Turning away, she saw that Luca was also watching them. Aware that he was under scrutiny, he glanced across at her. For once he didn’t smile.

*

Luca, tired to his bone marrow, had already forgotten the young woman’s name. She seemed to have a lot of children. And tattoos. And disturbingly intense grey eyes, the left bearing two streaks of blue in its iris like clock arms, reading quarter to four.

‘What d’you want me to show you first – the mares in foal?’ she offered. Her kids looked frozen through, Luca realised. The dog was shivering too. Sleet had started to turn to rain.

Luca fished the deerhound puppy out of the boot. ‘A hot drink would be great.’

‘There’s a kettle in the tack room,’ she said, leading the way. ‘You come far?’

‘Canada.’ He couldn’t even remember when he’d set out, his sense of time lost; he was beyond exhausted.

‘Long way to bring a dog.’

‘I picked him up on the way. He’s called Knott.’

‘Knot as in “tie the” knot?’

‘You could say that.’ Or untie it in the case of Pax Forsyth’s marriage. The bloody woman was unhinged.

‘Cute little thing.’ The blonde led the way into a big tack room with polished wooden racks, a vaulted roof and a wood burner in one corner. ‘That’s Pricey.’ She indicated the coffin-headed hound, brindle-striped like a tiger, that looked as though it was lovingly but insanely about to eat her children. ‘Don’t mind the fact she’s nutty looking. Heart of gold.’

Luca thought of Pax again. He preferred the dog.

Distracting the older two children with her phone, and the baby with a stainless-steel snaffle that he started gumming at furiously, she set about making coffee at supersonic speed, a pace at which he suspected she did most things. ‘Isn’t this place amazing?’ She pronounced it ‘’mazing’ in a creamy accent. ‘Like something out of a telly adaptation. You know, Downton Abbey? I love it here. Look at all them old bridles.’

Luca, who had seen a lot of tack rooms, sagged in one of the ancient floral armchairs by the unlit wood-burning stove and looked at her instead. Sleepy hacienda eyes, tattoos, urban clothes and a steel rod of sass belying her Wessex-wench voice, she wasn’t at all what he expected of a Ronnie Percy apprentice. The Ronnie he knew, savvy and straight-speaking, had a tight inner circle of contemporaries, generally preferring the company of men.

‘What’s your name again?’

‘Carly. Like Carly Simon. Sang “You’re So Vain”.’ Outside, they could hear a horsebox roaring into life. ‘He probably thinks that song is about him. Sorry if he’s an old friend of yours, but he’s a grumpy bugger, that Blair.’

‘Never met him before.’ The man was a legend Luca had long been inspired by. The disappointment of being snubbed was blunted by tiredness. ‘Is it always like this here?’

‘Dunno. I only started today.’

‘So we’re both new recruits?’

‘Yeah,’ she laughed, turning to put the kettle on. ‘You’re the one everyone’s talking about, aren’t you? The whisperer.’