In the intervening years he’d found it easiest to see Mishaal as a pantomime baddy in Italian breeches and diamanté-crusted hard hat, a modern cliché of a moneyed sporting villain: spoilt, petulant, egotistical and vain, his limited talents as a rider outweighed by his father’s limitless purse, his ambition all-encompassing. Better by far to have chosen motor racing or yachts. Cars and boats had no sentience.

Yet his conscience knew the young prince was a more complicated figure than that. Mishaal genuinely loved horses, his warrior steeds. The only son after a dozen daughters in a rigidly patriarchal family, his duty was to bring honour. Starved of affection, sent away to a strict English boarding school at eight, he was a far more serious character than his father: edgy, obsessive, not good at making human attachments. He’d seen the Olympics as the ultimate crusade. Poor coaching and over-spoiling were undoubtedly partly to blame for his bad riding, but more so the overwhelming expectation. If Luca had been on the ball, he’d have realised that the young prince would crack long before the toughest of his warrior horses.

That breaking point had come on the eve of a competition to which his father had invited tens of grandees, eager to show off his brilliant son, losing not an option on the horse he’d paid millions for. Unwilling to admit fear or failure, the young prince had bribed his most corruptible groom to lame Beck, determined not only that he would never have to ride him again, but that nobody would. The plan had been simple; feed doped with sedative, one hard crack of a steel bar across a tendon. But the groom, also frightened of the stallion, had backed out at the last minute, agreeing only to keep watch. To protect himself, he’d hidden his phone in the eaves of the stable, recording the unwitting prince who had set about the task himself, armed with a taser and enough dope to knock out an elephant. Neither of them counted on Beck’s instinct for survival.

The red mist of Mishaal’s humiliation had lent him ferocious cruelty. Unable to watch the horse struggling to escape the rain of electric shocks, the stable-hand had quickly fled. By the time Luca arrived on the scene, Beck had his attacker cornered. The sound of steel shoe cracking against bone had been like gunfire.

Luca still had no idea how he’d pulled Mishaal out from beneath crashing hooves and teeth without getting struck, the unconscious prince’s face smashed and bloodied. His head injury had looked horrific, Luca fearing that even if the boy lasted the night, he would be permanently brain-damaged.

He hadn’t accounted for the legendary toughness of the family, descendants of Islamic warriors who had crossed deserts bearing far worse injuries. Regaining consciousness en route to hospital, Mishaal was immediately calling for the horse’s destruction, his father in agreement, the order made to the veterinary team to do it that night.

Watching Beck charging around now, Luca still remembered the war that had raged inside him six years earlier when he’d waited with the horse, trying to calm him, sending up every prayer he knew.