By the time Becky rode out with Brighteyes the next morning, she still had not managed to get him to eat anything, and he’d drunk next to nothing either. Without Alfie there, Brighteyes never once raced ahead, never bounded away through the bracken like a deer. He loped alongside Becky and Red, his head hanging, all the spring gone from his step. Once up on High Moor he whined wistfully as he looked all about him. Then he came over and sat down beside Becky, his head laid on his paws. He never looked up at her, not once, as if he could not bear to, as if he felt she had betrayed him. She talked to him, stroked him, tried to comfort and reassure him, but he was inconsolable.

“Mum wouldn’t lie to me,” Becky told him. “So it must be like she said. He’s gone to a good home. Alfie’s fine. I know he is.”

Brighteyes looked up at her then, and she knew absolutely that he did not believe her, that he knew something she didn’t know, something dreadful and unthinkable, something he was desperately trying to tell her. Quite suddenly, as she was looking into his eyes, she understood. “It’ll be me next,” he was telling her. “I can’t run without Alfie, and if I can’t race I can’t win. And if I can’t win, they’ll take me away just like Alfie.”

She cried, throwing her arms around him. “I won’t let them take you, not ever. I promise you I won’t. I promise.” She rocked him gently, burying her face in his neck. “We’ll stay together, you and me. No matter what. No matter what.”

Becky wanted to stay out on the moor and ride as far as she could, for as long as the light lasted. Before she left High Moor she called out a goodbye to her father, as she always did. Where she rode that afternoon she did not know, and she did not care. She just rode. With Brighteyes beside her, she followed a tumbling stream from the pool on High Moor, along a rock-strewn track through a forest of stunted oak trees into a valley of scattered boulders and soggy marshland, until they came at last on to a narrow track with rushy fields on either side.

She could see in the distance now a ramshackle farmstead, a glowering place, where the mists hung over the fields, as if hiding some terrible secret. It looked deserted. She was in two minds as to whether she should go on or not, until she saw a chimney and smoke rising from it. Then from somewhere she heard a radio playing. Intrigued but still wary, she walked Red on past a field strewn with long abandoned farm machinery. Crows were perched there, dozens of them, and all were watching her silently as she passed.

Becky could see no one, but she sensed danger in this desolate place, and so did Brighteyes. His whole body tensed, his ears pricked. Then Becky saw the Land Rover parked outside the farmhouse, a battered grey Land Rover, just like the one that came to take away the dogs, that had taken Alfie away the day before. A gunshot rang out from beyond the farm buildings. Crows lifted off and scattered skywards, through the mists, cawing raucously. Red shied and reared, but somehow Becky managed to stay on. She dismounted, whispering to him, smoothing his nose, trying to settle him down again.