‘I do,’ he said bluntly. ‘And I do realize that it would quite likely mean that you wouldn’t have a horse with me again.’

‘But what would we do with him?’ I asked forlornly.

‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ he said, ‘but I am in need of a new hack. And that’s not, I promise, the reason I think you should retire Sandeman.’

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But what about old Debenture?’

Debenture had been Paul’s hack for almost as long as I could remember and Paul rode him up to the gallops every morning to watch his horses work.

‘He’s too old now,’ said Paul. ‘It’s time to put him out to grass. Every time I’ve got on him recently I’ve feared he’s about to collapse under me.’

‘So you’d replace him with Sandeman?’ I asked.

‘I would like to, if Sandeman recovers sufficiently,’ he said. ‘And I think he probably will, if his progress so far is anything to go by.’

‘Well, I suppose that would be fine by me,’ I said. ‘But can he go on living in this stable?’

‘Geoffrey, you are far too sentimental,’ he said, laughing. ‘No way. He’ll have to live in the dog kennel.’ He laughed loudly, mostly at my expense. ‘Of course he can stay here and Kit will continue to look after him.’

‘Can I still ride him?’ I asked.

‘Geoffrey,’ he said laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘You don’t want to ride him as a hack. I would simply walk him through the village at the head of the string and then I’d sit on him as I watched the other horses, before he walked back here. If you really want to ride out, you can ride one of the others.’

‘Do you mean that?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Of course I do,’ he said. ‘And I won’t even make you pay training fees for the privilege. Come any time you like, as long as you stay reasonably fit, and light. I won’t let you if you go over twelve stone.’

‘I have absolutely no intention of doing that,’ I said.

‘That’s what all those fat ex-jockeys said.’ He laughed.

Sandeman finished his lunch and came over to the stable door for another apple from my pocket. I rubbed his ears and massaged his neck. If only he could talk, I thought yet again, he could tell me what he wanted.

‘Well, old boy,’ I said to him. ‘Seems like you and I have run our last race. Welcome to old age.’

‘We’ll look after him,’ said Paul, stroking Sandeman’s nose.

I didn’t doubt it, but somehow this felt like a defining moment in my life. Gone, abruptly and unexpectedly, were the days of excitement and adrenalin that I had coveted for so long. My racing days had been what I had lived for. When one was past, I spent my time working but with half an eye on the calendar to show me when I was next due to weigh out and hear the familiar call for ‘jockeys’. But suddenly, this minute, I was no longer an injured jockey on the road to recovery and my next ride. I had become, here and now, an ex-jockey, and I was very aware of having lost something. There was an emptiness in me as if a part of my soul had been surgically excised.

‘Are you OK?’ said Paul, as if he, too, was aware of the significance of the moment.

‘Fine,’ I said to him with a smile. But I wasn’t really fine. Inside I was hurting.

‘You’ll just have to get a new hobby,’ Paul said.

But riding races had never felt like a hobby to me. It had been what I had lived for, especially these past seven years. It really was time to get a new life, and now I didn’t have any choice in the matter.

I stayed for a leisurely lunch with Paul and Laura and then Bob drove me further west to Uffington and the Radcliffe Foaling Centre. I had called ahead and spoken to the manager, Larry Clayton, who seemed bored with his job and quite keen to show a visitor around the place.

The tyres of the Mercedes crunched over the gravel as we drove slowly up the driveway and pulled up in front of a new looking red-brick single-storey building to the side of the main house. ‘Visitors Report Here’ ordered a smartly painted notice stuck into the grass verge. So I did.

‘It’s very quiet at this time of the year,’ said Larry Clayton as we sat in his office. ‘Most of the mares and foals are gone by now.’

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘Back to their owners for the summer, most of them,’ he said. ‘Some have gone to Ireland. A few of the mares have gone back into training. I don’t really know.’ And it sounded like he didn’t really care.

‘So when’s your busy time?’ I asked.

‘January to April,’ he said. ‘That’s when most of them are born. Absolutely crazy here in February and March. Foals dropping every five minutes.’

‘How many?’ I asked.

‘Too many,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘About a hundred, and they want to double that next year.’

‘Is that more than in the past?’ I said.

‘Dunno,’ he said putting his feet up on his desk. ‘My first year here. But I think it must be. The Radcliffes built more foaling boxes last summer, and these offices. I think it was pretty small fry before then.’

I looked at his feet on the desk. He was wearing badly scuffed cowboy boots under tight blue jeans with a check-pattern open-necked shirt. I wondered if the Radcliffes knew that their manager was so casual with their guests. I had picked up some of their marketing material stacked upright in a rack in the reception area on my way in. It was a well produced large glossy brochure with plenty of impressive facts and figures about the equine care provided for the expectant mothers, and a smiling picture on the front of Roger and Deborah Radcliffe standing together next to some mares and foals in a paddock.

‘Are they at home?’ I asked Larry, indicating the picture. ‘I didn’t get an answer on their home phone when I called them yesterday.’

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘They are in Kentucky for the sales and the Derby. Not back until next week.’

‘Can I have a look round?’ I asked.

‘Sure,’ he said, lifting both his feet together off the desk. ‘Not much to see.’

We walked around the new complex of foaling boxes and other stalls, each angle covered by a closed-circuit television camera.

‘How many staff do you have?’ I asked.

‘About a dozen in the high season but only a couple now,’ he said. ‘We have an onsite delivery team who are on constant standby when we’re foaling. But they’ve gone now. We only have a few horses here at the moment and they mostly belong to the Radcliffes. Two of them are mares that dropped in early March and their foals will be fully weaned by the end of July, ready for the sales.’

We walked past the rows of deserted stables and looked into the new foaling boxes. They had hard concrete floors devoid of the soft cushion of straw that would be laid down for the arrival of a new foal, possibly a new superstar like Peninsula.

‘Where was Peninsula foaled?’ I asked.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Here somewhere. But lots has changed.’

‘Do you know if the stud groom still works here?’ I asked. ‘The one who helped with Peninsula.’

‘No idea,’ he said again. ‘Do you know who it was? Stud grooms come and go round here like wet Sundays.’

‘Have you ever heard of anyone called Julian Trent?’ I asked him.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Should I?’

I decided that it really hadn’t been a very helpful excursion. In fact, the whole day had been rather disappointing so far from start to finish. I could only hope that it would get better.

Bob dropped me back at Ranelagh Avenue around quarter to eight and, in spite of the bright spring evening light, I asked him to wait while I made it up the steps to the front door and then safely inside it.

But he had driven away before I realized that there was something very wrong. I was about half-way up the stairs when I first heard the sound of running water where there shouldn’t have been.

It was running through the light fitting in the ceiling of my sitting room onto the floor below. It wasn’t just a trickle, more of a torrent. And that wasn’t the only problem. My home had been well and truly trashed.