The Danger

'Andrew? Call for you from Bologna. I'll put it through to your room.'

I dumped the coffee and picked up the receiver, and a voice said 'Andrew? This is Enrico Pucinelli.'

We exchanged hellos, and he began talking excitedly, the words running together in my ear.

'Enrico,' I shouted. 'Stop. Speak slowly. I can't understand you.'

'Hah.' He sighed audibly and began to speak clearly and distinctly, as to a child. 'The young one of the kidnappers has been talking. He is afraid of being sent to prison for life, so he is trying to make bargains. He has told us where Signorina Cenci was taken after the kidnap.'

'Terrific,' I said warmly. 'Well done.'

Pucinelli coughed modestly, but I guessed it had been a triumph of interrogation.

'We have been to the house. It is in a suburb of Bologna, middle-class, very quiet. We have found it was rented by a father with three grown sons.' He clicked his tongue disgustedly. 'All of the neighbours saw men going in and out, but so far no one would know them again.'

I smiled to myself. Putting the finger on a kidnapper was apt to be unhealthy anywhere.

The house has furniture belonging to the owner, but we have looked carefully, and in one room on the upper floor all the marks where the furniture has stood on the carpet for a long time are in slightly different places.' He stopped and said anxiously, 'Do you understand, Andrew?'

'Yes,' I said. 'All the furniture had been moved.'

'Correct.' He was relieved. 'The bed, a heavy chest, a wardrobe, a bookcase. All moved. The room is big, more than big enough for the tent, and there is nothing to see from the window except a garden and trees. No one could see into the room from outside.'

'And have you found anything useful… any clues in the rest of the house?'

'We are looking. We went to the house for the first time yesterday. I thought you would like to know.'

'You're quite right. Great news.'

'Signorina Cenci, he said, 'has she thought of anything else?'

'Not yet.'

'Give her my respects.

'Yes,' I said. 'I will indeed.'

'I will telephone again,' he said. 'I will reverse the charges again, shall I, like you said? As this is private, between you and me, and I am telephoning from my own house?'

'Every time,' I said.

He said goodbye with deserved satisfaction, and I added a note of what he'd said to my report.

By Thursday morning I was back in Lambourn, chiefly for the lists of music, and I found I had arrived just as a string of Popsy's horses were setting out for exercise. Over her jeans and shirt Popsy wore another padded waistcoat, bright pink this time, seeming not to notice that it was a warm day in July; and her fluffy grey-white hair haloed her big head like a private cumulus cloud.

She was on her feet in the stable-yard surrounded by scrunching skittering quadrupeds, and she beckoned when she saw me, with a huge sweep of her arm. Trying not to look nervous and obviously not succeeding, I dodged a few all-too-mobile half-tons of muscle and made it to her side.

The green eyes looked at me slantwise, smiling, 'Not used to them, are you?'

'Er…' I said. 'No.'

'Want to see them on the gallops?'

'Yes, please.' I looked round at the riders, hoping to see Alessia among them, but without result.

The apparently disorganised throng suddenly moved off towards the road in one orderly line, and Popsy jerked her head for me to follow her into the kitchen; and at the table in there, coffee cup in hand, sat Alessia.

She still looked pale, but perhaps now only in contrast to the outdoor health of Popsy, and she still looked thin, without strength. Her smile when she saw me started in the eyes and then curved to the pink lipstick; an uncomplicated welcome of friendship.

'Andrew's coming up on the Downs to see the schooling,' Popsy said.

'Great.'

'You're not riding?' I asked Alessia.

'No… I… anyway, Popsy's horses are jumpers.'

Popsy made a face as if to say that wasn't a satisfactory reason for not riding them, but passed no other comment. She and I talked for a while about things in general and Alessia said not much.

We all three sat on the front seat of a dusty Land Rover while Popsy drove with more verve than caution out of Lambourn and along a side road and finally up a bumpy track to open stretches of grassland.

Away on the horizon the rolling terrain melted into blue haze, and under our feet, as we stepped from the Land Rover, the close turf had been mown to two inches. Except for a bird call or two in the distance there was a gentle enveloping silence, which was in itself extraordinary. No drone of aeroplanes, no clamour of voices, no hum of faraway traffic. Just wide air and warm sunlight and the faint rustle from one's own clothes.

'You like it, don't you?' observed Popsy, watching my face.

I nodded.

'You should be up here in January with the wind howling across. Though mind you, it's beautiful even when you're freezing.'

She scanned a nearby valley with a hand shading her eyes. 'The horses will be coming up from there at half-speed canter,' she said. 'They'll pass us here. Then we'll follow them up in the Land Rover to the schooling fences,'

I nodded again, not reckoning I'd know a half-speed canter from a slow waltz, but in fact when the row of horses appeared like black dots from the valley I soon saw what speed she meant. She watched with concentration through large binoculars as the dots became shapes and the shapes flying horses, lowering the glasses only when the string of ten went past, still one behind the other so that she had a clear view of each. She pursed her mouth but seemed otherwise not too displeased, and we were soon careering along in their wake, jerking to a stop over the brow of the hill and disembarking to find the horses circling with tossing heads and puffing breath.

'See those fences over there?' said Popsy, pointing to isolated limber and brushwood obstacles looking like refugees from a racecourse. 'Those are schooling fences. To teach the horses how to jump.' She peered into my face, and I nodded. 'The set on this side, they're hurdles. The far ones are… er… fences. For steeplechasers.' I nodded again. 'From the start of the schooling ground up to here there are six hurdles - and six fences - so you can give a horse a good work-out if you want to, but today I'm sending my lot over these top four only, as they're not fully fit.'

She left us abruptly and strode over to her excited four-legged family, and Alessia with affection said, 'She's a good trainer. She can see when a horse isn't feeling right, even if there's nothing obviously wrong. When she walks into the yard all the horses instantly know she's there. You see all the heads come out, like a chorus.'

Popsy was despatching three of the horses towards the lower end of the schooling ground. 'Those three will come up over the hurdles,' Alessia said. "Then those riders will change onto three more horses and start again.'

I was surprised. 'Don't all of the riders jump?' I asked.

'Most of them don't ride well enough to teach. Of those three doing the schooling, two are professional jockeys and the third is Popsy's best lad.'

Popsy stood beside us, binoculars ready, as the three horses came up over the hurdles. Except for a ratatatat at the hurdles themselves it was all very quiet, mostly, I realised, because there was no broadcast commentary as on television, but partly also because of the Doppler effect. The horses seemed to be making far more noise once they were past and going away.

Popsy muttered unintelligibly under her breath and Alessia said ' Borodino jumped well,' in the sort of encouraging voice which meant the other two hadn't.

We all waited while the three schooling riders changed horses and set off again down the incline to the starting point -and I felt Alessia suddenly stir beside me and take a bottomless breath - moving from there into a small, restless, aimless circle. Popsy glanced at her but said nothing, and after a while Alessia stopped her circling and said, 'Tomorrow…'