Longshot (34 page)

“I feel sick,” she said to my inquiry. “Thank goodness.”

“Lie down, my dear girl,” Tremayne said.

“You all fuss too much.”

Sam said to me, “Doone spent all Saturday afternoon at the boatyard.”

“I thought he was off duty.”

“He got a message from you, it seems.”

“Mm. I did send one.”

“What message?” Tremayne asked.

“I don’t know,” Sam answered. “Doone phoned me yesterday to say he’d been to the boatyard and taken away some objects for which he would give me a receipt.”

“What objects?” asked Tremayne.

“He wouldn’t say.” Sam looked at me. “Do you know what they were? You steered him to them, it seems. He sounded quite excited.”

“What was the message?” Mackie asked me.

“Um . . .” I said. “I asked him why the floorboards didn’t float.”

Tremayne and Mackie appeared mystified but Sam immediately understood and looked thunderstruck.

“Bloody hell—how did you think of it?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “It just came.”

“Do explain,” Mackie begged.

I told her what I’d told Erica at Tremayne’s dinner, and said it might not lead to anything helpful.

“But it certainly might,” Mackie said.

Sam said to me thoughtfully, “If you hadn’t stopped me, I’d have rolled up the curtain so as to go into the dock in a boat, and all that stuff under the water would have slithered away into the river and no one would have been any the wiser.”

“Fiona’s sure John will find out, before Doone does, who set that trap for Harry,” Mackie said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know who it was. Wish I did.”

“Matter of time,” Tremayne said confidently. He looked at his watch. “Talking of time, second lot.” He stood up. “Sam, I want a trial of that new horse Roydale against Fringe. You ride Roydale, John’s on Fringe.”

“OK,” Sam said easily.

“John.” Tremayne turned to me. “Don’t try to beat Sam as if it were a race. This is a fact-finder. I want to see which has most natural speed. Go as fast as you can but if you feel Fringe falter, don’t press him, just ease back.”

“Right.”

“Mackie, talk to Dee-Dee or something. I’m not taking you up there to vomit in the Land-Rover.”

“Oh, Tremayne, as if I would.”

“Not risking it,” he said gruffly. “Don’t want you bouncing about on those ruts.”

“I’m not an invalid,” she protested, but she might as well have argued with a rock. He determinedly left her behind and drove Sam and me up to the gallops.

On the way, Sam said to me dryly, “Nolan usually rides any trials. He’ll be furious.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Tremayne said repressively, “I’ve told Nolan he won’t be riding work here again until he cools off.”

Sam raised his eyebrows comically. “Do you want John shot? Nolan’s a whiz with a gun.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Tremayne said a shade uneasily, and bumped the Land-Rover across the ruts of the track and onto the smooth upland grass before drawing to a halt. “Keep your mind on Roydale. He belongs to a new owner. I want your best judgment. His form’s not brilliant, but nor is the trainer he’s come from. I want to know where we’re at.”

“Sure,” Sam said.

“Stay upside Fringe as long as you can.”

Sam nodded. We took Roydale and Fringe from the lads and when Tremayne had driven off and positioned himself on his hillock we started together up the all-weather gallop, going the fastest I’d been ever. Fringe, flat-out at racing pace, had a wildness about him I couldn’t really control and I guessed it was that quality which won him races. Whenever Roydale put his nose in front, Fringe found a bit extra, but it seemed there wasn’t much between them, and with the end of the wood chippings in sight the contest was still undecided. I saw Sam sit up and ease the pressure, and copied him immediately, none too soon for my taxed muscles and speed-starved lungs. I finished literally breathless but Sam pulled up nonchalantly and trotted back to Tremayne for a report in full voice.

“He’s a green bugger,” he announced. “He has a mouth like elephant skin. He shies at his own shadow and he’s as stubborn as a pig. Apart from that, he’s fast, as you saw.”

Tremayne listened impassively. “Courage?”

“Can’t tell till he’s on a racecourse.”

“I’ll enter him for Saturday. We may as well find out. Perhaps you’d better give him a pop over hurdles tomorrow.”

“OK.”

We handed the horses back to their respective lads and went down the hill again with Tremayne and found Doone waiting for us, sitting in his car.

“That man gives me the bloody creeps,” Sam said as we disembarked.

The grayly persistent detective chief inspector emerged like a turtle from his shell when he saw us arrive, and he’d come alone for once: no silent note-taker in his shadow.

“Which of us do you want?” Tremayne inquired bullishly.

“Well, sir.” The singsong voice took all overt menace away, yet there was still a suggestion that collars might be felt at any minute. “All of you, sir, if you don’t mind.”

Just the same if we did mind, he meant.

“You’d better come in, then,” Tremayne offered, shrugging.

Doone followed us into the kitchen, removed a gray tweed overcoat and sat by the table in his much-lived-in gray suit. He felt comfortable in kitchens, I thought. Tremayne vaguely suggested coffee, and I made a mug of instant for each of us.

Mackie came through from having breakfasted with Perkin, saying she wanted to know how the trial had gone. She wasn’t surprised to see Doone, only resigned. I made her some coffee and she sat and watched while Doone picked a piece of paper out of his breast pocket and handed it to Sam.

“A receipt, sir,” he said, “for three lengths of floorboard retrieved from the dock in your boathouse.”

Sam unfolded the paper and looked at it dumbly.

“Why didn’t they float?” Tremayne asked bluntly.

“Ah. So everyone knows about that?” Doone seemed disappointed.

Tremayne nodded. “John just told us.”

Doone gave me a sorrowful stare, but I hadn’t given a thought to his wanting secrecy.

“They didn’t float, sir, because they were weighted.”

“With what?” Sam asked.

“With pieces of paving stone. There are similar pieces of paving stone scattered on a portion of your boatyard property.”

“Paving
stone?” Sam sounded bemused, then said doubtfully, “Do you mean broken slabs of pink and gray marble?”

“Is that what it is, sir, marble?” Doone didn’t know much about marble, it appeared.

“It might be.”

Doone pondered, made up his mind, went out to his car and returned carrying a five-foot plank which he laid across the kitchen table. The old gray wood, though still dampish, looked as adequate for its purpose as its fellows still forming the boathouse floor and didn’t seem to have been weakened in any way. Slightly towards one end, on the surface that was now uppermost on the table, rested a long, unevenly shaped darkish slab of what I might have thought was rough-faced granite.

“Yes,” Sam said, glancing at it. “That’s marble.” He stretched out his hand and tried to pick it up, and the plank came up an inch with it. Sam let it drop, frowning.

“It’s stuck on,” Doone said, nodding. “From the looks of the other pieces lying about, the surface that’s stuck to the wood is smooth and polished.”

“Yes,” Sam said.

“Superglue, we think,” Doone said, “would make a strong enough bond.”

“A lot of plastic adhesives would,” Sam said, nodding.

“And how do you happen to have chunks of marble lying about?” Doone asked, though not forbiddingly.

“It came with a job lot of stuff I bought from a demolition firm,” Sam explained without stress. “They had some paneling I wanted for a boat I did up, and some antique bathroom fittings. I had to take a lot of oddments as well, like the marble. It came from a mansion they were pulling down. They sell off things, you know. Fireplaces, doors, anything.”

Doone asked conversationally, “Did you stick the marble onto the floorboards, sir?”

“No, I bloody well did
not,”
Sam said explosively.

“Onto the underside of the floorboards,” I said. “There were no slabs of marble in sight when Harry and I went into the upstairs room of the boathouse. I expect, if there are some other blocks still in place, that you can see them from underneath, in the dock.”

Doone with slight reluctance admitted that there seemed to be marble stuck to the underside of one more floorboard on each side of the hole.

The plank on the table was about eight inches across. Harry had taken three of them down with him; five altogether had been doctored. The trap with its missing section of beam had been three and a half feet across, and Harry, taking the envelope bait, had gone through its center.

“Have you finished snooping round my place now?” Sam demanded, and Doone shook his head.

“I want to work on my boat,” Sam objected.

“Go ahead, sir. Never mind my men, if they’re there.”

“Right.” Sam stood up with bouncing energy, quite unlike a patient suddenly stricken with flu. “‘Bye, Tremayne. ’Bye Mackie. See you, John.”

He went out to his car, carrying his jazzy jacket, and tooted as he drove away. The kitchen seemed a lot less alive without him.

“I’d like to talk to Mr. Kendall alone,” Doone said placidly.

Tremayne’s eyebrows rose but he made no objection. He suggested I take Doone into the dining room while he told Mackie about Roydale’s gallop, and Doone followed me docilely, bringing the plank.

The formality of the dining-room furnishings seemed at first to change his mood from ease to starch, but it appeared to me after a short while that he was troubled rather by indecision as to which side I was now on, them or us.

He seemed to settle finally for us, us being the police, or at least the fact-seekers and, clearing his throat, he told me that his men with grappling irons and magnets had missed finding the floorboards the first time, probably because the floorboards weren’t magnetic. Did I, he wanted to know, think the trap-setter had taken magnetism into account?

I frowned. “Stretching it a bit,” I said. “I should think he looked around for something heavy that would take glue, and with all that junk lying around there was bound to be something. The marble happened to be perfect. But the whole thing was so thoroughly thought out, you really can’t tell.”

“Do you know who did it?” he asked forthrightly.

“No,” I said truthfully.

“You must have opinions.” He shifted on his chair, looking around him. “I’d like to hear them.”

“They’re negative more than positive.”

“Often just as valuable.”

“I’d assume the trap-setter had been a guest at Sam Yaeger’s boatyard party,” I said, “only you warned me never to assume.”

“Assume it,” he said, almost smiling and in some inner way contented.

“And,” I went on, “I’d assume it was the person who killed Angela Brickell, who wanted to fix the blame forever on Harry by making him disappear, only . . .”

“Assume it,” he said.

“Anyone could have killed Angela Brickell, but only a hundred and fifty or so people went to Sam’s party, and half of those were women.”

“Don’t you think a woman could have set that trap?” he asked neutrally.

“Sure, a woman could have thought it out and done the carpentering. But what woman could have lured Angela Brickell and persuaded her to take all her clothes off in the middle of a wood?”

He sucked his teeth.

“All right,” he said, “I agree, a man killed her.” He paused. “Motive?”

“I’d guess ... to keep a secret. I mean, suppose she was pregnant. Suppose she went out into the woods with ... him, and they were going to make love ... or they’d done it ... and she said, ‘I’m pregnant, you’re the father, what are you going to do about it?’ She was full of jumbled religious guilts, but it was she who was the seducer ...” I paused. “I’d think perhaps she was killed because she wanted too much ... and because she wouldn’t have an abortion.”

He made a sound very like a purr in his throat.

“All right,” he said again. “Method: strangulation. Guaranteed to work, as everyone around here knew, after the death of that other girl, Olympia.”

“Yes.”

“Opportunity?” he said.

“No one can remember what they were doing the day Angela Brickell disappeared.”

“Except the murderer,” he observed. “What about opportunity on the day Mr. Goodhaven fell through the floor?”

“Someone was there to drive his car away ... no fingerprints, I suppose?”

“Gloves,” he said succinctly. “Too few of Mr. Goodhaven’s prints are still there. No palm print on the gear lever, for instance. I don’t know if we’d have worried about that if we’d thought he’d done a bunk. It was a cold day, after all. He might have worn gloves himself.”

“You might have guessed at collusion,” I suggested.

“Did you ever consider police work?”

“Not good at that sort of discipline.”

“You don’t like taking orders, sir?”

“I prefer giving them to myself.”

He smiled without criticism. “You’d be no good in uniform.”

“None at all.”

He was entitled, I supposed, to his small exploratory excursion around my character; and if he himself, I thought, had been wholly fulfilled by uniform, he would still be in it.

Perkin in his overalls appeared in the open doorway, hovering.

“Is Mackie over here?” he said. “I can’t find her.”

“In the kitchen with Tremayne,” I said.

“Thanks.” He swept a gaze over Doone and the plank and said with irony, “Sorting it out, then?”

Doone said a shade heavily, “Mr. Kendall’s always helpful,” and Perkin made a face and went off to join Mackie.