I was sitting at the kitchen table in Oliver’s house as Kate tended to the cut on my ear.
‘This really needs a stitch or two,’ she said, washing away the dried blood. ‘How did you do it?’
I explained to her that Momentum had kicked me and it didn’t take her long to realise how close I had come to having something far more serious than a cut ear.
‘Why did you get on him?’ Oliver asked.
‘Self-preservation,’ I said. ‘It was the only place he couldn’t kick or bite me.’
I recounted the entire saga to them from the time I’d received the message in the hotel until the moment they had found me.
Kate’s eyes grew wider and wider as I described my attempts to get up on Momentum’s back.
‘But I didn’t send you any message,’ Oliver moaned.
‘Somebody did,’ Kate said.
I smiled at her. ‘So what brought you here?’
‘I tried to call you to say goodnight but you weren’t answering your phone, in spite of the fact that I knew it was ringing because it didn’t go straight to voicemail. So I called you on the hotel landline but you didn’t answer that either.’
She smiled. ‘I was worried, so I badgered the hotel’s night receptionist into going to your room to check you were still alive. I had visions of you having slipped in the shower and lying injured on the bathroom floor desperate for help.’
I squeezed her hand.
‘Anyway, the receptionist called me back from your room to say you weren’t there but your phone was. And there was also a message lying on the bed from someone called Oliver asking you to go immediately to the old yard. So I called Mr Chadwick.’
‘I told her I had no idea what she was talking about,’ Oliver said, looking rather sheepish. ‘In fact, I may have been a bit rude to her. Sorry about that. But it was well past my bedtime. I told her to stop fussing and go to sleep.’
‘Which, of course, I didn’t,’ Kate said proudly. ‘In the end I drove over here and banged on Oliver’s door until he answered. Then I insisted we take a look.’
I checked my watch.
It was past midnight. I’d been in that stable with the mad horse for almost two hours.
‘Thank you,’ I said, meaning it. ‘You probably saved my life.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Oliver with a laugh. ‘Momentum’s an old softy, really.’
I stared at him.
Had he really done it after all? Just to frighten me?
At Kate’s insistence, we spent the next couple of hours in the Casualty department of Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge for me to have my right ear stitched.
‘I’m sure it doesn’t need it,’ I’d said to her but, as Oliver had discovered earlier, there were times when Kate wouldn’t take no for an answer.
She drove me to the hospital in her Mini.
‘Aren’t you going to call the police?’ she said on the way. ‘This must constitute assault at the very least.’
‘Probably attempted murder.’
‘Well then. Shouldn’t you tell someone?’
I’d already thought about that.
It wasn’t as if I’d been badly hurt, so how much effort would the police actually take in trying to find out who had done it? I’d also have to admit to them that I’d been foolish enough to walk straight into a trap.
But it did clearly show one thing.
Someone thought that I was getting a bit too close to the truth for comfort.
‘How did this happen?’ the doctor at the hospital asked as he picked and prodded at my ear, making it even more sore than it had been before.
‘I was kicked by a horse,’ I said, although I don’t think he really believed me.
‘What were you doing?’ he asked. ‘Lying down?’
‘Something like that,’ I said, without going into details.
In the end, he put four small stitches in my ear lobe, an anti-tetanus jab in my arm, a couple of painkiller tablets in my stomach, and told me to be more careful in future around horses.
I assured him that I would.
Next Kate drove us to Six Mile Bottom and I stayed with her after all, getting to bed just before three in the morning. But, unlike my host, I didn’t go straight to sleep.
For a start, my ear throbbed badly in spite of the painkillers, but mostly it was because I carried on with the mental exercise that I had been engaged in when on the horse in the stable, which had been interrupted by my rescue.
I went through the rest of the week piece by piece, trying to find the elusive missing clue to what the hell was going on.
It had to be there somewhere.
Kate dropped me at the Bedford Lodge at eight-thirty on her way into work.
‘Now be careful,’ she said as I climbed out of the Mini. ‘No more visiting lonely stables at night.’
I laughed and promised to be more vigilant. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
She drove away and I watched her go with what was becoming an all too familiar ache in my heart.
Pull yourself together, I said to myself. You’ll be seeing her again later.
As I walked into the hotel, the receptionist gave me a very strange look before rushing towards me from behind her desk.
‘Ah, Mr Foster,’ she said almost breathlessly. ‘There you are. We’ve been so worried about you. Very worried indeed.’
‘Have you?’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘Because you didn’t return last night. Someone called us last evening and was very insistent that something terrible must have happened to you.’
That would have been Kate.
Perhaps we should have rung the hotel to let them know that all was well.
‘The night staff were most concerned. When you hadn’t come back by six o’clock this morning, I’m afraid they called the police,’ she said. ‘In fact, a detective is in your room right now. He arrived here about ten minutes ago.’ She suddenly looked troubled. ‘I hope it’s all right that I let him in.’
‘Perfectly fine,’ I said, smiling at her. If Kate hadn’t been so determined, even to the point of driving over at midnight and banging on Oliver’s front door, I might have still been in the stable with Momentum. It was good to know that there was someone else looking out for me as well.
To my surprise, the detective searching my room was DCI Eastwood.
He seemed quite surprised to see me too, or maybe he was just cross at having had his limited resources wasted, yet again.
‘I didn’t realise that chief inspectors investigated missing persons,’ I said.
‘Where have you been?’ he asked accusingly, sounding awfully like my father.
‘Six Mile Bottom.’ I said it with a smile. I still found the name funny.
‘But you were checked in here.’
‘So,’ I said. ‘Is there a law that says you have to sleep in a hotel room just because you’re paying for it?’
‘Don’t play silly games with me, Mr Foster,’ he said. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I told you. I was in Six Mile Bottom.’
‘You check in to this hotel at 10 p. m. Then, five minutes later, you walk out alone — no phone, no coat, no bag. A hysterical female then calls here saying you have gone missing and she is so seriously concerned for your welfare that she convinces the hotel to mount an unsuccessful search not only of your bedroom but also of the rest of the building. You do not return all night and the staff are so worried that they finally call the police. And now, you claim you spent the night safe and well in Six Mile Bottom with no washbag, no change of clothes, nothing?’
‘Yes,’ I said. Although safe and well was a relative term — my ear was still throbbing rather badly.