“God,” Gareth said, barging in through the back door, “lead me to a pizza. To two pizzas, maybe three.”
Laughing, I peeled off my long-suffering ski suit and left them to it in the kitchen, heading myself for warmth in the family room; and there I found a whole bunch of depressed souls sprawling in armchairs contemplating a different sort of disastrous tomorrow where food was no problem but danger abounded.
Harry, Fiona, Nolan, Lewis, Perkin, Mackie and Tremayne, all silent, as if everything useful had been said already. Tight-knit, interlocked, they looked at me vaguely, at the stranger within their gates, the unexpected character in their play.
“Ah ... John,” Tremayne said, stirring, remembering, “are both boys still living?”
“More or less.”
I poured myself some wine and sat on an unoccupied footstool, feeling the oppression of their collective thoughts and guessing that they all now knew everything I did, and perhaps more.
“If Harry didn’t do it, who did?” It was Lewis’s question, which got no specific reply, as if it had been asked over and over before.
“Doone will find out,” I murmured.
Fiona said indignantly, “He’s not trying. He’s not looking beyond Harry. It’s disgraceful.”
Proof that Doone was still casting about, however, arrived noisily at that point in the shape of Sam Yaeger, who hooted his horn outside as a preliminary and swept into the house in a high state of indignation.
“Tremayne!” he said in the doorway, and then stopped abruptly at the sight of the gathered clan. “Oh. You’re all here.”
“You’re supposed to be resting,” Tremayne said repressively.
“To hell with bloody resting. There I was quietly nursing my bruises according to orders, when this Policeman Plod turns up on my doorstep. Sunday afternoon! Doesn’t the bugger ever sleep? And d‘you know what little gem he tossed at me? Your sodding stable girls told him I’d had a bit of how’s-your-father with Angela effing Brickell.”
The brief silence which greeted this announcement wasn’t exactly packed with disbelief.
“Well, did you?” Tremayne asked.
“That’s not the point. The point is that it wasn’t any Tuesday last June. So this Doone fellow asks me what I was doing that day, as if I could remember. Working on my boat, I expect. He asked if I logged the hours I worked on it. Is this man for real? I said I hadn’t a sodding clue what I was doing, maybe it was a couple of willing maidens, and he has no sense of humor, it’s in a permanent state of collapse, he said it wasn’t a joking matter.”
“He has three daughters,” I said. “It worries him.”
“I can’t help his effing hangups,” Sam said. “He said he had to check every possibility, so I told him he’d have a long job considering old Angie’s opportunities, not to mention willingness.” He paused. “She was even making goo-goo eyes at Bob Watson at one time.”
“She wouldn’t have got past Ingrid,” Mackie said. “Ingrid looks meek and mild but you should see her angry. She keeps Bob in her sight. She doesn’t trust any girl in the yard. I doubt if Angela got anywhere with Bob.”
“You never know,” Sam said darkly. “Can I have a drink? Coke?”
“In the fridge in the kitchen,” Perkin said, not stirring to fetch it.
Sam nodded, went out and came back carrying a glass, followed by Gareth and Coconut busily stoking their furnaces with pizza wedges.
Tremayne raised his eyebrows at the food.
“We’re starving,” explained his younger son. “We ate roots, and birch bark and dandelion leaves, and no one in their right mind would live in Sherwood Forest being chased by the Sheriff.”
Sam looked bewildered. “What are you on about?” he demanded.
“Survival,” Gareth said. He marched over to a table, picked up
Return Safe from the Wilderness
and thrust it into Sam’s hands. “John wrote it,” he said, “and five other books like it. So we built a shelter and made a fire and cooked roots and boiled water to drink ...”
“What about Sherwood Forest?” Harry drawled, smiling but looking strained notwithstanding.
Coconut explained, “We might be cold and hungry but there weren’t any enemies lurking behind the apple trees.”
“Er ...” Sam said.
Tremayne, amused, enlightened everyone about our day.
“Tell you what,” Gareth said thoughtfully, “it makes you realize how lucky you are to have a bed and a pizza to come home to.”
Tremayne looked at me from under lowered lids, his mouth curving with contentment. “Teach them they’re lucky,” he’d said.
“Next time,” Coconut inquired, “why don’t we make some bows and arrows?”
“What for?” asked Perkin.
“To shoot the Sheriff’s men, of course.”
“You’d wind up hanged in Nottingham,” Tremayne said. “Better stick to dandelion leaves.” He looked at me. “Is there going to be a next time?”
Before I could answer, Gareth said, “Yes.” He paused. “Well, it wasn’t all a laugh a minute, but we did do something. I could do it again. I could live out in the cold and the rain ... I feel good about it, that’s all.”
“Well done!” Fiona exclaimed sincerely. “Gareth, you’re a great boy.”
It embarrassed him, of course, but I agreed with her.
“How about it?” Tremayne asked me.
“Next Sunday,” I said, “we could go out again, do something else.”
“Do what?” Gareth demanded.
“Don’t know yet.”
The vague promise seemed enough for both boys, who drifted back to the kitchen for further supplies, and Sam, leafing through the book, remarked that some of my more ingenious traps looked as if they would kill actual people, not only big animals like deer.
“Eating venison in Sherwood Forest was a hanging matter too,” Harry observed.
I said, agreeing with Sam, “Some traps aren’t safe to set unless you know you’re alone.”
“If Gareth’s confident after one day,” Nolan said to me without much friendliness from the depths of an armchair, “what does that make you? Superman?”
“Humble,” I said, with irony.
“How very goody-goody,” he said sarcastically, with added obscenities. “I’d like to see you ride in a steeplechase.”
“So would I,” Tremayne said heartily, taking the sneering words at face value. “We might apply for a permit for you, John.”
No one took him seriously. Nolan took offense. He didn’t like even a semihumorous suggestion that anyone else should muscle in on his territory.
MONDAY FOUND DEE-DEE in tears over Angela Brickell’s pregnancy test. Not tears of sympathy, it seemed, but of envy.
Monday also found Doone on our doorstep, wanting to check up on the dates when Chickweed had won and Harry had been there to watch.
“Mr. Goodhaven?” Tremayne echoed. “It’s Mrs. Goodhaven’s horse.”
“Yes, sir, but it was Mr. Goodhaven’s photo the dead lass was carrying.”
“It was the horse’s photo,” Tremayne protested. “I told you before.”
“Yes, sir,” Doone agreed blandly. “Now, about those dates . . .”
In suppressed fury, Tremayne sorted the way through the form book and his memory, saying finally that there had been no occasion that he could think of when Harry had been at the races without Fiona.
“How about the fourth Saturday in April?” Doone asked slyly.
“The what?” Tremayne looked it up again. “What about it?”
“Your traveling head lad thinks Mrs. Goodhaven had flu that day. He remembers her saying later at Stratford, when the horse won but failed the dope test later, that she was glad to be there, having missed his last win at Uttoxeter.”
Tremayne absorbed the information in silence.
“If Mr. Goodhaven went alone to Uttoxeter,” Doone insinuated, “and Mrs. Goodhaven was at home tucked up in bed feeling ill . . .”
“You really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tremayne interrupted. “Angela Brickell was in charge of a horse. She couldn’t just go off and leave it. And she came back here with it in the horse box. I’d have known if she hadn’t, and I’d have sacked her for negligence.”
“But I understood from your traveling head lad, sir,” Doone said with singsong deadliness, “that they had to wait for Angela Brickell that day at Uttoxeter because when they were all ready to go home she couldn’t be found. She did leave her horse unattended, sir. Your traveling head lad decided to wait another half hour for her, and she turned up just in time, and wouldn’t say where she’d been.”
Tremayne said blankly, “I don’t remember any of this.”
“No doubt they didn’t trouble you, sir. After all, no harm had been done... had it?”
Doone left one of his silences hovering, in which it was quite easy to imagine the specific harm that could have been done by Harry.
“There’s no privacy for anything odd on racecourses,” Tremayne said, betraying the path his own thoughts had taken. “I don’t believe a word of what you’re hinting.”
“Angela Brickell died about six weeks after that,” Doone said, “by which time she’d used a pregnancy test.”
“Stop it,” Tremayne said. “This is supposition of the vilest kind, aimed at a good intelligent man who loves his wife.”
“Good intelligent men who love their wives, sir, aren’t immune to sudden passions.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Tremayne said doggedly.
Doone rested a glance on him for a long time and then transferred it to me.
“What do you think, sir?” he asked.
“I don’t think Mr. Goodhaven did anything.”
“Based on your ten days’ knowledge of him?”
“Twelve days now. Yes.”
He ruminated, then asked me slowly, “Do you yourself have any feeling as to who killed the lassie? I ask about feeling, sir, because if it were solid knowledge you would have given it to me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I would. And no, I have no feeling, no intuition, unless it is that it was someone unconnected with this stable.”
“She worked here,” he said flatly. “Most murders are close to home.” He gave me a long assessing look. “Your loyalties, sir,” he said, “are being sucked into this group, and I’m sorry about that. You’re the only man here who couldn’t have any hand in the lassie’s death, and I’ll listen to you and be glad to, but only if you go on seeing straight, do you get me?”
“I get you,” I said, surprised.
“Have you asked Mr. Goodhaven about the day he went racing without his wife?” Tremayne demanded.
Doone nodded. “He denies anything improper took place. But then, he would.”
“I don’t want to hear any more of this,” Tremayne announced. “You’re inventing a load of rubbish.”
“Mr. Goodhaven’s belongings were found with the lassie,” Doone said without heat, “and she carried his photograph, and that’s not rubbish.”
In the silence after this somber reminder he took his quiet leave and Tremayne, very troubled, said he would go down to the Goodhavens’ house to give them support.
Fiona however telephoned while he was on his way, and I answered the call because Dee-Dee had already gone home, feeling unwell.
“John!” she exclaimed. “Where’s Tremayne?”
“On his way down to you.”
“Oh. Good. I can’t tell you how awful this is. Doone thinks ... he says ...”
“He’s been here,” I said. “He told us.”
“He’s like a bulldog.” Her voice shook with distress. “Harry’s strong, but this ... this barrage is wearing him down.”
“He’s desperately afraid you’ll doubt him,” I said.
“What?” She sounded overthrown. “I don’t, for a minute.”
“Then tell him.”
“Yes, I will.” She paused briefly. “Who did it, John?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ll see. You’ll see what we’re too close to see. Tremayne says you understand things without being told, more than most people do. Harry says it comes of all those qualities his Aunt Erica wouldn’t allow you, insight through imagination and all that.”
They’d been discussing me; odd feeling.
I said, “You might not want to know.”
“Oh.” It was a cry of admission, of revelation. “John . . . save us all.”
She put the phone down without waiting for a response to her extraordinary plea, and I wondered seriously what they expected of me, what they saw me to be: the stranger in their midst who would solve all problems as in old-fashioned westerns, or an eminently ordinary middling writer who was there by accident and would listen to everyone but in the end be ineffectual. Given a choice, I would without question have opted for the latter.
BY TUESDAY THE press had been drenched with leaks from all quarters. Trial by public opinion was in full swing, the libel laws studiously skirted by a profligate scattering of the word “alleged” but the underlying meaning plain: Harry Goodhaven had allegedly bedded a stable girl, got her pregnant and throttled her to save his marriage to a “wealthy heiress,” without whose money he would be penniless.
Wednesday’s papers, from Harry’s point of view, were even worse, akin to the public pillory.
He phoned me soon after lunch.
“Did you see the bloody tabloids?”
“Yes,” I said.
“If I come and pick you up, will you just come out driving with me?”
“Sure.”
“Fine. Ten minutes.”
Without many twinges of conscience I laid aside my notes on Tremayne’s midcareer. With two weeks already gone of my four-week allocation I was feeling fairly well prepared to get going on the page, but as usual any good reason for postponing it was welcome.
Harry came in his BMW, twin of Fiona’s, and I climbed in beside him, seeing more new lines of strain in his face and also rigidity in his neck muscles and fingers. His fair hair looked almost gray, the blue eyes altogether without humor, the social patina wearing thin.
“John, good of you,” he said. “Life’s bloody.”
“I’ll tell you one thing.” I tried a shot at comfort. “Doone knows there’s something wrong with his case, otherwise he would have arrested you already.” I settled into the seat beside him, fastening the belt.