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yard a few months back wearing
cowboy
boots!’ He laughed at the memory. ‘Trying to be young, see? And trying to be rich. It’ll work for a while, I reckon. And then it won’t, and he’ll sell the dressage horses and fire the trainer and the girl will leave him and everyone will get paid. That’s how these things happen.’
    Cooper seemed so affable that Reynolds was confused as to why he was on the list at all.
    ‘Who knows,’ Cooper said with an expansive shrug. ‘Took’s a right paranoid tit.’
     
    *
     
    To the surprise of both Reynolds and Rice, the ninth person on Took’s list was not a creditor. It was Jonas Holly’s elderly neighbour, Mrs Paddon.
    ‘She must be eighty if she’s a day,’ said Rice. ‘How’s she an enemy?’
    ‘He said she was a leader in the campaign to get the local hunt disbanded.’
    ‘Good for her,’ murmured Rice.
    Reynolds remembered Mrs Paddon. A tough old bird. They’d speak to her first thing in the morning; he had no doubt she was an early riser.
    ‘Let me handle the interview,’ he told Rice. He fancied he got on well with old folk. His mother’s friends adored him.
     
    Mrs Paddon didn’t.
    Mrs Paddon was as wary of Rice and Reynolds as if they’d been Jehovah’s Witnesses – only reluctantly opening her door wide enough for them actually to enter her home, instead of conducting the interview on the stone doorstep.
    Inside, the cottage was dark but clean. Every available surface was crammed with nick-nacks. No, not nick-nacks, Rice thought as she looked more closely; nick-nacks implied miscellaneous bad-taste china kittens and Spanish holiday souvenirs. Mrs Paddon’s collection was a more unusual mix of chunky, practical objects and delicate glass animals. Brass barometers and copper kettles towered over dainty fauns and cut-glass hedgehogs. The mantelpiece held a parade of carnival glass ponies and a pickaxe handle. The ornaments gave the room a schizophrenic feel – as if a man and his wife warred constantly over the available space, and yet Mrs Paddon was a spinster, Rice remembered.
    She offered them tea, then warned quickly that she had no milk. ‘Or sugar,’ she added discouragingly.
    ‘We’re fine, thanks,’ said Reynolds. ‘It’s nice to see you again, Mrs Paddon. How have you been?’
    ‘Well enough,’ she said brusquely.
    The old woman had remained standing in the middle of the front room, and did not offer them a seat.
    ‘And Jonas? How’s he now?’
    ‘You’ll have to ask
him
that.’ Mrs Paddon took a string bag from the back of the front door. ‘I was just off to the shop, actually.’
    Reynolds ignored the pointed invitation to leave. ‘We’re here about Jess Took.’
    ‘Oh.’ The old woman seemed a little taken aback, and then her tone softened. ‘Poor child.’
    ‘We asked Mr Took for a list of people who might wish him harm, and we were surprised to find your name on there.’
    Mrs Paddon snorted. ‘I’m not! I certainly
did
wish him harm. Wished he’d fall off his horse into a pond, the fat buffoon.’
    ‘But not any more?’ Rice asked.
    Mrs Paddon waved the very notion away with a flap of her string bag. ‘The Blacklands hunt’s gone. That was all I wanted. Of course, there’s another one, and another one, and another one after that, but we did what we set out to do, and I’m too old to start sabbing all across Britain.’
    ‘Sabbing?’ asked Reynolds.
    ‘Sabotaging. Being a hunt saboteur. You know,’ said Mrs Paddon. ‘Waving banners, blowing whistles, laying false trails.’
    ‘Damaging property, personal injury,’ added Reynolds dryly.
    The string bag flapped again. ‘Oh, I did nothing like that. That’s for young folk and strangers. I just made life difficult for them, that’s all. Made life difficult for
him
. And it worked, and the hunt’s gone and I tell you what, being on that list is a badge of honour, far as I’m concerned.’
    She winked one pale-blue eye at Reynolds, leaving him