Longshot. Part 4

'Do you mean it?'

'Of course, I mean it.' He sounded surprised I should ask. 'For someone who's not afraid of jungles you exhibit the strangest self-confidence deficiency.'

'I know where I am in jungles.'

'Go and catch your train,' he said, and wished me luck.

I caught, instead, a bus, as it was much cheaper, and was met outside the Reading bus station by a s.h.i.+vering young woman in a padded coat and woollen hat who visually checked me over from boots six feet up via ski-suit to dark hair and came to the conclusion that I was, as she put it, the writer.

'You're the writer?' She was positive, used to authority, not unfriendly.

'John Kendall,' I said, nodding.

'I'm Mackie Vickers. That's m, a, c, k, i, e,' she spelled. 'Not Maggie. Your bus is late.'

'The roads are bad,' I said apologetically.

'They're worse in the country.' It was dark and extremely cold. She led the way to a chunky jeep-like vehicle parked not far away and opened the rear door. 'Put your bags in here. You can meet everyone as we go along.'

There were already four people in the vehicle, it seemed, all cold and relieved I had finally turned up. I stowed my belongings and climbed in, sharing the back seat with two dimly seen figures who moved up to give me room. Mackie Vickers positioned herself behind the wheel, started the engine, released the brake and drove out into a stream of cars. A welcome trickle of hot air came out of the heater.

'The writer says his name is John Kendall,' Mackie said to the world in general.

There wasn't much reaction to the introduction.

'You're sitting next to Tremayne's head lad,' she went on, 'and his wife is beside him.'

The shadowy man next to me said, 'Bob Watson.' His wife said nothing.

'In front,' Mackie said, 'next to me, are Fiona and Harry Goodhaven.'

Neither Fiona nor Harry said anything. There was an intense quality in the collective atmosphere that dried up any conversational remark I might have thought of making, and it had little to do with temperature. It was as if the very air were scowling.

Mackie drove for several minutes in continuing silence, concentrating on the slush-lined surface under the yellowish lights of the main road west out of Reading. The traffic was heavy and slow moving, the ill-named rush hour crawling along with flas.h.i.+ng scarlet brake lights, a procession of curses.

Eventually Mackie said to me, turning her head over her shoulder as I was sitting directly behind her, 'We're not good company. We've spent all day in court. Tempers are frayed. You'll just have to put up with it.'

'No trouble,' I said.

Trouble was the wrong word to use, it seemed.

As if releasing tension Fiona said loudly, 'I can't believe you were so stupid.'

'Give it a rest,' Harry said. He'd already heard it before.

'But you know d.a.m.ned well that Lewis was drunk.'

'That doesn't excuse anything.'

'It explains things. You know d.a.m.ned well he was drunk.'

'Everyone says he was drunk,' Harry said, sounding heavily reasonable, 'but I don't know it, do I? I didn't see him drinking too much.'

Bob Watson beside me said 'Liar' on a whispered breath, and Harry didn't hear.

'Nolan is going to prison,' Fiona said bitterly. 'Do you realise? Prison. All because of you.'

'You don't know he is,' Harry complained. 'The jury haven't found him guilty yet.'

'But they will, won't they? And it will by your fault. Dammit, you were under oath. All you had to do was say Lewis was drunk. Now the jury thinks he wasn't drunk, so he must be able to remember everything. They think he's lying when he says he can't remember. Christ Almighty, Nolan's whole defence was that Lewis can't remember. How could you be so stupid?'

Harry didn't answer. The atmosphere if possible worsened, and I felt as if I'd gone into a movie halfway through and couldn't grasp the plot.

Mackie, without contributing any opinions, turned from the Great West Road onto the M4 motorway and made better time westwards along an unlit and uninhabited stretch between snow-covered wooded hills, ice crystals glittering in the headlights.

'Bob says Lewis was drunk,' Fiona persisted, 'and he should know, he was serving the drinks.'

'Then maybe the jury will believe Bob.'

'They believed him until you stood there and blew it.'

'They should have had you in the witness box,' Harry said defensively, 'then you could have sworn he was paralytic and had to be sc.r.a.ped off the carpet, even if you weren't there.'

Bob Watson said, 'He wasn't paralytic.'

'You keep out of it, Bob,' Harry snapped.

'Sorr-ee,' Bob Watson said, again under his breath.

'All you had to do was swear that Lewis was drunk.' Fiona's voice rose with fury. 'That's all the defence called you for. Then you didn't say it. Nolan's lawyer could have killed you.'

Harry said wearily, 'You didn't have to stand there answering that prosecutor's questions. You heard what he said, how did I know Lewis was drunk? Had I given him a breath test, a blood test, a urine test? On what did I base my judgment? Did I have any clinical experience? You heard him. On and on. How many drinks did I see Lewis take? How did I know what was in the drinks? Had I ever heard of Lewis having black-outs any other time after drinking?'

'That was disallowed,' Mackie said.

'You let that prosecutor tie you in knots. You looked absolutely stupid-' Fiona ran on and on, the rage in her mind unabating.

I began to feel mildly sorry for Harry.

We reached the Chieveley interchange and left the motorway to turn north on the big A34 to Oxford. Mackie had sensibly taken the cleared major roads rather than go over the hills, even though it was further that way, according to the map. I'd looked up the whereabouts of Tremayne's village on the theory that it was a wise man who knew his destination, especially when it was on the Berks.h.i.+re Downs a mile from nowhere.

Silence had mercifully struck Fiona's tongue by the time Sh.e.l.lerton showed up on a signpost. Mackie slowed, signalled, and cautiously turned off the main road into a very narrow secondary road that was Hide more than a lane, where snow had been roughly pushed to the sides but still lay in shallow frozen brown ruts over much of the surface. The tyres scrunched on them, cracking the ice. Mist formed quickly on the inside of the windscreen and Mackie rubbed it away impatiently with her glove.

There were no houses beside the lane: it was well over a mile across bare downland, I found later, from the main road to the village. There were also no cars: no one was out driving if they could help it. For all Mackie's care one could sometimes feel the wheels sliding, losing traction for perilous seconds. The engine, engaged in low gear, whined laboriously up a shallow incline.

'It's worse than this morning,' Mackie said, sounding worried. 'This road's a skating rink.'

No one answered her. I was hoping, as I expect they all were, that we would reach the top of the slope without sliding backwards; and we did, only to see that the downside looked just as hazardous, if not more so. Mackie wiped the windscreen again and with extra care took a curve to the right.