The Pleasures of Spring (8 page)

‘He can make his own mistakes …’

Roz glared at him. ‘Look, he’s my dad. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t make sure he was safe. He’s all the family I have.’

Frankie said slowly, ‘He’s not, you know.’

What the hell was he saying? ‘If you think I’m going cap in hand to those fucking O’Sullivans, you can think again.’ She got up, planning to go to bed.

He grinned, all teeth and charm. ‘No, that’s not what I was thinking. How would you feel about pulling off the hustle of a lifetime?’

Roz sat down again. ‘Tell me more.’

‘That’s my girl.’ Frankie topped up her glass of wine. ‘It’s going to be the perfect scam. No one gets hurt, and only the greedy get burnt.’

She grunted. ‘No hustle would work if people weren’t greedy. It’s next to impossible to scam an honest person.’

Frankie nodded. They both knew that ninety per cent of all cons depended on someone trying to take advantage of someone else or get something for nothing.

‘This is a good one. You know that Tim O’Sullivan is a big racing buff?’

Roz shook her head. She hated the O’Sullivans; she couldn’t bear to read about them or listen when they were on the news. She wouldn’t even fly O’Sullivan Air. Every piece of extravagance was a bigger contrast to her poverty. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, he is. He has a stable of racing horses and every year he enters the Gold Cup at Cheltenham. I’ve talked to a few people in his yard, and they all say he would pay any money to win. It would mean more to him than winning the Grand National or Ascot.’

Roz knew nothing about horses. They were a rich man’s toy. She’d never even had a dog when she was growing up and had to make do with making pets of the feral cats wherever she happened to be living at the time. The final straw had been hearing that her twin Sinead had won some sort of pony competition. Sinead got a fucking pony of her own, and Roz had a three legged cat who scratched her when she tried to pet it.

‘Go on,’ she told Frankie. The idea of rooking Tim O’Sullivan was gaining appeal.

‘I want to show you something.’ Frankie gave her a hand to get to her feet. Roz blinked; her legs were unusually wobbly. It had been a long day.

She followed him to the tent where the horses were kept. ‘The castle stables haven’t been restored yet,’ he told her. ‘They’re full of rubble and mice.’

Roz shuddered. Maybe it was all the disgusting places she had ended up living with her father, but mice and spiders freaked her. She much preferred the large tent which contained about twenty horses.

The three horses at the end had big stalls and were clearly the stars. ‘Those ones are specially trained, they do the stunts,’ Frankie said. ‘The one I’m interested in is over here.’

There, in stall seventeen, was a large horse. In spite of a couple of night lights, it was too dim for Roz to make out what colour the horse was, but he was dark, maybe black or brown. He poked his nose out when they approached.

Frankie slipped inside the stall, pulling her with him. The horse snuffled at him before turning his attention to Roz.

She shrank back against the wooden wall. This horse was huge, and smelled, and had feet the size of dinner plates. He sniffed at her, then whickered, the sound shockingly loud, and revealing teeth like tent pegs. ‘Frankie,’ she said, panicked.

He was busy taking something out of his pocket, but looked up. ‘Don’t pay any attention, he won’t hurt you.’

Easy for him to say. She glared at his back. He wasn’t the one being poked in the chest by a head the size of a turkey.

‘Here, hold him still for me.’ Without waiting for her to agree, Frankie clipped a rope onto the leather halter the horse wore on his head, and put it into her hands. He got busy rubbing the front of the horse’s head with what smelled a lot like henna. He worked from between his eyes to the long nose.

‘What do you think of Nagsy?’ he asked her, still working away.

Roz had a death grip on the rope, and no idea what she would do if the stupid horse moved in any way. ‘Nagsy? What sort of a name is that?’

Frankie shrugged. ‘It’s as good as any other. Until we re-name him.’

She was going to kill him. If that monster of a horse didn’t kill her first. ‘Frankie, if you don’t tell me why we’re here, I’m going to let him trample on top of you.’

He put away the brush he had been using on Nagsy’s head. ‘This, dear Roz, is the key to scamming Tim O’Sullivan out of half a million.’

‘Are you mad?’ Roz looked up at the horse. Interested brown eyes looked back at her. She supposed as horses went, this one was pretty enough. But it was only a horse. She wouldn’t have paid a fiver for it.

‘He belongs to a local farmer who’s been riding him around the fields and to the pub. He’s a nice horse. But the most interesting thing about him,’ and Frankie lowered his voice, ‘is that this horse is the spitting image of Shergar.’

‘Who?’

He glared at her. ‘Only the most famous Irish horse
that ever lived. He won the Epsom Derby by the longest margin in history, and was kidnapped from a stud in Kildare two years later. No one ever found out what happened to him. But if we could produce the Son of Shergar, we could sell it to Tim O’Sullivan for whatever price we named.’

For a moment, she was tempted. But a horse? She couldn’t cope with horses. And she didn’t want to get close to the O’Sullivans. She shook her head. ‘Sorry Frankie. Good luck if you do, but this one is not for me. I’ll sort something else out for Dad.’

‘I can’t do this on my own,’ he said.

‘Dad’s in jail. I’m lucky I’m not. We can’t do this, it’s too risky.’ She put the rope into Frankie’s hand and let herself out of Nagsy’s stall.

Was it her imagination that the horse sneered at her? She didn’t care.

Andy wanted to throw his phone at the wall in frustration. It wasn’t her pert ass that upset him. That had been a sight for sore eyes. But she had been devious enough to un-tag the photograph before she sent it. Now, he had no idea where she was. He had thought he was being clever when he had sent her a photo of his abs. A flirtatious gesture like that sometimes caught women off guard and they forgot to take proper security measures. But not her. Not Roz. She was still three steps ahead of him, but he wasn’t giving up yet.

After a dribble of a shower – he didn’t bother waiting
for the water to heat up – Andy went downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast. It was too early for his parents to be awake, but it would give him a chance to catch up with the rest of the household.

Maggie was surrounded by the men from the estate. The guys joked and laughed as they tucked into several thousand calories of bacon and eggs and Jesus – was that fried soda bread?

His mouth watered. No. He was not doing this.

‘Sit yourself down there,’ Maggie said. ‘Will you have tea or coffee?’

‘Coffee, please and could I have a couple of poached eggs and toast?’

‘It’s far from poached eggs you were reared. Have you gone soft, Andy?’ one of the men asked.

Andy sat down next to Tom and elbowed him in the ribs. ‘I’d demonstrate, but then I’d have to drive you to hospital.’

‘Any time you want to try, laddie. Any time. So, how’s yon blond giant treating you?’

‘Niall? As good as could be expected.’

‘But you don’t get much time off?’

And there was the rub. Why wasn’t he home where he was needed, instead of wandering around the world? But there was something else going on. He caught a few furtive glances and there was an undercurrent of something not being said. Andy was determined to get to the bottom of it.

‘So, what are your plans for the day? A trip to the shops?’

‘Ach, he’s turned soft, spending all that time in London.
He’s probably booked a manicure,’ one of the grooms said and the others snorted with laughter.

If he hadn’t been in his mother’s kitchen, Andy would have shown him exactly how soft he was. But a Ranger didn’t get into stupid fights.

‘Pay them no heed,’ Maggie said as she set a plate in front of him. ‘Have ye no work to go to? Away with ye.’

Draining the last of his tea, Tom pushed back his chair. ‘I’ll be off then.’

The others followed him and within a minute the kitchen was silent. Andy wolfed down his breakfast and downed a mug of coffee.

‘And where do you think you’re going?’ Maggie demanded.

‘To work.’ He couldn’t sit around here all day watching his dad sleep. He needed something to do or he would go crazy.

Whistling, he made his way to the stables. No wonder the house was falling to rack and ruin; his father spent more money on the horses than he did on his own accommodation.

‘How many does he have now?’ he asked Tom.

‘It varies. Twenty-two at the minute, with the yearlings he bought at the December sale in Tattersalls.’

‘How much?’ Andy was almost afraid to ask.

‘Seven two for one. The other was a bargain at three thousand.’

‘Euros?’ Andy asked hopefully.

‘Pounds. And that was on top of the ones he bought last October.’

He didn’t have to hear the resignation in Tom’s voice to
know that his dad’s passion for horses was bleeding the estate dry.

‘How is the rest of the place?’

‘If you’re talking about the deer farming …’

Andy sighed. The ‘D’ word … It was another of his brother’s ‘agricultural experiments’. Robert had been great for ideas, but without his drive and enthusiasm they had been allowed to go wild.

‘The Devlins are angry about the damage to their forestry plantations. A few bucks can strip bark from a tree quicker than a machine. And as for trying to fence them in …’

Tom tut-tutted his disapproval. ‘I could have a team mending fences day and night and I wouldn’t be able to keep up with the beggars. Don’t get me wrong. Your father has a good eye for the horses, but it could be a couple of years before he sees a return and at his age, it’s tough. It’s not like the old days. Robert might not have been the best farmer, but he was here.’

He left the rest of the words unsaid, but Andy felt the rebuke as sharply as a slap. It was a young man’s game and his parents were getting on. The estate needed someone to breathe new life into it, or a new owner.

Disheartened, he returned to the house to inspect it.

Christ, he hadn’t realized it was this bad. His was the best room in the house but it wasn’t the only one with a damaged ceiling. The place was a money pit. Who the hell would want it? And even if they did, could he part with a house that had been in the family for two hundred years?

He was used to travelling light and he hadn’t contemplated settling down. What the house needed was a new
McTavish generation, an owner who would bring a wife and a family to revitalize the place. He wasn’t ready for either.

Idly, he flicked on his phone and without thinking he clicked on the Yahoo icon, but Roz was offline. He stared at the phone in his hand with a vague sense of disappointment. He was losing it.

The message flashed back and Andy laughed.

He glanced at his mother who was dozing in the chair near the fire. He could do with some shut eye himself. Maybe he should take this upstairs.

‘Night, Mum,’ he called.

‘Good night.’ Poppy sounded half asleep.

Andy took the steps two at a time and opened the door to his room. The carved four-poster bed should have been a chick-magnet, but he couldn’t ever imagine bringing someone here. But if it was a certain feisty redhead, he might be tempted to break his rule about bringing women home.

he asked.

he typed.

Andy laughed. He lay down on the bed and tapped another message into his phone.

The message hung in cyberspace for several seconds and he wondered if he had gone too far.

He waited.

Andy sat up as a vision popped into his head of Roz lying beside him on the dark red coverlet wearing nothing but a scrap of silk, her long red hair on his pillow. He would lick every inch of her smooth, pale skin.

he asked hopefully.

she snapped back.

No response came and as he was about to give up another message arrived.

Andy hit the accept icon and downloaded the picture.

The silk panties were folded neatly in the centre of a narrow single bed covered with a white duvet cover. There was nothing in the picture to give him a clue to where she was.

Of Roz, there was no sign and he could almost hear her laughter.

Andy debated how to respond. He couldn’t ignore a challenge like that but he was damned if he’d let her get the better of him.

He slipped out of his room and down the backstairs to the utility area adjoining the kitchen. Among the pile of neatly ironed garments was a pair of flannelette pyjamas belonging to his father. The brown check pattern screamed old folks home.

Whistling, he returned to his room and laid them out on the bed.

Her reply, when she received the photograph, was unrepeatable.

he asked.

He was almost tempted to tell her, but if Roz was hiding out somewhere in England he didn’t want her to think that she was off the hook because he was in another country.

he typed.

Andy waited, and when there was no response, he logged off and went to use the bathroom down the hall. If this were his home he would knock down a wall and put in a huge en-suite with a bath big enough for two. He hurried along the chilly corridor to the bedroom.

He had spent colder nights out in the field, but this was supposed to be a mansion. How did his parents live here? He eyed the pyjamas on the bed. There was nothing for it. He would have to wear them.

He slipped between the cold sheets and warmed himself with visions of Roz wearing those silky panties.

The following day was damp with occasional rain which halted filming, but Roz didn’t mind. She was grateful for
the chance to zone out occasionally after the previous few days.

Filming, Roz discovered, was a lot of, ‘Hurry up and wait’, and location filming seemed to be a combination of velvet and mud. She learnt quickly that it was not as glamorous as she had been expecting, but the chance to see Jack Winter wandering around like a regular person was worth standing in the damp.

Frankie, as expected, hovered, warning off the film crew who tried to hit on her, and Cheyenne continued to chat to her while they waited for their takes.

‘This is a great role for me. Usually I get to play the ugly friend and lately I’ve been offered roles of mother of the heroine. And I’m only thirty-nine. Did you know that my character, Gormflaith, was supposed to be a great beauty, even if she was evil?’

Roz had been watching the sword fighting scene, all too aware that she would soon have to be in one where she was knocked off her feet and ‘killed’. She turned to look at Cheyenne. ‘But you’re beautiful.’

The film star’s perfect mouth parted. ‘You must be blind. My lips aren’t symmetrical, my nose is too big, my eyebrows don’t match, and my agent tells me I need to lose thirty pounds.’

Roz looked her up and down, being as critical as possible, but couldn’t see any of the flaws that Cheyenne had pointed out. ‘You must be joking. You’re gorgeous. Anyone who says otherwise must be blind. And if you’re thirty pounds overweight, then so am I.’

Cheyenne opened her mouth, and shut it, clearly
deciding that this was not a fight she wanted to win. She turned back to the scene being filmed. ‘Would you have liked to have lived back then, when men were men?’

Roz laughed. ‘And didn’t wash? I’m very fond of modern bathrooms, thank you.’

‘Me too. Are we going into town tonight?’

With some surprise, Roz realized that Cheyenne was serious. She nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said before she got ready for her demise on the battlefield.

At lunchtime, she checked her phone and found another message from Andy.

The mouthful of diet cola went down the wrong way and she coughed until she could breathe normally again.

Time to nip this in the bud. She swiped across her phone screen.

It wasn’t a huge surprise when he messaged back.

Didn’t Andy McTavish have ideas about himself?

Ass. But she was grinning when she went to help Frankie sort out the horseback scenes.

In the daytime, she found it hard to tell which horse was Nagsy. She had thought he was black or dark brown, but now could see he had a light brown coat and black
mane and tail. Pretty enough, she supposed, if you were into horses.

Nagsy snuffled at her, and she tentatively patted his nose. The hair down the front of his face was a little rougher than the rest. ‘What were you doing last night?’ she asked Frankie in a low voice.

‘The blaze down the centre of his face is exactly the same size and shape as Shergar’s. I don’t want to tip anyone off, so I’ve dyed it to conceal it.’

When the stuntmen were mounted on the horses, Roz kept an eye on Nagsy and thought he seemed to be quick off the mark. But it was an unworkable idea. There were too many things that could go wrong, even if the thought of scamming the O’Sullivans of a large chunk of change made her feel all warm and fuzzy.

She didn’t know anything about horses, but it did look as if Nagsy was faster than the other horses. Maybe it wasn’t impossible. Nagsy certainly looked like a horse that would like to be in a race. She noticed something else unusual about him.

‘What the hell is that between his legs?’ she asked Frankie.

Frankie’s shoulders shook with laughter. ‘I forgot you were a city girl. Those are his balls. Nagsy is a stallion.’

She examined the other horses, but Nagsy was the only one with all his bits attached. ‘Is that good or bad?’ All she knew about stallions was that they were supposed to be temperamental and prone to waving their feet in the air. Or was that lions? She couldn’t remember.

‘It’s good.’ Frankie grinned. ‘It means that after he’s
won the Gold Cup, the lucky owner can put him out to stud and make a fortune. That makes him even more valuable. You could double the sale price.’

The scene ended and Nagsy nosed at Frankie for a treat. He handed Roz a piece of carrot and told her to put it on the flat of her hand for him.

Reluctantly, she did, waiting for those enormous teeth to take off a couple of fingers. But Nagsy snuffled at her hand, his whiskers tickling her, and picked off the carrot with surprising delicacy. She rubbed his nose, thinking that horses weren’t so scary after all.

Like men. They were big and dumb but would do what they were told.

‘You look at home like that,’ Frankie said. ‘A real Irish colleen.’

She stiffened. ‘I’m not Irish. Don’t ever say that.’

He gave her a knowing look. ‘So you’ve taken to lying to yourself now?’

She was so furious she wanted to spit. ‘How dare you? I’m as English as you. Just because I was born in some crappy hippie commune in the west of Ireland does not make me Irish.’

‘Being born in a stable does not make one a horse?’ quoted Frankie. ‘Your mother was Irish, your father was half-Irish, you were born here and grew up there.’ He paused to let that sink in. ‘If it waddles like a duck and quacks …’

What had got into him? ‘You know damn well it was nothing like that. My mother didn’t bother registering my birth. There are no records anywhere linking me to Ireland. When Dad was going to England for a job, she
told him to take me with him and she kept my sister. Do you have any idea how much trouble he had faking a birth certificate just so I could go to school?’

The memory still burnt. She had been a year older than all the other children because it had taken so long to get a convincing set of documents before she could enrol. Then the other children had mocked her accent and the colour of her hair and the clothes her dad had bought her. He did his best, but he had no clue about bringing up an unruly child.

Roisin O’Sullivan had turned into Roz Spring, she had lost any trace of an Irish accent, and she had learnt to blend in.

She turned her back on Frankie. ‘Discussion over, I’m going to work.’ She stamped away, leaving him with Nagsy.

By evening, she was ready to call it a day. She had been ‘killed’ fourteen times, and knocked on her ass so often she had lost count.

She had changed into a pair of leggings and a baggy sweatshirt, and was preparing to nurse her bruises when a knock on the caravan door announced a visitor. Cheyenne Knight was outside, clutching a large bag. ‘Well, are you ready?’

‘Ready?’ Roz had kicked off her shoes, preparing to spend the evening reading one of Frankie’s books about Shergar. No harm to know a bit more, even if she had no intention of running the con.

‘Yes, you said we were going into town tonight, pretend to be sisters. I can’t wait.’ Cheyenne looked so hopeful Roz didn’t have the heart to refuse her.

She pulled on her shoes. ‘Sure, I was waiting for you. Let’s go.’

Cheyenne had never ridden a motorbike before, and her Versace jacket wasn’t up to the job, so Roz grabbed one of Frankie’s jackets for her. Cheyenne snuggled into it, looking far happier than Roz would have expected.

The ride to the gate was dark and bumpy, and Cheyenne gripped Roz’s waist tightly, but the main road to Tullamore was easier going, and they could see more of the Irish countryside. The town was sprawling and old-fashioned and the hump-backed bridge over the canal caught Roz by surprise.

‘Eeek!’ Cheyenne exclaimed, gripping even more tightly. Roz was sweating by the time she glided to a halt in the centre of the town.

Inside the bar, it was dim and cosy. The barman assured them they could have food and handed her a laminated card. Roz saw Cheyenne grapple with the menu. It contained a lot of meat fried in different ways.

‘You’ve no egg-white omelettes? Or sushi? Something low fat?’

The barman peered at her. ‘You’re that American actress, Charlene Knight, right?’

‘It’s Cheyenne.’ The actress sighed before her face assumed a professional smile. ‘If you have a low-carb option, that would be great.’

‘No, we don’t do that fancy stuff. Only what’s on the menu, but I could do you a sandwich without butter if you like.’