Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  He looked at the drawing in motionless silence.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “A knuckle-duster,” he said, “that grew into a knife.”

  “And Dorothea's injuries?” I suggested. He stared at me. I said, “Not two assailants. Not two weapons. This one, that's both a blunt instrument and a blade.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Who would own such a thing?” I asked him. He shook his head mutely.

  “Do you know anyone called Derry?”

  He looked completely perplexed.

  I said, “Valentine once mentioned leaving a knife with someone called Derry.”

  Robbie Gill frowned, thinking. “I don't know any Derry.”

  I sighed. Too many people knew nothing.

  He said abruptly, “How old are you?”

  “Thirty. And you?”

  “Thirty-six.” He smiled wryly. “Too old to conquer the world.”

  “So am I.”

  “Steven Spielberg,” I said, “was twenty-seven when he made Jaws. I'm not him. Nor Visconti, nor Fellini, nor Lucas. Just a jobbing storyteller.”

  “And Alexander the Great died at thirty-three.”

  “Of diet coke?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Is it true that in America, if you die of old age, it's your fault?”

  I nodded gravely. “You should have jogged more. Or not smoked, or checked your cholesterol, or abstained from the juice.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you exist miserably for years with tubes.”

  He laughed and rose to go. “I'm embarrassed,” he said, “but my wife wants Nash Rourke's autograph.”

  “Done,” I promised. “How soon can you realistically move Dorothea?”

  He thought it over. “She was attacked yesterday evening. She's been sleepy from anaesthetic all day today. It was a bad wound ... they had to remove part of the intestine before repairing the abdomen wall. If all goes well she'll be fully awake tomorrow and briefly on her feet the day after, but I'd say it will be another week before she could travel.”

  “I'd like to see her,” I said. “The wretched Paul must sleep sometimes.”

  “I'll fix it. Phone me tomorrow evening.”

  Moncrieff, Ziggy Keene and I set off at four-thirty the next morning, heading north and east to the Norfolk coast.

  Ed, instructed by O'Hara, had found me a driver, a silent young man who took my car along smoothly and followed the instructions I gave him as I map-read beside him in the front passenger seat.

  Moncrieff and Ziggy slept in the back. Into the boot we'd packed the heavy camera Moncrieff could carry on his shoulders like a toy, also a cold-box full of raw film and a hot-box full of coffee and breakfast. The outside air was cold; the warm car soporific. I was glad, after a while, of the driver.

  We cleared Norwich and headed across the flat lands towards the North Sea, skirting the Broads and sliding eventually through the still-sleeping village of Happisburgh and slowing down a narrow lane that ended in sand dunes.

  Moncrieff and Ziggy climbed stiffly out of the car and shivered. It was still completely dark outside the range of the car's lights, and the coastal breeze was as unrelenting as ever.

  'You said to bring warm clothes,' Moncrieff com­plained, zipping himself into a fur-lined parka. 'You said nothing about playing Inuits.' He pulled the fur-lined hood over his head and thrust his hands into Arctic-issue gauntlets.

  Leaving the driver with his own separate breakfast in the car, the three of us walked onwards through the sand dunes towards the open shore, Moncrieff carrying the camera and the film box, I leading with the hot-box and Ziggy between us toting polystyrene rectangles for sitting insulation on cold salt-laden ground.

  “How did you find this godforsaken place?” Moncrieff grumbled.

  “I used to come here as a boy.”

  “Suppose it had sprouted casinos?”

  “I checked.”

  Beyond the range of the car's lights we paused to establish night vision, then went on slowly until the sand dunes fell away, the breeze freshened, and the sound of the restless waves spoke of timeless desolation.

  “OK,” I said, “if there's any shelter, sit in it.”

  Moncrieff groaned, took a pallet from Ziggy and folded himself with oaths into a shallow hollow on the sea side of the last dune. Ziggy, tougher and taciturn, found a similar place near him.

  Ziggy, Ukrainian by birth, had from the nursery proved so spectacularly acrobatic on horses that he had been sent to the Moscow Circus school at the age of eight, and there, far from his rural roots, had received a first-class education along with endless practice in his special skill. Every pupil in the school, boys and girls alike, received daily ballet lessons to teach graceful movement in the circus ring. Ziggy could in consequence have joined any ballet company anywhere, but nothing interested him except horses.

  Ziggy at twenty-two had left the circus behind: circuses everywhere had left town. Never political, though a favoured son, he had somehow travelled with his trade to America, and it was there that I'd seen him first, turning somersaults on a cantering horse one afternoon in an ill-attended practice for the Ringling Brothers in Madison Square Garden.

  I'd offered him a job in my rodeo film and, despite union protests, I'd secured him. I'd shortened his unpronounceable surname to Keene, and he'd quickly earned such a brilliant reputation in the horse stunt business that nowadays I had to beg him for his time.

  Slender, light and wiry, he took the Norfolk chill in his stride. Child's play, I supposed, after the Russian steppes. Alternately morose and laughing, he was intensely Ukrainian in temperament, and often told me he would return soon to his roots, a threat receding as years passed. His roots, as perhaps he acknowledged, were no longer there.

  At a fairly brief meeting the evening before, I'd outlined what we were looking for.

  “Film the sunrise!” Moncrieff exclaimed lugubriously, “We don't have to drive seventy miles for that! What's wrong with the Heath outside the door?”

  “You'll see.”

  “And the weather forecast?”

  “Cold, windy and clear.”

  His objections, I knew, were not from the heart. Every lighting cameraman knew that directors could be both unreasonable and unmovable when it came to specific locations. If I'd demanded the slopes of K2, he would have sworn and strapped on his crampons.

  I said, “As it's the time of the vernal equinox, the sun will rise due east. And that” - I consulted the small compass I'd brought - “is straight over there.” I pointed. “At the moment, looking directly out to sea, we are facing a bit further north. The coast runs from north-west to south-east, so when the sun rises, horses galloping along the sand from our left will be back-lit, but will also have the sun very slightly in their faces.”

  Moncrieff nodded.

  “Can you catch gleams of sun in their eyes?”

  “Heads, necks and manes in shot.”

  “Thomas,” Ziggy said, the bass notes in his voice always a surprise from the slightness of his body, “you ask for wild horses.”

  I'd asked him the previous evening to picture them and to suggest where we might find some. The trouble with sudden visions was that I'd had no idea of the scene while we were at the pre-production stage, and so had not arranged a wild herd in advance. Wild horses didn't grow on batwillows.

  Circus horses, Ziggy had said. Too fat and sleek, I'd objected. Moorland ponies no good, he'd said: too slow and stupid. Think, I'd urged him. Tell me in the morning.

  “Thomas,” Ziggy said, as always emphasising the second syllable of my name, “I think it must be Viking horses, from Norway.”

  I gazed at him. “Did you know that Viking ships once regularly raided this coast?”

  “Yes, Thomas.”

  Viking horses. Perfect. Where on earth could I get any? From Norway, of course. So easy.

  I asked him, “Have you ever worked with Norwegian horses?”

  “No
, Thomas. But I think they are not true wild. They are not ridden, but they are, I think, handled.”

  “Could you ride one without a saddle?”

  “Of course.” There wasn't a horse alive, his expression said, that wouldn't do what he asked.

  “You could ride one in a nightgown and a long blonde wig?”

  “Of course.”

  “Bare feet?”

  He nodded.

  “The woman is dreaming she is riding the wild horse. It must be romantic, not real.”

  “Thomas, she will float on the horse.”

  I believed him. He was simply the best. Even Moncrieff stopped grumbling about our mission.

  We ate our hot vacuum-packed bacon breakfast rolls and drank steaming coffee while the black sky slowly greyed and lightened and grew softly crimson far out at sea.

  With adjusted eyes we watched the world take shape. Around us and at our backs the irregularly heaped sand dunes were revealed as being patches of scrubby marram grass, fringes of long dried stalks leaning in the wind. Slightly below us the sand remained powdery, unwashed by the tide, but blowing back to add to the dunes; and below that, hard-packed sand stretched away to distant white-fringed waves.

  The tide, I reckoned, was as low as it ever went. Too low, really, for the best dramatic effect. One week ahead, the tide at dawn would be high, covering the sand. We needed, I thought, to arrange to film the horses on a mid-tide day: better, I supposed, during an ebb tide, as a flooding tide could race over these flat sands and maroon the cameras. Say ten days to the next mid-tide ebb at dawn. Too soon. Add two weeks to the next opportunity; twenty-four days. Perhaps.

  I told Ziggy the time frame. “We need the horses here on the beach twenty-four days from now. Or else fourteen days later; thirty-eight days. OK?”

  “I understand,” he agreed.

  “I'll send an agent to Norway to arrange the horses and the transport. Will you go with him, to make sure we get the sort of horses we need?”

  He nodded. “Best to have ten,” he said. “Or twelve.”

  “See what you can find.”

  Moncrieff stirred, abandoning breakfast in favour of art. Faint horizontal threads of clouds were growing a fiercer red against the still grey sky, and as he busied himself with camera speed and focus, the streaks intensified to scarlet and to orange and to gold, until the whole sky was a breath-gripping symphony of sizzling colour, the prelude to the earth's daily spin towards the empowerment of life.

  I had always loved sunrise: was always renewed in spirit. For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd slept through dawn. The primaeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plain had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why; and it had ever seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.

  The glittering ball rimmed over the horizon and hurt one's eyes. The brilliant streaks of cloud flattened to grey. The whole sun, somehow losing its magic, nevertheless lit a shimmering pathway across the ruffled surface of the sea, and Moncrieff went on filming, breathing deeply with satisfaction. Slowly on the wind, he and I became aware of a deep rhythmic humming that grew into a melody seeming age-old and sad: and as if of one mind we understood and laughed.

  Ziggy was singing.

  This was a dangerous coast as, flat as it looked, a few miles out to sea unrelenting sandbars paralleled the shore; underwater invisible hazards, shipwrecking the unwary. Graveyards in the coastal villages were heaped with memorials to sailors drowned before accurate depth charts were invented.

  Too much background music, I decided, would ruin the atmospheric quality of this historic shore. All we would need would be the wind, the waves, the clip of the horses' hooves, and perhaps Ziggy's own distant song, or maybe a haunting plaintive chant from Norway. This was to be a dream: did one ever hear whole orchestras in dreams?

  Fulfilled in all sorts of ways, the three of us were driven back to Newmarket where everyday reality returned to the hotel lobby in the unwelcome shape of our author, Howard Tyler.

  Howard was not repentant but incensed. The round glasses flashed as if with their own anger. The prissy little mouth puckered with injured feelings of injustice. Howard the great writer could produce temper tantrums like a toddler.

  Moncrieff, at the sight of him, evaporated into the woodwork. Ziggy, communing only with himself, loped off on foot towards the Heath and horses. Howard stood in my path, flushed with grievance.

  “O'Hara says the company will sue me for breach of contract!” he complained. “It's not fair.”

  I said reasonably, “But you did breach your contract.”

  “No, I didn't!”

  “Where did the Drumbeat get its opinions from?”

  Howard opened his baby lips and closed them again.

  “Your contract,” I reminded him, “forbids you to talk about the film to outsiders. I did warn you.”

  “But O'Hara can't sue me!”

  I sighed. “You signed with a major business corporation, not personally with O'Hara. The corporation has lawyers with flints for souls whose job it is to recover for the company any money they can squeeze from the most minor breaches of contract. They are not kind compassionate fellows who will pat you forgivingly on the back. They can imagine damages you never thought of. You opened your undisciplined mouth to some avidly listening ear, and whether you've done any real box-office damage or not, they're going to act as if you've cost the company millions, and they'll try to recover every penny they are contracted to pay you, and if you're really unlucky, more.”

  It seemed finally to get through to him that his gripe would prove expensive.

  “Then do something,” he insisted. “Tell them no harm was done.”

  “You as near as dammit cost me not just this job but any work in the future.”

  “All I said was ...” his voice died.

  “All you said was that I was a tyrannical buffoon wasting the film company's money.”

  “Well... I didn't mean it.”

  “That's almost worse.”

  “Yes ... but... you've mangled my book. And as an author I have moral rights.” The air of triumph accompanying these last words made my next statement sound perhaps more brutal than I would have let it if he'd shown the slightest regret.

  With vanishing patience I said, “Moral rights give an author the right to object to derogatory alterations being made to his work. Moral rights can be waived, and invariably this waiver is included in agreements between screenplay writers and film production companies. Often the screenplay writer is given the right to remove his name from the credits if he hates the film enough, but in your case, Howard, it's your name they're specifically paying for, and you waived that right also.”

  Stunned, he asked, “How do you know?”

  “I was given a sight of your contract. I had to know where we each stood.”

  he demanded. “When did you see it?”

  “Before I signed a contract myself.”

  “You mean ... weeks ago?”

  “Three months or more.”

  He began to look bewildered. “Then ... what can I do?”

  “Pray,” I said dryly. “But for a start, you can say who you talked to. You can say how you got in touch with the writer of "Hot from the Stars". Who did you reach?”

  “But I ...” He seemed not far from tears. “I didn't. I mean, I didn't tell the Drumbeat. I didn't.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Well, just a friend.”

  A friend? And the friend told the Drumbeat!”

  He said miserably, “I suppose so.”

  We had been standing all this time in the lobby with Monday morning coming and going around us. I waved him now towards the lounge area and found a pair of convenient armchairs.

  “I want some coffee,” he said, looking round for a waiter.

  “Have some later, I haven't got time. Who did you talk to?”

  “I don't think I should say.”

  I felt like shaking
him. “Howard, I'll throw you to the corporation wolves. And besides that, I'll sue you personally for defamation.”

  “She said questions weren't libellous.”

  “She, whoever she is, got it at least half wrong. I don't want to waste time and energy suing you, Howard, but if you don't cough up some answers pronto you'll get a writ in tomorrow's mail.” I took a breath. “So, who is she?”

  After a long pause in which I hoped he faced a few realities, he said, “Alison Visborough.”

  “Alison Vis -”

  “Yes, yes,” I interrupted. “I thought her name was Audrey.”

  “That's her mother.”

  I shook my head to clear it, feeling I'd left my senses back on Happisburgh beach.

  “Let's get this straight,” I said. “You poured out your grudges to Alison Visborough, whose mother is Audrey Visborough, who is the widow of the deceased Rupert Visborough, known in your book as Gibber. Right so far?”

  He nodded unhappily.

  “And,” I said, “when you read Rupert Visborough's obituary, and got the idea for your book, you did not go to see Jackson Wells, whose wife hanged, but you did go to see the dead woman's sister, Audrey Visborough.”

  “Well... I suppose so.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “And it was she who told you about her sister having dream lovers?”

  “Look,” he said, with a recurrence of petulance, “I don't have to answer all these questions.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “They wouldn't like it.”

  “Audrey and Alison wouldn't, do you mean?”

  He nodded. “And Roddy.”

  “Who's Roddy?”

  “Alison's brother.”

  Give me strength, I thought. I said, “Is this right? Rupert Visborough married Audrey; they had a daughter Alison and a son Roddy?”

  “I don't see why you make it sound so difficult.”

  “But you didn't put the children in your book.”

  “They're not children,” Howard objected. “They're as old as I am.”