Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,51

it, feeling I’d left my senses back on Happisburgh beach.

‘Let’s get this straight,’ I said. ‘You poured out your grudges to Alison Visborough, whose mother is Audrey Visborough, who is the widow of the deceased Rupert Visborough, known in your book as Cibber. Right so far?’

He nodded unhappily.

‘And,’ I said, ‘when you read Rupert Visborough’s obituary, and got the idea for your book, you did not go to see Jackson Wells, whose wife hanged, but you did go to see the dead woman’s sister, Audrey Visborough.’

‘Well… I suppose so.’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it was she who told you about her sister having dream lovers?’

‘Er…’

‘Howard!’

‘Look,’ he said, with a recurrence of petulance, ‘I don’t have to answer all these questions.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘They wouldn’t like it.’

‘Audrey and Alison wouldn’t, do you mean?’

He nodded. ‘And Roddy.’

‘Who’s Roddy?’

‘Alison’s brother.’

Give me strength, I thought. I said, ‘Is this right? Rupert Visborough married Audrey; they had a daughter Alison and a son Roddy?’

‘I don’t see why you make it sound so difficult.’

‘But you didn’t put the children in your book.’

‘They’re not children,’ Howard objected. ‘They’re as old as I am.’

Howard was forty-five.

‘When you bitched to Alison,’ I asked, ‘why did she get your complaints printed in the Drumbeat? And how?’

He stood up abruptly. ‘I didn’t know she was going to do it. I didn’t ask her to. If you want to know, I was shocked when I read the paper. I didn’t mean what I said to her to be published like that.’

‘Have you talked to her since?’

He said defensively, ‘She thought she was helping me.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

He took offence and stalked off, heading for the way out to the world.

With a feeling of medium irritation I went upstairs and found my message light flashing. O’Hara, it seemed, would be pleased by my appearance in his suite.

I walked the carpeted passages. ‘Did you know,’ he asked, opening his door to my knock, ‘that Howard is back?’

We discussed Howard. O’Hara’s use of words was profligate.

‘Howard told me,’ I said, only half successfully damming O’Hara’s flow, ‘that he poured out his woes to a lady friend who promptly relayed them to the Drumbeat but without his knowledge.’

‘What?’

I told O’Hara about the Visboroughs.

He repeated in disbelief, ‘Audrey, Alison and Roddy?’

‘And God knows who else.’

‘Howard,’ he pronounced heavily, ‘is off his trolley.’

‘He’s naive. Doesn’t make him a bad writer.’

O’Hara agreed gloomily. ‘Dream lovers are naive.’ He thought things over. ‘I’ll have to discuss his breach of contract again with the moguls. I suppose you’ve never met this disastrous Alison?’

I shook my head.

‘Someone will have to switch on her lights.’

‘Mm,’ I paused. ‘You?’

O’Hara ducked it. ‘What time do you have, yourself?’

‘Oh, no,’ I protested. ‘We know her opinion of me.’

‘All the same,’ O’Hara smiled, ‘if you want to, you can charm the birds off the trees.’

‘I don’t know where she lives.’

‘I’ll find out,’ he promised, ‘and you can do the damage control.’

He seemed all of a sudden happier. Suing Howard would have dragged on and on and could well have alienated the very lending-library customers his name was supposed to attract into the cinema. Never attack anyone, old Valentine had once written, unless you’ve counted the cost of winning.

O’Hara asked if I’d found Jackson Wells, but seemed disappointed in the sweetness and light of his household.

‘Do you think he murdered his wife?’ he asked curiously.

‘No one could ever prove it.’

‘But do you think he did?’

I paused. ‘I don’t know.’

O’Hara shrugged the thought away and, as he wanted to see the previous day’s rushes, we drove along to the stable yard. There, in the vast house, one small room had been rigged for projection, with a screen and six chairs but no luxury. The windows were blacked out to foil peepers, and the reels of previously printed film were secured in racks in there by every fancy lock and fireproofing invented. The moguls had in this case spent lavishly: no one could afford to start shooting all over again.

That morning I worked the projector myself. O’Hara sat impassively while the horses galloped up the training hill and breasted it into sunlight. I’d been right, I saw, about the third attempt, and my flourish of trumpets looked great. Moncrieff had stopped the cameras after that. The only shot left on the reel was the one I’d made myself; the line of horses on the skyline, black against sunshine. The worst of luck, I thought, that with all that raw film in our possession, we had no footage at all that included the rider whose