Dick Francis - Wild Horses

Sighing, I took back the photo, replaced it in my pocket and produced the small memo pad I habitually carried.

I said, ‘I don’t want to upset you, but if I draw a knife will you tell me if it’s the one that might have been used on you?’

‘I don’t want to see it.’

‘Please, Dorothea.’

‘Paul was killed with a knife,’ she wailed, and cried for her son.

‘Dearest Dorothea,’ I said after a while, ‘if it will help to find Paul’s killer, will you look at my drawing?’

She shook her head. I put the drawing close to her hand and, arter a long minute, she picked it up.

‘How horrid ,’ she said, looking at it, ‘I didn’t see a knife like that.’ She sounded extremely relieved. ‘It wasn’t anything like that.’

I’d drawn for her the American trench knife from the Heath. I turned the paper over and drew the wicked Armadillo, serrated edge and all.

Dorothea looked at it, went white and didn’t speak.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said helplessly. ‘But you didn’t die. Paul loved you... He saved your life.’

I thought of the cataclysmic shock in Paul’s face when he’d come to Dorothy’s house and seen the Armadillo lying on the kitchen table. When he’d seen me sitting there, alive.

He’d blundered out of the house and gone away, and it was pointless now to speculate that if we’d stopped him, if we’d sat him down and made him talk, he might have lived. Paul had been near, once, to breaking open. Paul, I thought, had become a fragile danger, likely to crumble, likely to confess. Paul, overbearing, pompous, unlikeable, had lost his nerve and died of repentance.

My driver, with the black-belt beside him, aimed my car towards Oxfordshire while consulting from time to time my written directions, and I sat in the back seat looking again at ‘The Gang’ photo and remembering what both Dorothy and Lucy had said about it.

‘They’re so young ’.

Young.

Jackson Wells, Ridley Wells, Paul Pannier, were all at least twenty-six years younger in the photo than the living men I’d met. Sonia had died twenty-six years earlier, and Sonia was alive in the picture.

Say the photo had been taken twenty-seven years ago — that made Jackson Wells about twenty-three, with all the others younger than that. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty: that sort of age. Sonia had died at twenty-one.

I had been four when she died and I hadn’t heard of her, and I’d come back at thirty and wanted to know why she had died, and I had said I might try and find out, and in saying that I’d set off a chain reaction that had put Dorothea into hospital and Paul into his grave and had earned me a knife in the ribs... and whatever else might come.

I hadn’t known there was a genie in the bottle, but genies once let out couldn’t be put back.

My driver found Batwillow Farm and delivered me to Jackson Wells’s door.

Lucy again answered the summons of the overloud bell, her blue eyes widening with astonishment.

‘I say,’ she said, ‘you didn’t mind my coming home for the day, did you? You haven’t come to drag me back by my ponytail?’

‘No,’ I smiled. ‘I really wanted to talk to your father.’

‘Oh, sure. Come in.’

I shook my head. ‘I wonder if he would come out.’

‘Oh? Well, I’ll ask him.’ Faintly puzzled, she disappeared into the house, to return soon with her blond, lean, farm-tanned enquiring parent looking exactly as he had looked there one week earlier.

‘Come in,’ he said, gesturing a welcome, happy-go-lucky.

‘Come for a walk.’

He shrugged. ‘If you like.’ He stepped out of his house and Lucy, unsure of herself, remained in the doorway.

Jackson eyed the two agile men sitting in my car and asked, ‘Friends?’

‘A driver and a bodyguard,’ I answered. ‘Film company issue.’

‘Oh.’

We crossed from the house and came to rest by the five-barred gate on which deaf old Wells senior had been leaning the week before.

‘Lucy’s doing a good job,’ I said. ‘Did she tell you?’

‘She likes talking to Nash Rourke.’

‘They get on fine,’ I agreed.

‘I told her to be careful.’

I smiled. ‘You’ve taught her well.’ Too well, I thought. I said, ‘Did she mention a photograph?’

He looked as if he didn’t know whether to say yes or no, but in the end said, ‘What photograph?’

‘This one.’ I brought it out of my pocket and gave it to him.

He looked at the front briefly and at the back, and met my eyes expressionlessly.

‘Lucy says that’s your handwriting,’ I commented, taking the picture back.

‘What if it is?’

‘I’m not the police,’ I said, ‘and I haven’t brought thumbscrews.’

He laughed, but the totally carefree manner of a week earlier had been undermined by wariness.

I said, ‘Last week you told me no one knew why Sonia had died.’

‘That’s right.’ The blue eyes shone, as ever, with innocence.

I shook my head. ‘Everyone in that photo,’ I said, ‘knew why Sonia died.’

His utter stillness lasted until he’d manufactured a smile and a suitably scornful expression.

‘Sonia is in that photo. What you said is codswollop.’

‘Sonia knew,’ I said.

‘Are you saying she killed herself?’ He looked almost hopeful, as well he might.

‘Not really. She didn’t intend to die. No one intended to kill her. She died by accident.’

‘You know bloody nothing about it.’

I knew too much about it. I didn’t want to do any more harm, and I didn’t want to get myself killed, but Paul Pannier’s death couldn’t simply be ignored; and apart from considerations of justice, until his murderer had been caught I would be wearing Delta-cast.

‘You all look so young in that photo,’ I said. ‘Golden girl, golden boys, all smiling, all with bright lives ahead. You were all kids then, like you told me. All playing at living, everything a game.’ I named the light-hearted gang in the photo. ‘There’s you and Sonia, and your younger brother Ridley. There’s Paul Pannier, your blacksmith’s nephew. There’s Roddy Visborough, the son of Sonia’s sister, which made Sonia actually his aunt. And there’s your jockey, P. Falmouth, known as Pig.’ I paused. ‘You were the eldest, twenty-two or twenty-three. Ridley, Paul, Roddy and Pig were all eighteen, nineteen or twenty when Sonia died, and she was only twenty-one.’

Jackson Wells said blankly, ‘How do you know?’

‘Newspaper reports. Doing sums. It hardly matters. What does matter is the immaturity of you all... and the feeling some people have at that age that youth is eternal, caution is for oldies, and responsibility a dirty word. You went off to York and the others played a game... and I think this whole gang, except you, were there when she died.’

‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘It wasn’t a gang thing. You’re meaning gang rape. That didn’t happen.’

‘I know it didn’t. The autopsy made it quite clear that there’d been no intercourse. The newspapers all pointed it out.’

‘Well, then.’

I said carefully, ‘I think one of those boys in some way throttled her, not meaning to do her harm, and they were all so frightened that they tried to make it look like suicide, by hanging her. And then they just — ran away.’

‘No,’ Jackson said numbly.

‘I think,’ I said, ‘that to begin with you truly didn’t know what had happened. When you talked to the police, when they tried to get you to confess, you could deal blithely with their questions because you knew you weren’t guilty. You truly didn’t know at that point whether or not she’d hanged herself, though you knew — and said — that it wasn’t like her. I think that for quite a while it was a true mystery to you, but what is also evident is that you weren’t psychologically pulverised by it. None of the newspaper reports — and I’ve now read a lot of them — not one says anything about a distraught young husband.’