The letters, she remembered again with a cold spasm of fear. She had to get rid of the letters.

She and Kes started back down towards the yard. It was getting dark, the lights glowing from the bays and half-doors. She could see Luca hard at it again, Pax helping him, the one wearing the pink hat now. Ronnie had noticed how well they worked well together from day one, both fast and efficient. They barely communicated – were positively frosty to each other if she was honest – and yet everything got done without fuss. If it was a stand-off, it was a productive one, both equally eager to be finished and part ways.

Coming back onto the yard now, she sensed a shift in atmosphere. They were talking together, both stooped over a piece of paper. Ronnie hoped it wasn’t another bill.

‘We’ve been collecting teasels!’ she shouted from the opposite end of the stable yard. ‘And Kes has found an owl pellet with a shrew’s skull in it!’

Looking up, eyes huge, Pax shoved the piece of paper in her back pocket and missed, sending it billowing across the cobbles. She and Luca went running after it, comical in their twists and turns as it changed direction, swept up, down and around in the wind.

Shrieking with laughter and dashing to join in the game, Kes employed the Percy cricket catch to grab it from under their noses, looking at it and proudly reading, ‘A… A.’

He turned back to thrust it at Ronnie. ‘What does the rest say, Gronny?’

Glancing at it, Ronnie resisted an urge to kiss it. ‘Boring grown-up stuff,’ she said as Pax hurried up, and Ronnie told her, ‘I don’t think he read the rest.’

‘It’s okay, Kes can only read the alphabet and words of one syllable.’ She stooped to pick him up, quickly mouthing thank you.

Ronnie brightened. ‘One syllable, hey, Kester the Genius? There are many Percys who never get beyond that at fifty, let alone five! I’m one of them without my specs.’

Ronnie turned as Luca appeared beside her and handed the flyer to him. Dear, kind Luca, whose smile gave nothing away. ‘Get her on a horse again and I might just give you your weight in gold,’ she said quietly, then called across at her giggling grandson, ‘Kes is going to start riding, aren’t you, darling?’

Pax’s protests that he was too young were drowned out by her son’s banshee cry of delight as he scrabbled down to charge around the yard pretending to gallop.

‘Born to ride!’ Ronnie realised that she sounded like her own mother.

Pax’s voice was brittle. ‘I suppose it’ll really piss off Mack, at least there’s that.’

Letting this pass, Ronnie watched as Kes charged up to Luca to butt him like a goat, which he took with an exaggerated ‘oof!’, pretending to reel backwards, then clicking him on as he cantered away again.

Breaking the good news about the tough-thug Shetland who would soon be Beck’s sidekick, she sensed she didn’t have Pax and Luca’s entire attention. Both were looking at everything but one another.