Longshot. Part 37

'Why?' Doone asked.

'Because I look after the old b.u.g.g.e.r now, that's why. Wouldn't mind having a snap of him.'

'Better take another one,' Doone advised him. 'By rights this belongs to the la.s.s's parents.'

'Well,' he later demanded of me, after we'd left. 'What do you think?'

'It's your job to think,' I protested.

He half smiled. 'There's a long way to go yet. If you think of anything, you tell me. I'll listen to everything anyone wants to say. I'm not proud. I don't mind the public telling me the answers. Make sure everyone knows that, will you?'

'Yes,' I said.

The telephone in Sh.e.l.lerton House began ringing that afternoon in a clamour that lasted for days. However reticent Doone had been, the news had spread at once like a bush fire through the village that another young woman connected with Tremayne Vickers' house and stables had been found dead. Newspapers, quickly informed, brusquely demanded to be told where, when and why. Dee-Dee repeated and repeated that she didn't know until she was almost in tears. I took over from her after a while and dispensed enormous courtesy and goodwill but no facts, of which, at the time anyway, I knew very few.

I worked on the book and answered the phone most of Friday and didn't see Doone at all, but on Sat.u.r.day I learned that he had spent the day before scattering fear and consternation.

Tremayne had asked if I would prefer to go to Sandown with Fiona, Harry and Mackie, saying he thought I might find it more illuminating: he himself would be saddling five runners at Chepstow and dealing with two lots of demanding owners besides. 'To be frank, you'd be under my feet. Go and carry things for Mackie.'

With old-fas.h.i.+oned views, which Mackie herself tolerated with affection, he persisted in thinking pregnant women fragile. I wondered if Tremayne understood how little Perkin would like my carrying things for Mackie and determined to be discreet.

'Fiona and Harry are taking Mackie,' Tremayne said, almost as if the same thought had occured to him. 'I'll check that they'll take you too, though it's a certainty if they have room.'

They had room. They collected Mackie and me at the appointed time and they were very disturbed indeed.

Harry was driving. Fiona twisted round in the front seat to speak to Mackie and me directly and with deep lines of worry told us that Doone had paid two visits to them the day before, the first apparently friendly and the second menacing in the extreme.

'He seemed all right in the morning,' Fiona said. 'Chatty and easy-going. Then he came back in the evening...' She s.h.i.+vered violently, although it was warm in the car, '- and he more or less accused Harry of strangling that b.l.o.o.d.y girl.'

'What?' Mackie said. 'That's ridiculous.'

'Doone doesn't think so,' Harry said gloomily. 'He says she was definitely strangled. And did he show you that photo of me with Chickweed?'

Mackie and I both said yes.

'Well, it seems he got it enlarged. I mean, blown up really big. He said he wanted to see me alone, without Fiona, and he showed me the enlargement which was just of me, not the horse. He asked me to confirm that I was wearing my own sungla.s.ses in the photo. I said of course I was. Then he asked me if I was wearing my own belt, and I said of course. He asked me to look carefully at the buckle. I said I wouldn't be wearing anyone else's things. Then he asked me if the pen clipped onto the racecard I was holding in the photo was mine also- and I got a bit s.h.i.+rty and demanded to know what it was ail about.' He stopped for a moment, and then in depression went on. 'You won't believe it- but they found my sungla.s.ses and my belt and my gold pen lying with that girl, wherever she was, and Doone won't tell us where for some G.o.d-silly reason. I don't know how the h.e.l.l those things got there. I told Doone I hadn't seen any of them for ages and he said he believed it. He thought they'd been with Angela Brickell all these months- that I'd dropped them when I was with her.'

He stopped again, abruptly, and at that point added no more.

Fiona, in a strong mixture of indignation and alarm, said, 'Doone demanded to know precisely where Harry had been on the day that girl went missing and also he said he might want to take Harry's fingerprints.'

'He thinks I killed her,' Harry said. 'It's obvious he does.'

'It's ridiculous,' Mackie repeated. 'He doesn't know you.'

'Where were you on that day?' I asked. 'I mean, you might have a perfect alibi.'

'I might have,' he said, 'but I don't know where I was. Could you say for certain what you were doing on the Tuesday afternoon of the second week of June last year?'

'Not for sure,' I said.

'If it had been the third week,' Harry said, 'we'd have been at Ascot races. Royal Ascot. Tarted up in top hats and things.'

'We keep a big appointments diary,' Fiona said fiercely. 'I dug up last year's. There's nothing listed at all on that second Tuesday. Neither of us can remember what we were doing.'

'No work?' I suggested. 'No meetings?'

Harry and Fiona simultaneously said no. Fiona was on a couple of committees for good causes, but there'd been no meetings that day. Harry, whose personal fortune seemed to equal Fiona's in robust good health, had in the past negotiated the brilliant sale of an inherited tyre-making company (so Tremayne had told me) and now pa.s.sed his time lucratively as occasional consultant to other private firms looking for a golden corporate whale to swallow them. He couldn't remember any consultations for most of June.

'We went to see Nolan ride Chickweed at Uttoxeter near the end of May,' Fiona said worriedly. 'Angela was there looking after the horse. That was the day someone fed him theobromine and caffeine, and if she didn't give Chickweed chocolate herself then she must have let someone else do it. Sheer negligence, probably. Anyway, Chickweed won and Angela went back to Sh.e.l.lerton with him and we saw her a few days later and gave her an extra present, as we were so pleased with the way she looked after the horse. I mean, a horse's success is always partly due to whoever cares for it and grooms it. And I can't remember seeing the wretched girl again after that.'

'Nor can I,' Harry said.

They went over and over the same old ground all the way to Sandown and it was clear they had spoken of little else since Doone's devastating identification of Harry's belongings.

'Someone must have put those things there to incriminate Harry,' Mackie said unhappily.

Fiona agreed with her, but it appeared that Doone didn't.

Harry said, 'Doone believes it was an unpremeditated murder. I asked him why and he just said that most murders were unpremeditated. Useless. He said people who commit unpremeditated murder often drop things from extreme agitation and don't know they've dropped them. I said I couldn't even remember ever talking to the girl except in the company of my wife and he simply stared at me, not believing me. I'll tell you, pals, it was unnerving.'

'Awful,' Mackie said vehemently. 'Wicked.'

Harry, trying to sound balanced, was clearly horribly disconcerted and was driving without concentration, braking and accelerating jerkily. Fiona said they had thought of not going to Sandown as they weren't in a fun-day mood, but they had agreed not to let Doone's suspicions ruin everything. Doone's suspicions were nevertheless conspicuously wrecking their equilibrium and it was a subdued little group that stood in the parade ring watching Fiona's tough hunter, the famous Chick-weed, walk round before the Wilfred Johnstone Hunter Chase.

No one, one hoped, had given him chocolate.

Fiona had told Nolan about Doone's accusations. Nolan told Harry that now he, Harry, knew what it was like to have a charge of murder hanging over him he would in retrospect have more sympathy for him, Nolan. Harry didn't like it. With only vestiges of friendliness he protested that he, Harry, had not been found with a dead girl at his feet.

'As good as, by the sound of things,' Nolan said, rattled.

'Nolan!' Fiona wasn't amused. 'Everyone, stop talking about it. Nolan, put your mind on the race. Harry, not another word about that b.l.o.o.d.y girl. Everything will be sorted out. We'll just have to be patient.'

Harry gave her a fond but rueful glance and, over her shoulder, caught my eye. There was something more in his expression, I thought, and after a moment identified it as fear: maybe faint, but definitely present. Harry and fear hadn't, until then, gone together in my mind, particularly not since his controlled behaviour in a frozen ditch.

Mackie, in loco Tremayne, saw Nolan into the saddle and the four of us walked towards the stands to see the race. With Mackie and Fiona in front, Harry fell into step beside me.

'I want to tell you something,' he said, 'but not Fiona.'

'Fire away.'

He looked quickly around him, checking no one could hear.

'Doone said- Christ- he said the girl had no clothes on when she died.'

'G.o.d, Harry.' I felt my mouth still open, and closed it consciously.

'I don't know what to do,' he said.