Jonathan lay curled in the space for luggage. He had one shoe off, with which he was assaulting my milk-coffee bodywork. When I lifted the lid he stopped banging and looked at me challengingly.

'What the hell are you doing there?' I demanded.

Silly question. He looked at his shoe. I rephrased it. 'Get out.'

He manoeuvered himself out onto the road and calmly replaced his shoe with no attempt at apology. I slammed the boot lid shut at the second try and returned to the driver's seat. He walked to the passenger side, found the door there locked and tapped on the window to draw my attention to it. I started the engine, lowered the electrically controlled window a little, and shouted to him, 'It's only three miles to Lambourn.'

'No. Hey! You can't leave me here!'

Want to bet, I thought, and set off along the deserted down-land road. I saw him, in the rear-view mirror, running after me determinedly. I drove slowly, but faster than he could run. He went on running, nevertheless.

After nearly a mile a curve in the road took me out of his sight. I braked and stopped. He came round the bend, saw my car and put on a spurt, racing this time up to the driver's side. I'd locked the door but lowered the window three or four inches.

'What's all that for?'he demanded.

'What's all what for?'

'Making me run.'

'You've broken the lock on my boot.'

'What?' He looked baffled. 'I only gave it a clout. I didn't have a key.' No key; a clout. Obvious, his manner said.

'Who's going to pay to get it mended?' I asked.

He said impatiently, as if he couldn't understand such small-mindedness, 'What's that got to do with it?'

'With what?'

'With the colt.'

Resignedly I leaned across and pulled up the locking knob on the front passenger door. He went round there and climbed in beside me. I noted with interest that he was hardly out of breath.

Jonathan's haircut, I thought as he settled into his seat and neglected to buckle the seat-belt, shouted an indication of his adolescent insecurity, of his desire to shock or at least to be noticed. He had, I thought, bleached inexpert haphazard streaks into his hair with a comb dipped in something like hydrogen peroxide. Straight and thick, the mop was parted in the centre with a wing each side curving down to his cheek, making a curtain beside his eye. From one ear backwards, and round to the other ear, the hair had been sliced off in a straight line. Below the line, his scalp was shaved. To my eyes it looked ugly, but then I wasn't fifteen.

Making a statement through hairstyle was universal, after all. Men with bald crowns above pigtails, men with plaited beards, women with severely scraped back pinnings, all were saying "This is me, and I'm different." In the days of Charles I, when long male hair was normal, rebellious sons had cut off their curls to have roundheads. Archie Kirk's grey hair had been short, neat and controlled. My own dark hair would have curled girlishly if allowed to grow. A haircut was still the most unmistakable give-away of the person inside.

Conversely, a wig could change all that.

I asked Jonathan, 'Have you remembered something else?'

'No, not really.'

'Then why did you stow away?'

'Come on, man, give me a break. What am I supposed to do all day in that graveyard of a house? The aunt's whinging drives me insane and even Karl Marx would have throttled Esther.'

He did, I supposed, have a point.

I thoughtfully coasted down the last hill towards Lambourn.

'Tell me about your uncle, Archie Kirk,' I said.

'What about him?'

'You tell me. For starters, what does he do?'

'He works for the government.'

'What as?'

'Some sort of civil servant. Dead boring.'

Boring, I reflected, was the last adjective I would have applied to what I'd seen in Archie Kirk's eyes.

'Where does he live?' I asked.

'Back in Shelley Green, a couple of miles from Aunt Betty. She can't climb a ladder unless he's holding it.'

Reaching Lambourn itself I took the turn that led to the equine hospital. Slowly though I had made the journey, the horse-ambulance had been slower. They were still unloading the colt.

From Jonathan's agog expression, I guessed it was in fact the first view he'd had of a shorn-off leg, even if all he could now see was a surgical dressing.

I said to him, 'If you want to wait half an hour for me, fine. Otherwise, you're on your own. But if you try stealing a car, I'll personally see you lose your probation.'

'Hey. Give us a break.'

'You've had your share of good breaks. Half an hour. OK?'

He glowered at me without words. I went across to where Bill Ruskin, in a white coat, was watching his patient's arrival. He said, 'Hello, Sid,' absentmindedly, then collected the bucket containing the foot and, with me following, led the way into a small laboratory full of weighing and measuring equipment and microscopes.

Unwrapping the foot, he stood it on the bench and looked at it assessingly.

'A good clean job,' he said.

'There's nothing good about it.'

'Probably the colt hardly felt it.'

'How was it done?' I asked.

'Hm.' He considered. 'There's no other point on the leg that you could amputate a foot without using a saw to cut through the bone. I doubt if a single swipe with a heavy knife would achieve this precision. And achieve it several times, on different animals, right?'

I nodded.

'Yes, well, I think we might be looking at game shears.'

'Game shears?' I exclaimed. 'Do you mean those sort of heavy scissors that will cut up duck and pheasant?'

'Something along those lines, yes.'

'But those shears aren't anywhere near big enough for this.'

He pursed his mouth. 'How about a gralloching knife, then? The sort used for disembowelling deer out on the mountains?'

'Jeez.'

'There are signs of compression, though. On balance, I'd hazard heavy game shears. How did he get the colt to stand still?'

'There were horse-nuts on the ground.'

He nodded morosely. 'Slime ball.'

'There aren't any words for it.'

He peered closely at the raw red and white end of the pastern. 'Even if I can reattach the foot, the colt will never race.'

'His owner knows that. She wants to save his life.'

'Better to collect the insurance.'

'No insurance. A quarter of a million down the drain. But it's not the money she's grieving over. What she's feeling is guilt.'

He understood. He saw it often.

Eventually he said, 'I'll give it a try. I don't hold out much hope.'

'You'll photograph this as it is?'

He looked at the foot. 'Oh, sure. Photos, X-rays, blood tests on the colt, micro-stitching, every luxury. I'll get on with anaesthetising the colt as soon as possible. The foot's been off too long …' He shook his head. 'I'll try.'

'Phone my mobile.' I gave him the number. 'Any time.'

'See you, Sid. And catch the bugger.' He bustled away, taking the foot with him, and I returned to my car to find Jonathan not only still there but jogging around with excitement.

'What's up?' I asked.

'That Range Rover that pulled the trailer that brought the colt …'

'What about it?'

'It's got a red dragon on the windscreen!'

'What? But you said a blue -

'Yeah, yeah, it wasn't the vet's Range Rover I saw in the lane, but it's got a red dragon transfer on it. Not exactly the same, I don't think, but definitely a red dragon.'

I looked round, but the horse-ambulance was no longer in sight.

'They drove it off,' Jonathan said, 'but I saw the transfer close to, and it has letters in it.' His voice held triumph, which I allowed was justified.

'Go on, then,'I said.'What letters?'

'Aren't you going to say "well done"?'

'Well done. What letters?'

'E.S.M. They were cut out of the red circle. Gaps, not printed letters.' He wasn't sure I understood.

'I do see,' I assured him.

I returned to the hospital to find Bill and asked him when he'd bought his Range Rover.

'Our local garage got it for us from a firm in Oxford.'

'What does E.S.M. stand for?'

'God knows.'

'I can't ask God. What's the name of the Range-Rover firm in Oxford?'

He laughed and thought briefly. 'English Sporting Motors. E.S.M. Good Lord.'

'Can you give me the name of someone there? Who did you actually deal with?'

With impatience he said, 'Look, Sid, I'm trying to scrub up to see what I can do about sticking the colt's foot back on.'

'And I'm trying to catch the bugger that took it off. And it's possible he travelled in a Land-Rover sold by English Sporting Motors.'

He said 'Christ' wide-eyed and headed for what proved to be the hospital's record office, populated by filing cabinets. Without much waste of time he flourished a copy of a receipted account, but shook his head.

'Ted James in the village might help you. I paid him. He dealt direct with Oxford. You'd have to ask Ted James.'

I thanked him, collected Jonathan, drove into the small town of Lambourn and located Ted James, who would do a lot for a good customer like Bill Ruskin, it seemed.

'No problem,' he assured me. 'Ask for Roger Brook in Oxford. Do you want me to phone him?'

'Yes, please.'

'Right-on.' He spoke briefly on the phone and reported back. 'He's busy. Saturday's always a busy sales day. He'll help you if it doesn't take long.'

The morning seemed to have been going on for ever, but it was still before eleven o'clock when I talked to Roger Brook, tubby, smooth and self-important in the carpeted sales office of English Sporting Motors.

Roger Brook pursed his lips and shook his head; not the firm's policy to give out information about its customers.

I said ruefully, 'I don't want to bother the police … '

'Well

'And, of course, there would be a fee for your trouble.'

A fee was respectable where a bribe wasn't. In the course of life I disbursed a lot of fees.

It helpfully appeared that the red-dragon transparent transfers were slightly differently designed each year: improved as time went on, did I see?

I fetched Jonathan in from outside for Roger Brook to show him the past and present dragon logos, and Jonathan with certainty picked the one that had been, Brook said, that of the year before last.

'Great,' I said with satisfaction. 'How many blue Land-Rovers did you sell in that year? I mean, what are the names of the actual buyers, not the middlemen like Ted James?'

An open-mouthed silence proved amenable to a larger fee. 'Our Miss Denver' helped with a computer print-out. Our Miss Denver got a kiss from me. Roger Brook with dignity took his reward in readies, and Jonathan and I returned to the Mercedes with the names and addresses of two hundred and eleven purchasers of blue Land-Rovers a little back in time.

Jonathan wanted to read the list when I'd finished. I handed it over, reckoning he'd deserved it. He looked disappointed when he reached the end, and I didn't point out to him the name that had made my gut contract.

One of the Land-Rovers had been delivered to Twyford Lower Farms Ltd.

I had been to Twyford Lower Farms to lunch. It was owned by Gordon Quint.

Noon, Saturday. I sat in my parked car outside English Sporting Motors, while Jonathan fidgeted beside me, demanding 'What next?'

I said, 'Go and eat a hamburger for your lunch and be back here in twenty minutes.'

He had no money. I gave him some. 'Twenty minutes.'

He promised nothing, but returned with three minutes to spare. I spent his absence thinking highly unwelcome thoughts and deciding what to do, and when he slid in beside me smelling of raw onions and chips I set off southwards again, on the roads back to Combe Bassett.

'Where are we going?'

'To see your Aunt Betty.'

'But hey! She's not at home. She's at Archie's.'

'Then we'll go to Archie's. You can show me the way.'

He didn't like it, but he made no attempt to jump ship when we were stopped by traffic lights three times on the way out of Oxford. We arrived together in due course outside a house an eighth the size of Combe Bassett Manor; a house, moreover, that was frankly modern and not at all what I'd expected.

I said doubtfully, 'Are you sure this is the place?'

'The lair of the wolf. No mistake. He won't want to see me.'

I got out of the car and pressed the thoroughly modern doorbell beside a glassed-in front porch. The woman who came to answer the summons was small and wrinkled like a drying apple, and wore a sleeveless sundress in blue and mauve.

'Er …' I said to her enquiring face, 'Archie Kirk?'

Her gaze lengthened beyond me to include Jonathan in my car, a sight that pinched her mouth and jumped her to an instant wrong conclusion. She whirled away and returned with Archie, who said repressively, 'What is he doing here?'

'Can you spare me half an hour?' I asked.

'What's Jonathan done?'

'He's been extraordinarily helpful. I'd like to ask your advice.

'Helpful!'

'Yes. Could you hold your disapproval in abeyance for half an hour while I explain?'

He gave me an intense inspection, the brown eyes sharp and knowing, as before. Decision arrived there plainly.

'Come in,' he said, holding his front door wide.

'Jonathan's afraid of you,' I told him. 'He wouldn't admit it, but he is. Could I ask you not to give him the normal tongue-lashing? Will you invite him in and leave him alone?'

'You don't know what you're asking.'

'I do,' I said.

'No one speaks to me like this.' He was, however, only mildly affronted.

I smiled at his eyes. 'That's because they know you. But I met you only this morning.'

'And,' he said, 'I've heard about your lightning judgements.'

I felt, as on other occasions with people of his sort, a deep thrust of mental satisfaction. Also, more immediately, I knew I had come to the right place.

Archie Kirk stepped out from his door, took the three paces to my car, and said through the window, 'Jonathan, please come into the house.'

Jonathan looked past him to me. I jerked my head, as before, to suggest that he complied, and he left the safe shelter and walked to the house, even if reluctantly and frozen-faced.

Archie Kirk led the way across a modest hallway into a middle-sized sitting-room where Betty Bracken, her husband, and the small woman who'd answered my ring were sitting in armchairs drinking cups of coffee.

The room's overall impression was of old oak and books, a room for dark winter evenings and lamps and log fires, not fitted to the dazzle of June. None of the three faces turned towards us could have looked welcoming to the difficult boy.

The small woman, introducing herself as Archie's wife, stood up slowly and offered me coffee, 'And … er … Jonathan … Coca-Cola?'

Jonathan, as if reprieved, followed her out to the next door kitchen, and I told Betty Bracken that her colt was at that moment being operated on, and that there should be news of him soon. She was pathetically pleased: too pleased, I was afraid.

I said casually to Archie, 'Can I talk to you in private?' and without question he said, 'This way,' and transferred us to a small adjacent room, again all dark oak and books, that he called his study.

'What is it?' he asked.

'I need a policeman,' I said.

He gave me a long level glance and waved me to one of the two hard oak chairs, himself sitting in the other, beside a paper-strewn desk.

I told him about Jonathan's night walk (harmless version) and about our tracing the Land-Rover to the suppliers at Oxford. I said that I knew where the Land-Rover might now be, but that I couldn't get a search warrant to examine it. For a successful prosecution, I mentioned, there had to be integrity of evidence; no chance of tampering or substitution. So I needed a policeman, but one that would listen and cooperate, not one that would either brush me off altogether or one that would do the police work sloppily.

'I thought you might know someone,' I finished. 'I don't know who else to ask, as at the moment this whole thing depends on crawling up to the machine-gun nest on one's belly, so to speak.'

He sat back in his chair staring at me vacantly while the data got processed.

At length he said, 'Betty called in the local police this morning early, but …' he hesitated, 'they hadn't the clout you need.' He thought some more, then picked up an address book, he leafed through it for a number and made a phone call.

'Norman, this is Archie Kirk.'

Whoever Norman was, it seemed he was unwilling.

'It's extremely important,' Archie said.

Norman apparently capitulated, but with protest, giving directions.

'You had better be right,' Archie said to me, disconnecting. 'I've just called in about a dozen favours he owed me.'

'Who is he?'

'Detective Inspector Norman Picton, Thames Valley Police.'

'Brilliant,' I said.

'He's off duty. He's on the gravel pit lake. He's a clever and ambitious young man. And I,' he added with a glimmer, 'am a magistrate, and I may sign a search warrant myself, if he can clear it with his superintendent.'

He rendered me speechless, which quietly amused him.

'You didn't know?' he asked.

I shook my head and found my voice, 'Jonathan said you were a civil servant.'

'That too,' he agreed. 'How did you get that boorish young man to talk?'

'Er …' I said. 'What is Inspector Picton doing on the gravel pit lake?'

'Water ski-ing,' Archie said.

There were speedboats, children, wet-suits, picnics. There was a club house in a sea of scrubby grass and people sliding over the shining water pulled by strings.

Archie parked his Daimler at the end of a row of cars, and I, with Jonathan beside me, parked my Mercedes alongside. We had agreed to bring both cars so that I could go on eventually to London, with Archie ferrying Jonathan back to pick up the Brackens and take them all home to Combe Bassett. Jonathan hadn't warmed to the plan, but had ungraciously accompanied me as being a lesser horror than spending the afternoon mooching aimlessly round Archie's aunt-infested house.

Having got as far as the lake, he began looking at the harmless physical activity all around him, not with a sneer but with something approaching interest. On the shortish journey from Archie's house he had asked three moody questions, two of which I answered.

First: 'This is the best day for a long time. How come you get so much done so quickly?'

No answer possible.

And second: 'Did you ever steal anything?'

'Chocolate bars,' I said.

And third: 'Do you mind having only one hand?'

I said coldly, 'Yes.'

He glanced with surprise at my face and I saw that he'd expected me to say no. I supposed he wasn't old enough to know it was a question one shouldn't ask; but then, perhaps he would have asked it anyway.

When we climbed out of the car at the water-ski club I said, 'Can you swim?'

'Do me a favour.'

'Then go jump in the lake.'

'Sod you,' he said, and actually laughed.

Archie had meanwhile discovered that one of the scudding figures on the water was the man we'd come to see. We waited a fair while until a large presence in a blue wet-suit with scarlet stripes down arms and legs let go of the rope pulling him and skied free and gracefully to a sloping landing place on the edge of the water. He stepped off his skis grinning, knowing he'd shown off his considerable skill, and wetly shook Archie's hand.

'Sorry to keep you waiting,' he said, 'but I reckoned once you got here I'd have had it for the day.'

His voice, with its touch of Berkshire accent, held self-confidence and easy authority.

Archie said formally, 'Norman, this is Sid Halley.'

I shook the offered hand, which was cold besides wet. I received the sort of slow searching inspection I'd had from Archie himself: and I had no idea what the policeman thought.

'Well,' he said finally, stirring, 'I'll get dressed.'

We watched him walk away, squelching, gingerly barefooted, carrying his skis. He was back within five minutes, clad now in jeans, sneakers, open-necked shirt and sweater, his dark hair still wet and spiky, uncombed.

'Right,' he said to me. 'Give.'

'Er …' I hesitated. 'Would it be possible for Mr Kirk's nephew, Jonathan, to go for a ride in a speedboat?'

Both he and Archie looked over to where Jonathan, not far away, lolled unprepossessingly against my car. Jonathan did himself no favours, I thought; self-destruction rampant in every bolshie tilt of the anti-authority haircut.

'He doesn't deserve any ride in a speedboat,' Archie objected.

'I don't want him to overhear what I'm saying.'

'That's different,' Norman Picton decided. 'I'll fix it.'

Jonathan ungraciously allowed himself to be driven round the lake by Norman Picton's wife in Norman Picton's boat, accompanied by Norman Picton's son. We watched the boat race past with a roar, Jonathan's streaky mop blown back in the wind.

'He's on the fence,' I said mildly to Archie. 'There's a lot of good in him.'

'You're the only one who thinks so.'

'He's looking for a way back without losing face.'

Both men gave me the slow assessment and shook their heads.

I said, bringing Jonathan's signed statement from my pocket, 'Try this on for size.'

They both read it, Picton first, Archie after.

Archie said in disbelief, 'He never talks. He wouldn't have said all this.'

'I asked him questions,' I explained. 'Those are his answers. He came with me to the Land-Rover central dealers in Oxford who put that red dragon transfer on the windscreen of every vehicle they sell. And we wouldn't know of the Land-Rover's presence in the lane, or its probable owner and whereabouts now, except for Jonathan. So I really do think he's earned his ride on the lake.'

'What exactly do you want the search warrant for?' Picton asked. 'One can't get search warrants unless one can come up with a good reason -- or at least a convincing possibility or probability of finding something material to a case.'

'Well,' I said, 'Jonathan put his hand on the bonnet of the vehicle standing right beside the gate to the field where Betty Bracken's colt lost his foot. If you search a certain Land-Rover and find Jonathan's hand-print on the bonnet, would that be proof enough that you'd found the right wheels?'

Picton said, 'Yes.'

'So,' I went on without emphasis, 'if we leave Jonathan here by the lake while your people fingerprint the Land-Rover, there could be no question of his having touched it this afternoon, and not last night.'

'I've heard about you,' Picton said.

'I think,' I said, 'that it would be a good idea to fingerprint that bonnet before it rains, don't you? Or before anyone puts it through a car-wash?'

'Where is it?' Picton asked tersely.

I produced the English Sporting Motors' print-out, and pointed. 'There,' I said. 'That one.'

Picton read it silently; Archie aloud.

'But I know the place. You're quite wrong. I've been a guest there. They're friends of Betty's.'

'And of mine,' I said.

He listened to the bleakness I could hear in my own voice.

'Who are we talking about?' Picton asked.

'Gordon Quint,' Archie said. 'It's rubbish.'

'Who is Gordon Quint?' Picton asked again.

'The father of Ellis Quint,' Archie said. 'And you must have heard of him.'

Picton nodded. He had indeed.

'I suppose it's possible,' I suggested tentatively, 'that someone borrowed the Land-Rover for the night.'

'But you don't believe it,' Picton remarked.

'I wish I did.'

'But where's the connection?' Picton asked. 'There has to be more. The fact that Twyford Lower Farms Ltd owned a blue Land-Rover of the relevant year isn't enough on its own. We cannot search that vehicle for hand-prints unless we have good reason to believe that it was that one and no other that we are looking for.'

Archie said thoughtfully, 'Search warrants have been issued on flimsier grounds before now.'

He and Picton walked away from me, the professionals putting their distance between themselves and Sid Public. I thought that if they refused to follow the trail it would be a relief, on the whole. It would let me off the squirming hook. But there could be another month and another colt … and an obsession feeding and fattening on success.

They came back, asking why I should link the Quint name to the deed. I described my box chart. Not conclusive, Archie said judiciously, and I agreed, no.

Picton repeated what I'd just said, 'Rachel's pony was bought by her father, Joe, on the advice of Ellis Quint?'

I said, 'Ellis did a broadcast about Rachel's pony losing his foot.'

'I saw it,' Picton said.

They didn't want to believe it any more than I did. There was a fairly long indeterminate silence.

Jonathan came back looking uncomplicatedly happy from his fast laps round the lake, and Norman Picton abruptly went into the club house, returning with a can of coke which he put into Jonathan's hands. Jonathan held it in his left hand to open it and his right hand to drink. Norman took the empty can from him casually but carefully by the rim, and asked if he would like to try the skiing itself, not just a ride in the boat.

Jonathan, on the point of enthusiastically saying, 'Yes,' remembered his cultivated disagreeableness and said, 'I don't mind. If you insist, I suppose I'll have to.'

'That's right,' Picton said cheerfully. 'My wife will drive. My son will watch the rope. We'll find you some swimming trunks and a wet-suit.'

He led Jonathan away. Archie watched inscrutably.

'Give him a chance,' I murmured. 'Give him a challenge.'

'Pack him off to the colonies to make a man of him?'

'Scoff,' I smiled. 'But long ago it often worked. He's bright and he's bored and he's not yet a totally confirmed delinquent.'

'You'd make a soft and rotten magistrate.'

'I expect you're right.'

Picton returned, saying, 'The boy will stay here until I get back, so we'd better get started. We'll take two cars, mine and Mr Halley's. In that way he can go on to London when he wants. We'll leave your car here, Archie. Is that all right?'

Archie said he didn't trust Jonathan not to steal it.

'He doesn't think stealing's much fun without his pals,' I said.

Archie stared. 'That boy never says anything.'

'Find him a dangerous job.'

Picton, listening, said 'Like what?'

'Like,' I said, unprepared, 'like … well … on an oil rig. Two years of that. Tell him to keep a diary. Tell him to write.'

'Good God,' Archie said, shaking his head, 'he'd have the place in flames.'

He locked his car and put the keys in his pocket, climbing into the front passenger seat beside me as we followed Norman Picton into Newbury, to his official place of work.

I sat in my car outside the police station while Archie and Picton, inside, arranged the back-ups: the photographer, the fingerprinter, the detective constable to be Inspector Picton's note-taking assistant.

I sat with the afternoon sun falling through the windscreen and wished I were anywhere else, engaged on any other mission.

All the villains I'd caught before hadn't been people I knew. Or people - one had to face it - people I'd thought I'd known. I'd felt mostly satisfaction, sometimes relief, occasionally even regret, but never anything approaching this intensity of entrapped despair.

Ellis was loved. I was going to be hated.

Hatred was inevitable.

Could I bear it?

There was no choice, really.

Archie and Picton came out of the police station followed by their purposeful troop.

Archie, sliding in beside me, said the search warrant was signed, the Superintendent had given the expedition his blessing, and off we could go to the Twyford Lower Farms.

I sat without moving, without starting the car.

'What's the matter?' Archie demanded, looking at my face.

I said with pain, 'Ellis is my friend.'

CHAPTER 6

Ginnie Quint was gardening in a large straw hat, businesslike gloves and grey overall dungarees, waging a losing war on weeds in flower beds in front of the comfortable main house of Twyford Lower Farms.

'Hello, dear Sid!' She greeted me warmly, standing up, holding the dirty gloves wide and putting her soft cheek forward for a kiss of greeting. 'What a nice surprise. But Ellis isn't here, you know. He went to the races, then he was going up to the Regent's Park flat. That's where you'll find him, dear.'

She looked in perplexity over my shoulder to where the Norman Picton contingent were erupting from their transport.

Ginnie said uncertainly, 'Who are your friends, dear?' Her face cleared momentarily in relief, and she exclaimed, 'Why, it's Archie Kirk! My dear man. How nice to see you.'

Norman Picton, carrying none of Archie's or my social-history baggage, came rather brutally to the point.

'I'm Detective Inspector Picton, madam, of the Thames Valley Police. I've reason to believe you own a blue Land-Rover, and I have a warrant to inspect it.'

Ginnie said in bewilderment, 'It's no secret we have a Land-Rover. Of course, we have. You'd better talk to my husband. Sid … Archie … what's all this about?'

'It's possible,' I said unhappily, 'that someone borrowed your Land-Rover last night and … er … committed a crime.'

'Could I see the Land-Rover, please, madam?' Picton insisted.

'It will be in the farmyard,' Ginnie said. 'I'll get my husband to show you.'

The scene inexorably unwound. Gordon, steaming out of the house to take charge, could do nothing but protest in the face of a properly executed search warrant. The various policemen went about their business, photographing, fingerprinting and collecting specimens of dusty earth from the tyre treads. Every stage was carefully documented by the assisting constable.

The warrant apparently covered the machinery and anything else behind the front seat. The two sticking up handles that had looked to Jonathan like those of a lawn mower were, in fact, the handles of a lawn mower - a light electric model. There were also a dozen or so angled iron posts for fencing, also a coil of fencing wire and the tools needed for fastening the wire through the posts. There was an opened bag of horse-feed nuts. There was a rolled leather apron, like those used by farriers. There were two spades, a heavy four-pronged fork and a large knife like a machete wrapped in sacking.

The knife was clean, sharp and oiled.

Gordon, questioned, growled impatiently that a good workman looked after his tools. He picked up a rag and a can of oil, to prove his point. What was the knife for? Clearing ditches, thinning woodland, a hundred small jobs around the fields.

There was a second, longer bundle of sacking lying beneath the fencing posts. I pointed to it non-committally, and Norman Picton drew it out and unwrapped it.

Inside there were two once-varnished wooden handles a good metre in length, with, at the business end, a heavy arrangement of metal.

'Lopping shears,' Gordon pronounced. 'For lopping off small branches of trees in the woods. Have to keep young trees pruned, you know, or you get a useless tangle where nothing will grow.'

He took the shears from Picton's hands to show him how they worked. The act of parting the handles widely away from each other opened heavy metal jaws at the far end; sharp, clean and oiled jaws with an opening wide enough to grip a branch three inches thick. Gordon, with a strong quick motion, pulled the handles towards each other, and the metal jaws closed with a snap.

'Very useful,' Gordon nodded, and rewrapped the shears in their sacking.

Archie, Picton and I said nothing.

I felt faintly sick.

Archie walked away speechlessly and Gordon, not understanding, laid the sacking parcel back in the Land-Rover and walked after him, saying, puzzled, 'Archie! What is it?'

Picton said to me, 'Well?'

'Well,' I said, swallowing, 'what if you took those shears apart? They look clean, but in the jaws … in that hinge … just one drop of blood … or one hair … that would do, wouldn't it?'

'So these shears fit the bill?'

I nodded faintly. 'Mr Kirk saw the colt's leg, like I did. And he saw the foot.' I swallowed again. 'Lopping shears. Oh Christ.'

'It was only a horse,' he protested.

'Some people love their horses like they do their children,' I said. 'Suppose someone lopped off your son's foot?'

He stared. I said wryly, 'Betty Bracken is the fifth bereaved owner I've met in the last three weeks. Their grief gets to you.'

'My son,' he said slowly, 'had a dog that got run over. He worried us sick … wouldn't eat properly …' He stopped, then said, 'You and Archie Kirk are too close to this.'

'And the great British public,' I reminded him, 'poured their hearts out to those cavalry horses maimed by terrorists in Hyde Park.'

He was old enough to remember the carnage that had given rise to the daily bulletins and to medals and hero-status bestowed on Sefton, the wonderful survivor of heartless bombs set off specifically to kill harmless horses used by the army solely as a spectacle in plumed parades.

This time the Great British public would vilify the deed, but wouldn't, and couldn't, believe a national idol guilty. Terrorists, yes. Vandals, yes. Idol … no.

Picton and I walked in the wake of Archie and Gordon, returning to Ginnie in front of the house.

'I don't understand,' Ginnie was saying plaintively. 'When you say the Land-Rover may have been taken and used in a crime … what crime do you mean?'

Gordon jumped in without waiting for Picton to explain.

'It's always for robbery,' he said confidently. 'Where did the thieves take it?'

Instead of answering, Norman Picton asked if it was Gordon Quint's habit to leave the ignition key in the Land-Rover.

'Of course not,' Gordon said, affronted. 'Though a little thing like no ignition key never stops a practised thief.'

'If you did by any chance leave the key available - which I'm sure you didn't, sir, please don't get angry - but if anyone could have found and used your key, would it have been on a key-ring with a silver chain and a silver horseshoe?'

'Oh no,' Ginnie interrupted utterly guilelessly. 'That's Ellis's key-ring. And it's not a silver horseshoe, it's white gold. I had it made especially for him last Christmas.'

I drove Archie Kirk back to Newbury. The unmarked car ahead of us carried the four policemen and a variety of bagged, docketed, documented objects for which receipts had been given to Gordon Quint.

Lopping shears in sacking. Machete, the same. Oily rag and oil-can. Sample of horse-feed nuts. Instant photos of red-dragon logo. Careful containers of many lifted fingerprints, including one sharply defined right full hand-print from the Land-Rover's bonnet that, on first inspection, matched exactly the right handprint from the coke can held by Jonathan at the lake.

'There's no doubt that it was the Quint Land-Rover in my sister's lane,' Archie said. 'There's no doubt Ellis's keys were in the ignition. But there's no proof that Ellis himself was anywhere near.'

'No,' I agreed. 'No one saw him.'

'Did Norman ask you to write a report?'

'Yes.'

'He'll give your report and Jonathan's statement to the Crown Prosecution Service, along with his own findings. After that, it's up to them.'

'Mm.'

After a silence, as if searching for words of comfort, Archie said,'You've done wonders.'

'I hate it.'

'But it doesn't stop you.'

What if he can't help it…? What if I couldn't help it, either?

At the police station, saying goodbye, Archie said, 'Sid … you don't mind if I call you Sid? And I'm Archie, of course, as you know … I do have some idea of what you're facing. I just wanted you to know.'

'I … er … thanks,' I said. 'If you wait a minute, I'll phone the equine hospital and find out how the colt is doing.'

His face lightened but the news was moderate.

'I've re-attached the tendon,' Bill reported. 'I grafted a couple of blood vessels so there's now an adequate blood supply to the foot. Nerves are always difficult. I've done my absolute best and, bar infection, the foot could technically stay in place. The whole leg is now in a cast. The colt is semi-conscious. We have him in slings. But you know how unpredictable this all is. Horses don't recover as easily as humans. There'll be no question of racing, of course, but breeding … I understand he's got the bloodlines of champions. Absolutely no promises, mind.'

'You're brilliant,' I said.

'It's nice,' he chuckled, 'to be appreciated.'

I said, 'A policeman will come and collect some of the colt's hair and blood.'

'Good. Catch the bugger,' he said.

I drove willy nilly without haste in heavy traffic to London. By the time I reached the pub I was half an hour late for my appointment with Kevin Mills of The Pump, and he wasn't there. No balding head, no paunch, no drooping beer-frothed moustache, no cynical world-weariness.

Without regret I mooched tiredly to the bar, bought some whisky and poured into it enough London tap water to give the distiller fits.

All I wanted was to finish my mild tranquilliser, go home, find something to eat, and sleep. Sleep, I thought, yawning, had overall priority.

A woman's voice at my side upset those plans.

'Are you Sid Halley?' it said.

I turned reluctantly. She had shining black shoulder-length hair, bright light-blue eyes and dark red lipstick, sharply edged. Naturally unblemished skin had been given a matt porcelain powdering. Black eyebrows and eyelashes gave her face strong definition, an impression her manner reinforced. She wore black clothes in June. I found it impossible to guess her age, within ten years, from her face, but her manicured red-nailed hands said no more than thirty.

'I'm from The Pump,' she said. 'My colleague, Kevin Mills, has been called away to a rape.'

I said 'Oh,' vaguely.

'I'm India Cathcart,' she said.

I said 'Oh' again, just as vaguely, but I knew her by her name, by her reputation and by her writing. She was a major columnist, a ruthless interviewer, a deconstructing nemesis, a pitiless ex-poser of pathetic human secrets. They said she kept a penknife handy for sharpening her ballpoints. She was also funny, and I, like every Pump addict, avidly read her stuff and laughed even as I winced.

I did not, however, aim to be either her current or future quarry.

'I came to pick up our exclusive,' she said.

'Ah.'Fraid there isn't one.'

'But you said.'

'I hoped,' I agreed.

'And you haven't answered your phone all day.'

I undipped my mobile phone and looked at it as if puzzled, which I wasn't. I said, making a discovery, 'It's switched off.'

She said, disillusioned, 'I was warned you weren't dumb.'

There seemed to be no answer to that, so I didn't attempt one.

'We tried to reach you. Where have you been?'

'Just with friends,'I said.

'I went to Combe Bassett. What did I find? No colt, with or without feet. No Sid Halley. No sobbing colt-owner. I find some batty old fusspot who says everyone went to Archie's house.'

I gazed at her with a benign expression. I could do a benign expression rather well.

'So,' continued India Cathcart with visible disgust, 'I go to the house of a Mr Archibald Kirk in the village of Shelley Green, and what do I find there?'

'What?'

'I find about five other newspapermen, sundry photographers, a Mrs Archibald Kirk and a deaf old gent saying 'Eh?'

'So then what?'

'Mrs Kirk is lying, all wide-eyed and helpful. She's saying she doesn't know where anyone is. After three hours of that, I went back to Combe Bassett to look for ramblers.'

'Did you find any?'

'They had rambled twenty miles and had climbed a stile into a field with a resident bull. A bunch of ramblers crashed out in panic through a hedge backwards and the rest are discussing suing the farmer for letting a dangerous animal loose near a public footpath. A man with a pony-tail says he's also suing Mrs Bracken for not keeping her colt in a stable, thus preventing an amputation that gave his daughter hysterics.'

'Life's one long farce,' I said.

A mistake. She pounced on it. 'Is that your comment on the - maltreatment of animals?'

'No.'

'Your opinion of ramblers?'

'Footpaths are important,' I said.

She looked past me to the bartender. 'Sparkling mineral water, ice and lemon, please.'

She paid for her own drink as a matter of course. I wondered how much of her challenging air was unconscious and habitual, or whether she volume-adjusted it according to who she was talking to. I often learned useful things about people's characters by watching them talk to others than myself, and comparing the response.

'You're not playing fair,' she said, judging me over the wedge of lemon bestriding the rim of her glass. 'It was The Pump's Hotline that sent you to Combe Bassett. Kevin says you pay your debts. So pay.'

'The Hotline was his own idea. Not a bad one, except for about a hundred false alarms. But there's nothing I can tell you this evening.'

'Not can't. Won't.'

'It's often the same thing.'

'Spare me the philosophy!'

'I enjoy reading your page every week,'I said.

'But you don't want to figure in it?'

'That's up to you.'

She raised her chin. 'Strong men beg me not to print what I know.'

I didn't want to antagonise her completely and I could forgo the passing pleasure of banter, so I gave her the benign expression and made no comment.

She said abruptly, 'Are you married?'

'Divorced.'

'Children?'

I shook my head. 'How about you?'

She was more used to asking questions than answering. There was perceptible hesitation before she said, 'The same.'

I drank my Scotch. I said, 'Tell Kevin I'm very sorry I can't give him his inside edge. Tell him I'll talk to him on Monday.'

'Not good enough.'

'No, well … I can't do more.'

'Is someone paying you?' she demanded. 'Another paper?'

I shook my head. 'Maybe Monday,' I said. I put my empty glass on the bar. 'Goodbye.'

'Wait!' She gave me a straight stare, not overtly or aggressively feminist, but one that saw no need to make points in a battle that had been won by the generation before her. I thought that perhaps India Cathcart wouldn't have made it a condition of continued marriage that I should give up the best skill I possessed. I'd married a loving and gentle girl and turned her bitter: the worst, the most miserable failure of my life.

India Cathcart said, 'Are you hungry? I've had nothing to eat all day. My expense account would run to two dinners.'

There were many worse fates. I did a quick survey of the possibility of being deconstructed all over page fifteen, and decided as usual that playing safe had its limits. Take risks with caution: a great motto.

'Your restaurant or mine?' I said, smiling, and was warned by the merest flash of triumph in her eyes that she thought the tarpon hooked and as good as landed.

We ate in a noisy brightly lit large and crowded black-mirrored restaurant that was clearly the in-place for the in-crowd. India's choice. India's habitat. A few sycophantic hands shot out to make contact with her as we followed a lisping young greeter to a central, noteworthy table. India Cathcart acknowledged the plaudits and trailed me behind her like a comet's tail (Halley's?) while introducing me to no one.

The menu set out to amaze, but from long habit I ordered fairly simple things that could reasonably be dealt with one-handed: watercress mousse, then duck curry with sliced baked plantains. India chose baby aubergines with oil and pesto, followed by a large mound of crisped frogs' legs that she ate uninhibitedly with her fingers.

The best thing about the restaurant was that the decibel level made private conversation impossible: everything anyone said could be overheard by those at the next table.

'So,' India raised her voice, teeth gleaming over a herb-dusted cuisse, 'was Betty Bracken in tears?'

'I didn't see any tears.'

'How much was the colt worth?'

I ate some plantain and decided they'd overdone the caramel. 'No one knows,' I said.

'Kevin told me it cost a quarter of a million. You're simply being evasive.'

'What it cost and what it was worth are different. It might have won the Derby. It might have been worth millions. No one knows.'

'Do you always play word games?'

'Quite often,' I nodded. 'Like you do.'

'Where did you go to school?'

'Ask Kevin,'I said, smiling.

'Kevin's told me things about you that you wouldn't want me to know.'

'Like what?'

'Like it's easy to be taken in by your peaceful front. Like you having tungsten where other people have nerves. Like you being touchy about losing a hand. That's for starters.'

I would throttle Kevin, I thought. I said, 'How are the frogs' legs?'

'Muscular.'

'Never mind,' I said. 'You have sharp teeth.'

Her mind quite visibly changed gears from patronising to uncertain, and I began to like her.

Risky to like her, of course.

After the curry and the frogs we drank plain black coffee and spent a pause or two in eye-contact appraisal. I expected she saw me in terms of adjectives and paragraphs. I saw her with appeased curiosity. I now knew what the serial reputation-slasher looked like at dinner.

In the way one does, I wondered what she looked like in bed; and in the way that one doesn't cuddle up to a potential cobra, I made no flicker of an attempt to find out.

She seemed to take this passivity for granted. She paid for our meal with a Pump business credit card, as promised, and crisply expected I would kick in my share on Monday as an exclusive for Kevin.

I promised what I knew I wouldn't be able to deliver, and offered her a lift home.

'But you don't know where I live!'

'Wherever,' I said.

'Thanks. But there's a bus.'

I didn't press it. We parted on the pavement outside the restaurant. No kiss. No handshake. A nod from her. Then she turned and walked away, not looking back: and I had no faith at all in her mercy.

On Sunday morning I reopened the small blue suitcase Linda had lent me, and read again through all the clippings that had to do with the maimed Kent ponies.

I played again the video tape of the twenty-minute programme Ellis had made of the child owners, and watched it from a different, and sickened, perspective.

There on the screen he looked just as friendly, just as charismatic, just as expert. His arms went round Rachel in sympathy. His good-looking face filled with compassion and outrage. Blinding ponies, cutting off a pony's foot, he said, those were crimes akin to murder.

Ellis, I thought in wretchedness, how could you? What if he can't help it?

I played the tape a second time, taking in more details and attentively listening to what he had actually said.

His instinct for staging was infallible. In the shot where he'd commiserated with the children all together, he had had them sitting around on hay bales in a tack room, the children dressed in riding breeches, two or three wearing black velvet riding hats. He himself had sat on the floor among them, casual in a dark open-necked jogging suit, a peaked cap pushed back on his head, sunglasses in pocket. Several of the children had been in tears. He'd given them his handkerchief and helped them cope with grief.

There were phrases he had used when talking straight to camera that had brought the children's horrors sharply to disturbingly visual life: 'pierced empty sockets, their eyesight running down their cheeks,' and 'a pure-bred silver pony proud and shining in the moonlight'.

His caring tone of voice alone had made the word-pictures bearable.

'A silver pony shining in the moonlight.' The basis of Rachel's nightmare.

'In the moonlight.' He had seen the pony in the moonlight.

I played the tape a third time, listening with my eyes shut, undistracted by the familiar face, or by Rachel in his comforting hug.

He said, 'A silver pony trotting trustfully across the field lured by a handful of horse-nuts.'

He shouldn't have known that.

He could have known it if any of the Ferns had suggested it.

But the Ferns themselves wouldn't have said it. They hadn't fed Silverboy on nuts. The agent of destruction that had come by night had brought the nuts.

Ellis would say, of course, that he had made it up, and the fact that it might be true was simply a coincidence. I rewound the tape and stared for a while into space. Ellis would have an answer to everything. Ellis would be believed.

In the afternoon I wrote a long, detailed report for Norman Picton: not a joyous occupation.

Early Monday morning, as he had particularly requested it, I drove to the police station in Newbury and personally delivered the package into the Detective Inspector's own hands.

'Did you talk about this to anybody?' he asked.

'No.'

'Especially not to Quint?'

'Especially not. But …' I hesitated, 'they're a close family. It's more than likely that on Saturday evening or yesterday, Ginnie and Gordon told Ellis that you and I and Archie were sniffing round the Land-Rover and that you took away the shears. I think you must consider that Ellis knows the hunt is on.'

He nodded disgustedly. 'And as Ellis Quint officially lives in the Metropolitan area, we in the Thames Valley district cannot pursue our enquiries …'

'You mean, you can't haul him down to the local Regent's Park nick and ask him awkward questions, like what was he doing at 3.00 a.m. on Saturday?'

'That's right. We can't ask him ourselves.'

'I thought these divisions were being done away with.'

'Everything takes time.'

I left him to sort out his problems and set off to drive to Kent. On the way, wanting to give Rachel Ferns a cheering-up present, I detoured into the maze of Kingston and, having parked, walked around the precincts looking for inspiration in the shops.

A windowful of tumbling puppies made me pause; perhaps Rachel needed an animal to love, to replace the pony. And perhaps Linda would not be pleased at having to house-train a growing nuisance that moulted and chewed the furniture. I went into the pet shop, however, and that's how I came to arrive at Linda Ferns' house with my car full of fish tank, water weeds, miniature ruined castle walls, electric pump, lights, fish food, instructions, and three large lidded buckets of tropical fish.

Rachel was waiting by the gate for my arrival.

'You're half an hour late,' she accused. 'You said you'd be here by twelve.'

'Have you heard of the M25 ?'

'Everyone makes that motorway an excuse.'

'Well, sorry.'

Her bald head was still a shock. Apart from that she looked well, her cheeks full and rounded by steroids. She wore a loose sundress and clumpy trainers on stick-like legs. It was crazy to love someone else's child so comprehensively, yet for the first time ever, I felt the idea of fatherhood take a grip.

Jenny had refused to have children on the grounds that any racing day could leave her a widow, and at the time I hadn't cared one way or another. If ever I married again, I thought, following Rachel into the house, I would long for a daughter.

Linda gave me a bright bright smile, a pecking kiss and the offer of a gin and tonic while she threw together some pasta for our lunch. The table was laid. She set out steaming dishes.

'Rachel was out waiting for you two hours ago!' she said. 'I don't know what you've done to the child.'

'How are things?'

'Happy.' She turned away abruptly, tears as ever near the surface. 'Have some more gin. You said you'd got news for me.'

'Later. After lunch. And I've brought Rachel a present.'

The fish tank after lunch was the ultimate success. Rachel was enthralled, Linda interested and helpful. 'Thank goodness you didn't give her a dog,' she said. 'I can't stand animals under my feet. I wouldn't let Joe give her a dog. That's why she wanted a pony.'

The vivid fish swam healthily through the Gothic ruins, the water weeds rose and swelled, the lights and bubbles did their stuff. Rachel sprinkled fish food and watched her new friends eat. The pet shop owner had persuaded me to take a bigger tank than I'd thought best, and he had undoubtedly been right. Rachel's pale face glowed. Pegotty, in a baby-bouncer, sat wide eyed and open mouthed beside the glass. Linda came with me into the garden.

'Any news about a transplant?' I asked.

'It would have been the first thing I'd told you.'

We sat on the bench. The roses bloomed. It was a beautiful day, heartbreaking.

Linda said wretchedly, 'In acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, which is what Rachel's got, chemotherapy causes remission almost always. More than ninety per cent of the time. In seven out of ten children, the remission lasts for ever, and after five years they can be thought of as cured for life. And girls have a better chance than boys, isn't that odd? But in thirty per cent of children, the disease comes back.'

She stopped.

'And it has come back in Rachel?'

'Oh, Sid!'

'Tell me.'

She tried, the tears trickling while she spoke. 'The disease came back in Rachel after less than two years, and that's not good. Her hair was beginning to grow, but it came out again with the drugs. They re-established her again in remission, and they're so good, it isn't so easy the second time. But I know from their faces - and they don't suggest transplants unless they have to, because only about half of bone marrow transplants are successful. I always talk as if a transplant will definitely save her, but it only might. If they found a tissue match they'd kill all her own bone marrow with radiation, which makes the children terribly nauseous and wretched, and then when the marrow's all dead they transfuse new liquid marrow into the veins and hope it will migrate into the bones and start making leukaemia-free blood there, and quite often it works … and sometimes a child can be born with one blood group and be transfused with another. It's extraordinary. Rachel now has type A blood, but she might end up with type O, or something else. They can do so much nowadays. One day they may cure everybody. But oh … oh …'

I put my arm round her shoulders while she sobbed. So many disasters were for ever. So many Edens lost.

I waited until the weeping fit passed, and then I told her I'd discovered who had maimed and destroyed Silverboy.

'You're not going to like it,' I said, 'and it might be best if you can prevent Rachel from finding out. Does she ever read the newspapers?'

'Only Peanuts.'

'And the television news?'

'She doesn't like news of starving children.' Linda looked at me fearfully. 'I've wanted her to know who killed Silverboy. That's what I'm paying you for.'

I took out of my pocket and put into her hands an envelope containing her much-travelled cheque torn now into four pieces.

'I don't like what I found, and I don't want your money. Linda … I'm so very sorry … but it was Ellis Quint himself who cut off Silverboy's foot.'

She sprang in revulsion to her feet, immediate anger filling her, the shock hard and physical, the enormity of what I'd said making her literally shake.

I should have broken it more slowly, I thought, but the words had had to be said.

'How can you say such a thing?' she demanded. 'How can you? You've got it all wrong. He couldn't possibly! You're crazy to say such a thing.'

I stood up also. 'Linda …'

'Don't say anything. I won't listen. I won't. He is so nice. You're truly crazy. And of course I'm not going to tell Rachel what you've accused him of, because it would upset her,, and you're wrong. And I know you've been kind to her … and to me … but I wouldn't have asked you here if I'd thought you could do so much awful harm. So please … go. Go, just go.'

I shrugged a fraction. Her reaction was extreme, but her emotions were always at full stretch. I understood her, but that didn't much help.

I said persuasively, 'Linda, listen.'

'No!'

I said, 'Ellis has been my own friend for years. This is terrible for me, too.'

She put her hands over her ears and turned her back, screaming, 'Go away. Go away.'

I said uncomfortably, 'Phone me, then,' and got no reply.

I touched her shoulder. She jerked away from me and ran a good way down the lawn, and after a minute I turned and went back into the house.

'Is Mummy crying?' Rachel asked, looking out of the window. 'I heard her shout.'

'She's upset.' I smiled, though not feeling happy. 'She'll be all right. How are the fish?'

'Cool.' She went down on her knees, peering into the wet little world.

'I have to go now,' I said.

'Goodbye.' She seemed sure I would come back. It was a temporary farewell, between friends. She looked at the fishes, not turning her head.

'Bye,' I said, and drove ruefully to London knowing that Linda's rejection was only the first: the beginning of the disbelief.

In Pont Square the telephone was ringing when I opened my front door, and continued to ring while I poured water and ice from a jug in the refrigerator, and continued to ring while I drank thirstily after the hot afternoon, and continued to ring while I changed the battery in my left arm.

In the end, I picked up the receiver.

'Where the bloody hell have you been?'

The Berkshire voice filled my ear, delivering not contumely, but information. Norman Picton, Detective Inspector, Thames Valley Police.

'You've heard the news, of course.'

'What news?' I asked.

'Do you live with your head in the sand? Don't you own a radio?'

'What's happened?'

'Ellis Quint is in custody,' he said.

'He's what?'

'Yes, well, hold on, he's sort of in custody. He's in hospital, under guard.'

'Norman,' I said, disoriented. 'Start at the beginning.'

'Right.' He sounded over-patient, as if talking to a child. 'This morning two plain clothes officers of the Metropolitan Police went to Ellis Quint's flat overlooking Regent's Park intending to interview him harmlessly about his whereabouts early Saturday morning. He came out of the building before they reached the main entrance, so, knowing him by sight, they approached him, identifying themselves and showing him their badges. At which point,' Picton cleared his throat but didn't seem able to clear his account of pedestrian police phraseology, '… at which point Mr Ellis Quint pushed one of the officers away so forcefully that the officer overbalanced into the roadway and was struck by a passing car. Mr Quint himself then ran into the path of traffic as he attempted to cross the road to put distance between himself and the police officers. Mr Quint caused a bus to swerve. The bus struck Mr Quint a glancing blow, throwing him to the ground. Mr Quint was dazed and bruised. He was taken to hospital where he is now in a secure room while investigations proceed.'

I said, 'Are you reading that from a written account?'

'That's so.'

'How about an interpretation in your own earthy words?'

'I'm at work. I'm not alone.'

'OK,' I said. 'Did Ellis panic or did he think he was being mugged?'

Picton half laughed. 'I'd say the first. His lawyers will say the second. But, d'you know what? When they emptied his pockets , at the hospital, they found a thick packet of cash - and his passport.'

'No!'

'It isn't illegal.'

'What does he say?'

'He hasn't said anything yet.'

'How's the officer he pushed?'

'Broken leg. He was lucky.'

'And … when Ellis's daze wears off?'

'It'll be up to the Met. They can routinely hold him for seventy-two hours while they frame a charge. I'd say that's a toss-up. With the clout he can muster, he'll be out in hours.'

'What did you do with my report?'

'It went to the proper authorities.'

Authorities was such a vague word. Whoever described their occupation as 'an authority'?

'Thanks for phoning,' I said.

'Keep in touch.' An order, it sounded like.

I put down the receiver and found a handwritten scrawl from Kevin Mills on Pump note-headed paper in my Fax.

He'd come straight to the point.

'Sid, you're a shit.'

CHAPTER 7

The week got worse, slightly alleviated only by a letter from Linda on Thursday morning. Variably slanting handwriting. Jerky. A personality torn this way and that.

Dear Sid,

I'm sorry I talked to you the way I did. I still cannot believe that Ellis Quint would cut off Silverboy's foot, but I remember thinking when he came here to do the TV programme that he already knew a lot about what had happened. I mean things that hadn't been in the papers, like Silverboy liking horse-nuts, which we never gave him, so how did he know, we didn't know ourselves, and I did wonder who had told him, but of course Joe asked Ellis who to buy a pony from, so of course I thought Ellis knew things about him from way back, like Silverboy being fed on horse-nuts before he came to us.

Anyway, I can see how you got it wrong about Ellis, and it was very nice of you to bring the fish tank for Rachel, I can't tear her away from it. She keeps asking when you will come back and I don't like to tell her you won't, not as things are, so if you'll visit us again I will not say any more about you being wrong about Ellis. I ask you for Rachel.

We are glad Ellis wasn't hurt today by that horrid bus.

Yours sincerely,

Linda Ferns.

I wrote back thanking her for her letter, accepting her invitation and saying I would phone her soon.

On Tuesday Ellis was charged with 'actual bodily harm' for having inadvertently and without intention pushed 'an assailant' into the path of potential danger (under the wheels of a speeding motor) and was set free 'pending enquiries'.

Norman Picton disillusionedly reported, 'The only approximately good thing is that they confiscated his passport. His lawyers are pointing their fingers up any police nose they can confront, screeching that it's a scandal.'

'Where's Ellis now?'

'Look to your back. Your report is with the Crown Prosecution Service, along with mine.'

'Do you mean you don't know where he is?'

'He's probably in Britain or anywhere he can get to where he doesn't need a passport. He told the magistrates in court that he'd decided to do a sports programme in Australia, and he had to have his passport with him because he needed it to get a visa for Australia.'

'Never underestimate his wits,' I said.

'And he'd better look out for yours.'

'He and I know each other too well.'

On Wednesday afternoon Ellis turned up at his regular television studio as if life were entirely normal and, on completion of an audience-attended recording of a sports quiz, was quietly arrested by three uniformed police officers. Ellis spent the night in custody, and on Thursday morning was charged with severing the foot of a colt: to be exact, the off-fore foot of an expensive two-year-old thoroughbred owned by Mrs Elizabeth Bracken of Combe Bassett Manor, Berkshire. To the vociferous fury of most of the nation, the magistrates remanded him in custody for another seven days, a preliminary precaution usually applied to those accused of murder.

Norman Picton phoned me privately on my home number.

'I'm not telling you this,' he said. 'Understand?'

'I've got cloth ears.'

'It would mean my job.'

'I hear you,' I said. 'I won't talk.'

'No,' he said, 'that, I believe.'

'Norman?'

'Word gets around. I looked up the transcript of the trial of that man that smashed off your hand. You didn't tell him what he wanted to know, did you?'

'No … well … everyone's a fool sometimes.'

'Some fool. Anyway, pin back the cloth ears. The reason why Ellis Quint is remanded for seven days is because after his arrest he tried to hang himself in his cell with his tie.'

'He didn't!'

'No one took his belt or tie away, because of who he was. No one in the station believed in the charge. There's all hell going on now. The top brass are passing the parcel like a children's party. No one's telling anyone outside anything on pain of death, so Sid …'

'I promise,' I said.

'They'll remand him next week for another seven days, partly to stop him committing suicide and partly because …' he faltered on the brink of utter trust, his whole career at risk.

'I promise,' I said again quickly. 'And if I know what it is you want kept quiet, then I'll know what not to guess at publicly, won't I?'

'God,' he said, half the anxiety evaporating, 'then … there's horse blood in the hinges of the shears, and horse blood and hairs on the oily rag, and horse blood and hairs in the sacking. They've taken samples from the colt in the hospital at Lambourn, and everything's gone away for DNA testing. The results will be back next week.'

'Does Ellis know?'

'I imagine that's why he tried the quick way out. It was a Hermes tie, incidentally, with a design of horseshoes. The simple knot he tied slid undone because the tie was pure smooth silk.'

'For God's sake …'

'I keep forgetting he's your friend. Anyway, his lawyers have got to him. They're six deep. He's now playing the lighthearted celebrity, and he's sorrowful about you, Sid, for having got him all wrong. His lawyers are demanding proof that Ellis himself was ever at Combe Bassett by night, and we are asking for proof that he wasn't. His lawyers know we would have to drop the case if they can come up with a trustable alibi for any of the other amputations, but so far they haven't managed it. It's early days, though. They'll dig and dig, you can bet on it.'

'Yeah.'

'None of the Land-Rover evidence will get into the papers because the sub judice rule kicked in the minute they remanded him. Mostly, that helps us but you, as Sid Halley, won't be able to justify yourself in print until after the trial.'

'Even if I can then.'

'Juries are unpredictable.'

'And the law is, frequently, an ass.'

'People in the Force are already saying you're off your rocker. They say Ellis is too well known. They say that wherever he went he would be recognised, therefore if no one recognised him, that in itself is proof he wasn't there.'

'Mm,' I said. 'I've been thinking about that. Do you have time off at the weekend?'

'Not this weekend, no. Monday do you?'

'I'll see if I can fix something up with Archie … and Jonathan.'

'And there's another thing,' Norman said, 'the Land-Rover's presence at Combe Bassett is solid in itself, but Jonathan, if he gets as far as the witness box, will be a meal for Ellis's lawyers. On probation for stealing cars! What sort of a witness is that?'

'I understood the jury isn't allowed to know anything about a witness. I was at a trial once in the Central Law Courts - the Old Bailey -- when a beautifully dressed and blow-dried twenty-six-year-old glamour boy gave evidence -- all lies -- and the jury weren't allowed to know that he was already serving a sentence for confidence tricks and had come to court straight from jail, via the barber and the wardrobe room. The jury thought him a lovely young man. So much for juries.'

'Don't you believe in the jury system?'

'I would believe in it if they were told more. How can a jury come to a prison-or-freedom decision if half the facts are withheld? There should be no inadmissable evidence.'

'You're naive.'

'I'm Sid Public, remember? The law bends over backwards to give the accused the benefit of the slightest doubt. The victim of murder is never there to give evidence. The colt in Lambourn can't talk. It's safer to kill animals. I'm sorry, but I can't stand what Ellis has become.'

He said flatly, 'Emotion works against you in the witness box.'

'Don't worry. In court, I'm a block of ice.'

'So I've heard.'

'You've heard too damned much.'

He laughed. 'There's an old-boy internet,' he said. 'All you need is the password and a whole new world opens up.'

'What's the password?'

'I can't tell you.'

'Don't bugger me about. What's the password?'

'Archie,' he said.

I was silent for all of ten seconds, remembering Archie's eyes the first time I met him, remembering the awareness, the message of knowledge. Archie knew more about me than I knew about him.

I asked, 'What exactly does Archie do in the Civil Service?'

'I reckon,' Norman said, amused, 'that he's very like you, Sid. What he don't want you to know, he don't tell you.'

'Where can I reach you on Monday?'

'Police station. Say you're John Paul Jones.'

Kevin Mills dominated the front page of The Pump on Friday - a respite from the sexual indiscretions of cabinet ministers but a demolition job on myself. 'The Pump,' he reminded readers, had set up a Hotline to Sid Halley to report attacks on colts. Owners had been advised to lock their stable doors, and to great effect had done so after the Derby. The Pump disclaims all responsibility for Sid Halley now ludicrously fingering Ellis Quint as the demon responsible for torturing defenceless horses. Ellis Quint, whose devotion to thoroughbreds stretches back to his own starry career as the country's top amateur race-rider, the popular hero who braved all perils in the ancient tradition of gentlemen sportsmen …' More of the same.

'See also "Analysis" on page 10, and India Cathcart, page 15.' I supposed one had to know the worst. I read the leader column - 'Should an ex-jockey be allowed free rein as pseudo sleuth? (Answer: no, of course not.)' and then, dredging deep for steel, I finally turned to India Cathcart's piece.

Sid Halley, smugly accustomed to acclaim as a champion, in short time lost his career, his wife and his left hand, and then weakly watched his friend soar to super-celebrity and national star status, all the things that he considered should be his. Who does this pathetic little man think he's kidding? He's no Ellis Quint. He's a has-been with an ego problem, out to ruin what he envies.

That was for starters. The next section pitilessly but not accurately dissected the impulse that led one to compete at speed (ignoring the fact that presumably Ellis himself had felt the same power-hungry inferiority complex).

My ruthless will to win, India Cathcart had written, had destroyed everything good in my own life. The same will to win now aimed to destroy my friend Ellis Quint. This was ambition gone mad.

The Pump would not let it happen. Sid Halley was a beetle ripe for squashing. The Pump would exterminate. The Halley myth was curtains.

Damn and blast her, I thought and, for the first time in eighteen years, got drunk.

On Saturday morning, groaning around the flat with a headache, I found a message in my Fax machine.

Handwritten scrawl, Pump-headed paper same as before …

Kevin Mills.

Sid, sorry, but you asked for it.

You're still a shit.

Most of Sunday I listened to voices on my answering machine delivering the same opinion.

Two calls relieved the gloom.

One from Charles Roland, my ex-father-in-law. 'Sid, if you're in trouble, there's always Aynsford,' and a second from Archie Kirk, 'I'm at home. Norman Picton says you want me.'

Two similar men, I thought gratefully. Two men with cool dispassionate minds who would listen before condemning.

I phoned back to Charles, who seemed relieved I sounded sane.

'I'm all right,' I said.

'Ellis is a knight in shining armour, though.'

'Yeah.'

'Are you sure, Sid?'

'Positive.'

'But Ginnie … and Gordon … they're friends.'

'Well,' I said, 'if I cut the foot off a horse, what would you do?'

'But you wouldn't.'

'No.'

I sighed. That was the trouble. No one could believe it of Ellis.

'Sid, come, any time,' Charles said.

'You're my rock,' I said, trying to make it sound light. 'I'll come if I need to.'

'Good.'

I phoned Archie and asked if Jonathan were still staying with Betty Bracken.

Archie said, 'I've been talking to Norman. Jonathan is now addicted to water ski-ing and spends every day at the lake. Betty is paying hundreds and says it's worth it to get him out of the house. He'll be at the lake tomorrow. Shall we all meet there?'

We agreed on a time, and met.

When we arrived, Jonathan was out on the water.

'That's him,' Norman said, pointing.

The flying figure in a scarlet wet-suit went up a ramp, flew, turned a somersault in the air and landed smoothly in the water on two skis.

'That,' Archie said in disbelief, 'is Jonathan?

'He's a natural,' Norman said. 'I've been out here for a bit most days. Not only does he know his spatial balance and attitude by instinct, but he's fearless.'

Archie and I silently watched Jonathan approach the shore, drop the rope and ski confidently up the sloping landing place with almost as much panache as Norman himself.

Jonathan grinned. Jonathan's streaky hair blew wetly back from his forehead. Jonathan, changed, looked blazingly happy.

A good deal of the joy dimmed with apprehension as he looked at Archie's stunned and expressionless face. I took a soft sports bag out of my car and held it out to him, asking him to take it with him to the dressing-rooms.

'Hi,' he said. 'OK.' He took the grip and walked off barefooted, carrying his skis.

'Incredible,' Archie said, 'but he can't ski through life.'

'It's a start,' Norman said.

After we'd stood around for a few minutes discussing Ellis we were approached by a figure in a dark blue tracksuit, wearing also black running shoes, a navy baseball cap and sunglasses and carrying a sheet of paper. He came to within fifteen feet of us and stopped.,

'Yes?' Norman asked, puzzled, as to a stranger. 'Do you want something?'

I said, 'Take off the cap and the glasses.'

He took them off. Jonathan's streaky hair shook forward into its normal startling shape and his eyes stared at my face. I gave him a slight jerk of the head, and he came the last few paces and handed the paper to Norman.

Archie for once looked wholly disconcerted. Norman read aloud what I'd written on the paper.

'Jonathan, this is an experiment. Please put on the clothes you'll find in this bag. Put on the baseball cap, peak forward, hiding your face. Wear the sunglasses. Bring this paper. Walk towards me, stop a few feet away, and don't speak. OK? Thanks, Sid.'

Norman lowered the paper, looked at Jonathan and said blankly, 'Bloody hell.'

'Is that the lot?' Jonathan asked me.

'Brilliant,'I said.

'Shall I get dressed now?'

I nodded, and he walked nonchalantly away.

'He looked totally different,' Archie commented, still amazed. 'I didn't know him at all.'

I said to Norman, 'Did you look at the tape of Ellis's programme, that one I put in with my report?'

'The tape covered with stickers saying it was the property of Mrs Linda Ferns? Yes, I did.'

'When Ellis was sitting on the floor with those children,' I said, 'he was wearing a dark tracksuit, open at the neck. He had a peaked cap pushed back on his head. He looked young. Boyish. The children responded to him … touched him … loved him. He had a pair of sunglasses tucked into a breast pocket.'

After a silence Norman said, 'But he wouldn't. He wouldn't wear those clothes on television if he'd worn them to mutilate the Ferns pony.'

'Oh yes he would. It would deeply amuse him. There's nothing gives him more buzz than taking risks.'

'A baseball cap,' Archie said thoughtfully, 'entirely changes the shape of someone's head.'

I nodded. 'A baseball cap and sports clothes can reduce any man of stature to anonymity.'

'We'll never prove it,' Norman said.

Jonathan slouched back in his own clothes and with his habitual half-sneering expression firmly in place. Archie's exasperation with him sharply returned.

'This is not the road to Damascus,' I murmured.

'Damn you, Sid.' Archie glared, and then laughed.

'What are you talking about?' Norman asked.

'St Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus happened like a thunderclap,' Archie explained. 'Sid's telling me not to look for instant miracles by the gravel pit lake.'

Jonathan, not listening, handed me the grip. 'Cool idea,' he said. 'No one knew me.'

'They would, close to.'

'It was still a risk,' Norman objected.

'I told you,'I said,'the risk is the point.'

'It doesn't make sense.'

'Cutting off a horse's foot doesn't make sense. Half of human actions don't make sense. Sense is in the eye of the beholder.'

I drove back to London.

My answer-phone had answered so many calls that it had run out of recording tape.

Among the general abuse, three separate calls were eloquent about the trouble I'd stirred up. All three of the owners of the other colt victims echoed Linda Ferns' immovable conviction.

The lady from Cheltenham: 'I can't believe you can be so misguided. Ellis is absolutely innocent. I wouldn't have thought of you as being jealous of him, but all the papers say so. I'm sorry, Sid, but you're not welcome here any more.'

The angry Lancashire farmer: 'You're a moron, do you know that? Ellis Quint! You're stupid. You were all right as a jockey. You should give up this pretence of being Sherlock Holmes. You're pitiful, lad.'

The lady from York: 'How can you? Dear Ellis! He's worth ten of you, I have to say.'

I switched off the critical voices, but they went on reverberating in my brain.

The Press had more or less uniformly followed The Pump's lead. Pictures of Ellis at his most handsome smiled confidently from news stands everywhere. Trial by media found Ellis Quint the wronged and innocent hero, Sid Halley the twisted jealous cur snapping at his heels.

I'd known it would be bad: so why the urge to bang my head against the wall? Because I was human, and didn't have tungsten nerves, whatever anyone thought. I sat with my eyes shut, ostrich fashion.

Tuesday was much the same. I still didn't bang my head. Close run thing.

On the Wednesday Ellis appeared again before magistrates, who that time set him free on bail.

Norman phoned.

'Cloth ears?' he said. 'Same as before?'

'Deaf,' I assured him.

'It was fixed beforehand. Two minutes in court. Different time than posted. The Press arrived after it was over. Ellis greeted them, free, smiling broadly.'

'Shit.'

Norman said, 'His lawyers have done their stuff. It's rubbish to think that the well-balanced personality intended to kill himself - his tie got caught somehow but he managed to free it. The policeman he pushed failed to identify himself adequately and is now walking about comfortably in a cast. The colt Ellis is accused of attacking is alive and recovering well. As bail is granted in cases of manslaughter, it is unnecessary to detain Ellis Quint any longer on far lesser charges. So … he's walked.'

'Is he still to be tried?'

'So far. His lawyers have asked for an early trial date so that he can put this unpleasantness behind him. He will plead not guilty, of course. His lawyers are already patting each other on the back. And … I think there's a heavyweight manoeuvering somewhere in this case.'

'A heavyweight? Who?'

'Don't know. It's just a feeling.'

'Could it be Ellis's father?'

'No, no. Quite different. It's just … since our reports, yours and mine, reached the Crown Prosecution Service, there's been a new factor. Political, perhaps. It's difficult to describe. It's not exactly a cover-up. There's already been too much publicity, it's more a sort of re-direction. Even officially, and not just to the Press, someone with muscle is trying to get you thoroughly, and I'm afraid I must say, malignantly discredited.'

'Thanks a bunch.'

'Sid, seriously, look out for yourself.'

I felt as prepared as one could be for some sort of catastrophic pulverisation to come my way, but in the event the process was subtler and long drawn out.

As if nothing had happened, Ellis resumed his television programme and began making jokes about Sid Halley -- 'Sid Halley? That friend of mine! Have you heard that he comes from Halifax? Halley facts - he makes them up.'

And 'I like halibut - I eat it.' And the old ones that I was used to, 'halitosis' and 'Hallelujah.'

Hilarious.

When I went to the races, which I didn't do as often as earlier, people either turned their backs or laughed, and I wasn't sure which I disliked more.

I took to going only to jumping meetings, knowing Ellis's style took him to the most fashionable meetings on the Flat. I acknowledged unhappily to myself that in my avoidance of him there was an element of cringe. I despised myself for it. All the same, I shrank from a confrontation with him and truly didn't know whether it was because of an ever-deepening aversion to what he had done, or because of the fear - the certainty - that he would publicly mock me.

He behaved as if there were never going to be a trial; as if awkward details like Land-Rovers, lopping shears, and confirmed matching DNA tests tying the shears to the Bracken colt were never going to surface, once the sub judice silence ended.

Norman, Archie and also Charles Roland worried that, for all the procedural care we had taken, Ellis's lawyers would somehow get the Land-Rover disallowed. Ellis's lawyers, Norman said, backed by the heavy unseen presence that was motivating them and possibly even paying the mounting fees, now included a defence counsel whose loss rate for the previous seven years was nil.

Surprisingly, despite the continuing barrage of ignominy, I went on being offered work. True, the approach was often tentative and apologetic - 'Whether you're right or pigheaded about Ellis Quint …' and 'Even if you've got Ellis Quint all wrong …' the nitty gritty seemed to be that they needed me and there was no one else.

Well, hooray for that. I cleaned up minor mysteries, checked credit ratings, ditto characters, found stolen horses, caught sundry thieves, all the usual stuff.

July came in with a deluge that flooded rivers and ruined the shoes of racegoers, and no colt was attacked at the time of the full moon, perhaps because the nights were wet and windy and black dark with clouds.

The Press finally lost interest in the daily trashing of Sid Halley and Ellis Quint's show wrapped up for the summer break. I went down to Kent a couple of times, taking new fish for Rachel, sitting on the floor with her, playing draughts. Neither Linda nor I mentioned Ellis. She hugged me goodbye each time and asked when I would be coming back. Rachel, she said, had had no more nightmares. They were a thing of the past.

August came quietly and left in the same manner. No colts were attacked. The Hotline went cold. India Cathcart busied herself with a cabinet member's mistress but still had a routinely vindictive jab at me each Friday. I went to America for two short weeks and rode horses up the Teton mountains in Wyoming, letting the wide skies and the forests work their peace.

In September, one dew-laden early autumn English Saturday morning after a calm moonlit night, a colt was discovered with a foot off.

Nauseated, I heard the announcement on the radio in the kitchen while I made coffee.

Listeners would remember, the cool newsreader said, that in June Ellis Quint had been notoriously accused by ex-jockey Sid Halley of a similar attack. Quint was laughing off this latest incident, affirming his total ignorance on the matter.

There were no Hotline calls from The Pump, but Norman Picton scorched the wires.

'Have you heard?' he demanded.

'Yes. But no details.'

'It was a yearling colt this time. Apparently, there aren't many two-year-olds in the fields just now, but there are hundreds of yearlings.'

'Yes,' I agreed. 'The yearling sales are starting.'

'The yearling in question belonged to some people near Northampton. They're frantic. Their vet put the colt out of his misery. But get this. Ellis Quint's lawyers have already claimed he has an alibi.'

I stood in silence in my sitting-room, looking out to the unthreatening garden.

'Sid?'

'Mm.'

'You'll have to break that alibi. Otherwise, it will break you.'

'Mm.'

'Say something else, dammit.'

'The police can do it. Your lot.'

'Face it. They're not going to try very hard. They're going to believe in his alibi, if it's anything like solid.'

'Do you think, do you really think,' I asked numbly, 'that an ultra-respected barrister would connive with his client to mutilate … to kill … a colt -- or pay someone else to do it -- to cast doubt on the prosecution's case in the matter of a different colt?'

'Put like that, no.'

'Nor do I.'

'So Ellis Quint has set it up himself, and what he has set up, you can knock down.'

'He's had weeks - more than two months - to plan it.'

'Sid,' he said, 'it's not like you to sound defeated.'

If he, I thought, had been on the receiving end of a long pitiless barrage of systematic denigration, he might feel as I did, which, if not comprehensively defeated, was at least battle weary before I began.

'The police at Northampton,' I said, 'are not going to welcome me with open arms.'

'That's never stopped you before.'

I sighed. 'Can you find out from the Northampton police what his alibi actually is?'

'Piece of cake. I'll phone you back.'

I put down the receiver and went over to the window. The little square looked peaceful and safe, the railed garden green and grassy, a tree-dappled haven where generations of privileged children had run and played while their nursemaids gossiped. I'd spent my own childhood in Liverpool's back streets, my father dead and my mother fighting cancer. I in no way regretted the contrast in origins. I had learned self-sufficiency and survival there. Perhaps because of the back streets I now valued the little garden more. I wondered how the children who'd grown up in that garden would deal with Ellis Quint. Perhaps I could learn from them. Ellis had been that sort of child.

Norman phoned back later in the morning.

'Your friend,' he said, 'reportedly spent the night at a private dance in Shropshire, roughly a hundred miles to the north-west of the colt. Endless friends will testify to his presence, including his hostess, a duchess. It was a dance given to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the heir.'

'Damn.'

'He could hardly have chosen a more conspicuous or more watertight alibi.'

'And some poor bitch will swear she lay down for him at dawn.'

'Why dawn?'

'It's when it happens.'

'How do you know?'

'Never you mind,' I said.

'You're a bad boy, Sid.'

Long ago, I thought. Before Jenny. Summer dances, dew, wet grass, giggles and passion. Long ago and innocent.

Life's a bugger, I thought.

'Sid,' Norman's voice said, 'do you realise the trial is due to start two weeks on Monday?'

'I do realise.'

'Then get a move on, with this alibi.'

'Yes, sir, Detective Inspector.'

He laughed. 'Put the bugger back behind bars.'

On the Tuesday I went to see the Shropshire duchess, for whom I had ridden winners in that former life. She even had a painting of me on her favourite horse, but I was no longer her favourite jockey.

'Yes, of course Ellis was here all night,' she confirmed. Short, thin, and at first unwelcoming, she led me through the armour-dotted entrance hall of her draughty old house to the sitting-room where she had been watching the jump racing on television when I arrived.

Her front door had been opened to me by an arthritic old manservant who had hobbled away to see if Her Grace was in. Her Grace had come into the hall clearly anxious to get rid of me as soon as possible, and had then relented, her old kindness towards me resurfacing like a lost but familiar habit.

A three-mile steeplechase was just finishing, the jockeys kicking side by side to the finish line, the horses tired and straining, the race going in the end to the one carrying less weight.

The duchess turned down the volume, the better to talk.

'I cannot believe, Sid,' she said, 'that you've accused dear Ellis of something so disgusting. I know you and Ellis have been friends for years. Everyone knows that. I do think he's been a bit unkind about you on television, but you did ask for it, you know.'

'But he was here …?' I asked.

'Of course. All night. It was five or later when everyone started to leave. The band was playing still… we'd all had breakfast…'

'When did the dance start?' I asked.

'Start? The invitations were for ten. But you know how people are. It was eleven or midnight before most people came. We had the fireworks at three-thirty because rain was forecast for later, but it was fine all night, thank goodness.'

'Did Ellis say goodnight when he left?'

'My dear Sid, there were over three hundred people here last Friday night. A succes fou, if I say it myself.'

'So you don't actually remember when Ellis left?'

'The last I saw of him he was dancing an eightsome with that gawky Raven girl. Do drop it, Sid. I'm seeing you now for old times' sake, but you're not doing yourself any good, are you?'

'Probably not.'

She patted my hand. 'I'll always know you, at the races and so on.'

'Thank you,' I said.

'Yes. Be a dear and find your own way out. Poor old Stone has such bad arthritis these days.'

She turned up the volume in preparation for the next race, and I left.

The gawky Raven girl who had danced an eightsome reel with Ellis turned out to be the third daughter of an earl. She herself had gone off to Greece to join someone's yacht, but her sister (the second daughter) insisted that Ellis had danced with dozens of people after that, and wasn't I, Sid Halley, being a teeny weeny twit?

I went to see Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany, joint owners of the Windward Stud Farm, home of the latest colt victim: and to my dismay found Ginnie Quint there as well.

All three women were in the stud farm's office, a building separate from the rambling one-storey dwelling house. A groom long-reining a yearling had directed me incuriously and I drew up outside the pinkish brick new-looking structure without relish for my mission, but not expecting a tornado.

I knocked and entered, as one does with such offices, and found myself in the normal clutter of desks, computers, copiers, wall charts and endless piles of paper.

I'd done a certain amount of homework before I went there, so it was easy to identify Miss Richardson as the tall bulky dominant figure in tweed jacket, worn cord trousers and wiry grey short cropped curls. Fifty, I thought; despises men. Mrs Bethany, a smaller, less powerful version of Miss Richardson, was reputedly the one who stayed up at night when the mares were foaling, the one on whose empathy with horses the whole enterprise floated.

The women didn't own the farm's two stallions (they belonged to syndicates) nor any of the mares: Windward Stud was a cross between a livery stable and a maternity ward. They couldn't afford the bad publicity of the victimised yearling.

Ginnie Quint, sitting behind one of the desks, leapt furiously to her feet the instant I appeared in the doorway and poured over me an accumulated concentration of verbal volcanic lava, scalding, shrivelling, sticking my feet to the ground and my tongue in dryness to the roof of my mouth.

'He trusted you. He would have died for you.'

I sensed Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany listening in astonishment, not knowing who I was nor what I'd done to deserve such an onslaught; but I had eyes only for Ginnie, whose long fondness for me had fermented to hate.

'You're going to go into court and try to send your best friend to prison … to destroy him … pull him down … ruin him. You're going to betray him. You're not fit to live.'

Emotion twisted her gentle features into ugliness. Her words came out spitting.

It was her own son who had done this. Her golden idolised son. He had made of me finally the traitor that would deliver the kiss.

I said absolutely nothing.

I felt, more intensely than ever, the by now accustomed and bitter awareness of the futility of rebellion. Gagged by sub judice, I'd been unable all along to put up any defence, especially because the Press had tended to pounce on my indignant protests and label them as 'whining' and 'diddums', and 'please teacher, he hit me …' and 'it's not fair, I hit him first'.

A quick check with a lawyer had confirmed that though trying to sue one paper for libel might have been possible, suing the whole lot was not practical. Ellis's jokes were not actionable and, unfortunately, the fact that I was still profitably employed in my chosen occupation meant that I couldn't prove the criticism had damaged me financially.

'Grit your teeth and take it,' he'd advised cheerfully, and I'd paid him for an opinion I gave myself free every day.

As there was no hope of Ginnie's listening to anything I might say, I unhappily but pragmatically turned to retreat, intending to return another day to talk to Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany, and found my way barred by two new burly arrivals, known already to the stud owners as policemen.

'Sergeant Smith reporting, madam,' one said to Miss Richardson.

She nodded. 'Yes, sergeant?'

'We've found an object hidden in one of the hedges round the field where your horse was done in.'

No one objected to my presence, so I remained in the office, quiet and riveted.

Sergeant Smith carried a long narrow bundle which he laid on one of the desks. 'Could you tell us, madam, if this belongs to you?'

His manner was almost hostile: accusatory. He seemed to expect the answer to be yes.

'What is it?' Miss Richardson asked, very far from guilty perturbation.

'This, madam,' the sergeant said with a note of triumph, and lifted back folds of filthy cloth to reveal their contents, which were two long wooden handles topped by heavy metal clippers.

A pair of lopping shears.

Miss Richardson and Mrs Bethany stared at them unmoved. It was Ginnie Quint who turned slowly white and fainted.

CHAPTER 8

So here we were in October, with the leaves weeping yellowly from the trees.

Here I was, perching on the end of Rachel Ferns' bed, wearing a huge fluffy orange clown wig and a red bulbous nose, making sick children laugh while feeling far from merry inside.

'Have you hurt your arm?' Rachel asked conversationally.

'Banged it,' I said.

She nodded. Linda looked surprised. Rachel said, 'When things hurt it shows in people's eyes.'

She knew too much about pain for a nine-year-old. I said, 'I'd better go before I tire you.'

She smiled, not demurring. She, like the children wearing the other wigs I'd brought, all had very short bursts of stamina. Visiting was down to ten minutes maximum.

I took off the clown wig and kissed Rachel's forehead. 'Bye,' I said.

'You'll come back?'

'Of course.'

She sighed contentedly, knowing I would. Linda walked with me from the ward to the hospital door.

'It's … awful,' she said, forlorn, on the exit steps. Cold air. The chill to come.

I put my arms round her. Both arms. Hugged her.

'Rachel asks for you all the time,' she said. 'Joe cuddles her, and cries. She cuddles him, trying to comfort him. She's her daddy's little girl. She loves him. But you … you're her friend. You make her laugh, not cry. It's you she asks for all the time -not Joe.'

'I'll always come if I can.'

She sobbed quietly on my shoulder and gulped, 'Poor Mrs Quint.'

'Mm,' I said.

'I haven't told Rachel about Ellis …'

'No. Don't,'I said.

'I've been beastly to you.'

'No, far from it.'

'The papers have said such dreadful things about you,' Linda shook in my arms. 'I knew you weren't like that … I told Joe I have to believe you about Ellis Quint and he thinks I'm stupid.'

'Look after Rachel, nothing else matters.'

She went back into the hospital and I rode dispiritedly back to London in the TeleDrive car.

Even though I'd returned with more than an hour to spare I decided against Pont Square and took the sharp memory of Gordon Quint's attack straight to the bar in the Piccadilly hotel where I'd agreed to meet the lawyer Davis Tatum.

With a smile worth millions, the French lady in charge of the restaurant arranged for me to have coffee and a sandwich in the tiny bar while I waited for my friend. The bar, in fact, looked as if it had been wholly designed as a meeting place for those about to lunch. There were no more than six tables, a bartender who brought drinks to one's elbow, and a calm atmosphere. The restaurant itself was full of daylight, with huge windows and green plants, and was sufficiently hidden from the busy artery of Mayfair downstairs as to give peace and privacy and no noisy passing trade.

I sat at a bar table in the corner with my back to the entrance, though in fact few were arriving: more were leaving after long hours of talk and lunch. I took some ibuprofen, and waited without impatience. I spent hours in my job, sometimes, waiting for predators to pop out of their holes.

Davis Tatum arrived late and out of breath from having apparently walked up the stairs instead of waiting for the lift.

He wheezed briefly behind my back, then came round into view and lowered his six foot three inch bulk into the chair opposite.

He leaned forward and held out his hand for a shake. I gave him a limp approximation, which raised his eyebrows but no comment.

He was a case of an extremely agile mind in a totally unsuitable body. There were large cheeks, double chins, fat-lidded eyes and a small mouth. Dark smooth hair had neither receded nor greyed. He had flat ears, a neck like a weight-lifter and a charcoal pin-striped suit straining over a copious belly. He might have difficulty, I thought, in catching sight of certain parts of his own body. Except in the brain-box, nature had dealt him a sad hand.

'First of all,' he said, 'I have some bad news, and I possibly shouldn't be here talking to you at all, according to how you read Archbold.'

'Archbold being the dos and don'ts manual for trial lawyers?'

'More or less.'

'What's the bad news, then?' I asked. There hadn't been much that was good.

'Ellis Quint has retracted his "guilty" plea, and has gone back to "not guilty".'

'Retracted?' I exclaimed. 'How can one retract a confession?'

'Very easily.' He sighed. 'Quint says he was upset yesterday about his mother's death, and what he said about feeling guilty was misinterpreted. In other words, his lawyers have got over the shock and have had a re-think. They apparently know you have so far not been able to break Ellis Quint's alibi for the night that last colt was attacked in Northamptonshire, and they think they can therefore get the Bracken colt charge dismissed, despite the Land-Rover and circumstantial evidence, so they are aiming for a complete acquittal, not psychiatric treatment, and, I regret to tell you, they are likely to succeed.'

He didn't have to tell me that my own reputation would never recover if Ellis emerged with his intact.

'And Archbold?'

'If I were the crown prosecuting counsel in this case I could be struck off for talking to you, a witness. As you know, I am the senior barrister in the chambers where a colleague prosecuting Ellis Quint works. I have seen his brief and discussed the case with him. I can absolutely properly talk to you, though perhaps some people might not think it prudent.'

I smiled. 'Bye bye, then.'

'I may not discuss with you a case in which I may be examining you as a witness. But of course I will not be examining you. Also, we can talk about anything else. Like, for instance, a recent game of golf.'

'I don't play golf.'

'Don't be obtuse, my dear fellow. Your perceptions are acute.'

'Are we talking about angles?'

His eyes glimmered behind the folds of fat. 'I saw the report package that you sent to the CPS.'

'The Crown Prosecution Service?'

'The same. I happened to be talking to a friend. I said your report had surprised me, both by its thoroughness and by your deductions and conclusions. He said I shouldn't be surprised. He said you'd had the whole top echelon of the Jockey Club hanging on your every word. He said that, about a year ago, you'd cleared up two major racing messes at the same time. They've never forgotten it.'

'A year last May,' I said. 'Is that what he meant?'

'I expect so. He said you had an assistant then that isn't seen around any more. The job I'd like you to do might need an assistant for the leg-work. Don't you have your assistant nowadays?'

'Chico Barnes?'

He nodded. 'A name like that.'

'He got married,' I said briefly. 'His wife doesn't like what I do, so he's given it up. He teaches judo. I still see him -- he gives me a judo lesson most weeks, but I can't ask him for any other sort of help.'

'Pity.'

'Yes. He was good. Great company and bright.'

'And he got deterred. That's why he gave it up.'

I went, internally, very still. I said, 'What do you mean?'

'I heard,' he said, his gaze steady on my face, 'that he got beaten with some sort of thin chain to deter him from helping you. To deter him from all detection. And it worked.'

'He got married,' I said.

Davis Tatum leaned back in his chair, which creaked under his weight.

'I heard,' he said, 'that the same treatment was doled out to you, and in the course of things the Jockey Club mandarins made you take your shirt off. They said they had never seen anything like it. The whole of your upper body, arms included, was black with bruising, and there were vicious red weals all over you. And with your shirt hiding all that you'd calmly explained to them how and why you'd been attacked and how one of their number, who had arranged it, was a villain. You got one of the big shots chucked out.'

'Who told you all that?'

'One hears things.'

I thought in unprintable curses. The six men who'd seen me that day with my shirt off had stated their intention of never talking about it. They'd wanted to keep to themselves the villainy I'd found within their own walls; and nothing had been more welcome to me than that silence. It had been bad enough at the time. I didn't want continually to be reminded.

'Where does one hear such things?' I asked.

'Be your age, Sid. In the clubs … Buck's, the Turf, the RAC, the Garrick … these things get mentioned.'

'How often … do they get mentioned? How often have you heard that story?'

He paused as if checking with an inner authority, and then said, 'Once.'

'Who told you?'

'I gave my word.'

'One of the Jockey Club?'

'I gave my word. If you'd given your word, would you tell me?'

'No.'

He nodded. 'I asked around, about you. And that's what I was told. Told in confidence. If it matters to you, I've heard it from no one else.'

'It matters.'

'It reflects to your credit,' he protested. 'It obviously didn't stop you.'

'It could give other villains ideas,'

'And do villains regularly attack you?'

'Well, no,' I said. 'Physically no one's laid a finger on me since that time.' Not until yesterday, I thought. 'If you're talking about non-physical assaults … Have you read the papers?'

'Scurrilous.' Davis Tatum twisted in his seat until he could call the barman. 'Tanqueray and tonic, please -- and for you, Sid?'

'Scotch. A lot of water.'

The barman brought the glasses, setting them out on little round white mats.

'Health,'Davis Tatum toasted, raising his gin.

'Survival,'I responded, and drank to both.

He put down his glass and came finally to the point.

'I need someone,' he said, 'who is clever, unafraid and able to think fast in a crisis.'

'No one's like that.'

'What about you?'

I smiled. 'I'm stupid, scared silly a good deal of the time, and I have nightmares. What you think you see, is not what you get.'

'I get the man who wrote the Quint report.'

I looked benignly at my glass and not at his civilised face.

'If you're going to do something to a small child that you know he won't like,' I said, 'such as sticking a needle into him, you first tell him what a brave little boy he is -- in the hope that he'll then let you make a pincushion of him without complaint.'

There was a palpable silence, then he chuckled, the low rich timbre filling the air. There was embarrassment in there somewhere; a ploy exposed.

I said prosaically, 'What's the job?'

He waited while four businessmen arrived, arranged their drinks and sank into monetary conversation at the table furthest from where we sat.

'Do you know who I mean by Owen Yorkshire?' Tatum asked, looking idly at the newcomers, not at me.

'Owen Yorkshire.' I rolled the name around in memory and came up with only doubts. 'Does he own a horse or two?'

'He does. He also owns Topline Foods.'

'Topline … as in sponsored race at Aintree? As in Ellis Quint, guest of honour at the Topline Foods lunch the day before the Grand National?'

'That's the fellow.'

'And the enquiry?'

'Find out if he's manipulating the Quint case to his own private advantage.'

I said thoughtfully, 'I did hear that there's a heavyweight abroad.'

'Find out who it is, and why.'

'What about poor old Archbold? He'd turn in his grave.'

'So you'll do it!'

'I'll try. But why me? Why not the police? Why not the old boy internet?'

He looked at me straightly. 'Because you include silence in what you sell.'

'And I'm expensive,'I said.

'Retainer and refreshers,'he promised.

'Who's paying?'

'The fees will come through me.'

'And it's agreed,' I said, 'that the results, if any, are yours. Prosecution or otherwise will normally be your choice.'

He nodded.

'In case you're wondering,' I said, 'when it comes to Ellis Quint, I gave the client's money back, in order to be able to stop him myself. The client didn't at first believe in what he'd done. I made my own choice. I have to tell you that you'd run that risk.'

He leaned forward and extended his pudgy hand.

'We'll shake on it,' he said, and grasped my palm with a firmness that sent a shockwave fizzing clear up to my jaw.

'What's the matter?' he said, sensing it.

'Nothing.'

He wasn't getting much of a deal, I thought. I had a reputation already in tatters, a cracked ulna playing up, and the prospect of being chewed to further shreds by Ellis's defence counsel. He'd have done as well to engage my pal Jonathan of the streaky hair.

'Mr Tatum,' I began.

'Davis. My name's Davis.'

'Will you give me your assurance that you won't speak of that Jockey Club business around the clubs?'

'Assurance?'

'Yes.'

'But I told you … it's to your credit.'

'It's a private thing. I don't like fuss.'

He looked at me thoughtfully. He said, 'You have my assurance.' And I wanted to believe in it, but I wasn't sure that I did. He was too intensely a club man, a filler of large armchairs in dark panelled rooms full of old exploded reputations and fruitily repeated secrets: 'Won't say a word, old boy.'

'Sid.'

'Mm?'

'Whatever the papers say, where it really counts, you are respected.'

'Where's that?'

'The clubs are good for gossip, but these days that's not where the power lies.'

'Power wanders round like the magnetic North Pole.'

'Who said that?'

'I just did,'I said.

'No, I mean, did you make it up?'

'I've no idea.'

'Power, these days, is fragmented,' he said.

I added, 'And where the power is at any one time is not necessarily where one would want to be.'

He beamed proprietorially as if he'd invented me himself.

There was a quick rustle of clothes beside my ear and a drift of flowery scent, and a young woman tweaked a chair round to join our table and sat in it, looking triumphant.

'Well, well, well,' she said. 'Mr Davis Tatum and Sid Halley! What a surprise!'

I said, to Davis Tatum's mystified face, 'This is Miss India Cathcart, who writes for The Pump. If you say nothing you'll find yourself quoted repeating things you never thought, and if you say anything at all, you'll wish you hadn't.'

'Sid,' she said mock-sorrowfully, 'can't you take a bit of kicking around?'

Tatum opened his mouth indignantly and, as I was afraid he might try to defend me, I shook my head. He stared at me, then with a complete change of manner said in smooth lawyerly detachment, 'Miss Cathcart, why are you here?'

'Why? To see you, of course.'

'But why?'

She looked from him to me and back again, her appearance just as I remembered it: flawless porcelain skin, light-blue eyes, cleanly outlined mouth, black shining hair. She wore brown and red, with amber beads.

She said, 'Isn't it improper for a colleague of the Crown Prosecutor to be seen talking to one of the witnesses?'

'No, it isn't,' Tatum said, and asked me, 'Did you tell her we were meeting here?'

'Of course not.'

'Then how … why, Miss Cathcart, are you here?'

'I told you. It's a story.'

'Does The Pump know you're here?' I asked.

A shade crossly she said, 'I'm not a child. I'm allowed out on my own, you know. And anyway, the paper sent me.'

'The Pump told you we'd be here?' Tatum asked.

'My editor said to come and see. And he was right!'

Tatum said,'Sid?'

'Mm,' I said. 'Interesting.'

India said to me. 'Kevin says you went to school in Liverpool.'

Tatum, puzzled, asked, 'What did you say?'

She explained, 'Sid wouldn't tell me where he went to school, so I found out.' She looked at me accusingly. 'You don't sound like Liverpool.'

'Don't I?'

'You sound more like Eton. How come?'

'I'm a mimic,' I said.

If she really wanted to, she could find out also that between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one I'd been more or less adopted by a Newmarket trainer (who had been to Eton) who made me into a good jockey and by his example changed my speech and taught me how to live and how to behave and how to manage the money I earned. He'd been already old then, and he died. I often thought of him. He opened doors for me still.

'Kevin told me you were a slum child,'India said.

'Slum is an attitude, not a place.'

'Prickly, are we?'

Damn, I thought. I will not let her goad me. I smiled, which she didn't like.

Tatum, listening with disapproval, said, 'Who is Kevin?'

'He works for The Pump,' I told him.

India said, 'Kevin Mills is The Pump's chief reporter. He did favours for Halley and got kicked in the teeth.'

'Painful,' Tatum commented dryly.

'This conversation's getting nowhere,' I said. 'India, Mr Tatum is not the prosecuter in any case where I am a witness, and we may talk about anything we care to, including, as just now before you came golf.'

'You can't play golf with one hand.'

It was Tatum who winced, not I. I said, 'You can watch golf on television without arms, legs or ears. Where did your editor get the idea that you might find us here?'

'He didn't say. It doesn't matter.'

'It is of the essence,' Tatum said.

'It's interesting,' I said, 'because to begin with it was The Pump that worked up the greatest head of steam about the ponies mutilated in Kent. That was why I got in touch with Kevin Mills. Between us we set up a Hotline, as a "Save the Tussilago farfara" sort of thing.'

India demanded, 'What did you say?'

'Tussilago farfara,' Tatum repeated, amused. 'It's the botanicit name of the wildflower, coltsfoot.'

'How did you know that?' she asked me fiercely.

'I looked it up.'

'Oh.'

'Anyway, the minute I linked Ellis Quint, even tentatively, to the colts, and to Rachel Ferns' pony, The Pump abruptly changed direction and started tearing me apart with crusading claws. I can surely ask, India, why do you write about me so ferociously? Is it just your way? Is it that you do so many hatchet jobs that you can't do anything else? I didn't expect kindness, but you are … every week … extreme.'

She looked uncomfortable. She did what she had one week called me 'diddums' for doing: she defended herself.

'My editor gives me guidelines.' She almost tossed her head.

'You mean he tells you what to write?'

'Yes. No.'

'Which?'

She looked from me to Tatum and back.

She said, 'He subs my piece to align it with overall policy.'

I said nothing. Tatum said nothing. India, a shade desperately, said, 'Only saints get themselves burned at the stake.'

Tatum said with gravitas, 'If I read any lies or innuendoes about my having improperly talked to Sid Halley about the forthcoming Quint trial, I will sue you personally for defamation, Miss Cathcart, and I will ask for punitive damages. So choose your stake. Flames seem inevitable.'

I felt almost sorry for her. She stood up blankly, her eyes wide.

'Say we weren't here,' I said.

I couldn't read her frozen expression. She walked away from us and headed for the stairs.

'A confused young woman,' Tatum said. 'But how did she -or her paper - know we would be here?'

I asked, 'Do you feed your appointments into a computer?'

He frowned. 'I don't do it personally. My secretary does it. We have a system which can tell where all the partners are, if there's a crisis. It tells where each of us can be found. I did tell my secretary I was coming here, but not who I was going to meet. That still doesn't explain …'

I sighed. 'Yesterday evening you phoned my mobile number.'

'Yes, and you phoned me back.'

'Someone's been listening on my mobile phone's frequency. Someone heard you call me.'

'Hell! But you called me back. They heard almost nothing.'

'You gave your name … How secure is your office computer?'

'We change passwords every three months.'

'And you use passwords that everyone can remember easily?'

'Well…'

'There are people who crack passwords just for the fun of it. And others hack into secrets. You wouldn't believe how careless some firms are with their most private information. Someone has recently accessed my own on-line computer -- during the past month. I have a detector program that tells me. Much good it will do any hacker as I never keep anything personal there. But a combination of my mobile phone and your office computer must have come up with the possibility that your appointment was with me. Someone in The Pump did it. So they sent India along to find out … and here we are. And because they succeeded, we now know they tried.'

'It's incredible.'

'Who runs The Pump'? Who sets the policy?'

Tatum said thoughtfully, 'The editor is George Godbar. The proprietor's Lord Tilepit.'

'Any connection with Ellis Quint?'

He considered the question and shook his head. 'Not that I know of.'

'Does Lord Tilepit have an interest in the television company that puts on Ellis Quint's programme? I think I'd better find out.'

Davis Tatum smiled.

Reflecting that, as about thirty hours had passed since Gordon Quint had jumped me in Pont Square, he was unlikely still to be hanging about there with murderous feelings and his fencing post (not least because with Ginnie dead he would have her inquest to distract him) and also feeling that one could take self-preservation to shaming lengths, I left the Piccadilly restaurant in a taxi and got the driver to make two reconnoitring passes round the railed central garden.

All seemed quiet. I paid the driver, walked without incident up the steps to the front door, used my key, went up to the next floor and let myself into the haven of home.

No ambush. No creaks. Silence.

I retrieved a few envelopes from the wire basket clipped inside the letter box and found a page in my Fax. It seemed a long time since I'd left, but it had been only the previous morning.

My cracked arm hurt. Well, it would. I'd ridden races -- and winners - now and then with cracks: disguising them, of course, because the betting public deserved healthy riders to carry their money. The odd thing was that in the heat of a race one didn't feel an injury. It was in the cooler ebbing of excitement that the discomfort returned.

The best way, always, to minimise woes was to concentrate on something else. I looked up a number and phoned the handy acquaintance who had set up my computers for me.

'Doug,' I said, when his wife had fetched him in from an oil change, 'tell me about listening in to mobile phones.'

'I'm covered in grease,' he complained. 'Won't this do another time?'

'Someone is listening to my mobile.'

'Oh.' He sniffed. 'So you want to know how to stop it?'

'You're dead right.'

He sniffed again. 'I've got a cold,' he said, 'my wife's mother is coming to dinner and my sump is filthy.'