by Dick Francis
I took off my sweater and shirt and he removed the dressing, raising his eyebrows at the revealed scenery but appearing not displeased.
“You're healing. Is it sore?”
“The broken rib is.”
“Only to be expected,” he added, and stuck on a new dressing. “Now,” he said, “what do you know about Delta-cast?”
“It's used instead of the old plaster of Paris for fractured arms and legs. It's rigid. It's a polymer, actually, and porous, so you won't itch. A knife won't go through it.”
“A bullet?”
“That's another matter.”
He worked for half an hour, during which time we discussed Dorothea and Paul, and came to no useful conclusions, though I explained how, via Bill Robinson, I was now surrounded by the army of boxes containing Valentine's books.
At the end of Robbie's work I was encased from chin to waist in a hard sleeveless jacket that I could take off and put on in two halves and fasten with strips of Velcro.
When I protested at its height round my neck he said merely, “Do you want your throat cut? Wear a polo-necked sweater. I brought you this thin white one, in case you hadn't got one.” He handed it over as if it were nothing.
“Thanks, Robbie,” I said, and he could hear I meant it.
He nodded briefly. “I'd better get back to my mob of coughers, or they'll lynch me.” He packed things away. “Do you think your hanged lady was lynched?”
“No, I don't think so.”
“Did you trawl any useful mud with Professor Deny?”
“The knife that bust my rib is called an Armadillo. The one with the finger holes, from the Heath, is a replica from World War One. The police had already asked the professor about it.”
“The professor's about eighty-five. He told me not to say wow.”
“He sounds a riot.”
“We got on fine, but he doesn't know who owns the Armadillo.”
“Take care,” he said, leaving. “I'm around if you need me.”
I ate what was left of my breakfast, dressed slowly, shaved and gradually got used to living like a turtle inside a carapace.
At about the time I was ready to leave again the people at the reception desk phoned up to tell me that a young woman was asking for me. She thought I was expecting her. A Miss Lucy Wells.
“Oh, yes.” I'd temporarily forgotten her. “Please send her up.”
Lucy had come in jeans, sweater, trainers and pony-tail, chiefly with the cool eighteen-year-old young lady in charge but with occasional tongue-tied lapses. She looked blankly at the multitude of boxes and wanted to know where to begin.
I gave her a lap-top computer, a notebook, a biro and a big black marker pen.
“Give each box a big number,” I said, writing 'I' with the marker pen on a microwave oven carton. “Empty it out. Write a list of the contents on the pad, enter the list on the little computer and then put everything back, topping each box with the list of contents. On another page, write me a general list, saying, for example, "Box I, books, biographies of owners and trainers." OK?”
“Shake out each book in case it has loose papers inside its pages, and don't throw anything away, not even pointless scraps.”
“All right.” She seemed puzzled, but I didn't amplify.
“Order lunch from room service,” I said. “Don't leave any papers or books lying around when the waiter comes. OK?”
“Yes, but why?”
“Just do the job, Lucy. Here's the room key for here.” I gave it to her. “If you leave this room, use the key to return. When I come back I'll bring Nash Rourke in for a drink.”
Her blue eyes widened. She wasn't a fool. She looked at the boxes and settled for the package I'd offered.
I went back to work, driver and bodyguard giving me a lot less confidence than Delta-cast. We spent all morning in the stable yard, with Nash patiently (both in and out of character) dealing with the actors playing at police.
The initial police doubts, called for in the script, took an age to get right. “I don't want these policemen to appear thick,” I pleaded, but it was the actors, I concluded, who were slow. I'd had no hand in casting minor characters; the trick was to make the dumbest poodle jump through the hoops.
Moncrieff swore non-stop. Nash could turn and get the light across his forehead right every time, but Nash, I reminded my fuming director of photography, wasn't called a mega-star for nothing.
The level of muddle was not helped by the arrival of the real police asking why my fresh fingerprints were all over Dorothea's house. We could have played it for laughs, but no one was funny. I proved to have an alibi for whenever it was that Paul had died (they wouldn't or couldn't say exactly when) but the stoppage ate up my lunch hour.
Back at work we progressed at length to the first arrival (by car) of Gibber, and to his planting of suspicions against Nash in the (fictional) police mind. Gibber was a good pro, but inclined still to tell inappropriate fruity jokes and waste time. “Sorry, sorry,” he would breezily say, fluffing his words without remorse.
I hung on grimly to forbearance and walked twice out onto the Heath breathing deeply with sore rib twinges while Moncrieff's men loaded the cameras for the eighth take of a fairly simple sequence. I phoned Wrigley's garage and asked if Bill Robinson could have the afternoon off, and I spoke to Bill himself, thanking him for the second safe delivery of the boxes and asking him to open his home garage and bring bits of motorbike out onto his drive.
“We've decided to film your stuff after dark,” I said.
“Can you spare us the evening? And will you have your big bike at home?”
Natch, fine, yes indeedy, and cor, he said.
Tired and a shade dispirited I called it a day at five-thirty in the afternoon and invited Nash to my Bedford Lodge rooms for a reviver.
“Sure,” he agreed easily, and greeted Lucy with enough warmth to tongue-tie her into knock knees.
“How did you get on?” I asked her, explaining the task briefly to Nash; and she apologised for being slow and having completed only five boxes. She had just discovered that one of the boxes held some clippings about Sonia's death. Wasn't that extraordinary? Box six, she said. She hadn't had time to go through them.
“That's fine,” I said. “Come again tomorrow, will you? Are you going right home at nights? Or perhaps staying with your Uncle Ridley?”
She made a face. “Not with him. Actually,” she blushed perceptibly, “I'm staying here in this hotel. They had a room free and Dad agreed. I hope that's all right?”
“It's splendid,” I said moderately, knowing enthusiasm would frighten her. “What about Sunday, day after tomorrow?”
“I can stay until the job's finished,” she said. “Dad said it was better.”
“Good for Dad,” Nash smiled.
“He's awfully interested,” Lucy said, and after a pause added, “It's really odd, Mr Rourke, imagining you as my dad.”
Nash smiled, the eyelids crinkling. Despite his pregnant wife, he didn't look at all like anyone's dad, certainly not Lucy's.
We drank briefly together and split up, Nash yawning as he went and saying the slavedriver (T. Lyon) wanted him out working again in a couple of hours. Lucy, without making an issue of it, excused herself at the same time. Staying in the hotel, she was telling me, meant no more than convenience.
When she'd gone I looked at her master list of the boxes' contents. Since they had been well jumbled up on the journeys, and since she had started methodically at one end, the six boxes she'd worked on held mixed and random contents.
Box I. Form books. Flat racing. Box II. Biographies, trainers, owners and jockeys. Box III. Form books. National Hunt racing. Box IV. Weekly columns, Racing Gazette. Box V. Books, annuals, racing history.
With unstoppable curiosity I knelt on the floor and opened Box III, National Hunt form books, and found that by happy chance it contained the records of two of the years when I'd been racing.
A British racing form
book, built up week by week throughout the season with loose-leaf inserts tied between soft leather covers, contained details of every single race run, identifying each runner by name, trainer, jockey, weight carried, age and sex, and giving a start-to-finish commentary of performance.
There was no gainsaying the form book. If the form books said Mr T. Lyon (the Mr denoting amateur status) had finished fifth a long way back, it was no good Mr T. Lyon in memory thinking he'd ridden a close contest to be beaten by half a length. Mr T. Lyon, I read with nostalgia, had won a three-mile steeplechase by two lengths at Newbury, the horse carrying ten stone six. The underfoot conditions that day had been classified as 'soft', and the starting price had been 100-6, Mr T. Lyon's mount having unaccountably beaten the hot favourite (weighted out of it, carrying 20 lbs more). Mr T. Lyon, I remembered, had been ecstatic. The crowd, who'd mostly lost their bets, had been unenthusiastically silent.
I smiled. Here I was, twelve years later, clad in Delta-cast and trying not to be killed: and I didn't think I'd ever been happier than on that cold long-ago afternoon.
Valentine had put a red exclamation mark against my winner, which meant that he personally had fitted the horse with shoes especially for racing, probably on the morning of the race.
Horses wore thin aluminium shoes for racing, much lighter and thinner than the steel shoes they needed in the stable and out at exercise. Farriers would routinely change the shoes before and after a race.
Owing to chance, the form books in Box III went back only as far as my seventeenth birthday. For the Mr T. Lyon debut at sixteen to turn up, I would have to wait for Lucy.
I opened Box I, Flat racing form books, and found that in this instance the books were older. These, indeed, covered the few years when Jackson Wells had been training in Newmarket: one of them covered the year of Sonia's death.
Fascinated, I looked for Valentine's red dots (runners) and red exclamation marks (winners) and found my grandfather's name as trainer all over the place. Twenty-six years ago, when I'd been four. A whole generation ago. So many of them gone. So many horses, so many races, lost and forgotten.
Jackson Wells hadn't had large numbers of runners and precious few winners, as far as I could see. Jackson Wells hadn't had a regular jockey either: only successful wealthy stables could afford to retain a top-flighter. Several of the Wells horses had been ridden by a P. Falmouth, several others by D. Carsington, neither of whom I'd heard of, which wasn't surprising.
On the day of his wife's death, Jackson Wells had set off to York races where a horse from his stable had been entered. I looked up the actual day and found his horse hadn't started and was listed as a non-runner. Trainer Wells had been on his way back to Newmarket when they'd run the race without him.
I flicked forward through the pages. Valentine's dots for Jackson Wells were scattered and diminishing in number. There was only one exclamation mark, a minor race on a minor track, ridden by the minor jockey, D. Carsington.
“A winner is a winner,” my grandfather always said. “Never despise the lowliest.”
I put the form books back in the box, dutifully collected my guardian shadows from the lobby, and went by car to Betty's house to ask if she by any chance had Dorothea's key. She shook her head. Poor Dorothea; that poor man, Paul.
Betty's husband wasn't grieving for Paul. If I wanted to start tidying Dorothea's house, he said, he could open her door in no time. Betty's husband was an all-round handyman. A little how's-your-father and a shove, he said, would circumvent most locks, and consequently he and I soon went from room to ravaged room righting the mess as best we could. The police, he said, had taken their photos and their fingerprints and left. The house, such as it was, and crammed with bad memories, was Dorothea's to come home to.
I spent most time in her bedroom, looking for the photographs she said she kept in a box. I couldn't find them. I told Betty's husband what I was looking for -Dorothea's only mementos of Paul when young - but neither of us succeeded.
“Poor love,” Betty's husband said. “That son of hers was a brute, but she would never hear a strong word against him. Between you and me, he's no loss.”
“No ... but who killed him?”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. Gives you a nasty feeling, doesn't it, some geezer running around with a knife?”
“Yes,” I said. “It does.”
I stood in the dark street outside Bill Robinson's garage, with the black-belt at my back facing the crowd that had inevitably collected.
There were bright lights inside the garage where Bill Robinson himself stood, dressed in his accustomed black leather and studs and looking selfconscious. The monster Harley Davidson stood to one side. Pieces of a second, that Bill was rebuilding, lay in clumps on the drive. Moncrieff was busy pointing arc lamps and spots to give dramatic shadows and gleams, and Nash's stand-in walked to the designated point and looked towards the garage. Moncrieff lit his profile first, and then a three-quarter-face angle, one side bright, the other in darkness, only the liquid sheen of an eye showing.
Nash arrived, walked up beside me and watched.
“You pause,” I said. “'You're wondering how the hell you're going to get out of the fix you're in. You're psyching yourself up. OK?”
He nodded. He waved a hand towards the scene. “It's striking,” he said, “but why a bike?”
“It's what our movie is about.”
“How do you mean? There aren't any bikes in it, are there?”
“Fantasy,” I said. “Our movie is about the need for fantasy.”
“The dream lovers?” he suggested doubtfully.
“Fantasy supplies what life doesn't,” I said casually. “That boy there with his bike is eighteen, good natured, has a regular job, carries his elderly neighbour's shopping home for her, and in his fantasy life he's a hell raiser with roaring power between his legs and the gear and the studs. He's playing at what he wouldn't really like to be, but the imagining of it fills and satisfies him.”
Nash stood without moving. “You sound as though you approve,” he said.
“Yes, I do. A good strong fantasy life, I'd guess, saves countless people from boredom and depression. It gives them a feeling of being individual. They invent themselves. You know it perfectly well. You are a fantasy to most people.”
“What about serial killers? Aren't they fantasists?”
“There's a hell to every heaven.”
Moncrieff called, “Ready, Thomas,” and Nash, without comment, went to the place from where he would walk into shot, and pause, and turn his head, and watch Bill Robinson live in his courage-inducing dreamland.
Ed went round explaining the necessity of silence to the neighbours. He shouted, “Turn over.” The cameras reached speed. Ed yelled, “Action.” Nash walked, stopped, turned his head. Perfect. Bill Robinson dropped a piece of exhaust pipe out of nervousness and said, “Sorry.”
“Cut,” Ed said, disgusted.
“Don't say "sorry",” I told Bill Robinson, walking towards the garage to join him. “It doesn't matter if you drop something. It doesn't matter if you swear. It's normal. Just don't say "sorry".”
He grinned. We shot the scene again and he fitted two shining pieces of metal together as if he hadn't got fifty people watching.
“Cut,” Ed yelled with approval, and the neighbours cheered. Nash shook Bill Robinson's hand and signed autographs. We sold a lot of future cinema tickets, and no one stuck a knife in my back. Not a bad evening, overall.
Returning to Bedford Lodge, Nash and I ate room-service dinner together.
“Go on,” he said, “about the need for fantasy.”
“Oh ... I ...” I hesitated, and stopped, unwilling to sound a fool.
“Go on,” he urged. “People say ... in fact /say ... that play-acting isn't a suitable occupation for a serious man. So tell me why it is.”
“You don't need me to tell you.”
“Tell me why you make fantasies, then.”
“Have some w
ine.”
“Don't duck the issue, dammit.”
“Well,” I said, pouring lavishly, “I wanted to be a jockey but I grew too big. Anyway, one day I went to see a doctor about some damage I'd done to my shoulder in a racing fall, and she asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said "be a jockey" and she lectured me crossly on wasting my time on earth frivolously. I asked her what occupation she would recommend and she sternly told me that the only profession truly helpful and worthwhile was medicine.”
“She scorned me for wanting to be merely an entertainer.”
Nash shook his head.
“So,” I said, “I rationalised it, I suppose. I'm still an entertainer and always will be, I guess, and I've persuaded myself that I do at least as much good as tranquillisers. Everyone can go where their mind takes them. You can live in imaginary places without feeling the real terror or the real pain. I make the images. I open the door. I can inflame ... and I can heal ... and comfort ... and get people to understand ... and, for God's sake, don't remember a word of this. I've just made it up to entertain you.”
He drank his wine thoughtfully.
“And in this movie that we're engaged in,” I said, “the dream lovers make the spurned wife's existence happier. They're the best way she can face her husband's affair with her own sister. They're her refuge ... and her revenge.”
He smiled twistedly. “My character's a shit, isn't he?”
“Human,” I said.
'And are you going to sell Howard on her suicide?'
I shook my head. “I’m sure she didn't kill herself. But don't worry, your character will avenge her death and come up smelling of roses.”
“Has Howard written those extra scenes?”
“Not yet.”
“You're a rogue, Thomas, you know that?”
We finished dinner peaceably, and together with Moncrieff mapped out the next day's scenes, which were due to take place in the Athenaeum's look-alike dining-room, happily by now built and ready.
After that meeting I un-Velcroed my restricting knife-repeller with relief and washed without soaking the dressing, and in sleeping shorts thought I'd just take a quick look at the newspaper cuttings about Sonia's death before inching into bed: and two hours later, warmed by a dressing gown, I was still sitting in an armchair alternately amused and aghast and beginning to understand why Paul had desperately wanted to take away Valentine's books and why Valentine, perhaps, hadn't wanted him to have them. In leaving them to me, a comparative stranger, the old man had thought to safeguard the knowledge contained in them, since I couldn't have understood the significance of the clippings and might simply have thrown them away, a task he should have done himself but had left too late, until his progressing illness made action impossible.
