Dick Francis - Wild Horses

I nodded. I’d arranged with him that if he saw my door closed he was to use my key and enter my rooms immediately. I couldn’t think of a clearer or more simple demand for help.

‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Mr Lyon.’

I tried a smile. No response.

‘Don’t go to sleep,’ I said tamely.

‘No, Mr Lyon.’

O’Hara must have dug him up from central casting, I thought. Bad choice.

I retreated into my sitting-room, left the door six inches open, drank a small amount of brandy and answered a telephone call from Howard.

He was predictably raging.

‘Cibber told me you’ve made him the murderer! It’s impossible! You can’t do it. I won’t allow it! What will the Visboroughs say?’

I pointed out that we could slot in a different murderer, if we wanted to.

‘Cibber says you tore him to shreds.’

‘Cibber gave the performance of his life,’ I contradicted: and indeed, of the film’s eventual four Oscar nominations, Cibber won the award for Best Supporting Actor — graciously forgiving me about a year later.

I promised Howard, ‘We’ll hold a full script conference tomorrow morning. You, me, Nash and Moncrieff.’

‘I want you to stop the film!’

‘I don’t have that authority.’

‘What if you’re dead?’ he demanded.

I said after a moment, ‘The company will finish the movie with another director. Killing me, believe me, Howard, would give this film massive publicity, but it would not stop it.’

‘It’s not fair,’ he said, as if he’d learned nothing, and I said, ‘See you in the morning,’ and disconnected in despair.

The safe in my sitting-room, as in O’Hara’s, was out of casual sight in a fitment that housed a large TV set above and a mini-bar as well as the safe below. The mini-bar held small quantities of drinks for needy travellers, spirits, wine, champagne and beer, also chocolate and nuts. The safe — my safe — held nothing. I programmed it to open at seven three five two, entrusted ‘The Gang’ photo into its safe keeping, and closed its door.

I sat then in the armchair in my bedroom and waited for a long time, and thought about the obligations of the confessional, and about how totally, or how little, I myself was bound by Valentine’s dying and frantic admissions.

I felt the weight of the obligation of priesthood that so many priests themselves took lightly, knowing that their role absolved them from any dire responsibility, even while they dispensed regular indulgences. I had had no right to hear Valentine’s confession nor to pardon his sins, and I had done both. I’d absolved him. ‘In nomine Patris... ego te absolvo’.

I could not evade feeling an absolute obligation to the spirit of those words. I should not — and could not — save myself with the knowledge he’d entrusted to me as a priest when he was dying. On the other hand, I could in good conscience use what he’d left me in his will.

I hadn’t come across, in his books and papers, any one single revelation that could have been found by ransacking his house. The pieces had been there, but obscured and devious. I’d sorted those out a good deal by luck. I wished there were a more conclusive artifact than ‘The Gang’ photo with which to bait the safe, but I’d come to the conclusion that there wasn’t one. Valentine hadn’t written down his ultimate sin; he’d confessed it in his last lucid breaths but he had never meant it to live after him. He hadn’t left any exact concrete record of his twenty-six-year-old secret.

Two and a half hours after I’d talked to Howard, my visitor arrived. He came to my sitting-room door calling my name, and when I didn’t at first reply he walked in boldly and closed the door behind him. I heard it latch. I heard him open the fitment and press the buttons to open the safe.

I ambled to my bedroom door and greeted him.

‘Hello, Roddy.’

He was dressed in blazer, shirt and tie. He looked a pillar of show jumping rectitude; and he held ‘The Gang’ photo.

‘Looking for something?’ I asked.

‘Er... ’ Roddy Visborough said civilly, ‘Yes, actually. Bit of an imposition, I’m afraid, but one of the children I teach has begged me to get Nash Rourke’s autograph. Howard swears you’ll ask him for it.’

He laid the photo on the table and came towards me holding out an autograph album and a pen.

It was so very unexpected that I forgot Professor Derry’s warning — anything he possesses may hide a knife — and I let him get too close.

He dropped the autograph book at my feet, and when I automatically looked down at it, he pulled his gold-coloured pen apart with a movement too fast for me to follow, and lunged at me with it.

The revealed stiletto point went straight through my jersey and shirt and hit solid polymer over my heart.

Himself flummoxed, disbelieving, Roddy dropped the pen and reached for his tie, and with a tug produced from under it a much larger knife, fearsomely lethal, which I later saw to be a triangular blade like a flat trowel fixed to a bar which led between his fingers to a grip within his hand.

At the time I saw only the triangular blade that seemed to grow like an integral part of his fist, the wide end across his knuckles, the point protruding five or more inches ahead.

He slashed at my throat instantly and found Robbie’s handiwork foiling him there also, and with one quick movement flicked the blade higher so that it cut my chin and ran sharply up across my cheek to above my ear.

I hadn’t meant to have to fight him. I wasn’t good at it. And how could anyone fight an opponent so appallingly armed, when one had no defence except fists.

He meant to kill me. I saw it in his face. He was going to get blood on his elegant clothes. One thinks such stupid non-sequiturs at moments of maximum peril. He worked out that I wore a body protector from neck to waist and aimed at more vulnerable areas and punched his awful triangular blade into my left arm several times as I tried to shield my eyes from damage while unsuccessfully trying to get behind him to put my right arm round his throat.

I tried to evade him. We circled the bedroom. He sought to keep himself between me and the door while he killed me.

There were scarlet splatters all over the place; a scarlet river down my left hand. I yelled with what breath I could muster for my damned bodyguard to come to my rescue and nothing happened except that I began to believe that whatever happened to Roddy afterwards I wouldn’t be there to care.

I tugged the bedspread off the bed and threw it at him, and by good fortune it landed over his right hand. I sprang at him. I rolled against him, wrapping his right arm closely. I overbalanced him: I put one leg behind his and levered him backwards off his feet, and scrambled with him on the floor, enveloping him ever more deeply in the bedspread until he was cocooned in it, until I lay over him bleeding while he tried to heave me off.

I don’t know what would eventually have happened, but at that moment my bodyguard finally showed up.

He arrived in the bedroom doorway, saying enquiringly, ‘Mr Lyon?’

I was past answering him sensibly. I said, ‘Fetch someone.’ Hardly a Nash Rourke-hero sort of speech.

He took me literally, anyway. I vaguely heard him talking on the sitting-room telephone and soon my rooms seemed full of people. Moncrieff, Nash himself, large men from the Bedford Lodge kitchen staff who sat on the wriggling bedspread, and eventually people saying they were policemen and paramedics and so on.

I apologised to the hotel manager for the blood. Oh, well.

‘Where the hell were you?’ I asked my bodyguard. ‘Didn’t you see that my door was shut?’