'You're crazy,' he said loudly. 'You're ruining the stable. I won't have it. I won't have it, do you hear?'

He glared at me. A hot amber glare, not a cold black one. It made a change.

'I'll send Tommy Hoylake to see you,' I said. 'You can ask him what he thinks.'

Three days before the racing season started I walked into the office at two-thirty to see if Margaret wanted me to sign any letters before she left to collect her children, and found Alessandro in there with her, sitting on the edge of her desk. He was wearing a navy-black track suit and heavy white running shoes, and his black hair had crisped into curls from the dampness of his own sweat.

She was looking up at him with obvious arousal, her face slightly flushed as if someone had given all her senses a friction rub.

She caught sight of me before he did, as he had his back to the door. She looked away from him in confusion, and he turned to see who had disturbed them.

There was a smile on the thin sallow face. A real smile, warm and uncomplicated, wrinkling the skin round the eyes and lifting the upper lip to show good teeth. For two seconds I saw an Alessandro I wouldn't have guessed existed, and then the light went out inside and the facial muscles gradually reshaped themselves into the familiar lines of wariness and annoyance.

He slid his slight weight to the ground and wiped away with a thumb some of the sweat which stood out on his forehead and trickled down in front of his ears.

'I want to know what horses I am going to ride this week at Doncaster,' he said. 'Now that the season is starting, you can give me horses to race.'

Margaret looked at him in astonishment, for he had sounded very much the boss. I answered him in a manner and tone carefully lacking in both apology and aggression.

'We have only one entry at Doncaster, which is Pease Pudding in the Lincoln on Saturday, and Tommy Hoylake rides it,' I said. 'And the reason we have only one entry,' I went straight on, as I saw the anger stoking up at what he believed to be a blocking movement on my part, 'is that my father was involved in a motor accident the week these entries should have been made, and they were never sent in.'

'Oh,' he said blankly.

'Still,' I said, 'it would be a good idea for you to go every day to the races, to see what goes on, so that you don't make any crashing mistakes next week.'

I didn't add that I intended to do the same myself. It never did to show all your weaknesses to the opposition.

'You can start on Pullitzer on Wednesday at Catterick,' I said. 'And after that, it's up to you.'

There was a flash of menace in the black eyes.

'No,' he said, a bite in his voice. 'It's up to my father.'

He turned abruptly on one toe and without looking back trotted out of the office into the yard, swerved left and set off at a steady jog up the drive towards Bury Road. We watched him through the window, Margaret with a smile tinged with puzzlement and I with more apprehension than I liked.

'He ran all the way to the Boy's Grave and back,' she said. 'He says he weighed six stone twelve before he set off today, and he's lost twenty-two pounds since he came here. That sounds an awful lot, doesn't it? Twenty-two pounds, for someone as small as him.'

'Severe,' I said, nodding.

'He's strong, though. Like wire.'

'You like him,' I said, making it hover on the edge of a question.

She gave me a quick glance. 'He's interesting.'

I slouched into the swivel chair and read through the letters she pushed across to me. All of them in economic, good English, perfectly typed.

'If we win the Lincoln,' I said, 'You can have a raise.'

'Thanks very much.' A touch of irony. 'I hear the Sporting Life doesn't think much of my chances.'

I signed three of the letters and started reading the fourth. 'Does Alessandro often call in?' I asked casually.

'First time he's done it.'

'What did he want?' I asked.

'I don't think he wanted anything, particularly. He said he was going past, and just came in.'

'What did you talk about?'

She looked surprised at the question but answered without comment.

'I asked him if he liked the Forbury Inn and he said he did, it was much more comfortable than a house his father had rented on the outskirts of Cambridge. He said anyway his father had given up that house now and gone back home to do some business.' She paused thinking back, the memory of his company making her eyes smile, and I reflected that the house at Cambridge must have been where the rubber-faces took me, and that there was now no point in speculating more about it.

'I asked him if he had always liked riding horses and he said yes, and I asked him what his ambitions were and he said to win the Derby and be Champion Jockey, and I said that there wasn't an apprentice born who didn't want that.'

I turned my head to glance at her. 'He said he wanted to be Champion Jockey?'

That's right.'

I stared gloomily down at my shoes. The skirmish had been a battle, the battle was in danger of becoming war, and now it looked as if hostilities could crackle on for months. Escalation seemed to be setting in in a big way.

'Did he,' I asked, 'Ask you anything?'

'No. At least- yes, I suppose he did.' She seemed surprised, thinking about it.

'What?'

'He asked if you or your father owned any of the horses- I told him your father had half shares in some of them, and he said did he own any of them outright. I said Buckram was the only one- and he said-' She frowned, concentrating, 'He said he supposed it would be insured like the others, and I said it wasn't, actually, because Mr Griffon had cut back on his premiums this year, so he'd better be extra careful with it on the roads-' She suddenly sounded anxious. 'There wasn't any harm in telling him, was there? I mean, I didn't think there was anything secret about Mr Griffon owning Buckram.'

'There isn't,' I said comfortingly. 'It runs in his name, for a start. It's public knowledge, that he owns it.'

She looked relieved and the lingering smile crept back round her eyes, and I didn't tell her that it was the bit about insurance that I found disturbing.

One of the firms I had advised in their troubles were assemblers of electronic equipment. Since they had in fact reorganised themselves from top to bottom and were now delighting their shareholders, I rang up their chief executive and asked for help for myself.

Urgently, I said. In fact, today. And it was half past three already.

A sharp 'phew' followed by some tongue clicking, and the offer came. If I would drive towards Coventry, their Mr Wallis would meet me at Kettering. He would bring what I wanted with him, and explain how I was to install it, and would that do?

It would do very well indeed, I said: and did the chief executive happen to be in need of half a racehorse?

He laughed. On the salary cut I had persuaded him to take? I must be joking, he said.

Our Mr Wallis, all of nineteen, met me in a business-like truck and blinded me with science. He repeated the instructions clearly and twice, and then obviously doubted whether I could carry them out. To him the vagaries of the photoelectric effect were home ground, but he also realised that to the average fool they were not. He went over it again to make sure I understood.

'What is your position with the firm?' I asked in the end.

'Deputy Sales Manager,' he said happily, 'And they tell me I have you to thank.'

I quite easily, after the lecture, installed the early warning system at Rowley Lodge: basically a photoelectric cell linked to an alarm buzzer. After dark, when everything was quiet, I hid the necessary ultra-violet light source in the flowering plant in a tub which stood against the end wall of the four outside boxes, and the cell itself I camouflaged in a rose bush outside the office window. The cable from this led through the office window, across the lobby and into the owners' room, with a switch box handy to the sofa.