Longshot

‘Everyone says he was drunk,’ Harry said, sounding heavily reasonable, ‘but I don’t know it, do I? I didn’t see him drinking too much.’

Bob Watson beside me said ‘Liar’ on a whispered breath, and Harry didn’t hear.

‘Nolan is going to prison,’ Fiona said bitterly. ‘Do you realise? Prison. All because of you.’

‘You don’t know he is,’ Harry complained. ‘The jury haven’t found him guilty yet.’

‘But they will, won’t they? And it will by your fault. Dammit, you were under oath. All you had to do was say Lewis was drunk. Now the jury thinks he wasn’t drunk, so he must be able to remember everything. They think he’s lying when he says he can’t remember. Christ Almighty, Nolan’s whole defence was that Lewis can’t remember. How could you be so stupid?’

Harry didn’t answer. The atmosphere if possible worsened, and I felt as if I’d gone into a movie halfway through and couldn’t grasp the plot.

Mackie, without contributing any opinions, turned from the Great West Road onto the M4 motorway and made better time westwards along an unlit and uninhabited stretch between snow-covered wooded hills, ice crystals glittering in the headlights.

‘Bob says Lewis was drunk,’ Fiona persisted, ‘and he should know, he was serving the drinks.’

‘Then maybe the jury will believe Bob.’

‘They believed him until you stood there and blew it.’

‘They should have had you in the witness box,’ Harry said defensively, ‘then you could have sworn he was paralytic and had to be scraped off the carpet, even if you weren’t there.’

Bob Watson said, ‘He wasn’t paralytic.’

‘You keep out of it, Bob,’ Harry snapped.

‘Sorr-ee,’ Bob Watson said, again under his breath.

‘All you had to do was swear that Lewis was drunk.’ Fiona’s voice rose with fury. ‘That’s all the defence called you for. Then you didn’t say it. Nolan’s lawyer could have killed you.’

Harry said wearily, ‘You didn’t have to stand there answering that prosecutor’s questions. You heard what he said, how did I know Lewis was drunk? Had I given him a breath test, a blood test, a urine test? On what did I base my judgment? Did I have any clinical experience? You heard him. On and on. How many drinks did I see Lewis take? How did I know what was in the drinks? Had I ever heard of Lewis having black-outs any other time after drinking?’

‘That was disallowed,’ Mackie said.

‘You let that prosecutor tie you in knots. You looked absolutely stupid...’ Fiona ran on and on, the rage in her mind unabating.

I began to feel mildly sorry for Harry.

We reached the Chieveley interchange and left the motorway to turn north on the big A34 to Oxford. Mackie had sensibly taken the cleared major roads rather than go over the hills, even though it was further that way, according to the map. I’d looked up the whereabouts of Tremayne’s village on the theory that it was a wise man who knew his destination, especially when it was on the Berkshire Downs a mile from nowhere.

Silence had mercifully struck Fiona’s tongue by the time Shellerton showed up on a signpost. Mackie slowed, signalled, and cautiously turned off the main road into a very narrow secondary road that was Hide more than a lane, where snow had been roughly pushed to the sides but still lay in shallow frozen brown ruts over much of the surface. The tyres scrunched on them, cracking the ice. Mist formed quickly on the inside of the windscreen and Mackie rubbed it away impatiently with her glove.

There were no houses beside the lane: it was well over a mile across bare downland, I found later, from the main road to the village. There were also no cars: no one was out driving if they could help it. For all Mackie’s care one could sometimes feel the wheels sliding, losing traction for perilous seconds. The engine, engaged in low gear, whined laboriously up a shallow incline.

‘It’s worse than this morning,’ Mackie said, sounding worried. ‘This road’s a skating rink.’

No one answered her. I was hoping, as I expect they all were, that we would reach the top of the slope without sliding backwards; and we did, only to see that the downside looked just as hazardous, if not more so. Mackie wiped the windscreen again and with extra care took a curve to the right.

Caught by the headlights, stock-still in the middle of the lane, stood a horse. A dark horse buckled into a dark rug, its head raised in alarm. There was the glimmer of sheen on its skin and luminescence in its wide eyes. The moment froze like the landscape.

‘Hell!’ Mackie exclaimed, and slammed her foot on the brake.

The vehicle slid inexorably on the ice and although Mackie released the brakes a moment later it did as much harm as good.

The horse, terrified, tried to plunge out of the lane into the field alongside. Intent on missing him, and at the same time fighting the skid, Mackie miscalculated the curve, the camber and the speed, though to be fair to her it would have taken a stunt driver to come out of there safely.