Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  I looked up the hill. The lads still stood there, awaiting instructions.

  One behaves as one is, I suppose. I returned to the truck, climbed into it and drove it round until it stood over the knife, so that no one could pick up that weapon or dislodge it; so that no horse could step on it and get cut.

  Then I hopped into the back of the truck, set the camera rolling, and filmed the line of horsemen standing black against the risen sun.

  Even though I was again staring unemployment in its implacable face, it seemed a shame to waste such a shot.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I rearranged the day.

  Everyone returned to the stable yard except Moncrieff, whom I left stationed behind the steering wheel of the camera truck with strict instructions not to move the wheels even if it were demanded of him by irate men whose job it was to keep vehicles off the Heath. I had transgressed appallingly, I told him, by driving on the hallowed gallops. He was not to budge the truck an inch.

  “Why not?”

  I explained why not.

  “Knife?” he said disbelievingly.

  “Someone really did mean harm to Nash.”

  “Impossible!” Moncrieff exclaimed, though more in protest than disbelief.

  “Tennis players, skaters, John Lennon,” I said. “Who's safe?”

  Without choice, though reluctantly, I phoned the police, headlines bannering themselves in my head -”Jinx strikes Newmarket film again”. Shit, indeed. I met them in the stable yard where all the lads were waiting in groups and Ivan had come to grandiose terms with his possible nearness to injury.

  The policemen who presently arrived were different from those who had come to attend Dorothea. I wondered how odd it would strike the force eventually to have been called to two knife incidents within twenty-four hours, however unconnected the events might appear. I wondered if they would realise I'd been on the scene of both.

  Nash, beseeched by Ed, came out of the house in costume and make-up and stood side by side with Ivan. The policemen looked from one to the other and came, as we all had, to the only possible conclusion. In carefully matched riding breeches, tweed jacket and large buckled crash helmet, they looked from ten paces identical. Only the slash along the side of Ivan's jacket distinguished them easily.

  I said to Nash, “This may put paid to the film.”

  “No one got hurt.”

  “Someone was out to get you.”

  “They didn't manage it,” he said.

  “You're pretty calm.”

  “Thomas, I've lived through years of danger of this sort. We all do. The world's full of crazy fanatics. If you let it worry you, you'd never go out.” He looked across to where the police were writing down what the lads were telling them. “Are we going on with today's work?”

  I hesitated. “How will Silva react?”

  I smothered a smile. 'Do you want to come out on the Heath and see what someone intended to stick into you? And do you realise that from now on you have to have a bodyguard?'

  “No. I never have a bodyguard.”

  “No bodyguard, no film. Very likely, no film anyway, once Hollywood gets to hear of this.”

  He looked at his watch. “It's the middle of the night over there.”

  You'll go on, then?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “In that case, as soon as we can,” I said gratefully.

  Ed came across and said the police wanted to speak to the person really in charge. I went over: they were both older than I and seemed to be looking around for a father figure to relate to. I was not, it appeared, their idea of authority. O'Hara would have fitted their bill.

  The lads had told them that an extra horseman had joined their group while they were haphazardly circling after their third canter over the hill. They'd thought nothing much of it, as with film-making the normal routine of training-stable life was not adhered to. The newcomer, dressed in jeans, anorak and crash helmet, had blended in with themselves. It was only when Ivan's horse had reared away, and Ivan himself had shouted and fallen off, that they'd thought anything was wrong. No one seemed to have seen the slash of the blade.

  They couldn't do much towards describing the extra man. Crash helmets with heavy chin straps effectively hid half the face. The newcomer also, they remembered, had been wearing jockey's goggles, as many of them frequently did themselves to shield their eyes from dust and kicked-up debris. They thought he might have been wearing gloves: nothing unusual in that, either.

  Had I anything to add, the police wanted to know.

  “He could ride well,” I said.

  They seemed to find that unimportant, being used to the many skills of Newmarket, though I thought it significant.

  “He wasn't a jockey,” I said. “He was too heavy. Too thickset.”

  Description of features? I shook my head. I hadn't seen his face, only his back view galloping away.

  I waited until they had let the lads and the camera crew disperse out of earshot before I told them about the knife.

  We drove up the road to get as near as possible to the camera truck which still stuck out like an illegal sore thumb. Thanks only to its being Sunday, I guessed, no groundsmen were hopping up and down in rage. Leading the police vehicle, I took Nash with me in my car, breaking all the film company's rigid insurance instructions. What with one thing and another, who cared?

  Moncrieff backed the camera truck ten feet. The police peered in silence at the revealed peril. Moncrieff looked shocked. Nash grew still.

  “He dropped it,” I explained. “He turned to come back for it. Then he saw me chasing him and decided on flight.”

  Nash said, “He lunged at Ivan with that!”

  I nodded. “You'll have a bodyguard from now on.”

  He looked at me and made no further protest. One of the policemen produced a large paper bag and with care not to smudge possible fingerprints lifted the knife from the grass.

  “There weren't any touts,” I remarked.

  “What?” asked Nash.

  “Every day except Sunday there are watchers down there on the edge of the town, with binoculars.” I pointed. “Information is their trade. They know every horse on the Heath. They pass tit-bits of training progress to newspapermen and to bookmakers. If they'd only been here today, our knifeman wouldn't have been able to vanish so easily.”

  One of the policemen nodded. “So who knew, sir, that Mr Rourke would be out here this Sunday morning?”

  “About sixty people,” I said. “Everyone working on the film knows the shooting schedule a couple of days in advance.” I paused. “There were a few people out watching, as there always are with film-making, but we have staff moving them away as far as possible if we don't want them in shot. Then, too, we started work today before sunrise.” I looked round the Heath. Despite our activity, few people were about. Cars went past us on the road without slowing. The Heath looked wide and peaceful, the last place for death.

  As Nash had pointed out, no one had been hurt. The police took their notes, the knife and their possible theories back into Newmarket and, with a feeling of imminent doom sitting like vultures on our shoulders, I summoned the camera crews back to work and made the magical initial meeting of Nash and Silva come to life.

  It was nearly three in the afternoon by the time we'd finished on the Heath. Just as I returned to the stables four large motor horseboxes arrived to transport to Huntingdon racecourse all the horses, their saddles, bridles, rugs and other gear and their feed and bedding, besides the lads and their own travel bags. Our horse-master seemed to be managing fine. Despite the early morning upset everyone involved seemed to hum in a holiday mood.

  O'Hara banished the temporary euphoria, arriving in the yard by car and scrambling out angrily to demand of me loudly, “What in hell's teeth's going on?”

  “Going to Huntingdon,” I said.

  Thomas. I'm not talking about goddam Huntingdon. It's on the car radio that some maniac attacked Nash with a knife. What i
n buggery happened?”

  I tried to tell him but he was too agitated to listen.

  “Where's Nash?” he demanded.

  “In the house getting his make-up off.”

  He strode impatiently away and through the house's rear door, leaving me to re-start the transportation and set the wagon-train rolling, even though the pioneers no longer sang.

  Moncrieff was supposed to be having a rare afternoon off. I told him he deserved it and to scarper, which he rapidly did, hoping O'Hara wouldn't reappear too soon.

  Alone for a change, I leaned against the bottom half of a stable door, listening to the unaccustomed silence and thinking of knives. Valentine's old voice murmured in my head ... “I left the knife with Derry ...”

  The world was full of knives.

  Who was Derry?

  O'Hara and Nash came out of the house together looking more cheerful than I'd feared.

  “I spent half the night talking to Hollywood,” O'Hara announced. “I reminded them that yanking the director in mid-film almost inevitably led to critical disaster, as reviewers always latch onto that fact firstly and spend most of their column speculating on how much better it would have been to have left things alone.”

  “However untrue,” Nash commented dryly.

  “In this case,” O'Hara told him firmly, “you said, if I remember, that if they sacked Thomas they sacked you too.”

  “Yeah. Crazy.”

  O'Hara nodded. “Anyway, I'll be plugging the line that the attack on the stuntman is positive publicity, not bad. By the time this movie gets to distribution, the public will be fired up to see it.”

  He sounded, I thought, as though he had had to convince himself first, but I was certainly not going to argue.

  I asked instead, “Do you need me around, then, for the next several hours?”

  “I guess not.” He sounded doubtful, stifling curiosity.

  “Late Sunday afternoon,” I explained, “is a fairly mellow time for surprise calls on farmers.”

  O'Hara worked it out. “Jackson Wells!”

  “Right.” I turned to Nash. “Do you want to meet the man you're playing?”

  “No, I do not,” he said positively. “I do not want to pick up the crusty mannerisms of some bitter old grouch.”

  As I didn't want him to, either, I felt relieved rather than regretful. I said, “I'll be back by ten this evening. I've a meeting scheduled then with Moncrieff and Ziggy Keene.”

  “Ziggy who?” Nash asked.

  “Stuntman,” I said. “No one better on a horse.”

  “Better than Ivan?”

  I smiled. “He costs ten times as much and he's worth twenty.”

  “This beach business?” O'Hara asked.

  I nodded.

  “What beach business?” Nash wanted to know,

  “Don't ask,” O'Hara told him humorously. “Our boy has visions. Sometimes they work.”

  “What vision?” Nash asked me,

  “He can't tell you,” O'Hara answered for me. “But when he sees it, so will we.”

  Nash sighed. O'Hara went on, “Talking of seeing, when will today's dailies be ready?”

  “Tomorrow morning, as usual,” I assured him. “When the van comes back.”

  We were sending our exposed film to London every day by courier, to have it processed there overnight in a laboratory specialising in Technicolor. The film travelled each way in a London-based van, with the driver and an accompanying guard spending their nights in London and their days in Newmarket: and so far the arrangement had thankfully proved hitchless.

  Each day, after seeing the previous day's rushes, I entered on a complicated chart the scenes and takes that I thought we should use on screen, roughly editing the film as I went along. It both clarified my own mind and saved a great deal of time in the overall editing period later on. Some directors liked to work with the film's appointed editor always at hand making decisions throughout on the dailies, but I preferred to do it myself, even if sometimes it took half the night, as it gave me more control over the eventual product. The rough cut, the bones and shape of the finished film, would be in that way my own work.

  Stand or fall, my own work. Life on the leaning tower.

  I set off westwards from Newmarket with only a vague idea of where I was headed and an even vaguer idea of what I would say when I got there.

  Perhaps postponing the moment, but anyway because the city lay on my route, I drove first into Cambridge and stopped at the hospital housing Dorothea. Enquiries on the telephone had produced merely “She's comfortable” reports, which could mean anything from near death to doped to the eyeballs and, predictably, my arrival at the nurses' desk gained me no access to their patient.

  “Sorry, no visitors.”

  Nothing would budge them. Positively no visitors, except for her son. I could probably speak to him, if I liked.

  “Is he here?” I asked, wondering why I should be surprised. Nothing, after all, would unstick Paul from a full-blown crisis.

  One of the nurses obligingly went to tell him of my presence, coming back with him in tow.

  “Mother is not well enough to see you,” he announced proprietorially. “Also, she is sleeping.”

  We eyed each other in mutual dislike.

  “How is she?” I asked. “What do the doctors say?”

  “She is in intensive care.” His bulletin voice sounded over-pompous, even for him.

  I waited. In the end he amplified, “Unless there are complications, she will recover.”

  Great, I thought. “Has she said who attacked her?”

  “She is not yet lucid.”

  I waited again, but this time without results. After he began to show signs of simply walking off to end the exchange, I said, “Have you seen the state of her house?”

  He answered with a frown, “I went there this morning. The police took my fingerprints!” He sounded outraged.

  “They took mine also,” I said mildly. “Please return my books.”

  “Do what?”

  “Return Valentine's books and papers.”

  He stared with a mixture of indignation and hatred. “I didn't take Valentine's books. You did.”

  “I did not.”

  He glared righteously. “Mother locked the door and refused - refused - to give me the key. Her own son!”

  “The key was in the open door last night,” I said. “And the books had gone.”

  “Because you had taken them. I certainly did not.”

  I began to believe his protestations of innocence, unlikely as they were.

  But if he hadn't taken the things, who on earth had? The damage inside the house and the attack on Dorothea spoke of violence and speed. Moving a wall of books and cupboardfuls of papers out of the house spoke of thoroughness and time. And Robbie Gill had been sure the rampage had happened before the attack on Dorothea.

  None of it made any sense.

  “Why,” I asked, “were you so extremely anxious to get your hands on those books?”

  Somewhere in his brain warning bells sounded. I'd directed too many actors not to recognise the twitch of eye muscles that I'd so often prompted. Paul, I thought, had a motive beyond greed, but apart from seeing that it existed, I was not going to get any further.

  “It's best to keep family possessions in the family,” he pontificated, and fired a final shot before stalking off. “In view of my mother's condition, the cremation planned for tomorrow morning has been indefinitely postponed. And do not plague her or me by coming here again. She is old and frail and I will look after her.”

  I watched his large back-view bustle away, self-importance in every stride, the fronts of his suit jacket swinging out sideways in the motion.

  I called loudly after him, “Paul!”

  He stopped reluctantly and turned, standing foursquare in the hospital passage and not returning. “What is it now?”

  A forty-two-inch waist at least, I thought. A heavy leather belt held up his dark gr
ey trousers. Cream shirt, diagonally striped tie. The podgy chin tilted upwards aggressively.

  “What do you want?”

  “Nothing,' I said. 'Never mind.”

  He shrugged heavily with exasperation, and I went thoughtfully out to my car with my mind on telephones. I wore my mobile clipped to my belt, ready at all times. Paul, I'd noticed, carried a similar mobile, similarly clipped to his heavy belt.

  Yesterday evening, I remembered, I'd been glad for Dorothea's sake that Paul had answered from his Surrey home when I'd told him of the attack on his mother. Surrey was rock-solid alibi land.

  If I'd liked or even trusted Paul it wouldn't have occurred to me to check. As it was, I strove to remember the number I'd called, but could get no further than the first four digits and the last two, which wasn't going to connect me anywhere.

  I rang the operator and asked if the four first numbers were a regional exchange in Surrey.

  “No, sir,” a crisp female voice said. “Those numbers are used for mobile telephones.”

  Frozen, I asked if she could find me Paul Pannier's mobile number: he lived near Godalming; the last two digits were seven seven. Obligingly, after a short pause for searching, she told me the numbers I'd forgotten, and I wrote them down and made my call.

  Paul answered curtly, “Yes?”

  I said nothing.

  Paul said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  I didn't speak.

  “I can't hear you,” he said crossly, and switched off his instrument.

  So much for Surrey, I thought grimly. But even Paul - even Paul - couldn't have slashed open his mother.

  Sons had been known to murder their mothers...

  But not fat forty-five-year-old men with inflated self-esteem.

  Disturbed, I drove westwards to Oxfordshire and set about looking for Jackson Wells.

  With help again from directory enquiries I discovered his general location and, by asking at garages and from people out walking dogs, I arrived in the end at Batwillow Farm, south of Abingdon, south of Oxford, sleepy and peaceful in the late Sunday afternoon.