He stopped again, abruptly, and at that point added no more.
Fiona, in a strong mixture of indignation and alarm, said, ‘Doone demanded to know precisely where Harry had been on the day that girl went missing and also he said he might want to take Harry’s fingerprints.’
‘He thinks I killed her,’ Harry said. ‘It’s obvious he does.’
‘It’s ridiculous,’ Mackie repeated. ‘He doesn’t know you.’
‘Where were you on that day?’ I asked. ‘I mean, you might have a perfect alibi.’
‘I might have,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know where I was. Could you say for certain what you were doing on the Tuesday afternoon of the second week of June last year?’
‘Not for sure,’ I said.
‘If it had been the third week,’ Harry said, ‘we’d have been at Ascot races. Royal Ascot. Tarted up in top hats and things.’
‘We keep a big appointments diary,’ Fiona said fiercely. ‘I dug up last year’s. There’s nothing listed at all on that second Tuesday. Neither of us can remember what we were doing.’
‘No work?’ I suggested. ‘No meetings?’
Harry and Fiona simultaneously said no. Fiona was on a couple of committees for good causes, but there’d been no meetings that day. Harry, whose personal fortune seemed to equal Fiona’s in robust good health, had in the past negotiated the brilliant sale of an inherited tyre-making company (so Tremayne had told me) and now passed his time lucratively as occasional consultant to other private firms looking for a golden corporate whale to swallow them. He couldn’t remember any consultations for most of June.
‘We went to see Nolan ride Chickweed at Uttoxeter near the end of May,’ Fiona said worriedly. ‘Angela was there looking after the horse. That was the day someone fed him theobromine and caffeine, and if she didn’t give Chickweed chocolate herself then she must have let someone else do it. Sheer negligence, probably. Anyway, Chickweed won and Angela went back to Shellerton with him and we saw her a few days later and gave her an extra present, as we were so pleased with the way she looked after the horse. I mean, a horse’s success is always partly due to whoever cares for it and grooms it. And I can’t remember seeing the wretched girl again after that.’
‘Nor can I,’ Harry said.
They went over and over the same old ground all the way to Sandown and it was clear they had spoken of little else since Doone’s devastating identification of Harry’s belongings.
‘Someone must have put those things there to incriminate Harry,’ Mackie said unhappily.
Fiona agreed with her, but it appeared that Doone didn’t.
Harry said, ‘Doone believes it was an unpremeditated murder. I asked him why and he just said that most murders were unpremeditated. Useless. He said people who commit unpremeditated murder often drop things from extreme agitation and don’t know they’ve dropped them. I said I couldn’t even remember ever talking to the girl except in the company of my wife and he simply stared at me, not believing me. I’ll tell you, pals, it was unnerving.’
‘Awful,’ Mackie said vehemently. ‘Wicked.’
Harry, trying to sound balanced, was clearly horribly disconcerted and was driving without concentration, braking and accelerating jerkily. Fiona said they had thought of not going to Sandown as they weren’t in a fun-day mood, but they had agreed not to let Doone’s suspicions ruin everything. Doone’s suspicions were nevertheless conspicuously wrecking their equilibrium and it was a subdued little group that stood in the parade ring watching Fiona’s tough hunter, the famous Chick-weed, walk round before the Wilfred Johnstone Hunter Chase.
No one, one hoped, had given him chocolate.
Fiona had told Nolan about Doone’s accusations. Nolan told Harry that now he, Harry, knew what it was like to have a charge of murder hanging over him he would in retrospect have more sympathy for him, Nolan. Harry didn’t like it. With only vestiges of friendliness he protested that he, Harry, had not been found with a dead girl at his feet.
‘As good as, by the sound of things,’ Nolan said, rattled.
‘Nolan!’ Fiona wasn’t amused. ‘Everyone, stop talking about it. Nolan, put your mind on the race. Harry, not another word about that bloody girl. Everything will be sorted out. We’ll just have to be patient.’
Harry gave her a fond but rueful glance and, over her shoulder, caught my eye. There was something more in his expression, I thought, and after a moment identified it as fear: maybe faint, but definitely present. Harry and fear hadn’t, until then, gone together in my mind, particularly not since his controlled behaviour in a frozen ditch.
Mackie, in loco Tremayne, saw Nolan into the saddle and the four of us walked towards the stands to see the race. With Mackie and Fiona in front, Harry fell into step beside me.
‘I want to tell you something,’ he said, ‘but not Fiona.’
‘Fire away.’
He looked quickly around him, checking no one could hear.
‘Doone said... Christ... he said the girl had no clothes on when she died.’
‘God, Harry.’ I felt my mouth still open, and closed it consciously.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.
‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘Doone asked what I was doing there with my belt off.’
The shock still trembled in his voice.
‘The innocent aren’t found guilty,’ I protested.
He said miserably, ‘Oh, yes, they are. You know they are.’
‘But not on such flimsy evidence.’
‘I haven’t been able to tell Fiona. I mean, we’ve always been fine together, but she might start wondering... I don’t honestly know how I’d bear that.’
We reached the stands and went up to watch, Harry falling silent in his torturing troubles amid the raucous calls of bookmakers and the enfolding hubbub of the gathering crowd. The runners cantered past on their way to the starting gate, Nolan looking professional as usual on the muscly chestnut that Fiona had ridden all autumn out hunting. Chickweed, Mackie had told me, was Fiona’s especial pet: her friend as much as her property. Chickweed, circling and lining up, running in the first hunter chase of the spring season, was going to win three or four times before June, Tremayne hoped.
We were joined at that point by pudgy unfit Lewis, who panted that he had only just arrived in time and asked if the Jockey Club had said anything about Nolan going on riding.
‘Not a word,’ Fiona said. ‘Fingers crossed.’
‘If they were going to stop him,’ Lewis opined judiciously, taking deep breaths, ‘they’d surely have let him know by today, so perhaps the expletive sod’s got away with it.’
‘Brotherly love,’ Fiona remarked ironically.
‘He owes me,’ Lewis said darkly and with such growling intensity that all of us, I thought, recognised the nature of the debt, even if some hadn’t wanted to believe it earlier.
‘And will you collect?’ Harry asked, his sarcasm showing.
‘No thanks to you,’ Lewis replied sharply.
‘Perjury’s not my best act.’
Lewis smiled like a snake, all fangs.
‘I,’ he said, ‘am the best bleep bleep actor of you all.’
Fiona starkly faced the certainty that Lewis had not after all been too drunk to see straight when Olympia died. Mackie’s clear face was pinched with dismay. Harry, who had known all along, would have shrugged off Lewis’s admission philosophically were it not for his own ominous future.
‘What would you have me do?’ Lewis demanded, seeing the general disapproval. ‘Say he called her every filthy name in the book and shook her by the neck until her eyes popped out?’