film, but the camera on the truck was bolted to face backwards, as normally it was driven along in front of its subject, filming advancing cars, people or horses. If I stopped to turn the truck and change places to operate the camera my quarry would be too far off even for blow-ups, if not entirely out of sight.
I was just about to give up when the distant horse was suddenly and violently reined to a halt, the rider reversing his direction and starting back towards me. The truck’s engine raced. His head came up. He seemed to see me speeding down the hill towards him. He whirled his horse round again and galloped towards Newmarket at an even faster pace than before.
Even though the distance between us had closed, he’d travelled too far towards safety. It was already hard to distinguish his outline against the buildings ahead. I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t going to catch him, and if so I would settle for second best and try to discover what had made him stop and reverse.
I braked the truck to a standstill as near as I could judge to the place where he’d turned, then jumped out onto the grass, trying to see what he might have seen, that could have been important enough to interrupt his flight.
He’d been facing the town. I looked that way and could see nothing to alarm him. There seemed no reason for him to have doubled back, but no one escaping at that pace would have stopped unless he had to.
If I were filming it… why might he stop?
Because he’d dropped something.
The uphill stretch of well-grassed exercise ground was as wide as an airport runway and almost as long. I couldn’t be sure I was in the right place. If the rider had dropped something small I could search all day. If he had dropped something insignificant I wouldn’t see any importance in anything I might come across. Yet he had stopped.
I took a few irresolute strides. There was simply too much space. Grass all round; miles of it. I looked up the hill, to the brow, and saw all the film horses and riders standing there, like Indians appearing on the skyline in an old pioneer movie. The sun was rising behind them.
I’d dropped my walkie-talkie up there in my hurry. I decided to drive the truck back up the hill, having left a mark where I was currently standing, and get all the lads to walk down in that strung-out sideways fashion, to see if they could find anything odd on the ground.
I marked the spot by taking off my light blue sweater and dropping it in a heap: anything smaller couldn’t be seen. I walked back to climb into the truck.
The sun rose brilliantly over the hill, and in the grass twenty paces ahead of me, something glinted.
I went on foot to see what it was, as nothing should glint where racehorses worked; and I stood transfixed and breathless.
The escaping rider had dropped his knife.
No wonder he’d tried to retrieve it. I stared down at the thing which lay on the turf in front of my toes, and felt both awed and repelled. It was no ordinary knife. It had a wide double-edged blade about eight inches long, joined to a handle consisting of a bar with four finger holes like substantial rings attached to one side of it. The blade was steel and the grip yellowish, like dulled brass. Overall the knife, about a foot long, was thick, strong, frightening and infinitely deadly.
I looked up the hill. The lads still stood there, awaiting instructions.
One behaves as one is, I suppose. I returned to the truck, climbed into it and drove it round until it stood over the knife, so that no one could pick up that weapon or dislodge it; so that no horse could step on it and get cut.
Then I hopped into the back of the truck, set the camera rolling, and filmed the line of horsemen standing black against the risen sun.
Even though I was again staring unemployment in its implacable face, it seemed a shame to waste such a shot.
CHAPTER 7
I rearranged the day.
Everyone returned to the stable yard except Moncrieff, whom I left stationed behind the steering wheel of the camera truck with strict instructions not to move the wheels even if it were demanded of him by irate men whose job it was to keep vehicles off the Heath.