Vince jumped to his feet. ‘Won’t be a moment.’
He returned seconds later with the champagne and glasses in hand and I had to wonder, as he shot the cork into the night sky and poured the sparkling liquid, if we were the first people to drink champagne in the middle of a crime scene.
Under different circumstances, I might have toasted to the future, but having figured something out, I said, ‘You stole the paperwork from my handbag last night, didn’t you?’
Vince made an irritated face that told me I was on the money.
‘That’s how you figured it out, wasn’t it?’ I accused him. ‘You left me fumbling and took the evidence I found so you could figure this out for yourself.’
Vince sucked in some air between his teeth. ‘The clues on those sheets of paper … they were pretty obscure, babe. You were never going to be able to work it out from that. I only got there because I have years of experience in this business and a heap of contacts and resources I can turn to for help.’
I let him fill my champagne glass, then asked, ‘Don’t you think that is a little presumptuous?’
He held his glass up for me to clink mine against. ‘The important thing, babe, is that we solved the case and stopped the bad guy.’
I poured my drink over his head.
The End
Except it isn’t. It’s the end of this small chapter but wait until you read what happens next! Check the next page to get a look.
Author’s Notes
Yet again, as I finish this book, it is early in the morning and I probably ought to be asleep. Why did I stay up to finish it when I could just write the words tomorrow? Well, there are a couple of reasons.
The first is all to do with story flow and how I find myself immersed in it. Each morning when I start writing, it takes me a while to get going – I have to find the flow of the story. That is more true at the start of a book, when I am trying to find my way into the story. The way I write … making it up as I go along, it is very immersive. I honestly have no idea who is going to do what when I sit in front of my laptop. Toward the end, when I am in the last quarter of the book, that is less true. By then, the decisions have been made and the villain identified. By then, I am focused on the end and have a head rush to finish.
That is one reason why I stay up to the early hours to finish a book.
The other reason is the number of readers who tell me they stayed up until two or three or just didn’t get any sleep because they couldn’t stop reading. It is perhaps the greatest praise an author can get. I write stories that I would want to read and take my time to craft endings that take many, many books to arrive at.
I finished writing this book on the same day that book twenty in my Patricia Fisher series was published. In that book, I conclude a story arc that began in book one. The point is that the stories I want to tell cannot play out in a single book.
What do I mean?
Vince is clearly interested in Felicity. She could be interested in Vince, but I have another suitor waiting in the wings. Will either be suitable to win the lady’s heart? In truth, I haven’t decided yet. This series will run for a long while, so no decision is necessary. Not before the royal wedding anyway.
In this book I mention houses with ship’s beams in them. I believe this is not the first time I have brought the subject up in my books. I first came across a house with a curved beam from the hull of a ship as a young teenager. I was visiting the house of a friend not far from where I now live. Chatham dockyard, responsible for the construction of many wooden warships, is just a few miles to the east. As old ships were broken up, the oak beams were sought after as construction material – waste not and all that.
If I had the chance to buy a property with such history steeped into it, I would be sorely tempted.
It occurs to me that there may be people for whom this is the very first book of mine that they read. If that is the case, you have no doubt been asking who the heck Patricia Fisher is. She’s my bestselling sleuth and a character for who I have great affection. Patricia allowed me to cast off the corporate, bleeding eye socket life that I had. She gave me commercial success as an author, and I have never looked back. I have no wish to push you, but if you enjoyed this book enough to still be reading the author’s notes, you will love her adventures.
In this story, John Ramsey is belittled for his desire to wear women’s clothing. I wish to make it clear that I have no opinion on the subject. To accentuate this, I will claim that the clothing label I use – Hers for Him – is one I invented more than a decade ago when I briefly considered setting up an online marketplace for transvestites, transexuals, and crossdressers.
The idea came to me through a chance observation at a boot fair. If the term boot fair does not translate in your country, it is a place where people gather and sell things from the back of their car – in the UK, the bit at the back
