Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  Ah-ha!” Paul almost shouted in triumph. “Valen­tine's codicil will be invalid because he couldn't see what he was signing!”

  Dorothea protested, “But he knew what he was signing.”

  How did he know? Tell me that.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, halting the brewing bad temper. “If Valentine's codicil is judged invalid, which I think unlikely if his solicitor drew it up and witnessed its signing, then the books belong to Dorothea, who alone can decide what to do with them.”

  “Oh, thank you, dear,” she said, her expression relaxing, “then if they are mine, I will give them to you, Thomas, because I know that's what Valentine intended.”

  Paul looked aghast. “But you can't.”

  “Why not, dear?”

  “They ... they may be valuable.”

  “I'll get them valued,” I said, “and if they really are worth an appreciable amount, I'll give that much to Dorothea.”

  “No, dear,” she vehemently shook her head.

  “Hush,” I said to her. “Let it lie for now.”

  Paul paced up and down the kitchen in a fury and came to a halt on the far side of the table from where I sat with Dorothea beside me, demanding forcefully, “Just who are you, anyway, apart from ingratiating yourself with a helpless, dying old man? I mean, it's criminal.”

  I saw no need to explain myself to him, but Dorothea wearily informed him, “Thomas's grandfather trained horses that Valentine shod. Valentine's known Thomas for more than twenty years, and he's always liked him, he told me so.”

  As if unable to stop himself, Paul marched his bulk away from this unwelcome news, abruptly leaving the kitchen and disappearing down the hall. One might have written him off as a pompous ass were it not for the fugitive impression of an underlying, heavy, half-glimpsed predator in the undergrowth. I wouldn't want to be at a disadvantage with him, I thought.

  Dorothea said despairingly, “I don't want to live near Paul. I couldn't bear to have Janet coming to see me every day. I don't get on with her, dear. She bosses me about.”

  “You don't have to go,” I said. “Paul can't put this house up for sale, because it isn't his. But, dearest Dorothea ...” I paused, hesitating.

  “But what, dear?”

  “Well, don't sign anything.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, don't sign anything. Ask your solicitor friend first.”

  She gazed at me earnestly. “I may have to sign things, now Valentine's gone.”

  “Yes, but ... don't sign any paper just because Paul wants you to.”

  “All right,” she said doubtfully.

  I asked her, “Do you know what a power of attorney is?”

  “Doesn't it give people permission to do things on your behalf?”

  I nodded.

  She thought briefly and said, 'You're telling me not to sign a paper giving Paul permission to sell this house. Is that it?'

  'It sure is.'

  She patted my hand. “Thank you, Thomas. I promise not to sign anything like that. I'll read everything carefully. I hate to say it, but Paul does try too hard sometimes to get his own way.”

  Paul, to my mind, had been quiet for a suspiciously long time. I stood up and left the kitchen, going in search of him, and I found him in Valentine's sitting-room taking books off the shelves and setting them in stacks on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “Please leave those alone.”

  Paul said, “I'm looking for a book I loaned Valentine. I want it back.”

  “What's it called?”

  Paul's spur-of-the-occasion lie hadn't got as far as a title. “I'll know it when I see it,” he said.

  “If any book has your name in it,” I said politely, “I'll make sure that you get it back.”

  “That's not good enough.”

  Dorothea appeared in the doorway, saw the books piled on the floor and looked aghast and annoyed at the same time. “Paul! Stop that! Those books are Thomas's. If you take them you'll be stealing,”

  Paul showed no sign of caring about such a minor accusation.

  “He won't take them,” I told her reassuringly.

  Paul curled his lip at me, shouldered his way past and opened the front door.

  “What is he doing, dear?” Dorothea asked, perplexed, watching her son's back go purposefully down the path.

  “It seems,” I said, “that he's fetching one of his boxes to pack the books in.” I closed the front door and shot its bolts, top and bottom. Then I hurried through into the kitchen and secured its outside door in the same way, and made a quick trip through all the rooms, and both bathrooms, to make sure the windows were shut and locked.

  “But Paul's my son,” Dorothea protested.

  “And he's trying to steal Valentine's books.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  Paul began hammering on the front door. “Mother, let me in at once.”

  “Perhaps I should,” Dorothea worried.

  “He'll come to no harm out there. It's nowhere near freezing and he can sit in his car. Or go home, of course.”

  “Sometimes Paul isn't likeable,” Dorothea said sadly.

  I put the stacks of books back on Valentine's shelves. The ones that Paul had chosen to steal first were those with the glossiest covers, the recently published racing biographies, which were, in commercial resale terms, almost worthless. I guessed that chiefly it was Paul's vanity that was reacting against being thwarted by his mother and by me.

  I had never underestimated the virulence of outraged vanity since directing a disturbing film about a real-life fanatical body-builder who'd killed his girl-friend because she'd left him for a wimp. I'd had to understand him, to crawl into his mind, and I'd hated it.

  Paul's heavy hand banged repeatedly on the door and he pressed unremittingly on the doorbell. This last resulted not in a shrill nerve-shredding single note, but in a less insupportable non-stop quiet ding-dong; quiet because Dorothea had turned down the volume to avoid disturbing Valentine as he'd grown weaker.

  I looked at my watch: five minutes to six. Perhaps an hour before we could expect the doctor but only thirty minutes before I should start my own workday.

  “Oh, dear,” Dorothea said for about the tenth time, “I do wish he'd stop.”

  “Tell him you'll let him in if he promises to leave the books alone.”

  “Do you think he'll agree?” she asked dubiously.

  “A good chance,” I said.

  He wouldn't want to lose too much face with the awakening neighbours, I reckoned: only a fool would allow himself to be seen to be shut out like a naughty boy by his aged mother.

  With evident relief she relayed the terms, to which her son with bad grace agreed. She unbolted the door and let him in, an entrance I carefully didn't watch, as the slightest smile on my face would be interpreted by him as a jeer which would set him off again. Motorists had been shot for cutting in.

  I stayed for a while in Valentine's sitting-room with the door shut while mother and son sorted themselves out in the kitchen. I sat in the armchair opposite the one no longer occupied by the old man, and thought how easy it was to get embroiled in a senseless fracas. Without expecting it, I'd made an enemy of Paul Pannier: and I surmised that what he really wanted was not so much the books themselves, but to get me and my influence out of his mother's life, so that he could control and order her future as best suited his benefi­cent view of himself.

  At least, I hoped that was the case. Anything worse was more than I felt like dealing with in the middle of making a film.

  I stared vacantly at the wall of books, wondering if after all there were anything there of value. If so, I was sure Valentine had been unaware of it. When I'd mentioned the possibility of an autobiography and he'd vetoed the idea, he hadn't referred to any diaries or other raw material that could be used as sources by anyone else but, sitting there, I wondered if by any chance Paul had made some sort of deal with a writer or publisher, to trade Valentine'
s papers for a share of the profits. No biography of Valentine's would make a fortune, but Paul, I guessed, would be content with modest pickings. Anything was better than nothing, one might hear him say.

  Howard Tyler's book was not on the shelves.

  Valentine had asked me, the first time I'd called on him, what had brought me back to Newmarket, and when I'd explained about Howard's book - Unstable Times - and the film we were to make of it, he'd said he'd heard of the book but he hadn't bought it, since at the time of its publication his eyesight had been fast deteriorating.

  “I hear it's a load of rubbish,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “I knew Jacksy Wells. I often shod his horses. He never murdered that mousey wife of his, he hadn't got the guts.”

  “The book doesn't say he did,” I assured him.

  “And I hear it doesn't say he didn't, neither.”

  “Well, no.”

  “It wasn't worth writing a book about it. Waste of time making a film.”

  I'd smiled. Film-makers notoriously and wilfully distorted historical facts. Films knowingly based on lies could get nominated for Oscars.

  “What was she like?” I asked.

  “Jackson Wells's wife.”

  “Mousey, like I said. Funny, I can't remember her clearly. She wasn't one of those trainer's wives who run the whole stable. Mouths like cesspits, some of them had in the old days. Jackson Wells's wife, you wouldn't have known she existed. I hear she's halfway to a whore in the book, poor little bitch.”

  “Did she hang herself?”

  “Search me,” Valentine said. “I only shod the horses. The fuss died down pretty fast for lack of clues and evidence, but of course it did Jackson Wells in as a trainer. I mean, would you send your horses to a man who'd maybe killed his wife?”

  “Nor did anyone else.”

  “The book says she had a lover,” I said.

  “Did she?” Valentine pondered. “First I've heard of it,” he said. “But then, Dorothea could have a lover here under my nose and I wouldn't care. Good luck to her, if she did.”

  “You're a wicked old man, Valentine.”

  “Nobody's an angel,” he said.

  I looked at his empty chair and remembered his desperate half-whisper ... “I killed the Cornish boy”

  Maybe the Cornish Boy was a horse.

  Steps sounded on the path outside and the doorbell rang, ding-dong. I waited so as not to appear to be usurping Paul's desired status as head of the household, but it was in fact Dorothea who went to answer the summons.

  “Come in, Robbie,” she said, the loud relief in her voice reaching me clearly. “How dear of you to come.”

  “That son of yours!” The doctor's voice held dislike.

  “Sorry, sorry,” Dorothea said placatingly.

  “Not your fault.”

  Dorothea let him in and closed the front door, and I opened the door of Valentine's sitting-room to say hello.

  Robbie Gill shook my hand perfunctorily. “Glad you've got company,” he told Dorothea. “Now, about Valentine?”

  All three of us went quietly into the old man's dimly-lit room, followed importantly by Paul who immediately flooded the scene again with the overhead bulb. Perhaps it was only the director in me, I thought, that found this harsh insistence unpalatable. Certainly Robbie Gill made no protest but set about establishing clinically what was evident to any eye, that Valentine - he who had lived in that chemical shell - had left it.

  “What time did he die?” he asked Dorothea, his pen poised over a clipboard.

  “I don't know to the minute,” she said unhappily.

  “Around one o'clock,” I said.

  “Mother was asleep,” Paul accused forgivingly. “She confessed it. She doesn't know when he died.”

  Robbie Gill gave him an expressionless stare and without comment wrote 0100 on his clipboard, showing it to me and Dorothea.

  “I'll see to the paperwork for you,” he said to Dorothea. “But you'll need to get an undertaker.”

  “Leave it to me,” Paul interrupted. “I’ll take charge of all that.”

  No one demurred. Taking important charge of relatively minor matters suited Paul's character perfectly: and perhaps, I thought, he would be so fulfillingly involved that he would forget about the books. There was no harm, however, in seeking to give Dorothea a close line of defence.

  “How about,” I suggested to her, “letting me go across to your friend Betty's house, and asking her to come over to keep you company?”

  “Good idea,” Robbie Gill agreed emphatically.

  “No need for that!” Paul objected.

  “It's a bit early, dear,” Dorothea protested, looking at the clock, but seeming hopeful nevertheless.

  I crossed the road to the friend's house and woke the friend's husband, whose initial irritation turned to a resigned shrug.

  “Poor old sod,” he said, apparently referring to Valentine. “We'll look after Dorothea.”

  “Her son Paul is with her,” I told him.

  “Betty,” he said intensely, “will be over straight away.”

  smiled at the owner of the bristly chin and the crumpled pyjamas and dressing gown. Paul had a galvanic effect on everyone else's good nature, it seemed.

  I waited until Betty had bustled across, plump and loving like Dorothea, and until Robbie Gill had left, during which period Paul half a dozen times told me I had no need to remain. While he was at one point busy patronising the doctor, Dorothea confided to me guiltily that she had locked Valentine's sitting-room door, dear, just in case, and had hidden the key in the pink vase in her bedroom.

  I kissed her cheek, smiling, and drove off to work, half an hour late again but offering no apology.

  Rehearsal and lighting took all morning. Each of the non-speaking characters, Jockey Club members, had to be positioned in his armchair and taken through the responses to Nash Rourke's long vehement defence.

  “Act scandalised here,” I prompted, “then disbelieving, then throw up hands, throw down pencil, look angry, you think the man's guilty and lying. Right everyone, we go through it again.”

  And again and again, with Nash's stand-in repeating the speech and pausing step by forward step for Moncrieff's lighting plans to be finalised. Gibber, at the head of the table, kept making fruity jokes as usual and running down the government in the normal bored manner of an old character actor who'd long abandoned hopes of Hamlet. Gibber - I called most of the cast by their script names as I found it less confusing all round - Gibber was going to give a crack-up later of such truth and misery that he would garner good critical mentions while detesting me for a long time after, but as yet he coasted along on “heard the one about the sperm and the lawyer, old boy?”

  Gibber had been chosen by the casting director because of his upper-class appearance and voice; and I had no complaints about these, but only with his facile assumption that they were enough, when to me they were merely a start.

  We broke briefly for lunch. Nash Rourke arrived in good time for make-up, and did one silent walk-through under the lights, for Moncrieff to check he had the same colour temperatures as with the stand-in.

  Owing to Nash having rehearsed in private the evening before, the 'Jockey Club members' were not prepared for what they were going to see, and as I particularly wanted to record their spontaneous reactions in advance of their rehearsed version, I announced that the first take was in this case not to be considered to be a rehearsal, but would be the real thing: that action, failing only the set falling to pieces, would continue from start to finish, whatever was seeming to go wrong.

  “Continuous,” I said. “No stops. Right?”

  Everyone nodded, even if doubt could be spotted here and there. Except for unrepeatable effects involving five hundred extras, first takes were rarely those seen on the screen.

  With the world-weariness of unlimited experience, Nash understood what I wanted, but that didn't guarantee that he would deliver. That day, ho
wever, from some motive of his own, he decided generously to go along with the all-out take one, and performed with such vibrating power that the mouths round the table fell open with real incredulity. Moncrieff said the hairs on his own neck stood up, let alone those of the cast. Gibber instinctively slid down in his chair as Nash came to a thunderous halt leaning over him, and after a second or two of dead silence, when I said a shade breathlessly, “Cut, and print,” the crews and actors as if of one mind applauded.

  Nash shrugged it off. “Well, it's strongly written ...”

  He retraced his steps to leave the horseshoe and came over to where I stood.

  “Well?” he said.

  I was practically speechless.

  “Go on,” Nash said. “Say it. Say "Do it again".”

  His eyes smiled.

  “Do it again,” I said.

  We repositioned and reloaded the cameras and repeated the scene twice more. All three takes went miraculously without glitches, and all three were printable, but it wasn't only I who thought the first electric beyond insulation.

  “That man could murder,” Moncrieff said of Nash thoughtfully.

  “He was acting.”

  “No.” He shivered slightly. “I mean, in fact.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Howard had heard that the enquiry scene had given a galvanising, positively animating jolt to the whole production. He'd been told, by about ten different people, that Nash had said “It's strongly written”: and Howard knew that he hadn't written what Nash had yelled.

  “You,” he said furiously, facing me after dinner across a small table in the Bedford Lodge Hotel bar, far too public a venue for his emotions, “you changed the script.”

  “Well,” I said peaceably, “not very much. Most of it was your words exactly.”

  “But not the feeling,” he complained. “You wilfully misinterpreted my intention. You told Nash to lose control and threaten Gibber. You told him to look like a killer, you must have done, otherwise he wouldn't have thought of it, not from what I wrote.”

  “Look, Howard,” I said with resignation, “we'd better come once and for all to an understanding. I don't want to quarrel with you. I want us to work together to produce a good film, but you did sign a contract -”