by Dick Francis
I bumped slowly down a rutted unmade lane which ended in an untidy space outside a creeper-grown house. Weeds flourished. A set of old tyres leaned against a rotting wooden shed. An unsteady-looking stack of fencing timber seemed to be weathering into disintegration. A crusty old grouch of a man leaned on a farm gate and stared at me with disfavour.
Climbing out of the car and feeling depressed already, I asked, “Mr Wells?”
He was deaf.
“Mr Wells,” I shouted.
“Can I talk to you?” I shouted.
Hopeless, I thought.
The old man hadn't heard. I tried again. He merely stared at me impassively, and then pointed at the house.
Unsure of what he intended, I nevertheless walked across to the obvious point of access and pressed a conspicuous doorbell.
There was no gentle ding-dong as with Dorothea: The clamour of the bell inside Batwillow Farm set one's teeth rattling. The door was soon opened by a fair young blonde girl with pony-tailed hair and to-die-for skin.
I said, “I'd like to talk to Mr Jackson Wells.”
“OK,” she nodded. “Hang on.” She retreated into a hallway and turned left out of my sight, prompting the appearance presently of a lean loose-limbed blond man looking less than fifty.
“You wanted me?” he enquired.
I looked back to where the old deaf grump still leaned on the gate.
“My father,” the blond man said, following my gaze.
“Mr Jackson Wells?”
“That's me,” he said.
He grinned at my relief with an easy-going light-heartedness a hundred miles from my expectations. He waited, untroubled, for me to introduce myself, and then said slowly, “Have I seen you somewhere before?”
“I don't think so.”
“On the television,” he said doubtfully.
“Oh. Well - were you watching the Lincoln at Doncaster yesterday?”
“Yes, I was, but ...” He wrinkled his forehead, not clearly remembering.
“My name,” I said, “is Thomas Lyon, and I was a friend of Valentine Clark.”
A cloud crossed Jackson Wells's sunny landscape.
“Poor old bugger died this week,” he said. My name finally registered. “Thomas Lyon. Not him that's making the film?”
“Him,” I agreed.
“I did see you on the telly yesterday, then, with Nash Rourke.”
He summed me up in a short silence, and rubbed the top of his nose indecisively on the back of his hand.
I said, “I don't want to do you any harm in the making of this film. I came to ask you if there is anything you particularly don't want said. Because sometimes,” I explained, “one can invent things - or think one invents them - that turn out to be damagingly true.”
He thought it over and finally said, “You'd better come in, I reckon.”
“Thank you.”
He led me into a small room near the door; a room unlived in and furnished only with an upright piano, a piano stool, a hard wooden chair and a closed cupboard. He himself sat on the piano stool and waved me to the chair.
“Do you play?” I asked civilly, indicating the piano.
“My daughter does. Lucy, you met her.”
“Mm,” I nodded. I took a breath; said, “Actually, I came to ask you about Yvonne.”
'Yvonne. Your wife.'
“Sonia,” he said heavily. “Her name was Sonia.”
“It was Yvonne in Howard Tyler's book.”
'Aye,' he agreed. 'Yvonne. I read it. The book.'
He seemed to feel no anger or grief, so I asked, “What did you think of it?”
Unexpectedly, he laughed. “Load of rubbish. Dream
lovers! And that upper-class wimp in the book, that was supposed to be me! Cobblers.”
“You're going to be far from a wimp in the film.”
“Is it true, then? Nash Rourke is me?”
“He's the man whose wife is found hanged, yes.”
“You know what?” The sunniness shone in his manner and the smile in his eyes surely couldn't be faked. “It's all so bloody long ago. I don't give a piss what you say in the film. I can hardly remember Sonia, and that's a fact. It was a different life. I left it behind. Did a bunk, if you like. I got fed up with the whole bloody shooting match. See, I was twenty-two when I married Sonia and not yet twenty-five when she died, and I was only a kid really. A kid playing at being a big Newmarket racehorse trainer. After that business, people started taking their horses away, so I packed it in and came here instead, and this life's OK, mate, no regrets.”
As he seemed to discuss it quite easily I asked, “Why ... er... why did your wife die?”
“Call her Sonia. I don't think of her as my wife. My wife's here in this house. Lucy's mother. We've been wed twenty-three years now and we'll stay that way.”
There was an obvious self-contentment in his whole personality. He had the weathered complexion and thread-veined cheeks of an outdoors man, his eyebrows dramatically blond against the tanned skin. Blue eyes held no guile. His teeth looked naturally good, even and white. No tension showed in his long limbs or sturdy neck. I thought him no great brain, but one of nature's lucky accidents, a person who could be happy with little.
“Do you mind me asking about her?” I said.
“Sonia? Not really. I can't tell you why she died, though, because I don't know.”
That was, I thought, the first lie he'd told me.
“The police had me in,” he smiled. “Helping with their enquiries, they told the press. So of course everyone thought I'd done it. Questions! Days of them. I just said I didn't know why she died. I said it over and over. They did go on a bit. They thought they'd get me to confess, see?” He laughed. “Seems they do sometimes get fools to confess to things they haven't done. I can't see how that happens, can you? If you haven't done something, you just keep on saying it. In England, leastwise. No actual thumbscrews, see? They ban actual thumbscrews here, see?” He laughed again at his joke. “I told them to piss off and find out who really killed her, but they never managed that. They couldn't see farther than getting me to confess. I mean, it was daft. Would you confess to murdering someone if you hadn't?”
“I don't think so.”
“Course you wouldn't. Hour after hour of it! I stopped listening. I wouldn't let them work me up into a state. I just sat there like a lump and told them to piss off at regular intervals.”
“They must have loved it,” I said dryly.
“You're taking the mickey!”
“Indeed, I'm not,” I assured him. “I think you were great.”
“I was young,” he said cheerfully. “They kept waking me up in the night. Silly sods didn't realise I was often up half the night with sick horses. Colic. Stuff like that. I just nodded off when they frothed on about Sonia. It narked them no end.”
“Mm,” I agreed, and asked tentatively, “Did you see ... Sonia ... I mean ... er...”
“Did I see her hanging? No, I didn't. I saw her in the morgue, hours after they took her down. They'd made her look peaceful by then.”
“So it wasn't you who found her?”
“No. Reckon I was lucky, there. One of my stable lads found her while I was driving north to York races. The police drove me back and they'd already decided I'd killed her. She'd been in a box we weren't using at that point. The lad that found her brought his food up for a week after, poor sod.”
“Did you think she'd hanged herself?”
“It wasn't like her.” He showed a very long-lived old doubt. “There was a stack of hay bales there she could have jumped off of.” He shook his head. “No one ever did know the truth of it and, tell you no lie, it's better that way. I read in that Drumbeat rag that you're trying to find out. Well, I'd just as soon you didn't, to be honest. I don't want my wife and Lucy stirred up. Not fair to them, it isn't. You just get on and make up what story you like for your film. As long as you don't make out I killed her, it'll be all right with me.”
“In the film you do not kill her,” I said.
“That's fine, then.”
“But I have to say why she died.”
He said without heat, “I told you, I don't know why she died.”
“Yes, I know you did, but you must have thought about it.”
He gave me an unadulteratedly carefree smile and no information, and I had a clear picture of what the interrogating police had faced all those years ago: a happy unbroachable brick wall.
“In Howard Tyler's book,” I said, “Yvonne daydreams about jockey lovers. Where ... I mean ... have you any idea where he got that idea?”
Internally this time, Jackson Wells laughed. “Howard Tyler didn't ask me about that.”
“No,” I agreed. “He told me he hadn't tried to see you at all.”
“No, he didn't. First I knew of it, people were saying that that book, Unstable Times, was about me and Sonia.”
“And did she ... well... daydream?”
Again the secret, intense amusement. “I don't know,” he said. “She might have done. That whole marriage, it was a sort of make-believe. We were kids playing at grown-ups. That writer, he got us dead wrong. I'm not complaining, mind.”
“But the dream lovers are so striking,” I persisted. “Where did he get the idea?”
Jackson Wells thought it over without any apparent anxiety.
“I reckon,” he told me at length, “you should ask that stuck-up sister of hers.”
“Sister ... do you mean Rupert Visborough's widow?”
He nodded. “Audrey. Sonia's sister. Audrey was married to a member of the Jockey Club and never let me forget it. Audrey told Sonia not to waste herself on me. I wasn't good enough for her, see?” He grinned, not caring. “When I read that book I heard Audrey's prissy voice all through it.”
Stunned by the simple depth of that perception I sat in silence wondering what to ask him next; wondering whether I should or could ask why the hanging death of an obscure young sister-in-law had so thoroughly and permanently blighted Rupert Visborough's chances of political life.
How unacceptable in Westminster, in fact, were mysteriously dead relations? Disreputable family misfortunes might prove an embarrassment, but if the sins of sons and daughters could be forgiven, surely the more distant unsolved death should have been but a hiccup.
Before I'd found the words, the door opened to reveal Lucy, sunny like her father.
“Mum wants to know if you want anything, like for instance drinks.”
I took it as the dismissal Mum had intended, and stood up.
Jackson Wells introduced me to his daughter with “Lucy, this is Thomas Lyon, the personification-of-evil film-maker, according to yesterday's Drumbeat.”
Her eyes widened and, with her father's quiet mischief, she said, “I saw you on the telly with no horns or tails in sight! How cool to be making a film with Nash Rourke.”
I said, “Do you want to be in it?”
“What do you mean?”
I explained that we were recruiting the local inhabitants of Huntingdon to be “crowd” at our version of a race meeting held on the course.
“We need people to ooh and aah ...”
“And scream "shift your arse"?” she grinned.
Her father's instinct was to say no. As he shook his head I said, “No one needs to know who you are. Give your name as Batwillow ... and, incidentally, what is a batwillow?”
“A tree you make cricket bats from,” Lucy said, as if my question revealed my stupidity.
“You're kidding me?”
“Certainly not,” her father said. “Where do you think cricket bats come from? They grow on trees.”
They watched my face. “We grow the willows in wetlands near the brook,” he said. “This farm has grown batwillows for generations.”
Growing cricket bats, it seemed to me, entirely fitted his nature: wide shoulders hitting carefree sixes over the boundary with fast balls solidly blocked to prevent the breaking of the wicket.
Lucy's mother appeared with curiosity in the doorway, a friendly woman in fawn trousers and an enormous brown sweater over a cream polo-neck. Unconscious style, I thought, just like her daughter.
Jackson Wells explained my presence. His wife enjoyed the tale.
“Of course, we'll all come,” she said decisively, “if you promise we'll see Nash Rourke!”
“How corny can you get?” Lucy demanded of her.
I said, “Tomorrow at two o'clock we hold crowd rehearsals. Nash might be there, can't promise. On Tuesday and Wednesday we shoot the crowd scenes. We offer breakfast, lunch and expenses to everyone who turns up, and Nash Rourke will definitely be there.”
“It's near a two-hour drive from here to Huntingdon racecourse,” Jackson Wells protested.
“You're outvoted, Dad,” Lucy told him. “What time Tuesday? Would it be OK if we miss tomorrow's rehearsal?”
I gave them one of my cards, writing on the back “Priority entry. Batwillow family.” “Nine in the morning, on Tuesday,” I said. “Follow the crowd, who'll know what to do. When we break for lunch, use this card, and find me.”
“Wow,” Lucy said.
She had freckles on her nose. Quizzical blue eyes. I wondered how mature she was on the piano.
I said to her father, “Do you know why anyone would do violence to get this film abandoned?”
He answered blandly, “Like I heard on the radio? Someone tried to take a knife to your star? Total madman. To my knowledge, no one's afraid of your film.”
I thought that that was probably the second lie he'd told me, or at least the second I'd noticed.
Lucy said, “Can Dad's brother come as well?”
Her father made a dismissive gesture and said, “He wouldn't want to.”
“Yes, he would.” To me she said, “My Uncle Ridley lives in Newmarket. He goes to the cinema all the time, and he'd rave to be in a film with Nash Rourke.”
“Then bring him in with you,” I agreed. “We need the largest crowd we can get.” Her parents, I saw, didn't share her enthusiasm for her Uncle Ridley.
“Is he free,” I asked, fishing, “to spend a day at Huntingdon on Tuesday or Wednesday?”
Lucy guilelessly answered, “Uncle Ridley bums around, Dad says.”
Her father shook his head at her shortage of worldliness and amplified, “My brother Ridley breaks in horses and acts as a general nagsman. He's not exactly high-powered, but he makes a living.”
I smiled, half interested. “I'll be glad to meet him.” I paused, and returned to what more closely concerned me. “Could you lend me a photo of ... er ... Sonia? Just so we don't make Yvonne too like her in the film.”
“Haven't got one,” Jackson Wells said promptly.
“Not even ... Excuse me,” I said to Mrs Wells apologetically, “... not even a wedding photo?”
“No,” Jackson Wells said. “They got lost when I moved here.” His eyes were wide with innocence, and for the third time I didn't believe him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Driving towards Newmarket and working out times, I thought I might squeeze in an empty half-hour before my ten o'clock meeting, and accordingly telephoned Dr Robbie Gill, whose number I did remember clearly from Dorothea's heavy black help-summoning handwriting.
“Do you feel,” I asked, “like a quick jar somewhere?”
I'd worked it out. “I'm in my car. I'll hit Newmarket around nine-thirty. Any good? I have to be at Bedford Lodge at ten.”
“Is it important?”
“Interesting,” I said. “About Dorothea's attacker.”
“I'll square it with my wife.” His voice smiled, as if that were no problem. “I'll come to Bedford Lodge at nine-thirty and wait in the lounge.”
“I heard someone attacked Nash Rourke with a knife.”
“As good as. It was his stand-in, though. And no harm done.”
“So I gathered. Nine-thirty, then.”
He clicked off, his Scottish voice as
brusque as ever: and red-headed and terrier-like, he was patiently waiting in the entrance lounge when I got back to Bedford Lodge.
“Come upstairs,” I said, shaking his hand. “What do you drink?”
“Diet coke.”
I got room service to bring up his fizzy tipple and for myself poured cognac from a resident bottle. This film, I thought fleetingly, was driving me towards forty per cent proof.
“Well,” I said, waving him to an armchair in the neat sitting-room, “I went to see Dorothea in Cambridge this afternoon and found my way barred by our friend Paul.”
Robbie Gill grimaced. “She's basically my patient, and he's barring my way too, as far as possible.”
“What can I do to preserve her from being shanghaied by him as soon as she's capable of being transported by ambulance? She told him, and me, that she didn't want to move into this retirement home he's arranging for her, but he pays no attention.”
“He's a pest.”
“Can't you slap a "don't move this patient" notice on Dorothea?”
He considered it doubtfully. “No one would move her at present. But a few days from now...”
“Any which way,” I said.
“How much do you care?”
“A good deal.”
“I mean ... moneywise.”
I looked at him over my brandy glass. “Are you saying that an application of funds might do the trick?”
He replied forthrightly, as was his Scottish nature. “I'm saying that as her doctor I could, with her permission, shift her into a private nursing home of my choice if I could guarantee the bills would be paid.”
“Would it break me?”
He mentioned an alarming sum and waited without censure for me to find it too much.
“You have no obligation,” he remarked.
“I'm not poor, either,” I said. “Don't tell her who's paying.”
He nodded. “I'll say it's free on the National Health. She'll accept that.”
“Go ahead, then.”
He downed his diet coke. “Is that the lot?”
“No,” I said. “If I draw something for you, tell me what you think.” I took a large sheet of writing paper, laid it on the coffee table, and drew a picture of the knife I'd found on the Heath. A wickedly knobbed hand grip on eight sharp inches of steel.
