He rubbed his face. ‘One more day and he’ll be thousands of miles away. It’s all cool.’

He headed unsteadily towards the house.

‘Wouldn’t be able to walk along the white lines on the road tonight officer, no.’

It took all his willpower not to knock on the cottage door. Pax must have gone to bed. It was still early, but there was no light on. That had to be a big, lonely bed. They could talk. No funny business, she was too fragile. He liked talking to Pax. He could tell her about Mishaal.

‘Fuck, no.’ He forced himself to walk on, knowing that more than anything he just wanted to kiss her again.

Then he turned back, reeling round further than he intended. He had to see Pax. Recrossing the yard, he stood on her doorstep, taking a few deep breaths to steady his nerves and spinning head. There was a low, gruff bark from just inside as Stubbs identified a prowler.

About to knock, Luca stopped himself. Was that what Pax would think he was too? Luca prowling around in his cups? It was how he was behaving. He held a position of trust here, had a job to do, must stop thinking about himself. This matters a whole load more than you feeling thirsty, he reminded himself. He heard his Canadian former boss yelling in his head, ‘Keep your bloody pants on, boy.’

Stubbs barked louder, there was movement in the hallway beyond the door.

Had he said that aloud? In a Canadian accent?

He turned and hurried away.

Lined up outside the back door to the main house were four wooden boxes crammed with bottles of plum gin. There was a note:

Thank you for keeping my sobriety. I’m sorry you lost yours a little.

Pax.

He carried it upstairs, tucked it under his pillow and stared up into the beamed eaves of his attic room, wondering if he’d ever sleep. A half-moon was brightening his row of little casement windows and throwing shadow blades across the ceiling.

The drink was his sedative, a lullaby of heavy-headed breaths seeing him into slumber curled beside the imaginary warmth of a woman until the early hours, when he woke from a fitful dream in which Mishaal was hunting down Beck, a great circus whip in his hand that he cracked overhead as he ripped through the stud’s fields on a black Arab horse in tasselled Bedouin finery.

Luca took a moment to adjust, to tell himself it was a dream. The moon-shadow daggers on the ceiling had moved and were pointing at him now.

Then he realised he could hear hooves hurtling out in one of the fields, an urgent shout. Nothing was turned out overnight. Did they have an intruder? His first thought was Beck.

He stumbled out of bed, pulling on jeans, hurrying to the window, his heart full throttle.

A horse and rider were thundering around the biggest of the hay fields.

The moonlight was at half strength, but he recognised them straight away: the horse compact and short-coupled with a hogged neck like a truss arch, its rider standing in her stirrups and punching the air, a stream of wild red mane flying behind her.