To the hilt

CHAPTER NINE

I walked to the office of Young and Uttley, half expecting to find it locked, but when I knocked and turned the handle, the door opened.

I walked in. The occupant that day wasn't a skinhead or a secretary or Mr Young with moustache or even the football coach Uttley, but a straightforward-looking man of about my own age dressed much as I was myself in jeans, shirt and sweater: no tie, unaggressive trainers and clean hands. The chief difference between us was that he had very short light brown hair, while mine still curled on my shoulders.

I smiled at him slowly, and I said, 'Hello.'

'Hello.'

'What's your name?' I asked.

'Chris.'

'Chris Young?'

He nodded. 'I've done a bit of let-your-fingers-do-the-walking for you,' he said.

His accent was unchanged. The skinhead, the secretary and Chris Young all spoke with the same voice.

'And?' I asked.

"There was a goldsmith name of Maxim working in London in the eighteen hundreds. Like Garrard's or Asprey's today. Good name. Ritzy. Made fancy things like peacocks for table ornaments, gold filigree feathers with real jewels in.'

'Tobe promised me you were good,' I said.

'Just good?'

'Brilliant. A genius, actually.'

He grinned immodestly. 'Tobe told me you were a walking brain and not to be put off by your good manners.'

'I'll kill him.'

'Tobe told me you were raised in a castle.'

'It was cold.'

'Yeah. I drew an orphanage. Warm.'

We got on fine. I made a drawing of King Alfred's golden chalice, and he phoned back to his goldsmith informant with a detailed description. 'And it has engraved lines round it that look just like random patterns but are some sort of verse in Anglo-Saxon. Yeah, yeah, that's what I said, Anglo-bloody-Saxon. See what you can do.'

He put down the receiver. 'Those specs you gave me,' he said, 'you can buy them anywhere.'

I nodded.

'I'd use them myself for disguises, if I could see through them.'

'I reckon that's why the robber took them off.'

'That's another thing,' Chris Young said. 'Boxing gyms. Your spanking pal Surtees never goes near a gym. He's as unfit as a leaking balloon. I've tailed him until I've had it up to here with him, and besides, none of the gyms in his area have ever heard of him.'

'Fingers doing the walking?'

'Sure.'

'Suppose he uses a different name?'

Chris Young sighed. 'He's not the gym type, I'm telling you. Which leaves me - and don't point it out -with no option but to flash your drawings of your robbers all over the place hoping for a fist in the guts.'

I stared.

'An adverse reaction,' he said carefully, in his incongruous voice, 'is a positive indication of a nerve touched.'

'You've been reading books!'

'I've been bashed a few times. It always tells me something. Like being bashed told you quite a lot, didn't it?'

'I suppose it did.'

'See? If anyone bashes you again, learn from it.'

'I don't intend to be bashed again.'

'No? That's why you asked about bodyguards?'

'Exactly why.'

He grinned. 'I've a friend who's a jockey over the jumps. He's broken his bones about twenty times. It'll never happen again, he says. He says it every time.'

'Mad,' I agreed.

'Have you ever met a jump jockey?'

'I was married once to a trainer in Lambourn.'

'Emily Cox,' he said.

I was still.

'I like to know who I'm working for,' he said.

'And to check up on whether I would lie to you?'

'Most of my clients do.'

I would, I acknowledged to myself, have lied to him if I'd wanted to.

His telephone rang and he answered it formally, 'Young and Uttley, can I help you?'

He listened and said, 'Thank you' half a dozen times, and wrote a few words onto a notepad, and disconnected.

'Your chalice,' he said, 'was inscribed with something called Bede's Death Song. It sounds a right laugh. It was made in 1867 to the order of a Mr Hanworth Hill of Wantage, Berkshire, probably to impress the neighbours. It cost an arm and a leg because it was solid gold inlaid with emeralds, sapphires and rubies.'

'Real ones?' I exclaimed, surprised.

Chris consulted his notes. 'Cabochon gems, imperfect.' He looked up. 'What does cabochon mean?'

'It means polished but uncut. No facets. Rounded, like pebbles. Not made to sparkle.' I paused. 'They don't look real. They're big.'

'You mean, you've actually seen this thing?'

'I think it's what I got bashed for.'

'So where is it now?'

'You,' I said smiling, 'are - I hope - going to prevent anyone else from trying to bash that information out of me.'

'Oh.' He blinked. 'How difficult would it be to make you tell?'

'Fairly easy.' But, I thought, it might depend on who was asking.

'You'd fold? You surprise me.'

'The chalice isn't mine.'

'Reasonable. OK. I'll start on the gyms.'

'Be careful,' I said.

'Sure.' He sounded lighthearted. 'Black eyes will cost you extra.'

He wanted to know if I were serious about a bodyguard, and we agreed that identifying my robbers took priority.

Ah well.

Returning by train, tube and legs to Park Crescent I was met by my mother in a state of agitation: that is to say, she was looking out for me and told me calmly but at once that I should telephone Emily immediately.

'What about?'

'Golden Malt got loose.'

Damnation, I thought; fuck it.

'How's Ivan?' I asked.

'Not bad. Phone Emily, won't you?'

I phoned her.

'Golden Malt got loose on the Downs at Foxhill,' she said. 'He's not an easy ride, as you know. He bucked off the exercise lad and got loose and they couldn't catch him.'

'But racehorses often go home by themselves, don't they? Surely he'll turn up-'

'He has turned up,' she interrupted. 'He's found his way back here. Don't ask me how. He's been in this yard for five years, ever since Ivan bought him as a foal, and, first chance he got, he came home.'

'Bugger.'

'The thing is, what do you want me to do?'

'Keep him. I'll think.'

'I've had a phone call from Surtees. He says he's coming to collect him.'

'He said what?

'He says the horse is Patsy's.'

I took a steadying breath. 'The horse is Ivan's.'

'Surtees says Patsy's going to sell the horse to prevent you getting your hands on it. He says you've stolen the King Alfred Cup and you'll steal Golden Malt and rob Patsy and the brewery. I said you wouldn't do that, but he's bringing a trailer to collect Golden Malt and take him to his stud farm for safe keeping.'

I tried to organise scattered thoughts.

'When do you expect him?' I asked.

'He'll be on his way already.'

I groaned. I'd just come from Reading, about thirty miles from Lambourn, and now, in London, it was nearer eighty.

'How did Surtees know you have the horse back?' I asked.

'I don't know. But he also knows he was in Foxhill. All my lads know, too. I can't send the horse back there.'

'Well, I'll come as soon as I can. Don't let Surtees take Golden Malt.'

She said despairingly, 'But how do I stop him?'

'Let down the tyres of the trailer. Build a Great Wall. Anything.'

I explained the problem briefly to my mother, who said at once that I could borrow Ivan's car.

Two hours at least by car. Roadworks and hold-ups in tortoise-slow traffic. Also, remembering the gauge from Saturday, I would have to stop for petrol.

I chose a train. I wasn't bad at trains. I ran and was lucky, catching an underground without waiting and a non-stop express from Paddington to Didcot junction and a taxi driver who hurried his wheels to Lambourn for a bonus. I took with me my mother's cash card and her phone card and all her available money, and my own new credit card and cheques, and also a zipped bag containing the things I'd borrowed ten days earlier from Emily - helmet, padded jacket, jodhpur boots - that my mother hadn't yet returned to her.

Helter-skelter though I went, Surtees had arrived first. He had brought with him not only a trailer for the horse but an assistant horse-handler in the shape of his nine-year-old daughter, Xenia.

Surtees, Emily, Xenia and Golden Malt were all out in the stable yard, Emily holding the horse by his bridle and arguing angrily with the others.

Emily's Land Rover stood in the driveway behind Surtees's trailer, effectively blocking his way out. The exit on the far side of the yard, the wide earth track used by the horses on their way out to exercise, was at present impassable as it seemed a lorry delivering hay had carelessly shed its load of bales there.

I paid the taxi driver his bonus and with reluctance walked into the angry scene. Emily looked relieved to see me, Surtees furious. Xenia gave me a head-to-toe sneer and in a voice just like her mother's said, 'What do you think you look like?'

'Good afternoon, Surtees,' I said. 'Having trouble?'

Surtees said with unthrottled rage, 'Tell your wife to get out of my way. That horse is Patsy's, and I'm taking it.'

I said, 'It's Ivan's, and I'm looking after Ivan's things, as you know.'

'Get out of my way!'

'The horse is officially in training here with Emily. It can't race from your stud farm. You surely know the rules.'

'Bugger the rules!'

Xenia, giving me the insolent stare she'd learned from her parents, said, 'You're a thief. Mummy says so.'

She was dressed in riding breeches, navy hacking jacket, polished boots and black velvet helmet, as if for a showground. Not a bad kid. Fair haired, blue eyed, hopelessly spoiled.

'Why aren't you in school?' I asked.

'I have riding lessons on Monday afternoons,' she answered automatically, and then added, 'and it's none of your business.'

Surtees, presumably deciding that argument would get him nowhere, made a sudden rugger charge at me while my head and attention were turned towards Xenia, and with his shoulder cannon-balling into my stomach, knocked me over.

He fell on top of me, seeking to damage. Neither rugger nor any form of contact sport had ever been my choice or capability. I rolled over and over in the gravelly dirt with Surtees, scrambling for a weight advantage, trying to disconnect myself and stand up.

I could sense Xenia jumping up and down and screaming, 'Kill him, Daddy. Kill him.'

The whole situation was idiotic. Farcical. Killing me was definitely outside Surtees's imagination, but the prospect of offering Golden Malt to Patsy as a symbol of his virility and superiority over the hated stepbrother lent him a strength and viciousness hard to deal with.

Neither of us landed a decisive punch. Surtees, as Chris Young had sworn, wasn't the boxing-gym type.

Add in Xenia who, as befitted her clothes, carried a riding crop, and we arrived at a childish form of warfare in which a bodyguard would have lightened the load.

Surtees clutched my hair and tried to bang my head on the ground, which gave me the idea of doing it to him, with equal lack of effectiveness, while Xenia danced around us lashing out with the riding crop which usually landed on me though occasionally on her father, to his bellowing disgust.

I scrambled finally to my feet, but dragged Surtees up with me as he wouldn't leave go. Xenia hit my legs. Surtees tried a sweeping too-slow wide-armed clout to my head that gave me a chance to both duck the blow and get hold of his clothes and fling him with all my strength away from me so that he overbalanced and staggered backwards and, falling, cracked his head against a brick stable wall.

It stunned him. He slid to his knees. Xenia screamed, 'You've killed my Daddy,' though I clearly hadn't, and I wrapped my arms round her writhing little body, lifting her off her feet, and yelled to Emily, 'Are any of these boxes empty?'

'The end two,' she shouted, and struggled to hold Golden Malt in control, the horse stamping around, upset by the noise.

The top half door of the end box stood open, the bottom half closed and bolted. I carried the frantically struggling child over there and dropped her over the lower half of the door, closing the top half and sliding home a bolt before she could climb out.

I unbolted and opened both halves of the vacant box next door and, grabbing the groggy Surtees by the back of his collar and by his belt, half ran him, half flung him into the space, closing both halves of the door and slapping home the bolts.

Xenia screeched and kicked her door. Surtees had yet to find his voice. Out of breath, I went over to Emily, whose expression was a mixture of outrage and laugh.

'Now what?' she said.

'Now I bolt you into Golden Malt's box so that none of this is your fault, and decamp with the horse.'

She stared. 'Are you serious?'

'None of this is serious, but it's not very funny, either.'

We could both hear Xenia 's muffled shrieks.

'She'll upset all the horses,' Emily said, calming Golden Malt with small pats. 'I did think you might ride this fellow away again,' she said. 'I was just saddling him when Surtees came. The saddle is over there, in his box.'

I walked across the yard and found the saddle, which I carried back and fixed in place. There was a full net of hay in the box also, and a head collar for tying up a horse more comfortably than with a bridle. I carried them out and threaded them together with the zipped bag I'd brought, taking out the helmet but slinging the rest over the withers of the horse, in front of the saddle; like saddle bags of yore.

Then I took the reins from Emily and walked with her to the empty box. She went inside and I bolted the bottom half of the door.

'You'd better hurry,' she said calmly. The lads will arrive in less than half an hour for evening stables, and Surtees will have the police looking for you five minutes after that.'

I kissed her over the stable door.

'It will be dark in the next hour,' she said. 'Where will you go?'

'God knows.'

I kissed her again and bolted her into her temporary prison, and hauled myself into Golden Malt's saddle and, buckling on the helmet, set off again onto the Downs.

I needed the helmet for anonymity more than safety. So universal was the wearing of helmets that a head without one would have been remembered, even in a part of the country where horses were commoner than cows.

Golden Malt, to my relief, showed no reluctance to go along the stretch of road leading to the familiar track up to the training grounds, and seemed, if I understood him at all, to be reassured by being ridden and directed, not running loose and having to find his own way home.

Even at four in the afternoon there were other horses around in the distance. Golden Malt whinnied loudly and received an echoing response from afar, which caused him to nod his head as if in satisfaction: he went along sweetly, not trying to buck me off.

The problem was that I didn't know where to go. Surtees might indeed send the police after me, and although they wouldn't try to catch me on horseback like a Wild West posse, at some point or other I would very likely find myself vulnerably back on a road. Out of sight - that was the thing.

I tried to remember the map Emily and I had spread out in the kitchen, but I'd been concentrating on the way to Foxhill then, and I certainly couldn't go back there. Emily had a Patsy-informant in her yard - one of her lads making a little extra money from Surtees -and so, now, maybe, had her Foxhill friend. No good risking it.

The rolling sea of grass on Lambourn Downs was to my eyes featureless. I'd been up there fairly often with Emily in her Land Rover, but it had been five or six years ago. I looked back and could no longer distinguish the track home.

Think.

Monday, late afternoon. Time for all horses to go to their stables for food, for night.

I decided to be ordinary; to conform. It would be the abnormal, like an unhelmeted head, that would draw comment and attention and questions.

I thought again of the Ridgeway. I wouldn't get lost on it.

I might get found on it.

Golden Malt trotted happily the length of Mandown, his regular exercise ground. It was when I stopped at the far end and didn't turn his head back towards home that he grew restive.

I patted his neck and talked to him, as Emily would have done.

'Never mind, old fellow, we're safe out here,' I murmured over and over, and it was the lack of panic in the voice of confidence, that I think calmed him. I was afraid he would by-pass the false front and go instinctively for the underlying doubt, but he slowly relaxed and waited patiently, twitching his ears forward and back as untroubled horses do, leaving his future in my hands.

Unwelcome though the thought had been, I'd accepted that we might have to stay out on the Downs all night. I could otherwise amble into someone's stable yard or farm and ask for stabling until morning, but this wasn't normal any longer in the age of cars. There were motels but no horsetels; not anyway for unannounced strangers on thoroughbreds.

Shelter.

The weather was fine, though chilly. It wasn't too cold for Golden Malt's survival, but he was used to a snug box with food and drink provided, and perhaps a rug. An animal of racehorse calibre wouldn't stand quiet for even an hour if one simply tied his reins to a railing. He would break free and kick up his heels in a V sign as he galloped to the horizon. While red carpets might be out, four walls and water were essential.

There were two hours left until darkness. It took me nearly all of that time to find a place that Golden Malt would enter.

There were various huts on the Downs where the groundsmen kept equipment, but none of those would be big enough or empty enough, or would have running water. What I needed was the sort of shelter farmers built at a distance from their home yards, providing walls and roofs against hail and gales, and troughs for their stock to drink from.

The first two such shelters I came to were both filthy inside, thick with droppings. More importantly, Golden Malt wouldn't drink the water. He whiffled his nose and lips over the surface and turned his fastidious head away: and it was no good getting angry, I had to trust to his equine sense.

The third shelter I came to looked just as unappetising, but Golden Malt walked into it amiably and then came out and drank from the trough even before I'd removed bits and pieces from the water's surface.

Much relieved, I waited until he'd drunk his fill and then walked back in with him, and found a comfort in the shape of an iron ring let into the wall. Exchanging the head collar for the bridle I fastened the horse into his new quarters and positioned the hay net where he could eat when he wanted. I unsaddled him and took the saddle outside where he couldn't step on it, and finally - and resignedly - took stock of my own situation.

Like almost all such shelters, its windowless walls faced chiefly north and west and south against the prevailing winds. The east wall was pierced by the entry, which of course had no door. By good luck, although the air was always on the move on the uplands, there was no strong wind that evening, and although the temperature dropped with darkness, I felt more at home in the open than inside with the horse.

I unzipped the holdall and thankfully put on the padded jacket, which alone made the night enterprise feasible. Then I folded the holdall thickly to make a cushion and propped the saddle against the wall for a chair back, and reckoned I'd spent far worse hours on Scottish mountains.

After dark, the clear sky blazed with depths of stars, and in the folds of the Downs below me, little clumps of distant lights assured me that this solitude was relative: and solitude, to me, anyway, was natural.

Inside the shelter, Golden Malt steadily chomped on his hay and made me feel hungry. I'd eaten breakfast in London and a chocolate bar on the train to Didcot, but I hadn't had the foresight to fill the holdall with enough for dinner.

It couldn't be helped. I scooped a handful of water out of the trough and smelled it, and although it wasn't the cleanest ever, judged that if the horse had passed it fit, it wouldn't kill me. Cold water was never bad at anaesthetising hunger: and hunger was an odd sort of thing, not so much a grind in the stomach as an overall feeling of lassitude, and a headache.

I put my hands into the jacket pockets for warmth and slept sitting up, and soon after two o'clock (according to the luminous hands on the cheap watch I'd bought to replace my father's stolen gold one) awoke from cold. Everything was so quiet inside the shelter that I went in in some alarm, but Golden Malt was still there, safely tied up, asleep, resting a hock in mental twilight, his eyes open but no thoughts showing.

I walked around quietly outside to unstiffen and warm myself and after a while drank more water and sat down again to wait for dawn.

None of my thoughts was hilariously funny.

Surtees's second-hand dislike and spite towards me would now certainly have intensified into personal hatred, because he would think I had made a fool of him in front of his daughter. No matter that he had belligerently chosen to come to remove Ivan's horse, no matter that it was he who had rushed me first to knock me down, he would care only that Xenia had seen him fail on both fronts: the obnoxious Alexander had made off with the goods and left her father imprisoned in a box for horses, looking stupid.

Xenia, with whom I had no quarrel, could now be counted a foe for life. Her mother's consequently increased antagonism might really give a bodyguard work. Someone had sent the robbers to my bothy.

Next time you'll scream…

Bugger it, I thought. Even if I should dump Ivan and all his concerns (and with him, my mother) I wouldn't necessarily free myself from Patsy's obsession or revenge.

Surtees was Ivan's son-in-law. I was Ivan's stepson. Which of us, I wondered vaguely, took legal priority? Did priority exist?

I itched to paint, I longed to go back to my easel, to my silent room. Zoл Lang filled crevices in my mind to such an extent that in the middle of wondering if water were drinkable I would see the hollow under her cheekbone and think 'purple glaze on turquoise thinned with medium'. The face of the inner woman had to be built of glazes, of colour not as opaque as outer living skin might be, but still to be unmistakably the person who lived in that flesh, who thought and believed and confronted doubt.

I had set myself an unattainable ideal. Such human skill as I could summon wasn't enough for the job. I felt the suicidal despair of all who longed to do what they couldn't, what only a few in each century could -whether blessed or cursed in spirit. No achievement was ever finite. There was no absolute summit. No peak of Everest to plant a flag on. Success was someone else's opinion.

I drifted and dozed and woke again shivering in the first grey promise of light. Golden Malt was pawing the ground, his hooves thudding heavily on dirt, giving me the prosaic news that he had finished his hay. I undid his head collar and took him outside for a drink, and felt, if not exactly a communion with him, at least an awareness of being a fellow creature on a lonely planet.

Deciding that grass would do for breakfast he walked around a bit, head down, munching, while I held his rope and thought of coffee and toast. Then, as daylight more positively arrived, I saddled and bridled him in the shelter, and changed my trainers for jodhpur boots, to look and ride better, and finally, when the morning's first exercise strings would be peopling the landscape, heaved myself and gear onto his back and set about completing the disappearing trick.

I rode to the east, towards the strengthening light. I knew that the Ridgeway path lay to the north of me, also running west to east. Not far ahead I would come to the road from Wantage going south to Hungerford, and I wanted to cross that to reach the next wide expanse of open downland on the far side, where many trainers had their yards but wouldn't know by sight a conspicuous horse from Lambourn. Neither Emily nor I, in my rush to be gone before the lads arrived for evening stables, had given a thought this time to a hood and boots for hiding Golden Malt's white features.

I came to the main road and dismounted to walk the horse across, needing to open and shut gates on either side but, that done, I was free on the wide lands south of Wantage, with five or six miles available in most directions to find a suitable string of horses to attach myself to and follow.

I was looking for a small string of no more than four or five, as I reckoned I would get a more hospitable reception from a small-scale trainer: and so it proved. Just when I thought I'd drawn a blank and was in trouble I came across four horses plodding homeward, one of them being led by a lad on foot.

I followed at a distance and tried not to feel disconcerted when my leaders headed towards the heart of a village from where I could see ahead the huge swathe of the main north-south arterial road, the A34: impassable, if not impossible, for horses to walk across.

The road into the village led downhill. The string of four marched on, undaunted, and I found we were crossing the road beneath it, to a second half of the village on the far side. On through the village, the horses turned in between the peeling gates of a small stable yard.

A motor horsebox stood in the yard with a trainer's name and phone number painted on it. I retraced Golden Malt's steps to a phone box we had passed in the village and, juggling reins and coins, took the trainer away from his breakfast.

I was, I explained, an owner who was also an amateur jockey. I had just had a blazing row on the Downs with my trainer and had ridden off in a fury, and I was looking for somewhere to park my horse while I sorted things out. Could he help?

'Glad to,' he said heartily, and showed no less enthusiasm when I shortly arrived on a good-looking thoroughbred, offering generous cash for its board and lodging.

When I asked the trainer ('Call me Phil') the quickest way to London he said, 'By taxi to Didcot,' and I thought it ironic that I'd travelled three parts of an oval on Golden Malt and ended in the underpass village of East Ilsley which was actually nearer to Surtees's stud farm than to Emily's yard.

I would come to fetch my horse later that day, I told Phil, and he said not to hurry. He phoned for a taxi for me. We shook hands, in tune.

Back in London I met Ivan's and my mother's anxiety with perhaps more reassurance than I truly felt. Golden Malt, I assured them, was secure and well looked after, but it might be better to move him right away from the Berkshire Downs area where, to horse-educated eyes, he was as recognisable as a film star.

I asked Ivan to lend me his copy of Horses in Training, which gave the location amongst other details of every licensed trainer and permit holder in Britain, and I asked my mother to phone Emily and get her to go out shopping in Swindon or Newbury, as she often

did, and to phone back to Park Crescent from a public phone there.

'But why?' my mother asked, puzzled.

'Emily's walls have ears, and Surtees is listening.' My mother looked disbelieving. 'And,' I added, 'please don't tell Emily I'm here.'

My obliging parent talked to Emily, who cheerfully said she would be going shopping soon, and forty-five minutes later she was telling my mother the number she was calling from in Swindon. I took the number and my mother's phone card and jogged to the nearest outside line; and Emily wanted to know if all this cloak and dagger stuff were necessary.

'Probably not,' I said, 'but just in case.' I paused. 'What happened when I left?'

Emily almost laughed. 'The lads came for evening stables and let us all out. Xenia 's tantrums turned to tears. Surtees was purple with fury and phoned the police, who arrived with a siren wailing that upset all the horses. Surtees told them that you'd stolen Golden Malt but fortunately the police had been to my yard before when we had a lot of saddles and bridles stolen, and they believed me when I said the horse was Ivan's and you had absolute authority to look after it in any way you thought best. I showed them the copy you gave me of the power of attorney and they told Surtees they wouldn't start a police hunt for you, which sent him practically berserk. He was yelling at the police, which did him no good at all with them, but I begged them to stay until he had gone because he was so violent I was afraid he would attack me or some of the horses. So they tried to quieten him and finally got him to drive his trailer away, but Xenia was crying out of control, and if Surtees reached home without causing an accident it will have been a miracle.'

'He's a fool.'

'He's a dangerous fool,' Emily said. 'All that silly-ass front of his has changed to pure poison. So take care, Al. I'm serious. You made him look stupid and he'll never forgive you.'

I said lightly, 'I'm engaging a bodyguard.'

'Al!' She sounded exasperated. 'Look out for Surtees. I mean it.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I want to talk to you, though, about Golden Malt.'

'Where is he?'

'Safe enough, but it will be better if I move him again, and I need your knowledge and advice. I've borrowed Ivan's copy of Horses in Training and sorted out four trainers who look possible, so if I tell you who they are, will you give me your opinion?'

'Fire away.'

I named the four trainers and again asked what she thought.

Two of them would be OK,' she said slowly, 'but look up Jimmy Jennings.'

I looked him up and objected, 'He has too many horses.' I counted. 'Thirty-six.'

'Not any more. He's been ill. He's halved his yard… told some of the owners to take their horses away temporarily, but it looks as if it might be for ever. He and I are good friends. The real advantage of going to him is that he has two yards, and one of them is now standing empty. Tell me his phone number and I'll see what he says.'

I read out the phone number and asked, 'Would the horse be able to race from there in your own name as its trainer?'

'Well, Jimmy's a licensed trainer himself; no problem there. The horse could detour to my yard in Lambourn on the day of the race to pick up the colours and tack and his usual lad. I could inform the Jockey Club in advance, and as the owner, Ivan, is a member, I can't see there being any difficulty.' She thought briefly. 'From the secrecy point of view it's always the lads that are the leaky sieves. It's not deliberate disloyalty, they just talk in the pubs.'

'And one of your lads talks to Surtees.'

She sighed. 'If I knew which one, I would give him disinformation.'

'That's a thought.'

'Give me ten minutes and I'll phone you back.'

I waited quite a while by the phone, loitering and repelling a resentful woman who wanted to use the end instrument of the row, not one of the vacant others. She had fierce words to say. When Emily at last rang, the resentful woman still hovered, black beady eyes full of ill will.

'It's all fixed,' Emily said. 'Sorry I was so long. I told Jimmy the whole situation. He's a hundred per cent trustable if you trust him first. He says he'll put Golden Malt in his empty yard, and to avoid the chatty lad business, the horse will be cared for and exercised by Jimmy's sixteen-year-old daughter, who's already an amateur jockey and knows when to keep quiet. There's no need for his regular lads even to know Golden Malt is there. The yards are at opposite ends of the village. What's more, it's not a busy training area. Jimmy's gallops aren't the best, though it hasn't stopped him training a lot of winners in his time. I said you'd get there sometime this afternoon, and… er… I promised the training fee would be inflated. Jimmy didn't want to hear of it, but I insisted. He could do with a bit extra, though he's too proud to ask.'

'He'll get it,' I said.

'Yes. I knew you would agree.'

She gave me directions to the Hampshire village and said Jimmy had said I should look for a square white house with bronze flaming-torch gateposts, and I should ring the front door bell, not go round to the back.

'OK.'

'I'll phone Jimmy later for news. Don't worry, I won't do it from home. And I told him not to phone me.'

'Brilliant.'

'Do you really think my phone is bugged?'

'Don't take the risk.'

We said goodbye and the baleful old witch shouldered me out of the way to reach her preferred public phone. Everyone to their own obsession, I supposed. Impossible to dislodge fixed ideas. There were six unoccupied instruments she could have used.

I returned to Ivan's house, detouring to a newsagent for a copy of Horse and Hound and an up-to-date road map, and to my mother's and stepfather's bemusement I told them in detail about the shenanigans in Emily's yard and my travels with Golden Malt.

I said, 'Emily has arranged for a trainer friend of hers to look after your horse and keep him fit so he can run in the King Alfred Gold Cup. If you agree with what we've planned, I'll transfer Golden Malt to the trainer this afternoon. The horse will be in very good hands and it would be only by exceptionally bad luck that Surtees would discover where he is.'

Ivan said slowly, 'You've gone to a lot of trouble.'

'Well, the horse is yours. You asked me to look after your affairs, so… er… I try.'

'For your mother's sake.' A statement, not a question.

'Yes, but for yours, also. You don't approve of the way I live, but you have never been ungenerous to me, and you would have taken me into the brewery, and I don't forget that.'

He looked at his hands and I couldn't read his thoughts, but when I asked if I could borrow his car for the afternoon, he agreed without conditions.

Via the classified advertisements in Horse and Hound and the road map and the telephone, I arranged to meet a four-horse travelling horsebox (the smallest of a prestigious firm) in Phil's yard in East Ilsley, and there loaded Golden Malt for the last leg of his journey.

Phil and I shook hands again, mutually pleased and, asking the box driver of the top-class transport firm to follow Ivan's car as arranged, I led him southwards and eastwards along secondary roads until we arrived somewhere near Basingstoke in a village that looked as if it had never seen a racehorse. But there, in the village's main street, stood a square white house with bronze flaming torches on the gateposts.

I stopped the car, the horsebox braking to a halt behind me, and went to ring the front door bell, as instructed.

A thin, smiling middle-aged man opened the door in welcome. His skin had the grey tautness of terminal illness but his handshake was strong. A pace or two behind him stood a short fine-boned girl whom he introduced as his daughter, saying she would drive through the village in the horsebox and settle Golden Malt into his new home. He watched approvingly as she climbed into the high cab beside the driver for the journey, and he invited me into his house, eyeing Ivan's expensive car with reassurance and telling me that Emily had said she was sending her 'special lad' to ensure the safe transit of a special horse.

Jimmy Jennings asked why I was smiling. Was I not Emily's 'special lad'?

'I'm married to her,' I said.

'Really?' He looked me up and down. 'Are you that painter feller who ran off and left her?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'Good Lord! Come this way. Come this way.'

He hurried down a hallway, beckoning me to follow, and led me into his office, furnished, like most trainers' such rooms, with ranks of framed photographs on the walls. He stood and pointed in silence, but I didn't need his directing finger: among the clutter hung a painting I'd done and sold four or more years earlier.

As always when I saw my own work freshly after an interval, I felt a mixture of excitement and shock. The picture was of a jockey plodding back to the stands after a fall, disappointment in his shoulders, a tear in his grass-stained breeches. I remembered the intensity of feeling in the brushstrokes, the stoicism and the loneliness of that man's defeat.

Teller I trained for couldn't pay his bill,' Jimmy Jennings explained. 'He offered me that picture instead. He swore it would be worth a fortune one day, but I took it because I liked it. Whether you realise it or not, that picture just about sums up a jump jockey's life. Endurance. Courage. Persistence. All those things. Do you see?'

I said lamely, 'I'm glad you like it.' He thrust out his chin, a defiant gesture against an imminent and inevitable fate.

'That picture keeps me going,' he said.

I drove back to London, having briefly checked on Golden Malt in his isolated splendour, Jimmy Jennings's daughter tending him with years of experience showing.

The horsebox driver had already unloaded and gone, as agreed with his firm. The hiding of Ivan's horse should, barring accidents, be complete.

I left Ivan's car in its underground lair and returned to his house to learn that Patsy had spent the afternoon with him, complaining that I had attacked Surtees so murderously as to leave him concussed, that I had committed child abuse against Xenia, and had brazenly stolen Golden Malt for my own illegal ends, such as holding him for ransom.

'I listened to her,' Ivan said judiciously. 'Is my horse safe?'

'Yes.'

'And a ransom?'

I said tiredly, 'Don't be silly.'

He actually laughed. 'I listened to her, and she's my daughter, but when she went on and on about how devious and dishonest you are, I slowly realised that I've truly been trusting you all along, that my inner instinct has held firm, even though to you I may sometimes have shown indecision. I love my daughter, but I think she's wrong. I said once impulsively that I wished you were my son. I didn't think I meant it when I said it. I do mean it now.'

My mother embraced him with uncharacteristic delight and he stroked her arm happily, content to have pleased her. I saw in them both the youthful faces they had left behind, and thought I might paint that perception, one day soon.

There was time after that for the three of us to eat dinner calmly before I left for the night train. We drank wine in friendship, Ivan and I, and had come nearer than ever before to an appreciative and lasting understanding. I did believe, against all previous experience, that Patsy could not henceforth sow overthrowing doubts of me in his decent mind.

He insisted on returning to my care the unopened envelope containing the codicil to his Will.

'Don't argue, Alexander,' he said. 'It will be safest with you.'

'We won't need it for years. By then it will be out of date.'

'Yes. Perhaps. Anyway, I've decided to tell you what's in it.'

'You don't have to.'

'I need to,' he said, and told me.

I smiled and hugged him for the first time ever.

I hugged my mother, and went to Scotland.