Part 13 (1/2)

'Be my guest.'

I loaded up four of the boxes and set off with them, and in a minute found her following me.

'Wait,' she said inside the dining-room door, 'mahogany gets scratched easily.'

She went over to a large sideboard and from a drawer drew out a vast green baize cloth which she draped over the whole expanse of the large oval table.

'You can work on that,' she said.

'Thank you.'

I put down the boxes and went to fetch another load, ferrying them until the whole lot was transferred. Dee-Dee meanwhile went back to her desk and her work, which largely consisted of the telephone. I could hear her still talking on and off while I arranged the boxes of cuttings chronologically and took the lid off the first, realising from the date on its end that it had to go back beyond Tremayne; that he hadn't started training when he was a baby. Tattered yellow pieces of newsprint informed me that Mr Loxley Vickers, of Sh.e.l.lerton House, Berks.h.i.+re, had bought Triple Subject, a six-year-old gelding, for the record sum for a steeplechaser of twelve hundred guineas. A house, an astonished reporter wrote, could be bought for less.

I looked up, smiling, and found Dee-Dee standing in the doorway, hesitantly hovering.

'I've been talking to Fiona Goodhaven,' she said abruptly.

'How is she?'

'All right. Thanks to you, it seems. Why didn't you tell me about your rescue job?'

'It didn't seem important.'

'Are you mad?'

'Well, it didn't seem important in the context of whether I could or couldn't do justice to Tremayne's biography.'

'G.o.d Almighty.' She went away but shortly came back. 'If you turn that thermostat,' she said, pointing, 'it will get warmer in here.'

She whisked away again before I could thank her, but I understood that peace had been declared, or, at the very least, hostilities temporarily suspended.

Tremayne returned in time. I heard him talking forcefully into an office telephone and presently he strode into the dining-room to tell me that someone had finally found they had a horse missing.

'It came over the hill from the next village. They're sending a box to pick it up. How are you doing?'

'Reading about your father.'

'A lunatic. Had an obsession about how things would look in his stomach after he'd eaten them. He used to make his butler put an extra serving of everything he was going to eat into a bucket and stir it round. If my father didn't like the look of it, he wouldn't eat his dinner. Drove the cook mad.'

I laughed. 'What about your mother?'

'She'd fallen off the perch by then. He wasn't so bad when she was alive. He went screwy after.'

'How old were you when she- er- fell off the perch?'

'Ten. Same age as Gareth when his mother finally hopped it. You might say I know what it's like to be Gareth. Except his mother's still alive and he sees her sometimes. I can't remember mine very clearly, to be honest.'

After a moment I said, 'How much can I ask you?'

'Ask anything. If I don't want to answer, I'll say so.'