Requiem for a Dealer by Jo Bannister Page B

career.
    So Sunday morning came and, as with every Sunday, Paddy was ready for her eleven o’clock lesson by nine-thirty and sitting on the stairs in the hall with her hard hat on by ten. It was a fifteen-minute drive to Cheyne Warren – twenty if they bought ice creams on the way. But by twenty-past ten Brodie could feel her child’s longing like a magnet pulling her towards the front door. She gave in with a sigh, left what she was doing and headed out to the car, Paddy cavorting joyfully around her like a springer spaniel.
    Which is how they came to be at Appletree Farm while Dieter
Townes was still getting his ponies ready.
    Brodie had met him before, when she first went to enquire about lessons, and had exchanged a wave with him across the yard on a number of occasions since. But she hadn’t sat and chatted to him while he brushed mud off half a dozen ponies of assorted sizes, colours and degrees of shagginess, and she found herself enjoying his company.
    At ease in his natural habitat, freed of the need to impress a new customer, he seemed younger than she remembered: a couple of years her junior, she guessed, maybe thirty or thirty-one. He was as tall as her, strongly built and athletic, the muscles of his arms prominent where he pushed the sleeves of his sweatshirt up out of his way. It served to remind her that his was a very physical job: not just riding horses but working with them eight or ten hours a day. Brodie had gone to pick up a bale of hay once, for Paddy to use as a mounting block. She’d been surprised at the weight of the thing. Even the child-sized saddle she used was heavier than seemed necessary, and an uncooperative Shetland pony is stronger than the strongest man. It all helped keep him in shape.
    A shocked little quiver ran through Brodie when she caught herself thinking that. But what the hell: a person’s thoughts are her own, she has nothing to apologise for unless she acts on them when she shouldn’t. And all she was doing, and all she intended to do, was sit on a bench chatting to the man while he worked, and occasionally passing him a tool from his extensive and arcane collection.
    â€˜Can I have the hoof-pick next?’ He had a pleasant, even-tempered voice, without any inflection that would hint at his background. ‘Er – that’s the curry-comb.’
    Brodie tried again, came up with a sweat-scraper. In an agony of embarrassment, Paddy reached into the box on the bench beside her and passed her the required item.
    â€˜I suppose you were born knowing this stuff,’ said Brodie.
    â€˜Not really,’ said Townes. ‘My father was a soldier, my mother’s a teacher. Neither of them had any interest in horses. I don’t know where I got the idea from but I always knew I wanted to ride. Like Paddy.’ He smiled at the little girl, who blushed
with pleasure. ‘By the time I was twelve I knew I wanted to do this for a living.’
    â€˜How long have you had this place?’
    â€˜About four years. Before that I worked in other people’s yards.’
    â€˜Teaching?’
    â€˜Teaching, grooming, schooling, competing – anything I got the chance to do. The scary thing about horses is not how big they are or how fast they can travel: it’s how much there is to learn about them. How easy it is to do the wrong thing. How much it can matter.’
    It wasn’t that she wanted further information on Alison Barker, more that she was enjoying talking to him. Even though she was committed elsewhere, Brodie didn’t begrudge herself a little pleasant conversation with an attractive man. Deacon was many things, some of them quite admirable, but he was nobody’s idea of a conversationalist. ‘Someone was telling me much the same thing the other day. They’d been having all sorts of problems transporting their horses.’
    Townes nodded. ‘Body-brush, please. No, that’s the dandy-brush.