Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,43

brain warning bells sounded. I’d directed too many actors not to recognise the twitch of eye muscles that I’d so often prompted. Paul, I thought, had a motive beyond greed, but apart from seeing that it existed, I was not going to get any further.

‘It’s best to keep family possessions in the family,’ he pontificated, and fired a final shot before stalking off. ‘In view of my mother’s condition, the cremation planned for tomorrow morning has been indefinitely postponed. And do not plague her or me by coming here again. She is old and frail and I will look after her.’

I watched his large back-view bustle away, self-importance in every stride, the fronts of his suit jacket swinging out sideways in the motion.

I called loudly after him, ‘Paul!’

He stopped reluctantly and turned, standing four-square in the hospital passage and not returning. ‘What is it now?’

A forty-two-inch waist at least, I thought. A heavy leather belt held up his dark grey trousers. Cream shirt, diagonally striped tie. The podgy chin tilted upwards aggressively.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Never mind.’

He shrugged heavily with exasperation, and I went thoughtfully out to my car with my mind on telephones. I wore my mobile clipped to my belt, ready at all times. Paul, I’d noticed, carried a similar mobile, similarly clipped to his heavy belt.

Yesterday evening, I remembered, I’d been glad for Dorothea’s sake that Paul had answered from his Surrey home when I’d told him of the attack on his mother. Surrey was rock-solid alibi land.

If I’d liked or even trusted Paul it wouldn’t have occurred to me to check. As it was, I strove to remember the number I’d called, but could get no further than the first four digits and the last two, which wasn’t going to connect me anywhere.

I rang the operator and asked if the four first numbers were a regional exchange in Surrey.

‘No, sir,’ a crisp female voice said, ‘Those numbers are used for mobile telephones.’

Frozen, I asked if she could find me Paul Pannier’s mobile number: he lived near Godalming; the last two digits were seven seven. Obligingly, after a short pause for searching, she told me the numbers I’d forgotten, and I wrote them down and made my call.

Paul answered curtly, ‘Yes?’

I said nothing.

Paul said, ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

I didn’t speak.

‘I can’t hear you,’ he said crossly, and switched off his instrument.

So much for Surrey, I thought grimly. But even Paul – even Paul – couldn’t have slashed open his mother.

Sons had been known to murder their mothers…

But not fat forty-five-year-old men with inflated self-esteem.

Disturbed, I drove westwards to Oxfordshire and set about looking for Jackson Wells.

With again help from directory enquiries I discovered his general location and, by asking at garages and from people out walking dogs, I arrived in the end at Batwillow Farm, south of Abingdon, south of Oxford, sleepy and peaceful in the late Sunday afternoon.

I bumped slowly down a rutted unmade lane which ended in an untidy space outside a creeper-grown house. Weeds flourished. A set of old tyres leaned against a rotting wooden shed. An unsteady-looking stack of fencing timber seemed to be weathering into disintegration. A crusty old grouch of a man leaned on a farm gate and stared at me with disfavour.

Climbing out of the car and feeling depressed already, I asked, ‘Mr Wells?’

‘Eh?’

He was deaf.

‘Mr Wells,’ I shouted.

‘Aye.’

‘Can I talk to you?’ I shouted.

Hopeless, I thought.

The old man hadn’t heard. I tried again. He merely stared at me impassively, and then pointed at the house.

Unsure of what he intended, I nevertheless walked across to the obvious point of access and pressed a conspicuous doorbell.

There was no gentle ding-dong as with Dorothea: the clamour of the bell inside Batwillow Farm set one’s teeth rattling. The door was soon opened by a fair young blonde girl with ponytailed hair and to-die-for skin.

I said, ‘I’d like to talk to Mr Jackson Wells.’

‘OK,’ she nodded. ‘Hang on.’ She retreated into a hallway and turned left out of my sight, prompting the appearance presently of a lean loose-limbed blond man looking less than fifty.

‘You wanted me?’ he enquired.

I looked back to where the old deaf grump still leaned on the gate.

‘My father,’ the blond man said, following my gaze.

‘Mr Jackson Wells?’

‘That’s me,’ he said.

‘Oh!’

He grinned at my relief with an easy-going light-heartedness a hundred miles from my expectations. He waited, untroubled, for me to introduce myself, and then said slowly, ‘Have I seen you somewhere before?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘On