.

  “I saw Mr. Tremayne Vickers in the car park,” he said. “I suppose he told you their bad news?”

  “Yes. Dreadful for them.”

  “You wouldn’t think, would you,” he added, “that this could be another murder?”

  He saw my surprise. “I hadn’t thought of it,” I said.

  “It looks like an accident,” he said with a certain delicacy, “but he was experienced with that knife, was young Mr. Vickers, and after Angela Brickell, after Mr. Goodhaven, after your little bit of trouble ...” He left the thought hanging and I did nothing to bring it to earth. He sighed after a while and asked how I was feeling.

  “Fine.”

  “Hm.” He bent down and picked up a paper bag that he’d laid on the floor. “Thought you might like to see this.” He drew out a sturdy transparent plastic inner bag and held it up to the light to show me the contents.

  An arrow, cut into two pieces.

  One half was clean and pale, and the other stained and dark, with a long black section sharpened at the tip.

  “We’ve had our lab take a look at this,” he said in his singsong way, “but they say there are no distinctive tool marks. It could have been sharpened by any straight blade in the kingdom.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But charring the point, now, that’s in your books.”

  “And in other books besides mine.”

  He nodded. “Yesterday morning, at Shellerton House, Mr. Tremayne Vickers and young Mr. and Mrs. Perkin Vickers all told me they’d spent three or four hours looking for you on Monday night. Young Gareth didn’t want them to give up, they said, but Mr. Vickers senior told him you’d be all right even if you had got lost. You knew how to look after yourself, he said. They were just about to go home when they found you.”

  “Lucky me.”

  He nodded. “An inch either way and you’d be history, so I hear. I told them all not to worry, I would go on working with you as soon as you were conscious and we would see our way together to a solution of the whole case.”

  “Did you?” He took away what breath I still had.

  “Mr. Tremayne Vickers said he was delighted.” He paused. “Did you follow that trail of paint towards the clearing they talk about?”

  “Mm.”

  “And was it along the trail that someone shot at you?”

  “Mm.”

  “We’ll be taking a look at it ourselves, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  I made no comment and he looked disappointed.

  “You should be wanting your assailant brought to just
ice.” Textbook words again. “You don’t seem to care.”

  “I’m tired,” I said.

  “You wouldn’t be interested then in the glue.”

  “What glue?” I asked. “Oh, yes, glue.”

  “For sticking marble to floorboards,” he said. “We had it analyzed. Regular impact adhesive. On sale everywhere. Untraceable.”

  “And the alibis?”

  “We’re working on them, but everyone moved about so much except poor young Mr. Vickers, who was in his workroom all the time.”

  He seemed to be waiting for me to react, rather as if he’d floated a fly in front of a fish.

  I smiled at him a little and displayed no interest. His mustache seemed to droop further from the lack of good results. He rose to go and told me to take care. Good advice, though a bit too late. He would proceed, he said, with his inquiries.

  I wished him luck.

  “You’re too quiet,” he said.

  When he’d gone I lay and thought for a long time about poor young Mr. Vickers, and of what I should have told Doone, and hadn’t.

  Perkin, I thought, was one of the very few people who’d known about the camera and the trail. I’d listened to Gareth tell him in detail on Sunday evening.

  Mackie had told Sam Yaeger on Monday morning.

  Theoretically she could also have told Fiona on the telephone, who could have told Nolan or Lewis, but it wasn’t the sort of item one would naturally bother to pass on.

  On Monday morning Doone had turned up at Shellerton House with the plank. Perkin knew it was I who had remembered that the floorboards should have floated, and on Monday he’d seen the plank on the dining-room table and heard Doone and me talking in close private consultation. Everything Fiona and Tremayne believed of me must have looked inevitable at that moment. John Kendall would lead Doone to the quarry, who was himself. Any quarry was entitled to take evasive action: to preempt discovery by striking first.

  By lunchtime Perkin had driven off, going to Newbury for supplies, he said. Going to the Quillersedge woods, more like.