Twice Shy

'You can't manage that brute on your own.' He shook his head. 'How long do you mean to keep him?'

'Until I find a man called Pitts.' I explained to him and Cassie what I wanted to do and why, and Bananas sighed and said it seemed fairly sensible in the circs, and that he would help where he could.

We shoe-horned Cassie gently into my car and I drove her to Cambridge while Bananas in his effective way set himself to tidy the sitting-room. There wasn't a great deal one could do at that point about the splintered and unclosable front door, and he promised to stay in the cottage until we got back.

In the event it was only I who returned. I sat with Cassie through the long wait in the silent hospital while they tried to find someone to X-ray her arm, but it seemed that after midnight the radiology department was firmly shut, with all the radiologists asleep in their own homes, and only the direst surgical emergency would recall them.

Cassie was given a careful splint from shoulder to fingernails and also another pain-killer and a bed: and when I kissed her and left she said, 'Don't forget to feed the bull,' which the nurses put down to drug-induced light-headedness.

Bananas was asleep when I got back, flat out on the sofa and dreaming I dare say of palm trees. The mess I'd left behind was miraculously cleared with every broken fragment out of sight. There were many things missing but overall it looked more like a room the owners would recognise. Gratefully I went quietly into the kitchen and found my barricade altered and strengthened with four planks which had been lying in the garage, the door now wedged shut from top to bottom.

The light switch was up. Except for whatever dim rays were crawling through the ventilation holes, Angelo was lying in the dark.

Although I'd been quiet I'd woken Bananas, who was sitting up pinching the bridge of his nose and blinking heavy eyelids open and shut.

'All the pieces are in the garage,' he said. 'Not in the dustbin. I reckoned you might need them, one way or another.'

'You're great,' I said. 'Did Angelo try to get out?'

Bananas made a face. 'He's a horrible man, that.'

'You talked to him?'

'He was shouting through the door that you'd stopped his circulation by tying his wrists too tight. I went to see, but you hadn't, his fingers were pink. He was halfway up the stairs and he tried to knock me over. Tried to sweep my legs from under me and make me fall. God knows what he thought it would achieve.'

'Probably to scare me into letting him go.'

Bananas scratched himself around the ribs. 'I came up into the kitchen and shut the door on him, and switched his light off, and he went on howling for ages about what he'd do to you when he got out.'

Keeping his courage up, I thought.

I looked at my watch. Five o'clock. Soon be light. Soon be Friday with all its problems. 'I guess,' I said yawning, 'that a couple of hours shut-eye would do no harm.'

'And that one?' He jerked his head towards the kitchen.

'He won't suffocate.'

'You're a revelation to me,' Bananas said.

I grinned at him and I think he thought me as ruthless as our visitor. But he was wrong. I was fairly sure that Angelo that night had come back to kill, to finish off what he had earlier started, knowing by then who I was and not expecting a Cassie. I was soft compared with him.

Bananas walked home to his dishwasher and I took his place on the sofa, feeling the bedroom too far away out of touch. Despite the hectic night I went to sleep immediately and woke with mind-protesting reluctance to switch off the alarm clock at seven o'clock. The horses would be working on the Heath. Simpson Shell had set up a trial of two late-developing three-year-olds, and if I wasn't there to watch he'd be writing to Luke Houston to say I was a shirker… and I wanted anyway, Angelo or no Angelo, to see how those horses went.

I loved the Heath in the early mornings with the manes blowing under the wide skies. My affection for horses was so deep and went back so far that I couldn't imagine life without them. They were a friendly foreign nation living in our land, letting their human neighbours tend them and feed them, accepting them as servants as much as masters. Fast, fascinating, essentially untamed, they were my landscape, my old shoes, the place to where my heart returned, as necessary to me as the sea to sailors.

Even on that morning they lifted my spirits and I watched the trial with a concentration Angelo couldn't disrupt. One of the three-year-olds finished most decisively fast and Simpson said with careful civility that he hoped I would report to Luke how well the colt was looking.

'I'll tell Luke you've done wonders with him. Remember how unbalanced he looked in May? He'll win next week, don't you think?'

He gave me the usual ambivalent stare, needing my approbation but hating it. I smiled internally and left him to drive the short distance to where Mort was directing his string.

'All OK?' I asked.