Longshot. Part 73

Mr Vickers, and after Angela Brickell, after Mr Goodhaven, after your little bit of trouble-' He left the thought hanging and I did nothing to bring it to earth. He sighed after a while and asked how I was feeling.

'Fine.'

'Hm.' He bent down and picked up a carrier that he'd lain on the floor. 'Thought you might like to see this.' He drew out a st.u.r.dy transparent plastic inner bag and held it up to the light to show me the contents.

An arrow, cut into two pieces.

One half was clean and pale, and the other stained and dark, with a long black section sharpened at the tip.

'We've had our lab take a look at this,' he said in his sing-song way, 'but they say there are no distinctive tool marks. It could have been sharpened by any straight blade in the kingdom.'

'Oh,' I said.

'But charring the point, now, that's in your books.'

'And in other books besides mine.'

He nodded. 'Yesterday morning, at Sh.e.l.lerton House, Mr Tremayne Vickers and young Mr and Mrs Perkin Vickers all told me they'd spent three or four hours looking for you on Monday night. Young Gareth didn't want them to give up, they said, but Mr Vickers senior told him you'd be all right even if you had got lost. You knew how to look after yourself, he said. They were just about to go home when they found you.'

'Lucky me.'

He nodded. 'An inch either way and you'd be history, so I hear. I told them all not to worry, I would go on working with you as soon as you were conscious and we would see our way together to a solution of the whole case.'

'Did you?' He took away what breath I still had.

'Mr Tremayne Vickers said he was delighted.' He paused. 'Did you follow that trail of paint towards the clearing they talk about?'

'Mm.'

'And was it along the trail that someone shot at you?'

'Mm.'

'We'll be taking a look at it ourselves, I shouldn't wonder.'

I made no comment and he looked disappointed.

'You should be wanting your a.s.sailant brought to justice.' Text book words again. 'You don't seem to care.'

'I'm tired,' I said.

'You wouldn't be interested then in the glue.'

'What glue?' I asked. 'Oh yes, glue.'

'For sticking marble to floorboards,' he said. 'We had it a.n.a.lysed. Regular impact adhesive. On sale everywhere. Untraceable.'

'And the alibis?'

'We're working on them, but everyone moved about so much except poor young Mr Vickers, who was in his workroom all the time.'

He seemed to be waiting for me to react, rather as if he'd floated a fly in front of a fish.

I smiled at him a little and displayed no interest. His moustache seemed to droop further from the lack of good results. He rose to go and told me to take care. Good advice, though a bit too late. He would proceed, he said, with his enquiries.

I wished him luck.

'You're too quiet,' he said.

When he'd gone I lay and thought for a long time about poor young Mr Vickers, and of what I should have told Doone, and hadn't.

Perkin, I thought, was one of the very few people who'd known about the camera and the trail. I'd listened to Gareth tell him in detail on Sunday evening.

Mackie had told Sam Yaeger on Monday morning.

Theoretically she could also have told Fiona on the telephone who could have told Nolan or Lewis, but it wasn't the sort of item one would naturally bother to pa.s.s on.

On Monday morning Doone had turned up at Sh.e.l.lerton House with the plank. Perkin knew it was I who had remembered that the floorboards should have floated, and on Monday he'd seen the plank on the dining-room table and heard Doone and me talking in close private consultation. Everything Fiona and Tremayne believed of me must have looked inevitable at that moment. John Kendall would lead Doone to the quarry, who was himself. Any quarry was ent.i.tled to take evasive action: to pre-empt discovery by striking first.

By lunchtime Perkin had driven off, going to Newbury for supplies, he'd said. Going to the Quillersedge woods, more like.

Tremayne had gone to Oxford to his tailor. Mackie was out to lunch with Dee-Dee. Gareth was at school. I'd abandoned the empty house and walked joyfully into the woods and only by chance did I know what had hit me.

I imagined Perkin threading along that trail at night, following the paint quite easily as he'd been that way already in daylight, and being secretly pleased with himself because if he had inadvertently left any traces of his pa.s.sage the first time they could be explained away naturally by the second. That satisfaction would smartly have evaporated when he reached the clearing and found me gone. A nasty shock, one might say. He might have been intending to go back to his family and appear utterly horrified while breaking the news of my death. Instead, he'd looked shocked and utterly horrified at seeing me still alive. Open-mouthed. Speechless. Too bad.

If I'd tried to walk out along the- trail, I would have met Perkin face to face.

I shivered in the warm hospital room. Some things were better unimagined.

For Perkin, making arrows would have been like filing his nails, and he'd had a stove right in his workroom for the charring. He must have constructed a pretty good strong bow too (according to my detailed instructions) which would by now no doubt be broken into unidentifiable pieces in distant undergrowth. Perhaps he'd risked time to practise with a few shots before I got there. Couldn't tell unless I went back to look for spent arrows, which I wasn't going to do.

Random thoughts edged slowly into my mind for the rest of the day.

For instance, Perkin thought in wood, like a language. Any trap he made would be wooden.

Nolan had knocked Perkin down at Tremayne's dinner. I'd picked Nolan up and made a fool of him. Perkin wouldn't have risked any way to kill me that meant creeping up on me, not after what he'd seen.

Perkin had had to get over the shock of finding my familiar ski-jacket and boots in the boathouse and then the far worse shock of the cataclysmic reversal of his scheme when Harry and I both lived.

The best actor of them all, he had contained those shocks within himself with no screaming crises of nerves. Many a convicted murderer had displayed that sort of control. Maybe it was something to do with a divorce from reality. There were books on the subject. One day I might read them.

Perkin had resented Mackie's friendly feelings towards me. Not strongly enough to kill me for that, but certainly strongly enough to make killing me satisfying in that respect also.

Never a.s.sume-

Perkin had always been presumed to be busy in his workshop, and yet there were hours and days when he might not have been, when Mackie was out of the house seeing to the horses. On the Wednesday of Harry's trap, Mackie had been saddling Tremayne's runner in the three-mile chase at Ascot.

Perkin had made none of the cla.s.sic mistakes. Hadn't scattered monogrammed handkerchiefs about or faked alibis or carelessly dropped dated train tickets or shown knowledge he shouldn't have had. Perkin had listened more than he'd talked, and he'd been cunning and careful.