Tip Off Read Free Page B

overheads – all he needed was his formbook and a telephone; no office and no staff. I guessed, though, that since his recent run of winners, turnover must have trebled at least.
    Â 
    When Lord Tintern showed me out, I got into my Audi outside the Jockey Club and joined the traffic creeping round Portman Square, heading for the M4 to go back to the office.
    My thoughts flitted between interest in the job I’d just been handed and excitement at seeing Emma again for the first time in over a year.
    She’d gone off to the States soon after I’d bought Nester from her, saying she’d be back the following spring. But by autumn, she still hadn’t reappeared; she’d gone to spend most of the winter ski-ing in Colorado. I guessed, reluctantly, that there were other, unstated attractions there for her. I couldn’t blame her for that; I hadn’t told her how much I’d wanted her to stay.
    I had spent most of the two years before that with Laura Trevelyan, who had worked with my sister. Laura was neurotic, quick-witted, and one of the best-looking women on Vogue . But that relationship had ground to an inevitable and uncomfortable halt soon after Emma had left.
    Emma had sent me a few postcards while she was away, asking after Nester and Baltimore and, as an afterthought, me. I’d kept her up to date, but the most recent communication had been at Christmas in which she’d asked only after the horses.
    Now she was coming back.
    Slowing for the perennial hold up on the M4 near Slough, I could summon up a vivid picture of how Emma had looked, fifteen months earlier at Jane’s stables.
    She’d been wearing a pair of cream-coloured, stretch jodhpurs, uninterrupted by any panty lines, and a thin denim shirt, open just far enough to show the top of her lively breasts.
    Her light auburn hair, damp and dishevelled, fell in rat’s tails around a peach-soft face and her large turquoise eyes gleamed with conspiratorial excitement. It would have taken a man of far steelier resolve than I not to fall under her spell. I remembered it as if it were yesterday . . .
    Â 
    It had been a darkening afternoon in November when I’d walked through the broad-arched gatehouse into Jane’s handsome stable-yard.
    â€˜I’m very sorry, Gerald, but there’s absolutely no point in shouting at me.’ I could hear a rare tremor in Jane’s voice. ‘This horse will never race again and that’s all there is to it.’
    â€˜Then you’ll just have to shoot the bloody animal!’ Gerald Tintern wasn’t joking. That much was obvious from the pitch and vindictive edge in his normally mellow voice.
    I’d caught the sharp exchange over the howl of a damp wind which blustered unchecked from Salisbury Plain. Not far short of a gale, it shrieked through the old brick archway.
    I took in the tableau in front of me: a horse as fit and strong as any I’d seen – apart from a bulky dressing around its near forefoot – and three human figures, all apparently oblivious to the vortex of icy air whirling around the enclosed space.
    Instinctively, I changed course, looking for cover from the weather and Lord Tintern’s anger. I knew Jane had seen me, and that she might have valued some moral support, but I kept my eyes down and walked quickly across to the office in one of the near corners of the yard.
    I let myself in. It was another world in here; warm and quiet except for the murmur of a television in the corner. Even the acrid smell of the head lad’s cheap tobacco was welcoming. The sight of Lord Tintern’s daughter with her long legs dangling over the side of an old desk was positively exhilarating.
    â€˜Hi, Si,’ Emma said in her husky, lazy voice, and I grinned back at her, although up until now I’d always hated being called ‘Si’.
    â€˜What’s going on outside?’ I asked. ‘Your father doesn’t sound too