He’d laughed. ‘They won’t prove that. We’re not dealing with bloody amateurs here. There’ll be no incriminating empty petrol can or an open box of firelighters. Someone will have just tossed a burning match or a lit cigarette into the hay store and whoosh, up it goes. You watch. It will be concluded that the fire was accidental—they’ll say that either one of my stupid staff was smoking where he shouldn’t have been, or even that the hay spontaneously combusted. It can, you know, if it’s not been properly dried.’

I did know. Farmers are always being warned about the fire risk, but that was usually in freshly cut hay, not in March.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Lie low for a bit. But I still need you here.’

‘Where’s here?’

‘Never you mind. If you don’t know where I am, you can’t be accused of withholding the information from the police.’

But should I tell them he was alive? I did know that. And they could probably trace his whereabouts from his phone signal.

‘What about the other horses? Those that survived.’

‘What about them?’

‘Don’t you need to look after them?’

He’d laughed again. ‘And where do you think I should do that? Have you seen the remains of my yard? They’ll all have to go somewhere else—probably already have. My fellow Middleham trainers will have probably been swarming round them all day like bees round a honey pot, trying to poach them for themselves. Especially as they all think I’m dead.’

‘But surely you’d get them all back when you reappear.’

There had been a pause.

‘I’m not really sure I want them back. Not now.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘To nail the bastards who did this. Nail them good and proper, preferably to a fence post and then leave them there to rot.’

I thought back to that former Northern Irish terrorist that Charles and I had had some unfortunate dealings with in the past, a man who’d had a penchant for nailing people to the floor and leaving them there to die of thirst.

I shivered just thinking about it.

‘Do you have any idea at all who the bastards are?’ I asked Gary.

‘I’ll tell you when you get here.’

‘You seem very sure that I’ll come.’

‘Course you’ll come. Don’t you want to find out who killed my horses? The Sid Halley I know wouldn’t give up this opportunity.’

Maybe I was no longer the Sid Halley he knew.

After my hand injury forced my retirement from the saddle, I’d been employed by the detective agency only because it had a racing-mad owner.