‘Sick.’ Flynn didn’t even look up. ‘Ask her what she’s paying – Percys still think slavery’s legal.’

When do I start? she messaged Ronnie back.

As she pressed send, Petra burst out of her Plotting Shed and hurried towards them, waving a sheet of A4. ‘Carly, I’ve been thinking something over. I’d like to offer you a job. I’ve bullet pointed a two-page brief, but I can write it in more detail if you want.’ She thrust the pages at her.

Carly took them. ‘What job exactly?’

‘How much do you want per hour to be me?’

‘Now that’s an offer you’d be mad to refuse,’ Flynn said grinning, dodging a kick from the Shetland.

*

Alone on the yard, the wind now Wizard of Oz high, Luca was a solo yachtsman skippering a boat in need of a crew. Usually it wouldn’t bother him; he’d circumnavigated the world alone enough times to appreciate solitude, the ever-changing surf of horses his sea, the call of the siren his downfall. Yet today he couldn’t shake the sense that he’d sailed straight past a perfect storm.

He was stopped in his tracks every few minutes by his whipcrack conscience, like the snap of a sail that drew his eyes to the same place each time, the same small window, a porthole beyond which some unseen ballast shifted inside him, a loyalty he hadn’t yet fathomed. It frustrated him. He had no reason to concern himself with Pax’s whereabouts, and yet he did. It was his curse since arriving to have her always on his radar.

Be kind to Pax. Ronnie had asked it.

Watched by a concerned Beck and Cruisoe, Luca criss-crossed the biggest yard, small practical tasks rendered increasingly long-winded as the pressure grew in his head.

The whip cracked again. He looked across at the stable cottage.

He couldn’t shake the look on Pax’s face earlier, the first colour he’d seen in her cheeks. Not hard to spot the cause. Luca was disappointed in her, guessing Mr Blue Eyes the posh-boy neighbour was something to do with her marriage coming apart.

He wanted to push it all out of his mind, but he couldn’t. Since Posh Boy had left, Pax had gone to ground. She usually worked on the yard like an addict. They both did. It was their therapy. And Ronnie had said something about her collecting her son, hadn’t she?

Be kind to Pax.

Eventually, he jogged beneath the arch to the front of the stables cottage to knock on the door. When there was no answer, he turned back and played ship’s head beneath the little porch for a moment, telling himself that this was absolutely none of his business, and that he didn’t want it to be.

Be kind to Pax.

And where are you, Ronnie?

You have absolutely no idea about this family!

Tell me, Pax.

Still he remained rooted, the same compulsion to play sentry as the one which had kept watch from the chair in her hotel room a week earlier. He felt in his pockets, pulling out the leaflet he’d picked up in town a few days earlier, raided from a display by the chemist’s pharmacy counter. If he posted it through the door, he guessed she’d take terrible offence. He folded it back up. He could hear music – a kitschy Latin Jazz – and had a brief involuntary mental image of Pax as a fifties housewife slewed on gin, head in the oven.