Score!

‘Come on, Tab, everyone’s waiting,’ chided Dizzy, giving her a leg up.

Rozzy rushed forward to give her boots a last polish, Griselda tucked in her shirt and smoothed down her breeches. René took the shine off her nose with a powder brush.

‘Your collar’s sticking up, Tab,’ cried out Simone.

‘A little piece of hair’s come loose from your toggle,’ cried Rozzy.

‘Oh, fuck off, the lot of you,’ screamed Tab.

‘Cool it, Tab,’ yelled Ricky France-Lynch.

‘Please don’t shout,’ grumbled Dommie Carlisle, ‘I’ve got a bloody awful headache. Shouldn’t have spent last night shagging someone called Pissy or Cushy.’

Ogborne revved up the car. Valentin in the passenger seat could see through his long lens the players shouting at each other, the ponies’ legs a jumble against the pink faces and pretty clothes of the excited crowd. Rannaldini’s overture was echoing round the field.

‘Quiet, please, everyone,’ yelled Bernard. ‘We’re turning over.’

Clocking the loathing on Baby’s face, Tab panicked.

He’s going to kill me, she thought, but it was too late.

As Ogborne trod on the accelerator Tristan, in the back of the car, had shouted, ‘Action’.

Ricky France-Lynch stroked the ball to Baby, who hit it perfectly, galloping after it towards goal. Too fast, thought Rupert, in sudden terror, as Tab came thundering in at an angle to push him off the ball. But Baby’s pony held firm, and dapple-grey and chestnut shoulders met in a shunt so forceful it took both horses off the ground in a cloud of dust, but gave Tab the slight advantage to stroke the ball back up-field to safety.

‘Wonderful,’ breathed Tristan. ‘Keep rolling.’

But as Tab leant over, putting her whole weight on her right stirrup to take the backhand, the leather gave way like a broken arm. There was no way she could save herself. She was toppling over. Next moment the ground came hurtling up to meet her.

The crowd gave a collective scream of horror.

Fuck, I wonder if we’ve shot enough, Tristan was horrified to find himself thinking, particularly when Tab remained in a huddled heap.

The Ghost was running around trailing his reins. Ambulances and police cars were careering across the field. Baby was instantly off his pony, pleading as he knelt down beside Tab.

‘Oh, angel, I’m sorry, please be OK.’

But Tab didn’t move, whiter than the burning sun above. From the horrible angle of her head to her body, Baby knew she had broken her neck.

Rupert, who’d vaulted on to someone’s pony, beat the police cars and ambulances. ‘Turn that fucking music off! Why’d you have to hit her so hard?’ he yelled at Baby. Then, catching sight of his motionless daughter, he dropped to his knees beside her. ‘Oh, my Christ.’

Her stirrup, with its broken leather, was still attached to her foot.

Driving back with Alpheus’s suit, taking a short-cut through one of George’s side gates, Wolfie heard a wail of sirens. Through a screen of hogweed, blond grasses and mauve willowherb, he saw an ambulance belting towards the main gates.

Abandoning the Lamborghini in the gateway to the field where all the unit was parked, he tore after the ambulance, which was temporarily trapped behind a hay lorry.

‘Who is it?’ he begged a cameraman running in the other direction.

‘Campbell-Black’s daughter. Looks nasty.’

Catching up with the ambulance, Wolfie drummed his fists frenziedly on the back door until it opened a fraction.

‘You can’t come in,’ said an ambulance man, putting his head out.

‘I bloody can. What’s the matter with her?’

‘Are you a relative?’

‘Brother,’ gasped Wolfie.

Seeing his blond hair and normally ruddy face now as white as Tab’s, they allowed him in, then were slightly startled when he began gabbling away in German, beseeching Tab to live.

78

Wolfie was magnificent. He comforted and found cups of tea for his sobbing stepmother and, later, for a stunned, horrified Taggie. He conjured up a large whisky for Rupert and, by acting as mediator, defused the situation when Rupert’s explosions of rage looked like antagonizing the hospital staff.

He also remained icily calm when the specialist listed the terrible alternatives so he could translate the details — albeit watered down — to the others, who were too shocked to take them in.

Tab had been rushed into Intensive Care, where X-rays had mercifully ruled out a broken neck or a fractured skull. But they would have to watch out she didn’t develop a subdural oedema.

‘What the fuck’s that? Can’t you speak English?’

The specialist’s lips tightened. ‘A blood clot inside the cavity of the brain, Mr Campbell-Black. We’ll keep examining her pupils for signs of bleeding under the skull.’

‘And if you find them?’ Wolfie’s voice shook only slightly.

‘We’ll whizz her straight off to a neuro-surgeon and drill straight through the skull.’

Helen’s sobs redoubled.

‘She’ll be all right.’ Wolfie put an arm round her shoulders.

‘How d’you fucking know?’ snapped Rupert. ‘And how long before we find out?’

Du lieber Gott, beseeched Wolfie, for the thousandth time, don’t extinguish something so vibrant and lovely.