Wild Horses Part 33

On returning to my own rooms I found Nash, on the point of leaving, announcing that he was going to spend the afternoon watching racing on TV while betting by phone with a bookmaker I'd arranged for him.

'Is it still on, for tonight?' he asked, pausing in the doorway.

'Certainly is, if the rain stops, which it is supposed to.'

'How do you expect me to ride a horse in the G.o.ddam dark?'

'There will be moonlight. Moncrieff's arranging it.'

'What about G.o.ddam rabbit holes?'

'There aren't any on Newmarket's gallops,' I a.s.sured him.

'But what if I fall off! off!'

'We'll pick you up and put you back in the saddle.'

'I hate you sometimes, Thomas.' He grinned and went on his way. I left Lucy up to her elbows in decades of form books, collected my minders in the lobby and was bowled the short mile back to the stables.

On my way back to 'The Athenaeum' I detoured into the downstairs office, used chiefly by Ed, where we had the business paraphernalia of telephones, faxes, and large-capacity copier, and asked the young woman operating everything there to keep on trying Ridley Wells's number for me, and if he returned home and answered the summons, to put the call through to me upstairs immediately.

'But you said never to do that, in case the phone rang during a shot.'

'We can re-shoot,' I said. 'I want to catch this man. OK?'

She nodded, rea.s.sured, and I went upstairs to re-coax Cibber and Silva into their most venomous faces.

Ridley Wells answered his telephone at three-thirty, and sounded drunk.

I said, 'Do you remember you asked our producer, O'Hara, if we had any riding work for you in our film?'

'He said you hadn't.'

'Right. But now we have. Are you still interested?' I mentioned a fee for a morning's work large enough to hook a bigger fish than Ridley, and he didn't even ask what the job entailed.

I said, 'We'll send a car for you tomorrow morning at seven. It will bring you to the stables where we're keeping our horses. You don't need to bring anything with you. We'll supply you with clothes from our wardrobe department. We'll supply the horse for you to ride. We don't want you to do anything out of the ordinary or dangerous on the horse. We're just short of a rider for a scene we're shooting tomorrow.'

'Got you,' he said grandly.

'Don't forget,' I insisted.

'Mum's the word, old boy.'

'No,' I said. 'Mum's not not the word. If you're not sober in the morning, then no job and no fee.' the word. If you're not sober in the morning, then no job and no fee.'

After a pause he said, 'Got you,' again, and I hoped he meant it.

When we'd finished the close-ups and the day's work was safely on its way to London for processing I ran the previous day's rushes in the screening room, happy for Bill Robinson's sake that he and his monster bike positively quivered with shining power, filling Nash's character with the determination he needed if he were to take action.

From fantasy, courage, I thought. I wanted the film to a.s.sert that old idea, but without ramming it down anyone's throat. I wanted people to see that they had always known it. To open coors. A door-opener; that was my function.

It stopped raining more or less at the time forecast miraculous and Moncrieff busied himself in the stable-yard supervising the loading of cameras, films, lights and crews onto trucks for the 'moonlit' shots of Nash on the Heath.

Nash arrived to the minute, no surprise, and came out of the house half an hour later in riding clothes and night-time makeup, carrying his helmet and demanding a thoroughly tranquillised mount.

'If your fans could only hear you!' I remarked dryly.

'You, Thomas,' he said, smiling, 'can go try 6G in a brake turn at low level.'

I shook my head. Nash could fly fast jet aircraft when not under a restrictive contract in mid-film and I couldn't. Nash's pre-mega-star hair-raising CV included air force service in fighters, all part of his mystique.

'The scene comes a night or two before the motor bikes,' I said. 'You have been accused. You are worried. OK?'

He nodded. The screenplay had included the night-on-the-horse scene from the beginning, and he was prepared.

We drove the camera truck slowly up the road by the hill, Nash in the saddle beside us (the horse in dim 'moonlight') looking worried and thoughtful. We then filmed him sitting on the ground with his back to a wind-bent tree, the horse cropping gra.s.s nearby. We'd more or less finished when the thick clouds unexpectedly parted and blew in dramatic shapes across the real full moon, and Moncrieff turned his camera heavenwards for more than sixty seconds, and beamed at me triumphantly through his straggly beard.

The long day ended. Back at Bedford Lodge I found three more boxes itemised, plus a note from Lucy saying she hoped I didn't mind but her parents wanted her home for Sunday after all. Back Monday, she wrote.

Box VIII. Form books. Flat racing.

Box IX. Horseshoes.

Box X. Encyclopaedias, A-F.

The horseshoes were actual horseshoes, each saved in a plastic bag and labelled with the name of the horse that had worn it, complete with winning date, racecourse and event. Valentine had been a true collector, squirrelling his successes away.

I pulled out the first of the encyclopaedias without anything particular in mind and, finding a slip of paper in it acting as a bookmark, opened it there. Autocrat Autocrat: an absolute ruler. Multiple examples followed.

I closed the book, rested my head against the back of my armchair, decided it was time to take off the Delta-cast and drifted towards sleep.

The thought that galvanised me to full wakefulness seemed to come from nowhere but was a word seen peripherally, unconsidered.

Autocrat...

Further down the page came Auto-erotism Auto-erotism.

I picked the volume out of the box and read the long entry. I learned much more than I wanted to about various forms of masturbation, though I could find nothing of much significance. Vaguely disappointed, I started to replace the bookmarker, but glanced at it and kept it in my hand. Valentine's bookmarker bore the one word 'Paraphilia'.

I didn't know what paraphilia was, but I searched through several unopened boxes and finally found the P volume of the encyclopaedia, following where Valentine had directed.

The P volume also had a bookmark, this time in the page for Paraphilia Paraphilia.

Paraphilia I read, consisted of many manifestations of perverted love. One of them was listed as 'erotic strangulation the starvation of blood to the brain to stimulate s.e.xual arousal'.

Valentine's knowledge of self-asphyxia, the process he had described to Professor Derry, had come from this book.

'In 1791 in London,' I read, 'at the time of Haydn, a well-known musician died as a result of his leaning towards paraphilia. One Friday afternoon he engaged a prost.i.tute to tie a leash round his neck which he could then tighten to the point of his satisfaction. Unfortunately he went too far and throttled himself. The prost.i.tute reported his death and was tried for murder, but acquitted, as the musician's perversion was well known. The judge ordered the records of the case not to be published, in the interests of decency.'

One lived and learned, I thought tolerantly, putting the encyclopaedia back in its box. Poor old Professor Derry. Just as well, perhaps, that he hadn't acted on Valentine's information.

Before throwing them both away I glanced at Valentine's second bookmark. On the strip of white paper he'd written, 'Tell Derry this' and, lower down, 'Showed this to Pig'.

I went along to O'Hara's room, retrieved the folder and 'The Clang' photograph from the safe, and sat in his armchair looking at them and thinking long and hard.

Eventually, I slept in his bed, as it was safer.

CHAPTER 15.

The film company's car brought Ridley Wells to the stables on time and sober the next morning. We sent him into the house to the wardrobe department, and I took the opportunity to telephone Robbie Gill on my mobile.

I expected to get his message service at that early hour, but in fact he was awake and answered my summons himself.

'Still alive?' he asked chattily.

'Yes, thank you.'

'So what do you need?'

As always with Robbie, straight to the point.

'First,' I said, 'who gave you the list of knife specialists?'

'My professional colleague in the police force,' he said promptly. 'The doctor they call out locally. He's a randy joker, ex-rugger player, good for a laugh and a jar in the pub. I asked him for known knife specialists. He said the force had drawn up the list themselves recently and asked him if he could add to it. He couldn't. The people he knows who carry knives tend to be behind bars.'

'Did he attend Dorothea?'

'No, he was away. Anything else?'

'How is she?'

'Dorothea? Still sedated. Now Paul's gone, do you still want to pay for the nursing home?'

'Yes, I do, and I want to see her soon, like this afternoon.'

'No problem. Just go. She's still in a side ward because of Paul, but physically she's healing well. We could move her by Tuesday, I should think.'

'Good,' I said.

'Take care.'

I said wryly, 'I do.'

In the stable yard the lads were readying for morning exercise, saddling and bridling the horses. As it was Sunday, I told them, we would again have the Heath gallops more or less to ourselves, but we wouldn't be filming exactly the same scenes as the week before.

'You were all asked to wear what you did last Sunday,' I said. 'Did you all check with our continuity girl if you couldn't remember?'

I got nods.

'Fine. Then all of you will canter up the hill and stop where you stopped and circled last week. OK?'

More nods.

'You remember the rider who came from nowhere and made a slash at Ivan?'

They laughed. They wouldn't forget it.

'Right,' I said, 'today we don't have Ivan, but we're going to stage that attack ourselves, and put it into the film. Today it will be a fictional affair. OK? The knife used will not be a real knife but one that's been made out of wood by our production department. What I want you to do is exactly the sort of thing you were doing last Sunday circling, talking, paying not much attention to the stranger. Right?'

They understood without trouble. Our young horsemaster said, 'Who is going to stand in for Ivan?'

'I am,' I said. 'I'm not as broad-shouldered as him or as Nash, but I'll be wearing a jacket like the one Nash usually wears as the trainer. I'll be riding the horse Ivan rode. When we're ready with the cameras, the man playing the knife-attacker will mount and ride that slow old bay that finished last in our race at Huntingdon. The lad who usually rides him will be standing behind the cameras, out of shot. Any questions?'

One asked, 'Are you going to chase him down the hill on the camera truck, like last week?'

'No,' I said. 'He will gallop off down the hill. The camera will film him.'

I handed over command, so to speak, to the horsemaster, who organised the mounting and departure of the string. Ed and Moncrieff were already on the Heath. I went into the wardrobe section to put on Nash's jacket and, Ridley being ready, took him with me in my car up the road to the brow of the hill. Ridley and I, out of the car, walked over to the circling horses, stopping by the camera truck.

'What we need,' I told Ridley, 'is for you to ride into the group from somewhere over there...' I pointed. 'Trot into the group, draw a make-belief knife from a sheath on your belt, slash at one of the group as if you intended to wound him badly, and then, in the ensuing melee, canter off over the brow of the hill and down the wide training ground towards the town. OK?'

Ridley stared, his eyes darkly intense.

'You will slash at me me, OK? I'm standing in for Nash.'

Ridley said nothing.

'Of course,' I told him pleasantly, 'when this scene appears in the finished film it will not look like one smooth sequence. There will be flashes of the knife, of horses rearing, of jumbled movement and confusion. There will be a wound. There will be blood. We will fake those later.' Ed brought various props across to where I stood with Ridley, and handed them to him one by one.

'Make-believe knife in sheath on belt,' Ed said, as if reading from a list. 'Please put on the belt.'

As if mesmerised, Ridley obeyed.

'Please practise drawing the knife,' I said.

Ridley drew the knife and looked at it in horror. The production department had faithfully reproduced the American trench knife from my drawing, and although the object Ridley held was light-weight and of painted wood, from three paces it looked like a heavy knuckleduster with a long blade attached to its index finger side.

'Fine,' I said non-committally. 'Put it back in its sheath.'

Ridley fumbled the knife back into place.

'Helmet,' Ed said, holding it out.