Wild Horses Part 15

'Haven't got one,' Jackson Wells said promptly.

'Not even... Excuse me,' I said to Mrs Wells apologetically, '... not even a wedding photo?'

'No,' Jackson Wells said. 'They got lost when I moved here.' His eyes were wide with innocence, and for the third time I didn't believe him.

CHAPTER 8.

Driving towards Newmarket and working out times. I thought I might squeeze in an empty half-hour before my ten o'clock meeting, and accordingly telephoned Dr Robbie Gill, whose number I did remember clearly from Dorothea's heavy black help-summoning handwriting.

'Do you feel,' I asked, 'like a quick jar somewhere?'

'When?'

I'd worked it out. 'I'm in my car. I'll hit Newmarket around nine-thirty. Any good? I have to be at Bedford Lodge at ten.'

'Is it important?'

'Interesting,' I said. 'About Dorothea's attacker.'

'I'll square it with my wife.' His voice smiled, as if that were no problem. 'I'll come to Bedford Lodge at nine-thirty and wait in the lounge.'

'Great.'

'I heard someone attacked Nash Rourke with a knife.'

'As good as. It was his stand-in, though. And no harm done.'

'So I gathered. Nine-thirty, then.'

He clicked off, his Scottish voice as brusque as ever: and redheaded and terrier-like, he was patiently waiting in the entrance lounge when I got back to Bedford Lodge.

'Come upstairs,' I said, shaking his hand. 'What do you drink?'

'Diet c.o.ke.'

I got room service to bring up his fizzy tipple and for myself poured cognac from a resident bottle. This film, I thought fleetingly, was driving me towards forty per cent proof.

'Well,' I said, waving him to an armchair in the neat sitting-room, 'I went to see Dorothea in Cambridge this afternoon and found my way barred by our friend Paul.'

Robbie Gill grimaced. 'She's basically my patient, and he's barring my way too, as far as possible.'

'What can I do to preserve her from being shanghaied by him as soon as she's capable of being transported by ambulance? She told him, and me, that she didn't want to move into this retirement home he's arranging for her, but he pays no attention.'

'He's a pest.'

'Can't you slap a "don't move this patient" notice on Dorothea?'

He considered it doubtfully. 'No one would move her at present. But a few days from now...'

'Any which way,' I said.

'How much do you care?'

'A good deal.'

'I mean... money wise.'

I looked at him over my brandy gla.s.s. 'Are you saying that an application of funds might do the trick?'

He replied forthrightly, as was his Scottish nature. 'I'm saying that as her doctor I could, with her permission, shift her into a private nursing home of my choice if I could guarantee the bills would be paid.'

'Would it break me?'

He mentioned an alarming sum and waited without censure for me to find it too much.

'You have no obligation,' he remarked.

'I'm not poor, either,' I said. 'Don't tell her who's paying.'

He nodded. 'I'll say it's free on the National Health. She'll accept that.'

'Go ahead, then.'

He downed his diet c.o.ke. 'Is that the lot?'

'No,' I said. 'If I draw something for you, tell me what you think.'

I took a large sheet of writing paper, laid it on the coffee table, and drew a picture of the knife I'd found on the Heath. A wickedly k.n.o.bbed hand grip on eight sharp inches of steel.

He looked at the drawing in motionless silence.

'Well?' I asked.

'A knuckle-duster,' he said, 'that grew into a knife.'

'And Dorothea's injuries?' I suggested.

He stared at me.

I said, 'Not two a.s.sailants. Not two weapons. This one, that's both a blunt instrument and and a blade.' a blade.'

'Dear G.o.d.'

'Who would own such a thing?' I asked him.

He shook his head mutely.

'Do you know anyone called Derry?'

He looked completely perplexed.

I said, 'Valentine once mentioned leaving a knife with someone called Derry.'

Robbie Gill frowned, thinking. 'I don't know any Derry.'

I sighed. Too many people knew nothing.

He said abruptly, 'How old are you?'

'Thirty. And you?'

'Thirty-six.' He smiled wryly. 'Too old to conquer the world.'

'So am I.'

'Ridiculous!'

'Steven Spielberg,' I said, 'was twenty-seven when he made Jaws Jaws. I'm not him. Nor Visconti, nor Fellini, nor Lucas. Just a jobbing storyteller.'

'And Alexander the Great died at thirty-three.'

'Of diet c.o.ke?'I asked.

He laughed. 'Is it true that in America, if you die of old age, it's your fault?'

I nodded gravely. 'You should have jogged more. Or not smoked, or checked your cholesterol, or abstained from the juice.'

'And then what?'

'And then you exist miserably for years with tubes.'

He laughed and rose to go. 'I'm embarra.s.sed,' he said, 'but my wife wants Nash Rourke's autograph.'

'Done,' I promised. 'How soon can you realistically move Dorothea?'

He thought it over. 'She was attacked yesterday evening. She's been sleepy from anaesthetic all day today. It was a bad wound... they had to remove part of the intestine before repairing the abdomen wall. If all goes well she'll be fully awake tomorrow and briefly on her feet the day after, but I'd say it will be another week before she could travel.'

'I'd like to see her,' I said. 'The wretched Paul must sleep sometimes sometimes.'

'I'll fix it. Phone me tomorrow evening.'

Moncrieff, Ziggy Keene and I set off at four-thirty the next morning, heading north and east to the Norfolk coast.

Ed, instructed by O'Hara, had found me a driver, a silent young man who took my car along smoothly and followed the instructions I gave him as I map-read beside him in the front pa.s.senger seat.

Moncrieff and Ziggy slept in the back. Into the boot we'd packed the heavy camera Moncrieff could carry on his shoulders like a toy, also a cold-box full of raw film and a hot-box full of coffee and breakfast. The outside air was cold; the warm car soporific. I was glad, after a while, for the driver.

We cleared Norwich and headed across the flat lands towards the North Sea, skirting the Broads and sliding eventually through the still-sleeping village of Happisburgh and slowing down a narrow lane that ended in sand dunes.

Moncrieff and Ziggy climbed stiffly out of the car and shivered. It was still completely dark outside the range of the car's lights, and the coastal breeze was as unrelenting as ever.

'You said to bring warm clothes,' Moncrieff complained, zipping himself into a fur-lined parka. 'You said nothing about playing Inuits.' He pulled the fur-lined hood over his head and thrust his hands into Arctic-issue gauntlets.

Leaving the driver with his own separate breakfast in the car, the three of us walked onwards through the sand dunes towards the open sh.o.r.e, Moncrieff carrying the camera and the film box, I leading with the hot-box and Ziggy between us toting polystyrene rectangles for sitting insulation on cold salt-laden ground.

'How did you find this G.o.d-forsaken place?' Moncrieff grumbled.

'I used to come here as a boy.'

'Suppose it had sprouted casinos?'

'I checked.'

Beyond the range of the car's lights we paused to establish night vision, then went on slowly until the sand dunes fell away, the breeze freshened, and the sound of the restless waves spoke of timeless desolation.

'OK,' I said, 'if there's any shelter, sit in it.'

Moncrieff groaned, took a palette from Ziggy and folded himself with oaths into a shallow hollow on the sea side of the last dune. Ziggy, tougher and taciturn, found a similar place near him.

Ziggy, Ukrainian by birth, had from the nursery proved so spectacularly acrobatic on horses that he had been sent to the Moscow Circus school at the age of eight, and there, far from his rural roots, had received a first-cla.s.s education along with endless practice in his special skill. Every pupil in the school, boys and girls alike, received daily ballet lessons to teach graceful movement in the circus ring. Ziggy could in consequence have joined any ballet company anywhere, but nothing interested him except horses.

Ziggy at twenty-two had left the circus behind: circuses everywhere had left town. Never political, though a favoured son, he had somehow travelled with his trade to America, and it was there that I'd seen him first, turning somersaults on a cantering horse one afternoon in an ill-attended practice for the Ringling Brothers in Madison Square Garden.

I'd offered him a job in my rodeo film and, despite union protests, I'd secured him. I'd shortened his unp.r.o.nounceable surname to Keene, and he'd quickly earned such a brilliant reputation in the horse stunt business that nowadays I had to beg him for his time.

Slender, light and wiry, he took the Norfolk chill in his stride. Child's play, I supposed, after the Russian steppes. Alternately morose and laughing, he was intensely Ukrainian in temperament, and often told me he would return soon to his roots, a threat receding as years pa.s.sed. His roots, as perhaps he acknowledged, were no longer there.

At a fairly brief meeting the evening before, I'd outlined what we were looking for.

'Film the sunrise!' Moncrieff exclaimed lugubriously, 'We don't have to drive seventy miles for that! What's wrong with the Heath outside the door?'

'You'll see.'

'And the weather forecast?'

'Cold, windy and clear.'

His objections, I knew, were not from the heart. Every lighting cameraman knew that directors could be both unreasonable and unmovable when it came to specific locations. If I'd demanded the slopes of K2, he would have sworn and strapped on his crampons.

I said, 'As it's the time of the vernal equinox, the sun will rise due east. And that,' I consulted the small compa.s.s I'd brought 'is straight over there.' I pointed. 'At the moment, looking directly out to sea, we are facing a bit further north. The coast runs from north-west to south-east, so when the sun rises, horses galloping along the sand from our left will be back-lit, but will also have the sun very slightly in their faces.'

Moncrieff nodded.