turned up his collar.
The car, including the front passenger seat, absorbed half of the boxes. I asked what he’d used to transport them on Saturday.
‘My dad’s little old pick-up,’ he said. ‘It needed three journeys. He takes it to work weekdays, so I can’t borrow it till this evening.’
He agreed to load and deliver the rest of the boxes in the pickup, and in cheerful spirits came along to the hotel and helped the porter there stack the cartons in the lobby.
‘Do you mean it about me being in your film?’ he asked on the way back to Wrigley’s garage. ‘And… when?’
‘Tomorrow, maybe,’ I said, ‘I’ll send a message. I’ll fix it with your boss, and the film company will pay you a fee for your help.’
‘Cor,’ he said.
Nash, Silva and Moncrieff all joined O’Hara and me to watch the Huntingdon rushes.
Even without much sound the crowd scenes looked like an everyday race meeting and the race itself was still remarkable for the Victoria Cross riding of the jockeys. The race had been filmed successfully by five cameras and semi-successfully by another. There was easily enough to cut together a contest to stir the pulses of people who’d never seen jump-racing at close quarters: even Silva gasped at one sequence, and Nash looked thoughtful. Moncrieff fussed about shadows in the wrong places, which no one else had noticed.
The close shots with dialogue showed Silva at her most enticing. I praised her interpretation, not her looks, and got a brief nod of acknowledgement. The two days-work, all in all, had been worth the effort.
After the end of the rushes the film developers had joined on the thirty seconds’ worth Moncrieff had shot of Lucy’s photo. Large and in sharp focus, the two faces appeared on the screen.
‘Who are they?’ O’Hara asked, perplexed.
‘The girl on the left,’ I said, ‘is Yvonne. Or rather, she was Sonia Wells, the girl who hanged. The real one.’
‘Christ,’ O’Hara said.
‘And who’s the man?’ Nash asked.
‘His name is Pig, I think.’ I explained about Lucy’s photo. ‘I promised her that Yvonne wouldn’t look like Sonia.’
The girl on the screen had curly light-brown hair, not a green crewcut or other weirdness. We would give Yvonne a long straight blonde wig and hope for the best.
The screen ran clear. We switched on the lights, talked about what we’d seen and, as always, went back to work.
Later at Huntingdon a photographer, who’d been engaged by the company to chart progress for the publicity department, brought a set of eight- by ten-inch prints for O’Hara to see. He and I took them into the weighing-room and sat at a table there, minutely searching the snap-shots with a magnifying glass.
We saw nothing of any help. There were photos of Nash signing in the end-of-the-day autograph session. A shot of Howard looking smug, inscribing his own book. Silva being film-star charming. Greg signing racecards. A shot of O’Hara and myself standing together. The lens had been focussed every time on the main subject’s face: people around were present, but not warts and all.
‘We need blow-ups of the crowd,’ O’Hara said.
‘We’re not going to get nice clear views of the Fury.’
Morosely, he agreed, but ordered blow-ups anyway.
No more knives appeared, in or out of bodies. We filmed the remaining scenes and shipped out the horses. We made sure the whole place was shipshape, thanked Huntingdon racecourse management for their kindnesses, and were back in Newmarket soon after six o clock.
The message light inexorably flashed in my sitting-room: whenever did it not?
Robbie Gill wanted me to phone him, urgently.
I got his answer service: he would be available at seven.
To fill in the time I opened the tops of a few of the cartons of Valentine’s books, which now took up a good deal of the floorspace, as I’d particularly asked for them not to be put one on top of another. I’d forgotten, of course, that bending down used chest muscles also. On my knees, therefore, I began to inspect my inheritance.
There was too much of it. After the first three boxes had proved to hold part of the collection of biographies and racing histories, after I’d painstakingly taken out every volume, shaken it for insertions and replaced it, I saw the need for secretarial help; for a record keeper with a lap-top computer.
Lucy, I thought. If I had a fantasy, I would materialise her in my sitting-room, like Yvonne’s dream lovers. Lucy knew how to work a computer.
Impulsively I phoned her father’s house and