The Horse Dancer by Jojo Moyes Page A

why she was there.
    Mac, the most unsuitable marriage material her parents had ever seen, the feckless enigma of a man she had married, the other battered half of a union that had nearly destroyed them both, was back in their home.
    She had refused to think about him for so long, and he had made it easy. Sometimes it was as if he had dropped off the face of the earth. During the last year of their marriage he had been away so much she had seemed to be single anyway. When he was there she had found she was so angry about everything that solitude had seemed easier. Take your stuff and go, she willed Mac, feeling an uncomfortable echo of the darker days that had only just receded. I don’t want to deal with any of this. I don’t want to feel even the slightest hint of what I felt last year. Do what you have to do and leave me in peace.
    She was dragged from her thoughts by a commotion in the next aisle towards the checkout. She walked to the end of the cereals where she could see what was going on.
    An overweight African man had hold of a teenage girl. She couldn’t have been much more than sixteen and was pulling hard against him, her hair flopping over her face, but he had her upper arms in a remorseless grip.
    ‘Is everything all right?’ Natasha asked, emerging from behind the porridge oats. She had addressed the girl; the scene was discomfiting. ‘I’m a lawyer,’ she explained. It was then that she spotted the man’s security badge.
    ‘There you go. You’ll need one of them down the nick,’ the checkout woman said. ‘It’ll save you a phone call.’
    ‘I wasn’t stealing.’ The girl shook her arm again. Her face was pale under the harsh neon lighting, her eyes huge and wary.
    ‘Hmph. So the fish-fingers just leapt out of the freezer and landed in your jacket?’
    ‘I just put them there while I went to get some other stuff. Look, please, let me go. I promise you I wasn’t stealing.’ She was close to tears. She didn’t have the mouthy defiance of the kids Natasha usually saw.
    ‘Walked straight past me, she did,’ said the checkout woman, ‘like she thought I was stupid.’
    ‘Perhaps she could just pay for them now and go,’ Natasha suggested.
    ‘Her?’ The big man shrugged. ‘She ain’t got no money.’
    ‘They never do,’ said the woman.
    ‘I must have dropped it.’ The girl was peering at the floor. ‘I won’t come back, okay? Just let me look for my money before someone else finds it.’
    ‘How much are they?’ Natasha said, reaching for her purse. ‘The fish-fingers?’
    The checkout woman raised her eyebrows.
    Natasha was tired. She just wanted to go home without the image of a sobbing girl pinned by a security guard on her mind. ‘Let’s assume this is an honest mistake. I’ll pay for them.’ The two looked at her as if she was somehow in on the scam until she held out a five-pound note. And then – after an infinitesimal pause – the checkout woman rang up the fish-fingers and handed her the change. ‘I don’t want to see your thieving little face in here again,’ she said, jabbing a nicotine-stained finger. ‘Got it?’
    The girl didn’t answer. She shrugged off the security guard and hurried for the door, the fish-fingers in her hand. It opened automatically, released her, and she was gone, swallowed by the dark.
    ‘Look at that.’ The security guard’s skin shone under the strip-lighting. ‘Never even said thank you.’
    ‘She was thieving, you know. We had her in here last week. Except that time we couldn’t prove it.’
    ‘If it makes you feel any better, that’s probably the best meal she’ll have this week,’ Natasha said. She paid for the milk, glanced at the vagrant, who was now arguing with the washing powders, and went out into the night street.
    She had walked only a few paces when the girl popped up beside her. If she had been less preoccupied, she might have jumped, would have assumed some dark purpose, but the girl thrust out her hand. ‘I