‘Is it true Smiley O’Reilly is coming to the Wolds?’ the MFH, Bay Austen, had demanded at check.

‘I think his name is O’Brien, sir.’

‘Ha!’ Bay’s frosty Dutch-born wife had ridden between them. ‘When I trained in Limburg, Luca was based at Gestüt Fuchs, just over the German border, okay. That place is so huge, nobody remembers names, but he was not so easy to forget. He could ride any horse, however crazy, played the violin like a gypsy and everybody there was in love with him. They all called him Smiley.’

‘Could be because he was a spy, I suppose?’ Bay had looked amused.

‘He left under a very dark cloud.’ Monique could slay a reputation in a breath. ‘I heard it was something to do with a stallion he handled that was injured. That wiped the smile off all their faces. It was no accident, perhaps.’

Lester had felt his blood quicken. If anybody mistreated his beloved stallion Cruisoe, he’d slay them. Or indeed the grey beast of Ronnie’s, who for all his delinquency, was the best-looking horse Compton Magna Stud had seen in a century.

The hunting field exchange unsettled Lester, although he normally took no heed of tittle-tattle. He wouldn’t dream of saying anything to Ronnie – in fact, he derived a certain amount of pride in the fact that he had managed to get within days of the man’s arrival having not once referred to him by name, nickname or reputation – but he felt a deep-seated need for allies.

‘Nobody’s fiddling while Rome burns around here,’ he muttered to Lawrence before following the smell of burned toast back inside. The infernal phone was ringing again. Lester shared the stud’s landline with the office in the main house, from which his late employer, the Captain, had shouted at bookmakers, friends and relatives. Having none of these himself, Lester rarely had use of it and was damned if he was going to answer it when he knew there was someone at home to do so.

As he set down Stubbs’ feed bowl, however, a flash of blonde, bright as the sun, appeared in the small rectangular window above his front door followed by a familiar, percussive rap.

Ronnie was on his doorstep, dressed up in her best fur-trimmed tweed coat and pearls, wearing make-up for once. She still knocked the rest dead, Lester thought, wondering if she was going to see her fancy man.

‘I have to set out now or I’ll miss this bloody lunch in Wilts,’ she said, glancing instinctively up at the clock over the stable-yard arch, although it had been saying half past ten for six years. ‘I’d bow out, but Bunny’s invited a bunch of owners and breeders especially, and lord knows we need the business. Pax should be here by now to help you. Did you take that call? Was it her?’ She plucked out her mobile phone, no more than a glorified clock on days like today when their patchy rural signal thinned to nothing, sighing at its blank face.