Longshot. Part 7

Although if we had still been outside the alcohol wouldn't have been such a good idea, the deep trembles in all our bodies abated and faded away. Bob Watson took off his cap and looked suddenly younger, a short stocky man with wiry brown hair and a returning glint of independence. One could still see what he must have looked like as a schoolboy, with rounded cheeks and a natural insolence not far from the surface but controlled enough to keep him out of trouble. He had called Harry a liar, but too quietly for him to hear. That rather summed up Bob Watson, I thought.

Ingrid, swamped in the ski-suit, looked out at the world from a thinly pretty face and sniffed at regular intervals. She sat beside her husband at the table, unspeaking and forever in his shadow.

Standing with his backside propped against the Aga, Harry warmed both hands round his mug and looked at me with the glimmering amus.e.m.e.nt that, when not under stress from giving evidence, seemed to be his habitual cast of mind.

'Welcome to Berkshire,' he said.

'Thanks a lot.'

'I would have stayed by the jeep and waited for someone to come,' he said.

'I thought someone would,' I agreed.

Mackie said, 'I hope the horse is all right,' as if her mind were stuck in that groove. No one else, it seemed to me, cared an icicle for the survival of the cause of our woes; and I suspected, perhaps unfairly, that Mackie kept on about the horse so as to reinforce in our consciousness that the crash hadn't been her fault.

Warmth gradually returned internally also and everyone looked as if they had come up to room temperature, like wine. Ingrid pushed back the hood of my ski-suit jacket revealing soft mouse-brown hair in need of a brush.

No one had a great wish to talk, and there was something of a return to the pre-crash gloom, so it was a relief when wheels, slammed doors and approaching footsteps announced the arrival of Perkin.

He hadn't come alone. It was Tremayne Vickers who advanced first into the kitchen, his loud voice and large personality galvanising the subdued group drinking coffee.

'Got yourselves into a load of s.h.i.t, have you?' he boomed with a touch of not wholly unfriendly scorn. 'Roads too much for you, eh?'

Mackie went defensively into the horse routine as if she'd merely been rehearsing earlier.

The man who followed Tremayne through the door looked like a smudged carbon copy: same height, same build, same basic features, but none of Tremayne's bullishness. If that was Perkin, I thought, he must be Tremayne's son.

The carbon copy said to Mackie crossly, 'Why didn't you go round the long way? You ought to have more sense than to take that short cut.'

'It was all right this morning,' Mackie said, 'and I always go that way. It was the horse-'

Tremayne's gaze fastened on me. 'So you got here. Good. You've met everyone? My son, Perkin. His wife, Mackie.'

I'd a.s.sumed, I realised, that Mackie had been either Tremayne's own wife pr perhaps his daughter; hadn't thought of daughter-in-law.

'Why on earth are you wearing a dinner jacket?' Tremayne asked, staring.

'We got wet in the ditch,' Harry said briefly. 'Your friend the writer lent us dry clothes. He issued his dinner jacket to himself. Didn't trust me with it, smart fellow. What I've got on is his bathrobe. Ingrid has his ski-suit. Fiona is his from head to foot.'

Tremayne looked briefly bewildered but decided not to sort things out. Instead he asked Fiona if she'd been hurt in the crash. 'Fiona, my dear-'

Fiona, his dear, a.s.sured him otherwise. He behaved to her with a hint of roguishness, she to him with easy response. She aroused in all men, I supposed, the desire to flirt.

Perkin belatedly asked Mackie about her head, awkwardly producing anxiety after his ungracious criticism. Mackie gave him a tired understanding smile, and I had a swift impression that she was the one in that marriage who made allowances, who did the looking after, who was the adult to her good-looking husband-child.

'But,' he said, 'I do think you were silly to go down that road.' His reaction to her injury was still to blame her for it, but I wondered if it weren't really a reaction to fright, like a parent clouting a much-loved lost-but-found infant. 'And there was supposed to be a police notice at the turn-off saying it was closed. It's been closed since those cars slid into each other at lunchtime.'

'There wasn't any police notice,' Mackie said.

'Well, there must have been. You just didn't see it.'

'There was no police notice in sight,' Harry said, and we all agreed, we hadn't seen one.

'All the same-' Perkin wouldn't leave it.

'Look,' Mackie said, 'if I could go back and do it again then I wouldn't go along there, but it looked all right and I'd come up in the morning, so I just did, and that's that.'

'We all saw the horse,' Harry said, drawling, and from the dry humour lurking in his voice one could read his private opinion of Perkin's behaviour.

Perkin gave him a confused glance and stopped picking on Mackie.

Tremayne said, 'What's done's done,' as if announcing his life's philosophy, and added that he would 'give the police a ring' when he got home, which would be very soon now.

'About your clothes,' Fiona said to me, 'shall I send them to the cleaners with all our wet things?'

'No, don't bother,' I said. 'I'll come and collect them tomorrow.'

'All right.' She smiled slightly. 'I do realise we have to thank you. Don't think we don't know.'

'Don't know what?' Perkin demanded.

Harry said in his way, 'Fellow saved us from ice-cubery.'

'From what?'

Ingrid giggled. Everyone looked at her. 'Sony,' she whispered, subsiding.

'Quite likely from death,' Mackie said plainly. 'Let's go home,' She stood up, clearly much better for the warmth and the stiffly laced coffee and also, it seemed to me, relieved that her father-in-law hadn't added his weight to her husband's bawling-out. 'Tomorrow,' she added slowly, 'which of us is going back to Reading?'

'Oh, G.o.d,' Fiona said. 'For a minute I'd forgotten.'

'Some of us will have to go,' Mackie said, and it was clear that no one wanted to.

After a pause Harry stirred. 'I'll go. I'll take Bob. Fiona doesn't have to go, nor does Ingrid. Mackie-' he stopped.

'I'll come with you,' she said. 'I owe him that.'

Fiona said, 'So will I. He's my cousin, after all. He deserves us to support him. Though after what Harry did today I don't know if I can look him in the face.'

'What did Harry do?' Perkin asked.

Fiona shrugged and retreated. 'Mackie can tell you.' Fiona, it seemed, could attack Harry all she liked herself, but she wasn't throwing him to other wolves. Harry was no doubt due for further tongue-lashing after we'd gone, and in fact was glancing at his wife in a mixture of apprehension and resignation.

'Let's be off,' Tremayne said. 'Come along, Bob.'

'Yes, sir.'

Bob Watson, I remembered, was Tremayne's head lad. He and his Ingrid went over to the door, followed by Mackie and Perkin. I put down my mug, thanking Harry for the reviver.