Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  There was no thunderbolt: just an insidious hungry delight that never went away.

  Her first response was abrupt and typical. “I can't afford it.”

  “Never mind, then.”

  “But... er ... yes.”

  The blush persisted. “You'll turn out to be a frog.”

  “Kermit's not bad,” I said, assessingly.

  She giggled. “What do you want me to do with the boxes?”

  Her work on the boxes had been originally my pathway to her father. I might not need her to work on them any longer, but I'd grown to like finding her here in my rooms.

  “I hope you'll go on with the cataloguing tomorrow,” I said.

  “All right.”

  “But this evening I have to work on the film ... er, alone.”

  She seemed slightly disappointed but mostly relieved. A daring step forward ... half a cautious step back. But we would get there one day, I thought, and was content and even reassured by the wait.

  We left through the still slightly open doorway and I walked down the passage a little way before waving her down the stairs; and, returning, I stopped to talk to my bodyguard whom O'Hara, for the company, had by now installed in the room opposite my own.

  My bodyguard, half Asian, had straight black hair, black shiny eyes and no visible feelings. He might be young, agile, well-trained and fast on his feet, but he was also unimaginative and hadn't saved me from the Armadillo.

  When I pushed open his unlocked door to reveal him sitting wide awake in an upright chair facing me, he said at once, “Your door has all the time been open, Mr Lyon.”

  I nodded. I'd arranged with him that if he saw my door closed he was to use my key and enter my rooms immediately. I couldn't think of a clearer or more simple demand for help.

  “Have you eaten?” I asked.

  “Yes, Mr Lyon.”

  I tried a smile. No response.

  “Don't go to sleep,” I said tamely.

  “No, Mr Lyon.”

  O'Hara must have dug him up from central casting, I thought. Bad choice.

  I retreated into my sitting-room, left the door six inches open, drank a small amount of brandy and answered a telephone call from Howard.

  He was predictably raging.

  “Gibber told me you've made him the murderer! It's impossible! You can't do it. I won't allow it! What will the Visboroughs say?”

  I pointed out that we could slot in a different murderer, if we wanted to.

  “Gibber says you tore him to shreds.”

  “Gibber gave the performance of his life,” I contradicted: and indeed, of the film's eventual four Oscar nominations, Gibber won the award for Best Supporting Actor - graciously forgiving me about a year later.

  I promised Howard, “We'll hold a full script conference tomorrow morning. You, me, Nash and Moncrieff.”

  “I want you to stop the film!”

  “I don't have that authority.”

  “What if you're dead?” he demanded.

  I said after a moment, “The company will finish the movie with another director. Killing me, believe me, Howard, would give this film massive publicity, but it would not stop it.”

  “It's not fair,” he said, as if he'd learned nothing, and I said, “See you in the morning,” and disconnected in despair.

  The safe in my sitting-room, as in O'Hara's, was out of casual sight in a fitment that housed a large TV set above and a mini-bar as well as the safe below. The mini-bar held small quantities of drinks for needy travellers, spirits, wine, champagne and beer, also choc­olate and nuts. The safe - my safe - held nothing. I programmed it to open at seven three five two, entrusted 'The Gang' photo into its safekeeping, and closed its door.

  I sat then in the armchair in my bedroom and waited for a long time, and thought about the obligations of the confessional, and about how totally, or how little, I myself was bound by Valentine's dying and frantic admissions.

  I felt the weight of the obligation of priesthood that so many priests themselves took lightly, knowing that their role absolved them from any dire responsibility, even while they dispensed regular indulgences. I had had no right to hear Valentine's confession nor to pardon his sins, and I had done both. I'd absolved him. 'In nomine Patris... ego te absolvo.'

  I could not evade feeling an absolute obligation to the spirit of those words. I should not - and could not - save myself with the knowledge he'd entrusted to me as a priest when he was dying. On the other hand, I could in good conscience use what he'd left me in his will.

  I hadn't come across, in his books and papers, any one single revelation that could have been found by ransacking his house. The pieces had been there, but obscured and devious. I'd sorted those out a good deal by luck. I wished there were a more conclusive artifact than 'The Gang' photo with which to bait the safe, but I'd come to the conclusion that there wasn't one. Valentine hadn't written down his ultimate sin; he'd confessed it in his last lucid breaths but he had never meant it to live after him. He hadn't left any exact concrete record of his twenty-six-year-old secret.

  Two and a half hours after I'd talked to Howard, my visitor arrived. He came to my sitting-room door calling my name, and when I didn't at first reply he walked in boldly and closed the door behind him. I heard it latch. I heard him open the fitment and press the buttons to open the safe.

  I ambled to my bedroom door and greeted him.

  “Hello, Roddy.”

  He was dressed in blazer, shirt and tie. He looked a pillar of show-jumping rectitude; and he held 'The Gang' photo.

  “Looking for something?” I asked.

  “Er ...” Roddy Visborough said civilly, “yes, actually. Bit of an imposition, I'm afraid, but one of the children I teach has begged me to get Nash Rourke's autograph. Howard swears you'll ask him for it.”

  He laid the photo on the table and came towards me holding out an autograph album and a pen.

  It was so very unexpected that I forgot Professor Derry's warning - anything he possesses may hide a knife - and I let him get too close.

  He dropped the autograph book at my feet, and when I automatically looked down at it, he pulled his gold-coloured pen apart with a movement too fast for me to follow, and lunged at me with it.

  The revealed stiletto point went straight through my jersey and shirt and hit solid polymer over my heart.

  Himself flummoxed, disbelieving, Roddy dropped the pen and reached for his tie, and with a tug produced from under it a much larger knife, fearsomely lethal, which I later saw to be a triangular blade like a flat trowel fixed to a bar which led between his fingers to a grip within his hand.

  At the time I saw only the triangular blade that seemed to grow like an integral part of his fist, the wide end across his knuckles, the point protruding five or more inches ahead.

  He slashed at my throat instantly and found Robbie's handiwork foiling him there also, and with one quick movement flicked the blade higher so that it cut my chin and ran sharply up across my cheek to above my ear.

  I hadn't meant to have to fight him. I wasn't good at it. And how could anyone fight an opponent so appallingly armed, when one had no defence except fists?

  He meant to kill me. I saw it in his face. He was going to get blood on his elegant clothes. One thinks such stupid non sequiturs at moments of maximum peril. He worked out that I wore a body protector from neck to waist and aimed at more vulnerable areas and punched his awful triangular blade into my left arm several times as I tried to shield my eyes from damage while unsuccessfully trying to get behind him to put my right arm round his throat.

  I tried to evade him. We circled the bedroom. He sought to keep himself between me and the door while he killed me.

  There were scarlet splatters all over the place; a scarlet river down my left hand. I yelled with what breath I could muster for my damned bodyguard to come to my rescue and nothing happened except that I began to believe that whatever happened to Roddy afterwards I wouldn't be there to care.
/>   I tugged the bedspread off the bed and threw it at him, and by good fortune it landed over his right hand. I sprang at him. I rolled against him, wrapping his right arm closely. I overbalanced him: I put one leg behind his and levered him backwards off his feet, and scrambled with him on the floor, enveloping him ever more deeply in the bedspread until he was cocooned in it, until I lay over him bleeding while he tried to heave me off.

  I don't know what would eventually have happened, but at that moment my bodyguard finally showed up.

  He arrived in the bedroom doorway, saying enquiringly, “Mr Lyon?”

  I was past answering him sensibly. I said, “Fetch someone.” Hardly a Nash Rourke-hero sort of speech.

  He took me literally, anyway. I vaguely heard him talking on the sitting-room telephone and soon my rooms seemed full of people. Moncrieff, Nash himself, large men from the Bedford Lodge kitchen staff who sat on the wriggling bedspread, and eventually people saying they were policemen and paramedics and so on.

  I apologised to the hotel manager for the blood. Oh, well.

  “Where the hell were you?” I asked my bodyguard. “Didn't you see that my door was shut?”

  “Yes, Mr Lyon.”

  “Well then?”

  “But, Mr Lyon,” he said in righteous self-justification, “sometimes I have to go to the bathroom.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Early on Thursday morning I sat on a windy sand dune waiting for the sun to rise over Happisburgh beach.

  O'Hara, back in a panic from LA, sat shivering beside me. About forty people, the various location crews, came and went from the vehicles parked close behind the dunes, and out on the wet expanse of firm sand left clean and unmarked by the ebbing tide, Moncrieff worked the cameras, lights and gantry that had been taken out there bolted onto a caterpillar-tracked orange beach-cleaning monster that could bull­doze wrecks if need be.

  Far off to the left, Ziggy waited with the Viking horses. Between him and us, Ed commanded a second camera crew, one that would give us side-on shots.

  We had held a rehearsal on the ebb tide the evening before and knew from the churned-up state of the sand afterwards that we needed to get the first shoot right. Ziggy was confident, Moncrieff was confident, O'Hara was confident: I fidgeted.

  We needed a decent sunrise. We could fudge together an impression by using the blazing shots of the sky from the previous week; we could shine lights to get gleams in the horses' eyes, but we needed luck and the real thing to get the effect I truly wanted.

  I thought over the events of the past few days. There had been a micro-surgeon in the Cambridge hospital who'd sewn up my face with a hundred tiny black stitches that at present looked as if a millipede was climbing from my chin to my hairline, but which he swore would leave hardly a scar. The gouges in my left arm had given him and me more trouble, but at least they were out of sight. He expected everything to be healed in a week.

  Robbie Gill visited the hospital briefly early on Tuesday morning, taking away with him the Delta-cast jacket that had puzzled the night-nursing staff the evening before. He didn't explain why I'd been wearing it beyond. “An experiment in porosity - interesting.” He also told me he'd mentioned to his police colleague that Dorothea could now identify her attacker, and that as two knife nuts suddenly active in Newmarket were unlikely, why didn't they try her with a photo?

  I'd spent Tuesday afternoon talking to policemen, and by then (during Monday night) I'd decided what to say and what not.

  I heard later that they had already searched Roddy Visborough's cottage in Leicestershire and had found it packed with hidden unusual knives. They asked why I thought Roddy had attacked me.

  “He wanted the film stopped. He believes it harms his family's reputation.”

  They thought it not a good enough reason for attempted murder and, sighing at the vagaries of the world, I agreed with them. Did I know of any other reason? Sorry, no.

  Roddy Visborough, I was certain, would give them no other reason. Roddy Visborough would not say, “I was afraid Thomas Lyon would find out that I connived at a fake hanging of my aunt to cover up a sex orgy.”

  Roddy, 'the' show jumper, had had too much to lose. Roddy, Paul and Ridley must all have been aghast when their buried crime started coming back to haunt them. They'd tried to frighten me off first with threats, and when those hadn't worked, with terminal action.

  With knives.

  The police asked if I knew that Mr Visborough's fingerprints had been found all over Mrs Pannier's house, along with my own? “How extraordinary!” I said; “I'd never seen Mr Visborough in her house.”

  They said that, acting on information, they had that morning interviewed Mrs Pannier who had identified a police photograph of Mr Visborough as being the man who had attacked her.

  I said.

  They asked if I knew why Mrs Pannier had been attacked by Mr Visborough. No, I didn't.

  What connection was there between her and me?

  “I used to read to her blind brother,” I said. “He died of cancer ...”

  They knew.

  They wondered if the knife I'd found on the Heath, that was now in their possession, had anything to do with what had happened to me.

  “We all believed it was an attempt to get the film abandoned,” I said. “That's all.”

  I believed also, though I didn't say so, that it was Roddy who had given Ridley the trench knife and told him to frighten off Nash and, through him, the film.

  I believed Roddy had coerced Paul to ransack Dorothea's house with him, both of them looking for any giveaway account Valentine might have left of Sonia's death.

  Roddy had been the strongest of the three of them, and the most afraid.

  Prompted by Lucy, Ridley had obligingly passed on to Roddy the combination of my safe, and had told him that I knew far too much.

  Roddy, as I'd hoped, had revealed himself and his involvement, the mackerel coming to the sprat. I had lured him to come, had hoped he might bring with him another esoteric knife: I hadn't meant to get myself so cut.

  The police went away as if dissatisfied, but they were sure at the very least of two convictions for grievous bodily harm, and if, with all the modern available detection techniques, they couldn't prove Roddy Visborough had killed Paul Pannier, too bad. As for motive, they might conclude Paul had threatened in remorse to give Roddy away to the police for attacking Dorothea: near enough for belief. Near enough, anyway, for Dorothea to believe it, and be comforted.

  On Wednesday morning I discharged myself from the hospital and returned to Newmarket to be confronted by a furious Howard and an extremely upset Alison Visborough.

  “I told you you shouldn't have made changes to my book,” Howard raged. “Now see what you've done! Roddy is going to prison.”

  Alison looked in disbelief at the long millipede track up my face. “Rodbury wouldn't have done that!”

  “Rodbury did,” I said dryly. “Did he always have knives?”

  She hesitated. She was fair minded under the outrage. “I suppose ... perhaps ... he was secretive ...”

  “And he wouldn't let you join in his games.”

  She said “Oh,” blankly, and began re-evaluating her brother's psyche.

  Sitting on the Norfolk dunes I thought of her father, Rupert, and of his aborted political career. I thought it almost certain that the scandal that had caused his retreat was not that his sister-in-law had been mysteriously hanged, but that he'd learned - perhaps from Valentine or even from Jackson Wells - that his own son had been present at the mid-morning cover-up hanging, having intended to have sexual relations with his aunt. Rupert, upright man, had given his son show jumpers with which to redeem himself, but had stopped short of loving forgiveness and had left his own house to his daughter. Poor Rupert Visborough ... he hadn't deserved to become Gibber, but at least he would never know.

  O'Hara, huddling into his padded ex-army jacket, said that while I'd been out on the beach rehearsing the previous eve
ning, he'd got the projectionist to show him the rushes of the hanging.

  “What sort of certificate did we earn?” I asked. “PG-13? That's what we ideally want.”

  “Depends on the cutting. What gave you that view of her death?”

  “Howard holds forth on the catharsis of the primal scream.”

  “Shit, Thomas. That death wasn't any sort of therapy. That hanging had gut-churning vigour.”

  O'Hara blew on his fingers. “I hope these damn horses are worth this frigging cold.”

  The eastern sky turned from black to grey. I picked up the walkie-talkie and spoke again to Ed and also to Ziggy. Everything was ready. I wasn't to worry. All would be well.

  I thought of Valentine's powerful muscles, years ago.

  I had kept faith with his confession. No one through me would ever learn his truth.

  left the knife with Derry...”

  Valentine's strength had fashioned for his great friend Professor Deny a unique knife to add to his collection: a steel knife with a spear head and a candy-twisted handle, unlike any ordinary weapon.

  I killed the Cornish boy...”

  One of the Gang, perhaps even Pig Falmouth himself, had told Valentine how Sonia had died, and in an overwhelming, towering tidal wave of anger and grief and guilt he had snatched up the spear and plunged it deep into the jockey's body.

  It had to have happened in some way like that. Valentine had loved Sonia in secret. He'd learned about paraphilia to solve Derry's impotence problem, and he'd shown the encyclopaedia article to Pig, no doubt light-heartedly - “I say, Pig, just look at this!” - and Pig had told his friends.

  destroyed all their lives...” I guessed he might have meant he ruined their lives by giving them the idea of their fatal game. They had destroyed their own lives, but guilt could lack logic.

  Valentine had killed Pig Falmouth in the wild, uncontainable sort of anger and grief that had caused Jackson Wells to beat his brother Ridley near to death: and Valentine himself had then written the gossip column that reported Pig's departure to work in Australia, that everyone had believed.