Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  He had demanded in advance to have an accounting for every cent disbursed or committed since the first day of principal photography, with the result that O'Hara's production department had spent the whole day itemising such things as food, transport, pay for stable-lads, lipsticks and light bulbs.

  We sat round the dining table in O'Hara's suite, I having made a detour to my own rooms to exchange my windproof jacket for a shirt and sweater. Robbie had stuck only a light dressing over the mended damage. I still felt a shade trembly, but apparently nothing showed. I concentrated on justifying Ziggy's fare and expenses in Norway, while sipping mineral water and longing for brandy.

  “Wild horses!” the mogul exclaimed in near-outrage to O'Hara. “You surely didn't sanction bringing horses all the way from Norway! They're not in the script.”

  “They're in the hanged woman's fantasy,” O'Hara explained flatly. “Her dream life is what the company thought best about the plot, and what you expect on the screen. Viking horses hold glamour for publicity, and will earn more than they cost.”

  O'Hara's clout silenced the mogul, who scowled but seemed to realise that if he antagonised his high-grade producer beyond bearing, he would lose him and scupper the whole investment. In any event, he moderated his aggressive approach and nodded through the bonus for the winning jockey with barely a grimace.

  The accounts audited, he wanted to discuss Howard.

  I didn't.

  O'Hara didn't.

  Howard proving to be usefully out of the hotel, the subject died. I excused myself on the grounds of the regular evening meeting with Moncrieff, and the mogul said in parting that he trusted we would have no further 'incidents', and announced that he would be watching the action the next morning.

  “Sure,” O'Hara agreed easily, hardly blinking. “The schedule calls for dialogue and close-ups, and several establishing shots of people walking in and out of the weighing-room at Huntingdon racecourse. No crowd scenes, though, they're in the can. No jockeys, they've finished also. The horses will be shipped back here tomorrow afternoon. Thanks to fine weather and Thomas's good management, we'll be through with the racetrack scenes a day early.”

  The mogul looked as if he'd bitten a wasp. I wondered, as I left, just what would make him happy.

  The Moncrieff session swelled with the arrival of both Nash and Silva, each wanting to continue with the private rehearsals. Nash had brought his script. Silva wore no lipstick and a feminist expression. I wondered what she and O'Hara were like together in bed, a speculation that didn't advance my work any, but couldn't be helped.

  We went through the scenes. Moncrieff and Nash discussed lighting. Silva thrust forward her divine jaw and to her pleasure Moncrieff assessed her facial bones in terms of planes and shadows.

  I drank brandy and painkillers with dedication: possibly medicinally a bad combination, but a great distancer from tribulation. When everyone left I went to bed half-sitting up, and stayed awake through a lot of o'clocks, throbbing and thinking and deciding that in the near future I would stand with my back to a wall at all times.

  O'Hara woke me from a troubled sleep by phoning at seven-thirty. Late.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  'It's raining.'

  “Is it?” I yawned. “That's good.”

  “Moncrieff phoned the weather people. It should be dry this afternoon. So we could watch all the Huntingdon rushes this morning, when the van comes from London.”

  “Yes ... I thought the mogul couldn't be bothered.”

  'He's going to London himself. He's not keen on waiting for Huntingdon this afternoon. He told me everything seems to be going all right with the movie now, and he'll report back to that effect.'

  O'Hara chuckled. “He thought you were businesslike. That's his highest word of praise. He says I can go back to LA.”

  “Oh.” I was surprised by the strength of my dismay. “And are you going?” “It's your movie,” he said.

  I said, “Stay.”

  After a pause he said, “If I go, it shows you're totally in command.” Another pause. “Think it over. We'll decide after the dailies. See you at eleven o'clock in the screening room. Will you be fit enough?”

  “I sure as hell wouldn't be,” he said, and disconnected.

  By nine I'd decided against the great British breakfast and had located Wrigley's garage on a town road map: by nine-fifteen my driver had found it in reality. There was a canopy over the petrol pumps: shelter from rain.

  Bill Robinson had long hair, a couple of pimples, a strong East Anglian accent, a short black leather jacket covered in gold studs and a belt of heavy tools strung round his small hips. He took in the fact that I had a chauffeur and offered opportunist respect.

  “Wha' can I do for yer?” he enquired, chewing gum.

  I grinned. “Mrs Dorothea Pannier thinks you're a great guy.”

  “Yeah?” He moved his head in pleasure, nodding. “Not such a bad old duck herself.”

  “Did you know she's in hospital?”

  His good humour vanished. “I heard some bastard carved her up.”

  “I'm Thomas Lyon,” I said. “She gave me your name.”

  “Yeah?” He was wary. “You're not from that son of hers? Right turd, that son of hers.”

  I shook my head. “Her brother Valentine left me his books in his will. She told me she'd trusted them to you for safekeeping.”

  “Don't give them to no one, that's what she said.” His manner was determined and straightforward. I judged it would be a bad mistake to offer him money, which conferred on him saintly status in the modern scheme of things.

  “How about,” I said, “if we could get her on the phone?”

  He could see nothing wrong in that, so I used the mobile to reach the hospital and then, with many clicks and delays, Dorothea herself.

  She talked to Bill Robinson in his heavy leather gear and studs, and Bill Robinson's face shone with goodness and pleasure. Hope for the old world yet.

  “She says,” he announced, giving me my phone back, “that the sun shines out of your arse and the books are yours.”

  “But they aren't here,” he said. “They're in the garage at home.”

  “When could I pick them up?”

  “I could go home midday in my lunch hour.” He gazed briefly to one side at a gleaming monster of a motorbike, heavily wheel-chained to confound would-be thieves. “I don't usually, but I could.”

  I suggested buying an hour of his time at once from his boss and not waiting for lunch.

  “Cor,” he said, awestruck; but his boss, a realist, accepted the suggestion, and the money, with alacrity, and Bill Robinson rode to his house in my car with undoubted enjoyment.

  “How do you know Dorothea?” I asked on the way.

  “My girlfriend lives next door to her,” he explained simply. “We do errands sometimes for the old luv. Carry her shopping, and such. She gives us sweets like we were kids.”

  “Er,” I said, “how old are you, then?”

  “Eighteen. What did you think of my bike?”

  “I envy you.”

  His smile was complacent, and none the worse for that. When we reached his home (“Ma will be out at work, the key's in this thing what looks like a stone”), he unlocked a padlock on the solid doors of a brick-built garage and revealed his true vocation, the care and construction of bikes.

  “I buy wrecks and rebuild them,” he explained, as I stood inside the garage gazing at wheels, handlebars, twisted tubing, shining fragments. “I rebuild them as good as new and then I sell them.”

  “Brilliant,” I said absently. “Do you want to be in a film?”

  “Do I what?”

  I explained that I was always looking for interesting backgrounds. Would he mind moving some of the parts of motorbikes out of the garage into his short driveway and getting on with some work while we filmed Nash Rourke walking down the street, thinking? “No dialogue,” I said, “just Nash strolling by and pausing for a
second or two to watch the work in progress. The character he's playing will be walking through Newmarket, trying to make up his mind about something.” I was looking for real Newmarket backgrounds, I said.

  “Nash Rourke! You're kidding me.”

  “No. You'll meet him.”

  “Mrs Pannier did say you were the one making the film they're talking about. It was in the Drumbeat.”

  “The tyrannical bully-boy? Yes, that's me.”

  He smiled broadly. “Your books are in all those boxes.” He pointed to a large random row of cartons that announced their original contents as TV sets, electrical office equipment, microwave ovens and bread-making machines. “A ton of paper, I shouldn't wonder. It took me the whole of Saturday morning to pack it all and shift it here, but Mrs Pannier, dear old duck, she made it worth my while.”

  It was approbation rather than a hint, but I said I would do the same, particularly if he could tell me which box held what.

  Not a snowball's chance, he said cheerfully. Why didn't I look?

  The task was too much, both for the available time and my own depleted stamina. I said I'd wrenched my shoulder and couldn't lift the boxes, and asked him to stow as many as possible in the boot of the car. He looked resignedly at the rain but splashed backwards and forwards efficiently, joined after hesitation by my driver who buttoned his jacket closely and turned up his collar.

  The car, including the front passenger seat, absorbed half of the boxes. I asked what he'd used to transport them on Saturday.

  “My dad's little old pick-up,” he said. “It needed three journeys. He takes it to work weekdays, so I can't borrow it till this evening.”

  He agreed to load and deliver the rest of the boxes in the pick-up, and in cheerful spirits came along to the hotel and helped the porter there stack the cartons in the lobby.

  “Do you mean it about me being in your film?” he asked on the way back to Wrigley's garage. “And ... when?”

  “Tomorrow, maybe,” I said. “I’ll send a message. I'll fix it with your boss, and the film company will pay you a fee for your help.”

  “Cor,” he said.

  Nash, Silva and Moncrieff all joined O'Hara and me to watch the Huntingdon rushes.

  Even without much sound the crowd scenes looked like an everyday race meeting and the race itself was still remarkable for the Victoria Cross riding of the jockeys. The race had been filmed successfully by five cameras and semi-successfully by another. There was easily enough to cut together a contest to stir the pulses of people who'd never seen jump-racing at close quarters: even Silva gasped at one sequence, and Nash looked thoughtful. Moncrieff fussed about shadows in the wrong places, which no one else had noticed.

  The close shots with dialogue showed Silva at her most enticing. I praised her interpretation, not her looks, and got a brief nod of acknowledgement. The two days' work, all in all, had been worth the effort.

  After the end of the rushes the film developers had joined on the thirty seconds' worth Moncrieff had shot of Lucy's photo. Large and in sharp focus, the two faces appeared on the screen.

  “Who are they?” O'Hara asked, perplexed.

  “The girl on the left,” I said, “is Yvonne. Or rather, she was Sonia Wells, the girl who hanged. The real one.”

  “Christ,” O'Hara said.

  “And who's the man?” Nash asked.

  “His name is Pig, I think.” I explained about Lucy's photo. “I promised her that Yvonne wouldn't look like Sonia.”

  The girl on the screen had curly light-brown hair, not a green crewcut or other weirdness. We would give Yvonne a long straight blonde wig and hope for the best.

  The screen ran clear. We switched on the lights, talked about what we'd seen and, as always, went back to work.

  Later at Huntingdon a photographer, who'd been engaged by the company to chart progress for the publicity department, brought a set of eight- by ten-inch prints for O'Hara to see. He and I took them into the weighing-room and sat at a table there, minutely searching the snapshots with a magnifying glass.

  We saw nothing of any help. There were photos of Nash signing in the end-of-the-day autograph session. A shot of Howard looking smug, inscribing his own book. Silva being film-star charming. Greg signing race-cards. A shot of O'Hara and myself standing together. The lens had been focused every time on the main subject's face: people around were present, but not warts and all.

  “We need blow-ups of the crowd,” O'Hara said.

  “We're not going to get nice clear views of the Fury.”

  Morosely, he agreed, but ordered blow-ups anyway.

  No more knives appeared, in or out of bodies. We filmed the remaining scenes and shipped out the horses. We made sure the whole place was shipshape, thanked Huntingdon racecourse management for their kindnesses, and were back in Newmarket soon after six o'clock.

  The message light inexorably flashed in my sitting-room: whenever did it not?

  Robbie Gill wanted me to phone him, urgently.

  I got his answer service: he would be available at seven.

  To fill in the time I opened the tops of a few of the cartons of Valentine's books, which now took up a good deal of the floorspace, as I'd particularly asked for them not to be put one on top of another. I'd forgotten, of course, that bending down used chest muscles also. On my knees, therefore, I began to inspect my inheritance.

  There was too much of it. After the first three boxes had proved to hold part of the collection of biographies and racing histories, after I'd painstakingly taken out every volume, shaken it for insertions and replaced it, I saw the need for secretarial help; for a record keeper with a lap-top computer.

  Lucy, I thought. If I had a fantasy, I would materialise her in my sitting-room, like Yvonne's dream lovers. Lucy knew how to work a computer.

  Impulsively I phoned her father's house and put a proposition to his daughter.

  “You told me you'd left school and are waiting to do a business course. Would you care for a two-week temporary job in Newmarket?” I explained what I needed. “I am not trying to seduce you,” I said. “You can bring a chaperon, you can stay anywhere you like, you can drive home every day to Oxfordshire if you prefer. I'll pay you fairly. If you don't want to do it, I'll get someone local.”

  She said a shade breathlessly, “Would I see Nash Rourke again?”

  Wryly, I promised that she would. “Every day.”

  “He's ... he's ...”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “and he's married.”

  “It's not that,” she said disgustedly. “He's just ... nice.”

  “True. What about the job?”

  “I could start tomorrow.”

  The boxes could wait that long, I thought.

  At seven I phoned Robbie Gill's number again and reached him promptly.

  “Which do you want first,” he asked, “the good news or the appalling?”

  “The good. I'm tired.”

  “You don't surprise me. The good news is a list of names of knife experts. Three in London, two in Glasgow, four in Sheffield and one in Cambridge.” He read them all out and took away what little breath I could manage with a broken rib.

  I said weakly, “Say that Cambridge one again.”

  He repeated it distinctly. “Professor Meredith Deny, lecturer in mediaeval history, late of Trinity College, retired.”

  “Do you want the appalling?” Robbie asked.

  “I suppose I have to hear it?”

  “Afraid so. Paul Pannier has been murdered.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Murdered?”

  “Fraid so.”

  “Where? And ... er ... how?”

  As if it were inevitable, the Scots voice informed me, “He was killed in Dorothea's house ... with a knife.”

  I sighed; a groan. “Does Dorothea know?”

  “The police sent a policewoman to the hospital.”

  “Poor, poor Dorothea.”

  He said bluntly, “She won't be bullied an
y more.”

  “But she loved him,” I protested. “She loved the baby he'd been. She loved her little son. She will be devastated.”

  “Go and see her,” Robbie said. “You seem to understand her. I never could see why she put up with him.”

  She needed a hug, I thought. She needed someone to hold her while she wept. I said, “What about Paul's wife, Janet?”

  “The police have told her. She's on her way here now, I think.”

  I looked at my watch. Five past seven. I was sore and hungry and had tomorrow's shots to discuss with Nash and Moncrieff. Still...

  “Robbie,” I said, “does Professor Derry have an address?”

  “There's a phone number.” He read it out. “What about Dorothea?”

  “I’ll go to see her now. I could be at the hospital in about forty minutes. Can you fix it that they'll let me see her?”

  He could and would. Who had discovered Paul's murder, I asked.

  “I did, damn it. At about three o'clock this afternoon I went to pick up a notebook that I left in Dorothea's kitchen last night. I called to get the key again from her friend Betty, but she said she didn't have the key any more, she'd given it to Paul this morning early. I went across to Dorothea's house and rang the bell - that ruddy quiet ding-dong - and no one came, so I went round the back and tried the kitchen door, and it was open.” He paused. “Paul was lying in the hall on almost the exact spot where Betty found Dorothea. There wasn't any blood, though. He'd died at once and he'd been dead for hours. He was killed with what looked like one of Dorothea's big kitchen knives. It was still in him, driven deep into his chest from behind at a point not far above his right elbow”

  I said, stunned.

  “Yes. Almost the same place as you. The handle was sticking out. An ordinary chef's knife handle, nothing fancy. No Fury. So I phoned the police and they kept me hanging about in that house all afternoon, but I couldn't tell them why Paul had gone there. How could I know? I couldn't tell them anything except that it looked to me as if the knife had reached his heart and stopped it.”