Longshot

‘Angela Brickell’s sexuality frightened him. He would never have gone into the woods with her. Apart from that, he hasn’t a driving licence, and he was at school on Wednesday afternoon.’

‘Actually,’ Doone said calmly, ‘he is known to be able to drive his father’s jeep on the Downs expertly, and my men have discovered he was out of school last Wednesday afternoon on a field trip to Windsor Safari Park. That’s not miles from the boatyard. The teacher in charge is flustered over the number of boys who sloped off to buy food.’

I considered Gareth as a murderer. I said, ‘You asked me for my knowledge of these people. Gareth couldn’t possibly be our man.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

‘I just am.’

He wrote a cross against Gareth’s name, and then as an afterthought, a question mark also.

I shook my head. Under Gareth’s name he wrote ‘PERKIN VICKERS’.

‘What about him?’ he asked.

‘Perkin...’ I sighed. ‘He lives in another world half the time. He works hard. For, I suppose, is that he makes furniture, he’s good with wood. I don’t know that it’s for or against that he dotes on his wife. He’s very possessive of her. He’s a bit childlike in some ways. She loves him and looks after him. Against... he doesn’t have much to do with the horses. Seldom goes racing. He didn’t remember who Angela Brickell was, the first morning you were here.’

Doone pursed his lips judiciously, then nodded and wrote a cross against Perkin, and then again a question mark.

‘Keeping your options open?’ I asked dryly.

‘You never know what we don’t know,’ he said.

‘Deep.’

‘It might be reasonable to assume that Mr Goodhaven didn’t set the trap himself, to persuade me of his innocence,’ he said, writing ‘HENRY GOODHAVEN’ on the list.

‘A hundred per cent,’ I agreed.

‘However, he took you along as a witness.’ He paused. ‘Suppose he planned it and it all went wrong? Suppose he needed you there to assert he’d walked into a trap?’

‘Impossible.’

He put a question mark against Harry, all the same.

‘Who drove his car away?’ I said, a shade aggressively.

‘A casual thief.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘You like him,’ Doone said. ‘You’re unreliable.’

‘That page is headed “KENDALL’S ASSESSMENTS”,’ I protested. ‘My assessment of Harry merits a firm cross.’

He looked at what he’d written, shrugged and changed the question mark to a negative. Then he made a question mark away to the right on the same line. ‘My assessments,’ he said.

I smiled a little ruefully and said reflectively, ‘Have you worked out when the trap was set? Raising the floorboards, finding the marble and sticking it on, cutting out the bit of beam — and I bet that went floating down the river — remembering to lock the lower door... It would all have taken a fair time.’

‘When would you say it was done, then?’ he asked, giving nothing away.

‘Any time Tuesday, or Wednesday morning, I suppose.’

‘Why, exactly?’

‘Anti-Harry fever was publicly at its height on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but by the Sunday before, at least, you’d begun to spread your investigation outwards... which must horribly have alarmed our man. Sam Yaeger spent Monday at the boatyard because he’d been medically stood down from racing as a result of a fall, but by Tuesday he was racing again; on Wednesday he rode at Ascot, so the boathouse was vulnerable all day Tuesday and again Wednesday morning.’

Doone looked at me from under his eyelids.

‘You’re forgetting something,’ he said, and added ‘SAM YAEGER’ to his list.

Chapter 17

‘Put a cross,’ I said.

Doone shook his head. ‘You admire him. You could be blinded.’

I thought it over. ‘I do in many ways admire him, I admit. I admire his riding, his professionalism. He’s courageous. He’s a realist.’ I paused. ‘I’ll agree that on the For side you could put the things you listed the other day, that he has all the skills to set the trap and the perfect place to do it.’

‘Go on,’ Doone nodded.

‘You’d begun actively investigating him,’ I said.

‘Yes, I had.’

‘He’d rolled around a bit with Angela Brickell,’ I said, ‘and that’s where we come to the biggest Against.’

‘You’re not saying he couldn’t have had the irritation, the nerve, the strength to strangle her?’

‘No, I’m not, though I don’t think he did it. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have taken her out into the woods. He told you himself he moves a mattress into the boathouse on such occasions. If he’d strangled her on impulse it would have been there, and he could have slid her weighted body into the river, no one the wiser.’

Doone listened with his head on one side. ‘But what if he’d deliberately planned it? What if he’d suggested the woods as being far away from his own territory?’

‘I wouldn’t think he’d need to cover his sins with strangulation,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows he seduces anything that moves. He would pass off an Angela Brickell sort of scandal with a laugh.’

Doone disapproved, saying, ‘Unsavoury,’ and maybe thinking of his assailable daughters.