Her smile sweetened. ‘Try cooking.’
‘Dammit...’
She laughed. ‘I hear the power of your bananas flambées made Gareth oversleep.’
Perkin, on her other side, murmured something to get her attention and for a while I watched Tremayne make the best of our table having been graced by the sponsor’s wife, a gushing froth of a lady in unbecoming lemon. He would clearly have preferred to be talking to Fiona on his other side, but the award was having to be paid for with politeness. He glanced across the table, saw me smiling, interpreted my thought and gave me a slow ironic blink.
He soldiered manfully through the salmon soufflé and the beef Wellington while Lewis on the lady’s other side put away a tumbler full of vodka poured from a half-bottle in his pocket. Fiona watched him with a frown: Lewis’s drinking, even to my eyes, was increasingly without shame. Almost as if, having proclaimed himself paralytic in court, he was setting about proving it over and over again.
Glumly fidgeting between Lewis and Perkin, Gareth ate everything fast and looked bored. Perkin with brotherly bossiness told him to stop kicking the table leg and Gareth uncharacteristically sulked. Mackie made a placatory remark and Perkin snapped at her too.
She turned her head my way and with a frown asked, ‘What’s wrong with everyone?’
‘Tension.’
‘Because of Harry?’ She nodded to herself. ‘We all pretend, but no one can help wondering... This time it’s much worse. Last time at least we knew how Olympia died. Angela Brickell’s on everyone’s nerves. Nothing feels safe any more.’
‘You’re safe,’ I said. ‘You and Perkin. Think about the baby.’
Her face cleared as if automatically: the thought of the baby could diminish to trivia the grimmest forebodings.
Perkin on her other side was saying contritely, ‘Sorry, darling, sorry,’ and she turned to him with ever-ready forgiveness, the adult of the pair. I wondered fleetingly if Perkin, as a father, would be jealous of his child.
Dinner wound to a close: speeches began. Cultured gents, identified for me by Mackie as being the Himalayan peaks of the Jockey Club, paid compliments to Tremayne from an adjacent table and bowed low to the sponsor. He, the lemon lady’s husband, eulogised Tremayne, who winced only slightly over Top Spin Lob being slurred to Topsy Blob, and a minion in the livery of Castle Houses brought forth a tray bearing the award itself, a silver bowl rimmed by a circle of small galloping horses, an award actually worthy of the occasion.
Tremayne was pink with gratification. He accepted the bowl. Everyone cheered. Photos flashed. Tremayne made a brief speech of all-round thanks: thanks to the sponsors, to his friends, his staff, his jockeys, to racing itself. He sat down, overcome. Everyone cheered him again and clapped loudly. I began to wonder how many of them would buy Tremayne’s book. I wondered whether after that night Tremayne would need the book written.
‘Wasn’t that great?’ Mackie exclaimed, glowing.
‘Yes, indeed.’
The background music became dance music. People moved about, flocking round Tremayne, patting his back. Perkin took Mackie to shuffle on the square of dance floor adjoining the table. Nolan took Fiona, Lewis got drunker, Gareth vanished, the sponsor retrieved his lady: Erica and I sat alone.
‘Do you dance?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She looked out at the still-alive party. ‘The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball,’ she said.
‘Do you expect Waterloo tomorrow?’
‘Sometime soon. Who is Napoleon?’
‘The enemy?’
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Use your brains. What about insight through imagination?’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in it.’
‘For this purpose, I do. Someone tried to kill Harry. That’s extremely disturbing. What’s disturbing about it?’
It seemed she expected an answer, so I gave it. ‘It was premeditated. Angela Brickell’s death may or may not have been, but the attack on Harry was vastly thought out.’
She seemed minutely to relax.
‘My God!’ I said, stunned.
‘What? What have you thought of?’ She was alert again, and intent.
‘I’ll have to talk to Doone.’
‘Do you know who did it?’ she demanded.
‘No, but I know what he knew.’ I frowned. ‘Everyone knows it.’
‘What? Do explain.’
I looked at her vaguely, thinking.
‘I don’t believe it’s very important,’ I said in the end.
‘Then what is it?’ she insisted.
‘Wood floats.’
She looked bemused. ‘Well, of course it does.’
‘The floorboards that went down to the water with Harry, they stayed under. They didn’t float.’
‘Why not?’
‘Have to find out,’ I said. ‘Doone can find out.’
‘What does it matter?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘no one could be absolutely certain that Harry would be spiked and drown immediately. So suppose he’s alive and swimming about. He’s been in that place before, at Sam’s party, and he knows there’s a mooring dock along one wall. He knows there’s a door and he has daylight and can see the river through the metal curtain. So how does he get out?’
She shook her head. ‘Tell me.’
‘The door opens outwards. If you’re inside, and you’re standing in only six inches of water, not six feet, and you’ve got three or four floorboards floating about, you use one of them as a ram to break the lock or batter the door down. You’re big and strong like Harry and also wet, cold, desperate and angry. How long does it take you to break out?’
‘I suppose not long.’
‘When Napoleon came to the boathouse,’ I said, ‘there wasn’t any sound of Harry battering his way out. In fact,’ I frowned, ‘there’s no saying how long the enemy had been there, waiting. He might have been hiding... heard Harry’s car arrive.’
Erica said, ‘When your book’s published, send me a copy.’
I looked at her open-mouthed.
Then I can tell you the difference between invention and insight.’
‘You know how to pierce,’ I said, wincing.
She began to say something else but never completed it. Instead our heads turned in unison towards the dancers, among whom battle seemed already to have started. There was a crash and a scream and bizarrely against the unrelentingly cheerful music two figures could be seen fighting.
Sam... and Nolan.
Sam had blood on his white jacket and down the white ruffles. Nolan’s shirt was ripped open, showing a lot of hairy chest. They were both reeling about exchanging swinging blows not ten feet from table six and I stood up automatically, more in defence than interference.
Perkin tried to pull them apart and got smartly knocked down by Nolan, quick and tough with his fists as with his riding. I stepped without thinking onto the polished square and tried words instead.
‘You stupid fools,’ I said: not the most inventive sentence ever.
Nolan took his attention off Sam for a split second, lashed out expertly at my face and whirled back to his prime target in time to parry Sam’s wildly lunging arm and kick him purposefully between the legs. Sam’s head came forward. Nolan’s fist began a descent onto the back of Sam’s vulnerable neck.
With instinct more than thought, I barged into Nolan bodily, pushing him off line. He turned a face of mean-eyed fury in my direction and easily transferred his hatred.
I was vaguely aware that the dance floor had cleared like morning mist and also acutely conscious that Nolan knew volumes more about bare-knuckle fisticuffs than I did.
Racing people were extraordinary, I thought. Far from piling into Nolan in a preventative heap, they formed an instant ring around us and, as the band came to a straggling sharp-flat unscheduled halt, Lewis’s drunken aristocratic voice could be heard drawling, ‘Five to four the field.’