Longshot

Tremayne said, ‘What’s done’s done,’ as if announcing his life’s philosophy, and added that he would ‘give the police a ring’ when he got home, which would be very soon now.

‘About your clothes,’ Fiona said to me, ‘shall I send them to the cleaners with all our wet things?’

‘No, don’t bother,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and collect them tomorrow.’

‘All right.’ She smiled slightly. ‘I do realise we have to thank you. Don’t think we don’t know.’

‘Don’t know what?’ Perkin demanded.

Harry said in his way, ‘Fellow saved us from ice-cubery.’

‘From what?’

Ingrid giggled. Everyone looked at her. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered, subsiding.

‘Quite likely from death,’ Mackie said plainly. ‘Let’s go home,’ She stood up, clearly much better for the warmth and the stiffly laced coffee and also, it seemed to me, relieved that her father-in-law hadn’t added his weight to her husband’s bawling-out. ‘Tomorrow,’ she added slowly, ‘which of us is going back to Reading?’

‘Oh, God,’ Fiona said. ‘For a minute I’d forgotten.’

‘Some of us will have to go,’ Mackie said, and it was clear that no one wanted to.

After a pause Harry stirred. ‘I’ll go. I’ll take Bob. Fiona doesn’t have to go, nor does Ingrid. Mackie...’ he stopped.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I owe him that.’

Fiona said, ‘So will I. He’s my cousin, after all. He deserves us to support him. Though after what Harry did today I don’t know if I can look him in the face.’

‘What did Harry do?’ Perkin asked.

Fiona shrugged and retreated. ‘Mackie can tell you.’ Fiona, it seemed, could attack Harry all she liked herself, but she wasn’t throwing him to other wolves. Harry was no doubt due for further tongue-lashing after we’d gone, and in fact was glancing at his wife in a mixture of apprehension and resignation.

‘Let’s be off,’ Tremayne said. ‘Come along, Bob.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Bob Watson, I remembered, was Tremayne’s head lad. He and his Ingrid went over to the door, followed by Mackie and Perkin. I put down my mug, thanking Harry for the reviver.

‘Come down this time tomorrow to fetch your clothes,’ he said. ‘Come for a drink. An ordinary drink, not an emergency.’

‘Thank you. I’d like that.’

He nodded amiably, and Fiona also, and I picked up my dry clothes-bag and the camera case and followed Tremayne and the others out again into the snow. The six of us squeezed into a large Volvo, Tremayne driving, Perkin sitting beside him, Ingrid sitting on Bob’s lap in the back with Mackie and me. At the end of the village Tremayne stopped to let Bob and Ingrid get out, Ingrid giving me a sketchy smile and saying Bob would bring my suit and boots along in the morning, if that would be all right. Of course, I said.

They turned away to walk through a garden gate towards a small shadowy house, and Tremayne started off again towards open country, grousing that the trial would take his head lad away for yet another day. Neither Mackie nor Perkin said anything, and I still had no idea what the trial was all about. I didn’t know them well enough to ask, I felt.

‘Not much of a welcome for you, John, eh?’ Tremayne said over his shoulder. ‘Did you bring a typewriter?’

‘No. A pencil, actually. And a tape recorder.’

‘I expect you know what you’re doing.’ He sounded cheerfully more sure of that than I was. ‘We can start in the morning.’

After about a mile of cautious crawling along a surface much like the one we’d come to grief on, he turned in through a pair of imposing gateposts and stopped outside a very large house where many lights showed dimly through curtains. As inhabitants of large houses seldom used their front doors we went into this one also at the side, not directly into the kitchen this time but into a warm carpeted hall leading to doorways in all directions.

Tremayne, saying, ‘Bloody cold night,’ walked through a doorway to the left, looking back for me to follow. ‘Come on in. Make yourself at home. This is the family room, where you’ll find newspapers, telephone, drinks, things like that. Help yourself to whatever you want while you’re here.’

The big room looked comfortable in a sprawling way, not tidy, not planned. There was a mixture of patterns and colours, a great many photographs, a few poinsettias left over from Christmas and a glowing log fire in a wide stone fireplace.

Tremayne picked up a telephone and briefly told the local force that his jeep was in the ditch in the lane, not to worry, no one had been hurt, he would get it picked up in the morning. Duty done, he went across to the fire and held out his hands to warm them.

‘Perkin and Mackie have their own part of the house, but this room is where we all meet,’ he said. ‘If you want to leave a message for anybody, pin it to that board over there.’ He pointed to a chair on which was propped a corkboard much like the one in Ronnie’s office. Red drawing pins were stuck into it at random, one of them anchoring a note which in large letters announced briefly ‘BACK FOR GRUB’.