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 17
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 sown 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.
'Amazing,' 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