'I'll wait until they come out before I do theirs. If he's saved, they'll be a while yet.'
'Do you think he'll live?'
Jackie shook her head. 'I doubt it. Never seen a horse get itself in such a tangle. He must have bashed his leg hard to buckle the partition like that. And those thoroughbreds have such weedy legs . . .' She sat down heavily behind the desk, and glanced up at the clock. Then she looked at Sarah, as if seeing her for the first time. 'You're late to be riding. Not from round here, are you?'
'I - I was told to come to you. I need a stable for the night.'
Jackie scrutinised her. 'You off somewhere?'
Sarah took a sip of her tea. She nodded. If these last months had taught her anything it was to say as little as possible.
'You look very young.'
Sarah met her eye. 'Everyone says that.' She forced a smile.
Jackie opened a big book in front of her. 'Well, we can certainly do you a stable. Looks like we'll have one spare, after all. What's your horse's name?'
'Baucher,' Sarah said.
'Passport?'
Sarah reached into her rucksack and handed it over. 'All his vaccinations are up to date,' she said.
Jackie flicked through it, scribbled a number and handed it back to her. 'We're twenty-five a night, hay and food inclusive. Hard food is extra. You tell me what he needs and I'll sort it out.'
'Could we stay a couple of days? I need to sort out the next part of my journey.'
Jackie fiddled with her ballpoint pen. 'Stay as long as you like, sweetheart, long as you're paying. Just leave me a number where you can be contacted.'
'Can't I stay here?'
'Not unless you fancy a bed of straw.' Jackie sighed. 'Aren't you booked in anywhere?'
'I thought this place was for people too.'
'We don't do humans, sweetheart. It's not worth the hassle. The drivers tend to sleep in their lorries, and the others stay in one of the B-and-Bs. But I can give you a number if you like. Here.' She pointed at a list on the wall. 'The Crown can usually do you at short notice. Forty pound a night with an en-suite. Kath'll look after you. She's quiet this time of year. I'll give her a ring.'
'Is it far?'
'About four miles up the road.'
Sarah's shoulders slumped. She was silent for a few minutes while she forget to get her voice under control. 'I rode here,' she said finally, her voice muffled by her collar. 'I haven't got any way of getting there.' She was so tired. She couldn't go any further. She would beg this woman to let her sleep on the office floor.
A muffled shot rang out.
They looked up. Jackie pulled a packet of cigarettes from a drawer in front of her, removed one with a flick of her wrist and tamped it on the desk. She waited a moment before she spoke again. 'Did you just say you rode here? From where?'
Sarah's pulse was still reverberating with that shot. 'It's . . . complicated.'
Jackie lit the cigarette, leant back in her seat and took a deep drag. 'You in trouble?' Her voice had hardened.
Sarah was familiar with that tone. It was the sound of someone assuming the worst of you. 'No.'
'That horse yours?'
'You saw his passport.'
The woman was staring at her.
'My name's on it. Look, he knows me. I'll make him call to me if it helps. I've had him since he was four.'
The vet was emerging from the lorry, his case closed.
'We've got a spare room at the back. Twenty-five quid and I'll throw in a bit of dinner, seeing as you got stuck in with us. I've promised Thom I'll sort him out tonight so another at the table won't make much difference. But,' she leant forwards, 'I'm keeping you off the books. There's something not quite right here, I'll put you up, but I don't want to get involved.'
They were interrupted as the door opened. The two men walked in, filling the little room. The Irishman shook his head.
'Ah, shame,' Jackie muttered. 'Here, sit down, Thom, I'll do you a tea. And you, Bob. Sit next to . . .'
'Sarah,' she said. She kept her hands around her mug, fearful that if she said or did too much she might lose the chance to stay.
'Fracture in front and a severed artery. Poor boy had no chance.' The Irishman's face was bleached with shock, smears of red on his skin where he must have touched it without realising. 'Tim never even had time to sign his papers. He's got a mare foaling. One in, one out, eh?'
'Ah, sod the tea.' Jackie slammed the lid down on the kettle. 'This calls for a drop of the medicinal.' She reached for the other drawer of her desk and pulled out a bottle of amber liquid. 'Not you, though, Sarah.' Her eyes flashed a warning.
She had guessed her age, Sarah thought. She wouldn't be implicated in more than she had to be.
Sarah kept her head down. 'I prefer tea,' she said.
Twenty
'Never deal with him when you are in a fit of passion. Anger, impatience, fear . . . virtually any human emotion undermines effective communication with a horse.'
Xenophon, On Horsemanship
Despite the rain, she was already outside the office, awkward in her smart suit and heels, pacing the pavement with small, impatient steps. As soon as she saw his car, she ran to it, briefcase and handbag thrust under her arm. He felt relieved: there was still some part of Natasha that he understood. He smiled as he leant over to open the passenger door, and she climbed in, disregarding the horns sounding from the traffic behind them. 'I thought you--'
'Don't say anything,' she interrupted, jaw set, hair slick with rain. 'And as soon as we've found her you and I don't have to deal with each other again. Okay?'
Mac's smile died on his lips. He had been about to pull into the stream of traffic, but he paused. 'Thanks, Mac, for swinging all the way across town to pick me up.'
'You want me to thank you? Okay. Thanks, Mac. Can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to this little outing. Is that better?' Her face was flushed with anger, dots of colour on her cheeks.
'You don't have to come, you know. You made that quite clear.'
'She's my responsibility, too. You made that quite clear.'
Mac's patience was already at a low ebb. 'You know what? This is hard enough as it is without dealing with your crap. If you want to come with me, fine, but if you're going to be like this, I'll drop you at the house now. We'll go in separate cars.'
'Dealing with my crap? Have you any idea what I've had to drop to come and look for her? Or what this has just done to my reputation?'
'Nice to see you again.' Natasha jumped as Cowboy John thrust his head through the gap between the front seats. 'Just thought I'd remind you folks that you have an audience.' He resumed lighting a cigarette.
She turned to Mac, open-mouthed.
'He knows about horses,' he explained, 'and he's known Sarah since she was a kid.'
When Natasha said nothing, he added, 'You going to sort the horse out once we find them, Tash?'
She rummaged in her handbag. 'So, where is she? Have you heard anything? I've got to be back at work as soon as possible.'
'Yeah,' Mac muttered, at last swinging the car out into the traffic. 'Because you're the only one with a real job, after all.'
'I'm in the middle of a big case, Mac.'
'Yeah. You said.'
She swivelled in her seat to face him. 'Meaning?'
'Meaning all you've done is go on about how difficult this is for you. How this is disrupting your life. How I have disrupted your life.'
'That's not fair.'
'But it's accurate. Have you considered the possibility that any of this might be down to you?'
Cowboy John sat back and tilted his hat over his face. 'Oh, Lordy.'
'Me?'
The traffic was terrible. Mac stuck his right arm out of the window, forcing his way into another, equally sluggish queue. 'Yes. You,' he said. Perhaps it was because he felt as if he had been driving in circles all day. Perhaps it was fear of where the girl was. Perhaps it was just the sight of Natasha, pr
im in her neat suit, forever treating him as the enemy, the guilty party, a convenient whipping boy. 'You were the one who walked out, Natasha. You were the one who signed up to look after her, then decided it was all too difficult.' He sensed the outrage in her silence, but he didn't care. 'You think you're the only one who's been inconvenienced here? I've had to cancel jobs, and John here has better things to do.'
He wrenched the wheel and whizzed up the inside lane. The car felt as if it was shrinking around him. 'Maybe if you'd stuck around, put Sarah before your own hurt pride, we wouldn't be in this mess.'
'You're blaming me for this?'
'I'm just saying you played a part.'
She was shouting at him now: 'Well, who brought his girlfriend home and paraded her around in front of Sarah in her underwear?'
'I didn't parade her around!'
'She had almost nothing on. And I walk into my house - our house - and there's this bloody prepubescent glamour model smirking at me in her knickers!'
'I like the sound of your house,' said John.
'You think that was nice for Sarah to see? When we'd been playing happy families around her?'
'Oh, don't pretend that had anything to do with Sarah going.'
'Well, it hardly made for a harmonious atmosphere, did it?'
'I said I was sorry.' Mac thumped the steering-wheel. 'I told you it wouldn't happen again. But, come on, it's not as if you didn't have your boyfriend in our house, right? In my bedroom.'
'It's not your bedroom.'
'What was our bedroom.'
'Better and better,' said John, dragging on his cigarette.
'He didn't stay once while you were living there. So don't you--'
'Only because you had somewhere else to go.'
'Oh.' She sat back in her seat, arms folded. 'I wondered how long it would be before you brought that up.'
'Brought what up?'
'My second home. I was warned about this.' She shook her head. 'I should have listened.'
He glanced at her. 'What the hell is that supposed to mean?'
'That you'd use it against me when it came to negotiating a settlement.'
'Oh, for Chrissake, you're being ridiculous. You think I give a stuff about your rented bloody cottage? I couldn't care if you had the bloody QE2 to spend your weekends on.'
'I hate to interrupt here.' John leant forward again, letting out a long plume of smoke. 'And, believe me, I could listen to you two for hours. But ain't we kind of losin' the thread?'
Mac's heart thumped uncomfortably against his ribs.
She sat as far away from him as she could reasonably get in the front of the small, slightly overloaded car - as if he was contaminated, as if she would rather be anywhere else in the world.
'Can you lovely people call a truce?' John asked. 'Just till we find her? That would be . . . nice.'
They sat in silence as Mac drove east across the city. He had clamped his jaw shut.
'Fine by me.' Her voice was small. She reached for the battered A-Z. 'Where are we headed, anyway?'
'She's going to love this.' John chuckled.
Mac kept his gaze firmly to the front. 'France,' he said, chucking her passport into her lap. 'She's headed for France.'
It took the entire clogged length of the Blackwall Tunnel to explain what had happened at the hospital. She had questioned them several times as to whether they had heard him correctly, whether the old man was even in his right mind, until Cowboy John had become irritable. 'He's sick, but he's just as sharp as you, lady,' he grumbled. He did not like Natasha, Mac could tell. He eyed her, as he did the hissing geese in his yard, with beady suspicion.
'Even if you heard right, I find it very hard to believe that even Sarah thinks she has a realistic chance of riding all the way to . . . Where is it?'
'Look at the map.' Mac gestured with a finger, eyes fixed on the road. 'Halfway down France.'
Natasha squinted. 'But she won't get there, will she?'
'She ain't goin' to make it past the coast. 'Less that horse can swim the Channel.'
'John and I think she won't even get to Dover.'
They emerged into the darkening evening sky, and Mac's heart sank when he saw that the traffic was just as dense and slow on the other side. He indicated right, pulling on to the dual-carriageway. 'He says the horse will need resting long before then.'
Natasha coughed pointedly, then rolled down her window. She sniffed, then swivelled in her seat. There was an ominous silence. 'Is that what I think it is?' she said.
'How do I know?' said John. 'I can't see in yo' head.'
'Is it . . . weed?'
He took the roll-up from between his lips and examined it carefully. 'I sure hope so, price I paid for it.'
'You can't smoke that in this car. Mac, tell him.'
'Well, I sure can't step outside, lady, can I?'
Natasha's head sank briefly into her hands. Mac caught John's eye in the mirror, the briefest glint of amused recognition.
Natasha raised her head. She took a deep breath. 'You know, Mr Cowboy, or whatever your name is, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't smoke drugs in the car. At least while we're stuck in traffic.' She was edging down in her seat, an eye on the cars to each side of them.
'It stops me gettin' car sick. And, 'sides, you guys fightin' makes me stressed. And that ain't good for us old folk. You see what it did to the Captain back there.'
Natasha swallowed. She looked like someone heading fast towards the end of a short touchpaper. 'Let me get this straight. If we don't let you smoke illegal substances in Mac's car, you're likely to throw up or die of stress.'
'That's about it.'
Mac watched her struggle to control her breathing. It appeared to take a while. For the first time in days he wanted to smile.
There had been a time, according to Cowboy John, when London's rush-hour lasted just that: one hour. Now the traffic began to slow, the queues lengthening, just after school pick-up and rarely eased for four hours. They could not, he remarked, with the detachment of a casual observer - or perhaps of someone who had just smoked the best part of a quarter-ounce of dope - have picked a worse time to set off. Oh, and if it was all the same to them, he needed to pee. Again.
Just to add to the tension, it had begun to rain heavily. Mac's car now sat in a long queue on the A2, the stream of red brake lights like the tail of some great red dragon intermittently visible between the squeaking trajectory of his windscreen wipers.
Natasha had been silent for the last half an hour, sending messages on her phone, flicking through paperwork and making notes. She had a hushed and heated exchange with someone about her court case, and a whispered conversation with someone he suspected was Conor. When she slammed the phone shut he felt slyly gratified. He fiddled with the radio for the fifteenth time, trying to find the latest traffic report.
'I don't know why you keep doing that,' she snapped. 'It's obvious we're stuck in traffic.'
Mac let it slide. He could see that her communications had wound her up. To explain that he was listening for news of horse-related accidents would not improve matters.
'My feeling is she's got to be out of London by now,' he said, tapping his fingers on the steering-wheel. 'I say we come off the A2 at the next junction, maybe follow a B road. She would probably have cut off a long time before this. If we're lucky, we might even overtake her.'
He stuck a hand out of the window at someone who allowed him into the adjoining queue of traffic. 'I suggest we go as far as we think she could go and if we haven't found her by eight o'clock we ring the police.'
In the back seat, all that was visible of John was his hat. It nodded. 'Sounds like a plan,' the hat said. 'Though I still ain't too happy about the police.'
'Because you'd have to throw your stash out of the window?'
'Sweetheart, you goin' to be prisin' that stash from my cold dead hands.'
'We can arrange that too,' she said sweetly.
Mac glanced at her.
'I've been thinking about something else. If we cancel your credit card, she won't have any money. She'll have to turn round and come back.'
Natasha considered this. 'But if we leave her with no money, she'll be at greater risk.'
Cowboy John's voice cut in: 'I don't think havin' no money's goin' to stop her. She's pretty determined.'
'It depends how much she's taken out already,' said Mac, 'but if she's allowed to keep on using it, there's no telling where she could go. We're almost facilitating her running away.'
'You absolutely sure she's taken your card?' John said. 'I tell you, I've known that girl a long time and she ain't the type to steal.'
Mac waited for Natasha to speak up, perhaps to mention fish-fingers in a supermarket, money missing from their home. But she sat across from him, apparently deep in thought. 'Tash?'
'If she keeps using it,' she said, thinking aloud, 'it'll tell us where she's been. It has a facility you can ring up to find out the details of your last transaction.' She turned to him, and for once she didn't look as if she was accusing him of something. 'Often within a couple of hours of it taking place. It's our best chance of tailing her without the police getting involved. And if she's booked into a hotel, well, great. We could go straight there.' She allowed herself a small smile. 'It's possible we might even find her tonight.'
Cowboy John let out a long puff of smoke. 'She ain't as silly as she looks, your missus.'
'I'm not his missus,' Natasha said briskly, and dialled again. 'Open your window, Cowboy. This car stinks.'
'Dartford,' she said triumphantly, fifteen minutes later. 'She withdrew a hundred pounds at Dartford some time before midday. We're on the right track.'
It had looked so simple on the road map, Natasha thought, running her finger along the little red line. The A2 followed in a fairly straight route through Sittingbourne, Gillingham, and on to Canterbury. But as the car moved along it in the dark, the queues moving and stalling, rain and the steam of three people's breath steadily obscuring the windows, there was no sign that a girl and her horse had ever existed, let alone come this way.
Natasha sat in silence. The further they travelled from London, the greater the weight of the solid mass that settled in her stomach. Every mile they passed she found herself understanding a little better the magnitude of the task before them. Sarah could be anywhere within a fifty-mile radius. She could have gone east from Dartford. She might have anticipated that any search party would head for Dover and decided to travel to one of the minor ports. Worse, they might have got it wrong, and she might not be making for France at all.