Chapter 1

ON THESE EARLY spring Sundays, there were usually a few visitors who came to the farm at the top of the hill.

Some of them were regulars, horse-lovers and children with carrots and apples and sugar for all the horses, and special snacks for their favourites. Peppermints for Cobbler’s Dream. Soft stale biscuits for Lancelot, who was too old to have much use of his teeth.

Some of the people who came into the yard under the stone archway were strangers who had been driving by, saw the sign, ‘Home of Rest for Horses’, and stopped to see what it was all about.

‘What’s it all about then?’ The two boys who had roared up on a motorbike were not the sort of people who usually came to the farm. Nothing much doing here. Daft really, the whole outfit. ‘What’s it all about?’ The taller boy swaggered across the yard as if he had come to buy the place: cracked leather jacket with half the studs fallen out, cheap shiny boots, long seaweed hair, a scrubby fringe of beard that wouldn’t grow.

‘Saving lives,’ Steve muttered, not loud enough for them to hear. They wouldn’t understand anyway, that kind. Steve went on sweeping the cobbles, his head down dark hair falling into his eyes.

‘Huh?’ The shorter, thicker boy looked as if his mother should have had his adenoids out long ago.

‘Horses that are too old to work, or too badly treated – we give them a good life.’

‘Daft, innit?’ The boys went jeering towards the loose boxes that lined three sides of the yard.

‘Willy. Spot. Ranger. Wonderboy.’ The younger boy, about sixteen, with a stupid hanging lip, spelled out the names above the stable doors, to show he could read. ‘Cobles Dram. Whoever heard of a name like that?’

‘Cobbler’s Dream.’ Callie came out of the stable, where she had been brushing the mud off the chestnut pony, whose favourite rolling places would delight a hippopotamus. ‘And everybody’s heard of him. He was on television. He was in all the newspapers for catching a horse thief.’

‘Thrills.’ When the boy hung his big cropped head and looked up at her with his slow eyes, she thought for a moment she knew him. Where had she seen that broad earthy face with the thick lips hanging open, because he could not breathe through his pudgy nose?

One of the boys threw up a hand and the pony flicked back his ears and jerked his head away.

‘That’s not the way to go up to a horse,’ Callie said. ‘Especially Cobby. He’s half blind.’

‘Don’t tell me about horses,’ the boy grunted. ‘We’ve got dozens of ’em at home.’

‘Bad luck on them.’ Usually Callie was polite to the visitors. Her mother was married to the Colonel, who ran this farm, and Callie loved to take people round the stables or down the muddy track to the fields, and tell them the history of each of the twenty horses, or as much as they would listen to.

But these boys would not listen to any of it. When she started to tell them about Wonderboy, who had been her brother’s famous steeplechaser before he died, and Ranger with the ruined mouth, and Spot, the circus rosinback with the rump as broad as a table, the taller boy said, ‘Oh shut up, you silly kid,’ and the younger one stuck out a boot and tripped Callie up as she turned to go on to the mule’s box.

‘What the hell are you playing at?’ Steve was there in seconds, holding the broom like a weapon, his clear blue eyes hard with anger.

‘Don’t touch me,’ the boy whined, ‘or I’ll call the coppers.’

‘I’ll call them myself if you don’t get out of here.’

‘Can’t wait,’ the older boy said. ‘“Visitors Welcome”, it says on the sign. Some welcome. Come on, Lewis.’

Willy the mule stared sadly over his door, a pocket of air in his lower lip, lop ears sagging. Callie, inspecting her grazed hands for blood and disappointed to find none, yelled after them as they ran under the arch, ‘Don’t bother to come back!’

‘Don’t worry!’ Lewis yelled back over his shoulder. Yes … there was something familiar about him. Where on earth—?

‘Lewis.’ She wiped off her hands on the seat of her patched jeans, as if she were wiping off the disgustingness of Lewis.

‘Louse,’ Steve said.

The motorbike snarled, spat foul smoke and roared away.