I nodded. ‘Better than a funeral.’
‘Anything is.’ He dredged up a smile. ‘I’ve got a neighbour coming in to be with me tonight while you’re all out. I feel a bit of a coward.’
‘Rubbish. Bodyguards make good sense.’
‘Do you want a permanent job?’
Fiona returned, pulling on a flurry white wrap over her red silk dress, saying she really didn’t want to go to the dinner and being persuaded again by her husband. He would be fine, he said, his friend would be there in a moment and goodbye, have a good time, give Tremayne the evening of his life.
Fiona drove her own car, the twin of Harry’s (still lost), and settled Erica Upton in the front beside her when we collected her on a westerly detour. The five-star novelist gave me an unfathomable glimmer when I closed the car door for her and remarked that she’d had a long chat with Harry that afternoon on the telephone.
‘He told me to lay off you, as you’d saved his life,’ she announced baldly. ‘A proper spoilsport.’
I said in amusement, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll obey him.’
I heard the beginning of a chuckle from the front seat, quickly stifled. The battle lines, it seemed, had already been drawn. Hostilities however were in abeyance during arrival at the racecourse, disrobing, hair-tidying and first drinks. Half the racing world seemed to have embraced the occasion, for which after the last race that afternoon there had been much speedy unrolling of glittering black and silver ceiling-to-floor curtaining, transforming the workaday interior of the grandstand into something ephemerally magnificent.
‘Theatrical,’ Erica said disapprovingly of the decor, and so it was, but none the worse for that. It lifted the spirits, caused conversation, got the party going. Background music made a change from bookies’ cries. Fiona looked at the seating plan and said to meet at table six. People came and surrounded her and Erica, and I drifted away from them and around, seeing a few people I knew by sight and hundreds I didn’t. Like being at a gravediggers’ convention, I thought, when one had marked out one’s first plot.
My thoughts ran too much on death.
Bob Watson was there, dapper in a dark grey suit, with Ingrid shyly pretty in pale blue.
‘Couldn’t let down the guv’nor,’ Bob said cheerfully. ‘Anyway, he gave us the tickets.’
‘Jolly good,’ I said inanely.
‘You’re riding Fringe tomorrow,’ he said, halfway between announcement and question. ‘Schooling. The guv’nor just told me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Fringe will look after you,’ he said inscrutably, looking around. ‘Done this place up like an Egyptian brothel, haven’t they?’
‘I don’t really know.’
‘Oh, very funny.’
Ingrid giggled. Bob quelled her with a look, but I noticed slightly later and indeed all evening that she stuck very closely to his side; this could have been interpreted as her own insecurity if I hadn’t remembered Mackie saying that meek little Ingrid never gave Bob much chance to stray with the likes of Angela Brickell and God help him if he did.
Sam Yaeger, ever an exhibitionist, had come in a white dinner jacket, having lent Gareth his black. He also had a frilled white shirt, a black shoestring tie and a definite air of strain under the confident exterior. Doone, it appeared, had more or less accused him straight out of sabotaging his own boathouse.
‘He says I had the tools, the knowledge, the opportunity and the location, and he looked up those races I rode at Ascot and worked out that I could have had time between the first two and the last to drive to Maidenhead and remove Harry’s car. I asked why should I bother to do that when presumably if I had set the trap I would expect Harry’s car still to be there
‘He’s persistent.’
‘He listens to you,’ Sam said. ‘We’ve all noticed. Can’t you tell him I didn’t sodding do it?’
‘I could try.’
‘And he whistled up his cohorts after you’d gone,’ Sam complained, ‘and they came with wet-suits and grappling irons and a heavy magnet and dredged up a lot of muck from the dock. An old broken bicycle frame, some rusted railings, an old disintegrating metal gate... it had all been lying here and there on the property. They clammed up after a bit and wouldn’t show me everything, but he thinks I put it all in the water hoping Harry would get tangled in it.’
‘Which he did.’
‘So I’m asking you, how come
‘I learned how to jump into shallow water very young. So I didn’t go down far. Put my feet down cautiously after I was floating.’
He stared. ‘How the sod do you do that?’
‘Jump shallow? The second your feet touch the water you raise your knees and crumple into a ball. The water itself acts as a brake. You must have done it yourself some time or other. And I had the air in my clothes to hold me up, don’t forget.’
