The Irish brogue lent him a natural storyteller’s voice, his enthusiasm bewitching.

‘There’s a fifty-acre lake in the woods with a log cabin the family use for fishing trips. We’d drive up there to work on our functioning alcoholism. It’s probably thanks to him training me up that I eventually got so I could drink a bottle of liquor a night and still ride ten the next day.’

‘You should be dead.’

‘It was only in the last few months it got that bad. Winters there are harsh. The man’s a showjumping legend, but he’s a hard bastard with people, especially his family. Five Olympics his horses have competed in, one for each of his marriages.’

‘A difficult character, then?’

‘No more than many. I’ve worked with him a decade on and off; we understand each other. They treat me like family when I stay, and he protected me from some bad stuff going down after the job in the Middle East. But I went against his wishes, let him down.’

Pax remembered the call before he’d arrived, the death threat that had so shocked poor Lester and amused Ronnie.

‘What happened to the daughter who got married? The one who’s the reason you started drinking in the first place?’

He studied the road ahead. ‘She had an affair.’

‘With you?’

‘It’s over now. I drank way too much; I had to break the habit. That’s my story.’

‘That’s barely an elevator pitch!’ Pax complained. ‘If it took you from highballs on the pontoon to suicide in a saddle, that’s some love affair. I know what it takes to drink, remember? What changed?’

There was a long pause. Pax waited, sensing its energy crackle.

‘I found out one of her kids is mine.’

She turned, open-mouthed.

‘Her daughter, our daughter,’ he corrected. ‘She’s six.’

Pax tried to imagine the shock of discovering he’d fathered a child older than Kes was now, a fully loaded little person, features shaped by genetics, character formed, loyalty forged to the parents who had raised her. ‘What’s her name?’

‘Dizzy.’

‘It’s a sweet name.’

‘Opening a bottle alone to toast my shock entry into fatherhood wasn’t my finest hour.’

‘It’s a lot to take in.’ No wonder he didn’t want to tell it to a meeting room of scraping chairs and strangers. ‘You never suspected?’

‘They’d moved to the States by the time Dizzy was born; I was back in Europe. It was ten months after the wedding, so everyone always assumed she was a honeymoon baby.’

‘The affair happened when she’d just married?’

The smile flashed uncomfortably. ‘The wedding marquee was being taken down the day I arrived back there after drinking myself stupid in the Middle East,’ he explained. ‘Her dad’s a cruel bastard. He wanted me to get the message loud and clear that his princess was taken.’

Pax envisaged the princess, wholesome in checked-shirt and jeans, ponytail swinging, perched on white post and rails. ‘What’s she like?’

She waited out a long pause.