by Dick Francis
Tremayne had gone to Oxford to his tailor. Mackie was out to lunch with Dee-Dee. Gareth was at school. I’d abandoned the empty house and walked joyfully into the woods and only by chance did I know what had hit me.
I imagined Perkin threading along that trail at night, following the paint quite easily as he’d been that way already in daylight, and being secretly pleased with himself because if he had inadvertently left any traces of his passage the first time they could be explained away naturally by the second. That satisfaction would smartly have evaporated when he reached the clearing and found me gone. A nasty shock, one might say. He might have been intending to go back to his family and appear utterly horrified while breaking the news of my death. Instead, he’d looked shocked and utterly horrified at seeing me still alive. Openmouthed. Speechless. Too bad.
If I’d tried to walk out along the trail, I would have met Perkin face-to-face.
I shivered in the warm hospital room. Some things were better unimagined.
For Perkin, making arrows would have been like filing his nails, and he’d had a stove right in his workroom for the charring. He must have constructed a pretty good strong bow too (according to my detailed instructions), which would by now no doubt be broken in unidentifiable pieces in distant undergrowth. Perhaps he’d risked time to practice with a few shots before I got there. Couldn’t tell unless I went back to look for spent arrows, which I wasn’t going to do.
Random thoughts edged slowly into my mind for the rest of the day.
For instance, Perkin thought in wood, like a language. Any trap he made would be wooden.
Nolan had knocked Perkin down at Tremayne’s dinner. I’d picked Nolan up and made a fool of him. Perkin wouldn’t have risked any way to kill me that meant creeping up on me, not after what he’d seen.
Perkin had had to get over the shock of finding my familiar ski jacket and boots in the boathouse and then the far worse shock of the cataclysmic reversal of his scheme when Harry and I both lived.
The best actor of them all, he had contained those shocks within himself with no screaming crises of nerves. Many a convicted murderer had displayed that sort of control. Maybe it was something to do with a divorce from reality. There were books on the subject. One day I might read them.
Perkin had resented Mackie’s friendly feelings towards me. Not strongly enough to kill me for that, but certainly strongly enough to make killing me satisfying in that respect also.
Never assume . . .
Perkin had always been presumed to be busy in his workshop, and yet there were hours and days when he might not have been, when Mackie was out of the house seeing to the horses. On the Wednesday of Harry’s trap, Mackie had been saddling Tremayne’s runner in the three-mile chase at Ascot.
Perkin had made none of the classic mistakes. Hadn’t scattered monogrammed handkerchiefs about or faked alibis or carelessly dropped dated train tickets or shown knowledge he shouldn’t have had. Perkin had listened more than he’d talked, and he’d been cunning and careful.
I thought of Angela Brickell and of all the afternoons Perkin had spent alone in the house. She had tried to seduce even Gareth. Not hard to imagine she’d set her sights also on Perkin. Intelligent men in love with their wives weren’t immune to blatantly offered temptations. Sudden arousal. Quick, casual gratification. End of episode.
Except not the end of the episode if there were a failure of a birth control measure and the result was conception. Not the end if the woman asked for money or threatened disclosure. Not the end if she could and would destroy the man’s marriage.
Say Angela Brickell had definitely been pregnant. Say she was sure who the father was; and working in a racing stable with thoroughbreds she would know that proving paternity was increasingly an exact science. The father wouldn’t be able to deny it. Say she enticed him into the woods and became demanding in every way and heavily emotional, piling on pressure.
Perkin had not long before seen Olympia lying dead at Nolan’s feet. He’d heard over and over again how fast she’d died. Say that picture, that certainty, had flashed into his mind. The quick way out of all his troubles lay in his own two strong hands.
I imagined what Perkin might have been feeling. Might have been facing.
Mackie at that time had been unable to conceive and was troubled and unhappy because of it. Angela Brickell however was devastatingly carrying Perkin’s child. Perkin loved Mackie and all too probably couldn’t face her knowing what he’d done. Couldn’t bear to hurt her so abominably. Was perhaps ashamed. Didn’t want his father to find out.
Irresistible solution: a fast death for Angela too. Easy.
Perhaps he, not she, had chosen the woods. Perhaps he’d planned it, perhaps it hadn’t been a lightning urge but the first of his traps.
Impossible to know now if either scenario were right. Possible, likely, probable; no more than one of those.
I wondered if he had gone home feeling anything but relief.
Long before Doone came knocking on the door, Perkin could have decided, in case the girl’s body were ever found, to say he didn’t remember her. No one had thought it odd that he didn’t; he was seldom seen with the horses.
His one catastrophic mistake had been to try to settle the mystery forever by making Harry disappear.
By his actions shall you know him ...
By his arrows.
I thought that Doone might not think of looking in Perkin’s workroom for a match to the arrow’s wood. Perkin hadn’t had much time to hunt elsewhere for anything suitable. He would have used a common wood, not exotic, but all the same, there would be more of it to be found, perhaps even in the cabinet he was making of bleached oak.
He hadn’t had any handy feathers, so no flights.
Perkin would have known that a wood match could be made. He knew more about wood than anyone else.
Doone, with his promise of instant detection once I woke up, must have been the end of hope.
He did love Mackie. His universe was lost. One way out remained.
I thought of Tremayne and his pride in Perkin’s work. Thought of Gareth’s vulnerable age. Thought of Mackie, her face alive with the wondrous joy of discovering she was pregnant. Thought of that child growing up, loved and safe.
Nothing could be gained by trying to prove what Perkin had done. Much would be smashed. They all would suffer. The families always suffered most.
No child would become a secure and balanced adult with a known murderer for a father. Without knowledge, Mackie’s grief would heal normally in time. Tremayne and Gareth wouldn’t be crippled by undeserved shame. All of them would live more happily if they and the world remained in ignorance, and to try to achieve that I would give them the one gift I could.
Silence.
AT THE SHORT uncomplicated inquest on Perkin a week later the coroner found unhesitatingly for “Accident” and expressed sympathy with the family. Tremayne came to collect me from the hospital afterwards and told me on the way to Shellerton that Mackie had got through the court ordeal bravely.
“The baby?” I asked.
“The baby’s fine. It’s what’s giving Mackie strength. She says Perkin is with her, will always be with her that way.”
“Mm.”
Tremayne glanced briefly across at me and back to the road.
“Has Doone found out yet who put that arrow through you?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You don’t know, yourself?”
“No.”
He drove for a while in silence.
“I just wondered . . .” he said uncertainly.
After a while I said, “Doone came to see me twice. I told him I didn’t know who shot me. I told him I had no ideas of any sort anymore.”
I certainly hadn’t told him where to look for arrow wood.
Doone had been disgustedly disillusioned with me: I had closed ranks with them, he said. Goodhavens, Everards, Vickerses and Kendall. “Yes,” I’d a
greed, “I’m sorry.” Doone said there was no way of proving who had killed Angela Brickell. “Let her lie,” I’d said, nodding. After a silence he’d risen grayly to his feet to leave and told me to look after myself. Wryly I’d said, “I will.” He’d gone slowly, regretfully, seeing regret in my face also, an unexpected mutual liking slipping inevitably into memory.
“You don’t think,” Tremayne said painfully. “I mean, it had to be someone who knew you would fetch Gareth’s camera who shot you.”
“I told Doone it was a kid playing Robin Hood.”
“I’m ... afraid . . .”
“Block it out,” I said. “Some kid did it.”
“John . . .”
He knew, I thought. He was no fool. He could have worked things out the same way I had, and he’d have had a hellish time believing it all of his own son.
“About my book,” he said, hesitating. “I don’t know that I want to go on with it.”
“I’m going to write it,” I said positively. “It’s going to be an affirmation of your life and your worth, just as was intended. It’s all the more important now, for you especially, but for Gareth, for Mackie and your new grandchild as well. For you and for them, it’s essential I do it.”
“You do know,” he said.
“It was a kid.”
He drove without speaking the rest of the way.
Fiona and Harry were with Mackie and Gareth in the family room. Perkin’s absence was to me almost a shock, so accustomed had I become to his being there. Mackie looked pale but in charge of things, greeting me with a sisterly kiss.
“Hi,” Gareth said, very cool.
“Hi yourself.”
“I’ve got the day off from school.”
“Great.”
Harry said, “How are you feeling?” and Fiona put her arms carefully around me and let her scent drift in my senses.
Harry said his Aunt Erica sent good wishes, his eyes ironic.
I asked Harry how his leg was. All on the surface and polite.
Mackie brought cups of tea for everyone; a very English balm in troubles. I remembered the way Harry had laced the coffee after the ditch, and would have preferred that, on the whole.
It was a month yesterday, I thought, that I came here.
A month in the country . . .
Harry said, “Has anyone found out who shot at you?”
He was asking a simple unloaded question, not like Tremayne. I gave him a simple answer, the one that eventually became officially accepted.
“Doone is considering it was a child playing out a fantasy,” I said. “Robin Hood, cowboys and Indians. That sort of thing. No hope of ever really knowing.”
“Awful,” Mackie said, remembering.
I looked at her with affection and Tremayne patted my shoulder and told them I would be staying on as arranged to write his book.
They all seemed pleased, as if I belonged; but I knew I would leave them again before summer, would walk out of the brightly lit play, and go back to the shadows and solitude of fiction. It was a compulsion I’d starved for, and even if I never went hungry again I would feel that compulsion forever. I couldn’t understand it or analyze it, but it was there.
After a while I left the family room and wandered through the great central hall and on into the far side of the house, into Perkin’s workroom.
It smelled aromatically and only of wood. Tools lay neatly as always. The glue pot was cold on the stove. Everything had been cleaned and tidied and there were no stains on the polished floor to show where his life had pumped out.
I felt no hatred for him. I thought instead of the extinction of his soaring talent. Thought of consequences and seduction. What’s done is done, Tremayne would say, but one couldn’t wipe out an enveloping feeling of pathetic waste.
A copy of Return Safe from the Wilderness lay on a workbench, and I picked it up idly and looked through it.
Traps. Bows and arrows. All the familiar ideas.
I flipped the pages resignedly and they fell open as if from use at the diagram in the first-aid section showing the pressure points for stopping arterial bleeding. I stared blankly at the carefully drawn and accurate illustration of exactly where the main arteries could be found nearest the surface in the arms and wrists... and in the legs.
Dear God, I thought numbly. I taught him that too.