Longshot by Dick Francis

boots along in the morning, if that would be all right. Of course, I said.
    They turned away to walk through a garden gate towards a small shadowy house, and Tremayne started off again towards open country, grousing that the trial would take his head lad away for yet another day. Neither Mackie nor Perkin said anything, and I still had no idea what the trial was all about. I didn’t know them well enough to ask, I felt.
    “Not much of a welcome for you, John, eh?” Tremayne said over his shoulder. “Did you bring a typewriter?”
    “No. A pencil, actually. And a tape recorder.”
    “I expect you know what you’re doing.” He sounded cheerfully more sure of that than I was. “We can start in the morning.”
    After about a mile of cautious crawling along a surface much like the one we’d come to grief on, he turned in through a pair of imposing gateposts and stopped outside a very large house where many lights showed dimly through curtains. As inhabitants of large houses seldom used their front doors, we went into this one also at the side, not directly into the kitchen this time but into a warm carpeted hall leading to doorways in all directions.
    Tremayne, saying, “Bloody cold night,” walked through a doorway to the left, looking back for me to follow. “Come on in. Make yourself at home. This is the family room, where you’ll find newspapers, telephone, drinks, things like that. Help yourself to whatever you want while you’re here.”
    The big room looked comfortable in a sprawling way, not tidy, not planned. There was a mixture of patterns and colors, a great many photographs, a few poinsettias left over from Christmas and a glowing log fire in a wide stone fire-place.
    Tremayne picked up a telephone and briefly told the local police that his jeep was in the ditch in the lane, not to worry, no one had been hurt, he would get it picked up in the morning. Duty done, he went across to the fire and held out his hands to warm them.
    “Perkin and Mackie have their own part of the house, but this room is where we all meet,” he said. “If you want to leave a message for anybody, pin it to that board over there.” He pointed to a chair on which was propped a cork-board much like the one in Ronnie’s office. Red drawing pins were stuck into it at random, one of them anchoring a note which in large letters announced briefly, BACK FOR GRUB.
    “That’s my other son,” Tremayne said, reading the message from a distance. “He’s fifteen. Unmanageable.” He spoke however with indulgence. “I expect you’ll soon get the hang of the household.”
    “Er . . . Mrs. Vickers?” I said tentatively.
    “Mackie?” He sounded puzzled.
    “No . . . Your wife?”
    “Oh. Oh, I see. No, my wife took a hike. Can’t say I minded. There’s just me and Gareth, the boy. I’ve a daughter, married a frog, lives outside Paris, has three children, they come here sometimes, turn the place upside down. She’s the eldest, then Perkin. Gareth came later.”
    He was feeding me facts without feelings, I thought. I’d have to change that, if I were to do any good: but maybe it was too soon for feelings. He was glad I was there, but jerky, almost nervous, almost—now we were alone—shy. Now that he had got what he wanted, now that he had secured his writer, a lot of the agitation and anxiety he’d displayed in Ronnie’s office seemed to have abated. The Tremayne of today was running on only half-stress.
    Mackie, coming into the room, restored him to his confident self. Carrying an ice bucket, she glanced quickly at her father-in-law as if to assess his mood, to find out if his tolerance in Fiona and Harry’s kitchen was still in operation. Reassured in some way, she took the ice over to a table bearing a tray of bottles and glasses and began mixing a drink.
    She had taken off her padded coat and woolly hat, and was wearing a blue jersey dress over knee-high narrow black boots. Her red-brown hair, cut short, curled neatly on a