revealed peril. Moncrieff looked shocked. Nash grew still.
‘He dropped it,’ I explained. ‘He turned to come back for it. Then he saw me chasing him and decided on flight.’
Nash said, ‘He lunged at Ivan with that?’
I nodded. ‘You’ll have a bodyguard from now on.’
He looked at me and made no further protest. One of the policemen produced a large paper bag and with care not to smudge possible fingerprints lifted the knife from the grass.
‘There weren’t any touts,’ I remarked.
‘What?’ asked Nash.
‘Every day except Sunday there are watchers down there on the edge of the town, with binoculars.’ I pointed. ‘Information is their trade. They know every horse on the Heath. They pass titbits of training progress to newspapermen and to bookmakers. If they’d only been here today, our knifeman wouldn’t have been able to vanish so easily.’
One of the policemen nodded. ‘So who knew, sir, that Mr Rourke would be out here this Sunday morning?’
‘About sixty people,’ I said. ‘Everyone working on the film knows the shooting schedule a couple of days in advance.’ I paused. ‘There were a few people out watching, as there always are with film-making, but we have staff moving them away as far as possible if we don’t want them in shot. Then, too, we started work today before sunrise.’ I looked round the Heath. Despite our activity, few people were about. Cars went past us on the road without slowing. The Heath looked wide and peaceful, the last place for death.
As Nash had pointed out, no one had been hurt. The police took their notes, the knife and their possible theories back into Newmarket and, with a feeling of imminent doom sitting like vultures on our shoulders, I summoned the camera crews back to work and made the magical initial meeting of Nash and Silva come to life.
It was nearly three in the afternoon by the time we’d finished on the Heath. Just as I returned to the stables four large motor horseboxes arrived to transport to Huntingdon racecourse all the horses, their saddles, bridles, rugs and other gear and their feed and bedding, besides the lads and their own travel bags. Our horsemaster seemed to be managing fine. Despite the early morning upset everyone involved seemed to hum in a holiday mood.
O’Hara banished the temporary euphoria, arriving in the yard by car and scrambling out angrily to demand of me loudly, ‘What in hell’s teeth’s going on?’
‘Going to Huntingdon,’ I said.
‘Thomas. I’m not talking about goddam Huntingdon. It’s on the car radio that some maniac attacked Nash with a knife. VC hat in buggery happened?’
I tried to tell him but he was too agitated to listen.
‘Where’s Nash?’ he demanded.
‘In the house getting his make-up off.’
He strode impatiently away and through the house’s rear door, leaving me to re-start the transportation and set the wagon-train rolling, even though the pioneers no longer sang.
Moncrieff was supposed to be having a rare afternoon off. I told him he deserved it and to scarper, which he rapidly did, hoping O’Hara wouldn’t reappear too soon.
Alone for a change, I leaned against the bottom half of a stable door, listening to the unaccustomed silence and thinking of knives. Valentine’s old voice murmured in my head… ‘I left the knife with Derry…’
The world was full of knives.
Who was Derry?
O’Hara and Nash came out of the house together looking more cheerful than I’d feared.
‘I spent half the night talking to Hollywood,’ O’Hara announced. ‘I reminded them that yanking the director in mid-film almost inevitably led to critical disaster, as reviewers always latch onto that fact firstly and spend most of their column speculating on how much better it would have been to have left things alone.’
‘However untrue,’ Nash commented dryly.
‘In this case,’ O’Hara told him firmly, ‘you said, if I remember, that if they sacked Thomas they sacked you too.’
‘Yeah. Crazy.’
O’Hara nodded. ‘Anyway, I’ll be plugging the line that the attack on the stuntman is positive publicity, not bad. By the time this movie gets to distribution, the public will be fired up to see it.’
He sounded, I thought, as though he had had to convince himself first, but I was certainly not going to argue.
I asked instead, ‘Do you need me around, then, for the next several hours?’
‘I guess not.’ He sounded doubtful, stifling curiosity.
‘Late Sunday afternoon,’ I explained, ‘is a fairly mellow time for surprise calls on farmers.’
O’Hara worked it out. ‘Jackson Wells!’
‘Right.’ I turned to Nash. ‘Do you want to meet the man you’re playing?’
‘No, I do