Longshot (32 page)

“I was high for days. Kept smiling. Topsy Blob, I ask you!” He stood up. “Back to business. You’ll come up with me in the Land-Rover. Fringe’s lad can ride him up, then change with you.”

“Right.”

Ronnie’s news, I found, had given me a good deal more confidence on Fringe than I had had on Drifter, illogical though it might be.

It’s all beginning
...

Concentrate.

Fringe was younger, whippier and less predictable than Drifter: rock music in place of classical. I gathered the reins and lengthened the stirrup leathers a couple of holes while Fringe made prancing movements, getting used to his new and heavier rider.

“Take him down below the three flights of hurdles,” Tremayne said, “then bring him up over them at a useful pace. You’re not actually racing. Just a good half-speed gallop. Bob Watson will be with you for company. Fringe jumps well enough but he likes guidance. He’ll waver if you don’t tell him when to take off. Don’t forget, it’s you that’s schooling the horse, not the other way round. All ready?”

I nodded.

“Off you go, then.”

He seemed unconcerned at letting me loose on his half-share investment and I tried telling myself that ahead lay merely a quick pop over three undemanding obstacles, not the first searching test of my chances of racing. I’d ridden over many jumps before, but never on a racehorse, never fast, never caring so much about the outcome. Almost without being aware of it I’d progressed from the hesitancy of my first few days there to a strong positive desire to go down to the starting gate: any starting gate, anywhere. I had to admit that I envied Sam and Nolan.

Bob was circling on his own horse, waiting for me. Both his horse and Fringe, aware they would be jumping, were stimulated and keen.

“Guv’nor says you’re to set off on the side nearest him,” Bob said briefly. “He wants to see what you’re doing.”

I nodded, slightly dry-mouthed. Bob expertly trotted his mount into position, gave me a raised-eye query about readiness and kicked forward into an accelerating gallop. Fringe took up his position alongside with familiarity and eagerness, an athlete doing what he’d been bred for, and enjoyed.

First hurdle ahead. Judge the distance ... give Fringe the message to shorten his stride ... I gave it to him too successfully, he put in a quick one, got too near to the hurdle, hopped over it nearly at a standstill, lost lengths on Bob.

Damn, I thought.
Damn.

Second hurdle, managed it a bit better, gave him the signal three strides from the jump, felt him lift off at the right time, felt his assurance flow back and his faith in me revive, even if provisionally.

Third hurdle, I left him too much to his own devices as the distance was awkward. I couldn’t make up my own mind whether to get him to lengthen or shorten and in consequence I didn’t make his mind up to do either and we floundered over it untidily, his hooves rapping the wooden frames, my weight too far forward ... a mess.

We pulled up at the end of the schooling stretch and trotted back to where Tremayne stood with his binoculars. I didn’t look at Bob; didn’t want to see his disapproval, all too wretchedly aware that I hadn’t done very well.

Tremayne with pursed lips offered no direct opinion. Instead he said, “Second pop, Bob. Off you go,” and I gathered we were to go back to the beginning and start again.

I seemed to have more time to get things together the second time and Fringe stayed beside Bob fairly smoothly to the end. I felt exalted and released and newly alive in myself, but also I’d watched Sam Yaeger in a schooling session one morning and knew the difference.

Tremayne said nothing until we were driving back to the stable and then all he did was ask me if I were happy with what I’d done. Happy beyond expression in one way, I thought, but not in another. I knew for certain I wanted to race. Knew I had elementary skill.

“I’ll learn,” I said grimly, and he didn’t answer.

When we reached the house however he rummaged about in the office for a while complaining that he could never find anything on Dee-Dee’s days off and eventually brought a paper into the dining room, plonked it on the table and instructed me to sign.

It was, I saw, an application for a permit to race as an amateur jockey. I signed it without speaking, incredibly delighted, grinning like a maniac.

Tremayne grunted and bore the document away, coming back presently to say I should stop working and go with him to Newbury races, if I didn’t mind. Also Mackie would be coming with us and we’d be picking up Fiona.

“And frankly,” he said, coming to the essence of the matter, “those two don’t want to go without you, and Harry wants you to be there and ... well ... so do I.”

“All right,” I said.

“Good.”

He departed again and, after a moment’s thought, I went into the office to put through a call to Doone’s police station. He was off duty, I was told. I could leave my name and a message.

I left my name.

“Ask him,” I said, “why the floorboards in the boathouse didn’t float.”

“Er ... would you repeat that, sir?”

I repeated it and got it read back with skepticism.

“That’s right,” I confirmed, amused. “Don’t forget it.”

We went to the races and watched Nolan ride Fiona’s horse Groundsel and get beaten by a length into second place, and we watched Sam ride two of Tremayne’s runners unprofitably and then win for another trainer.

“There’s always another day,” Tremayne said philosophically.

Fiona told us on the way to the races that the police had phoned Harry to say they’d found his car in the station car park at Reading.

“They said it looks OK but they’ve towed it off somewhere to search for clues. I never knew people really said ‘search for clues,’ but that’s what they said.”

Tremayne nodded. “They talk like their notebooks.”

From Reading station one could set off around the world. Metaphorical cliff, I thought. A guilty disappearance had been the intended scenario, not a presumption of suicide. Unless of course the car had been moved again after Harry had made his unscheduled reappearance.

The racecourse was naturally buzzing with accounts of the row at Tremayne’s dinner, most of the stories inflamed and inaccurate because of the embroidery by the press. Tremayne bore the jokes with reasonable fortitude, cheered by the absence of inquiry or even remarks from the Jockey Club, not even strictures about “bringing racing into disrepute,” which I’d learned was the yardstick for in-house punishment.

By osmosis of information, both Sam and Nolan knew details of Fringe’s schooling. Sam said, “You’ll be taking my sodding job next,” without meaning it in the least, and Nolan, bitter-eyed and cursing, saw Tremayne’s warning glare and subsided with festering rancor.

“How on earth do they know?” I asked, mystified.

“Sam phoned Bob to find out,” Tremayne said succinctly. “Bob told him you did all right. Sam couldn’t wait to tell Nolan. I heard him doing it. Bloody pair of fools.”

All afternoon Fiona kept me close by her side, looking around for me any time I fell a step behind. She tried unsuccessfully to hide what she described as “preposterous fear,” and I understood that her fear had no focus and no logic, but was becoming a state of mind. Tremayne, sensing it also, fussed over her even more than usual and Fiona herself made visible efforts to act normally and as she said “be sensible.”

Whenever Mackie wasn’t actively helping Tremayne she stayed close also to Fiona, and although I tried I couldn’t dislodge the underlying anxiety in their eyes. Silver-blond and redhead, they clung to each other occasionally as long-time friends, and spoke to Nolan, cousin of one, ex-fiancé of the other, with an odd mixture of dread, exasperation and compassion.

Nolan was disconcerted by having lost on Groundsel though I couldn’t see that he’d done anything wrong. Tremayne didn’t blame him, still less did Fiona, but the nonsuccess intensified if possible his ill-will towards me. I was truly disconcerted myself to have acquired so violent an enemy without meaning to and could see no resolution short of full retreat; and the trouble was that since that morning’s schooling, any inclination to retreat had totally vanished.

I looked back constantly to the morning with huge inward joy; to Ronnie’s phone call, to the revelation over hurdles. Doors opening all over the place. All beginning.

The afternoon ending, we took Fiona home and went on to Shellerton House, where Perkin came through for drinks, Tremayne went out to see the horses and Gareth returned from a football match. An evening like most others in that house, but to me the first of a changed life.

 

 

THE NEXT DAY, Sunday, Gareth held me to my promise to take him and Coconut out on another survival trip.

The weather was much better; sunny but cold still with a trace of a breeze, a good day for walking. I suggested seven miles out, seven miles back; Gareth with horror suggested two. We compromised on borrowing the Land-Rover for positioning, followed by walking as far as their enthusiasm took them.

“Where are you going?” Tremayne asked.

“Along the road over the hills towards Reading,” I said. “There’s some great woodland there, unfenced, no signs saying keep out.”

Tremayne nodded. “I know where you mean. It’s all part of the Quillersedge Estate. They only try to keep people out just before Christmas, to stop them stealing the fir trees.”

“We’d better not light a fire there,” I said, “so we’ll take our food and water with us.”

Gareth looked relieved. “No fried worms.”

“No, but it will be survival food. Things you could pick or catch.”

“OK,” he said with his father’s brand of practical acceptance. “How about chocolate instead of dandelion leaves?”

I agreed to the chocolate. The day had to be bearable. We set off at ten, collected Coconut and bowled along to the woods.

There were parking places all along that road, not planned official tarmacked areas but small inlets of beaten earth formed by the waiting cars of many walkers. I pulled into one of them, put on the handbrake and when the boys were out, locked the doors.

Gareth wore of course his psychedelic jacket. Coconut’s yellow oilskins had been superseded by an equally blinding anorak and I, in the regrettable absence of my ski-suit jacket, looked camouflaged against the trees in stone-washed jeans and a roomy olive-drab Barbour borrowed from Tremayne.

“Right,” I said, smiling, as they slid the straps of bright-blue nylon knapsacks over their shoulders, “we’ll take a walk into the Berkshire wilderness. Everyone fit?”

They said they were, so we stepped straight into the tangled maze of alder, hazel, birch, oak, pine, fir and laurel and picked our steps over dried grass, scratchy brambles and the leafless knee-high branching shoots of the wood’s next generation. None of this had been cleared or replanted; it was scrub woodland as nature had made it, the real thing as far as the boys were concerned.

I encouraged them to lead but kept them going towards the sun by suggesting detours around obstructing patches, and I identified the trees for them, trying to make it interesting.

“We’re not eating the bark again, are we?” Coconut said, saying ugh to a birch tree.

“Not today. Here is a hazel. There might still be some nuts lying round it.”

They found two. Squirrels had been there first.

We went about a mile before they tired of the effort involved, and I didn’t mean to go much farther in any case because according to the map I had in my pocket we were by then in about the center of the western spur of the Quillersedge woods. We’d come gently up- and downhill, but not much farther on the ground fell away abruptly, according to the map’s contour lines, with too hard a climb on the return.

Gareth stopped in one of the occasional small clearings and mentioned food hopefully.

“Sure,” I said. “We can make some reasonable seats with dead twigs to keep our bottoms off the damp ground, if you like. No need today for a shelter.”

They made flat piles of twigs, finished them off with evergreen, then emptied their rucksacks and spread the blue nylon on top. We all sat fairly comfortably and ate the things I’d bought for the occasion.

“Smoked trout!” Gareth exclaimed. “That’s an advance on roots.”

“You could catch trout and smoke them if you had to,” I said. “The easiest way to catch them is with a three-pronged spear, but don’t tell that to fishermen.”

“How do you smoke them?”

“Make a fire with lots of hot embers. Cover the embers thickly with green fresh leaves: they’ll burn slowly with billows of smoke. Make a latticed frame to go over the fire and put the trout on it or otherwise hang them over the smoke, and if possible cover it all with branches or more leaves to keep the smoke inside. The best leaves for smoking are things like oak or beech. The smell of the smoke will go into the fish to some extent, so don’t use anything you don’t like the smell of. Don’t use holly or yew, they’re poisonous. You can smoke practically anything. Strips of meat. Bits of chicken.”

“Smoked salmon!” Coconut said. “Why not?”

“First catch your salmon,” said Gareth dryly.

He had brought a camera and he took photos of everything possible: the seats, the food, ourselves.

“I want to remember these days when I’m old like Dad,” Gareth said. “Dad wishes he’d had a camera when he went round the world with his father.”

“Does he?” I asked.

He nodded. “He told me when he gave me this one.”

We ate the trout with unleavened bread and healthy appetites and afterwards filled up with mixed dried fruit and pre-roasted chestnuts and almonds. The boys declared it a feast compared with the week before and polished off their chocolate as a bonus.

Gareth said casually, “Was it in a place like this that someone killed Angela Brickell?”