Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

“She's longing to go to the nursing home, she said, and a lot of her toughness of spirit is back. But medically ... could she go?”

  “She's remembered a good deal more about being stabbed,” I said. “She saw the attacker's face, but she doesn't know him. She also saw the knife that cut her.”

  Robbie exclaimed, “that knuckle-duster thing?”

  “No. It was the one that ended in me.”

  “So, move her tomorrow if you can. Give her a false name in the nursing home. She's at risk.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  “She remembers that Paul interrupted the attack on her and effectively saved her life. It's comforting her. She's amazing. She's had three terrible things happen, but she'll be all right, I think.”

  “Spunky old woman. Don't worry, I'll shift her.”

  “Great.” I paused. “You remember the police took our fingerprints to match them with the prints in Dorothea's house?”

  “Of course I do. They took Dorothea's and her friend Betty's and her husband's and worked out Valentine's from his razor.”

  “And,” I said, “there were others they couldn't match.”

  “Sure. Several, I believe. I asked my police friend how their enquiries were progressing. Dead stop, I would guess.”

  “Mm,” I said. “Some of the prints they couldn't match would have been O'Hara's, and some would have been Bill Robinson's.” I explained Bill Robinson. “And there has to be another - Dorothea's attacker didn't wear gloves.”

  Robbie said breathlessly, “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. She said she saw his hand through the knife and he had dirty fingernails.”

  “When he went to her house he didn't expect her to be there. He didn't plan in advance to attack her. He went to search with Paul for something Valentine might have had and I guess they ripped the place to bits from fury and frustration that they couldn't find anything. Anyway, his prints must be all over the place.”

  Robbie, perplexed, asked, “Whose?”

  “I’ll tell you when I'm sure.”

  “Don't get yourself killed.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  Yvonne came upstairs at the required time, and proved to be the regulation issue semi-anorexic Californian waif beloved of moguls, a culture concept a cosmos away from the real laughing reckless Sonia.

  Sonia, at her death, had worn, according to the more conservative newspapers, 'a rose-red satin slip', and, according to the titillators, in blackest type, 'A shiny scarlet mini with shoe-string shoulder straps, and black finely-strapped sandals with high rhinestone heels.'

  No wonder, I'd thought, that suicide had been in doubt.

  Yvonne of the dream lovers was wearing a loose white day-dress described in American fashion circles as a 'float': that is to say, it softly outlined only what it touched. She also wore, at my request, chandelier pearl and gold earrings and a long pearl necklace nearly to her waist. She looked beautifully ethereal and spoke like Texas.

  “This morning,” I said, “we're shooting the scenes in the right sequence. That's to say, first you enter through that split door.” I pointed. “There will be back-lighting. When Moncrieff is ready, I'd like you to stand in the doorway and turn your head slowly until we say stop, then if you'll remember that position and stop your head right there for the take, we will get a dramatic effect. You will be entering but looking back. OK? I expect you know your lines.”

  She gave me a limpid unintelligent wide-eyed look: great for the film, not so good for technical speed while we made it.

  “They say,” she said, “you get mad if you have to shoot a scene more than three times. That so?”

  “Absolutely so.”

  “Guess I'd better concentrate then.”

  “Honey child,” I said in her accent, “you do just that and I'll earn you talk-show spots.”

  “The Today Show?”

  “Nothing's impossible.”

  Calculation clouded the peerless violet eyes and she went quietly off to one side and studied her script.

  Battle lines drawn, we proceeded. When Moncrieff was satisfied with his light placement we stood Yvonne in the doorway and moved her inch by inch until the light outside the door shone through her flimsy float to reveal her body to the camera inside: too flat-chested for my interest, but of the dreamy otherworld unreality I'd hoped for.

  “Jeeze,” Moncrieff murmured, looking through his lens.

  I said, “Can you put a glint on those earrings?”

  “You don't ask much!”

  He positioned an inkie - an inkie-dinkie, meaning a very small spotlight - to give a glitter below her ears.

  “Great,” I said. “Everyone ready? We'll do a rehearsal. Yvonne, don't forget you're being followed by an earthy man who is parsecs away from a dream lover. You are already laughing at him in your mind, though not openly, as he has power to make Nash's life - that's to say, your film husband's life - very difficult. Just imagine you're being followed by a man you sexually despise but can't be rude to ...”

  Yvonne giggled. “Who needs to act? I meet them every day.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Moncrieff said under his breath.

  “Right then,” I said, trying not to laugh, “we'll do a walk-through. Ready? And ...” a pause, “go.”

  Yvonne got it dead right at the second rehearsal and then we shot the scene for real twice, both times fit to print.

  “You're a doll,” I told her. She liked it, where Silva might have said 'sexism' or 'harassment'. I liked women, all sorts; I'd simply discovered, as I had with male actors, that it saved time to accept, not fight, their views of themselves in the world.

  In the scene Yvonne, talking to a man out of shot, had been saying she'd promised to prepare the loose box for a soon-to-arrive horse, a job she'd forgotten earlier but was now doing before joining her husband at a drinks party, to be held somewhere on his way home from the races.

  So silly about her white sandals, she said, on the rough flooring. Would he please help her move the stack of hay bales, since - eyelashes fluttering - he was so much bigger and stronger than little Yvonne?

  “I'd lie down and die for her,” Moncrieff observed.

  “He more or less did.”

  “Such a cynic,” Moncrieff told me, moving lights to a point high among the rafters.

  I rehearsed Yvonne through the scene where she realised the man meant business against her wishes. We trekked through surprise, discomfort, revulsion and, dangerously, mockery. I made sure she understood - and could personally relate to - every step.

  “Most directors just yell at me,” she said at one point, when she'd fluffed her lines in rehearsal for the fifth or sixth time.

  “You look stunning,” I said. “All you need to do is act stunned. Then laugh at him. Some men can't bear women laughing at them. He's full of lust for you, and you think he's funny. What you're doing is mocking him to madness. He's going to kill you.”

  Total comprehension lit her sweet features. “Get out the strait-jacket,” she said.

  “Yvonne, I love you.”

  We took a long series of shots of her face, one emotion at a time, and many of negative messages of body language and of the growth of fright, of panic, of desperate disbelief: enough to cut together the ultimate terror of approaching unexpected death.

  We gave Yvonne a rest for lunch, while Moncrieff and I filmed the crews slapping heavy ropes sharply over the rafters, and tying frightful knots, to show the violence, the speed, the lack of mercy that I wanted. Naturally each segment took many minutes to stage and get right, but later, in cinemas, with every successful impression strung together - slap, slap, slap - the horror of the hanging would strike the popcorn crunchers silent.

  I sat beside Yvonne on a hay bale. I said, “This afternoon we are going to tie your wrists together with that thick rope now hanging free from that rafter.”

  She took it easily.

  “The man has by now frightened you so much that you are almost relieved t
hat it is your wrists he has tied.”

  She nodded.

  “But suddenly he pulls some slack into the rope leading from the rafter, and he loops the slack round your neck, and does it a second time, and pulls the rope tight until your pearls break and slide down inside your dress, and he leans all his weight on the free end of rope swinging from the rafter, and ... er ... he lifts you off your feet... and hangs you.”

  Big-eyed, she said, “What do I say? Do I beg? It doesn't say this.”

  “You don't say anything,” I said. “You scream.”

  “Yes. Can you?”

  She opened her mouth and screamed up a hair-raising scale, alarming everyone on set and bringing them galloping to her rescue.

  She giggled.

  “No one rescued Yvonne,” I said regretfully, “but no one will forget that scream.”

  We filmed a brutal hanging, but short of the dreaded 'NC-17' or '18' certificates. We showed no black asphyxiated face, no terrible bloating. I got Yvonne to wriggle frantically while we suspended her from the wrists, but I filmed her only from the roped neck to her feet that frantically stretched down to the out-of-reach floor. We arranged for one of her white shoes to fall off. We turned the camera onto the shoe while the shadow of her last paroxysms fell across the white-washed walls, and we filmed her broken pearls and one twisted earring in the straw with her bare jerking toes just above.

  That done, I let her down and hugged her gratefully; and told her she was marvellous, ravishing, brilliant, moving, could play Ophelia in her sleep and would undoubtedly appear on the Today Show (which fortunately, later, she did).

  I'd planned from the beginning to shoot the hanging separate from the murderer just in case we needed to make a radical plot re-think at a later stage. By filming murder and murderer apart, one could slot in anyone's face behind the rope. That afternoon, however, I'd invited Gibber to learn the murderer's few lines, and he arrived on set with them only vaguely in his mind, while he expansively smoked a large cigar and exercised his fruity larynx on inappropriate jokes.

  He patted Yvonne's bottom. Silly old buffoon, I thought, and set about turning him into a lecherous bull.

  I positioned him in the manger section, and gave him an ashtray to prevent his setting fire to the straw. We placed Yvonne so that her white dress, on the edge of the frame and out of focus from being too near the camera, nonetheless established her presence.

  Moncrieff, concentrating on the lighting, added a sheet of blue gelatine across one of the spots. He looked through the lens and smiled, and I looked also, and there it was, the actor blinking, bored, waiting for us while we fiddled, but with the probability of his guilt revealed by a trick of light.

  Gibber, as first written by Howard, had been a pillar of the Jockey Club, an upright, unfortunate victim of events. Reluctantly Howard, bowing to the film company, had agreed to write a (mild!) liaison between Gibber's wife (Silva) and Nash Rourke. Equally reluctantly he had agreed that Gibber should persecute Nash for supposedly having hanged his (Nash's) wife Yvonne. Howard still didn't know that it would be Gibber himself that did the hanging. I would have trouble with Howard. Nothing new.

  To me, the character of Gibber lay at the centre of the film's dynamic. The Gibber I saw was a man constrained by his position in society; a man forced by upbringing, by wealth, by the expectations of his peers to mould himself into a righteous puritan, difficult to love, incapable of loving. Gibber couldn't in consequence stand ridicule; couldn't bear to know his wife had rejected him for a lover, couldn't have waiters hearing his wife mock him. Gibber expected people to do his bidding. He was, above all, accustomed to deference.

  Yet Gibber, underneath, was a raw and passionate man. Gibber hanged Yvonne in a burst of uncontrollable rage when she laughed at his attempt at rape. Appalled, unable to face his own guilt, Gibber persecuted Nash to the point of paranoia and beyond. Gibber, eventually, would be totally destroyed and mentally wrecked when Nash, after many tries, found that the one way to defeat his persecutor was to trap him into earning pitying sneers. Gibber would, at the end, disintegrate into catatonic schizophrenia.

  I looked at Gibber the actor and wondered how I could ever dig out of him Gibber the man. I started that afternoon by blowing away his complacency and telling him he didn't understand lust.

  He was indignant. “Of course I do.”

  “The lust I want is uncontrollable. It's out of control, frenetic, frantic, raging, berserk. It's murderous.”

  “And you expect me to show all that?”

  “No, I don't. I don't think you can. I don't think you have the technique. I don't think you're a good enough actor.”

  Gibber froze. He stubbed out the cigar: and he produced for the camera that day a conception of lust that made one understand and pity his ungovernable compulsion even while he killed for having it mocked.

  He would never be a grandee type-cast actor again.

  “I hate you,” he said.

  Lucy was busy with the boxes when, on returning to the hotel, I opened the door of my sitting-room and went in, leaving it ajar.

  She was on her knees among the boxes and looked up as if guiltily, faintly blushing.

  “Sorry for the mess,” she said, flustered. “I didn't think you'd be back before six o'clock, as usual. I'll just tidy this lot away. And shall I close the door?”

  “No, leave it open.”

  Books and papers were scattered over much of the floor, and many of them, I was interested to see, had come out of boxes she had already investigated and itemised. The folder of clippings about Sonia's death lay open on the table: the harmless clippings only, as Valentine's totally revealing souvenirs were out of sight in O'Hara's safe.

  “You had some messages,” Lucy said jerkily, picking up and reading from a notebook. “Howard Tyler wants to see you. Someone called Ziggy - I think - wanted you to know the horses had come without trouble through Immingham and had reached their stable. Does that sound right? Robbie - he wouldn't give any other name - said to tell you the move had been accomplished. And the film crew you sent to Huntingdon races got some good crowd and bookmaker shots, they said.”

  I viewed the general clutter on the floor and mildly asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “Oh.” The blush deepened. “Dad said ... I mean, I hope you won't mind, but my Uncle Ridley came in to see me.”

  “In here?”

  “Yes. I didn't know he was coming. He just knocked on the door and walked straight in when I opened it. I said you might not be pleased, and he said he didn't care a f---. I mean, he didn't care what you thought.”

  “Did your father send him?”

  “I don't know if he sent him. He told him where I was and what I was doing.”

  I hid from her my inner satisfaction. I had rather hoped to stir Ridley to action; hoped Jackson would perform the service.

  “What did Ridley want?” I asked.

  “He said I wasn't to tell you.” She stood up, her blue eyes troubled. “I don't like it... and I don't know what I should do.”

  “Perch on something and relax.” I lowered myself stiffly into an armchair and eased my constricted neck. “Bad back,” I said, explaining it away. “Nothing to fuss over. What did Ridley want?”

  She sat doubtfully sideways on the edge of the table, swinging a free leg. The ubiquitous jeans were accompanied that day by a big blue sweater across which white lambs gambolled: nothing could possibly have been less threatening.

  She made up her mind. “He wanted that photo of the Gang that you showed Dad yesterday. And he wanted anything Valentine had written about Sonia. He emptied out all this stuff. And,” her forehead wrinkled, “he wanted the knives.”

  “What knives?”

  “He wouldn't tell me. I asked him if he wanted that one a boy asked me to give you at Huntingdon, and he said that one and others.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I hadn't seen any others and anyhow, if you had anything like that
you would keep it locked away safely ... and ... well ... he told me to wheedle out of you the combination you're using for the safe here. He tried to open it, you see ...” She stopped miserably. “I know I should never have let him in. What is it all about?”

  “Cheer up,” I said, “while I think.”

  “Shall I tidy the boxes?”

  “Yes, do.”

  First catch your sprat...

  “Lucy,” I said, “why did you tell me what Ridley wanted?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “Do you mean, why am I not loyal to my uncle?”

  “Yes, I do mean that.”

  “I didn't like him saying wheedle. And ... well ... he's not as nice as he used to be.”

  I smiled. “Good. Well, if I tell you the combination number, will you please tell Ridley? And also tell him how clever you were, the way you wheedled it out of me! And tell him you do think I have knives in the safe.”

  She hesitated.

  I said, “Give your allegiance one way or the other, but stick to one.”

  She said solemnly, “I give it to you.”

  “Then the combination is seven three five two.”

  “Now?” she asked, stretching towards the telephone.

  She spoke to her uncle. She blushed deeply while she lied, but she would have convinced me, let alone Ridley.

  When she put down the telephone I said, “When I've finished all the work on this film, which will be in another four and a half months, I should think, would you like to spend a holiday in California? Not,” I went on hastily, “with any conditions or expectations attached. Just a holiday. You could bring your mother, if you like. I thought you might find it interesting, that's all.”

  Her uncertainty over this suggestion was endearing.

  I was everything she'd been taught to fear, a young healthy male in a position of power, out for any conquest he could make.

  “I won't try to seduce you,” I promised lightly. But I might end by marrying her, I thought unexpectedly, when she was older. I'd been forever bombarded by actresses. An Oxfordshire farmer's freckled-nosed blue-eyed daughter who played the piano and lapsed occasionally into sixteen-year-old awkwardness seemed in contrast an unrealistic and unlikely future.