Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  Paul had wanted Valentine's books and papers, and Paul was dead. I looked at the Delta-cast jacket standing empty and mute on a table and felt a strong urge to fasten it on again, even at two in the morning.

  In describing Sonia to me, Valentine had called her a mouse, but that couldn't have been how he'd thought of her when she was alive. The folder of clippings about her held two large photographs, both the likenesses of a vividly pretty young woman with a carefree spirit and, I would have said, considerable carnal knowledge.

  One of the photographs was an expert, glossy, eight by ten black and white version of the coloured photo Lucy had lent me of 'Sonia and Pig'. In Valentine's photo the young man's presence had been deleted. Sonia smiled alone.

  The second photo was of Sonia in her wedding dress, again alone, and again with nothing virginal about her eyes. My mother, of all people, had once instructed me about the difference: once a woman had slept with a man, she said, the woman would develop little pouches in her lower eyelids which would show when she smiled. Sonia was smiling in both pictures, and the small pouches were there unmistakably. Valentine had said the book made her out to be a poor little bitch and, in saying that, he'd intended to mislead. The folder held clippings about her death from a myriad of newspapers and, in the most derogatory of the various accounts, in those most overtly speculatory about Mrs Wells's fidelity to Jackson, someone - and it had to have been Valentine himself - had stricken the accounts through and through with red biro and had written No! No! as if in pain.

  I took everything out of the Sonia folder and found that beside the photos and the whole sheaf of newspaper cuttings, there were two frail dried roses, a brief note about shoeing which started 'Darling Valentine', and a wisp of creamy lace-edged panties.

  Valentine had confessed he'd been too easily aroused by young women, Professor Derry had said. According to Valentine's own collection of memories, one of those young women had been Sonia Wells.

  Poor old sod, I thought. He had been sixty, nearly, when she died. I was young enough to have considered sixty the far side of acute sexual obsession: Valentine enlightened even from beyond the grave.

  The emotional vigour of the thick Sonia file blinded me for a long while to the slim folder underneath which lay at the bottom of the box: but this folder proved, when I read the contents carefully, to be raw explosive material in search of a detonator.

  In search of myself.

  I slept for five hours, put on the carapace, went back to work. Saturday morning. I struck it off in my mind's calendar as Day Nineteen of production, or almost a third of my time allowed.

  It rained all day, which didn't matter as we were engaged indoors in the Athenaeum dining-room, shooting the scene where Gibber's suspicions of his wife's canoodling gelled into inescapable certainty. Gibber and Silva endlessly said yes please and no thank you to actor-waiters; chewed endless mouthfuls of food, and in Silva's case spitting them out immediately I said “Cut”; drank endless sips of wine-coloured water; waved (in Gibber's case) to unidentified acquaintances across the room; conducted a conversation of concentrated spite with rigidly smiling lips and a vivid awareness of social status. Jockey Club membership, to Gibber, meant not publicly slapping your wife's face in the most conservative dining-room in London.

  Howard, I thought, as I listened and watched, had surpassed himself in understanding and reproducing the constraints of class on the potentially dangerous ego of a rejected male.

  Silva sneered at Gibber with her eyes, her mouth saccharine. Silva told him she couldn't bear his hands on her breasts. Gibber, destroyed within, looked around to make sure the waiters hadn't heard. Both players gave the film enormously good value for money.

  Breaking for lunch, with the close-ups to do in the afternoon, I returned for a respite to Bedford Lodge and found Nash in my rooms sprawling in an armchair and having an easy time with Lucy. She, in consequence, had, as her morning's work, itemised the contents of barely one and a half cartons.

  “Oh, hello,” she greeted me from her knees, “what would you like me to do with three boxfuls of huge old encyclopaedias?”

  “How old?”

  She pulled out one large volume and investigated. “Forty years!” Her voice made forty years unimaginable. Nash reflexly winced.

  “Just label them and leave them,” I said.

  “Right. Oh ... and I haven't come across any photo albums, that you wanted me to look for, but I did find a lot of snaps in an old chocolate box. What do you want me to do with those?”

  “In a chocolate box ...?”

  “Well, yes. It's got flowers on the lid. Pretty old.”

  “Er ... where's the box?”

  She opened a carton that had once held a fax machine, and from it produced several box files full of ancient racecards and newspaper clippings of winners that Valentine had regularly shod. “Here's the chocolate box,” Lucy said, lifting out and handing me a faded and battered gold-coloured cardboard box with flowers like dahlias on the lid. “I didn't make a list of the photos. Do you want me to?”

  “No,” I said absently, taking off the lid and finding small ancient pictures inside, many in long-ago faded colours with curling edges. Pictures of Valentine and his wife, pictures of Dorothea and her husband, a photo or two of Meredith Derry and his wife, and several of Dorothea with her child: with her nice-looking little boy, Paul. Pictures when life was fine, before time loused it up.

  “How about ordering us all some lunch?” I said.

  Nash did the ordering. “What do you want to drink, Thomas?”

  “Lethe,” I said.

  “Not until you've finished the movie.”

  'What's Lethe?' Lucy asked.

  Nash said, “The river in the underworld that, if you drink it, makes you sleep and forget about living.”

  “For ever,” Nash added. “But Thomas doesn't mean that.”

  Lucy covered non-comprehension in activity with the marker pen.

  At the bottom of the chocolate box, I came across a larger print, the colours still not razor sharp, but in a better state of preservation. It was of a group of young people, all looking about twenty. On the back of the photo were two simple words - 'The Gang'.

  The Gang.

  The Gang consisted of five young men and a girl.

  I sat staring at it for long enough for the other two to notice.

  “What is it?” Nash asked. 'What have you found?'

  I handed the photo to Lucy, who glanced at it, did a double take and then exclaimed, “Why, that's Dad, isn't it? How young he looks.” She turned the photo over. “The Gang,” she read aloud. “That's his handwriting, isn't it?”

  “You'd know better than I would.”

  “I'm sure of it.”

  “Who are the people with him? Who are the Gang?” I asked.

  She studied the picture. “That's Sonia, isn't it? It must be.”

  Nash took the photo out of Lucy's hand and peered at it himself, nodding. “That's definitely your father, and the girl looks like the photo you lent us ... and that boy next to her, that's the other one in that photo ... that's surely "Pig".”

  “I suppose so,” Lucy said doubtfully. “And that one on the end, he looks like ...” She stopped, both unsure and disturbed.

  “Like who?” I asked.

  “He's not like that any more. He's, well ... bloated ,.. now. That's my Uncle Ridley. He looks lovely there. How awful, what time does to people.”

  “Yes.” Nash and I said it in unison. An endless host of barely recognisable old actors and actresses lived on in Hollywood in inelastic skins, everything sagging but the memory of glamour, their youthful selves mocking them relentlessly from rented videos and movie channels.

  “Who are the others?” I asked.

  “I don't know them,” Lucy said, handing the photo back to me.

  I said, “They look like people of your age.”

  “Yes, they do.” She found it unremarkable. “Do you want me to repack this box?”<
br />
  “Yes, please. But leave out the chocolate box.”

  Lunch came and we ate. Ziggy phoned the hotel from Norway.

  “I cannot reach O'Hara's number,” he complained.

  “He's gone back to LA,” I said. “How are the horses?”

  “Working well.”

  “Good. The production department has found a disused stable yard for them to stay in, only ten miles from our beach.” I fished a piece of paper out of an inner pocket and spelled the address for him patiently, letter by letter. “Phone me after you've landed at Immingham on Monday if you have any problems.”

  ‘Yes, Thomas.”

  “Well done, Ziggy.”

  He laughed, pleased, and departed.

  I left Nash and Lucy drinking coffee and, taking with me both 'The Gang' photo and the lower file from the previous night's reading, went along to O'Hara's suite, let myself in with his key and stowed Valentine's mementos in the safe, with the knives. All the rooms in the hotel were equipped with individual small safes, which each guest could set to open to his own choice of combination. I hardly liked to acknowledge the instinct for extra security that led me to use O'Hara's safe instead of my own, but anyway, I did it.

  Still in O'Hara's rooms I looked up the number of Ridley Wells in the local phone directory, and tried it, but there was no answer.

  On returning to my own rooms I found Nash, on the point of leaving, announcing that he was going to spend the afternoon watching racing on TV while betting by phone with a bookmaker I'd arranged for him.

  “Is it still on, for tonight?” he asked, pausing in the doorway.

  “Certainly is, if the rain stops, which it is supposed to.”

  “How do you expect me to ride a horse in the goddam dark?”

  “There will be moonlight. Moncrieff's arranging it.”

  “What about goddam rabbit holes?”

  “There aren't any on Newmarket's gallops,” I assured him.

  “But what if I fall off?”

  “We'll pick you up and put you back in the saddle.”

  “I hate you sometimes, Thomas.” He grinned and went on his way. I left Lucy up to her elbows in decades of form books, collected my minders in the lobby and was bowled the short mile back to the stables.

  On my way back to 'The Athenaeum' I detoured into the downstairs office, used chiefly by Ed, where we had the business paraphernalia of telephones, faxes, and large-capacity copier, and asked the young woman operating everything there to keep on trying Ridley Wells's number for me, and if he returned home and answered the summons, to put the call through to me upstairs immediately.

  “But you said never to do that, in case the phone rang during a shot.”

  “We can re-shoot,” I said. “I want to catch this man. OK?”

  She nodded, reassured, and I went upstairs to re-coax Gibber and Silva into their most venomous faces.

  Ridley Wells answered his telephone at three-thirty, and sounded drunk.

  I said, “Do you remember you asked our producer, O'Hara, if we had any riding work for you in our film?”

  “He said you hadn't.”

  “Right. But now we have. Are you still interested?” I mentioned a fee for a morning's work large enough to hook a bigger fish than Ridley, and he didn't even ask what the job entailed.

  I said, “We'll send a car for you tomorrow morning at seven. It will bring you to the stables where we're keeping our horses. You don't need to bring anything with you. We'll supply you with clothes from our wardrobe department. We'll supply the horse for you to ride. We don't want you to do anything out of the ordinary or dangerous on the horse. We're just short of a rider for a scene we're shooting tomorrow.”

  “Got you,” he said grandly.

  “Don't forget,” I insisted.

  “Mum's the word, old boy.”

  “No,” I said. “Mum's not the word. If you're not sober in the morning, then no job and no fee.”

  After a pause he said, “Got you,” again, and I hoped he meant it.

  When we'd finished the close-ups and the day's work was safely on its way to London for processing I ran the previous day's rushes in the screening room, happy for Bill Robinson's sake that he and his monster bike positively quivered with shining power, filling Nash's character with the determination he needed if he were to take action.

  From fantasy, courage, I thought. I wanted the film to assert that old idea, but without ramming it down anyone's throat. I wanted people to see that they had always known it. To open doors. A door-opener; that was my function.

  It stopped raining more or less at the time forecast -miraculous - and Moncrieff busied himself in the stable yard supervising the loading of cameras, films, lights and crews onto trucks for the 'moonlit' shots of Nash on the Heath.

  Nash arrived to the minute, no surprise, and came out of the house half an hour later in riding clothes and night-time make-up, carrying his helmet and demanding a thoroughly tranquillised mount.

  “If your fans could only hear you!” I remarked dryly.

  “You, Thomas,” he said, smiling, “can go try 6G in a brake turn at low level.”

  I shook my head. Nash could fly fast jet aircraft - when not under a restrictive contract in mid-film - and I couldn't. Nash's pre-mega-star hair-raising CV included air force service in fighters, all part of his mystique.

  “The scene comes a night or two before the motorbikes,” I said. “You have been accused. You are worried. OK?”

  He nodded. The screenplay had included the night-on-the-horse scene from the beginning, and he was prepared.

  We drove the camera truck slowly up the road by the hill, Nash in the saddle beside us (the horse in dim 'moonlight') looking worried and thoughtful. We then filmed him sitting on the ground with his back to a wind-bent tree, the horse cropping grass nearby. We'd more or less finished when the thick clouds unexpectedly parted and blew in dramatic shapes across the real full moon, and Moncrieff turned his camera heavenwards for more than sixty seconds, and beamed at me triumphantly through his straggly beard.

  The long day ended. Back at Bedford Lodge I found three more boxes itemised, plus a note from Lucy saying she hoped I didn't mind but her parents wanted her home for Sunday after all. Back Monday, she wrote.

  Box VIII. Form books. Flat racing.

  Box IX. Horseshoes.

  Box X. Encyclopaedias, A-F.

  The horseshoes were actual horseshoes, each saved in a plastic bag and labelled with the name of the horse that had worn it, complete with winning date, racecourse and event. Valentine had been a true collector, squirrelling his successes away.

  I pulled out the first of the encyclopaedias without anything particular in mind and, finding a slip of paper in it acting as a bookmark, opened it there. Autocrat: an absolute ruler. Multiple examples followed.

  I closed the book, rested my head against the back of my armchair, decided it was time to take off the Delta-cast and drifted towards sleep.

  The thought that galvanised me to full wakefulness seemed to come from nowhere but was a word seen peripherally, unconsidered.

  Further down the page came Auto-erotism.

  I picked the volume out of the box and read the long entry. I learned much more than I wanted to about various forms of masturbation, though I could find nothing of much significance. Vaguely disappointed, I started to replace the bookmarker, but glanced at it and kept it in my hand. Valentine's bookmarker bore the one word 'Paraphilia'.

  I didn't know what paraphilia was, but I searched through several unopened boxes and finally found the P volume of the encyclopaedia, following where Valentine had directed.

  The P volume also had a bookmark, this time in the page for Paraphilia.

  Paraphilia, I read, consisted of many manifestations of perverted love. One of them was listed as 'erotic strangulation - the starvation of blood to the brain to stimulate sexual arousal'.

  Valentine's knowledge of self-asphyxia, the process he had described to Profes
sor Derry, had come from this book.

  “In 1791 in London,” I read, “at the time of Haydn, a well-known musician died as a result of his leaning towards paraphilia. One Friday afternoon he engaged a prostitute to tie a leash round his neck which he could then tighten to the point of his satisfaction. Unfortunately he went too far and throttled himself. The prostitute reported his death and was tried for murder, but acquitted, as the musician's perversion was well known. The judge ordered the records of the case not to be published, in the interests of decency.”

  One lived and learned, I thought tolerantly, putting the encyclopaedia back in its box. Poor old Professor Derry. Just as well, perhaps, that he hadn't acted on Valentine's information.

  Before throwing them both away I glanced at Valentine's second bookmark. On the strip of white paper he'd written, 'Tell Derry this' and, lower down, 'Showed this to Pig'.

  I went along to O'Hara's room, retrieved the folder and 'The Gang' photograph from the safe, and sat in his armchair looking at them and thinking long and hard.

  Eventually, I slept in his bed, as it was safer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The film company's car brought Ridley Wells to the stables on time and sober the next morning. We sent him into the house to the wardrobe department, and I took the opportunity to telephone Robbie Gill on my mobile.

  I expected to get his message service at that early hour, but in fact he was awake and answered my summons himself.