under two years. This new one had by far the biggest budget. I loved the work, I was lucky to be wanted, I felt no flicker of regret: I just didn’t seem to have time to look for a wife.
One day, I guessed, it might happen like a thunderbolt. The sides, however, had to date vouchsafed only scattered showers, and Lucy looked like a continuing drought.
Someone unexpectedly knocked my elbow. I whirled round with surging heartbeat and found myself face to face with Moncrieff.
‘Jumpy!’ he said, watching me reach for composure. ‘What were you expecting? A tiger?’
‘With claws,’ I agreed. I got things under control and we discussed the next scene.
‘Are you all right?’ Moncrieff asked, puzzled. ‘Not ill?’
Not ill, I thought, but plain scared. I said, ‘Everything’s fine. But… er… some nutter wants to get the film stopped, and if you see anyone in my area raising a blunt instrument, give me a holler.’
His eyebrows rose. ‘Is that why O’Hara has been standing behind you whenever he can?’
‘I guess so.’
He thought it over. ‘Nasty knife, that, on the gallops.’ A pause. ‘It got effing close to Ivan.’
‘Do me a favour and don’t remind me.’
‘Just keep my eyes open?’
‘Got it.’
We lit and shot some non-speaking takes of Nash’s emotions during the race. The block of crowd behind him, mostly bonafide extras but some townspeople, also Mrs Wells, Lucy, Ridley and Nash’s bodyguards, responded faithfully to Ed’s exhortations, looking for each shot to where he pointed, oohing and aahing, showing anxiety, showing excitement and finally cheering wildly as they watched in memory the horses racing to the finish.
All of the faces except Nash’s would be very slightly out of focus, thanks to Moncrieff’s wizardry with lenses. One of his favourite lenses had to be focussed principally on the light in the actor’s eyes. Everything else on the actor’s head would be a tiny shade fuzzy, his neck, hair, the lot.
‘The daylight’s going,’ Moncrieff told me eventually, though to any eye but his the change was too slight to notice. ‘We should wrap for today.’
Ed through his megaphone thanked the citizens of Huntingdon for their work and invited them back for the morrow. They clapped. Happy faces all round. Nash signed autographs with the bodyguards at his shoulders.
Lucy, glowing with the day’s pleasures, walked to where I was checking through the following day’s schedule with O’Hara, and handed me a flat white box about a foot long by three inches wide, fastened shut with a rubber band.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A boy asked me to give it to you.’
‘What boy?’
‘Just a boy. A present, he said. Aren’t you going to open it?’
O’Hara took it out of my hands, stripped off the rubber band and cautiously opened the box himself. Inside, on a bed of crunched up white office paper, lay a knife.
I swallowed. The knife had a handle of dark polished wood, ridged round and round to give a good grip. There was a businesslike black hilt and a narrow black blade nearly six inches long: all in all, good looking and efficient.
‘Wow,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s beautiful.’
O’Hara closed the box without touching the knife and, restoring the rubber band, stuck it in his outside jacket pocket. I thought it was better to get a knife in a box than in the body.
‘We should stop all boys from leaving,’ O’Hara said, but he could see, as I could, that it was already too late. Half of the crowd had already walked homewards through the gates.
‘Is something the matter?’ Lucy asked, frowning, sensing our alarm.
‘No,’ I smiled at the blue eyes. ‘I hope you’ve had a good day.’
‘Spectacular!’
I kissed her cheek. In public, she allowed it. She said, ‘I’d better go, Dad’s waiting,’ and made a carefree departure, waving.
O’Hara took the white box from his pocket and carefully opened it again, picking out of the raised lid a folded strip of the same white paper. He handed it to me and I looked at its message.
Again a computer print-out, it said, ‘Tomorrow’.
O’Hara and I walked out together towards the cars and I told him about Dorothea and her injuries. I described again for him, as I had two days earlier, the knife that had been dropped on the Heath.
He stopped dead in mid-stride. ‘Are you saying,’ he demanded, ‘that your friend was attacked with that knife? The one on the Heath?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But,’ he protested, bemused, ‘what possible connection could there be between her and our film?’