appetite for women as Harle did. None of them had heard of the place. I sighed and did some physical and mental head-scratching. Supposing Harle had been abducted. I had to assume it was by the two men who’d smashed up Bergmark and blinded Rask and maybe killed Danny Gordon. Harle had last been seen at Cheltenham races. If these guys wanted to get him, they’d have known they could intercept him on the way back from the racecourse. Harle lived in Lambourn but would probably have been staying over in Cheltenham for the three-day race-meeting. I knew he hadn’t because the receptionist had told me he’d checked out of his hotel on the Wednesday morning, the second day of the meeting. Whatever had spooked him, must have happened at the party on the Tuesday night, or after it. Assuming he was running for home after leaving the hotel, he’d have travelled south west toward Lambourn. The area around Cheltenham had its share of quiet country roads and most jockeys knew the short-cuts. I needed a road map to try and figure out the route Harle might have taken. I headed for Cheltenham to buy one. Driving into town along the A46 I saw the Library sign and quickly turned left. They’d have maps, and parking spaces. The smiling young man at the desk said they didn’t have ‘your standard road map’, but the reference section did have ordnance survey maps for the whole of the UK. Juggling a plastic cup of very hot coffee from the machine I sat down with OS Map 163, Cheltenham and Cirencester. I smoothed out the area to the south west: one of the benefits of the OS map was that it included every road, right down to a pig track. From the centre of town, I searched the possible routes Harle would have taken if he’d planned to go home. Three cups of coffee later I was bleary-eyed and no wiser and I began chiding myself on the basis that I hadn’t a bloody clue what I was doing. They could have got him anywhere. Stepping into the car at The Duke’s Hotel, arriving home at his remote place in Lambourn and any point in between. I got up and began folding the map to hand it back when something caught my eye; an area to the east of Cheltenham coloured green on the map, shaped like a pair of thin legs wearing different size boots - Puckham Woods. Slowly, I sat back down keeping my eyes fixed on the spot in case I lost it. Opening the map again, I traced with my finger a narrow dead-end road on the north west side of Puckham Woods. Where the road finished sat some small closely-grouped buildings with the name Puckham Farm. From the throat of a desperate man to the ear of an angry woman how easily misheard? I noted the road numbers and directions and hurried to the car. It was only half an hour’s drive. The closer I got to it the narrower grew the roads and the sparser the houses. Just after one o’clock I passed through the last village on the map and out into open country. The road climbed and the surface worsened. Bushes on the overgrown verges scratched at the Rover as we sped along. In that twenty minutes a blue van passed me going in the opposite direction; that was the only vehicle I saw. It began to rain. I turned at the no-through-road sign, knowing the farm should be at the end of it. The track dipped steeply like a ramp in the first fifty yards. It ran between trees and broken rusted barbed wire fencing and I could hear the tyres sloshing through the rain-softened surface. The fields on either side were empty. The trees grew denser the further I went till I seemed to be driving in a tunnel. I broke out of it into daylight and a farmyard, so suddenly that I ran past and had to reverse to a point where I faced what looked like the main house. I sat in the car watching for some sign of life. The yard, rutted and puddled, was about the size of two tennis courts and seemed to envelop the house in a grasping semi-circle of black muck. The dark grey stone walls were pitted and dirty. The front door was not in