Dick Francis - Wild Horses

‘Just label them and leave them,’ I said.

‘Right. Oh... and I haven’t come across any photo albums, that you wanted me to look for, but I did find a lot of snaps in an old chocolate box. What do you want me to do with those?’

‘In a chocolate box... ?’

‘Well, yes. It’s got flowers on the lid. Pretty old.’

‘Er... where’s the box?’

She opened a carton that had once held a Fax machine, and from it produced several box files full of ancient race cards and newspaper clippings of winners that Valentine had regularly shod. ‘Here’s the chocolate box,’ Lucy said, lifting out and handing me a faded and battered gold-coloured cardboard box with flowers like dahlias on the lid. ‘I didn’t make a list of the photos. Do you want me to?’

‘No,’ I said absently, taking off the lid and finding small ancient pictures inside, many in long ago faded colours with curling edges. Pictures of Valentine and his wife, pictures of Dorothea and her husband, a photo or two of Meredith Derry and his wife, and several of Dorothea with her child: with her nice looking little boy, Paul. Pictures when life was fine, before time loused it up.

‘How about ordering us all some lunch?’ I said.

Nash did the ordering. ‘What do you want to drink, Thomas?’

‘Lethe,’ I said.

‘Not until you’ve finished the movie.’

‘What’s Lethe?’ Lucy asked.

Nash said, ‘The river in the underworld that, if you drink it, makes you sleep and forget about living.’

‘Oh.’

‘For ever,’ Nash added. ‘But Thomas doesn’t mean that.’

Lucy covered non-comprehension in activity with the marker pen.

At the bottom of the chocolate box, I came across a larger print, the colours still not razor sharp, but in a better state of preservation. It was of a group of young people, all looking about twenty. On the back of the photo were two simple words — ‘The Gang’.

The Gang.

The Gang consisted of five young men and a girl.

I sat staring at it for long enough for the other two to notice.

‘What is it?’ Nash asked. ‘What have you found?’

I handed the photo to Lucy, who glanced at it, did a double take and then exclaimed, ‘Why, that’s Dad, isn’t it? How young he looks.’ She turned the photo over. ‘The Gang,’ she read aloud. ‘That’s his handwriting, isn’t it?’

‘You’d know better than I would.’

‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Who are the people with him? Who are the gang?’ I asked.

She studied the picture. ‘That’s Sonia, isn’t it? It must be.’

Nash took the photo out of Lucy’s hand and peered at it himself, nodding. ‘That’s definitely your father, and the girl looks like the photo you lent us... and that boy next to her, that’s the other one in that photo... that’s surely “Pig”.’

‘I suppose so,’ Lucy said doubtfully. ‘And that one on the end, he looks like... ’ She stopped, both unsure and disturbed.

‘Like who?’ I asked.

‘He’s not like that any more. He’s, well... bloated ... now. That’s my Uncle Ridley. He looks lovely there. How awful , what time does to people.’

‘Yes.’ Nash and I said it in unison. An endless host of barely recognisable old actors and actresses lived on in Hollywood in inelastic skins, everything sagging but the memory of glamour, their youthful selves mocking them relentlessly from rented videos and movie channels.

‘Who are the others?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know them,’ Lucy said, handing the photo back to me.

I said, ‘They look people of your age.’

‘Yes, they do.’ She found it unremarkable. ‘Do you want me to repack this box?’

‘Yes, please. But leave out the chocolate box.’

‘OK.’

Lunch came and we ate. Ziggy phoned the hotel from Norway.

‘I cannot reach O’Hara’s number,’ he complained.

‘He’s gone back to LA.’ I said. ‘How are the horses?’

‘Working well.’

‘Good. The production department has found a disused stable yard for them to stay in, only ten miles from our beach.’ I fished a piece of paper out of an inner pocket and spelled the address for him patiently, letter by letter. ‘Phone me after you’ve landed at Immingham on Monday if you have any problems.’

‘Yes, Thomas.’

‘Well done, Ziggy.’

He laughed, pleased, and departed.

I left Nash and Lucy drinking coffee and, taking with me both ‘The Gang’ photo and the lower file from the previous night’s reading, went along to O’Hara’s suite, let myself in with his key and stowed Valentine’s mementos in the safe, with the knives. All the rooms in the hotel were equipped with individual small safes, which each guest could set to open to his own choice of combination. I hardly liked to acknowledge the instinct for extra security that led me to use O’Hara’s safe instead of my own, but anyway, I did it.

Still in O’Hara’s rooms I looked up the number of Ridley Wells in the local phone directory, and tried it, but there was no answer.

On returning to my own rooms I found Nash, on the point of leaving, announcing that he was going to spend the afternoon watching racing on TV while betting by phone with a bookmaker I’d arranged for him.

‘Is it still on, for tonight?’ he asked, pausing in the doorway.

‘Certainly is, if the rain stops, which it is supposed to.’

‘How do you expect me to ride a horse in the goddam dark?’

‘There will be moonlight. Moncrieff’s arranging it.’

‘What about goddam rabbit holes?’

‘There aren’t any on Newmarket’s gallops,’ I assured him.

‘But what if I fall off! ’

‘We’ll pick you up and put you back in the saddle.’

‘I hate you sometimes, Thomas.’ He grinned and went on his way. I left Lucy up to her elbows in decades of form books, collected my minders in the lobby and was bowled the short mile back to the stables.

On my way back to ‘The Athenaeum’ I detoured into the downstairs office, used chiefly by Ed, where we had the business paraphernalia of telephones, faxes, and large-capacity copier, and asked the young woman operating everything there to keep on trying Ridley Wells’s number for me, and if he returned home and answered the summons, to put the call through to me upstairs immediately.

‘But you said never to do that, in case the phone rang during a shot.’

‘We can re-shoot,’ I said. ‘I want to catch this man. OK?’

She nodded, reassured, and I went upstairs to re-coax Cibber and Silva into their most venomous faces.

Ridley Wells answered his telephone at three-thirty, and sounded drunk.

I said, ‘Do you remember you asked our producer, O’Hara, if we had any riding work for you in our film?’

‘He said you hadn’t.’

‘Right. But now we have. Are you still interested?’ I mentioned a fee for a morning’s work large enough to hook a bigger fish than Ridley, and he didn’t even ask what the job entailed.

I said, ‘We’ll send a car for you tomorrow morning at seven. It will bring you to the stables where we’re keeping our horses. You don’t need to bring anything with you. We’ll supply you with clothes from our wardrobe department. We’ll supply the horse for you to ride. We don’t want you to do anything out of the ordinary or dangerous on the horse. We’re just short of a rider for a scene we’re shooting tomorrow.’

‘Got you,’ he said grandly.

‘Don’t forget,’ I insisted.

‘Mum’s the word, old boy.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Mum’s not the word. If you’re not sober in the morning, then no job and no fee.’

After a pause he said, ‘Got you,’ again, and I hoped he meant it.