Wild Horses Part 22

'I didn't mean,' she said awkwardly, sixteen surfacing again after all. 'I mean, I don't want to offend you...'

'But no casting couches. It's all right.'

She blushed and retreated, sane and confused, to her parents, and I thought bed wouldn't have been such a bad idea after all.

The trouble with making films, I acknowledged, was the way the occupation gobbled time. For the three months of any pre-production, I worked flat out to put the film together, choosing locations, getting the feel the vision in place, altering the screenplay, living with the characters. During production, like now, I worked seven days a week with little sleep. Post-production the recording of music and sound effects, the cutting together of scenes and parts of scenes to make an impact and tell a story, the debates and the meetings and the previews all of those often had to be scrambled into just a further three months. And with one film done, another crowded on my heels. I'd made three films lately in under two years. This new one had by far the biggest budget. I loved the work, I was lucky to be wanted, I felt no flicker of regret: I just didn't seem to have time to look for a wife.

One day, I guessed, it might happen like a thunderbolt. The sides, however, had to date vouchsafed only scattered showers, and Lucy looked like a continuing drought.

Someone unexpectedly knocked my elbow. I whirled round with surging heartbeat and found myself face to face with Moncrieff.

'Jumpy!' he said, watching me reach for composure. 'What were you expecting? A tiger?'

'With claws,' I agreed. I got things under control and we discussed the next scene.

'Are you all right?' Moncrieff asked, puzzled. 'Not ill?'

Not ill, I thought, but plain scared. I said, 'Everything's fine. But... er... some nutter wants to get the film stopped, and if you see anyone in my area raising a blunt instrument, give me a holler.'

His eyebrows rose. 'Is that why O'Hara has been standing behind you whenever he can?'

'I guess so.'

He thought it over. 'Nasty knife, that, on the gallops.' A pause. 'It got effing close to Ivan.'

'Do me a favour and don't remind me.'

'Just keep my eyes open?'

'Got it.'

We lit and shot some non-speaking takes of Nash's emotions during the race. The block of crowd behind him, mostly bonafide extras but some townspeople, also Mrs Wells, Lucy, Ridley and Nash's bodyguards, responded faithfully to Ed's exhortations, looking for each shot to where he pointed, oohing and aahing, showing anxiety, showing excitement and finally cheering wildly as they watched in memory the horses racing to the finish.

All of the faces except Nash's would be very slightly out of focus, thanks to Moncrieff's wizardry with lenses. One of his favourite lenses had to be focussed princ.i.p.ally on the light in the actor's eyes. Everything else on the actor's head would be a tiny shade fuzzy, his neck, hair, the lot.

'The daylight's going,' Moncrieff told me eventually, though to any eye but his the change was too slight to notice. 'We should wrap for today.'

Ed through his megaphone thanked the citizens of Huntingdon for their work and invited them back for the morrow. They clapped. Happy faces all round. Nash signed autographs with the bodyguards at his shoulders.

Lucy, glowing with the day's pleasures, walked to where I was checking through the following day's schedule with O'Hara, and handed me a flat white box about a foot long by three inches wide, fastened shut with a rubber band.

'What is it?' I asked.

'I don't know,' she said. 'A boy asked me to give it to you.'

'What boy?'

'Just a boy. A present, he said. Aren't you going to open it?'

O'Hara took it out of my hands, stripped off the rubber band and cautiously opened the box himself. Inside, on a bed of crunched up white office paper, lay a knife.

I swallowed. The knife had a handle of dark polished wood, ridged round and round to give a good grip. There was a businesslike black hilt and a narrow black blade nearly six inches long: all in all, good looking and efficient.

'Wow,' Lucy said. 'It's beautiful.'

O'Hara closed the box without touching the knife and, restoring the rubber band, stuck it in his outside jacket pocket. I thought it was better to get a knife in a box than in the body.

'We should stop all boys from leaving,' O'Hara said, but he could see, as I could, that it was already too late. Half of the crowd had already walked homewards through the gates.

'Is something the matter?' Lucy asked, frowning, sensing our alarm.

'No,' I smiled at the blue eyes. 'I hope you've had a good day.'

'Spectacular!'

I kissed her cheek. In public, she allowed it. She said, 'I'd better go, Dad's waiting,' and made a carefree departure, waving.

O'Hara took the white box from his pocket and carefully opened it again, picking out of the raised lid a folded strip of the same white paper. He handed it to me and I looked at its message.

Again a computer print-out, it said, 'Tomorrow'.

O'Hara and I walked out together towards the cars and I told him about Dorothea and her injuries. I described again for him, as I had two days earlier, the knife that had been dropped on the Heath.

He stopped dead in mid-stride. 'Are you saying,' he demanded, 'that your friend was attacked with that that knife? The one on the Heath?' knife? The one on the Heath?'

'I don't know.'

'But,' he protested, bemused, 'what possible connection could there be between her and our film?'

'I don't know.'

'It can't have been the same knife.' He walked on, troubled but certain.

'The only connection,' I said, going with him, 'is the fact that long ago Dorothea's brother Valentine put shoes on Jackson Wells's racehorses.'

'Much too distant to have any significance.'

'And Valentine said he once gave a knife to someone called Derry.'

'h.e.l.l's teeth, Thomas, you're rambling.'

'Yes. Valentine was at the time.'

'Valentine was what?'

'Rambling,' I said. 'Delirious.'

I killed the Cornish boy...

Too many knives.

'You are not,' O'Hara said strongly, 'going to get knifed tomorrow.'

'Good.'

He laughed. 'You're a jacka.s.s, Thomas.'

He wanted me to travel in his car, but I called Robbie Gill's mobile and found I could briefly see Dorothea, if I arrived by seven.

At the hospital the egregious Paul had positioned himself in a chair outside the single room into which Dorothea had been moved. He rose heavily to his feet at the sight of me, but to my surprise made none of the objections I was expecting.

'My mother wants to see you,' he said disapprovingly. 'I've told her I don't want you here, but all she does is cry.'

There had been, I thought, a subtle change in Paul. His pompous inner certainty seemed to have rocked: the external bombast sounded much the same, but half its fire had gone.

'You're not to tire her,' he lectured. 'Five minutes, that's all.'

Paul himself opened Dorothea's door, and came in with me purposefully.

Dorothea lay on a high bed, her head supported by a bank of pillows, her old face almost as colourless as the cotton except for dark disturbing bruises and threadlike minutely st.i.tched cuts. There were tubes, a bag delivering drops of blood, another bag of clear liquid, and a system that allowed her to run painkillers into her veins when she needed it. Her hold on life looked negligible. Her eyes were closed and her white body was motionless, even the slow rise and fall of her chest seeming too slight to register on the covering sheet.

'Dorothea,' I said quietly. 'It's Thomas. I've come.'

Very faintly, she smiled.

Paul's loud voice broke her peace. 'I've told him, Mother, that he has five minutes. And, of course, I will remain here at hand.'

Dorothea, murmuring, said she wanted to talk to me alone.

'Don't be silly, Mother.'

Two tears appeared below her eyelids and trembled in the lashes.

'Oh, for heaven's sake,' Paul said brusquely. 'She does that all the time.' He turned on his heel and gave her her wish, seeming hurt at her rejection. 'Five minutes,' he threatened as a parting shot.

'Paul's gone,' I said, as the door closed behind him. 'How are you feeling?'

'So tired, dear.' Her voice, though still a murmur, was perfectly clear. 'I don't remember how I got here.'

'No, I've been told. Robbie Gill told me.'

'Robbie Gill is very kind.'

'Yes.'

'Hold my hand, dear.'

I pulled the visitor's chair to her side and did as she asked, vividly remembering Valentine's grasp of my wrist, exactly a week ago. Dorothea, however, had no sins to confess.

'Paul told me,' she said, 'that someone tore my house apart, looking for something.'

'I'm afraid so. Yes, I saw it.'

'What were they looking for?'

'Don't you know?'

'No, dear. The police asked me. It must have been something Valentine had. Sometimes I think I know. Sometimes I think I hear him shouting at me, to tell him. Then it all goes away again.'

'Who was shouting?'

She said doubtfully, 'Paul was shouting.'

'Oh, no.'

'He does shout, you know. He means well. He's my son, my sweet baby.' Tears of weakness and regret ran down her cheeks. 'Why do precious little babies grow...?' Her question ended in a quiet sob, unanswerable. 'He wants to look after me.'

I said, 'Did Robbie Gill talk to you about a nursing home?'

'So kind. I'd like to go there. But Paul says...' She stopped, fluttering a white hand exhaustedly. 'I haven't the strength to argue.'

'Let Robbie Gill move you,' I urged. 'In a day or two, when you' re stronger.'

'Paul says...' She stopped, the effort of opposing him too much.

'Just rest,' I said. 'Don't worry. Just lie and drift and get stronger.'

'So kind, dear.' She lay quiet for a long minute, then said, 'I'm sure I know what he was looking for, but I can't remember it.'

'What Paul was looking for?'

'No, dear. Not Paul.' She frowned. 'It's all jumbled up.' After another pause she said, 'How many knives did I have?'

'How many...?'

'The police asked me. How many knives in the kitchen. I can't remember.'

'No one knows how many knives they have in the kitchen.'

'No. They said there weren't any knives in the house with blood on them.'

'Yes, I see.'

'Perhaps when I go home I'll see which knife is missing.'

'Yes, perhaps. Would you like me to tidy your house up a bit?'

'I can't ask you.'