He sounded, I thought, as though he had had to convince himself first, but I was certainly not going to argue.
I asked instead, 'Do you need me around, then, for the next several hours?'
'I guess not.' He sounded doubtful, stifling curiosity.
'Late Sunday afternoon,' I explained, 'is a fairly mellow time for surprise calls on farmers.'
O'Hara worked it out. 'Jackson Wells!'
'Right.' I turned to Nash. 'Do you want to meet the man you're playing?'
'No, I do not not,' he said positively. 'I do not not want to pick up the crusty mannerisms of some bitter old grouch.' want to pick up the crusty mannerisms of some bitter old grouch.'
As I didn't want him to, either, I felt relieved rather than regretful. I said, 'I'll be back by ten this evening. I've a meeting scheduled then with Moncrieff and Ziggy Keene.'
'Ziggy who?' Nash asked.
'Stuntman,' I said. 'No one better on a horse.'
'Better than Ivan?'
I smiled. 'He costs ten times as much and he's worth twenty.'
'This beach business?' O'Hara asked.
I nodded.
'What beach business?' Nash wanted to know.
'Don't ask,' O'Hara told him humorously. 'Our boy has visions. Sometimes they work.'
'What vision?' Nash asked me, 'He can't tell you,' O'Hara answered for me. 'But when he sees it, so will we.'
Nash sighed. O'Hara went on, 'Talking of seeing, when will today's dailies be ready?'
'Tomorrow morning, as usual,' I assured him. 'When the van comes back.'
'Good.'
We were sending our exposed film to London every day by courier, to have it processed there overnight in a laboratory specialising in Technicolor. The film travelled each way in a London-based van, with the driver and an accompanying guard spending their nights in London and their days in Newmarket: and so far the arrangement had thankfully proved hitchless.
Each day, after seeing the previous day's rushes, I entered on a complicated chart the scenes and takes that I thought we should use on screen, roughly editing the film as I went along. It both clarified my own mind and saved a great deal of time in the overall editing period later on. Some directors liked to work with the film's appointed editor always at hand making decisions throughout on the dailies, but I preferred to do it myself, even if sometimes it took half the night, as it gave me more control over the eventual product. The rough cut, the bones and shape of the finished film, would be in that way my own work.
Stand or fall, my own work. Life on the leaning tower.
I set off westwards from Newmarket with only a vague idea of where I was headed and an even vaguer idea of what I would say when I got there.
Perhaps postponing the moment, but anyway because the city lay on my route, I drove first into Cambridge and stopped at the hospital housing Dorothea. Enquiries on the telephone had produced merely 'She's comfortable' reports, which could mean anything from near death to doped to the eyeballs and, predictably, my arrival at the nurses' desk gained me no access to their patient.
'Sorry, no visitors.'
Nothing would budge them. Positively no visitors, except for her son. I could probably speak to him him, if I liked.
'Is he here?' I asked, wondering why I should be surprised. Nothing, after all, would unstick Paul from a full-blown crisis.
One of the nurses obligingly went to tell him of my presence, coming back with him in tow.
'Mother is not well enough to see you,' he announced proprietorially. 'Also, she is sleeping.'
We eyed each other in mutual dislike.
'How is she?' I asked. 'What do the doctors say?'
'She is in intensive care.' His bulletin voice sounded overpompous, even for him.
I waited. In the end he amplified, 'Unless there are complications, she will recover.'
Great, I thought. 'Has she said who attacked her?'
'She is not yet lucid.'
I waited again, but this time without results. After he began to show signs of simply walking off to end the exchange, I said, 'Have you seen the state of her house?'
He answered with a frown, 'I went there this morning. The police took my fingerprints!' He sounded outraged.
'They took mine also,' I said mildly. 'Please return my books.'
'Do what what?'
'Return Valentine's books and papers.'
He stared with a mixture of indignation and hatred, 'I didn't take Valentine's books. You You did.' did.'
'I did not not.'
He glared righteously. 'Mother locked the door and refused refused refused to give me the key. Her own son!' to give me the key. Her own son!'
'The key was in the open door last night,' I said. 'And the books had gone.'
'Because you you had taken them. had taken them. I I certainly did certainly did not not.'
I began to believe his protestations of innocence, unlikely as they were.
But if he hadn't taken the things, who on earth had? The damage inside the house and the attack on Dorothea spoke of violence and speed. Moving a wall of books and cupboardsful of papers out of the house spoke of thoroughness and time. And Robbie Gill had been sure the rampage had happened before the attack on Dorothea.
None of it made any sense.
'Why,' I asked, 'were you so extremely anxious to get your hands on those books?'
Somewhere in his brain warning bells sounded. I'd directed too many actors not to recognise the twitch of eye muscles that I'd so often prompted. Paul, I thought, had a motive beyond greed, but apart from seeing that it existed, I was not going to get any further.
'It's best to keep family possessions in the family,' he pontificated, and fired a final shot before stalking off. 'In view of my mother's condition, the cremation planned for tomorrow morning has been indefinitely postponed. And do not plague her or me by coming here again. She is old and frail and I I will look after her.' will look after her.'
I watched his large back-view bustle away, self-importance in every stride, the fronts of his suit jacket swinging out sideways in the motion.
I called loudly after him, 'Paul!'
He stopped reluctantly and turned, standing four-square in the hospital passage and not returning. 'What is it now?'
A forty-two-inch waist at least, I thought. A heavy leather belt held up his dark grey trousers. Cream shirt, diagonally striped tie. The podgy chin tilted upwards aggressively.
'What do you want?'
'Nothing,' I said. 'Never mind.'
He shrugged heavily with exasperation, and I went thoughtfully out to my car with my mind on telephones. I wore my mobile clipped to my belt, ready at all times. Paul, I'd noticed, carried a similar mobile, similarly clipped to his heavy belt.
Yesterday evening, I remembered, I'd been glad for Dorothea's sake that Paul had answered from his Surrey home when I'd told him of the attack on his mother. Surrey was rock-solid alibi land.
If I'd liked or even trusted Paul it wouldn't have occurred to me to check. As it was, I strove to remember the number I'd called, but could get no further than the first four digits and the last two, which wasn't going to connect me anywhere.
I rang the operator and asked if the four first numbers were a regional exchange in Surrey.
'No, sir,' a crisp female voice said, 'Those numbers are used for mobile telephones.'
Frozen, I asked if she could find me Paul Pannier's mobile number: he lived near Godalming; the last two digits were seven seven. Obligingly, after a short pause for searching, she told me the numbers I'd forgotten, and I wrote them down and made my call.
Paul answered curtly, 'Yes?'
I said nothing.
Paul said, 'Who are you? What do you want?'
I didn't speak.
'I can't hear you,' he said crossly, and switched off his instrument.
So much for Surrey, I thought grimly. But even Paul even Paul even Paul couldn't have slashed open his mother. couldn't have slashed open his mother.
Sons had been known to murder their mothers...
But not fat forty-five-year-old men with inflated self-esteem.
Disturbed, I drove westwards to Oxfordshire and set about looking for Jackson Wells.
With again help from directory enquiries I discovered his general location and, by asking at garages and from people out walking dogs, I arrived in the end at Batwillow Farm, south of Abingdon, south of Oxford, sleepy and peaceful in the late Sunday afternoon.
I bumped slowly down a rutted unmade lane which ended in an untidy space outside a creeper-grown house. Weeds flourished. A set of old tyres leaned against a rotting wooden shed. An unsteady-looking stack of fencing timber seemed to be weathering into disintegration. A crusty old grouch of a man leaned on a farm gate and stared at me with disfavour.
Climbing out of the car and feeling depressed already, I asked, 'Mr Wells?'
'Eh?'
He was deaf.
'Mr Wells,' I shouted.
'Aye.'
'Can I talk to you?' I shouted.
Hopeless, I thought.
The old man hadn't heard. I tried again. He merely stared at me impassively, and then pointed at the house.
Unsure of what he intended, I nevertheless walked across to the obvious point of access and pressed a conspicuous doorbell.
There was no gentle ding-dong as with Dorothea: the clamour of the bell inside Batwillow Farm set one's teeth rattling. The door was soon opened by a fair young blonde girl with ponytailed hair and to-die-for skin.
I said, 'I'd like to talk to Mr Jackson Wells.'
'OK,' she nodded. 'Hang on.' She retreated into a hallway and turned left out of my sight, prompting the appearance presently of a lean loose-limbed blond man looking less than fifty.
'You wanted me?' he enquired.
I looked back to where the old deaf grump still leaned on the gate.
'My father,' the blond man said, following my gaze.
'Mr Jackson Wells?'
'That's me,' he said.
'Oh!'
He grinned at my relief with an easy-going light-heartedness a hundred miles from my expectations. He waited, untroubled, for me to introduce myself, and then said slowly, 'Have I seen you somewhere before?'
'I don't think so.'
'On the television,' he said doubtfully.
'Oh. Well were you watching the Lincoln at Doncaster yesterday?'
'Yes, I was, but...' He wrinkled his forehead, not clearly remembering.
'My name,' I said, 'is Thomas Lyon, and I was a friend of Valentine Clark.'
A cloud crossed Jackson Wells's sunny landscape.