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one of the good ones who wouldn’t reappear in court some day.
    If he had lied about how he’d got here, he could have lied about anything.
    Conor leant back and took a long sip of his wine. ‘Ah, let it go, Natasha. Some desperate kid managed to avoid being sent back to some plague-infested hell-hole. So what? Move on.’
    Even when he was dealing with the most high-profile cases, Conor had a deceptively sanguine air, beaming outside court, glad-handing, as if it was of no consequence to him whether he won or not. He patted his pockets. ‘Will you get me another? I’ve got to nip to the cashpoint.’
    She checked in her bag for her wallet and found her fingers entangled in something. She pulled it out. It was the little amulet, the roughened silver horse, that Ahmadi had given her on the morning she had won his case. She had resolved to send it to his home – he had too few possessions to give anything away – and had promptly forgotten. Now it was a reminder of how she had failed. Suddenly she remembered the unlikely vision of that morning, an unearthly apparition in urban surroundings.
    ‘Conor – I saw the strangest thing this morning.’
    The train had stopped for fifteen minutes in a tunnel outside Liverpool Street station, just long enough for the temperature to rise to a point at which people shifted restlessly in their seats and a low murmur of discontent rippled along the train. Just long enough for Natasha, shielded from telephone calls now, to stare out at the inky nothingness and think about an ex-husband who wasn’t yet ex enough.
    She had shifted slightly on her feet as, with a harsh squeal of overheated metal, the train edged forward and out into daylight. She wouldn’t think about Mac. She wouldn’t think about Ali Ahmadi, who had proven so depressingly removed from the person he had presented to her.
    And it was at that moment she saw it, so fast, so unlikely, that even as she cricked her neck to look back, she wasn’t sure she had registered it correctly. Gone in a flash, swallowed by the blurred streets and backyards, grimy balconies and lead-specked lines of laundry.
    But the image had stayed with her all day, long after the train had carried her towards the hazy centre of the City. In a quiet cobbled street squeezed between high-rise blocks, flanked by lorry yards and parked cars a young girl had stood, her arm raised, a long stick in her hand – not in threat but instruction.
    Above her, in the middle of the road, perfectly balanced on glossy, muscular haunches, a huge horse reared.
    Natasha dropped the silver pendant into her bag, barely suppressing a shiver. ‘Did you hear what I just said?’
    ‘Mm?’ He was reading the newspaper. He had already lost interest. Move on, he always told her. As if he ever could.
    She stared at him. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and get the drinks.’

Two
     
    ‘See to it that the colt be kind, used to the hand and fond of men . . . he is generally made so at home.’
     
    Xenophon, On Horsemanship
     
    Boo was not a horse you might usually find in the back-street yards of East London. He was neither a heavy, feather-legged dray nor a ewe-necked thoroughbred pacer, the kind backed rapidly into a sulky so that illegal races could take place on the dual-carriageway, trotting their way into private record books and prompting the transfer of thick wads of illegal betting cash. He was not a well-mannered riding-school hack from Hyde Park or one of the many varieties of short, stout pony, black and white or mulish, which tolerated, with varying degrees of good humour, being ridden down steps, scrambled over beer barrels, or taken into lifts so that, with shrieks of laughter, their owners might canter along the balconies of their blocks of flats.
    Boo was a Selle Français, a large-boned thoroughbred, his legs sturdier and his back stronger than that breed might suggest. He was athletic but sure-footed. His short-coupled back made him good at