The Country Lovers Read online

  ‘He’s competing the stallion again tomorrow.’ Luca rubbed his face tiredly. ‘His father’s booked a hospitality tent.’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘He’s hosting lunch for eighty. My arse is for the firing squad if the horse kicks off.’

  ‘No shit!’

  ‘If only the boy listened. He’s got enough talent. He’s just a total brat.’

  ‘He’s not so bad,’ Signe volunteered. ‘Mishaal is always nice to me; he has good manners and knows lots about Sweden. He has a crush, I think.’ She eyed him for reaction.

  ‘Probably wants to make you his cougar Queen Noor.’

  She looked rather taken with the idea. ‘I could have a string of four-star eventers.’

  ‘You’d have to share golden boy with his other wives.’

  ‘As long as I didn’t have to share the horses, that’s cool by me.’ That hucking laugh.

  This time, Luca had no desire to share it.

  ‘His father will buy him another horse, maybe?’ Signe seemed to think the answer to everything lay in the patriarch’s bottomless pockets. ‘You can ask him to. You are his pet.’

  ‘Since when did you do what your pet told you?’ Luca felt powerless, his advice ignored, royal pride intractable in both father and son; those early wins had been taken as proof that the millions spent were justified. Luca must work the horse better, that’s all. Whilst the father – a jovial, Hibernophile racing fanatic – had favourited the Irish rider from day one, the message was clear: you will get this partnership to the Olympics, Horsemaker. Luca was a courtier. His smiling, fiddle-playing Irish charm was mandatory; having an opinion was not. They were all courtiers, the legion of brash horsey westerners with their loose morals and fast jump-offs.

  Signe’s lips were on his right ear now, her little tongue working it like an oyster shell. His stomach curled, torn between pleasure and unease.

  ‘It was fun last time, hey?’ she purred into his ear, but instead of finding it arousing, he just felt worse that he couldn’t remember. They’d talked and laughed more last time, surely? Drunk more, certainly.

  He tried not to let his mind drift back to that angry little figure picking himself out of the sand last week, whip arm raised to bring it down on the horse, enraged when Luca had stepped forward to snatch it away with a firm ‘no’.

  They were in Signe’s staff apartment, which was neater and sweeter-smelling than his; she’d put on music he didn’t recognise, a clubby trance thing that she got up to dance a few steps to.

  ‘Ørjan Nilsen featuring Neev Kennedy, “Anywhere But Here”,’ she told him, hands on her head, hips gyrating. ‘She’s Irish too.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  He looked around the room. The staff apartments were all identical, white sarcophagus cells with brightly polished floors and windows too high to look through. No bigger than a single garage, cupboard doors mirrored to give the impression of space, the icy cold air conditioning made it feel more like living in an igloo than an accommodation block in a scorching equestrian oasis. Signe had personalised hers with a framed photograph of her ruddy-faced blonde family, a Swedish flag throw over the sofa back, the glacially white shelves jewelled with colourful boxes and bottles bought at the souk. Her love of shopping was a running joke on the yard, the tax-free earnings that others saved up going through her fingers like sand.

  Signe sat back down astride him. He rolled her off, deflective smile at the ready. ‘Let’s have another vodka.’

  ‘Have as many as you like, sötnos.’ She picked up the bottle, unruffled. ‘I have more in the freezer: Beluga Noble.’

  ‘Only the best black markets for you.’

  She unscrewed the lid with a wink.

  ‘Don’t you ever find this place soulless?’ he asked her.

  ‘Not any more. After four or five months, you stop noticing the hypocrisy: that the Indians are bussed in from camps to work like slaves, that the ecology is totally fucked and the malls are full of zombies with credit cards buying pret-a-porter Stella McCartney like it’s an H&M sale. This place buys your skill and sells your soul. And they get the best horses.’ She whistled. ‘They just keep arriving like drugs. Watching you on that stallion is something else, Mr Horsemaker. You make him look like Pegasus.’

  ‘He’s better.’

  She handed him a brimming shot glass, blue eyes gleaming.

  ‘He flies without wings.’ He drank the vodka in one.

  While it burned his lips and throat, he saw all too clearly through his own evasion. Tonight, he needed sleep, not drunken sex he wouldn’t remember. He couldn’t make the boy ride any better, but if he put his mind to it, perhaps he could stop the horse self-destructing.

  He cast Signe an apologetic smile. ‘I’m going back to crash out.’

  ‘Stay and talk just a little longer, hey.’ With a mischievous smile, she refilled his glass so fast it overflowed.

  He stared at it, wishing he had the willpower to push it away. ‘Just one more then.’

  She was playing with his collar now, head tilted prettily. ‘What are you, Luca, twenty-eight, thirty?’

  ‘Thereabouts.’

  ‘Good-looking man like you must have broken a lot of hearts.’

  He smiled, shaking his head. She had a lovely, lively face, and he was reminded again of somebody he’d once known; her eyes had the same roundness and sparkle, the way they drank him in with that live-for-the-moment vivid blue. But he wasn’t about to share his shadowed soul. Looking away, he caught his own reflection staring back at him from one of the mirrored doors, a clean-cut stranger. Luca’s royal employers, who liked their staff immaculately presented, sent in a barber every fortnight to keep the team’s hair trimmed. He looked as if he was in the army, his shorn hair bleached white by the sun.

  He turned as he heard shot glasses being refilled yet again. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Nonsense. I want you to tell me everything, mysterious Mr Horsemaker.’ Handing him one, Signe wriggled closer. She’d changed the music streaming to something bluesier, a saxophone ripping through some bass notes. ‘Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t?’

  ‘Buzzcocks, 1978,’ he deflected.

  ‘I’ve done it plenty,’ she sighed, lifting her shot and squinting into its clear depths, quite drunk now. ‘It’s like falling off a horse, they say – do it seven times and you can call yourself a pro.’

  ‘And what number are you up to?’ he humoured her.

  She held up a Victory V with the hand holding the glass, then lifted the other to add five more fingers. ‘You’re looking at a pro. You?’

  Just one woman. Not mine to keep. ‘Signe, I’m not looking for any sort of relationship right now. I’m only just out of something that did my head in, you know?’ Leaving the final shot untouched, Luca planted a modest kiss on her cheek. ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘Hey, you’re safe.’ She caught hold of his shirt collar. ‘I’m not in the market for number eight. Let’s change the subject, okay?’ She played with the lapel. ‘Stay a while.’ She drew him closer. ‘We’ll just fuck, no more talking.’

  ‘Another time.’

  She looked crestfallen when he stood up, her face unguarded for once. ‘I need company tonight.’

  Luca kept his guilt in check. It could be a lonely life for a gypsy in Konig boots, trick riders living off their wits. But the cardinal rule of the job was that horses always came first. He reached back down to extract his phone and keys from the coffee table.

  She was too quick for him, grabbing them and dancing off behind the big carved wooden screen that divided the room from the sleeping area. ‘You’ll need to do better than that!’

  ‘Signe, this isn’t funny.’

  ‘At least stay for a blow job.’ She headed into the bathroom with another husky laugh. ‘You know I’m good!’

  Luca glanced at his watch impatiently. It was past midnight. He wanted to look in on the stallion. The stable hand on nightshift was his least favou
rite, a surly Bangladeshi, always sloping off for a cigarette when he wasn’t napping in the office with the CCTV screens. He didn’t check the horses often enough. Bechstein, who box-walked endlessly, and had to have automatic drinkers turned off because they freaked him out, would almost certainly need his water bucket topped up.

  He could hear Signe peeing, the door open out of sight as she carried on talking. ‘You’re a boring old man, Luca,’ she shouted brightly. ‘You promised me you’d let me play your fiddle!’

  Had he drunkenly offered to teach her a jig last time, he wondered as he pulled on his trainers by the door, or was that a sexual innuendo?

  When Signe reappeared around the screen, she was naked, his keys in one hand, phone in the other. ‘Ready to fiddle?’

  Innuendo, then. Luca eyed her warily. Hair tousled and lips glossed, she was propping one arm up on the wall and striking a Playboy pose. She had a chandelier tattoo beneath her breasts. With a flash of clarity, he remembered burying his forehead drunkenly into it, calling her by somebody else’s name.

  His groin – no great judge of one-liners, but a rapid response unit to full frontal – was stirring obligingly, and he forced himself to think about the boy spitting out sand, the undiluted fury in his face. Mishaal would never bear the shame of such dishonour if his father was there to witness it with eighty close friends and business allies. Luca had to ensure it didn’t happen by getting up at dawn tomorrow to work the horse in. ‘Signe, I really can’t stay.’

  ‘Of course you can.’ She weaved towards him, chandelier swinging as her hips swayed exaggeratedly, holding his keys and phone behind her back now.

  ‘Put some clothes on, please.’ He reached round her to take them, finding himself trapped in an octopus tangle of naked Signe clinch. ‘Seriously, I’m away to my bed.’

  ‘Away to mine instead,’ she said, mocking his accent breathily, arms curling around him.

  If it was difficult to take one’s leave with a small, naked and remarkably strong Swedish woman grappling to undo one’s fly buttons, it was harder still with door double-locked.

  ‘How do I undo this fucking thing?’

  Signe was on his belt buckle now, kissing his chest where his shirt was still open from all her unbuttoning earlier.

  ‘For the love of God, Signe, will you get off me! What’s got into you?’

  She backed off reluctantly, holding her hands up. ‘Okay! So you don’t want sex?’

  ‘You’re beautiful and you’re fun, but no. Not right now.’

  She looked suddenly vulnerable, crossing her arms over her breasts. ‘Just stay and sleep here tonight, will you? No sex, I promise.’

  Again, Luca sought to shrug off the yoke of obligation from his shoulders. ‘Sure, you’ll be fine. Nobody’s going to get in past this thing, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ He spun the lock again. ‘Will you let me out? I have to check on Bechstein.’

  ‘Why?’ she demanded, anxious white rims round the blue eyes. ‘The nightman’s there.’

  ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘The dogs will be loose.’

  ‘Sure, they don’t bother me. C’mon, Signe, stop mucking about.’

  Looking even more agitated, she reversed to the sofa to wrap herself in the Swedish flag. ‘I think it’s best you stay here, Luca, for your own sake.’

  This was starting to get seriously weird. Guessing that she’d double-locked the door, Luca started searching for her keys. In a large glass bowl beside him, amongst loose change, hairclips and lanyarded competition passes, was a man’s watch, a chunky Patek Phillipe, its three-dial face familiar. He’d stared it in its face at wither height more than once, the crocodile strap wrapped around the sinewy wrist of a petulant young horseman born to the sort of outrageous privilege that meant his timepieces were worth more than Irish country houses set amid rolling acres, and yet could be casually left forgotten on a washbasin rim or in a member of staff’s flat.

  Suspicion gripped him, chaotic as smoke at first. Was it stolen? A bribe? Surely not something left behind by a lover? Signe might eat cavalier young riders for frokost, but Mishaal was barely legal.

  ‘What is going on, Signe?’ The expensive imported vodka, the dedicated seduction, the lock-in. It all added up. ‘What’s Mishaal up to?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She kept her head turned away. She had another tattoo at the top of her spine, an intricately lacy dreamcatcher. Luca would have given anything to wake up right now and find this was all a nightmare.

  ‘He’s doing something to the horse, isn’t he? To Bechstein?’

  She let out a guilty whimper, covering her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Just fucking tell me! What’s Mishaal up to?’

  ‘I’m supposed to keep you busy,’ she whispered. ‘I think he’s paid the nightman to dope him. That’s all I know.’

  He turned and sprinted towards the fire escape. For a moment a Swedish flag blocked his way and Signe begged him to stay, pleading that she would be fired.

  ‘It’s only a bit of dope!’ she protested, believing it.

  But Luca had seen the boy’s humiliation and anger close up, how incensed he was that the horse refused to jump for him. He was a vindictive character whose cruelty to his sisters, staff and horses Luca had witnessed more than once. To spare his own dishonour, Mishaal would make sure Bechstein could jump for no man.

  He pushed Signe aside and clambered out onto the fire escape at the back of the staff accommodation, a narrow first-floor walkway that connected all the apartments, overshadowed by the big American barn housing the most valuable competition horses in state-of-the-art, temperature-controlled luxury.

  As he sprinted along towards the ladder, Luca could hear an eerie, feral sound coming from inside the building. It was something he’d heard only a few times, always a precursor to tragedy. A horse screaming, terrified and in pain.

  The stallion was fighting for his life.

  PART ONE

  1

  It was New Year’s Eve, and the Saddle Bags were hacking around the village of Compton Bagot. Bright winter sunshine had burned off the early frost, the quartet of long shadows mounted on giant black silhouette horses far slimmer than the four women felt.

  Bridge Mazur’s shadow – a head shorter and a lot hairier than the others thanks to her helmet bobble and fake fur jacket – was bouncing around a lot as her grey Connemara pony Craic took exception to the flashing icicle lights around the eaves of the Old Post Office.

  ‘I swear I’m still sweating cream liqueur,’ Petra complained beside her.

  ‘I’ve got a muffin top – and bottom,’ panted Mo from behind.

  ‘Let’s step this up, shall we?’ Front rider Gill led them into a vigorous rising trot. ‘There’s half a stone of cheese, assorted nuts and Shiraz on each of these thighs.’

  ‘I raise you two loosened belt notches in honour of jakbłecznik and makowiec,’ Bridge said as Craic bunny-hopped forwards, vying to be in front.

  ‘Are those more of Aleš’s cousins?’ Petra’s unruly chestnut mare charged past them all.

  ‘Polish cakes,’ she explained, clinging onto the reins. ‘Make my old ma’s fifteens look like diet food. I’m amazed Ryanair didn’t charged me excess baggage on these Michelins.’ She patted her belly, ignoring the crabby looks from her fellow riders who knew she was the only one amongst them whose gym membership card got swiped regularly.

  Yet for all her air of sharp hipster cool, Bridge liked sweet things: Haribos, mojitos, Gil Elvgren illustrations, sticky desserts and unicorns. Her husband Aleš – typically Polish, romantic and soppily sentimental – was very sweet when he wasn’t being oafish or sulky, their little Cotswold cottage with beams so low he bumped his head every day was sweet, their chubby-wristed toddler Flavia and curly-haired tot Zak were both sweet, and Bridge’s dappled grey pony was sugar-spun perfection. Wise enough to see that amongst her village riding friends, her comparative youth and inexperience was als
o sweet, Bridge was nonetheless a competitive soul who found failure a bitter pill to swallow.

  Bridge had flown home two days earlier than planned, summoned back from Krakow to the Cotswolds by an eleventh-hour job interview. Abandoning Aleš and the children to see in Nowego Roku without her, she’d been almost as excited by the prospect of a rare chance to be Zen in their cluttered little cottage – and to ride – as in her bid to return to work after her long baby sabbatical. As it turned out, the attempt at a career reboot was a waste of dry cleaning. Running the business administration side of a chain of Cotswold gastro pubs owned by a self-absorbed daytime telly star was always going to be a tall order for a straight-talking Belfast woman like Bridge. She didn’t suffer fools, especially matcha and redbean ones topped with black sesame Yatsuhashi.

  ‘How did the interview go?’ Mo asked eagerly, red-faced from the effort of kicking her coloured cob along to keep up with the others. ‘Is the Sous Vide as mad as they say?’

  ‘Madder,’ Bridge grumbled, thinking back to the breathless half hour spent following the glow of Suzy David’s famously bleached white crew cut and perpetually animated iPad around the village pub. ‘We could have done the whole thing on Skype. She needs common sense, not an HR consultant. D’you know she’s dropping the “Jugged” from “Hare” because she thinks it has unfortunate beer and boob connotations? I said, “Queen, it’s a country pub. Boozing and tit-ogling are still legal blood sports round here.”’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  Utterly professional in work mode, Bridge had waited to say it into her hall mirror afterwards, but she winked now, satisfied it was God’s truth. She had a reputation to protect; her three riding friends delighted in being shocked by their Belfast black sheep. Youngest and most urban of the four, and with the shortest and hottest marriage, Bridge’s chippy streak meant she took on the plums in her fellow riders’ mouths with her pierced tongue. She considered it her duty to be the naughty kid at the back of the middle class. Historical novelist Petra, Yorkshire-born and determinedly left wing, might fancy herself the arty boho outsider, but she had a barrister husband, independently educated children and a working gun dog. Farmer’s daughter Mo – perpetually broke, always dealing with a family crisis and juggling three jobs – ate home-reared guinea fowl and hunted twice a week. And Gill, grey-haired, gung-ho equine vet, mother of three and Laura Ashley devotee, was an original Sloane Ranger, if endearingly supportive. They were all diamonds, this mounted big-sisterhood, whose kindness and honesty had seen Bridge through giddying ups and downs during her first year in the village, their endless good humour and wise counsel keeping her sane, their poshness a running joke to a dock-worker’s daughter from Ardoyne.