slept for a hundred years. I picked my way across the rubble and felt the weight of the work I still had to do there lying heavy across my shoulders.
At the time I’d agreed to take the cottage on I’d desperately needed something that was physically demanding enough to occupy my mind. And, for a time, it had worked. Now, though, it just felt like a burden.
My parents had bought the place intending it to be a weekend getaway but it had proved a little too rustic for my mother’s refined tastes and they’d barely used it.
The idea in offering the cottage to me was that I’d oversee the alterations. Something to keep me out of trouble – and away from Sean. By the time they found out I was actually carrying out most of the work myself, it was too late for them to do much about it.
Now, I stripped off my dirty clothes and pulled on my Dainese leathers, zipping the jacket and jeans together to form a one-piece suit and transferring all the accumulated junk from one set of pockets to the other. I stuffed clean jeans, underwear and shirts into a bag that I could clip onto the Suzuki’s tank. The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Then, with a last regretful look at the debris, I pulled the door shut behind me and was back on the road.
It would keep.
***
Twenty minutes later I was turning into the gateway of Jacob and Clare’s house near Caton village. It was big and old and rather beautiful in a faded kind of a way. A remnant of Jacob’s ill-fated but prosperous marriage, the house was a sprawling hotchpotch of a place, three-quarters hidden by creepers. The driveway swept down from the main road and across a field until it opened out onto a moss-coated forecourt.
Jacob dealt in classic motorbikes and antiques from the outbuildings around the house itself. Because of this he’d always been security conscious and I knew that somewhere in the trees at the top of the driveway was an alarm connected to various buzzers and bells at the house to give advance warning of approaching visitors. I’d never been able to spot its location and Jacob had always refused, laughing, to show me exactly where it was.
As it was, the dogs were already going loopy when I pulled up in front of the house and cut the engine. I could see Beezer, the wire-haired terrier, scrabbling about on the kitchen window sill, her wet nose leaving slither marks across the glass.
Before I went in I unlocked the ramshackle coach house with one of the keys from Clare’s ring and wheeled the bike in alongside Jacob’s classic Laverda Jota and Clare’s Ducati. And still I wondered why hadn’t she ridden her own bike today? Maybe, if she had . . .
The dogs were ecstatic to see me. Poor old Bonneville, the arthritic Labrador, had suffered most from the unexpected confinement. She waddled up to me feathering her tail in anxious apology. I patted her head in forgiveness and fetched some old newspapers from the pile in the scullery to put down over the puddle. Good job the kitchen had a stone flagged floor that was easy to mop.
I left both dogs wolfing down food like they’d been starved for a month and went through the silent house to Jacob’s wood-panelled study. I don’t think I’d ever seen him actually do any work in there – he preferred to run his business from the scrubbed pine kitchen table – but it was at least a repository for his paperwork. Stacks of it.
I sighed and sat in the swivel captain’s chair behind the desk, staring moodily at the mass of scrawled notes and shipping inventories. Somewhere in all this lot might be some clue about where Jacob was staying in Ireland, or who with. Possibly. I knew he tended to keep most things balanced in his head. Good for him. Not so good for me.
The phone was sitting half-buried under auction catalogues. I reached for it twice, pulling my hand back each time, before my courage was up enough to dial. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the call to be picked up on the second ring.
“Meyer,” said the terse voice at the other end of the line.
It shouldn’t have taken me by surprise. That was the way Sean always answered his mobile but I had to draw another breath before I could launch in.
“Sean? It’s Charlie.”
It was his turn for silence. Then I thought I heard a sigh that my paranoid brain translated as annoyance. “What is it?” he said at last.
“Look, I’m sorry to trouble you on a Sunday evening—” I rushed on.
“Charlie,” he cut across me, gently this time. Definitely gently. “Don’t apologise for calling me.
So I told him the whole story, from Sam’s mad dash to find me to Clare’s news about Jacob’s uncertain whereabouts. “I need to find him but I don’t know where to start,” I finished, a little lamely. “I thought maybe Madeleine could help.”
Madeleine Rimmington worked for Sean’s close protection agency, mainly handling electronic security, and there was very little she couldn’t coax out of a computer. If anyone could track down Jacob, she could.
“Hang on,” Sean said. “She’s here. I’ll ask.” And there was the sound of muffled voices in the background.
I recognised the flush that rode over me as jealousy, pure and simple. In my head I knew there was nothing going on between Madeleine and Sean. That there never had been. But in my heart I wanted to scratch her eyes out.
When he came back on the line I couldn’t hold back a snitty comment. “She working overtime?”
“No. Actually, she and Dominic are round for dinner,” Sean said evenly, amusement in his voice now. “He’s in the kitchen – as you would expect. We’re having duck. Would you like to speak to him?”
The closest I’d come to actually meeting Madeleine’s chef boyfriend was looking at a photo of him. I wouldn’t have any idea what to say to him over the phone, as Sean very well knew.
“No,” I muttered quickly, ashamed and trying to make light of it. “Why would I want to talk to a dead duck?”
