'Good G.o.d.'

'I'll cook when I get back.'

'You don't have to,' he protested. 'Don't let Gareth talk you into it.'

'I said I would, though.'

'I don't care much what I eat.'

I grinned. 'Maybe that will be just as well. I'll be back soon after Gareth, I expect.'

I'd discovered that the younger son rode his bicycle each morning to the house of his friend Coconut, from where both of them were driven to and from a town ten miles away, as day boys in a mainly boarding school. The hours were long, as always with that type of school: Gareth was never home much before seven, often later. His notice 'BACK FOR GRUB' seemed to be a fixture. He removed it, Tremayne said, only when he knew in the morning that he would be out until bedtime. Then he would leave another message instead, to say where he was going.

'Organised,' I commented.

'Always has been.'

I reached the main street of Sh.e.l.lerton and tramped along to the Goodhavens' house, pa.s.sing three or four cars in their driveway and walking round to the kitchen door to ring the bell.

After an interval the door was opened by Harry whose expression changed from inhospitable to welcoming by visible degrees.

'Oh, h.e.l.lo, come in. Forgot about you. Fact is, we've had another lousy day in Reading. But home without crashing, best you can say.'

I stepped into the house and he closed the door behind us, at the same time putting a restraining hand on my arm.

'Let me tell you first,' he said. 'Nolan and Lewis are both here. Nolan got convicted of manslaughter. Six months' jail suspended for two years. He won't go behind bars but no one's happy.'

'I don't need to stay,' I said. 'Don't want to intrude.'

'Do me a favour, dilute the atmosphere.'

'If it's like that-'

He nodded, removed his hand and walked me through the kitchen into a warm red hallway and on into a pink-and-green chintzy sitting-room beyond.

Fiona, turning her silver-blond head said, 'Who was it?' and saw me following Harry. 'Oh, good heavens, I'd forgotten.' She came over, holding out a hand, which I shook, an odd formality after our previous meeting.

'These are my cousins,' she said. 'Nolan and Lewis Everard.' She gave me a wide don't-say-anything stare, so I didn't. 'A friend of Tremayne's,' she said to them briefly. John Kendall.'

Mackie, sitting exhaustedly in an armchair, waggled acknowledging fingers. Everyone else was standing and holding a gla.s.s. Harry pressed a pale gold drink into my hand and left me to discover for myself what lay under the floating ice. Whisky, I found, tasting it.

I had had no mental picture of either Nolan or Lewis but their appearance all the same was a surprise. They were both short, Nolan handsome and hard, Lewis swollen and soft. Late thirties, both of them. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark jaws. I supposed I had perhaps expected them to be like Harry in character if not in appearance, but it was immediately clear that they weren't. In place of Harry's amused urbanity, Nolan's aristocratic-sounding speech was essentially violent and consisted of fifty per cent obscenity. The gist of his first sentence was that he wasn't in the mood for guests.

Neither Fiona nor Harry showed embarra.s.sment, only weary tolerance. If Nolan had spoken like that in court, I thought, it was no wonder he'd been found guilty. One could quite easily imagine him throttling a nymph.

Harry said calmly, 'John is writing Tremayne's biography. He knows about the trial and the Top Spin Lob party. He's a friend of ours, and he stays.'

Nolan gave Harry a combative stare which Harry returned with blandness.

'Anyone can know about the trial,' Mackie said. 'It was in all the papers this morning, after all.'

Harry nodded. 'To be continued in reel two.'

'It's not an expletive joke,' Lewis said. 'They took photos of us when we were leaving.' His peevish voice was like his brother's though a shade higher in pitch and, as I progressively discovered, instead of truly offensive obscene words he had a habit of using euphemisms like 'expletive', 'bleep' and 'deleted'. In Harry's mouth it might have been funny; in Lewis's it seemed a form of cowardice.

'Gird up such loins as you have,' Harry told him peaceably. 'The public won't remember by next week.'

Nolan said between four-letter words that everyone that mattered would remember, including the Jockey Club.

'I doubt if they'll actually warn you off,' Harry said. 'It wasn't as if you hadn't paid your bookmaker.'

'Harry!' Fiona said sharply.

'Sorry, m'dear,' murmured her husband, though his lids half veiled his eyes like blinds drawn over his true feelings.

Tremayne and I had each read two accounts of the previous day's proceedings while dealing with the sandwiches, one in a racing paper, another in a tabloid. Tremayne's comments had been grunts of disapproval, while I had learned a few facts left out by the Vickers family the evening before.

Fiona's cousin Nolan, for starters, was an amateur jockey ('well-known', in both papers) who often raced on Fiona's horses, trained by Tremayne Vickers. Nolan Everard had once briefly been engaged to Magdalene Mackenzie (Mackie) who had subsequently married Perkin Vickers, Tremayne's son. 'Sources' had insisted that the three families, Vickers, Goodhavens and Everards were on friendly terms. The prosecution, not disputing this, had suggested that indeed they had all closed ranks to shield Nolan from his just deserts.

A demure photograph of Olympia (provided by her father) showed a fair-haired schoolgirl, immature, an innocent victim. No one seemed to have explained why Nolan had said he would strangle the b.i.t.c.h, and now that I'd heard him talk I was certain those had not been his only words.

'The question really is,' Fiona said, 'not whether the Jockey Club will warn him off racecourses altogether, because I'm sure they won't - they let real villains go racing - but whether they'll stop him riding as an amateur.'

Harry said, as if sympathetically, to Nolan, 'It's rather put paid to your ambitions to be made a member of the Jockey Club, though, hasn't it, old lad?'

Nolan looked blackly furious and remarked with venom that Harry hadn't helped the case by not swearing to h.e.l.l and back that Lewis had been comprehensively p.i.s.sed.

Harry didn't reply except to shrug gently and refill Lewis's gla.s.s, which was unquestionably comprehensively empty.

If one made every possible allowance for Nolan, I thought; if one counted the long character-withering ordeal of waiting to know if he were going to prison; if one threw in the stress of having undoubtedly killed a young woman, even by accident; if one added the humiliations he would forever face because of his conviction; if one granted all that, he was still unattractively, viciously ungrateful.

His family and friends had done their best for him. I thought it highly likely that Lewis had in fact perjured himself and that Harry had also, very nearly, in the matter of the alcoholic blackout. Harry had at the last minute shrunk from either a positive opinion or from an outright lie, and I'd have put my money on the second. They had all gone again to court to support Nolan when they would much rather have stayed away.

'I still think you ought to appeal,' Lewis said.

Nolan's p.o.r.nographic reply was to the effect that his lawyer had advised him not to push his luck, as Lewis very well knew.

'Bleep the lawyer,' Lewis said.

'Appeal courts can increase sentences, I believe,' Fiona said warningly. 'They might cancel the suspension. Doesn't bear thinking about.'

'Olympia's father was incandescent afterwards,' Mackie said gloomily, nodding. 'He wanted Nolan put away for life. Life for a life, that's what he was shouting.'

'You can't just appeal against a sentence because you don't happen to like it,' Harry pointed out. 'There has to be some point of law that was conducted wrongly at the trial.'

Lewis said obstinately, 'If Nolan doesn't appeal it's as good as admitting he's expletive guilty as charged.'

There was a sharp silence all round. They all did think him guilty, though maybe to different degrees. Don't push your luck seemed good pragmatic advice.