were older. These, indeed, covered the few years when Jackson Wells had been training in Newmarket: one of them covered the year of Sonia’s death.
Fascinated, I looked for Valentine’s red dots (runners) and red exclamation marks (winners) and found my grandfather’s name as trainer all over the place. Twenty-six years ago, when I’d been four. A whole generation ago. So many of them gone. So many horses, so many races, lost and forgotten.
Jackson Wells hadn’t had large numbers of runners and precious few winners, as far as I could see. Jackson Wells hadn’t had a regular jockey either: only successful wealthy stables could afford to retain a top-flighter. Several of the Wells’ horses had been ridden by a P. Falmouth, several others by D. Carsington, neither of whom I’d heard of, which wasn’t surprising.
On the day of his wife’s death, Jackson Wells had set off to York races where a horse from his stable had been entered. I looked up the actual day and found his horse hadn’t started and was listed as a non-runner. Trainer Wells had been on his way back to Newmarket when they’d run the race without him.
I flicked forward through the pages. Valentine’s dots for Jackson Wells were scattered and diminishing in number. There was only one exclamation mark, a minor race on a minor track, ridden by the minor jockey, D. Carsington.
‘A winner is a winner,’ my grandfather always said. ‘Never despise the lowliest.’
I put the form books back in the box, dutifully collected my guardian shadows from the lobby, and went by car to Betty’s house to ask if she by any chance had Dorothea’s key. She shook her head. Poor Dorothea; that poor man, Paul.
Betty’s husband wasn’t grieving for Paul. If I wanted to start tidying Dorohea’s house, he said, he could open her door in no time. Betty’s husband was an all-round handyman. A little how’s-your-father and a shove, he said, would circumvent most locks, and consequently he and I soon went from room to ravaged room righting the mess as best we could. The police, he said, had taken their photos and their fingerprints and left. The house, such as it was, and crammed with bad memories, was Dorothea’s to come home to.
I spent most time in her bedroom, looking for the photographs she said she kept in a box. I couldn’t find them. I told Betty’s husband what I was looking for – Dorothea’s only mementos of Paul when young – but neither of us succeeded.
‘Poor love,’ Betty’s husband said, ‘That son of hers was a brute, but she would never hear a strong word against him. Between you and me, he’s no loss.’
‘No… but who killed him?’
‘Yeah, I see what you mean. Gives you a nasty feeling, doesn’t it. some geezer running around with a knife?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It does.’
I stood in the dark street outside Bill Robinson’s garage, with the black-belt at my back facing the crowd that had inevitably collected.
There were bright lights inside the garage where Bill Robinson himself stood, dressed in his accustomed black leather and studs and looking self conscious. The monster Harley Davidson stood to one side. Pieces of a second, that Bill was rebuilding, lay in clumps on the drive. Moncrieff was busy pointing arc lamps and spots to give dramatic shadows and gleams, and Nash’s stand-in walked to the designated point and looked towards the garage. Moncrieff lit his profile first, and then a three-quarter face angle, one side bright, the other in darkness, only the liquid sheen of an eye showing.
Nash arrived, walked up beside me and watched.
‘You pause,’ I said. ‘You’re wondering how the hell you’re going to get out of the fix you’re in. You’re psyching yourself up. OK?’
He nodded. He waved a hand towards the scene. ‘It’s striking,’ he said, ‘but why a bike?’
‘It’s what our movie is about.’
‘How do you mean? There aren’t any bikes in it, are there?’
‘Fantasy,’ I said. ‘Our movie is about the need for fantasy.’
‘The dream lovers?’ he suggested doubtfully.
‘Fantasy supplies what life doesn’t,’ I said casually. ‘That boy there with his bike is eighteen, good natured, has a regular job, carries his elderly neighbour’s shopping home for her, and in his fantasy life he’s a hell raiser with roaring power between his legs and the gear and the studs. He’s playing at what he wouldn’t really like to be, but the imagining of it fills and satisfies him.’
Nash stood without moving. ‘You sound as though you approve,’ he said.
‘Yes, I