‘This is the covering barn.’ Ronnie showed him into a dingy broad-span with broken Yorkshire boarding and a potholed floor covered in straw and droppings. ‘It doubles up as a kindergarten through winter.’

The grand limestone stable yards were beautiful by comparison, like a Downton Abbey backdrop. Accustomed to huge state-of-the-art facilities, Luca thought the once-grand Victorian stud was as quaintly impractical as an antique doll’s house. The date 1839 was stamped over one of the stable-yard arches.

‘How long’s your family run this place?’ he asked Ronnie.

‘They built it,’ she said simply, leading him to a big corner box where the stud’s long-standing – and last-standing – stallion, Cruisoe, bobbed his handsome head over the V grille, bellyaching for food and attention.

Seven parts thoroughbred speed and stamina to an eighth cool-headed, no-nonsense draft, Cruisoe was Irish sports-horse aristocracy with the noble good looks of an Old Masters’ painting, coloured in by an excited child – his body bright gold, his mane, tail and points black. He was an extremely class act, but his pedigree was out of favour and, at twenty-one, he was pensionable. He was also carrying far too much condition, his legs filled and his over-crested neck hard as a stone bridge, eye-bulges hinting at early Cushing’s Disease.

‘He’s got quite a following for show-hunter breeding.’ Ronnie rubbed the old horse’s greying forehead and he leaned into her hand appreciatively. ‘Lester dotes on him. We think he’s got a few years in him yet.’

Again, Luca said nothing.

‘You can see how much I need your Midas touch, Luca.’ Ronnie stepped back and looked up at the verdigris cupola topping the dome above the central archway, its weathervane horse galloping east. ‘I have to make some money out of this place this year. That means handling, backing, breaking and tarting up everything we can sell, and pimping that old Irish golden boy. Not to mention working out what the hell we do to transform Jekyll over here into Hyde.’

Crossing the smaller second yard, as pretty as a miniature Oxford collage quad, Luca found a head collar and the chifney thrust in his hand, the round pen ahead. In it stood the horse that until today he’d thought he would never meet again.

‘It usually takes me and Lester an hour. Let’s see if you can do it any quicker.’

‘He’s hardly been out here forty minutes.’

‘Longer than that and he starts kicking it apart, believe me.’

Luca could believe it. That horse could bring down a city if he chose to. His heart thudded hollow in his chest, the lump in his throat hard as bone knuckle, relief at knowing Beck was alive and safe was tempered by the danger this reunion put them both in.

*

Pax was a Pink Panther of clothes collection, slipping in and out of the Mack Shack unnoticed in little more than twenty minutes of minimalist packing. Not that there was anybody to see her on New Year’s Day: no builders – they’d been off for months anyway because Mack hadn’t paid them – and no neighbours, the closest a field away either side.