'Not bad,' said O'Dowda. 'You can have him for dinner. The chef has a way of grilling 'em with a Parmesan cheese flavouring that's out of this world. Not enough to kill the flavour of the fish. Just enough to bring it up. Did you get any kind of look at the man who shot at you?'
'No. Not really. He was away before I was close enough. It has occurred to me, though, that he might come back.'
'He won't.'
'I'm glad to hear it.'
'Anyway, he wasn't after you. He was after me. Just made a target mistake. Badly briefed.'
We were in close to the tree-lined bank now. O'Dowda did a neat switch-cast and dropped his flies just off a clump of lily-pads. A moment later he was into a fish and Tich finally netted a big brown trout for him. Watching O'Dowda, I was wondering how badly briefed a man had to be to mistake me for him. If I took this job, I was thinking, there would have to be substantial danger money.
We fished for an hour. O'Dowda got three brace of brown trout. I got a brown and then hooked something that finally smashed my trace and got away.
'Must have been a big one,' I said.
'You rushed him a bit,' said Kermode.
'Out of practice,' said O'Dowda. Then he slewed his head at me and gave me a Polaroid look. 'Little fish land easy. Big fish… well, the time element is in geometric not arithmetic proportion. For big fish, you need time and patience. That's why I'm a millionaire.' He laughed and it was a sound like flood water rising rapidly in an underground tunnel. I didn't like the sound and — I had a strong feeling — I didn't like him.
O'Dowda looked at his watch and gave Kermode a nod. Kermode reached into the hamper at his feet and pulled out a hand microphone on a flex. He spoke into it. 'Mr O'Dowda's car. Five minutes.'
He replaced the microphone and we began to row back to the landing stage.
O'Dowda saw me looking at the hamper, and said, 'Time and patience, Mr Carver. And always keep in contact with the outside world. Life is full of sudden emergencies.'
I said nothing. I had no real quarrel with his philosophy. But you had to be a millionaire to be able to afford it.
There was a big navy blue Ford Zephyr station wagon waiting for us in the turning space when we arrived. In the driving seat was a small, neat-looking man of about forty. He had a bristly little toothbrush moustache, large teeth and hard agate-coloured eyes which he kept moist by constant blinking. I wasn't introduced to him but from the conversation I gathered th3t he was called Durnford and was O'Dowda's secretary.
The only item of conversational interest on the way to the house was O'Dowda saying, 'I want a full report on how that fellow got in, Durnford.'
'It's the public bridle path, sir.' His voice, even to O'Dowda, was clipped, sharp, just as he had been to me on the phone. 'We've got no legal right to close it.'
'Then find some other way.'
That was all. The millionaire's solution. No legal right — then find some other way.
The house was a great square construction of rag stone. You went through a small archway into an inner courtyard that was flagged with great paving stones and lined with a small raised walk, the balustrade of which was marked every few yards by nude classical statues, mostly of women with expressionless faces and large thighs. The entrance hall was small and one entered through mahogany doors which, I later learned, were steel-lined. O'Dowda and I got into a lift, went up two floors and stepped out into a long picture gallery. A manservant was waiting and O'Dowda instructed him to take me to my room. O'Dowda then gave me a nod and disappeared in one direction while I followed the manservant in the other, walking gingerly on the highly polished floorboards to avoid slipping.
'Dinner,' said the servant as he left me, 'will be in one hour.'
'You'd better leave me a map of the place. Otherwise I'll get lost.'
'It won't be necessary, sir.' He went.
I had a bedroom and a bathroom. From the bedroom window I could see the park. Outside the window was a small balcony, big enough to take a deckchair. Standing on it, I could see that all the other rooms on this side of the wing had similar balconies.
My Brighton pyjamas and dressing gown had been laid out on the downturned bed. There were cigarettes and a glass, siphon, water-jug, ice and four bottles on a silver tray on top of a low dressing table. The carpet gave little wheezy gasps as I trod on it. There were two water-colours of the fishing lake, and there wasn't a piece of furniture which didn't have the shining, well-kept patina of age. The bathroom was chrome and marble and the toilet flushed with just the hint of a faint sigh. The bath-towel was so big it really needed two men to handle it. I finished my inspection of the luxuries and went back to the silver tray to fix myself a whisky and soda. Underneath the soda siphon was a little piece of pasteboard with a message in ink on it.
I want to come and talk to you late tonight. So don't scream when I arrive. Julia.
I sipped my drink, staring out at the now darkening parkland. Tich Kermode wore field-glasses. He could have seen the man run out of the woods. They would be good glasses and they could have seen as much as I saw. And clearly, from O'Dowda's remark to Durnford, the incident had been reported over the radio to the house. If the two bullets had been meant for O'Dowda then he was being remarkably calm about it. If they were meant for me, then he was being remarkably cavalier about his concern for a guest. But, as he was a millionaire, I suppose he'd long ago given up having a normal person's reaction to abnormal events. Not that that made me any happier. And what the hell did Julia want?
I finished my drink and picked up the telephone by the bed. It was a house-phone and somewhere, probably in some basement office, a girl asked if she could help me. I gave her Miggs's number. She said she'd call me, and I went and got another drink.
Miggs came through in about three minutes. He started his usual jossing act, but I cut through it and he knew at once that it wasn't the time or place. I was willing to bet that every phone call that went out of the house was monitored, or would be for a guest of my standing.
I said, 'See if you can get me a line on a motor scooter, don't know the make, number JN4839. Gubby at the Yard will do it for you, and you can let Wilkins know.'
'Okay. Will do.'
I put the phone down, and went through for a bath. The cabinet held a wide range of bath essences. I chose Floris, No. 89, and soaked for half an hour.
He was wearing a green smoking jacket, a loose white silk shirt open at the neck, tartan trousers and black patent-leather slippers. He had a glass of brandy in one hand and a cigar in the other. I sat opposite him, similarly armoured, except that my cigar wasn't as big as his — my choice — and I hadn't been poured — his doing — so much brandy as he had given himself.
The manservant had come for me and escorted me to the dining room, a small private one off his study, where we had dined alone; a clear soup and sherry, the trout, lightly flavoured with Parmesan cheese and a good Mersault, and then fillet of beef, spinach en branche, roast potatoes and a claret that was nameless to me, out of the decanter, but which was so good that we had finished it between us. Overall he ate and drank twice as much as me, but I suppose given his size it was reasonable. Apart from that it was evident that he enjoyed the delights of the board for their own sake. In fact, I was sure that he was a man who enjoyed most of the world's delights for their own sake, which, of course, would make him dangerous if anyone got in the way of his getting what he wanted. Through dinner he had talked of fishing and his various houses. I didn't have to say anything. I just listened, and wondered when he would get around to business. Okay, he had this house, a London house, another in Cannes, a château just outside Evian, a flat in Paris, the fishing rights on an Irish river, the shooting over a few thousand acres of Scotland — oh, and an estate in the Bahamas where he went for the golf and big-game fishing — and, boy, wasn't it good to be alive and have all that. Not that he said that, but it was there. Naturally, as the claret mellowed me, I felt jealous. Why not? I've got nothing against wealth. I would have settled for a third of what he had and been happy for life. Not that I wasn't happy as I was, but a little more cash to go with it would have taken the greyness out of Monday mornings. I should add that somewhere in the catalogue he mentioned that he had six cars in the garage at this place, and quite a few in other places — so why was he concerned about the loss of a Mercedes 250SL? To him that was like losing a bicycle.