Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,42

not,’ he said positively. ‘I do not want to pick up the crusty mannerisms of some bitter old grouch.’

As I didn’t want him to, either, I felt relieved rather than regretful. I said, ‘I’ll be back by ten this evening. I’ve a meeting scheduled then with Moncrieff and Ziggy Keene.’

‘Ziggy who?’ Nash asked.

‘Stuntman,’ I said. ‘No one better on a horse.’

‘Better than Ivan?’

I smiled. ‘He costs ten times as much and he’s worth twenty.’

‘This beach business?’ O’Hara asked.

I nodded.

‘What beach business?’ Nash wanted to know.

‘Don’t ask,’ O’Hara told him humorously. ‘Our boy has visions. Sometimes they work.’

‘What vision?’ Nash asked me,

‘He can’t tell you,’ O’Hara answered for me. ‘But when he sees it, so will we.’

Nash sighed. O’Hara went on, ‘Talking of seeing, when will today’s dailies be ready?’

‘Tomorrow morning, as usual,’ I assured him. ‘When the van comes back.’

‘Good.’

We were sending our exposed film to London every day by courier, to have it processed there overnight in a laboratory specialising in Technicolor. The film travelled each way in a London-based van, with the driver and an accompanying guard spending their nights in London and their days in Newmarket: and so far the arrangement had thankfully proved hitchless.

Each day, after seeing the previous day’s rushes, I entered on a complicated chart the scenes and takes that I thought we should use on screen, roughly editing the film as I went along. It both clarified my own mind and saved a great deal of time in the overall editing period later on. Some directors liked to work with the film’s appointed editor always at hand making decisions throughout on the dailies, but I preferred to do it myself, even if sometimes it took half the night, as it gave me more control over the eventual product. The rough cut, the bones and shape of the finished film, would be in that way my own work.

Stand or fall, my own work. Life on the leaning tower.

I set off westwards from Newmarket with only a vague idea of where I was headed and an even vaguer idea of what I would say when I got there.

Perhaps postponing the moment, but anyway because the city lay on my route, I drove first into Cambridge and stopped at the hospital housing Dorothea. Enquiries on the telephone had produced merely ‘She’s comfortable’ reports, which could mean anything from near death to doped to the eyeballs and, predictably, my arrival at the nurses’ desk gained me no access to their patient.

‘Sorry, no visitors.’

Nothing would budge them. Positively no visitors, except for her son. I could probably speak to him, if I liked.

‘Is he here?’ I asked, wondering why I should be surprised. Nothing, after all, would unstick Paul from a full-blown crisis.

One of the nurses obligingly went to tell him of my presence, coming back with him in tow.

‘Mother is not well enough to see you,’ he announced proprietorially. ‘Also, she is sleeping.’

We eyed each other in mutual dislike.

‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘What do the doctors say?’

‘She is in intensive care.’ His bulletin voice sounded overpompous, even for him.

I waited. In the end he amplified, ‘Unless there are complications, she will recover.’

Great, I thought. ‘Has she said who attacked her?’

‘She is not yet lucid.’

I waited again, but this time without results. After he began to show signs of simply walking off to end the exchange, I said, ‘Have you seen the state of her house?’

He answered with a frown, ‘I went there this morning. The police took my fingerprints!’ He sounded outraged.

‘They took mine also,’ I said mildly. ‘Please return my books.’

‘Do what?’

‘Return Valentine’s books and papers.’

He stared with a mixture of indignation and hatred, ‘I didn’t take Valentine’s books. You did.’

‘I did not.’

He glared righteously. ‘Mother locked the door and refused – refused – to give me the key. Her own son!’

‘The key was in the open door last night,’ I said. ‘And the books had gone.’

‘Because you had taken them. I certainly did not.’

I began to believe his protestations of innocence, unlikely as they were.

But if he hadn’t taken the things, who on earth had? The damage inside the house and the attack on Dorothea spoke of violence and speed. Moving a wall of books and cupboardsful of papers out of the house spoke of thoroughness and time. And Robbie Gill had been sure the rampage had happened before the attack on Dorothea.

None of it made any sense.

‘Why,’ I asked, ‘were you so extremely anxious to get your hands on those books?’

Somewhere in his