The Horse Dancer Page 4

  'Oh, yes.' She stretched out her arms, letting her face fall briefly on to the desk. Then she reached over and picked at an almond croissant. 'My man there. I'm wondering if I should tell Richard.'

  'Our senior partner? Oh, nonononono! No need for a hair shirt, Hotshot.'

  'It's a pretty serious crime.'

  'And one you could not have predicted. Let it go, Natasha. All part of the job, sweetheart. You know that.'

  'I do. It's just that it's . . . so grim. And he was . . .' She shook her head, remembering. 'I don't know. He just didn't seem the type.'

  'Didn't seem the type.' Conor actually laughed.

  'Well, he didn't.' She took a swig of cold coffee. 'I just don't like having been part of something so awful. I can't help feeling responsible.'

  'What? You forced him to attack the girl?'

  'You know that's not what I meant. I put up a good case for him to stay in the country. I'm responsible for him being here.'

  'Because nobody else could have made that happen, could they?'

  'Well . . .'

  'Get over yourself, Natasha.' Conor tapped the file. 'If Ravi had been here it would have been him. Let it go. Move on. I'll see you for a quick drink tonight. Are we still on? Fancy the Archery? They've started doing tapas, you know.'

  But Natasha had only ever been good at giving advice, not taking it. Later that day she found herself opening Ahmadi's file for a second time, searching for clues, some reason why this boy, who had cried, had held her hands so gently, had been capable of such a random act of violence. It didn't make sense. 'Ben? I need you to find me an atlas.'

  'An atlas?'

  He had found one within twenty minutes, scuffed and fabric-bound, the spine missing in patches. 'It's probably very much out of date. It has - ah - references to Persia and Bombay,' he said apologetically. 'You might do better looking up whatever you need on the web. I could do it for you.'

  'I'm a Luddite, Ben,' she said, flicking through the pages, 'you know that. I need to see it on paper.'

  Almost on a whim, she'd decided to look up where the boy had come from; the name of the town had stuck in her mind.

  It was then, as she stared at the map, tracing the names of the places with a finger, that she realised none of the care workers, the legal team, his foster-mother had asked Ali Ahmadi the obvious question. But there it was - staring up at her: how could anyone walk nine hundred miles in thirteen days?

  That evening Natasha sat in the bar and cursed herself for not being thorough. She told Conor the story, and he laughed, a short, wry laugh, then shrugged. 'You know these kids are desperate,' he said. 'They tell you what they think you want to hear.'

  She saw them every day, refugees, 'problem' children, young people who were displaced or neglected, teenagers who had never known a word of praise or a supportive embrace, their faces prematurely hardened, their minds already hard-wired to survival at any cost. She believed she could usually tell the ones who were lying: the girls who claimed their parents were abusive because they no longer wanted to live at home; the asylum-seekers who swore they were eleven or twelve, even when you could make out the thick stubble of adulthood on their cheeks. She was used to seeing the same young offenders, in an endless cycle of misbehaviour and alleged repentance. But she had been moved by Ahmadi.

  Conor gave her his full attention. 'Okay. Are you sure you got the place right?'

  'It's in the statements.' She asked a passing waiter for mineral water.

  'And he really couldn't have walked that far?'

  'In less than two weeks?' Her voice was sarcastic. She couldn't help it. 'Seventy miles a day. I calculated it.'

  'I don't know why you're so upset. You're protected by privilege. You knew nothing of this while you were representing him, so what does it matter? You don't have to say anything. You don't have to do anything. Hell, it happens to me all the time. I have to tell half my clients to shut up at first meeting before they tell me something I'm not supposed to hear.'

  But if she had checked his story herself, Natasha wanted to say, she might have guessed earlier on that Ahmadi was lying. She might have excused herself from the case - cited 'embarrassment'. That was often enough to get people looking at the facts a little harder. She could have saved that woman, that unknown sales assistant, 26. But she had skimmed the notes. And she had let the boy go, allowed him to disappear between the cracks of London's landscape, assuming that he was 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 Francais, 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 jumping and his sweet, almost doglike, nature made him tolerant and friendly. He was unfazed by the heaviest traffic, and a fool for company. He was also easily bored, and Papa had hung so many balls from ropes in his stable to entertain him that Cowboy John would mutter that the old man must be trying to get him a place in the basketball leagues.

  The other kids at Sarah's school or on the estate got their highs in little paper wraps or plastic bags, skidding stolen cars around shrinking patches of wasteland or spending hours dressing up like celebrities, studying their magazines with far more attentiveness than they ever did their schoolbooks. She didn't care about any of it. From the moment Sarah put on the saddle and breathed in the familiar scent of warm horse and clean leather, she forgot everything else.

  Riding Boo lifted her away from everything that was annoying and grubby and depressing. It helped her forget that she was the skinniest girl in her class, and the only one with little justifiable reason to wear a bra, that only she - and Renee, the Turkish girl nobody spoke to - didn't have a mobile phone or a computer. She forgot that it was just her and Papa.

  This was what she felt for her horse on their good days: awe at his majesty, the sheer power beneath her, and what he would do for her. He behaved badly only when she failed to ask him properly - her mind still lodged in school, or thirst, or tiredness - and the sweetness that radiated from him when they got it right brought a lump to her throat. Boo was hers, and he was special.

  Papa told people who didn't know about horses that he was like a Rolls-Royce after a tractor: everything was finely tuned, responsive, elegant. You communicated quietly, rather than flapping and shouting. You achieved a communion of minds, of wills. She asked Boo: he collected himself, his quarters gathering under him, his great head dropping into his chest, and he gave. His only limits, said Papa, were Sarah's limits. He said Boo had the biggest heart of any horse he had ever known.

  It hadn't always been like that: Sarah had two moon-shaped scars on her arm from where he had bitten her, and when they had broken him there had been days when he would snap off the lunge rein and go tearing across the park, his tail up like a banner, while the mothers shrieked and bolted with their prams and Papa prayed aloud in French that he wouldn't hit a car. Papa told her every time that it was her fault, to the point at which she wanted to scream at him, but now she knew a little more and understood that he had been right.

  Horses, perhaps more so than any other creature, were made by man. They might be naturally spooky, or fearful, or bolshy, but their reactions to their world were shaped entirely by what was done to them. A child would give you a second chance because it hoped to be loved. A dog would return to you slavishly, even after you'd beaten it. A horse would never let you - or anyone else - near him again. So Papa never shouted at him. He never lost his temper, or got frustrated, even when it was clear that Boo was being as mischievous or unruly as any teenager.

  And now he was eight years old, grown. He was educated enough to have manners, clever enough that his paces floated, elegant enough, if Papa had judged this as correctly as he seemed to judge everything else, to carry Sarah away from this chaotic city and on to her future.

  Cowboy John leant on his broom and looked through the gates at the park where the girl was making the horse canter small, steady circles in the corner by the trees, slowing occasionally to praise him or let him stretch out. She wasn't wearing a hat - a rare act of rebellion against her grandfather, who would not allow her so much as sit on that horse without one - and the sun gleamed off her hair as brightly as it did the horse's quarters. He saw the postman cycle past, yelling something to her as he went, and she lifted a hand in greeting, her face still turned to what she was doing.

  She was a good kid, not like a lot who came here. They would race their horses on empty streets till their hooves cracked, slinging them back in their stables, sweaty and overwrought, before they ran home, promising that their mums or dads would be along with the rent money the very next day. They would cheek the adults, spend their feed money on cigarettes, which he confiscated when they were in the yard. 'I couldn't care jack about your lungs. But I ain't about watching my old boys git barbecued,' he would say. This was usually accompanied by a meditative pull on his own cigarette. The last packet he had taken had come from a kid of no more than eight.

  He doubted Sarah Lachapelle had smoked a cigarette in her life. The Captain kept her on as tight a rein as he kept that horse: no playing out late, no drinking, no smoking, no hanging about on street corners. The girl never seemed to chafe against it. It was like he'd trained her too.

  Not like her mother.

  Cowboy John removed his hat and wiped his forehead, already feeling the heat of the day seep through the battered leather into his skin. Maltese Sal had assured him that if he took over the lease the Captain's horse would be safe here, as would that of anyone else who was not in arrears. The place would remain as it had been for forty years, a stables.

  'I need a base,' he kept saying to John. 'This is near my home. My horses are comfortable here.' He spoke as if it was already decided. And this ramshackle old yard would be a useful front for whatever you buy and sell, John wanted to answer him, but you didn't say that to a man like Sal. Especially when he was offering the kind of money he was suggesting.

  Truth was, Cowboy John was tired. He quite fancied the idea of retiring to the country, swapping his house for a little cottage with a plot of land his horses could graze on. City life was getting uglier and he was getting older, tired of fighting the council, tired of picking up the broken bottles that the drunks and idiots threw over the gates every night for the animals to cut themselves on. He was tired of arguing with kids who didn't want to pay what they owed. Increasingly, he could picture himself sitting on a porch somewhere, looking at a horizon that was a single line of green.

  Sal would keep it as a yard. And he was talking a good sum of money, money enough for John to make his dream reality. But still . . . Despite the money, despite the lure of peace, of watching his old boys swish their tails in the long grass, part of him was reluctant to let it go to that man. He had a sneaking feeling that Sal's promises carried all the weight of diddly-squat.

  'Bon anniversaire!'

  Sarah, fiddling to get the key out of the lock, stepped into their flat and heard her grandfather's voice before she saw him. She smiled. 'Merci!'

  She had thought he might have laid the kitchen table with a birthday cake, as he had the previous year, but instead she walked down the hall to find him standing in front of the television. 'Voila! Sit, sit,' he instructed, having kissed her on both cheeks. He was wearing his best tie.

  She peered at the little kitchen table. 'We're not having tea?'

  'Pizza. Afterwards. You choose,' he said, pointing to a menu. Takeaway was a rare treat.

  'After what?'

  She put down her bag and sat on the sofa, feeling a jolt of excitement. Papa seemed so pleased, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. She couldn't remember the last time he had looked like this. Since Nana had died four years ago, he had retreated into himself, emerging only when Boo arrived. She knew he loved her, but his love was not the kind you saw on television: he didn't tell her he loved her, didn't ask what was on her mind. He made sure she was fed, washed and up to date with her homework. He taught her practical stuff, about money, mending things and horsemanship. Between them they had long since mastered the washing-machine, the housekeeping and the cheapest way to do a weekly shop. If she was sad, he would lay a hand on her shoulder, perhaps tell her to keep a perspective. If she was giddy with excitement he would wait until she had calmed down. If she did wrong, he made his displeasure known with a certain curtness, a disapproving glance. In short, he probably treated her a little like he treated a horse
.

  'First,' he said, 'we are going to watch something.'

  She followed his gaze, seeing now the DVD player that had not been there when she had left that morning. 'You bought me a DVD player?' She knelt down and ran a finger across its shiny metallic surface.

  'It's not new,' he said apologetically, 'but it is parfait. And it is not stolen. I bought it from the house clearance.'

  'We can watch anything?' she exclaimed. She would be able to rent films like the other girls at school did. She was always years behind when anyone talked about movies.

  'Not just anything. We are going to see un spectacle. But first . . .' He reached behind him to a bottle, opened it with a flourish and poured. 'Fourteen, eh? Old enough for some wine.' He nodded as he handed it to her.

  She took a sip, trying not to look as unimpressed as she felt by the sour taste. She would have preferred Diet Coke, but didn't feel she could spoil the moment by asking.

  Apparently satisfied, he adjusted his spectacles, peered at the remote control and, with a hint of flamboyance that suggested he had practised this earlier in the day, pressed a button. The television screen flickered into life and he settled into the sofa beside her, still upright despite the collapsing cushions. He took a sip of his wine. She glimpsed his look of quiet pleasure and leant against him.

  The music began, classical music, and a white horse pranced across the screen.

  'Is it . . . ?'

  'Le Cadre Noir,' he confirmed. 'Now you will see what we are aiming for.'

  Even those people who knew about horses had rarely heard of Le Cadre Noir. It was an arcane organisation of elite French riders that had existed since the 1700s, and still did in a form recognisable to its originators, an academy at which debate might revolve around the exact angle of a horse's hind legs when it performed the thousand-year-old manoeuvres of croupade, or levade, and the riders wore an ancient black uniform. It admitted no more than one or two new members a year, and aimed not to make money, or to bestow its skills and knowledge on the masses, but to pursue excellence in things that most people could not even see. If you knew this you might question the point of it, yet nobody who saw those horses moving beneath their sombre riders, lined up in perfect symmetry or defying gravity with astonishing leaps, could watch their strange, dancing steps, the muscular acceptance of their riders' wishes, without being profoundly moved by their obedience, their beauty, their astonishing agility. And perhaps, even if you did not particularly like horses - or the French - you would feel glad that such an organisation still existed.