1

The turf was racing by in a blur of green and brown in the instant before Matt Shepherd hit it, shoulder first, and slammed over onto his back.

Years of practice had him instinctively curling into a ball and rolling to cover his face and stomach, but emerging unscathed from a steeple-chasing fall is always a matter of luck, and, on this occasion, luck wasn't entirely with him.

He'd been near the front of the field, riding the favourite, when he'd approached the last fence in the back straight, with only three fences left to jump and every expectation of lifting the prestigious Camberley Gold Cup for the second year running. But, three strides out, he knew it was not to be. Kandahar Prince was wrong at it – totally wrong – and it was too late to do anything but sit quietly and hope the horse could sort it out for himself.

To be fair to Prince, he might have done, had the horse immediately behind not been so close. A Herculean effort saw him clear the tightly packed birch, but he landed too steeply and, as he stumbled, the following horse cannoned into his hindquarters, sending him pitching forward onto his nose and then down, catapulting Matt some ten or twelve feet further on.

For a moment, as he pressed close to the track, his whole world diminished to a chaos of thunderous noise, flashes of colour, and the thudding blows of galloping hooves.

It was a big field – twenty-five runners, to be exact – and it seemed to Matt that they all managed to clip him in passing, the last one giving him such a clout that he was rolled over twice more before he stopped moving.

An eternity passed in seconds and, as the drumming hoofbeats receded into the distance, Matt lay still for a moment, grass tickling his nose and the earthy aroma of bruised turf filling his nostrils. Somewhere behind him he heard Prince get to his feet and set off after the other horses.

'You all right, old boy?' a voice enquired, and, lifting his head cautiously, Matt saw a blur of scarlet and yellow close by, which presently resolved itself into the shape of another jockey, sitting up and watching him with a level of concern that belied the jokey tone he'd used.

Matt blinked, and the jockey became, more specifically, Jamie Mullin, Irishman and his own good friend.

Matt opened his mouth to speak, paused, spat a quantity of grass and gritty soil, then said, 'Fancy meeting you here! Do you come here often?'

Jamie's face widened into a characteristic grin.

'Not if I can help it. You?'

'Unfortunately, yes.' Matt uncurled, gingerly testing each limb for function.

'Got all your fingers and toes?' Jamie stood up and came over, undoing the strap on his crash cap and taking it off to reveal a quantity of thin, spiky blond hair and the dark smudge of a goatee beard.

'Yep. Think so.' Matt waggled them experimentally and felt pain spread through his left ankle and foot. 'Damn! Some bugger's stepped on my ankle.' Holding his hand up, he balanced on one foot as Jamie pulled him to his feet, and then stood holding on to his friend while he tried putting a little weight on the injured foot.

The result wasn't encouraging.

'Bugger! I've got Secundo in the next.'

Jamie pursed his lips. 'Or . . . not.'

'Shh-hit!' Matt said.

The racecourse medics, who had been hovering on the other side of the rails, now ducked under and approached, bags in hand.

'Everything OK?' they wanted to know.

After a precautionary visit to A&E for X-rays, which showed his ankle to be badly bruised but not broken, Matt found Jamie waiting in the hospital reception area when he was wheeled out in a wheelchair, a walking stick held in his lap.

'Thought you'd have gone home ages ago,' he said, surprised. There had been a lot of waiting around and it was gone six o'clock.

'We came in your car this morning, if you remember. Your valet gave me the key. Anyway, it's the least I could do for the bloke who stepped aside to give me my third winner of the day,' the Irishman declared jauntily. 'Or should I say – hopped aside?'

Matt favoured him with a parody of a smile. Secundo had been his own best prospect of the day – a horse he'd nursed through the uncertainty of the first outings as a novice, and who he'd been looking forward to partnering in the first big trial of its career. But such disappointments were part and parcel of jump racing and, if someone had to benefit from his misfortune, he would rather it was Jamie than anyone else. At twenty-two, the Irishman was still hovering on the fringes of success.

'Oh well. At least it gives you a taste of what it's like to be a proper jockey,' he retorted.

'Nice try, but you can't put me down today; I'm on a roll! Three winners this afternoon, two decent rides on Monday – one courtesy of Matt Shepherd Esq. – and a date with the gorgeous Sophie tonight. Things are definitely looking up!'

Jamie drove fast, patently enjoying the powerful engine and sweet handling of Matt's MR2, and, in less than forty-five minutes, they had reached the tiny village of Norton Peverill and were turning in through the gateway of the Somerset cottage that Matt shared with his fiancée, Kendra Brewer. Jamie also had a room there, which he used whenever he was riding in the south of the country for a few days; this was one such time.

Built of the local golden stone with a brown-tiled roof, the cottage sat end-on to the lane and was approached from the left-hand side via a wooden gate in the stone wall. Once in the yard, there was garaging for three cars on the left, built into an old timber-framed barn. Ahead was a five-bar gate, which led to a concreted yard with three stables and a second barn, and, beyond that, another gate into a lane and the first of three paddocks where he hoped, one day, three or four thoroughbred brood mares might graze. At the moment they were playing host to a couple of yearlings, bought on impulse at a recent sale.

To the right, as they drove in, the cottage sat illuminated by the soft sunlight of early evening. Now, in mid-September, the narrow flowerbeds either side of the front porch were bursting with late-summer colour: blowsy pink dahlias, elbowing their way through the drifts of goldenrod; asters and lavender, all bobbing and bowing in a lively breeze.

Matt regarded the beds with satisfaction. He'd lived at Spinney Cottage for just over three years, but the garden had been left more or less to its own devices until a few months ago, when Kendra had moved in.

Jamie stopped the car in front of the wooden doors of the garage to allow Matt to get out.

'What'll you do about the party tonight?' he asked.

'Oh, I expect I'll go,' Matt said, climbing stiffly out with the aid of the stick. 'Doogie would be very disappointed if I missed it. But I might not stay till the end. I'll see how I feel.'

Leaving Jamie to put the car away, he limped across the brick-paved yard towards the cottage. When he was still several feet from the door, it opened and a slim blonde girl stepped out to meet him. Just as the sight of the cottage gave Matt a lift each time he came home to it, so it was with Kendra. Just turned twenty-one, with fine-boned features, hazel eyes, and elbow-length hair of the palest gold, he continually blessed whatever quirk of her personality had made her fall for him.

'Hiyah. Are you OK? What did the hospital say?' Her concern showed in the tiny crease between her eyes. She rarely came to the racecourse and never watched his races on TV – saying that it made her nervous – but he'd rung to warn her that he'd very likely be late home.

'Just bruised, but I'll be signed off for a day or two. Secundo won,' he added, ruefully.

'Oh, what a shame!' She put her arms round his neck and kissed him. 'Well – not that he won, obviously – but you know what I mean. You've worked so hard on him.'

'Yeah. Still, there'll be other races. And Jamie's not complaining.'

He followed her into the cottage, limping through the lounge with its oak beams, ochre walls, and stone fireplace, and was almost knocked over by the welcome from the dogs as she opened the kitchen door. There were four of them, though sometimes, when they were whirling excitedly, as now, it seemed as if there were twice as many.

He spoke to them all, reserving his fondest welcome for his own special dog, a German shepherd bitch called Sky. Rocko and Patches, the collie crosses he'd adopted from the local rescue centre, were always first in the queue for attention, but Kendra's dainty sheltie waited back until the fuss died down before coming forward demurely to receive her greeting.

'Hallo, Taffy.' He bent gingerly to ruffle her fur, the action reminding him of the buffeting he'd received.

'It's not just your foot, is it?' Kendra observed astutely. 'C'mon, my lad. Let's get you upstairs and into a hot bath.'

Kendra was going out for the evening too, to the hen night of an old school friend, and was picked up by a minibus just after eight, leaving Matt and Jamie to drive to the party in her car. It was an automatic, which meant that if – as was probable – Jamie went on to spend the night with his girlfriend, Matt would be able to get himself home with only one good foot to operate the pedals.

'Wouldn't you do better to get a taxi?' Kendra had asked, on her way out.

'I'll be OK. I've no intention of getting sloshed anyway, unlike our young friend here!'

An evening spent socialising was not number one on Matt's wish list after the day he'd had, but the party was to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Doogie McKenzie, the trainer who had been his mentor and who'd given him his first break as a jockey. They'd had many successes since those days. Indeed, there was a photograph on the wall at Spinney Cottage that showed the two of them standing beside Blackavar in the winner's enclosure after the Champion Hurdle. In the picture, Doogie had his arm round Matt's shoulders, and Matt, still wearing his cap on his short brown hair, chinstrap undone, had the widest of wide smiles on his lean countenance.

Although Matt had moved on from Doogie's yard to a much bigger one, they remained firm friends, and it would have taken a far more serious injury than the one he'd received today to make him miss this particular bash.

The party was being held in the function rooms of a livestock auction house two or three miles from Charlborough. The venue stood back from the road, surrounded on three sides by parking and having what looked like a couple of acres of covered livestock holding pens on the other. It was approached along an unlit stretch of B-road with fields on one side and an area of private woodland on the other.

Doogie had been in racing all his life and was an extremely well-liked man, as was evident by the number of cars in the car park. When Matt and Jamie entered the building, they found upward of two hundred people jostling for space on the dance floor, seated at tables around the perimeter, or queuing at the bar. The music pounded uncompromisingly loud, keeping time with the throbbing pulse of Matt's headache.

Jamie's eyes were alight with anticipation of an evening's enjoyment, but Matt, whose taste ran more to classical music than the relentless rhythm of club anthems, regarded the next hour or two as something to be endured, and was surprised that Doogie should have wanted a celebration along such lines.

The main function room was lit only by table lights and the flashing coloured bulbs of the DJ's rig, but, even so, Matt recognised several faces. Kendra's younger brother, Deacon, was there and, in the centre of a group by the bar, he could see the ever-popular figure of ex-jockey Harry Leonard in his wheelchair. A good friend of Matt's, Harry was also the son of and assistant to the trainer he usually rode for, and he'd rung whilst Matt was awaiting attention in hospital, to check that he was all right.

As Matt paused just inside the doors, Jamie tapped him on the shoulder, pointed across the dance floor, and moved away. Almost immediately, a stick-thin, gaunt-faced man took his place, leaning close to speak in Matt's ear.

Bob 'Bully' Jennings had yet to reach thirty, but could have been taken for a man twice his age, his features ravaged by a dozen years of struggling to make the weight required of a top-ranked jockey. His teeth were misshapen and discoloured, and, in the daylight, his skin looked sallow, but he invariably wore a smile. Matt liked him a lot, and wished, without much hope, that he would hang up his boots and give his body a chance to recover. Matt was no stranger to the weight battle himself, but, at six foot, Bully had the disadvantage of being at least three inches taller, and his nickname was rumoured to result from a past struggle with bulimia.

'Good to see you up and about,' Bully told him. 'I heard you'd been carted off to hospital. What's the verdict?'

'Just bruised. I'll be back in time to ride Tortellini next week, so don't start getting your hopes up.'

'I never even gave it a thought!' the other jockey protested, unconvincingly. 'By the way, Doogie's in the other bar, if you're looking for him. I'm stopping here to see if I can get lucky.' He winked, waved a hand, and turned away.

Matt looked round for Jamie and saw him weaving his way through the throng towards the place where a platinum blonde in a slinky red dress was dancing with her hands above her head, flaunting her ample curves for the delectation of whoever might care to watch. From what Matt could see in the fluctuating light, a number of people cared, almost all of them men. Shaking his head slightly, he turned away. He had no doubt that Sophie Bradford would give Jamie the runaround – it was her stock-in-trade – but he supposed it would do him no harm in the long term, and he had to learn.

Hobbling into the smaller bar and lounge with the aid of his stick, Matt saw Doogie McKenzie seated at a circular table, attended by a group of mainly older men and women. When he caught sight of Matt, he stood up and waved, his weather-beaten face splitting into a huge smile.

'Matt! You made it! Come over here, lad,' he called, in his broad Scottish tones, and Matt saw, with amusement, that he had come to the party in a kilt with a tartan tam o' shanter atop his shock of unruly white hair.

As he approached the table, the other guests shifted up to clear a space for him on the red leatherette corner seat.

Doogie accepted Matt's bottle-shaped gift bag with thanks and waved a hand to a hovering member of staff.

'Can we have some more drinks over here? What'll it be, Matt? Don't tell me Diet Coke – this is a celebration! Have some champagne!'

Matt smiled, easing himself gratefully into the waiting space. His ankle was beginning to protest strongly, in spite of the painkillers he'd dosed himself with.

'Thanks. Just one, though. I'm driving.'

'So what's the damage?' Doogie asked, gesturing at Matt's foot, then, before he had time to answer, turning to the other guests and saying, 'Matt used to ride for me, you know. You could say I discovered him. Best bloody rider I ever saw – even at sixteen! Ran away from school and turned up on my doorstep, he did. Knew what he wanted and went for it – a man after my own heart!'

Matt smiled faintly at the polite murmurs of interest from those closest, most of whom would have heard the story many times before, and let the trainer get on with it. It was his birthday, after all.

After a couple of hours in the company of Doogie and his friends, trying not to look at the well-laden buffet table from which most of the guests were helping themselves at regular intervals, Matt felt he'd done his duty and was only waiting for the right moment to make his apologies and leave. His head was still aching and he had, for at least half of that time, been politely but firmly repelling the advances of a not so young redhead who became more amorously inclined with each glass of wine. The cottage and his bed had never seemed more desirable.

'Think I'll make a move now,' he told Doogie, as soon as the chance arose.

'Feeling a bit sore?' the elderly trainer asked, bushy white brows drawing down over eyes that were chips of brilliant blue. 'I'm not surprised. Looked a bit nasty, that fall. Thanks for coming – I'm sure you didn't feel like it.'

Matt shrugged. 'Oh, I'm OK. And I certainly wasn't going to miss your birthday bash. But I must admit I'll be thankful to get this shoe off and put my feet up.' He stood up, hopping a little as he took the bulk of his weight on his right foot.

'Oh, you're not going already?' The redhead rose with him, making a moue with lips from which scarlet was beginning to bleed into the surrounding lines. 'The party's only just started. Stay with me and I'll make you forget all your troubles . . .'

'Ah, sorry. Another time, perhaps.' With his free hand, Matt lifted her arm off his shoulders and draped it, instead, over Doogie's.

'Thanks, pal,' the older man muttered, and Matt was chuckling as he turned away.

In the main function room the music was still as thumpingly loud, and the track, from Matt's point of view, was indistinguishable from whichever one had been playing when he first arrived. He glanced round for Jamie, even though they had already arranged that Matt should take the car when he was ready to go; Jamie would probably get a taxi home from Sophie's flat sometime the next day.

Suddenly, to Matt's right, there was a ripple of movement in the crowd by the bar, and, at its centre, he saw Sophie's blonde head forging through towards the dance floor with Jamie hot on her heels. Seconds later, Jamie caught up with her, grabbed her arm, and pulled her round to face him.

Whatever passed between them was lost in the unremitting pounding of the music, but the result was plain for all to see. With an ugly expression twisting her carefully made-up features, Sophie swung her arm and slapped Jamie hard across the face, rocking him back on his heels. Wrenching her arm free, she turned away, but Matt could see that Jamie wasn't going to let the matter rest and, sure enough, he recovered his balance and headed after her.

Matt groaned inwardly. Jamie had a quick temper at the best of times, something that had undoubtedly hindered his career once or twice in the past, and alcohol and high emotion were a combustible combination. He watched helplessly, too far away – even without the handicap of his injured ankle – to intercept his friend before he reached the girl again.

The altercation hadn't gone unnoticed by the club's security, however, and, to Matt's relief, a burly figure stepped into Jamie's path, halting his forward progress in the nick of time by dint of placing a meaty hand on each of the young man's shoulders.

Jamie didn't take kindly to the intervention and made that abundantly clear, but, as combatants, they were woefully ill-matched. In the absence of a sling and pebbles, the smaller man took the only course available to him and swung a punch at the face some eight inches above his own.

The bouncer swayed back in a way that suggested time spent in the boxing ring, fielded the flying fist, and twisted it up behind Jamie's back. Shaking his head with grim amusement, the bouncer then steered him, with no further ado, towards the exit.

Matt let out breath he hadn't been aware of holding. He turned to follow and almost walked into a corpulent figure with sparse grey hair arranged over a shiny brown pate and weak eyes behind bottle-glass spectacles.

'Ah, Matt! Just the chap I was looking for!' the man exclaimed triumphantly. 'Didn't think I'd see you after that nasty-looking fall, but Doogie said you were here. No wonder they call you India Rubber Man!'

Matt paused, producing a smile. Roy Emmett, Tortellini's owner, was a kindly and generous man, but one infamous for never making do with half a dozen words where twenty or thirty would do. He was also – although Matt personally had no problem with it – what Kendra's father disgustedly termed a 'Raving Poofter'. With a glance at the door through which Jamie and the bouncer had just disappeared, Matt resigned himself to at least twenty minutes' delay.

'Hi, Roy. How are you? And how's that horse of yours?'

Emmett beamed. 'He's well, Matt – very well. That's what I wanted to talk about . . .'

Twenty minutes turned out to be a conservative estimate; it was, in fact, nearly forty before Matt managed to get away, and then only by taking advantage of the distraction offered by the appearance of Emmett's partner.

Pleading weariness, he made his excuses and left the party behind, making as much haste as was politely and physically possible. He emerged into the car park and looked round without much hope for Jamie. A light high on the side of the building illuminated the immediate vicinity, revealing one or two snogging couples, and a dozen or more smokers, braving a blustery wind to get their fix. Jamie was not amongst them.

Matt approached the nearest group, one of whom was a young jockey he vaguely recognised.

'Hi. I'm looking for a friend . . .'

'Well, try Internet dating,' one of them suggested, and the whole group fell about laughing.

Matt smiled. 'Very good. No, this guy came out maybe half an hour ago. He was, er . . . shown out by the bouncer.'

'Oh, Jamie Mullin?' a girl in an eight-inch skirt and hooped earrings said, sobering up. 'Yeah, I saw him. He, like, hung around for a while and tried to get back in, but the bouncer was, like, waiting for him? Then he wanders off.'

'Did you see which way he went?'

'Nah, sorry.' She chewed gum and looked Matt up and down appraisingly. 'I could help you look, if you like.'

'Thanks, I'll manage,' Matt said.

'Suit yourself. I think he went that way.' She waved a hand in the general direction of the car park and road out before losing interest. As Matt turned away, he saw her remove a cigarette from the lips of the boy next to her and slip it between her own, drawing in a deep lungful of pollution with evident enjoyment.

Matt made his way to the corner of the building and stood, taking most of his weight on his good foot, scanning the rows of cars and the exit road. As far as he could see, there was no one in sight. If Jamie had gone that way, he was long gone.

Taking his mobile from his pocket, Matt keyed in Jamie's number, but the network's answering service cut in immediately. He left a message for Jamie to call back and returned the phone to his pocket. The only sensible course of action seemed to be for him to collect the car and head for home, keeping an eye open for Jamie as he went.

Sighing, Matt did just that, checking the vicinity of the parked car before he left. Unsure of how much his friend had had to drink, he felt it was just possible that he could have sat down to wait for him and fallen asleep, but he wasn't there.

Driving slowly, Matt scanned each side of the road all the way down to the junction with the highway. Here he paused for a moment, the engine idling. The road he was joining had originally been the main one into Charlborough from the south until a road-straightening project had cut this section out and left it almost redundant, serving only a garden centre, the cattle market, and a newly built business park some half a mile further on. Consequently, at this time of night, it was deserted, the businesses shut and the businessmen gone home.

It seemed most likely that Jamie had either decided to walk to Charlborough or called a taxi to take him there and, irritated that he hadn't thought to let him know, Matt pushed the gear lever into Drive and turned left towards the town. As he pulled onto the open road, he became aware of just how much the wind had strengthened since the afternoon, the trees on the edge of the wood bowing and waving, and a few early fallen leaves scurrying along the kerb line towards him. Fifty yards or so from the junction there was a lonely bus stop followed by a stone bridge over a stream, and then the pavement came to an end, leaving any walkers to take to the road or stumble along the grass verge.

Even with his lights on main beam, Matt might easily have missed the flash of white in the trees at the side of the road, had he not been keeping an eye open for just such a thing. He pulled in with two wheels on the grass about a car's length beyond the bridge and, retrieving the stick from the passenger-seat footwell and a torch from the glove compartment, got out and made his way back.

The white turned out to be not Jamie's shirt with Jamie inside it – as he'd half hoped – but a piece of white satiny material with a fringe: a lady's evening wrap caught on a branch in the shrubby undergrowth at the side of the road. The fringed edge of the shawl was decorated with something that sparkled in the light; someone would undoubtedly be upset at having lost it.

Shrugging, Matt disentangled it from the bush it had caught on and turned back to his car. As he crossed the bridge, he could hear the rush of a fair amount of water and, drawn by it, shone the torch over the parapet into the darkness below.

He could see the river maybe fifteen or twenty feet down, foaming as it tumbled over a lip of stone under the bridge. On each bank vegetation crowded darkly and Matt would have turned away had the torch beam not sparkled on something at the edge of the water. He leant over the wall, holding the torch at arm's length, wishing the bulb had more power.

There it was again – a bright glint, as of light reflecting from the multifaceted surface of a jewel. Moving the torch from side to side, Matt scanned the surrounding area.

And froze in shock.

The beam, suddenly less than steady, had found the unmistakable outline of a woman's stiletto-heeled evening sandal and, just visible amongst the tangle of plant growth, the long smooth shape of a leg.

'Christ!'

Matt propped the hospital's walking stick against the parapet of the bridge and, using his free hand, retrieved his mobile from an inner pocket and dialled three nines while he flashed the torch to and fro over the side, seeking a way down.

By the time the emergency operator answered, Matt had decided that the left-hand side, with a scattering of saplings to hold onto, looked the better bet.

Cutting through her attempts to follow procedure, Matt gave the operator his location and requested an ambulance before returning the phone to his pocket and beginning the descent.

Climbing over three strands of wire and negotiating a steep slope, thick with vegetation, wouldn't have been easy in daylight and full fitness, but, with an injured ankle and a torch in one hand, it was going to be touch and go whether he reached the bottom on his feet or his backside.

Tripping and scrambling, covered in nettle stings, and with bramble-torn clothes and skin, he did indeed lose his footing, and slid the last three or four feet to land knee-deep in the edge of the river, swearing vociferously as the action jarred his swollen ankle.

The route Matt had chosen landed him on the opposite bank to where the woman was lying, so it was now a case of wading across the remaining six or eight feet of water and climbing out. This, in itself, presented a challenge. In the centre, where the current was relatively strong, the streambed was stony, but Matt dreaded to think what the consultant at the hospital would have said if he'd been witness to the spectacle of his patient plunging his handiwork into the thick, stinking silt near the banks.

Shining the torch into the reeds and brambles ahead of him, Matt scrambled out onto the marshy margin of the river. From here he could see both of the woman's legs, one outstretched, one bent at the knee, and the hem of a dress or skirt riding high over her hips. Chivalrous instinct bade him pull the material down to hide the skimpy white underwear that left little to the imagination, but he resisted the urge, knowing that, if she were dead, and her death was in any way suspicious, the police wouldn't be happy to find that he had tampered with their crime scene.

Treading carefully, he approached, directing the torchlight over the woman's body toward her head. She was lying on her back, with one arm outflung and the other twisted under her, a long glittering earring trailing over her neck and into her blonde hair. A dark smudge of dirt or blood discoloured the skin of her cheek and, catching the light, her eyes gleamed half-open and still. With a sense of disbelief and a sinking heart, Matt recognised her.

It was Jamie's girlfriend, Sophie.