Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,75

and thought of her unfulfilled life: the disappointing brother, the adored but distant father, the mother who’d prevented a perhaps unsuitable match. An admirable woman overall.

‘I like you, Miss Visborough,’ I said.

She gave me a straight look. ‘Stop the film, then.’

I thought of her feelings, and I thought of knives.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

We completed the day’s shooting schedule in time to hold the semi-planned good-public-relations final autographing session outside the weighing-room. Nash, Silva and Cibber scribbled there with maximum charm.

Many Huntingdon residents were already wearing their UNSTABLE AT ALL TIMES T-shirts. Good humour abounded all around. The envisaged orderly line of autograph hunters dissolved into a friendly scrum. O’Hara signed books and racecards presented to him by people who knew a producer when they saw one, and I, too, signed my share. Howard modestly wrote in proffered copies of his book.

The happy crowd roamed around. Nash’s bodyguards were smiling. The lioness tried to stop him being kissed. My black-belt stood at my left hand so that I could sign with my right.

I felt a thud as if someone had cannoned into me, a knock hard enough to send me stumbling forward onto one knee and from there overbalancing to the ground. I fell onto my right side and felt the first pain, sharp and alarming, and I understood with searing clarity that I had a knife blade in my body and that I had fallen onto its hilt, and driven it in further.

CHAPTER 12

O’Hara, laughing, stretched his hand down to help me up.

I took his hand in my right, and reflexly accepted his assistance, and he saw the strong wince round my eyes and stopped laughing.

‘Did you hurt yourself?’

‘No.’ His pull had lifted me back to my knees. I said, ‘Lend me your jacket.’ He wore an old flying type of jacket, army-coloured, zip fronts hanging open. ‘Jacket,’ I repeated.

‘What?’ He leaned down towards me from his craggy height.

‘Lend me your jacket.’ I swallowed, making myself calm. ‘Lend me your jacket and get my driver to bring my car right up here to the weighing-room.’

‘Thomas!’ He was progressively concerned, bringing his head lower to hear me better. ‘What’s the matter?’

Clear-headed beyond normal, I said distinctly, ‘There is a knife in my side. Drape your jacket over my right shoulder, to hide it. Don’t make a fuss. Don’t frighten the moguls. Not a word to the press. Don’t tell the police. I am not dead, and the film will go on.’

He listened and understood but could hardly believe it. ‘Where’s the knife?’ he asked as if bewildered. ‘You look all right.’

‘It’s somewhere under my arm, above my elbow. Do lend me your jacket.’

‘I’ll get our doctor.’

‘No, O’Hara. No. Just the jacket.’

I put, I suppose, every scrap of the authority he’d given me into the words that were half plea, half order. In any case, without further objection, he took off his windproof jacket and draped it over my shoulder, revealing the heavy-knit army-coloured sweater he wore underneath.

Other eyes looked curiously our way. I put my left hand on O’Hara’s arm, as he was facing me, and managed the endless inches to my feet. I concentrated on his eyes, at the same height as my own.

‘The bastard,’ I said carefully with obvious anger, ‘is not going to succeed.’

‘Right,’ O’Hara said.

I relaxed infinitesimally, but in fact bloody-mindedness was the best anaesthetic invented, and too much sympathy would defeat me quicker than any pain from invaded ribs.

O’Hara sent one of Ed’s assistants to bring my car and reassuringly told a few enquirers that I’d fallen and wrenched my shoulder but that it was nothing to worry about.

I saw a jumbled panorama of familiar faces and couldn’t remember any of them having been near enough for attack. But crowd movement had been non-stop. Anyone I knew in England, or anyone they had employed – and professionals were for hire and invisible everywhere – could have stood among the autograph hunters and seized the moment. I concentrated mostly on remaining upright while rather wildly wondering what vital oigans lay inwards from just above one’s right elbow, and realising that though my skin might feel clammy from the shock waves of an outraged organism, I was not visibly leaking blood in any large quantities.

‘Your forehead’s sweating,’ O’Hara observed.

‘Never mind.’

‘Let me get the doctor.’

‘You’ll get Greg Compass and television coverage, if you do.’

He was silent.

‘I know a different doctor,’ I promised. ‘Where’s the car?’

Ed returned with it pretty soon, though it seemed an age to me. I asked