with audible regret, ‘I’ll be watching from the ground.’ I paused. ‘If you can possibly avoid it, don’t give us any flagrant grounds for an enquiry. There’s no enquiry in the script. Try not to cross. OK?’
I went outdoors through the deserted weighing-room that on a real race day would have been crowded with officials and trainers, and I watched for a moment the helpful people of Huntingdon arrive in droves, all dressed in racegoing clothes and carrying, in impressive numbers, binoculars. Ed, I saw, had done a fine job.
One of the film personnel came up to me and handed me an envelope, saying it was urgent. I thanked him perfunctorily, and he’d gone before I’d opened the message.
I unfolded the inside sheet of contents, and read the words:
Stop making this film or you will die by the knife today.
Oh, delightful.
It looked like a computer printout on anonymous white office paper.
O’Hara appeared, wanting to discuss a detail or two, and asked what was the matter. ‘Why are you frozen?’
I gave him the missive. ‘I’ve had death threats before,’ I pointed out.
‘Those were after the movie had been distributed. But we have to take this seriously.’ He flicked the page with a fingernail. ‘What are we going to do about it?’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘If you leave the set,’ O’Hara said plainly, ‘the movie automatically goes into recess. It would give us all time to find this bozo and slap him behind bars.’
‘We can’t stop the filming,’ I said. ‘After the Drumbeat article and the knife on the Heath… one more panic and the moguls will take complete fright and yank the whole movie for ever.’
O’Hara suspected it was true, but worriedly said, ‘This letter doesn’t just say you’ll die, it says you’ll die today.’
‘Mm.’
‘Thomas, you’re no good to us dead.’
‘What strikes me,’ I said, half-smiling at his pragmatism, ‘is that whoever sent this note doesn’t actually want to kill me, he wants to stop the film without being driven to drastic action. If he – or, I suppose, she – meant to stop the film by killing me, why not just do it? Why the preliminary melodrama? We’ll ignore it and press on.’
‘I’ll at least get you a bodyguard, like Nash.’
Nash, that day, had not one but two bodyguards in attendance but, as I reminded O’Hara, both of these bodyguards were well known to us.
‘If you bring in a stranger, you’re risking what you’re trying to avoid,’ I said. ‘In classic cases, it’s the bodyguards themselves that kill the victim.’ I tried a lie that I hoped would be true, and said, ‘I don’t think I’m in much danger, so just forget it.’
‘Difficult.’ He was mildly relieved, all the same, by my decision.
‘Keep the paper,’ I told him, ‘and keep the envelope.’ I gave it to him. ‘And let’s get on with the film.’
‘I still don’t like it.’
Nor did I, much; but delivering a death threat took little organisation or courage, and delivering a death by knife took both.
The knife intended for Nash had been incompetently dropped. Cling to that. Forget – for Christ’s sake forget – the intestines spilling out of Dorothea.
‘Who gave you the letter?’ O’Hara asked.
‘One of the grips. I’ve seen him around but I don’t know his name.’
There was never time to know the names of the between sixty and a hundred people working on a film on location. I hadn’t learned even the names of the horses, neither their registered names, nor the names the lads called them, nor their invented names for the film. I didn’t know the jockeys’ names, nor those of the bit-part actors. It was faces I remembered, horses’ faces, jockeys’ faces, actors’ faces from way back: my memory had always been chiefly visual.
I did forget for a while about the death threat: too much else to do.
As always with scenes involving two or three hundred people, the race took forever to set up. I spent ages on the walkie-talkie checking the status of each far-flung section but, at last, towards noon, everything seemed to be ready. The lads brought the horses from the stables and the jockeys mounted their balloted numbers and cantered down to the start.
I decided to ride on the camera truck with Moncrieff, to be nearer the action: and to guard my back, I cravenly and privately acknowledged.
Ed, equipped with loudspeaker, alerted the Huntingdon multitude to put on raceday faces and cheer the finish. The commentary, we had explained, would be missing; we had to record it separately