Page 133 of Waiting for Ru
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RU CAME ROUND face down in bedding pellets. A horse’s hoof moved close to his head and he gasped. He pushed himself to a sitting position and saw he was in with Lightning, not the best tempered of ponies. Ru gingerly rose to his feet and felt the back of his head. His fingers came away wet with blood.Not again.He reached into his pocket for a tissue and felt something hard in there. When he pulled it out, his knees gave way. It was a ring and he’d never seen it before. Not hard to figure out that Mike had put it in his pocket. He checked his other pocket but it held only his keys.
In a minute, someone was going to come and they were going to accuse him of stealing the ring. Ru thought quickly. He slipped out of Lightning’s stall, put the ring at the bottom of Dream’s equipment box, then went back into Lightning’s stall and lay down again.Please don’t tread on me.
How was Mike going to play this? Claim that Lightning had knocked him out? Then accidentally-on-purpose find the ring in his pocket? Had he put other stuff in Ru’s room?Shit.Maybe he’d be better going back to his room to check. He’d thought that only he had a key, but maybe that wasn’t true. Or had he been unconscious long enough for Mike to have taken his keys, done his worst, and brought them back? That would have been a big risk for Mike. But he’d have found a way round that. Claimed Ru had lost his keys.
Ru sat up. He couldn’t prove Mike had hit him and put him in here. Why bother staying where he was? He headed back to the accommodation block to find the place in an uproar.
“What’s wrong?” Ru asked.
“My rings have gone,” Kirstie said. “They were on the bedside cabinet where I always leave them and they’re gone. Someone must have taken them.” She looked at Ru.
“What are you looking at me for? Why would I want them?”
“They’re valuable. They were my grandma’s.”
“I didn’t take them.”
“Let’s look in your room then,” Mike said.
“Can I ask first when they went missing?” Ru said.
“They were there this morning when I got changed for work.”
“I haven’t been anywhere near the accommodation block since first thing this morning. I didn’t even stop for lunch.”
“Everyone else has let us look in their room,” Kirstie said.
Ru’s heart was galloping. He knew he was being set up but he didn’t know what to do about it. “Check the CCTV. I went from the match to the stables and I’ve not left it until now.”
Kirstie shot Mike a glance.
“I didn’t see Ru in here this morning,” Diego said.
“Nor me,” a couple of others chimed in.
“Prove the rings aren’t in your room and we’re done,” Mike said.
Oh God.Refusing to let him in would make him look guilty. Ru took out his keys and unlocked the door. Bela was in her cage eating peanuts, but she flew out of the window when they came in.
“Kirstie can look, not you,” Ru said to Mike.
Mike shrugged and stood against the wall. Kirstie checked the drawers and the wardrobe, then the bathroom. When she walked towards Bela’s cage, Ru guessed that was where Mike or she had hidden something. Maybe they’d pulled the window a little wider to get a hand in and hadn’t even needed a key. Kirstie poked the sawdust at the bottom of Bela’s cage with a pen. Then poked at it again.
“Nothing,” she muttered and when she turned, it was Mike she looked at.
Mike stayed where he was. “Empty your pockets.”
Ru stared straight at him as he turned his pockets inside out.
“So where the hell are they?” Kirstie asked.
“Maybe he trained his bird to steal,” Mike said.
Ru gave a heavy sigh. “Or maybe you and Kirstie connived together to get me blamed.”
Ru spotted Paolo at the back of the group crowding round his door. Mike hadn’t seen him.
