Longshot. Part 53

'He told me to lay off you, as you'd saved his life,' she announced baldly. 'A proper spoilsport.'

I said in amus.e.m.e.nt, 'I don't suppose you'll obey him.'

I heard the beginning of a chuckle from the front seat, quickly stifled. The battle lines, it seemed, had already been drawn. Hostilities however were in abeyance during arrival at the racecourse, disrobing, hair-tidying and first drinks. Half the racing world seemed to have embraced the occasion, for which after the last race that afternoon there had been much speedy unrolling of glittering black and silver ceiling-to-floor curtaining, transforming the workaday interior of the grandstand into something ephemerally magnificent.

'Theatrical,' Erica said disapprovingly of the decor, and so it was, but none the worse for that. It lifted the spirits, caused conversation, got the party going. Background music made a change from bookies' cries. Fiona looked at the seating plan and said to meet at table six. People came and surrounded her and Erica, and I drifted away from them and around, seeing a few people I knew by sight and hundreds I didn't. Like being at a gravediggers' convention, I thought, when one had marked out one's first plot.

My thoughts ran too much on death.

Bob Watson was there, dapper in a dark grey suit, with Ingrid shyly pretty in pale blue.

'Couldn't let down the guv'nor,' Bob said cheerfully. 'Anyway, he gave us the tickets.'

'Jolly good,' I said inanely.

'You're riding Fringe tomorrow,' he said, halfway between announcement and question. 'Schooling. The guv'nor just told me.'

'Yes.'

'Fringe will look after you,' he said inscrutably, looking around. 'Done this place up like an Egyptian brothel, haven't they?'

'I don't really know.'

'Oh, very funny.'

Ingrid giggled. Bob quelled her with a look, but I noticed slightly later and indeed all evening that she stuck very closely to his side; this could have been interpreted as her own insecurity if I hadn't remembered Mackie saying that meek little Ingrid never gave Bob much chance to stray with the likes of Angela Brickell and G.o.d help him if he did.

Sam Yaeger, ever an exhibitionist, had come in a white dinner jacket, having lent Gareth his black. He also had a frilled white shirt, a black shoestring tie and a definite air of strain under the confident exterior. Doone, it appeared, had more or less accused him straight out of sabotaging his own boathouse.

'He says I had the tools, the knowledge, the opportunity and the location, and he looked up those races I rode at Ascot and worked out that I could have had time between the first two and the last to drive to Maidenhead and remove Harry's car. I asked why should I bother to do that when presumably if I had set the trap I would expect Harry's car still to be there after the races, and he just wrote down my answer as if I'd made a confession.'

'He's persistent.'

'He listens to you,' Sam said. 'We've all noticed. Can't you tell him I didn't sodding do it?'

'I could try.'

'And he whistled up his cohorts after you'd gone,' Sam complained, 'and they came with wet-suits and grappling irons and a heavy magnet and dredged up a lot of muck from the dock. An old broken bicycle frame, some rusted railings, an old disintegrating metal gate- it had all been lying here and there on the property. They clammed up after a bit and wouldn't show me everything, but he thinks I put it all in the water hoping Harry would get tangled in it.'

'Which he did.'

'So I'm asking you, how come you didn't get spiked when you went down there after him?'

'I learned how to jump into shallow water very young. So I didn't go down far. Put my feet down cautiously after I was floating.'

He stared. 'How the sod do you do that?'

'Jump shallow? The second your feet touch the water you raise your knees and crumple into a ball. The water itself acts as a brake. You must have done it yourself some time or other. And I had the air in my clothes to hold me up, don't forget.'

'Doone asked me if I'd left your jacket and boots in Harry's car. Tricky b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I know now how Harry's been feeling. You get that flatfoot looking to tie you in knots and it's like being squeezed by coils and coils of a sodding boa constrictor. Everything you say, he takes it in the wrong way. And he looks so d.a.m.ned harmless. He got me so riled I lost a race this afternoon I should have won. Don't say I said that. I don't b.l.o.o.d.y know why we all tell you things. You don't belong here.'

'Perhaps that's why.'

'Yeah, perhaps.'

He seemed to have let out sufficient steam and resentment for the moment and turned to flirt obligingly with a middle-aged woman who touched his arm in pleased antic.i.p.ation. Owners, Tremayne had said, either loved or hated Sam's manner: the women loved it; the men put up with it in exchange for winners.

Nolan, glowering routinely at Sam from a few feet away, switched his ill-humour to me.

'I don't want you treading on my effing toes,' he said forcefully. 'Why don't you clear off out of Sh.e.l.lerton?'

'I will in a while.'

'I told Tremayne there'll be trouble if he gives you any of my rides.'

'Ah.'

'He has the effing gall to say I suggested it myself and he knows b.l.o.o.d.y well I was taking the p.i.s.s.' He glared at me. 'I don't understand what Fiona sees in you. I told her you're just a bag of s.h.i.t with a pretty face who needs his a.r.s.e kicked. You keep away from her horses, understand?'

I understood that he like everyone else was suffering from the atmospheric blight cast by Angela Brickell; he perhaps most because the strain of his own trial and conviction was so recent. There was no way I was ever going to ride as well as he did and he surely knew it. Fiona would never jock him off, in racing's descriptive phrase.

He stomped away, his place almost immediately taken by his brother, who gave me a malicious imitation of a smile and said, 'Nolan doesn't expletive like you, dear heart.'

'You don't say.'

Lewis was sober, so far. Also unaccompanied, like Nolan, though Harry had mentioned at one time that Lewis was married: his reclusive wife preferred to stay at home to avoid the fuss and fracas of Lewis drunk.

'Nolan likes to be the centre of attention and you've usurped his pinnacle,' Lewis said.

'Rubbish.'

'Fiona and Mackie look to you, now, not to him. And as for Tremayne, as for Gareth- ' He gave me a sly leer. 'Don't put your neck within my brother's reach.'

'Lewis!' His lack of fraternal feeling shocked me more than his suggestion. 'You stuck your neck out for him, anyway.'

'Sometimes I hate him,' he said with undoubted truth, and wheeled away as if he had said enough.

Gla.s.ses in hand, the chattering groups mixed and mingled, broke and re-formed, greeted each other with glad cries as if they hadn't seen each other for years, not just that afternoon. Tremayne, large smile a permanence, received genuinely warm congratulations with believable modesty and Gareth, appearing eel-like at my elbow, said with gratification, 'He deserves it, doesn't he?'

'He does.'

'It makes you think a bit.'

'What about?'

'I mean, he's just Dad.' He struggled to get it right. 'Everyone's two people, aren't they?'

I said with interest, 'That's profound.'