Fifth Victim (11 page)

Any moment now
, I thought cynically,
he’s going to suggest a group hug
.

‘I wouldn’t put that untouchable status to the test as far as she’s concerned, if I were you,’ I said quietly. ‘She’s well protected.’

‘I kinda like
her
, too,’ Torquil said. ‘That was a cool gift.’ And as if to prove it, he reached into a pocket and dragged out the Swiss Army knife Dina had given to him for his birthday. He fingered the engraved casing, looking almost unsure of himself. ‘I thought I might invite her to dinner. As a thank you and an apology. You think she’ll come?’

I thought of Dina’s comment before the party, that Torquil was the price rather than the object of going. It was not part of my job description, I decided, to vet my principal’s choice of date unless they posed an actual threat.

All I said was, ‘A little early in the day for that, isn’t it?’

‘Depends.’ Torquil checked the encrusted Rolex that swamped his wrist. If he ever fell into deep water wearing it, it would pull him to the bottom so fast his eardrums would burst. ‘I know a place does great seafood in Miami,’ he said, almost diffident. ‘And Dad’s just bought a new Lear 85.’

‘Nice choice,’ I said sedately. His expression turned slightly mulish, as if he’d been hoping for more surprised admiration of his father’s executive jet. I put my head on one side, asked in mild tones, ‘How do you live with such certainty? Once you’ve had everything – done everything – how will you even bring yourself to get out of bed in the morning?’

Just for a moment, something flitted across his face. It took me a moment to recognise it as panic and I realised he’d already reached his boredom saturation point. He was a week past his twenty-first birthday.

At that moment, his cellphone began to vibrate and emit the theme from
Mission: Impossible
. Now why didn’t
that
surprise me? Torquil snatched it up immediately.

I tuned out his mumbled phone conversation and watched Dina instead. She was walking Cerdo in a cooling-off circle around her instructor at the far end of the arena. Raleigh was talking animatedly, mainly with his hands, and Dina was nodding seriously, a buzz of excitement about her. At least she hadn’t reached the same plane as Torquil. Not yet.

It was a testament to the newly attained state of relaxation between horse and rider that the sudden clatter of hooves on the concrete yard didn’t startle Cerdo beyond a slight quickening of his stride, a twitch of his ears. But at least he didn’t try to dump his rider again.

A girl on a fine-boned bay Arabian horse arrived from the direction of the cross-country course, both looking hard-ridden. The girl swung down in the yard, where another of Raleigh’s girl groom groupies rushed to take her reins. As the rider removed her crash helmet, I recognised Orlando’s delicate features. She handed over care of her horse without eye contact or a backward glance, and climbed the steps to the café balcony.

There were grass stains on her knee, elbow and shoulder, I saw as she approached. Looked like Dina wasn’t the only one who’d hit the dirt today.

When she saw me sitting with Torquil at the end table, her stride faltered momentarily.

‘Hey, Tor,’ she greeted him stiffly as he finished his call, nodding to me in a vague way that suggested she’d completely forgotten my name. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Came to see what all the fuss was about,’ Torquil said airily. ‘After all, Dad has a couple of horse farms out in Kentucky, so maybe I should give this stuff a try.’

Orlando almost smiled. ‘Your father has thoroughbreds, for racing,’ she chided. ‘They’re not the kinda animals you could learn to horseback-ride on.’

‘I’m a quick study. And how hard can it be?’ Torquil grinned, draining the last of his coffee and getting to his feet, leaving the empty cup on the table. For a moment I harboured the vain hope that he might be leaving, but he merely wandered over to the serving window for another coffee. ‘Get you ladies anything?’

‘Coffee,’ we both said together.

That seemed, if not to break the ice, then certainly to start a thaw. Orlando considered me out of the corner of her eye for a moment, then leant in closer, keeping her voice conspiratorially low. ‘He gives me the creeps.’

I glanced over my shoulder to where Torquil was still at the serving window. I didn’t like to tell her he was growing on me. ‘At least you know they’re the best creeps money can buy.’

She giggled suddenly, hiding her mouth behind her hand like a kid. The gesture seemed to emphasise the anxiety in her eyes. They were an incredible shade of emerald green, I noticed, but then I saw the faint outline around her iris and realised she probably wore tinted contact lenses.

‘What is it?’ I asked gently. ‘What’s scaring you?’

She let her hand drop away, the laughter falling with it. ‘He did this before,’ she said, speaking fast. ‘Tor. He’d just turn up, out of the blue, wherever I went. Like he was following me—’

Over her shoulder, Torquil had finished paying for the coffees, amazing me with the fact he bothered to carry loose change, and was carefully working out how to pick up and carry three cups at once. Judging by the hash he was making of such a simple task, it was a new experience for him. I knew I didn’t have much time.

‘Did this before
what
, Orlando?’

She looked at me, and now I saw a roiling mix of fear and guilt and shame. ‘Before I was kidnapped.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Before I’d time to fully process that information, or even ask Orlando for more, the riding club’s runabout, a GMC pickup, pulled up in the yard and Hunt got out. He appeared up the steps to the balcony, hands casually in the pockets of his chinos. Orlando’s boyfriend was wearing a lightweight tweed jacket over a blue Oxford shirt, and his air of cool polish made Torquil’s pseudo-rapper outfit seem like a child’s fancy dress.

Hunt greeted me with cautious reserve, frowning at Orlando as though he immediately sensed her unease and suspected I might be the cause of it. She gave him a wan smile and he stopped behind her chair to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

‘Charlie,’ he said with a fraction more warmth. ‘How goes it?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Are you into horses, Hunt?’

He gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘I dabble. My family kept quite a string before the anti-hunting lobby had their way and riding to hounds was banned. Damn shame.’

I didn’t point out that it wasn’t following the hounds that people objected to, so much as setting the dogs on errant foxes as the object of the exercise. Still, I was in no position to be squeamish.

Hunt and Torquil were eyeing each other with tolerance rather than friendship, until Hunt asked if that was Torquil’s new Bentley Continental Supersports in the parking lot, and then the two of them segued into a conversation about cars from which Orlando and I were pointedly excluded.

I rapidly tuned out Torquil boasting languidly about his latest toy – a birthday gift from his father. He incorrectly described the Continental’s six-litre engine as a V12 when I knew for a fact Bentley used a W12 configuration. I’d always been more of a motorcycle nut than a car nut, but it was hard not to pick up the specs of high-performance luxury cars in this job.

In the arena, Dina and Raleigh were now ambling in our direction, the lesson over. I made my excuses and headed down the wooden steps into the yard, just as Raleigh opened the gate and Cerdo’s hooves rang on the concrete.

Dina flashed me a wide smile as they halted. She patted the horse’s damp neck with gusto, and I guessed that my advice to settle him down before she tried again might just have improved relations between us.

Raleigh took the horse’s bridle as she dismounted, but as soon as Dina’s feet hit the ground, her right knee buckled under her and, if the burly instructor hadn’t been right alongside her with a steadying arm, she might have fallen.

‘Dina! You OK?’ He handed off Cerdo onto the girl groom who had been walking Geronimo round. By the time he turned back, I was already putting my arm around Dina.

‘Lean on me,’ I told her. ‘We’ll find you a chair.’

‘Out of the way, Pom,’ Raleigh said with a wink, brushing me aside. ‘This is man’s work.’ And with that he swung Dina into his arms and carried her lightly up the steps to the café balcony, leaving me biting my tongue as I trailed on his heels. Torquil, Orlando and Hunt immediately crowded round us.

Raleigh deposited his pupil onto the nearest chair and crouched in front of her, noting the smudge of dirt on the knee of her jodhpurs. ‘Must have clobbered it on something when you came off,’ he said. There was a hint of strain to his reassuring smile, as if he were worried about being sued if she was injured on his watch.

I flipped out my cellphone. As a matter of routine, I had already input the numbers for the Willners’ personal doctor and dentist, as well as all the major local hospitals and trauma centres. Dina put up a staying hand before I could hit speed dial for any of them.

‘I’m fine, really,’ she said. ‘Please don’t fuss. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve fallen off of a horse. My knee’s been aching some, but I just wasn’t expecting it to give out on me like that.’

‘You need to rest up,’ Raleigh told her, his hand still on her leg. ‘Why don’t you leave the horses here tonight, see how you go? You can always run over tomorrow and pick them up.’

Dina shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she reiterated doggedly. ‘I’d rather take them home. Charlie and I can manage, if you’ll help us load them into the trailer?’

Raleigh bounded to his feet. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the girls untack them and give you a shout when they’re ready to go.’

‘So, your horse threw you?’ Torquil asked, and I realised that incident must have taken place before his arrival. ‘You gonna get rid of it?’

‘Of course not,’ Dina said, and it was a toss-up which of them looked the more astonished.

‘Orlando took a tumble, too,’ Hunt pointed out. ‘All part of the game, eh?’

‘What did you do every time you fell on your backside when you were out snowboarding, Tor?’ Orlando asked in a wry voice. ‘Sack the mountain?’

‘Only if I’d bought it first.’ He gave a sigh. ‘I guess that dinner in Miami will just have to wait,’ he grumbled, returning to his original seat and slumping into it. Anyone would have thought that Dina had damaged her leg with the sole intention of spoiling his plans. Not that he’d actually asked her out – or that she’d accepted – but he seemed to have taken it as read.

The girl groom who’d been walking Orlando’s little Arabian horse round, meanwhile, called up that she seemed to have gone lame in her off foreleg.

‘Aw, crap,’ Orlando said. She glanced at Hunt. ‘I told you she dropped a leg coming out of the water.’

‘Hmm, I may need to pop over and do some minor repairs to a few of the cross-country fences for you at some point,’ Hunt said, smiling apologetically at Raleigh. ‘For such a little thing, that pony of Orlando’s does tend to go through them as much as she goes over them.’

‘The ground staff will be laying new sod around some of the fences where the ground’s gotten a little churned up, so the course will be out of action for a couple of days next week,’ Raleigh said, frowning. ‘There’s no need for you to get your hands dirty, though. They’ll fix anything that’s busted.’

‘I’d feel better about it,’ Hunt insisted with a disarming smile. ‘Like replacing your divots on a golf course.’

Raleigh made a ‘no sweat’ kind of a gesture and Hunt nodded to him before following Orlando to see to her horse.

Dina put her foot up onto a chair and the café provided a bag of ice wrapped in a cloth to deal with any swelling in her knee. Raleigh hovered, giving her a running list of advice for recovery. There was some horse-related event coming up that he was trying to persuade her to enter with Cerdo, I gathered. ‘You gotta be fighting fit for that,’ he warned. ‘But it’s still a few weeks away. You’ll be OK.’

Dina did not look reassured on any level. ‘Look, Raleigh, I’m still not sure we’re ready for this—’

‘Rubbish, Dina! You could do it in your sleep. Just look at how well he went today. That horse could be a champion.’

‘Yeah,’ she muttered, ‘
after
he’d thrown me in the dirt.’

A look of frustration crossed Raleigh’s features, but he seemed to realise that arguing further right now would just make her more stubborn. He got easily to his feet. ‘Well, think about it, OK?’ he said, more neutral, and glanced down as one of the girls waved to him from the yard. ‘I think we’re all set.’

I wondered about Raleigh’s attitude, just a tad. What did he hope to gain by forcing Dina to enter a competition she didn’t feel ready for – other than possibly more fees for intensive tuition on the run-up?

And I wondered about the possible connections, too. The kidnap victims might have been taken by someone who knew them. But Manda Dempsey had shown no interest in ponies when I’d been working for the family, and Benedict Benelli seemed more likely to bet on a horse than climb onto its back. I shrugged. Maybe I was just getting paranoid.

Dina refused to be carried back down the steps and insisted that she would lead her horse out to where the trailer was parked. Raleigh walked slowly alongside her, eyes on her face as if ready to sweep her off her feet the moment he saw she was in pain. I followed with Geronimo, who obviously realised we were going home and strode out briskly by my shoulder, barging me when I tried to slow him down.

I spotted Torquil’s huge gold-coloured Bentley sitting in splendid isolation off to one side of the riding club’s parking lot. Through the heavily tinted glass I could just make out the figure of one of his bodyguards in the passenger seat.

Dina’s trailer was parked, still hitched to the tow bar of the Navigator, in the middle of the lot, in a line of similar vehicles. I saw nothing amiss as we approached, stopping about four metres away.

‘You sure you’re OK?’ Raleigh asked Dina. ‘I’ll lower the ramp and walk Cerdo up for you.’

‘Thanks, Raleigh,’ she said with a sideways glance towards me as I brought Geronimo up alongside her. ‘Nice to have two guardian angels today.’