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he had ended. ‘He bore pain and illness with equal fortitude, but the happiest moment of his life came at the end, when his daughter Amber won the Grand National on a little one-eyed mare called Mrs Wilkinson.
    ‘Billy had an equally marvellous little horse called The Bull on whom he’d won a silver medal. “I hope I see The Bull again,” were his last words. I’m sure Billy’s riding The Bull across the clouds. Lucky heaven, to have both of them.’ Bloody mawkish that, Rupert thought wryly.
    The party afterwards, most of which he’d paid for, resulted in him having a blazing row with Billy’s widow Janey, who’d made a drunken and soppy speech, repeatedly quoting the line: ‘That’s the way for Billy and me’, while boasting of the over 3,019 letters of sympathy she had received. She was furious Rupert hadn’t praised her as a wonderful wife.
    ‘You were a fucking awful wife,’ Rupert had snarled back. ‘Billy’d be alive today if he hadn’t been permanently stressed by you squandering his money and fucking other men.’
    This had also resulted in a rare screaming match between Rupert and his wife Taggie, who’d ticked him off before rushing away to comfort Janey.
    Rupert was sure Janey would take the opportunity to solicit an invitation to move back into Lime Tree Cottage, the little seventeenth-century house in Rupert’s woods nearby, which she and Billy had lived in rent-free when they were first married. If Janey returned, Rupert knew she’d be hanging round, playing thegrieving widow, reminding him of Billy for the rest of his life.
    Last night’s row with Taggie had ended up with her sleeping in the spare room and their not speaking all day. He was tempted to ring her in the kitchen and make it up. Instead he poured himself another glass of whisky.
    On the wall opposite were monitors on which he could watch his own horses and the progeny of his stallions and brood mares winning races all over the world. On the left wall, flanked by framed photographs of victorious horses, hung the Stubbs of Rupert Black and Third Leopard, winner of the St Leger and for five years Leading Sire.
    Today there were two ways a horse could become Leading Sire: either if he were the stallion whose offspring had clocked up the most wins in a year, or, more importantly, if those offspring had earned the most prize money. Verdi’s Requiem, a dark-brown Irish Triple Crown winner, had topped the Leading Sire charts for Great Britain and Europe for fifteen years but now, aged twenty-five, his reign must be drawing to a close.
    Opening the
Racing Post
, Rupert noted Bloodstock News had predicted a bloody battle to topple Verdi’s Requiem between Rupert Campbell-Black’s Love Rat and Isa Lovell’s Roberto’s Revenge. Rupert ground his teeth. Isa Lovell, ex-champion jockey and ex-son-in-law, had worked uneasily for Rupert for ten years, learning everything he could about training and breeding before defecting to start his own yard directly in competition with Rupert.
    Even worse, Isa had joined forces with Cosmo Rannaldini, the fiendish little son of Rupert’s arch enemy, the late, great conductor Roberto Rannaldini. Married to Rupert’s first wife Helen, Roberto had not only tried to rape Rupert’s daughter Tabitha, but had managed to batter to death Taggie’s little mongrel Gertrude when she tried to protect Tabitha. In the Campbell-Black canon, it was arguable which was the greater crime.
    Cosmo and Isa were proving maddeningly successful with the progeny of Roberto’s Revenge, particularly with a colt called Feud for Thought, which had just beaten Rupert’s colt Dardanius in the Derby. Cosmo had inherited a great deal of money fromhis father, but he and Isa were spending such a fortune on yearlings and two-year-olds that someone must be bankrolling them. Rupert would kill to stop them beating him to Leading Sire. Love Rat
must
topple Verdi’s Requiem.
    In the still-baking evening, out in the fields he could see