Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,18

time I’d called on him, what had brought me back to Newmarket, and when I’d explained about Howard’s book – Unstable Times – and the film we were to make of it, he’d said he’d heard of the book but he hadn’t bought it, since at the time of its publication his eyesight had been fast deteriorating.

‘I hear it’s a load of rubbish,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘I knew Jacksy Wells. I often shod his horses. He never murdered that mousey wife of his, he hadn’t got the guts.’

‘The book doesn’t say he did,’ I assured him.

‘And I hear it doesn’t say he didn’t, neither.’

‘Well, no.’

‘It wasn’t worth writing a book about it. Waste of time making a film.’

I’d smiled. Film-makers notoriously and wilfully distorted historical facts. Films knowingly based on lies could get nominated for Oscars.

‘What was she like?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘Jackson Wells’s wife.’

‘Mousey, like I said. Funny, I can’t remember her clearly. She wasn’t one of those trainer’s wives who run the whole stable. Mouths like cesspits, some of them had in the old days. Jackson Wells’s wife, you wouldn’t have known she existed. I hear she’s halfway to a whore in the book, poor little bitch.’

‘Did she hang herself?’

‘Search me,’ Valentine said. ‘I only shod the horses. The fuss died down pretty fast for lack of clues and evidence, but of course it did Jackson Wells in as a trainer. I mean, would you send your horses to a man who’d maybe killed his wife?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did anyone else.’

‘The book says she had a lover,’ 1 said.

‘Did she?’ Valentine pondered. ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘But then, Dorothea could have a lover here under my nose and I wouldn’t care. Good luck to her, if she did.’

‘You’re a wicked old man, Valentine.’

‘Nobody’s an angel,’ he said.

I looked at his empty chair and remembered his desperate half-whisper… ‘I killed the Cornish boy…’

Maybe The Cornish Boy was a horse.

Steps sounded on the path outside and the doorbell rang, ding-dong. I waited so as not to appear to be usurping Paul’s desired status as head of the household, but it was in fact Dorothea who went to answer the summons.

‘Come in, Robbie,’ she said, the loud relief in her voice reaching me clearly. ‘How dear of you to come.’

‘That son of yours!’ The doctor’s voice held dislike.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Dorothea said placatingly.

‘Not your fault.’

Dorothea let him in and closed the front door, and I opened the door of Valentine’s sitting-room to say hello.

Robbie Gill shook my hand perfunctorily. ‘Glad you’ve got company,’ he told Dorothea. ‘Now, about Valentine?’

All three of us went quietly into the old man’s dimly-lit room, followed importantly by Paul who immediately flooded the scene again with the overhead bulb. Perhaps it was only the director in me, I thought, that found this harsh insistence unpalatable. Certainly Robbie Gill made no protest but set about establishing clinically what was evident to any eye, that Valentine – the he who had lived in that chemical shell – had left it.

‘What time did he die?’ he asked Dorothea, his pen poised over a clipboard.

‘I don’t know to the minute,’ she said unhappily.

‘Around one o’clock,’ I said.

‘Mother was asleep,’ Paul accused unforgivingly. ‘She confessed it. She doesn’t know when he died.’

Robbie Gill gave him an expressionless stare and without comment wrote 0100 on his clipboard, showing it to me and Dorothea.

‘I’ll see to the paperwork for you,’ he said to Dorothea. ‘But you’ll need to get an undertaker.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Paul interrupted. ‘I’ll take charge of all that.’

No one demurred. Taking important charge of relatively minor matters suited Paul’s character perfectly: and perhaps, I thought, he would be so fulfillingly involved that he would forget about the books. There was no harm, however, in seeking to give Dorothea a close line of defence.

‘How about,’ I suggested to her, ‘letting me go across to your friend Betty’s house, and asking her to come over to keep you company?’

‘Good idea,’ Robbie Gill agreed emphatically.

‘No need for that!’ Paul objected.

‘It’s a bit early, dear,’ Dorothea protested, looking at the clock, but seeming hopeful nevertheless.

I crossed the road to the friend’s house and woke the friend’s husband, whose initial irritation turned to a resigned shrug.

‘Poor old sod,’ he said, apparently referring to Valentine. ‘We’ll look after Dorothea.’

‘Her son Paul is with her,’ I told him.

‘Betty,’ he said intensely, ‘will be over straight away.’

I smiled at the owner of the bristly chin and the crumpled pyjamas and dressing gown. Paul had a galvanic effect on everyone else’s