Outside Chance (39 page)

Several more heads turned his way this time, and one animal even started to amble in his direction, trailing a long wisp of hay from its chomping jaws.

‘It's all right. There's nothing to get excited about. Go back to your hay,' Ben told it quietly, as much to reassure himself as the horse.

The horse stopped, ears forward, still chewing. Shame it wasn't the one Ben wanted to examine. He stepped round it and approached the group feeding from the nearest hayrack. Because of the low light and the fact that all the horses had their rumps turned towards him, it was impossible for Ben to see whether his main suspect was amongst the bunch. He was going to have to get closer.
It was nothing short of crazy to consider squeezing between them from behind, so that meant going round and ducking under their necks.

If Ben had allowed himself time to think, he would probably have bottled out there and then, but he didn't, and in a few moments he was beside the end horse, patting its neck and saying with a calm he was far from feeling, ‘All right, lad. Just coming under, OK?'

The horse looked down his long nose at him with mild curiosity and pulled another mouthful of hay from the rack. A rather plain-headed creature, with longish ears; it was, quite patently, not Cajun King. Ben didn't waste any time on it. Pulse rate rocketing, and feeling at once both hot and cold, he ducked under its neck and came up in the gap between it and its neighbour, wincing as the action squeezed his bruised ribs.

This next horse tilted its head, slightly startled, as Ben appeared, but beyond taking half a step backwards, didn't react. Glancing quickly over it, Ben could see from the narrowness of its chest and forehead that this wasn't the horse from the photograph either.

‘All right, lad. Gently.'

Once again, Ben doubled up and slipped under its chin, coming up in the centre of the group of five.

This time he was met with flattened ears and obvious annoyance.

‘It's all right. I'm not going to bother you,' Ben said soothingly. ‘You are a grump, aren't you?'

Thankfully the bad-tempered animal was also
a non-candidate, and before it had time to do more than glower, he'd ducked beneath its neck and moved on.

Here, though, things started to go wrong. The fourth horse in line had obviously been half-asleep and, as Ben materialised beside it, it jumped violently back and whirled away, forcing the next horse to go with it. Startled by each other rather than the man in their midst, two of the others also shied away, cannoning into one another in their haste; for a moment, chaos reigned.

Instinctively, Ben shrank back against the hayrack, holding his breath as the half-ton silhouettes scrambled, pushed and shoved around him in momentary panic. All ten horses were on the move now, and the airy barn was suddenly uncomfortably crowded. Hooves thudded in the peat, which in turn was flung up to shower the walls and Ben, and the strong, musky smell of horse filled the air as they tried to flee but couldn't.

Ben closed his eyes against the terror, counting steadily under his breath to try and keep control.

At ten, he opened his eyes.

The horses had stopped moving and were standing in a semicircle, watching him; one or two of them snorted softly as they stared, goggle-eyed, at the human who had caused their fright.

Ben swore softly. His plan to single out the suspect horse, scan it and follow the troupe to Gyorgy's wagon before he was missed had gone pear-shaped. How long was it going to be before the horses trusted him enough to return to their
hay and let him continue his search? Were it not for the fact that he only had use of the scanner for this one night, he would have given up there and then.

He waited, murmuring soothing words in a shaky, breathy voice, his heart thudding painfully hard and sweat running down his face from his hairline. When this is over, he promised himself, I'll become a motoring journalist, test-driving and rating new cars.

One of the horses, finishing its mouthful of hay, lowered its head and regarded Ben thoughtfully. Then, apparently deciding that he was relatively harmless, it came forward to begin feeding once more, albeit at the other rack. One by one its companions followed, seven crowding in at one feeding station and just three nervously approaching Ben's.

He couldn't tell, after the confusion, whether any of the three were the ones he'd previously discounted, and to help matters along, the moon slipped behind a cloud, leaving the inside of the barn in almost complete darkness.

Cursing, Ben looked up, but with the distorting effect of the layered polycarbonate panels he couldn't tell how big the cloud was. Any moment now, Nico or one of the others might grow curious and come to find him. In the inside pocket of his jacket was a pencil-thin LED torch that emitted a surprisingly powerful beam, but with the horses in their current state of mind he hesitated to use it.

Just as he was beginning to think he'd have to risk the torch, the clouds cleared the moon once
more and vision returned. Crooning softly, Ben pushed himself away from the wall and reached up to rub the neck of the nearest horse. For a fraction of a second it stopped munching, its ears flicking anxiously, but Ben continued his gentle caress and gradually it began to relax.

In view of the wasted time and the increasing likelihood of the return of the two security guards, Ben decided to throw method out of the window in favour of backing a hunch. The way he saw it, the horse Tamás had described as Nico's troublemaker was likely to be one of the leaders of the bunch and, that being so, it seemed likely that it was the one who'd led the others back to their fodder. With that in mind he turned his back on the three closest to him and transferred his attention to those feeding at the second hayrack.

For the first time that night it seemed something was going his way. As he drew closer, he realised that the animal he'd identified as the herd leader was in fact the one nearest to him. He could have cheered.

Unzipping his pocket, he took the scanner out and pressed the large central button to switch it on. With a soft beep, the screen lit up.

Ben knew the worst thing he could do was to let the horse see his fear, so he approached in a manner that he hoped conveyed calm confidence. The animal turned its head, still chewing, then pulled another mouthful of hay. In the gloom, it was difficult to say for sure that it was the horse in the picture but, on the other hand, there was nothing about it that ruled that possibility out.
Ben patted the sleek neck and, encouraged by its relative placidity, decided that the rope halter might not be necessary.

‘Steady lad. Just want to see who you are,' he murmured and, keeping his thumb on the button, he swept the scanner smoothly over the horse's neck from just behind its ears to its withers.

The scanner stayed disappointingly silent.

Ben looked closely at it. The display said
SEARCHING
.

He covered the area again, this time more slowly and zigzagging across the search area, but with the same negative result.

What was he doing wrong? He tried to remember what Penny had told him.

‘The official injection site for horses is on the left side of the neck, halfway between the poll and the withers, one inch below the midline of the mane, into the nuchal ligament.' She'd even showed him on a diagram in one of her veterinary manuals. ‘The microchip has a synthetic membrane around it that adheres to muscle. It's about the size of a grain of rice, injected with a twelve gauge needle and, once in place, it rarely causes any problems at all, although it's not unknown for them to migrate – at least in cats and dogs; I don't know about horses. Anyway, the scanner then picks up the microchip's number, which can be fed into the universal database and used to identify the registered owner, wherever they are in the world.'

Ben scanned the horse a third time, passing the device over an even greater area.

Nothing.

The screen now displayed
NO ID FOUND
and, shortly afterwards, turned itself off, as if to finalise the matter.

The horse had no chip. It couldn't be Cajun King.

Ben wasn't sure whether to be glad or sorry.

Nico's troublemaker swung its head to look at Ben, clearly becoming a little irritated by his odd behaviour and, absent-mindedly, Ben scratched it gently behind the ear, allowing his hand to follow the line of its mane down to the halfway point where the chip should have been. There, just below its crest, his roving fingertips paused as they encountered a thin, scratch-like scab, maybe an inch and a half long. Just as the possible implications of this were seeping into his mind, the barn door rolled back and light flooded in.

FOR A MOMENT,
beyond letting his hand fall away from the horse's neck, Ben didn't move, his mind racing to find the most credible excuse for his presence.

Who had come? And how much had they seen?

He turned, almost casually, hoping beyond hope that he would see one of the security guards. But it was Nico who stood there, with Tamás at his shoulder.

The story about looking for his keys wouldn't explain his being amongst the horses, but even as Ben tried to formulate another Nico pulled the rug from beneath his feet.

‘It's not there, my friend,' he said coolly.

‘I'm sorry?' Ben had slipped the scanner back into his pocket as he turned.

‘The chip. Tamás took it out. That was what you were looking for?' As Nico stepped forward, Miklós and András joined Tamás in the doorway. Gone was the easy camaraderie they had hitherto shared with him; they now appeared to Ben as a
hard-eyed and implacable family unit, and he was very much the outsider.

‘It was.' There was little point in denying it. ‘How did you know I'd be here?'

‘You were different tonight. I could tell something was not right. Then Tamás told me you'd been asking questions. He said he thought he might have given the game away. I didn't want to believe it, but when you didn't come . . .Was that what it was about all along, Ben? Did that bastard Truman send you? I thought you were our friend.'

‘I
am
your friend,' Ben protested. ‘That's why I came myself. Truman knows nothing about it. And you forget, I first came to you before any of this happened.'

One or two of the horses were moving towards the gate now, disturbed by the light and all the people, and perhaps hopeful of titbits. Ben kept ahead of them, reaching the gate just as Nico reached it from the other side. The horses crowded in on each side, jostling him, and Ben began to feel the familiar surging fear.

He put a hand out towards the catch but Nico's hand was there before it, holding the gate shut, and his dark eyes flashed with malice.

‘All these questions, Ben – about Stefan, about the family. This article you pretended you were writing; all lies!'

‘No! Not all lies! There is an article. But what I don't understand is why you agreed to me coming when you knew what you had planned? It was crazy!'

‘No. Because no one should have known about the horse; it was between Truman and me.'

‘And Jakob.'

A frown creased Nico's handsome face.

‘Jakob?'

‘Because of Stefan – I assumed . . .'

‘Jakob knows nothing about it. This was my doing. Mine and my brothers.'

‘And Tamás, and Jeta. Jeta disguised the horse, didn't she?' Ben prompted, trying to subdue the urge to forget pride and scramble out over the gate as three more horses came pushing forward and tempers flared amongst the herd.

‘We are family,' Nico stated.

András stepped closer. ‘The Gadjo has been fooling us all along, Nico, with this fear of the horses. He's been lying to us all.'

Nico looked closely at Ben through narrowed eyes and then shook his head.

‘No, I think not about that.' He took his hand off the gate catch and stepped back and, with that simple act of humanity, unknowingly ensured that Ben would do everything in his power to extricate him from the trouble that was inevitably coming his way.

Closing the gate on the crowding horses, Ben turned to find that he was at the centre of a semicircle formed by Tamás and the Bardu clan. Still wearing the studded black trousers and long boots that were remnants of their show costumes, they looked a bit like the cast of a spaghetti western. Worryingly, András still wore his whip coiled at his hip.

Ignoring the others, Ben looked straight at Nico.

‘Thank you.'

Nico looked away and back again, frustration evident in every fibre of his being.

‘Why would you work for a bastard like Truman, Ben? This is what I do not understand. Do you not know what he's like? Do you not know what he does to people?'

‘I know now, but I didn't. My brother rides for him. He told me about the kidnap and Truman promised me the story if I'd help. I'm a journalist; there's no way I'd pass up a chance like that.'

‘Well, if you care about your brother, tell him to get out before Truman ruins his life, as he did mine – ours, our family's. We Rom have a saying:
O zalzaro khal peski piri
:
Acid corrodes its own container
. Truman is like that with people, everyone around him gets burnt.'

‘And it's corroded you, too,' Ben said. ‘Look what you've done. You've put the whole troupe at risk, your family and your livelihood, for the sake of revenge. What Truman did to Stefan was unforgivable and he shouldn't have got away with it, but that doesn't change the fact that what you've done is against the law and if you get caught – no,
when
you get caught, he'll have won again. Come on, Nico! Loyalty is one thing, but is it really worth it? Do you think Stefan would have wanted you to put all this on the line just for the chance to get back at Truman? It was sixteen years ago, for God's sake! Look at what you have here.'

‘I know it was sixteen years ago.' Nico's eyes sparkled dangerously. ‘Did you think I would have forgotten? How could that be, when every day I am reminded of what he did?'