Belle turned away. ‘All right, fair enough. I’ll stop asking. Waste of time, yeah?’

When dusk was setting in and the trees were black skeletons against the cool peach of the sunset, they went out and he loaded up the little trailer with hay.

The stables looked just about ready to fall down, but inside in a cosy clean loose box stood a big chestnut mare with a white blaze down her face. A tiny light-gold palomino pony was standing beside her, looking hopefully up at Jack as he came in and dumped the feed there for them. Immediately, they started to eat.

‘What a beautiful horse,’ said Belle, surprised. Jack’s mum obviously had an eye for a fine animal. Belle herself had ridden at pony clubs and hacked out at the riding stables, but the chestnut was something else; a thoroughbred. She reached out a hand and stroked the mare’s elegant neck.

‘This is Lady Marmalade. Because of her colour. Or Lady, as she’s called around here,’ said Jack, watching the horses munching contentedly. ‘She’s twenty-three years old. But she looks bloody good on it. Needs riding, really, but I don’t.’

Belle turned to him. ‘So what do you do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘For a job. For money.’

‘This and that.’

‘Evasive.’

‘Private.’

‘Same difference.’

Again he gave that sudden unexpected grin. Belle felt, to her absolute shock, a hard visceral tug of attraction. Christ! Why had she not noticed before? He was actually a handsome man. The realization of that made her feel even worse about her disfigurement. She turned her head away from him, concentrated on the sleek mare and the dumpy little Shetland.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and eat.’

124

‘We’ve always lived alongside Charlie Stone and his family,’ Belle told him over their dinner of cottage pie. ‘My dad worked in Charlie’s business. Manufacturing furniture for the big retailers.’

‘But it wasn’t the real business?’ prompted Jack.

Belle shook her head. ‘I was kept in the dark about it all. So was Milly, Charlie’s daughter. I’m sure now that the furniture making was only a blind. A cover for a drugs operation. A big one. Not dark corner small-time stuff, shady characters passing little packets to each other in the street. This was drugs on a massive scale, it was—’

‘Hang on. If you were kept in ignorance, how come you know that?’

Belle wiped a hand over her face, forgetting the scar. Then she felt it under her fingers. Horrible. Quickly she dropped her hand back onto the table.