Dick Francis - Wild Horses

‘Yes, Mr Lyon.’

‘Well then?’

‘But, Mr Lyon,’ he said in righteous self-justification, ‘sometimes I have to go to the bathroom.’

Early on Thursday morning I sat on a windy sand dune waiting for the sun to rise over Happisburgh beach.

O’Hara, back in a panic from LA, sat shivering beside me. About forty people, the various location crews, came and went from the vehicles parked close behind the dunes, and out on the wet expanse of firm sand left clean and unmarked by the ebbing tide, Moncrieff worked the cameras, lights and gantry that had been taken out there bolted onto a caterpillar-tracked orange beach-cleaning monster that could bulldoze wrecks if need be.

Far off to the left, Ziggy waited with the Viking horses. Between him and us, Ed commanded a second camera crew, one that would give us side-on shots.

We had held a rehearsal on the ebb tide the evening before and knew from the churned up state of the sand afterwards that we needed to get the first shoot right. Ziggy was confident, Moncrieff was confident, O’Hara was confident: I fidgeted.

We needed a decent sunrise. We could fudge together an impression by using the blazing shots of the sky from the previous week; we could shine lights to get gleams in the horses’ eyes, but we needed luck and the real thing to get the effect I truly wanted.

I thought over the events of the past few days. There had been a micro-surgeon in the Cambridge hospital who’d sown up my face with a hundred tiny black stitches that at present looked as if a millipede was climbing from my chin to my hairline, but which he swore would leave hardly a scar. The gouges in my left arm had given him and me more trouble, but at least they were out of sight. He expected everything to be healed in a week.

Robbie Gill visited the hospital briefly early on Tuesday morning, taking away with him the Delta-cast jacket that had puzzled the night-nursing staff the evening before. He didn’t explain why I’d been wearing it beyond, ‘An experiment in porosity — interesting.’ He also told me he’d mentioned to his police colleague that Dorothea could now identify her attacker, and that as two knife nuts suddenly active in Newmarket were unlikely, why didn’t they try her with a photo?

I’d spent Tuesday afternoon talking to policemen, and by then (during Monday night) I’d decided what to say and what not.

I heard later that they had already searched Roddy Visborough’s cottage in Leicestershire and had found it packed with hidden unusual knives. They asked why I thought Roddy had attacked me.

‘He wanted the film stopped. He believes it harms his family’s reputation.’

They thought it not a good enough reason for attempted murder and, sighing at the vagaries of the world, I agreed with them. Did I know of any other reason? Sorry, no.

Roddy Visborough, I was certain, would give them no other reason. Roddy Visborough would not say, ‘I was afraid Thomas Lyon would find out that I connived at a fake hanging of my aunt to cover up a sex orgy.’

Roddy, ‘the’ show jumper, had had too much to lose. Roddy, Paul and Ridley must all have been aghast when their buried crime started coming back to haunt them. They’d tried to frighten me off first with threats, and when those hadn’t worked, with terminal action.

With knives.

The police asked if I knew that Mr Visborough’s fingerprints had been found all over Mrs Pannier’s house, along with my own? How extraordinary! I said; I’d never seen Mr Visborough in her house.

They said that, acting on information, they had that morning interviewed Mrs Pannier who had identified a police photograph of Mr Visborough as being the man who had attacked her.

‘Amazing,’ I said.

They asked if I knew why Mrs Pannier had been attacked by Mr Visborough. No, I didn’t.

What connection was there between her and me?

‘I used to read to her blind brother,’ I said. ‘He died of cancer... ’

They knew.

They wondered if the knife I’d found on the Heath, that was now in their possession, had anything to do with what had happened to me.

‘We all believed it was an attempt to get the film abandoned,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

I believed also, though I didn’t say so, that it was Roddy who had given Ridley the trench knife and told him to frighten off Nash and, through him, the film.

I believed Roddy had coerced Paul to ransack Dorothea’s house with him, both of them looking for any give-away account Valentine might have left of Sonia’s death.

Roddy had been the strongest of the three of them, and the most afraid.

Prompted by Lucy, Ridley had obligingly passed on to Roddy the combination of my safe, and had told him that I knew far too much.

Roddy, as I’d hoped, had revealed himself and his involvement, the mackerel coming to the sprat. I had lured him to come, had hoped he might bring with him another esoteric knife: I hadn’t meant to get myself so cut.

The police went away as if dissatisfied, but they were sure at the very least of two convictions for grievous bodily harm, and if, with all the modern available detection techniques, they couldn’t prove Roddy Visborough had killed Paul Pannier, too bad. As for motive, they might conclude Paul had threatened in remorse to give Roddy away to the police for attacking Dorothea: near enough for belief. Near enough, anyway, for Dorothea to believe it, and be comforted.

On Wednesday morning I discharged myself from the hospital and returned to Newmarket to be confronted by a furious Howard and an extremely upset Alison Visborough.

‘ I told you you shouldn’t have made changes to my book,’ Howard raged. ‘Now see what you’ve done! Roddy is going to prison.’

Alison looked in disbelief at the long millipede track up my face. ‘Rodbury wouldn’t have done that!’

‘Rodbury did,’ I said dryly. ‘Did he always have knives?’

She hesitated. She was fair minded under the outrage. ‘I suppose... perhaps... he was secretive... ’

‘And he wouldn’t let you join in his games.’

She said ‘Oh,’ blankly, and began re-evaluating her brother’s psyche.

Sitting on the Norfolk dunes I thought of her father, Rupert, and of his aborted political career. I thought it almost certain that the scandal that had caused his retreat was not that his sister-in-law had been mysteriously hanged, but that he’d learned — perhaps from Valentine or even from Jackson Wells — that his own son had been present at the mid-morning cover-up hanging, having intended to have sexual relations with his aunt. Rupert, upright man, had given his son show jumpers with which to redeem himself, but had stopped short of loving forgiveness and had left his own house to his daughter. Poor Rupert Visborough... he hadn’t deserved to become Cibber, but at least he would never know.

O’Hara, huddling into his padded ex-army jacket, said that while I’d been out on the beach rehearsing the previous evening, he’d got the projectionist to show him the rushes of the hanging.

‘What sort of certificate did we earn?’ I asked. ‘PG-13? That’s what we ideally want.’

‘Depends on the cutting. What gave you that view of her death?’

‘Howard holds forth on the catharsis of the primal scream.’

‘Shit, Thomas. That death wasn’t any sort of therapy. That hanging had gut-churning vigour.’

‘Good.’

O’Hara blew on his fingers. ‘I hope these damn horses are worth this frigging cold.’

The eastern sky turned from black to grey. I picked up the walkie-talkie and spoke again to Ed and also to Ziggy. Everything was ready. I wasn’t to worry. All would be well.