Dick Francis - Wild Horses

‘But Paul’s my son,’ Dorothea protested.

‘And he’s trying to steal Valentine’s books.’

‘Oh, dear .’

Paul began hammering on the front door. ‘Mother, let me in at once .’

‘Perhaps I should ,’ Dorothea worried.

‘He’ll come to no harm out there. It’s nowhere near freezing and he can sit in his car. Or go home, of course.’

‘Sometimes Paul isn’t likeable ,’ Dorothea said sadly.

I put the stacks of books back on Valentine’s shelves. The ones that Paul had chosen to steal first were those with the glossiest covers, the recently published racing biographies, which were, in commercial resale terms, almost worthless. I guessed that chiefly it was Paul’s vanity that was reacting against being thwarted by his mother and by me.

I had never underestimated the virulence of outraged vanity since directing a disturbing film about a real-life fanatical bodybuilder who’d killed his girl-friend because she’d left him for a wimp. I’d had to understand him, to crawl into his mind, and I’d hated it.

Paul’s heavy hand banged repeatedly on the door and he pressed unremittingly on the doorbell. This last resulted not in a shrill nerve-shredding single note, but in a less insupportable non-stop quiet ding-dong; quiet because Dorothea had turned down the volume to avoid disturbing Valentine as he’d grown weaker.

I looked at my watch: five minutes to six. Perhaps an hour before we could expect the doctor but only thirty minutes before I should start my own workday.

‘Oh, dear,’ Dorothea said for about the tenth time, ‘I do wish he’d stop.’

‘Tell him you’ll let him in if he promises to leave the books alone.’

‘Do you think he’ll agree?’ she asked dubiously.

‘A good chance,’ I said.

He wouldn’t want to lose too much face with the awakening neighbours, I reckoned: only a fool would allow himself to be seen to be shut out like a naughty boy by his aged mother.

With evident relief she relayed the terms, to which her son with bad grace agreed. She unbolted the door and let him in, an entrance I carefully didn’t watch, as the slightest smile on my face would be interpreted by him as a jeer which would set him off again. Motorists had been shot for cutting in.

I stayed for a while in Valentine’s sitting-room with the door shut while mother and son sorted themselves out in the kitchen. I sat in the armchair opposite the one no longer occupied by the old man, and thought how easy it was to get embroiled in a senseless fracas. Without expecting it, I’d made an enemy of Paul Pannier: and I surmised that what he really wanted was not so much the books themselves, but to get me and my influence out of his mother’s life, so that he could control and order her future as best suited his beneficent view of himself.

At least, I hoped that was the case. Anything worse was more than I felt like dealing with in the middle of making a film.

I stared vacantly at the wall of books, wondering if after all there were anything there of value. If so, I was sure Valentine had been unaware of it. When I’d mentioned the possibility of an autobiography and he’d vetoed the idea, he hadn’t referred to any diaries or other raw material that could be used as sources by anyone else but, sitting there, I wondered if by any chance Paul had made some sort of deal with a writer or publisher, to trade Valentine’s papers for a share of the profits. No biography of Valentine’s would make a fortune, but Paul, I guessed, would be content with modest pickings. Anything was better than nothing, one might hear him say.

Howard Tyler’s book was not on the shelves.

Valentine had asked me, the first time I’d called on him, what had brought me back to Newmarket, and when I’d explained about Howard’s book — Unstable Times — and the film we were to make of it, he’d said he’d heard of the book but he hadn’t bought it, since at the time of its publication his eyesight had been fast deteriorating.

‘I hear it’s a load of rubbish,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘I knew Jacksy Wells. I often shod his horses. He never murdered that mousey wife of his, he hadn’t got the guts.’

‘The book doesn’t say he did,’ I assured him.

‘And I hear it doesn’t say he didn’t, neither.’

‘Well, no.’

‘It wasn’t worth writing a book about it. Waste of time making a film.’

I’d smiled. Film-makers notoriously and wilfully distorted historical facts. Films knowingly based on lies could get nominated for Oscars.

‘What was she like?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘Jackson Wells’s wife.’

‘Mousey, like I said. Funny, I can’t remember her clearly. She wasn’t one of those trainer’s wives who run the whole stable. Mouths like cesspits, some of them had in the old days. Jackson Wells’s wife, you wouldn’t have known she existed. I hear she’s halfway to a whore in the book, poor little bitch.’

‘Did she hang herself?’

‘Search me,’ Valentine said. ‘I only shod the horses. The fuss died down pretty fast for lack of clues and evidence, but of course it did Jackson Wells in as a trainer. I mean, would you send your horses to a man who’d maybe killed his wife?’

‘No.’

‘Nor did anyone else.’

‘The book says she had a lover,’ I said.

‘Did she?’ Valentine pondered. ‘First I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘But then, Dorothea could have a lover here under my nose and I wouldn’t care. Good luck to her, if she did.’

‘You’re a wicked old man, Valentine.’

‘Nobody’s an angel,’ he said.

I looked at his empty chair and remembered his desperate half-whisper... ‘I killed the Cornish boy... ’

Maybe The Cornish Boy was a horse.

Steps sounded on the path outside and the doorbell rang, ding-dong. I waited so as not to appear to be usurping Paul’s desired status as head of the household, but it was in fact Dorothea who went to answer the summons.

‘Come in, Robbie,’ she said, the loud relief in her voice reaching me clearly. ‘How dear of you to come.’

‘That son of yours!’ The doctor’s voice held dislike.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Dorothea said placatingly.

‘Not your fault.’

Dorothea let him in and closed the front door, and I opened the door of Valentine’s sitting-room to say hello.

Robbie Gill shook my hand perfunctorily. ‘Glad you’ve got company,’ he told Dorothea. ‘Now, about Valentine?’

All three of us went quietly into the old man’s dimly-lit room, followed importantly by Paul who immediately flooded the scene again with the overhead bulb. Perhaps it was only the director in me, I thought, that found this harsh insistence unpalatable. Certainly Robbie Gill made no protest but set about establishing clinically what was evident to any eye, that Valentine — the he who had lived in that chemical shell — had left it.

‘What time did he die?’ he asked Dorothea, his pen poised over a clipboard.

‘I don’t know to the minute,’ she said unhappily.

‘Around one o’clock,’ I said.

‘Mother was asleep,’ Paul accused unforgivingly. ‘She confessed it. She doesn’t know when he died.’

Robbie Gill gave him an expressionless stare and without comment wrote 0100 on his clipboard, showing it to me and Dorothea.

‘I’ll see to the paperwork for you,’ he said to Dorothea. ‘But you’ll need to get an undertaker.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Paul interrupted. ‘I’ll take charge of all that.’

No one demurred. Taking important charge of relatively minor matters suited Paul’s character perfectly: and perhaps, I thought, he would be so fulfillingly involved that he would forget about the books. There was no harm, however, in seeking to give Dorothea a close line of defence.