Longshot. Part 55

'My G.o.d!' I said, stunned.

'What? What have you thought of?' She was alert again, and intent.

'I'll have to talk to Doone.'

'Do you know who did it?' she demanded.

'No, but I know what he knew.' I frowned. 'Everyone knows it.'

'What? Do explain.'

I looked at her vaguely, thinking.

'I don't believe it's very important,' I said in the end.

'Then what is it?' she insisted.

'Wood floats.'

She looked bemused. 'Well, of course it does.'

'The floorboards that went down to the water with Harry, they stayed under. They didn't float.'

'Why not?'

'Have to find out,' I said. 'Doone can find out.'

'What does it matter?'

'Well,' I said, 'no one could be absolutely certain that Harry would be spiked and drown immediately. So suppose he's alive and swimming about. He's been in that place before, at Sam's party, and he knows there's a mooring dock along one wall. He knows there's a door and he has daylight and can see the river through the metal curtain. So how does he get out?'

She shook her head. 'Tell me.'

'The door opens outwards. If you're inside, and you're standing in only six inches of water, not six feet, and you've got three or four floorboards floating about, you use one of them as a ram to break the lock or batter the door down. You're big and strong like Harry and also wet, cold, desperate and angry. How long does it take you to break out?'

'I suppose not long.'

'When Napoleon came to the boathouse,' I said, 'there wasn't any sound of Harry battering his way out. In fact,' I frowned, 'there's no saying how long the enemy had been there, waiting. He might have been hiding- heard Harry's car arrive.'

Erica said, 'When your book's published, send me a copy.'

I looked at her open-mouthed.

Then I can tell you the difference between invention and insight.'

'You know how to pierce,' I said, wincing.

She began to say something else but never completed it. Instead our heads turned in unison towards the dancers, among whom battle seemed already to have started. There was a crash and a scream and bizarrely against the unrelentingly cheerful music two figures could be seen fighting.

Sam- and Nolan.

Sam had blood on his white jacket and down the white ruffles. Nolan's shirt was ripped open, showing a lot of hairy chest. They were both reeling about exchanging swinging blows not ten feet from table six and I stood up automatically, more in defence than interference.

Perkin tried to pull them apart and got smartly knocked down by Nolan, quick and tough with his fists as with his riding. I stepped without thinking onto the polished square and tried words instead.

'You stupid fools,' I said: not the most inventive sentence ever.

Nolan took his attention off Sam for a split second, lashed out expertly at my face and whirled back to his prime target in time to parry Sam's wildly lunging arm and kick him purposefully between the legs. Sam's head came forward. Nolan's fist began a descent onto the back of Sam's vulnerable neck.

With instinct more than thought, I barged into Nolan bodily, pushing him off line. He turned a face of mean-eyed fury in my direction and easily transferred his hatred.

I was vaguely aware that the dance floor had cleared like morning mist and also acutely conscious that Nolan knew volumes more about bare-knuckle fisticuffs than I did.

Racing people were extraordinary, I thought. Far from piling into Nolan in a preventative heap, they formed an instant ring around us and, as the band came to a straggling sharp-flat unscheduled halt, Lewis's drunken aristocratic voice could be heard drawling, 'Five to four the field.'

Everyone laughed. Everyone except Nolan. I doubted if he'd heard. He was high on the flooding wave from the bursting dam of his dark nature, all the anxiety, guilt, hate and repressions sweeping out in a reckless torrent, no longer containable.

In a straight fight I wasn't going to beat him. All I would be was a punchbag for his escaping fury, the ent.i.ty he saw as a new unbearable threat to his dominance in Tremayne's stable; the interloper, usurper, legitimate target.

I turned my back on him and took a step or two away. All I knew about fighting was ruse and trickery. I could see from the onlooking faces that he was coming for me and at what speed, and when I felt the air behind me move and heard the brush of his clothes I went down fast on one knee and whirled and punched upwards hard into the bottom of his advancing rib cage and then shifted my weight into his body and upwards so as to lift him wholesale off the floor, and before he'd got that sorted out I had one of his wrists in my hand and he ended up on his feet with me behind him, his arm in a nice painful lock and my mouth by his ear.

'You stupid s.h.i.t,' I said intensely. 'The Jockey Club are here. Don't you care about your permit?'

For answer, he kicked back and caught me on a shin.

'Then I'll ride all your horses,' I said unwisely.

I gave him a hard releasing shove in the general direction of Sam, Perkin and an open-mouthed Gareth and at last watched a dozen restraining hands clutch and keep him from destroying himself entirely, but he struggled against them and turned his vindictive face my way and shouted in still exploding rage, 'I'll kill you.'

I stood unmoving and listened to those words, and thought of Harry.

CHAPTER 15.

I apologized to Tremayne.

'Nolan started it,' Mackie said.

She peered anxiously at the reddening bruise on Perkin's cheek, a twin to one on mine.

Perkin sat in angry confusion at table six while the racing crowd, entertaining skirmish over, drifted away and got the band re-started.

Nolan was nowhere in sight. Sam took off his stained jacket, wiped his b.l.o.o.d.y nose, sucked his knuckles,and began making jokes as a form of released tension.

'I b.u.mped into him, that's all I did,' he proclaimed with tragicomic gestures. 'Well, say I then took Fiona off him and maybe I told him to go find himself another filly and the next thing was he got a pincer-hold on my ear and was bopping me one on the nose and there I was bleeding fit to fill the Frenchy furrows so naturally I gave him one back.'

He collected an appreciative audience which definitely didn't include Tremayne. The shambles at the end of his splendid evening was aggravating him sorely and he propelled Fiona into a seat at the table with some of the disgruntled force he'd shown in Ronnie Curzon's office.

Fiona said anxiously, 'But, Tremayne, Sam meant it as a joke.'