Wild horses by Dick Francis

Author:Dick Francis [Dick Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780425222713
Published: 2008-05-15T10:00:00+00:00

Alison Visborough’s hideaway proclaimed her personality from the gateposts onwards. A crumbling tarmac drive led to an old two-storey house, brick-built, possibly eighteenth century, but without distinction. Fields near the house were divided into many paddocks, all fenced with weathered wooden rails, some occupied by well-muscled but plain horses. A larger paddock to one side held a variety of flakily-painted gates, poles and fake walls, the paraphernalia of show jumping. At the far end, a man in a tweed jacket and high-domed black riding hat cantered a horse slowly round in a circle, looking down and concentrating on the leading foreleg, practising dressage. A child, watching him, held a workaday pony by the reins. Lesson, it appeared, being given and received.

Everything about the place looked tidy and efficient and spoke of a possible shortage of funds.

My driver drew up outside the undemonstrative front door. He had said he would check that we had arrived at the right place, but he had no need to. The door opened before he could reach it, to reveal a full-bosomed middle-aged woman dressed in jodhpurs, shirt and dull green sweater, accompanied by two half-grown labrador dogs.

‘Mr Lyon?’ Her voice reached me, loud, imperious, displeased.

My driver gestured to the car, out of which I unenthusiastically climbed.

‘I’m Thomas Lyon,’ I said, approaching her.

She shook my hand as an unwelcome social obligation and similarly invited me into her house, leaving my driver to look after himself.

‘I am Alison Visborough. Howard warned me to expect you,’ she announced, leading me into a cold tidy room furnished with hard-stuffed, blue-green armchairs and sofas which looked inviting but repelled boarders, so to speak. I perched on the inhospitable edge of one of them, and she on another. The dogs had been unceremoniously left in the hall.

‘You are younger than I expected,’ she pronounced, her vowels unselfconsciously plummy. ‘Are you sure you are who you say?’

‘Quite often.’

She stared.

I said, ‘I’m not the ogre you described to the Drumbeat.’

‘You were driving Howard to despair,’ she said crisply. ‘Something had to be done. I did not expect all this fuss. Still less did I intend to bring trouble to Howard. He has explained that your wretched film company are angry with me, but when I perceive an injustice, I must speak out.’

‘Always?’ I asked with interest.

‘Of course.’

‘And does it often get you into trouble?’

‘I am not to be deterred by opposition.’

‘For Howard’s sake,’ I said, ‘could you write a short apology to the film company?’

She shook her head indignantly, then thought it over, and finally looked indecisive, an unusual state for her, I guessed.

She had short dark hair with grey advancing, also unafraid brown eyes, weathered skin, no lipstick and ringless work-roughened hands. A woman hard on herself and on everyone else, but admired by Howard.

I asked, ‘Who did you talk to, who works for the Drumbeat?’

She hesitated again and looked not overpleased. ‘I didn’t say,’ she grudgingly answered, ‘exactly what she wrote in the paper.’

‘She?’

‘She’s an old acquaintance. We went to the same school.

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