‘Oh. Well – were you watching the Lincoln at Doncaster yesterday?’
‘Yes, I was, but…’ He wrinkled his forehead, not clearly remembering.
‘My name,’ I said, ‘is Thomas Lyon, and I was a friend of Valentine Clark.’
A cloud crossed Jackson Wells’s sunny landscape.
‘Poor old bugger died this week,’ he said. My name finally registered. ‘Thomas Lyon. Not him that’s making the film?’
‘Him,’ I agreed.
‘I did see you on the telly yesterday, then, with Nash Rourke.’
He summed me up in a short silence, and rubbed the top of his nose indecisively on the back of his hand.
I said, ‘I don’t want to do you any harm in the making of this film. I came to ask you if there is anything you particularly don’t want said. Because sometimes,’ I explained, ‘one can invent things – or think one invents them – that turn out to be damaging-ly true.’
He thought it over and finally said, ‘You’d better come in, I reckon.’
‘Thank you.’
He led me into a small room near the door; a room unlived in and furnished only with an upright piano, a piano stool, a hard wooden chair and a closed cupboard. He himself sat on the piano stool and waved me to the chair.
‘Do you play?’ I asked civilly, indicating the piano.
‘My daughter does. Lucy, you met her.’
‘Mm,’ I nodded. I took a breath; said, ‘Actually, I came to ask you about Yvonne.’
‘Who?’
‘Yvonne. Your wife.’
‘Sonia,’ he said heavily. ‘Her name was Sonia.’
‘It was Yvonne in Howard Tyler’s book.’
‘Aye,’ he agreed. ‘Yvonne. I read it. The book.’
He seemed to feel no anger or grief, so I asked, ‘What did you think of it?’
Unexpectedly, he laughed. ‘Load of rubbish. Dream lovers! And that upper-class wimp in the book, that was supposed to be me! Cobblers.’
‘You’re going to be far from a wimp in the film.’
‘Is it true, then? Nash Rourke is me?
‘He’s the man whose wife is found hanged, yes.’
‘You know what?’ The sunniness shone in his manner and the smile in his eyes surely couldn’t be faked. ‘It’s all so bloody long ago. I don’t give a piss what you say in the film. I can hardly remember Sonia, and that’s a fact. It was a different life. I left it behind. Did a bunk, if you like. I got fed up with the whole bloody shooting match. See, I was twenty-two when I married Sonia and not yet twenty-five when she died, and I was only a kid really. A kid playing at being a big Newmarket racehorse trainer. After that business, people started taking their horses away, so I packed it in and came here instead, and this life’s OK, mate, no regrets.’
As he seemed to discuss it quite easily I asked, ‘Why… er… why did your wife die?’
‘Call her Sonia. I don’t think of her as my wife. My wife’s here in this house. Lucy’s mother. We’ve been wed twenty-three years now and we’ll stay that way.’
There was an obvious self-contentment in his whole personality. He had the weathered complexion and thread-veined cheeks of an outdoors man, his eyebrows dramatically blond against the tanned skin. Blue eyes held no guile. His teeth looked naturally good, even and white. No tension showed in his long limbs or sturdy neck. I thought him no great brain, but one of nature’s lucky accidents, a person who could be happy with little.
‘Do you mind me asking about her?’ I said.
‘Sonia? Not really. I can’t tell you why she died, though, because I don’t know.’
That was, I thought, the first lie he’d told me.
‘The police had me in,’ he smiled. ‘Helping with their enquiries, they told the press. So of course everyone thought I’d done it. Questions! Days of them. I just said I didn’t know why she died. I said it over and over. They did go on a bit. They thought they’d get me to confess, see?’ He laughed. ‘Seems they do sometimes get fools to confess to things they haven’t done. I can’t see how that happens, can you? If you haven’t done something, you just keep on saying it. In England, leastwise. No actual thumbscrews, see? They ban actual thumbscrews here, see?’ He laughed again at his joke. ‘I told them to piss off and find out who really killed her, but they never managed that. They couldn’t see farther than getting me to confess. I mean, it was daft. Would you confess to murdering someone if you hadn’t?’