by Zoe Sharp
A girl on a fine-boned bay Arabian horse arrived from the direction of the cross-country course, both looking hard-ridden. The girl swung down in the yard, where another of Raleigh’s girl groom groupies rushed to take her reins. As the rider removed her crash helmet, I recognised Orlando’s delicate features. She handed over care of her horse without eye contact or a backward glance, and climbed the steps to the café balcony.
There were grass stains on her knee, elbow and shoulder, I saw as she approached. Looked like Dina wasn’t the only one who’d hit the dirt today.
When she saw me sitting with Torquil at the end table, her stride faltered momentarily.
‘Hey, Tor,’ she greeted him stiffly as he finished his call, nodding to me in a vague way that suggested she’d completely forgotten my name. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Came to see what all the fuss was about,’ Torquil said airily. ‘After all, Dad has a couple of horse farms out in Kentucky, so maybe I should give this stuff a try.’
Orlando almost smiled. ‘Your father has thoroughbreds, for racing,’ she chided. ‘They’re not the kinda animals you could learn to horseback-ride on.’
‘I’m a quick study. And how hard can it be?’ Torquil grinned, draining the last of his coffee and getting to his feet, leaving the empty cup on the table. For a moment I harboured the vain hope that he might be leaving, but he merely wandered over to the serving window for another coffee. ‘Get you ladies anything?’
‘Coffee,’ we both said together.
That seemed, if not to break the ice, then certainly to start a thaw. Orlando considered me out of the corner of her eye for a moment, then leant in closer, keeping her voice conspiratorially low. ‘He gives me the creeps.’
I glanced over my shoulder to where Torquil was still at the serving window. I didn’t like to tell her he was growing on me. ‘At least you know they’re the best creeps money can buy.’
She giggled suddenly, hiding her mouth behind her hand like a kid. The gesture seemed to emphasise the anxiety in her eyes. They were an incredible shade of emerald green, I noticed, but then I saw the faint outline around her iris and realised she probably wore tinted contact lenses.
‘What is it?’ I asked gently. ‘What’s scaring you?’
She let her hand drop away, the laughter falling with it. ‘He did this before,’ she said, speaking fast. ‘Tor. He’d just turn up, out of the blue, wherever I went. Like he was following me—’
Over her shoulder, Torquil had finished paying for the coffees, amazing me with the fact he bothered to carry loose change, and was carefully working out how to pick up and carry three cups at once. Judging by the hash he was making of such a simple task, it was a new experience for him. I knew I didn’t have much time.
‘Did this before what, Orlando?’
She looked at me, and now I saw a roiling mix of fear and guilt and shame. ‘Before I was kidnapped.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Before I’d time to fully process that information, or even ask Orlando for more, the riding club’s runabout, a GMC pickup, pulled up in the yard and Hunt got out. He appeared up the steps to the balcony, hands casually in the pockets of his chinos. Orlando’s boyfriend was wearing a lightweight tweed jacket over a blue Oxford shirt, and his air of cool polish made Torquil’s pseudo-rapper outfit seem like a child’s fancy dress.
Hunt greeted me with cautious reserve, frowning at Orlando as though he immediately sensed her unease and suspected I might be the cause of it. She gave him a wan smile and he stopped behind her chair to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
‘Charlie,’ he said with a fraction more warmth. ‘How goes it?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are you into horses, Hunt?’
He gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘I dabble. My family kept quite a string before the anti-hunting lobby had their way and riding to hounds was banned. Damn shame.’
I didn’t point out that it wasn’t following the hounds that people objected to, so much as setting the dogs on errant foxes as the object of the exercise. Still, I was in no position to be squeamish.
Hunt and Torquil were eyeing each other with tolerance rather than friendship, until Hunt asked if that was Torquil’s new Bentley Continental Supersports in the parking lot, and then the two of them segued into a conversation about cars from which Orlando and I were pointedly excluded.
I rapidly tuned out Torquil boasting languidly about his latest toy – a birthday gift from his father. He incorrectly described the Continental’s six-litre engine as a V12 when I knew for a fact Bentley used a W12 configuration. I’d always been more of a motorcycle nut than a car nut, but it was hard not to pick up the specs of high-performance luxury cars in this job.
In the arena, Dina and Raleigh were now ambling in our direction, the lesson over. I made my excuses and headed down the wooden steps into the yard, just as Raleigh opened the gate and Cerdo’s hooves rang on the concrete.
Dina flashed me a wide smile as they halted. She patted the horse’s damp neck with gusto, and I guessed that my advice to settle him down before she tried again might just have improved relations between us.
Raleigh took the horse’s bridle as she dismounted, but as soon as Dina’s feet hit the ground, her right knee buckled under her and, if the burly instructor hadn’t been right alongside her with a steadying arm, she might have fallen.
‘Dina! You OK?’ He handed off Cerdo onto the girl groom who had been walking Geronimo round. By the time he turned back, I was already putting my arm around Dina.
‘Lean on me,’ I told her. ‘We’ll find you a chair.’
‘Out of the way, Pom,’ Raleigh said with a wink, brushing me aside. ‘This is man’s work.’ And with that he swung Dina into his arms and carried her lightly up the steps to the café balcony, leaving me biting my tongue as I trailed on his heels. Torquil, Orlando and Hunt immediately crowded round us.
Raleigh deposited his pupil onto the nearest chair and crouched in front of her, noting the smudge of dirt on the knee of her jodhpurs. ‘Must have clobbered it on something when you came off,’ he said. There was a hint of strain to his reassuring smile, as if he were worried about being sued if she was injured on his watch.
I flipped out my cellphone. As a matter of routine, I had already input the numbers for the Willners’ personal doctor and dentist, as well as all the major local hospitals and trauma centres. Dina put up a staying hand before I could hit speed dial for any of them.
‘I’m fine, really,’ she said. ‘Please don’t fuss. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve fallen off of a horse. My knee’s been aching some, but I just wasn’t expecting it to give out on me like that.’
‘You need to rest up,’ Raleigh told her, his hand still on her leg. ‘Why don’t you leave the horses here tonight, see how you go? You can always run over tomorrow and pick them up.’
Dina shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she reiterated doggedly. ‘I’d rather take them home. Charlie and I can manage, if you’ll help us load them into the trailer?’
Raleigh bounded to his feet. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the girls untack them and give you a shout when they’re ready to go.’
‘So, your horse threw you?’ Torquil asked, and I realised that incident must have taken place before his arrival. ‘You gonna get rid of it?’
‘Of course not,’ Dina said, and it was a toss-up which of them looked the more astonished.
‘Orlando took a tumble, too,’ Hunt pointed out. ‘All part of the game, eh?’
‘What did you do every time you fell on your backside when you were out snowboarding, Tor?’ Orlando asked in a wry voice. ‘Sack the mountain?’
‘Only if I’d bought it first.’ He gave a sigh. ‘I guess that dinner in Miami will just have to wait,’ he grumbled, returning to his original seat and slumping into it. Anyone would have thought that Dina had damaged her leg with the sole intention of spoiling his plans. Not that he’d actually asked her out – or
that she’d accepted – but he seemed to have taken it as read.
The girl groom who’d been walking Orlando’s little Arabian horse round, meanwhile, called up that she seemed to have gone lame in her off foreleg.
‘Aw, crap,’ Orlando said. She glanced at Hunt. ‘I told you she dropped a leg coming out of the water.’
‘Hmm, I may need to pop over and do some minor repairs to a few of the cross-country fences for you at some point,’ Hunt said, smiling apologetically at Raleigh. ‘For such a little thing, that pony of Orlando’s does tend to go through them as much as she goes over them.’
‘The ground staff will be laying new sod around some of the fences where the ground’s gotten a little churned up, so the course will be out of action for a couple of days next week,’ Raleigh said, frowning. ‘There’s no need for you to get your hands dirty, though. They’ll fix anything that’s busted.’
‘I’d feel better about it,’ Hunt insisted with a disarming smile. ‘Like replacing your divots on a golf course.’
Raleigh made a ‘no sweat’ kind of a gesture and Hunt nodded to him before following Orlando to see to her horse.
Dina put her foot up onto a chair and the café provided a bag of ice wrapped in a cloth to deal with any swelling in her knee. Raleigh hovered, giving her a running list of advice for recovery. There was some horse-related event coming up that he was trying to persuade her to enter with Cerdo, I gathered. ‘You gotta be fighting fit for that,’ he warned. ‘But it’s still a few weeks away. You’ll be OK.’
Dina did not look reassured on any level. ‘Look, Raleigh, I’m still not sure we’re ready for this—’
‘Rubbish, Dina! You could do it in your sleep. Just look at how well he went today. That horse could be a champion.’
‘Yeah,’ she muttered, ‘after he’d thrown me in the dirt.’
A look of frustration crossed Raleigh’s features, but he seemed to realise that arguing further right now would just make her more stubborn. He got easily to his feet. ‘Well, think about it, OK?’ he said, more neutral, and glanced down as one of the girls waved to him from the yard. ‘I think we’re all set.’
I wondered about Raleigh’s attitude, just a tad. What did he hope to gain by forcing Dina to enter a competition she didn’t feel ready for – other than possibly more fees for intensive tuition on the run-up?
And I wondered about the possible connections, too. The kidnap victims might have been taken by someone who knew them. But Manda Dempsey had shown no interest in ponies when I’d been working for the family, and Benedict Benelli seemed more likely to bet on a horse than climb onto its back. I shrugged. Maybe I was just getting paranoid.
Dina refused to be carried back down the steps and insisted that she would lead her horse out to where the trailer was parked. Raleigh walked slowly alongside her, eyes on her face as if ready to sweep her off her feet the moment he saw she was in pain. I followed with Geronimo, who obviously realised we were going home and strode out briskly by my shoulder, barging me when I tried to slow him down.
I spotted Torquil’s huge gold-coloured Bentley sitting in splendid isolation off to one side of the riding club’s parking lot. Through the heavily tinted glass I could just make out the figure of one of his bodyguards in the passenger seat.
Dina’s trailer was parked, still hitched to the tow bar of the Navigator, in the middle of the lot, in a line of similar vehicles. I saw nothing amiss as we approached, stopping about four metres away.
‘You sure you’re OK?’ Raleigh asked Dina. ‘I’ll lower the ramp and walk Cerdo up for you.’
‘Thanks, Raleigh,’ she said with a sideways glance towards me as I brought Geronimo up alongside her. ‘Nice to have two guardian angels today.’
‘I do my best.’ As he reached up to unfasten the top catch on the far side of the ramp, he looked back over his shoulder towards me. ‘You wanna put your horse in first, Pom? Then you can give Dina a hand.’
I didn’t have time to agree, because at that moment a masked figure stepped out from behind the trailer. He had an aluminium baseball bat gripped in both hands and he swung it with all his might at Raleigh’s unprotected head.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
‘Look out!’
Even as I shouted the warning, Raleigh must have seen the shock in both our faces, sensed the rush of movement behind him. He hunched his neck down instinctively, but neglected to snatch his arm down from full stretch. The bat whistled past his head, skimming his hair, and landed across his extended forearm with a solid crunch. Some corner of my mind registered the sound of bones breaking. The shock of the sudden injury put him down, and the pain of it kept him there.
Geronimo had a sudden change of heart about being eager to get home. He spun on his haunches with a grunt of effort, jerking his lead rope through my hands. I’d taken off my riding gloves, so I let go rather than waste time trying to control him. He hightailed it back towards the safety of the horse barns.
At that moment, a second figure emerged from behind another parked trailer, over to our right this time, and closed in on us from the other side.
Like the first man, he was wearing dull nondescript clothing and a ski mask, dark glasses covering his eyes. But this one was unarmed apart from what looked like PlastiCuff restraints.
His focus was completely on Dina, hardly even glancing in my direction until I moved to intercept. Then he tried to shoulder me aside with blatant disregard. To protect my hands, I hit him hard with an upswept elbow under his jaw. He dropped.
Cerdo had started to panic as soon as the attack began, skittering in a circle around Dina. Hampered by her injured leg, she could do little to stop him, although something made her refuse to jettison him as I had with Geronimo. With more courage than sense, she clung to his lead rope with both hands even when he reared up to wave steel-shod front feet in her face.
It was a toss-up, at that moment, whether the greater threat to my principal came from our attackers or from her own horse.
The man who’d clouted Raleigh, meanwhile, was standing over his writhing quarry with the bat still at the ready, as if he’d expected the downed instructor to put up more of a fight. It was only when Cerdo began his antics that he looked across and saw his partner on the ground. He twisted in my direction and stood there a moment, frozen, then hurdled Raleigh’s legs and came for us with the bat upraised.
For a split second, time seemed to slow almost to a standstill, so I had time to analyse our situation with my options spread before me. All I had to do was choose. None of them looked good.
The parking area was out of direct sight of the yard itself. I could only hope that Geronimo’s sudden flight would bring people running, but how much use they’d be when they got here was another matter.
In my peripheral vision, I could see the nose of Torquil’s gold Bentley, one of his bodyguards still in the passenger seat. The man had jacked upright to get a better view – might even have drawn his weapon – but he was too well drilled to get out of the car and come to Dina’s rescue. As far as he was concerned, I was on my own.
I gave momentary thought to reaching for my own SIG, but dismissed the idea before it had formed. If I drew against a charging batsman at such close quarters, I’d have to fire to stop him. And not just shoot, but keep shooting until the threat was neutralised.
Instead, I chose the biggest and best weapon I had to hand.
Cerdo.
The horse’s flailing had spun him so that he was facing away from the trailer. As the man approached, I shoved Dina around onto the opposite side of the horse’s neck, keeping her behind me and the horse between both of us and our attacker. Cerdo reared again, stabbing out furiously with his hooves like a giant boxer. Even armed with a baseball bat, the man faltered in the face of this towering aggression.
As the horse’s front feet touched down again, I made a grab for his headcollar and, ignoring Dina’s protests, yanked his head around towards me, reaching back to prod him sharply in the rib
s with the stiffened fingers of an open hand at the same time.
Horses, like people, have a collection of nerve endings in their side which makes them sensitive to signals from the rider’s leg. Cerdo, being a dressage horse, was more sensitive than most. The effect of a strike in that spot was calculated to produce maximum effect. I wasn’t disappointed.
The white horse reacted immediately. I heard the furious clack of his teeth as he leapt away from the blow, ears laid flat, swinging his hindquarters in a rapid arc and cannoning into the man with the baseball bat. Three-quarters of a ton of fast-moving Andalusian, scared and pissed off in equal measure. It was not an even contest.
Cerdo’s primeval fight-or-flight reflexes were well and truly awoken now. They told him to run from the danger. And if he couldn’t run, to lash out at the thing behind him, before it had a chance to jump onto his back and sink teeth and claws into his neck. He humped his back and let rip with both hind legs.
If the man with the bat had been directly behind those flying hooves, he would have been in serious trouble. Fortunately for him, Cerdo’s initial impact had knocked him to the side and he caught a relatively glancing blow to his upper arm. It was enough.
He dropped the bat and scrambled away, obviously terrified of what the animal might do next. People not familiar with horses are often frightened by the sheer size and unpredictability of them close up. Such animals may no longer be asked to go charging towards the enemy on a battlefield, but the basic fear they instil is why police forces around the world still use them for crowd control. A mounted officer is deemed six times more effective than one on the ground.
I reckoned I’d get no arguments from our assailants on that score. The man with the restraints – the one I’d hit – had come round enough to reach his hands and knees, groaning. For a moment I watched his partner debate on leaving him to his fate, then he realised the drawbacks of such a move. He grabbed the fallen man with his uninjured left hand and dragged him to his feet. Together they stumbled through the line of trailers and were lost to view.