‘I’ll be with yous all tonight.’

‘Be with you tonight,’ he corrected again, mind racing.

‘Good to hear it. Flight KL1435, Birmingham. I should be through customs twenty-two thirty. Will it be yourself or Ronnie meeting me, Lester?’

Hearing his name, so affably spoken by this stranger to whom he had never been introduced, Lester stiffened further. He could no longer trust his eyes with night driving – a fact he had yet to acquaint Ronnie with – and he certainly had no intention of setting out in sub-zero temperatures to fetch the enemy home.

‘Not myself,’ he said, glancing at the flat cap. ‘We’ll see what we can do. Someone will be there.’ Perhaps Pip could be persuaded?

‘Great. Looking forward to meeting ya.’

‘Looking forward to meeting you.’ He rang off briskly.

When Lester called Pip, it went straight to voice mail. The same with Pax. He tried Alice next. Her reaction was predictable. ‘Absolutely not. We’ve a house full of teenagers, cows to milk first thing tomorrow, then hunting. Sod Mummy’s bad logistics. Come to supper.’

She sounded more like her grandmother Ann every year, he thought, politely declining the offer.

Grumbling under his breath to Stubbs that this was not his responsibility, Lester took the stud’s battered old hardback telephone book containing at least four generations of Percy handwriting listing contact details of all manner of professional equestrians. There was no record of a ‘Bunny’ in Wiltshire, which was the only name Lester had ever heard Ronnie use to refer to her former landlord, host of a large horse trials and a big eventing mover-shaker. There were, however, several entries for three-day-event rider Blair Robertson who had been buying and selling horses since he first got off the boat from Australia almost forty years earlier. Lester dialled the one number not crossed out, a mobile.

It was answered in two rings.

‘Ronnie.’ The low growl was pure sex-fuelled testosterone. If Luca was husky Gaelic gold, Aussie Blair was diamond-mine deep and rough-hewn.

‘It’s Compton Magna Stud. We need to get a message to Mrs Ledwell.’

‘Ooooookay.’

‘She will be with you later, I believe.’

‘Why’s she coming here?’ The voice rumbled like distant thunder. Was it anger?

Lester realised that perhaps he’d misread the situation, the love affair still in deep winter hibernation.

There was a click of tongue against palate, Blair’s hoarse voice cynical. ‘Don’t tell me, Bunny’s convinced her to join him for his end-of-year lunch?’

‘I believe so. Will you be attending?’

‘Not my bag, mate. I wondered why the old sod was being so coy. I bet he’s taking her to the Bretts’ bash too.’

‘Perhaps you have a telephone number on which I can contact Mr Bunny?’

He laughed again. ‘Tell me the message. I’ll make sure she gets it.’

‘Her friend arrives tonight. The Irish gentleman.’

The call was abruptly ended.

2

The Saddle Bags said farewell to Gill at her sprawling cottage in the wooded shadows behind St Mary’s church, her daughters’ ponies bellowing unseen for attention, the huge yews still spun with jewelled spiders’ webs. Soon afterwards, Petra headed through the electric gates to her handsome farmhouse. Cotswold vales laid out like giant, misty watercolour paintings to either side, it sat isolated on high ground midway between Compton Magna and Compton Bagot, on the orchard-skirted lane known as Plum Run, a runway from one village’s picture-postcard perfection to the other’s workmanlike hotchpotch of artisan and eyesore. With its Georgian face, Tudor flank and barn conversions sold off to rich Londoners, the farmhouse was a lifetime away from its agricultural roots, and hard to imagine it was anything like the ramshackle working farm belonging to Mo’s parents, where Bridge kept Craic on livery.