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for you.’
    Daniel laughed. Mary Walbrook raised a surprised eyebrow. Chastened, he explained. ‘I have a friend who does the same sort of thing. Not with horses but just about everything else. She calls her business Looking For Something? and uses exactly the same sales-pitch.’
    â€˜That’s because it’s true.’ Mary pulled out of the car park and onto the ring road. ‘The average person wanting to buy a riding horse will travel a thousand miles to look at half a dozen. There’ll be something wrong with five of them. None of them will match the advertised description. The 16.2 warmblood will be a 15.3 Thoroughbred ex-hurdler with no mouth that won’t go anywhere on its own. The nine-year-old all-rounder will be fifteen with spavins and navicular disease. The promising new – comer, potential in any sphere, needs bringing on, will have been overworked and overfaced before it was six and now needs
a JCB to shove it into a ring.’
    Daniel smiled. ‘You exaggerate.’
    â€˜Not even slightly,’ said the woman. ‘In fact, there’ll be things wrong with the sixth horse too, but after the other five he’ll look great and you’ll heave a sigh of relief. You’ll ride him round a couple of times, and when he doesn’t try to hang you in a tree and the vet says he’s got the right number of lungs you’ll hand over your hard-earned cash and think you’ve done pretty well. The likelihood is, though, he’ll have problems that either limit what you can do with him or mean he’ll be on the market again within a year. He might be a good enough horse, just not right for you. He might be a nice horse but not up to the standard you want to compete at. Or he might be monster once he’s taken away from a yard where it habitually took three professionals to get the tack on and sedatives to get him shod.’
    â€˜That happens?’ asked Daniel, shocked.
    â€˜All the time. There are a lot more ways of getting this wrong than getting it right. And it matters. More than buying the wrong car or even the wrong house. You don’t just stand to lose money on the wrong horse – it can kill you. You buy through me and it’ll cost you more but you’ll end up with an animal that’s suitable for the job you want it to do. Long term it’ll save you money. And you’ll have a lot more fun with it.’
    Daniel thought it was probably good advice though there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance he’d ever have a use for it. Paddy’s riding school pony came up to his hip and was rarely caught with both eyes open, and even it made him nervous. But then, he was a mathematician. If you could plot all the world’s pleasures on a graph, horses with their mad brains, lightning reactions and iron-clad extremities would come at one end and numbers weaving pretty patterns on a page at the other.
    He said, ‘What happened to Alison’s father?’
    The woman must have decided to answer his questions. ‘I told you: we had a run of bad luck. We thought we were going to the wall. Only while I was working my butt off and calling in every favour I was owed, and asking people who didn’t owe me a thing to let me owe them for a bit, Stanley was drowning his sorrows. First he drowned them in whisky, then he walked down
our back field and drowned them in the water jump.’
    Daniel recognised that her flippancy was a defence against the brutal reality. ‘Suicide?’
    She shrugged. ‘He might just have stumbled around until he fell in and been too drunk to climb out again so the police called it an accidental death. Ally didn’t believe that either. She didn’t want to believe that it was Stanley’s own actions which led to his death and the business going into free fall. She still believes he’d have fought for it – for her – to his last breath.’
    â€˜But you