To the hilt

CHAPTER THREE

My mother gave me her National Westminster Bank card for getting cash from machines and told me her secret number: a very extreme manifestation of trust.

I used the card and then bought a train ticket to Reading although I didn't, as she'd begged, acquire some 'decent' clothes before arriving at the offices of Pierce, Tollright and Simmonds.

I took with me from Ivan's study a folder containing the power of attorney, the certified copies, and a copy of Ivan's handwritten letter appointing me his Alternate Director.

Tobias Tollright looked me up and down, inspected the power of attorney and Ivan's letter and telephoned my mother.

'This person who says he's your son,' he asked her, 'would you please describe him.'

He had his office phone switched to conference, so I could hear her resigned reply.

'He's about six feet tall. Thin. He has chestnut hair, wavy, curling onto his shoulders. And, oh yes, he has a black eye.'

Tobias thanked her and disconnected, his enthusiasm for my appearance still bumping along at zero in a way that I was used to from men in suits.

'What is wrong,' I asked, plunging in, 'at the brewery?'

Once he'd come to terms with the way I looked, he proved both astute and helpful. In my turn I ignored his fussy little mannerism of digging round his teeth with a succession of wooden picks and making sucking noises, and concentrated on understanding the mumbled nasal voice that by-passed the cleaning. He was barely ten years older than myself, I reckoned. Not enough age gap, anyway for him to pull much advantage of seniority. After the first ten minutes we got on fine.

His office was a boring functional box with a view of railway lines from a stark window, and strip lighting overhead that developed bags under the youngest eyes. Interesting to paint (a thin glaze of ultramarine perhaps, over yellow ochre) but terrible to live with.

'Basically,' he said, 'the man in charge of the brewery's finances has milked the cow and done a bunk to Brazil or some such haven with no extradition treaties. The brewery cannot in consequence meet its obligations. The creditors are restive, to put it mildly, and as auditor I cannot at the moment give King Alfred an OK to continue trading.'

More than enough, I thought, to give Ivan a heart attack.

I asked, 'How much is missing?'

He smiled. 'How big is a fog?'

'You mean, you don't know?'

'Our embezzler was the Finance Director. He worked the three-card trick. Find the queen… but she's gone to a nice anonymous bank account for ever and all you have left is debts.'

I frowned. 'You're not being awfully precise.'

'I warned Sir Ivan last year that I thought he had an open drain somewhere, but he didn't want to believe it. Now he's so ill, he still won't face it. I'm sorry to say it, but there it is. And he would rather cover up the theft, if he can, than admit to the world that he - and his whole board of directors - has been careless and even stupid.'

'And he's not the first down that road.'

'Far, far from it.'

'So, what are your life-belt measures?'

He hesitated, picking away at the teeth. 'I can advise you,' he said, 'but I cannot act for you. As an auditor I must keep a certain distance from my clients' affairs. In effect, I can only point out a course of action you might wish to take.'

'Then please point.'

He fiddled some more with his mouth and I felt sore and in need of sleep and not scintillatingly bright.

'I would suggest,' he said carefully, 'that you might call in an insolvency practitioner.'

'A who?'

'Insolvency practitioner. Someone to negotiate for you.'

'I didn't know such people existed.'

'Lucky you.'

'Where do I find one?' I asked blankly.

'I'll give you a name. I can do that at least.'

'And,' I asked gratefully, 'what will he do?'

'She.'

'Oh, well, what will she do?'

'If she thinks the brewery can be saved - and to do that she will have to make her own independent assessment of the position - if she thinks there's still life in the corpse she'll set up a CVA.'

He looked at my face. 'A CVA,' he explained patiently, 'is a company voluntary arrangement. In other words, she will try to call together a meeting of creditors. She'll explain to them the scope of the losses, and if she can persuade them that the brewery can go back to trading at a profit, they will together work out a rate at which the debts can be paid off bit by bit. Creditors will always do that if possible, because if they force a firm into total liquidation, they don't get paid much at all.'

'That,' I said, 'I understand.'

'Then,' Tobias went on, 'if the committee, acting with the brewery, can produce to me a budget and a forecast that will satisfy me as auditor that the brewery has a viable future, then I can sign the audited accounts, and it can continue to trade.'

'Well…' I thought for a bit, then said, 'What are the chances?'

'Fairly reasonable.'

'No higher?'

'It depends on the creditors.'

'And… er… who are they?'

'The usual. The bank. The Inland Revenue. The pension fund. The suppliers.'

'The bank?'

'The Finance Director organised a line of credit for expansion. The money's gone. There's no expansion and nothing in the bank to service the loan. To pay the interest, that is to say. The bank has given notice that they will not honour any more cheques.'

'And the tax people?'

'The brewery hasn't paid its employees' national insurance contributions for six months. The money's vanished. As for the pension fund, it's evaporated. The suppliers, in comparison, are small beer - if you'll excuse the dreadful pun - but the can suppliers are berserk.'

'What a mess,' I said. 'Aren't there any… er… assets?

'Sure. The brewery itself. But there's an outstanding loan on that too, and nothing left to service it with. The bank would foreclose at a loss.'

'What about the pubs the brewery owns?' I asked.

'The tied houses? The Finance Director mortgaged the lot. To put it briefly, that money's gone too.'

'It sounds hopeless.'

'I've known worse.'

'And what about the King Alfred Cup?'

'Ah.' He concentrated on his teeth. 'You might ask Sir Ivan where it is.'

'At Cheltenham,' I said, puzzled. 'They run it at Cheltenham a month on Saturday.'

'Ah,' he said again, 'you're talking about the race.'

'Yes. What else?'

The Cup itself,' he said earnestly. 'The King Alfred Gold Cup. The chalice. Medieval, I believe.'

I rubbed a hand over my face. Bruises were catching up.

'It's extremely valuable,' Tobias said. 'Sir Ivan should really consider selling it to offset some of the debt. But there is some doubt as to whether it belongs to the brewery or to Sir Ivan personally and… I say,' he broke off, 'are you feeling all right?'

'Yes.'

'You don't look it. Would you like some coffee?'

'Very much.'

He bustled about, organising what turned out to be tea.

I took another of Keith Robbiston's pills and slowly stopped sweating. The tea was fine. I smiled feebly to allay Tobias's kind concern and explained I'd travelled all night on the train, which seemed to him reason enough for faintness in the afternoon, even without the rainbowed eye.

'Actually,' I said, getting a better grip on things, 'I was wondering about the race itself, not the trophy. The race is part of the brewery's prestige. A sign of its success. Would… er… would the creditors agree to go ahead on the basis of keeping up public confidence in the brewery, even though the prize money will have to be found, and also the money for an entertaining tent and lunch and drinks for maybe a hundred guests? It's the brewery's best advertisement, that race. Cancelling it now, at this late stage, when the entries are already in, would send a massive message to all and sundry that the company's in a shaky state… and there's nothing like an ill wind for blowing a dicky house to rubble.'

He gazed at me. 'You'll need to say all that to the committee.'

'She… your insolvency angel, couldn't she say it?'

His gaze wandered over my hair and down to my paint-marked jeans, and I could see him thinking that the race had a better chance of survival with a more conventional advocate.

'You'll need to convince her.' He smiled briefly. 'You've convinced me.' He paused. 'Incidentally, among the brewery's possible assets there is a racehorse. That's to say, it's unclear again whether it belongs to the brewery or to Sir Ivan himself. I'd be glad if you could clarify it.'

'I?'

'You are in total charge. Your comprehensive powers of attorney make that unquestionably clear.'

'Oh.'

'Sir Ivan must have absolute faith in you.'

'In spite of how I look?'

'Well…' He gave me suddenly a broad grin. 'Since you mention it, yes.'

'I'm a painter,' I explained, 'and I look like one. You don't find droves of painters in pinstripes.'

'I suppose not.'

I drank a second cup of tea and asked idly, 'What is the name of the horse?'

'How do you hide a horse, Alexander…?'

Hide a horse. Ye gods.

'It's called Golden Malt,' Tobias said.

Yesterday morning, I thought morosely, I was leading the peaceful if eccentric life of a chronicler of the equally eccentric compulsion to hit a small white ball a furlong or two and tap it over lovingly landscaped grass until it dropped into a small round hole. Yesterday morning's sensible madness now lay the other side of a violent robbery, an aching body, an edge-of-the-grave stepfather, his ordeal by domesticity and his shift onto my shoulders of ever-expanding troubles.

Ivan, I saw, wanted me to keep his horse hidden away from the clutches of bankruptcy. Ivan had given me the legal right to commit an illegal act.

'What are you thinking?' Tobias asked.

'Um… um… How is the brewery going to pay its workers this week?'

He sighed. 'You do have a way of cutting down to the essentials.'

'Will the bank cough up?'

'They say not. Not a penny more.'

'Do I have to go to them on my knees?'

He said with compassion, 'Yes.'

It was by then Wednesday afternoon. Payroll day at the brewery, as in most business enterprises, was Friday. On the Tollright telephone I engaged the professional services of the lady negotiator and also made an appointment with the bank for the following morning.

I asked Tobias how much was needed to keep the ship afloat until the creditors could set up the rescue operation - if they would - and he obligingly referred to King Alfred's ledgers and told me a sum that made Ivan's heart attack seem a reasonable response to the information.

'You can only do your best,' Tobias observed, busy with a toothpick. 'None of this is your fault. It appears you've just been dumped into it up to the hilt.'

I didn't know whether to wince or smile at the familiar phrase. Up to the hilt - in one particular way I'd been in jeopardy up to the hilt for the last five years. It had taken five years for the demons to arrive at my door.

I said, 'About that horse - Golden Malt, did you say? - why is there a doubt about who owns it?'

Tobias frowned. 'You'll have to ask Sir Ivan. The horse isn't listed as an actual asset of the brewery. There's been no annual claim for depreciation, as if it were office equipment, but the brewery has paid the training fees and claimed them against tax as an advertising expense. As I said, you'll need to sort it out.'

For the next hour he tracked with me through the past year's accounts, item by item. I could see, as he demonstrated, that but for the perfidy of the man in charge of the cash flow, the beer business would have fermented its yeast to its usual profitable heights.

'The head brewer's the best asset,' Tobias said. 'Don't lose him.'

I said helplessly, 'I know nothing about brewing beer.'

'You don't have to. You are the overall strategist. I'm simply advising you as an outsider, and I can tell you the brewery's share of the market has risen perceptibly since they appointed this particular brewmaster.'

'Thank you.'

'You do look exhausted,' he said.

'I was never that good at maths.'

'You're doing all right.'

He produced papers for me to sign. I read them and did my best to understand, but trusted a lot to his good faith. As Ivan had trusted his Finance Director, no doubt.

'Good luck with the bank tomorrow,' Tobias said, shuffling the papers together and sucking his toothpick. 'Don't let them mug you.'

They wouldn't be the first, I thought. 'Will you come with me?'

He shook his head. 'It's your job, not mine. I wish you good luck.'

I said, 'There's one other thing…'

'Yes?'

'How do I get from here to Lambourn nowadays, without a car?'

'Taxi.'

'And without much money.'

'Ah,' he said. 'Same as ever. Bus to Newbury. Bus from there to Lambourn.' He summoned a timetable from reception. 'Bus from Newbury to Lambourn leaves at five forty-five.'

'Thanks.'

'What you need,' he said, 'is the out-patients department of the Royal Berkshire Hospital.'

I caught the bus instead. I even had time at Newbury to spend some of my mother's cash on a new pair of jeans and to discard the old paint-stained denims in the bus station's gents. In fractionally more respectable mode, therefore, I arrived on a Lambourn doorstep that I would have been happier to avoid.

My stepfather's horses - and that included Golden Malt - and also my uncle Robert 'Himself's' horses, were trained at the racing town of Lambourn by a young woman, Emily Jane Cox.

She said at the sight of me, 'What the hell are you doing here?'

'Slumming.'

'I hate you, Alexander.'

The problem was that she didn't, any more than what I felt for her could at worst be described as lust, and at best as unrealistic Round Table chivalry. Worse than hate or love, we had come near to apathy.

I had walked, feet metaphorically dragging, from the bus stop to the stable on Upper Lambourn Road. I had arrived as she was completing her evening rounds of the stable, checking on the welfare of each of the fifty or so horses entrusted to her care.

It was true, as jealous detractors pointed out, that she had inherited the yard as a going concern from a famous father, but it was her own skill that continued to turn out winners trained by Cox.

She loved the life. She loved the horses. She was respected and successful. She might once also have loved Alexander Kinloch, but she was not going to dump a busy and fulfilled career for solitude on a bare cold mountain.

'If you love me,' she'd said, 'live in Lambourn.'

I'd lived with her in Lambourn for nearly six months, once, and I'd painted nothing worth looking at.

'It doesn't matter,' she'd consoled me early on. 'Marry me and be content.'

I had married her and after a while left her. She'd never used my name, but had become simply Mrs Cox.

'What are you doing here?' she repeated.

'Er… Ivan has had a heart attack.'

She frowned. 'Yes, I read about it in the papers. But he's all right, isn't he? I telephoned. Your mother said not to worry.'

'He's not well. He asked me to look after his horses.'

'You? Look after them? You don't know all that much about horses.'

'He just said…'

She shrugged. 'Oh, all right then. You may as well set his mind at rest.'

She turned away from me and walked back across her stable yard to an open door where a lad was positioning a bucket of water.

She had dark hair cut like a cap and the sort of figure that looked good in trousers. We were the same age almost to the day, and at twenty-three had married without doubts.

She'd always had a brisk authoritative way of talking that now had intensified with the years of responsibility and success. I had admired - loved - her positive energy, but it had drained my own. Even if I'd still loved her physically, I couldn't have forever bowed to her natural habit of command. We would have quarrelled if I'd stayed. We would have fought if I'd ever tried to return. We existed in a perpetual uncontested truce. We had met four times since I'd left, but never alone and never in Lambourn.

Ivan had three horses in training in Emily's yard. She showed me two unremarkable bays and one bright chestnut, Golden Malt. Somewhat to my dismay he had noticeably good looks, two white socks and a bright white blaze down his nose: great presence as an advertisement for a brewery, not such a good idea for disappearing without trace.

'He's entered for the King Alfred Gold Cup,' Emily said with pride, patting the horse's glossy neck. 'Ivan wants to win his own race.'

'And will he?'

'Win?' She pursed her lips. 'Let's say Golden Malt's running for the news value. He won't disgrace himself, can't put it higher than that.'

I said absently, 'I'm sure he'll do fine.'

'What's the matter with your eye?'

'I got mugged.'

She nearly laughed, but not quite. 'Do you want a drink?'

'Good idea.'

I followed her into her house, where she led the way through the much lived-in kitchen, past her efficient office and into the larger sitting-room where she entertained visiting owners and, it seemed, revenant husbands.

'Still Campari?' she enquired, hands hovering over a tray of bottles and glasses.

'Anything.'

'I'll get some ice.'

'Don't bother,' I said, but she went all the same to the kitchen.

I walked across the unchanged room with its checked wool sofas and dark oak side tables and stood before a painting she'd hung on the wall. It showed a view of windswept links with a silver slit of sea in the background; with grey scudding clouds and two golfers doggedly leaning face-against the gale, trudging and pulling their golf clubs behind them on trolleys. In the foreground, where long dry grass bent away from the wind, there lay a small white ball, invisible still to the players.

I'd sent the painting as a sort of peace offering: it was one of the first I'd painted in the bothy after I'd left, and seeing it again brought sharply back not just the feel of the paint going onto the canvas but also all the guilt and joyous sense of freedom of that tune.

Emily said behind me, 'One of my owners brought a friend with him a few weeks ago who spotted that painting from across the room and said, "I say, is that an Alexander?"'

I turned. She was carrying two tumblers with ice in and looking at the picture. 'You'd signed it just Alexander,' she said.

I nodded. 'I always do, as you know.'

'Nothing else?'

'Alexander's long enough.'

'Anyway, he recognised it. I was very surprised, but he turned out to be some sort of art critic. He'd seen quite a lot of your work.'

'What was his name?'

She shrugged. 'Can't remember. I said you always painted golf, and he said no you didn't, you painted the perseverance of the human spirit.'

God, I thought, and I asked again, 'What was his name?'

'I told you, I can't remember. I didn't know I was going to see you so soon, did I?' She walked over to the bottles and poured Campari and soda onto ice. 'He also said you might be going to be a great painter one day. He said you had both the technique and the courage. The courage, I ask you! I said what courage did it take to paint golf and he said it took courage to succeed at anything. Like training horses, he said.'

'I wish you could remember his name.'

'Well, I can't. He was a round little man. I told him I knew you and he went on a bit about how you'd got those tiny red flecks into the stems of the dry grass in the foreground.'

'Did he tell you how?'

'No.' She wrinkled her forehead. 'I think the owner asked me about his horse.'

She poured gin and tonic for herself, sat down and waved me to a sofa. It felt extraordinarily odd to be a guest where once I'd been host. The house had always been hers, as it had been her father's, but it had felt like my home when I'd lived there.

'That art man,' Emily said after a large swallow of gin, 'also said that your paintings were too attractive at present to be taken seriously.'

I smiled.

'Don't you mind?' she asked.

'No. Ugly is in. Ugly is considered real.'

'But I don't want ugly paintings on my walls.'

'Well… in the art world I'm sneered at because my paintings sell. I can do portraits, I accept commissions, I can draw - all unforgivable.'

'You don't seem bothered.'

'I paint what I like. I earn my bread. I'll never be Rembrandt. I settle for what I can do, and if that is to give pleasure, well, it's better than nothing.'

'You never said anything like that when you were here.'

'Too much emotion got in the way.'

'Actually,' she rose to her feet and crossed back to the picture, 'since that Sunday morning I've been looking at the grass. So how did you get those tiny red flecks on the stalks? And the brown flecks and the yellow flecks, come to that.'

'You'd be bored.'

'No, actually, I wouldn't.'

Campari tasted sweet and bitter, a lot like life. I said, 'Well, first I painted the whole canvas bright red.'

'Don't be silly.'

'I did,' I assured her. 'Bright solid cadmium red, all over.' I rose and walked over to join her. 'You can still see horizontal faint streaks of red in the silver of the sea. There's even some red in the grey of the clouds. Red in those two figures. All the rest is overpainted with the colours you can see now. That's the chief beauty of acrylic paint. It dries so fast you can paint layer on layer without having to wait days, like with oils. If you try to overpaint oils too soon the layers can mix and go muddy. Anyway, that grass… I over-painted that once with raw umber, which is a dark yellowish brown, and on top of that I put mixtures of yellow ochre, and then I scratched through all the layers with a piece of metal comb.'

'With what?

'A comb. I scratched the metal teeth through the layers right down to the red. The scratches lean as if with the wind… they are the stalks. The scratches show red flecks and brown flecks from the layers. And then I laid a very thin transparent glaze of purple over parts of the yellow, which is what gives it all that ripple effect that you get in long grass in a strong wind.'

She stared silently at the canvas that had hung on her wall for more than five years, and she said eventually, 'I didn't know.'

'What didn't you know?'

'Why you left. Why you couldn't paint here.'

'Em…' The old fond abbreviation arose naturally.

'You did try to tell me. I was too hurt to understand. And too young.' She sighed. 'And nothing's changed, has it?'

'Not really.'

She smiled vividly, without pain. 'For a marriage that lasted barely four months, ours wasn't so bad.'

I felt a great and undeserved sense of release. I hadn't wanted to come to Lambourn again: I'd avoided it from guilt and unwillingness to risk stirring Emily to an ill will she had in fact never shown. I had shied away habitually from the memory of her baffled eyes.

Her actual words to me had been tough. 'All right then, if you want to live on a mountain, bugger off.' It had been her eyes that had begged me to stay.

She'd said, 'If you care more for bloody paint than you do for me, bugger off.'

Now, more than five tranquillising years later, she said, 'I wouldn't have given up training racehorses, not for anything.'

'I know.'

'And you couldn't give up painting.'

'No.'

'So there we are. It's OK now between us, isn't it?'

'You're generous, Em.'

She grinned. 'I quite enjoy saintly forbearance. Do you want something to eat?'

It was she who made mushroom omelettes in the kitchen, though when I'd lived there I'd done most of the cooking. We ate at the kitchen table. She still had a passion for ice cream: strawberry, that evening.

She said, 'Do you want a divorce? Is that why you came here?'

Startled, I said, 'No. Hadn't thought of it! Do you?'

'You can have one any time.'

'Do you want one?'

'Actually,' she said calmly, 'I find it quite useful sometimes to be able to mention a husband, even if he's never around.' She sucked her ice-cream spoon. 'I'm used to being in charge. I no longer want a live-in husband, to be frank.'

She stacked our plates in the dishwasher, and said, 'If you don't want a divorce, why did you come?'

'Ivan's horses.'

'That's crap. You could have asked on the phone.'

The Emily I'd known had been forthrightly honest. She had rid herself of some of the owners she'd inherited from her father because they'd sometimes wanted her to instruct her jockeys not to win. There was a world of difference, she'd said, between giving a young horse an easy race to get him to like the game, and trying to cheat the racing public by stopping a horse from winning in order to come home next time out at better odds. 'My horses run to win,' she said robustly, and the racing world, with clear-eyed judgment, gave her its trust.

It was tentatively, therefore, that I said, 'Ivan wants me to make Golden Malt disappear.'

'What on earth are you talking about? Do you want some coffee?'

She made the coffee in a drip-feed pot, a new one since my days.

I explained about the brewery's financial predicament.

'The brewery,' Emily said tartly, 'owes me four months' training fees for Golden Malt. I wrote to Ivan personally about it not long before his heart attack. I don't like to bitch, but I want my money.'

'You'll get it,' I promised. 'But he wants me to take the horse away from here, so that it doesn't get sucked in and sold prematurely.'

She frowned, 'I can't let you take it.'

'Well… yes you can.'

I stretched down the table to reach the folder I'd brought with me and handed her one of the certified copies of the power of attorney, explaining that it gave me authority to do as I thought best regarding Ivan's property, which one way or another definitely included Golden Malt.

She read the whole thing solemnly and at the end said merely, 'All right. What do you want to do?'

'To ride the horse away from here tomorrow morning, when the town and the Downs are alive with horses going in all directions.'

She stared. 'Firstly,' she said, 'he's not an easy ride.'

'And I'd fall off?'

'You might. And secondly, where would you go?'

'If I tell you where, you'll be involved more than maybe you'd want to be.'

She thought it over. She said, 'I don't see how you can do it without my help. At the very least you need me to tell the lads not to worry when one of the horses goes missing.'

'Much easier with your help,' I agreed.

We drank the coffee, not talking.

'I like Ivan,' she said finally. 'Technically he's still my stepfather-in-law, same as Vivienne is still my mother-in-law. I see them at the races. We're on good terms, though she's never effusive. We send each other Christmas cards.'

I nodded. I knew.

'If Ivan wants the horse hidden,' Emily said, 'I'll help you. So where do you plan to go?'

'I bought a copy of Horse and Hound in Newbury,' I said, taking the magazine out of the folder and opening at the pages of classified advertisements. "There's a man here, over the Downs from here, saying he looks after hunters at livery and prepares horses for hunter 'chases and point-to-points. I thought about phoning him and asking him to take my hack for a few weeks. For four weeks, in fact, until a day or two before the King Alfred Gold Cup. The horse would have to come back here, wouldn't he, so he could run with you as trainer?'

She nodded absently, looking where my finger pointed.

'I'm not sending Golden Malt to him,' she announced. 'That man's a bully, horses go sour on him, and he thinks he's God's gift to women.'

'Oh.'

She thought briefly. 'I have a friend, a woman, who offers the same service and is a damn sight better.'

'Is she within riding distance?'

'About eight miles across the Downs. You'd get lost on the Downs, though.'

'Er… you used to have a map of the tracks and gallops.'

'Yes, the Ordnance Survey map. But my map must be seven years old. There are a lot of new roads.'

'Roads may change, but the tracks are seven thousand years old. They'll still be there.'

She laughed and fetched the map from the office, spreading it out on the kitchen table. 'Her yard is west of here,' Emily said, pointing. 'She's quite a good way away from Mandown, where most people exercise the Lambourn strings. She's there, see, outside the village of Foxhill.'

'I could find that,' I said.

Emily looked doubtful, but phoned her friend.

'My yard's so full,' she said, 'could you take an overflow for me for a week or two? Keep him fit. He'll be racing later on… You can? Good… I'll send one of my lads over with him in the morning. The horse's name? Oh, just call him Bobby. Send me the bills. How are your kids?'

After the chit-chat she put down the receiver.

'There you are,' she said. 'One conjuring trick done to order.'

'You're brilliant.'

'Absolutely right. Where are you sleeping?'

'I'll find a room in Lambourn.'

'Not unless you want to advertise your presence. Don't forget you lived here for six months. People know you. We got married in Lambourn church. I don't want tongues wagging that you've come back to me. You can sleep here, on a sofa, out of sight.'

'How about,' I said impulsively, 'in your bed?'

'No.'

I didn't try to persuade her. Instead, I borrowed her telephone for two calls, one to my mother to tell her I would be away for the night but hoped to have good news for Ivan the next day, and one to Jed Parlane in Scotland.

'How are you?' he said anxiously.

'Living at a flat-out gallop.'

'I meant… anyway, I took the police to the bothy. What a mess.'

'Mm.'

'I gave them your drawings. The police haven't had any other complaints about hikers robbing people around here.'

'Not surprising.'

'Himself wants to see you as soon as you return. He says I'm to meet you off the train and take you straight to the castle. When are you coming back?'

'With luck, on tomorrow night's Highlander. I'll let you know.'

'How is Sir Ivan?'

'Not good.'

'Take care, then,' he said. 'So long.'

Emily, deep in thought, said, as I put down the receiver, 'I'll send my head lad out with the first lot, as usual, but I'll tell him not to take Golden Malt. I'll tell him that the horse is going away for a bit of remedial treatment to his legs. There's nothing wrong with his legs, actually, but my lads know better than to argue.'

They always had, I reflected. Also, they faithfully stayed. She trained winners; the lads prospered, and did as she said.

She wrote, as she always did, a list of which lad would ride which horse when the first lot of about twenty horses pulled out for exercise at seven o'clock the next morning, and which lad would ride which horse in the second lot, after breakfast, and which lad would go out again later in the morning with every horse not yet exercised. She employed about twenty lads - men and women - for the horses, besides two secretaries, a housekeeper and a yard man. Jockeys came for breakfast and to school the horses over jumps. Vets called. People delivered hay and feed and removed manure. Owners visited. I'd learned to ride, but not well. The telephone trilled incessantly. Messages whizzed in and out by computer. No one ever for long sat still.

I had been absorbed into the busy scenery as general cook/dogsbody, and runner of errands, and although I'd fitted in as best I could, and for a while happily, my own internal life had shrivelled to zero. There had been weeks of self-doubt, of wondering if my compulsion to paint was mere selfishness, if the belief in my talent was a delusion, if I should deny the promptings of my nature and be forever the lieutenant that Emily wanted.

Now, more than five years later, she put her newly written list for the head lad in the message box outside the back door. She let out her two Labradors for a last run and walked round the stable yard to make sure that all was well. Then she came in, whistled for the dogs to return to their baskets in the kitchen, and locked her doors against the night.

All so familiar. All so long ago.

She gave me two travelling rugs to keep warm on the sofa and said calmly, 'Goodnight.'

I put my arms round her tentatively. 'Em?'

'No,' she said.

I kissed her forehead, holding her close. 'Em?'

'Oh,' she said in exasperation. 'All right.'