Dick Francis - Wild Horses

I thought of Valentine’s powerful muscles, years ago.

I had kept faith with his confession. No one through me would ever learn his truth.

I left the knife with Derry...

Valentine’s strength had fashioned for his great friend Professor Derry a unique knife to add to his collection: a steel knife with a spear head and a candy-twisted handle, unlike any ordinary weapon.

I killed the Cornish boy ...

One of the Gang, perhaps even Pig Falmouth himself, had told Valentine how Sonia had died, and in an overwhelming, towering tidal wave of anger and grief and guilt he had snatched up the spear and plunged it deep into the jockey’s body.

It had to have happened in some way like that. Valentine had loved Sonia in secret. He’d learned about paraphilia to solve Derry’s impotence problem, and he’d shown the encyclopaedia article to Pig, no doubt lightheartedly — ‘I say, Pig, just look at this!’ — and Pig had told his friends.

I destroyed all their lives...

I guessed he might have meant he ruined their lives by giving them the idea of their fatal game. They had destroyed their own lives, but guilt could lack logic.

Valentine had killed Pig Falmouth in the wild, uncontainable sort of anger and grief that had caused Jackson Wells to beat his brother Ridley near to death: and Valentine himself had then written the gossip column that reported Pig’s departure to work in Australia, that everyone had believed.

Pig Falmouth, I guessed, had lain for twenty-six years at the bottom of the well that Valentine had had a firm of builders fill in to make it safe for children. Valentine had stood with Jackson Wells and watched them throw the junk of years down the hole to obliterate the carefree boy who had kissed and killed his golden girl.

Valentine had at the end unloaded his soul’s burden of murder.

I laid them both to rest.

The sky’s amorphous grey was slowly suffused with a dull soft crimson in the east.

Moncrieff was holding a light meter to measure the changing intensity in minutes with the dedication that won him Unstable Times’ second Oscar, for Cinematography. Howard, nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, lost the award by inches, as did our fourth nominee, the Art Director. O’Hara and the moguls were happy, however, and I got allotted a big-budget epic with mega-star Nash.

Over Happisburgh beach the crimson in the sky blossomed to scarlet and coloured the waves pink. There were fewer cloud streaks than the week before, fewer brilliant gold halos against the vermilion. We would merge the two sunrises, I thought.

Away to our right, far behind Moncrieff and his cameras, the trainer of the Viking horses had spread out on the sands great bowls of horse-nuts: the wild horses would race, on our signal, to reach their breakfast, as they had been trained.

Moncrieff, raising meters high, greeted the dawn like an ancient prophet. When he lowered his arms, I was to cue the action.

The blinding sun swam upwards. Moncrieff’s arms swept down.

I said, ‘Action, Ed,’ and ‘Now, Ziggy,’ into my walkie-talkie, and away down the beach the horses began their run.

We had dressed Ziggy in an all-over body suit of grey lycra, to which, ballet trained, he’d adapted instantly. Over the body suit he wore a floating shapeless gown of translucent white silk voile, and on his head the light blonde wig. His own dark features had been transformed to blondeness by the make-up department, and he was riding, as he’d promised, without shoes, saddle or rems.

The horses accelerated, bursting into the wide silence of the deserted seascape with the thud and suction of their galloping hooves.

Ziggy knelt on his horse’s withers, his head forward above the horse’s straining neck. Gown and hair streamed out, gathering to themselves all the light, the grey-clad man inside seeming almost invisible, a misty shadow.

Moncrieff ran two head-on cameras, one set for a speed of thirty-six frames a second, slow motion.

The rising sun shone in the horses’ eyes. Light gleamed on the flying manes. The heads of the wild herd plunged forward in the urgency of racing, in the untamed compulsion to be first, to lead the pack. The herd parted and swept round Moncrieff, the plunging bodies close, the Viking heads wild and free.

Ziggy rode between Moncrieff and the maximum brilliance of light. On the finished film it looked as if the flying figure had evaporated there, had been absorbed and assimilated in luminescence; had become a part of the sun.

‘Jesus Christ,’ O’Hara said, when he saw it.

I cut some of the shots of the hanging scene into the wild horse sequences for the ending of the film.

Yvonne’s scream dissolved into the high thin forlorn cry of a wheeling seagull.

The young woman of the fantasy lovers dreamed she was riding the wild horses as she swung to her death.