Longshot Page 9

  Was it for this, I surmised wildly, that I’d sold my soul?

  “Well,” I said in amusement, “what do we have in the larder?”

  “What larder?”

  “Cupboards, then.”

  “You’d better look,” Gareth said, closing the second freezer’s door. “What are you going to make?”

  I hadn’t the faintest idea, but what Tremayne, Gareth and I ate not very much later was a hot pie made of beef extracted from twenty defrosted sandwiches and chopped small, then mixed with undiluted condensed mushroom soup (a find) and topped with an inch-thick layer of sandwich breadcrumbs fried crisp.

  Gareth watched the simple cooking with fascination, and I found myself telling him about the techniques I’d been taught of how to live off the countryside without benefit of shops.

  “Fried worms aren’t bad,” I said.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “They’re packed with protein. Birds thrive on them. And what’s so different from eating snails?”

  “Could you really live off the land? You yourself?”

  “Yes, sure,” I said. “But you can die of malnutrition eating just rabbits.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “It’s my business, really. My trade.” I told him about the six travel guides. “The company used to send me to all those places to set up holiday expeditions for real rugged types. I had to learn how to get them out of all sorts of local trouble, especially if they struck disasters like losing all their equipment in raging torrents. I wrote the books and the customers weren’t allowed to set off without them. Mind you, I always thought the book on how to survive would have been lost in the raging torrent with everything else, but maybe they would remember some of it, you never know.”

  Gareth, helping make breadcrumbs in a blender, said a shade wistfully, “How did you ever start on something like that?”

  “My father was a camping nut. A naturalist. He worked in a bank, really, and still does, but every spare second he would head for the wilds, dragging me and my mother along. Actually I took it for granted, as just a fact of life. Then after college I found it was all pretty useful in the travel trade. So bingo.”

  “Does he still go camping? Your father, I mean?”

  “No. My mother got arthritis and refused to go anymore, and he didn’t have much fun without her. He’s worked in a bank in the Cayman Islands for three or four years now. It’s good for my mother’s health.”

  Gareth asked simply, “Where are the Cayman Islands?”

  “In the Caribbean, south of Cuba, west of Jamaica.”

  “What do you want me to do with these breadcrumbs?”

  “Put them in the frying pan.”

  “Have you ever been to the Cayman Islands?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I went for Christmas. They sent me the fare as a present.”

  “You are lucky,” Gareth said.

  I paused from cutting up the beef. “Yes,” I agreed, thinking about it. “Yes, I am. And grateful. And you’ve got a good father, too.”

  He seemed extraordinarily pleased that I should say so, but it seemed to me, unconventional housekeeping or not, that Tremayne was making a good job of his younger son.

  Notwithstanding Tremayne’s professed lack of interest in food, he clearly enjoyed the pie, which three healthy appetites polished off to the last fried crumb. I got promoted instantly to resident chef, which suited me fine. Tomorrow I could do the shopping, Tremayne said, and without ado pulled out his wallet and gave me enough to feed the three of us for a month, though he said it was for a week. I protested it was too much and he kindly told me I had no idea how much things cost. I thought wryly that I knew how much things cost to the last anxious penny, but there was no point in arguing. I stowed the money away and asked them what they didn’t like.

  “Broccoli,” Gareth said instantly. “Yuk.”

  “Lettuce,” said Tremayne.

  Gareth told his father about fried worms and asked me if I had any of the travel guides with me.

  “No, sorry, didn’t think of bringing them.”

  “Couldn’t we possibly get some? I mean, I’d buy them with my pocket money. I’d like to keep them. Are they in the shops?”

  “Sometimes, but I could ask the travel company to send a set,” I suggested.

  “Yes, do that,” Tremayne said, “and I’ll pay for them. We’d all like to look at them, I expect.”

  “But Dad ... ” Gareth protested.

  “All right,” Tremayne said, “get two sets.”

  I began to appreciate Tremayne’s simple way of solving problems and in the morning, after I’d driven him on the tractor up to the Downs to see the horses exercise and after orange juice, coffee and toast, I phoned my friend in the travel agency and asked him to organize the books.

  “Today?” he said, and I said, “Yes, please,” and he said he would Red Star—parcel them by train, if I liked. I consulted Tremayne, who thought it a good idea and told me to get them sent to Didcot station where I could go to pick them up when I went in to do the shopping.

  “Fair enough,” the friend said. “You’ll get them this afternoon.”

  “My love to your aunt,” I said, “and thanks.”

  “She’ll swoon.” He laughed. “See you.”

  Tremayne began reading the day’s papers, both of which carried the results of the trial. Neither paper took any particular stance either for or against Nolan, though both quoted Olympia’s father at length. He came over as a sad obsessed man whose natural grief had turned to self-destructive anger and one could feel sorry for him on many counts. Tremayne read and grunted and passed no opinion.

  The day slowly drifted into a repetition of the one before. Dee-Dee came into the kitchen for coffee and instructions and when Tremayne had gone out again with his second lot of horses I returned to the boxes of clippings in the dining room.

  I decided to reverse yesterday’s order and start at the most recent clippings, and work backwards.

  It was Dee-Dee, I had discovered, who cut the sections out of the newspapers and magazines, and certainly she had been more zealous than whoever had done it before her, as the boxes for the last eight years were much fuller.

  I laid aside the current box as it was still almost empty and worked through from January to December of the previous year, which had been a good one for Tremayne, embracing not only his Grand National with Top Spin Lob but many other successes important enough to get the racing hacks excited. Tremayne’s face smiled steadily from clipping after clipping including, inappropriately, those dealing with the death of the girl, Olympia.

  Drawn irresistibly, I read a whole batch of accounts of that death from a good many different papers, the number of them suggesting that someone had gone out and bought an armful of everything available. In total, they told me not much more than I already knew, except that Olympia was twice described as a “jockette,” a word I somehow found repulsive. It appeared that she had ridden in several ladies’ races at point-to-point meetings, which one paper, to help the ignorant, described as “the days the hunting classes stop chasing the fox and chase each other instead.” Olympia the jockette had been twenty-three, had come from a “secure suburban background” and had worked as an instructor in a riding school in Surrey. Her parents, not surprisingly, were said to be “distraught.”

  Dee-Dee came into the dining room, offering more coffee, and saw what I was reading.

  “That Olympia was a sexpot bimbo,” she remarked flatly. “I was there at the party and you could practically smell it. Secure little suburban riding instructor, my foot.”

  “Really?”

  “Her father made her out to be a sweet innocent little saint. Perhaps he even believes it. Nolan never said any different because it wouldn’t have helped him, so no one told the truth.”

  “What was the truth?”

  “She had no underclothes on,” Dee-Dee said calmly. “She wore only a long scarlet strapless dress slit
halfway up her thigh. You ask Mackie. She knows, she tried to revive her.”

  “Er ... quite a lot of women don’t wear underclothes,” I said.

  “Is that a fact?” She gave me an ironic look.

  “My blushing days are over.”

  “Well, do you or don’t you want any coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She went out to the kitchen and I continued reading clippings, progressing from “no action on the death at Shellerton House” to “Olympia’s father brings private prosecution” and “Magistrates refer Nolan Everard case to Crown Court.” A sub judice silence then descended and the clippings stopped.

  It was after a bunch of end-of-jumping-season statistics that I came across an oddity from a Reading paper published on a Friday in June.

  “Girl groom missing,” read the headline, and there was an accompanying photo of Tremayne, still looking cheerful.

  Angela Brickell, 17, employed as a “lad” by prominent racehorse trainer Tremayne Vickers, failed to turn up for work on Tuesday afternoon and hasn’t been seen in the stables since. Vickers says lads leave without notice all too often, but he is puzzled that she didn’t ask for pay due to her. Anyone knowing Angela Brickell’s whereabouts is asked to get in touch with the police.

  Angela Brickell’s parents, like Olympia’s, were reported to be “distraught”

  6

  By the following week Angela Brickell’s disappearance had been taken up by the national dailies, who all mentioned the death of Olympia at Shellerton two months earlier but drew no significant conclusions.

  Angela, I learned, lived in a stable hostel with five other girls, who described her as “moody.” An indistinct photograph of her showed the face of a child, not a young woman, and pleas to “Find This Girl” could realistically never have been successful if they depended on recognizing her from her likeness in newsprint.

  There was no account in fact of her having been found, and after a week or so the clippings about her stopped.

  There were no cuttings at all for July, when it seemed the jump-racing fraternity took a holiday, but they began again with various accounts of the opening of the new season in Devon in August: “Vickers Victories Continue!”

  Nolan had ridden a winner on one of Fiona’s horses: “the well-known amateur now out on bail facing charges of assault resulting in death ...”

  In early September Nolan had hit the news again, this time in giving evidence at a Jockey Club inquiry in defense of Tremayne, who stood accused of doping one of his horses.

  With popping eyes, since Tremayne to me even on such short acquaintance seemed the last person to put his whole way of life in jeopardy for so trivial a reason, I read that one of his horses had tested positive to traces of the stimulants theobromine and caffeine, prohibited substances.

  The horse in question had won an amateurs’ race back in May. Belonging to Fiona, it had been ridden by Nolan, who said he had no idea how the drugs had been administered. He had himself been in charge of the horse that day, since Tremayne hadn’t attended the meeting. Tremayne had sent the animal in the care of his head traveling lad and a groom, and neither the head lad nor Tremayne knew how the drugs had been administered. Mrs. Fiona Goodhaven could offer no explanation either, though she and her husband had attended and watched the race.

  The Jockey Club’s verdict at the end of the day had been that there was no way of determining who had given the drugs or how, since they couldn’t any longer question the groom who had been in charge of the horse as she, Angela Brickell, could not be found.

  Angela Brickell. Good grief, I thought.

  Tremayne had nevertheless been adjudged guilty as charged and had been fined fifteen hundred pounds. A slapped wrist, it seemed.

  Upon leaving the inquiry Tremayne had shrugged and said, “These things happen.”

  The drug theobromine, along with caffeine, commented the reporter, could commonly be found in chocolate. Well, well, I thought. Never a dull moment in the racing industry.

  The rest of the year seemed an anticlimax after that, though there had been a whole procession of notable wins. “The Stable in Form” and “More Vim to Vickers” and “Loadsa Vicktories,” according to which paper or magazine one read.

  I finished the year and was simply sitting and thinking when Tremayne breezed in with downland air still cool on his coat.

  “How are you doing?” he said.

  I pointed to the pile of clippings out of their box. “I was reading about last year. All those winners.”

  He beamed. “Couldn’t put a foot wrong. Amazing. Sometimes things just go right. Other years, you get the virus, horses break down, owners die, you have a ghastly time. All the luck of the game.”

  “Did Angela Brickell ever turn up?” I asked.

  “Who? Oh, her. No, silly little bitch, God knows where she made off to. Every last person in the racing world knows you mustn’t give chocolate to horses in training. Pity really, most of them love it. Everybody also knows a Mars bar here or there isn’t going to make a horse win a race, but there you are, by the rules chocolate’s a stimulant, so bad luck.”

  “Would the girl have got into trouble if she’d stayed?”

  He laughed. “From me, yes. I’d have sacked her, but she’d gone before I heard the horse had tested positive. It was a routine test; they test most winners.” He paused and sat down on a chair across the table from me, staring thoughtfully at a heap of clippings. “It could have been anyone, you know. Anyone here in the yard. Or Nolan himself, though God knows why he should. Anyway”—he shrugged—“it often happens because the testing techniques are now so highly developed. They don’t automatically warn off trainers anymore, thank God, when odd things turn up in the analysis. It has to be gross, has to be beyond interpretation as an accident. But it’s still a risk every trainer runs. Risk of crooks. Risk of plain malice. You take what precautions you can and pray.”

  “I’ll put that in the book, if you like.”

  He looked at me assessingly. “I got me a good writer after all, didn’t I?”

  I shook my head. “You got one who’ll do his best.”

  He smiled with what looked like satisfaction and after lunch (beef sandwiches) we got down to work again on taping his early life with his eccentric father. Tremayne seemed to have soared unharmed over such psychological trifles as being rented out in Leicestershire as a harness and tack cleaner to a fox-hunting family and a year later as stableboy to a polo player in Argentina.

  “But that was child abuse,” I protested.

  Tremayne chuckled unconcernedly. “I didn’t get buggered, if that’s what you mean. My father hired me out, picked up all I earned and gave me a crack or two with his cane when I said it wasn’t fair. Well, it wasn’t fair. He told me that that was a valuable lesson, to learn that things weren’t fair. Never expect fairness. I’m telling you what he told me, but you’re lucky, I won’t beat it into you.”

  “Will you pay me?”

  He laughed deeply. “You’ve got Ronnie Curzon looking after that.” His amusement continued. “Did your father ever beat you?”

  “No, he didn’t believe in it.”

  “Nor do I, by God. I’ve never beaten Perkin, nor Gareth. Couldn’t. I remember what it felt like. But then, see, he did take me with him to Argentina and all round the world. I saw a lot of things most English boys don’t. I missed a lot of school. He was mad, no doubt, but he gave me a priceless education, and I wouldn’t change anything.”

  “You had a pretty tough mind,” I said.

  “Sure.” He nodded. “You need it in this life.”

  You might need it, I reflected, but tough minds weren’t regulation issue. Many children would have disintegrated where Tremayne learned and thrived. I tended to feel at home with stoicism and, increasingly, with Tremayne.

  About midafternoon, when we stopped taping, he lent me his Volvo to go to Didcot to fetch the parcel of books from the station and to do the household shopping
, advising me not to slide into any ditches if I could help it. The roads however were marginally better and the air not so brutally cold, though the forecasters still spoke of more days’ frost. I shopped with luxurious abandon for food and picked up the books, getting back to Shellerton while Tremayne was still out in his yard at evening stables.

  He came into the house with Mackie, both of them stamping their feet and blowing onto their fingers as they discussed the state of the horses.

  “You’d better ride Selkirk in the morning,” Tremayne said to her. “He’s a bit too fresh these days for his lad.”

  “Right.”

  “And I forgot to tell Bob to get the lads to put two rugs on their mounts if they’re doing only trotting exercise.”

  “I’ll remind him.”

  “Good.”

  He saw me in the kitchen as I was finishing stowing the stores and asked if the books had arrived. They had, I said.

  “Great. Bring them into the family room. Come on, Mackie, gin and tonic.”

  The big logs in the family-room fireplace never entirely went cold: Tremayne kicked the embers smartly together, adding a few small sticks and a fresh chunk of beech to renew the blaze. The evening developed as twice before, Perkin arriving as if on cue and collecting his Coke.

  With flattering eagerness Tremayne opened the package of books and handed some of them to Mackie and Perkin. So familiar to me, they seemed to surprise the others, though I wasn’t sure why.

  Slightly larger than paperbacks, they were more the size of videotapes and had white shiny hard covers with the title in various bright black-edged colors: Return Safe from the Jungle in green, Return Safe from the Desert in orange, Return Safe from the Sea in blue, Return Safe from the Ice in purple, Return Safe from Safari in red, Return Safe from the Wilderness in a hot rusty brown.

  “I’ll be damned,” Tremayne said. “Real books.”

  “What did you expect?” I asked.

  “Well ... pamphlets, I suppose. Thin paperbacks, perhaps.”

  “The travel agency wanted them glossy,” I explained, “and also useful.”