Longshot. Part 46

We didn't. The current took the dinghy immediately and started it on its way downstream, and I edged past Harry into the stern s.p.a.ce behind him and retrieved my piece of pole.

'What's that?' Harry asked weakly, trying to make sense of things.

'Rudder.'

'Oh.'

I made a crook of my left elbow on the back of the boat and laid the pole across it, the shorter end in my right hand, the longer end trailing behind in the water. The steering was rudimentary, but enough to keep us travelling bow-first downstream.

Downstream was always the way to people- Bits of the guide books floated familiarly to the surface. Some of your traps are horrific.

Some of the traps described how to arrange for the prey to fall through seemingly firm ground into a pit full of spikes beneath.

Everyone had read the guides.

'John?' Harry said. 'Where are we going?'

'Maidenhead, possibly. I'm not quite sure.'

'I'm b.l.o.o.d.y cold.'

There was some water in the boat now, slos.h.i.+ng about under our feet. s.h.i.+t.

Nowhere on the Thames was far from civilisation, not even Sam's boatyard. The wide river narrowed abruptly with a notice on our left saying DANGER in huge letters, and a smaller notice saying LOCK with an arrow to the right.

I steered the dinghy powerfully to the right. DANGER led to a weir. A lock would do just fine. Locks had keepers.

At about then I took note that there weren't in fact any other boats moving on the river and I remembered that often the locks closed for maintenance in winter and maybe the lock-keeper would have gone shopping-

Never mind. There were houses in sight on the right.

They proved to be summer cottages, all closed.

We floated on as if in a timeless limbo. The water in the bottom of the boat grew deeper. The current, away from the mainstream, was much weaker. The lock cut seemed to last for ever, narrowing though, with high dark trees on the left; finally, blessedly, on the right, there were moorings for boats wanting pa.s.sage through the lock to the lower level of the river below. No boats there, of course. No helping hands. Never mind.

I took the dinghy as far as we could go, right up near to the lock gates. Tied the painter to a mooring post and stepped up out of the boat.

'Won't be long,' I told Harry.

He nodded merely. It was all too much.

I climbed the steps up onto the lock and knocked on the door of the lock-keeper's house, and through great good fortune found him at home. A lean man: kind eyes.

'Fell in the river, did you?' he asked cheerfully, observing my soaked state. 'Want to use the phone?'

CHAPTER 13.

I went with Harry in the ambulance to Maidenhead hospital, both of us swathed in blankets, Harry also in a foil-lined padded wrap used for hypothermia cases; and from then on it was a matter of phoning and rea.s.suring Fiona and waiting to see the extent of Harry's injuries, which proved to be a pierced calf, entry and exit wounds both clean and clotted, with no dreadful damage in between.

While Fiona was still on her way the medics stuffed Harry full of antibiotics and other palliatives and put st.i.tches where they were needed, and by the time she'd wept briefly in my arms he was warm and responding nicely in a recovery room somewhere.

'But why,' she asked, half cross, half mystified, 'did he go to Sam's boatyard in the first place?' Like a mother scolding her lost child, I thought, after he's come back safe: just like Perkin with Mackie.

'He'll tell you about it,' I said. 'They say he's doing fine.'

'You're damp!' She disengaged herself and held me at arms' length. 'Did you fall through the floor too?'

'Sort of.' The hospital's central heating had been doing a fine job of drying everything on me and I felt like one of those old-fas.h.i.+oned clothes-horses, steaming slightly in warm air. Still no shoes or boots; couldn't be helped.

Fiona looked at my feet dubiously.

'I was going to ask you to drive Harry's car home,' she said, 'but I suppose you can't.'

I explained that Harry's car had already been driven away. 'Where is it, then?' she asked, bewildered. 'Who took it?'

'Maybe Doone will find out.'

'That man!' She s.h.i.+vered. 'I hate him.'

Before I could comment, a nurse came to fetch her to see Harry, and she went anxiously, calling over her shoulder for me to wait for her; and when she returned half a hour later she looked dazed.

'Harry's sleepy,' she said. 'He kept waking up and telling me silly things- How could you possibly get to this hospital in a boat?'

'I'll tell you on the way home. Would you like me to drive?'

'But-'

'It's quite easy with bare feet. I'll take off my socks.'

She unlocked the car herself and handed me the keys without comment. We arranged ourselves in the seats and as we headed for Sh.e.l.lerton in the early dark I told her calmly, incompletely and without terrors, the gist of what had befallen us in Sam's boatyard.

She listened with a frown, adding her own worry.

'Turn right here,' she said once, automatically, and another time, 'Sorry, we should have turned left there, we'll have to go back,' and finally, 'Go straight to Sh.e.l.lerton House. I'll drive home from there. I'm all right, really. It's just so upsetting. It made me shaky, seeing Harry dopey like that, pumped full of drugs.'

'I know.'

I pulled up outside Tremayne's house and while I put on my socks again she said she would come in for a while for company, 'to cure the trembles'.

Tremayne, Mackie and Perkin were all in the family room for the usual evening drinks. Tremayne made more than his usual fuss over Fiona, sensing some sort of turmoil, telling her comfortably that Mackie had just come back from Ascot races where he'd sent a runner for the apprentice race which had proved a total waste of time.

The note I'd left for Tremayne, 'GONE OUT WITH HARRY. BACK FOR GRUB' was still pinned to the cork-board. He took my arrival with Fiona as not needing comment.

'I think someone tried to kill Harry,' Fiona said starkly, cutting abruptly through Tremayne's continuing Ascot chat.

'What?'

There was an instant silence and general shock on all the faces, including Fiona's own.