Their room was on the top floor of the house. They had a view of a bricked-up window, of a ledge where pigeons carried on their ceaseless courting. There was a table, a chair, a bed big enough for two, though Calley made it clear there would be no sharing, that Medina could have the bed to himself. The impression he gave was that a bed—or just lying down—was something for weaker men, men who would, ultimately, come to no good. He spent the night on the chair facing the door, and though he must have slept at some hour, he was awake when Medina closed his eyes and awake when he opened them again in the morning.

They had horse-coats but no horses. They went back to the market to look for someone they might do business with. Calley picked men out. He clearly had a type in mind—watchful men, men who stood, feet apart, like boxers, who, when they spoke to you, looked at you once, made their judgement, then returned their attention to the street behind you. Men like Calley himself. At the third attempt he found one who would serve, a young blood with a branding scar on his cheek, a bristling, pink-eyed dog by his boots. They followed him to a farm, a place that had been swallowed up by the town, the old farmhouse derelict, the field it stood on converted into a waste ground where small fires burned and men and women camped, cooked, hung out their washing and observed the arrival of strangers.

Grazing between the fires were horses, a dozen or so in loose groupings, a pair of foals among them, upright as furniture. The man whistled up a boy. The boy fetched two mares, led them without the use of ropes or halters. Calley walked around them. He did not touch them. The man and the boy and the pink-eyed dog watched him. It took them less than a minute to realise he knew nothing about horses. Medina stepped forward. He ran a hand down the horses’ backs, stroked down the backs of their legs.

“Not these,” he said.

“Why?” said Calley.

“This one will be lame in a week. This one is blind in its right eye.”