Longshot Read Online Free PDF

go as soon as you can. Today, even, he said. Will you go today?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “He lives in a village called Shellerton, in Berkshire. He says if you can phone to say what train you’re catching, someone will meet you at Reading station. Here’s the number.” He read it out to me.
    “Fine,” I said. “And Ronnie, thanks very much.”
    “Don’t thank me. Just... well, just write a brilliant chapter or two and I’ll try to get the book commissioned on the strength of them. But go on writing fiction. That’s where your future is.”
    “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 shivering young woman in a padded coat and woolen 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 jeeplike 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 backseat 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 flashing 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 damned well that Lewis was drunk.”
    “That doesn’t excuse anything.”
    “It explains things. You know damned 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 realize? Prison. All because of you.”
    “You don’t know he is,” Harry complained. “The jury