Longshot

I’d asked him how many lads he had. Twenty-one, he said, plus Bob Watson, who was worth six, and the travelling head lad and a box driver and a groundsman. With Mackie and Dee-Dee, twenty-seven full-time employees. The economics of training racehorses, he remarked, put the book trade’s problems in the shade.

When I reminded him that I was going down to Fiona and Harry’s to fetch my belongings he offered me his car.

‘I quite like walking,’ I said.

‘Good God.’

‘I’ll cook when I get back.’

‘You don’t have to,’ he protested. ‘Don’t let Gareth talk you into it.’

‘I said I would, though.’

‘I don’t care much what I eat.’

I grinned. ‘Maybe that will be just as well. I’ll be back soon after Gareth, I expect.’

I’d discovered that the younger son rode his bicycle each morning to the house of his friend Coconut, from where both of them were driven to and from a town ten miles away, as day boys in a mainly boarding school. The hours were long, as always with that type of school: Gareth was never home much before seven, often later. His notice ‘BACK FOR GRUB’ seemed to be a fixture. He removed it, Tremayne said, only when he knew in the morning that he would be out until bedtime. Then he would leave another message instead, to say where he was going.

‘Organised,’ I commented.

‘Always has been.’

I reached the main street of Shellerton and tramped along to the Goodhavens’ house, passing three or four cars in their driveway and walking round to the kitchen door to ring the bell.

After an interval the door was opened by Harry whose expression changed from inhospitable to welcoming by visible degrees.

‘Oh, hello, come in. Forgot about you. Fact is, we’ve had another lousy day in Reading. But home without crashing, best you can say.’

I stepped into the house and he closed the door behind us, at the same time putting a restraining hand on my arm.

‘Let me tell you first,’ he said. ‘Nolan and Lewis are both here. Nolan got convicted of manslaughter. Six months’ jail suspended for two years. He won’t go behind bars but no one’s happy.’

‘I don’t need to stay,’ I said. ‘Don’t want to intrude.’

‘Do me a favour, dilute the atmosphere.’

‘If it’s like that...’

He nodded, removed his hand and walked me through the kitchen into a warm red hallway and on into a pink-and-green chintzy sitting-room beyond.

Fiona, turning her silver-blond head said, ‘Who was it?’ and saw me following Harry. ‘Oh, good heavens, I’d forgotten.’ She came over, holding out a hand, which I shook, an odd formality after our previous meeting.

‘These are my cousins,’ she said. ‘Nolan and Lewis Everard.’ She gave me a wide don’t-say-anything stare, so I didn’t. ‘A friend of Tremayne’s,’ she said to them briefly. John Kendall.’

Mackie, sitting exhaustedly in an armchair, waggled acknowledging fingers. Everyone else was standing and holding a glass. Harry pressed a pale gold drink into my hand and left me to discover for myself what lay under the floating ice. Whisky, I found, tasting it.

I had had no mental picture of either Nolan or Lewis but their appearance all the same was a surprise. They were both short, Nolan handsome and hard, Lewis swollen and soft. Late thirties, both of them. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark jaws. I supposed I had perhaps expected them to be like Harry in character if not in appearance, but it was immediately clear that they weren’t. In place of Harry’s amused urbanity, Nolan’s aristocratic-sounding speech was essentially violent and consisted of fifty per cent obscenity. The gist of his first sentence was that he wasn’t in the mood for guests.

Neither Fiona nor Harry showed embarrassment, only weary tolerance. If Nolan had spoken like that in court, I thought, it was no wonder he’d been found guilty. One could quite easily imagine him throttling a nymph.

Harry said calmly, ‘John is writing Tremayne’s biography. He knows about the trial and the Top Spin Lob party. He’s a friend of ours, and he stays.’

Nolan gave Harry a combative stare which Harry returned with blandness.

‘Anyone can know about the trial,’ Mackie said. ‘It was in all the papers this morning, after all.’

Harry nodded. ‘To be continued in reel two.’

‘It’s not an expletive joke,’ Lewis said. ‘They took photos of us when we were leaving.’ His peevish voice was like his brother’s though a shade higher in pitch and, as I progressively discovered, instead of truly offensive obscene words he had a habit of using euphemisms like ‘expletive’, ‘bleep’ and ‘deleted’. In Harry’s mouth it might have been funny; in Lewis’s it seemed a form of cowardice.

‘Gird up such loins as you have,’ Harry told him peaceably. ‘The public won’t remember by next week.’

Nolan said between four-letter words that everyone that mattered would remember, including the Jockey Club.

‘I doubt if they’ll actually warn you off,’ Harry said. ‘It wasn’t as if you hadn’t paid your bookmaker.’

‘Harry!’ Fiona said sharply.

‘Sorry, m’dear,’ murmured her husband, though his lids half veiled his eyes like blinds drawn over his true feelings.