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Dammit!

“Here, boy,” I said in as calming a voice as I could muster. “Good boy. Come on.” I held out my hand towards the terrified animal, which tossed his head up and down and neighed loudly. “Good boy,” I repeated as I moved towards where he stood, quivering, by the gate. When I was close enough, I lunged forward and grabbed the reins once more, but not before the horse had neighed loudly a couple of times more.

Had the men heard? Or seen the light?

The light in question was attached to the gable end of a wooden barn and had a motion sensor below it—a security light.

I looked around. We were in a farmyard, with more buildings beyond the barn.

I heard a whizzing sound close to my right.

The sound instantly gave me goose bumps on my arms and made the hairs on my neck stand upright. I knew that noise. I knew it because I’d heard it before in Lichfield Grove. It was the sound of a bullet passing by, and much too close for comfort. A second whizzed past and embedded itself into the wooden planking just a few inches from my face. And I could hear shouting, foreign-language shouting. Time to move, I thought, and quickly.

I pulled the horse forward, and we ran around the corner of the barn and away from the shouting. Another bullet whizzed past me and disappeared into the night.

I had intended leaving the horse tied up somewhere while I made my way to safety on foot, but my plans had just changed. If the men were close enough to shoot at me, they would be close enough to catch me if I was on foot. I needed the speed of the horse to escape.

I put my left foot into the stirrup iron and pulled myself back up onto the saddle, gathered the reins, and set off again. More security lights came on as I cantered the horse through the farmyard, but the horse was happier now with someone on his back and he didn’t react once. We went right across the brightly lit farmyard and then down a long drive that curved away into the darkness. Soon I could see headlights moving quickly from right to left ahead of us, as a car moved along the Winchcombe Road at the end of the drive.

We had now left the security lights well behind, but I had to take a chance in the dark as I kicked the horse forward as fast as I dared.

I neared the road. Which way should I turn?

I knew that I ought to go to the right towards Prestbury village and Cheltenham. I knew it because I should be on my way to the Cheltenham Police Station. I’d be safe there, and DCI Flight would finally get his interview.

I even worked out the best route in my head.

I had grown up in Prestbury and I knew intimately all the shortcuts from there to Cheltenham town center. I had used them either on foot or on my bicycle for half my life. And I knew all the deserted back roads and the quiet way through Pittville Park, past the Pump Room that gave Cheltenham its spa status, across the Tommy Taylor recreation area and down past the allotments off Gardners Lane, where I had often played as a kid with my school friends. Wherever possible, I would keep the horse off the hard surfaces and on the grass, all the way to Swindon Road, not far from the old Cheltenham Maternity Hospital, where, nearly thirty years ago, I had been brought screaming into the world.

I could then trot the horse past the railway station and down the wide tree-lined avenues around Christ Church to my destination on Lansdown Road.

Yes, I thought, I really ought to turn right towards the police station.

Instead, I turned left towards Woodmancote and Claudia.

How could I have been so stupid as to have told Shenington that she had gone to my mother’s? If he had been the one who sent the broken-neck gunman there to kill me, and I had no doubt that it had been, he would know exactly where to find my mother’s cottage. It would only be a matter of time before he worked out that he could get to me by attacking Claudia.

I just hoped I would get there first.

Fortunately, at this time on a wet Wednesday, the road was quiet. Only on