Luca played with the head-collar clip, quietly incandescent. He was only a nightmare because they’d stopped handling him as he’d taught them. They should never have paraded him. Gestüt Fuchs was the only place Beck felt safe by the end. He’d known it all his life, its institutionalised enormity and rigid routine calming him like pink noise.

‘I told Paul about one we stood here in the seventies, Golden Orb,’ Ronnie went on cheerfully, ‘a Derby trials winner who’d bust a tendon and had become such a rapist in his Newmarket stud at coverings that my father got him dirt cheap. The only way to keep him sane was to keep him busy, so Daddy stuffed him full of bute and did everything with him: hacking, hunting, jumping, you name it, even broke him to harness. He pulled the village float. And, bingo, he was fabulous to his mares. Give him just one day off and he’d beat them up again.’

It was Ronnie who had suggested Paul Fuchs put Beck back in work to settle the horse into his stud duties. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t ask you to do it, Luca.’

‘I’m not,’ he muttered, looking across at her, flashing a fast smile when she frowned. After he’d brought Beck back from the Middle East, Paul had never hired him again. It was, they had both agreed, for the best. When someone wanted you both dead, it was safest not to stand together too often. ‘Go on.’

‘Paul sent me a thank you message a few months later, a video of the horse looking a million dollars, popping one sixty at home then shagging the dummy like Valentino. I’d moved back to England by then and I forwarded the message to Henk, who shared the video on social media, the swine. It went viral – priapic horses are up there with cute cats on YouTube, I gather – and before you know it, a Lottery winner from Yorkshire, who was on a massive spending spree to fill her new bespoke stables, had asked “how much?”. Henk brokered the deal. Beck only had half a dozen foals on the ground at that point and none of them stood out, so Fuchs figured they had nothing to lose selling him. The woman didn’t even go over to Germany to see him. Henk got the impression she had a professional rider lined up, but apparently not. You can imagine the rest.’

Luca should have guessed that Paul Fuchs would sell anything for the right price. Working in Brazil at the time, it was weeks before he’d heard of Beck leaving Gestüt Fuchs, his sense of betrayal overwhelming, torn apart imagining that Mishaal was somehow behind it, buying his revenge. If there was one living creature in existence that Prince Mishaal hated more than Luca O’Brien, it was Beck. He carried the scars of their battle to this day, a constant reminder of the horse that had stolen his looks and the vision in one eye.