Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,12

a bit, and asked a question.

‘How different is the whole script than the one I saw originally?’

‘There’s more action, more bitterness and a lot more suspense.’

‘But my character – this guy – he still doesn’t kill his wife, does he?’

‘No. But there’s doubt about it right to the end, now.’

Nash looked philosophical. ‘O’Hara sweet-talked me into this,’ he said. ‘I had three months free between projects. Fill them, he said. Nice little movie about horseracing. O’Hara knows I’m a sucker for the horses. An old real-life scandal, he tells me, written by our world-famous Howard, who of course I’ve heard of. Prestige movie, not a sink-without-trace, O’Hara says. Director? I ask. He’s young, O’Hara says. You won’t have worked with him before. Too damn right, I haven’t. Trust me, O’Hara says.’

‘Trust me,’ I said.

Nash gave me one of the smiles an alligator would be proud of, the sort that in his Westerns had the baddies flinging themselves sideways in shoot-outs.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘is the opening day of the main Flat racing season in England.’

‘I know it.’

‘They run the Lincoln Handicap on Saturday.’

Nash nodded. ‘At Doncaster. Where’s Doncaster?’

‘Seventy miles north of here. Less than an hour by helicopter. Do you want to go?’

Nash stared. ‘You’re bribing me!’

‘Sure.’

‘What about insurance?’

‘I cleared it with O’Hara.’

‘Be damned!’ he said.

He stood up abruptly in amused good humour and began measuring his distances in paces round the set.

‘It says in the script,’ he said, ‘that I stand on the mat. Is this the mat, this thing across the open end of the table?’

‘Yes. It’s actually a bit of carpet. Historically the person accused at a Newmarket horse racing enquiry had to stand there, on the carpet, and that’s the origin of the phrase, to be carpeted.’

‘Poor bastards.’

He stood on the carpet and quietly said his lines, repeating and memorising them, putting in pauses and gestures, shifting his weight as if in frustration and finally marching the inside distance of the horseshoe to lean menacingly over the top chair, which would contain Cibber, the inquisitor.

‘And I yell,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

With the fury at that point silent, he murmured the shout of protest, and in time returned to his former seat beside me.

‘What happened to those people in real life?’ he asked. ‘Howard swears what he’s written are the true events. O’Hara tells me you’re sure they’re not, because no one’s screaming foul. So what really did happen?’

I sighed. ‘Howard’s guessing. Also he’s playing safe. For a start, none of the people who were really involved are called by their real names in his book. And I don’t honestly know more than anyone else, because it all happened in this town twenty-six years ago, when I was only four. I can’t remember even hearing about it then, and in any case the whole thing fizzled out. The trainer you’re playing was a man called Jackson Wells. His wife was found hanged in one of the boxes in his stable yard, and a lot of people thought he’d done it. His wife had had a lover. His wife’s sister was married to a member of the Jockey Club. That’s about as far as the known facts go. No one could ever prove Jackson Wells had hanged his wife and he swore he hadn’t.’

‘Howard says he’s still alive.’

I nodded. ‘The scandal finished him in racing. He could never prove he hadn’t hanged his wife and although the Jockey Club didn’t actually take away his licence, people stopped sending him horses. He sold his place and bought a farm in Oxfordshire, I think, and got married again. He must be nearly sixty now, I suppose, There apparently hasn’t been any reaction at all from him, and Howard’s book’s been out over a year.’

‘So he won’t come bursting onto the set here swinging a noose to lynch me.’

‘Believe in his innocence,’ I said.

‘Oh, I do.’

‘Our film is fiction,’ I said. ‘The real Jackson Wells was a middle-ability man with a middle-sized training stable and no outstanding personality. He wasn’t the upper-class powerful figure in Howard’s book, still less was he the tough, wronged, resourceful conqueror we’ll make of you before we’re done.’

‘O’Hara promised an up-beat ending.’

‘He’ll get it.’

‘But the script doesn’t say who did hang the wife, only who didn’t.’

I said, ‘That’s because Howard doesn’t know and can’t make up his mind what to invent. Haven’t you read Howard’s book?’

‘I never read the books scripts are written from. I find it’s too often confusing and contradictory.’

‘Just as well,’ I said, smiling.