'No.'

'Yep,' smiled Jacques, with that lop-sided easy grin he always had. 'Okay, not really. He's called Nicholas White. Santa Claus extraordinaire. He said he's looking forward to meeting you too. Again.'

'What do you mean, "aga-",' but Jacques had gone with his customary door slam. What a stupid, immature man, thought Eve. 'Again', as if it was the real S. C. and he was going to remember what she used to want for Christmas, like they did on those schmaltzy films. The thing she used to want most at Christmas, which she would never have admitted to anyone, for obvious reasons, was for her mum to fall a bit ill so they could move to Auntie Susan's for the whole week.

Santa was quickly forgotten as Eve picked up the keys and examined them. She heard Effin's voice call out to Jacques and wondered which one of them would come out the winner in a noisy competition. She watched Jacques climb into Effin's truck and it drove off. Then she zoomed out of the Portakabin in the direction of the ice-cream parlour.

Violet looked a little glum when Eve opened the door. She was staring into space and looking as if the cares of the world, wearing weighted boots, had settled on her shoulders.

'V, you okay?'

Violet forced on a smile. 'Yes, I'm fine. Just deep in thought,' she fibbed.

'Where's Pav?'

'Don't know,' replied Violet, shrugging her shoulders. He was disappearing more and more these days without saying where he was going. She wanted to ask him who Serena was, but she was frightened. So she bottled up her fears and they fermented and fizzed horribly inside her.

Eve, however, was too focussed on the opportunity which she had been offered that morning to notice the extent of Violet's angst.

'Violet, I need your help. It's an emergency.'

'Okay,' said Violet, pushing her own problems away. 'What do you want me to do?'

'Just sit in the Portakabin and wait for a garage mechanic, whilst I slip out for an hour. Ring me immediately if Jacques comes back but don't tell him where I am, for God's sake.'

'Eve, what are you up to?' said Violet, narrowing her eyes.

'Can't tell you,' said Eve.

'Can't or won't?'

'Won't.'

'You're going to Jacques' house, aren't you? Eve . . .'

'Violet,' Eve grabbed her small cousin by the arms. 'This is really, really important. I have to know more about Jacques Glace. If I can't find anything, I promise you I'll let it drop.'

And because Violet was a soft touch and because she needed something to fill her mind other than the awful thoughts that insisted on forcing themselves into her head, she sighed in a very resigned way and said, 'Okay then, what do you need me to do?'

Eve stripped the car key from the ring and handed it to her. Then, after leaving Violet in position in the Portakabin, she set off for Outer Hoodley with a clipboard, a set of curtains, a white overall, a pair of Harry Potter wire-framed glasses and a long black wig, left over from a Halloween do. All this had been collected over the weekend and put in Eve's car, ready and waiting for the perfect moment.

Eve pulled in just outside Outer Hoodley so she could dress up. The old lady who lived next to Jacques was like Cerberus, but with only one head, and she didn't want to be recognized. Eve checked her appearance in the wing mirror and found she looked as much like an interior designer as Mr Bean looked like a lifeguard.

Then she drove on into the village car park, picked up her clipboard and the curtains and locked up the car. She tried to walk confidently and innocently towards 1, May Green, with the chutzpah of a person going through customs with twelve bottles of brandy stuffed down their pants.

Eve stole a glance through her wire rims at number 2, but no curtain was twitching. She strutted around to the back of number 1 and tried a key in the lock, taking a deep breath and then another. She didn't know if an alarm was going to go off but would have to risk it. If it did, she would calmly walk back to the car and get the hell out of there.

She twisted the key and the door opened silently.

Eve entered quickly and closed the door behind her, locking it in case the neighbourhood witch came a-knocking. So far so good.

The inside of the house smelled of polish and some sort of spiced-apple air freshener. It was so tidy. There wasn't much furniture, yet it felt cosy and comfortable. The beamed ceiling looked very low; Eve wondered how many times Jacques had cracked his head on it. There were some sealed boxes in the corner. Evidently he hadn't been living in the cottage very long and was still in the process of unpacking.

'Right, no time to lose,' said Eve, slapping her hands together and then opening the single drawer in a long trestle table. There was nothing of interest really: two pens, a plain, unused notepad, a book of stamps, and an electricity bill in the name of Mr J Glace.

There was a file of Winterworld business on a shelf underneath the coffee table and a well-worn copy of the Robert Harris book Fatherland. But on a small wooden tray on the deep window sill, Eve found a hospital appointment card. Apparently, Jacques had been to see a Dr C Khan in August at Norgreen, which was a private hospital in Sheffield. Or was it O Khan? She would google that name and hospital when she got home.

There was nothing at all in the kitchen cupboards and drawers other than what one would expect to find in there, so Eve tried upstairs. The small bathroom was glaringly clean with a residue scent in the air of an expensive manly deodorant. The mirrored wall cabinet housed toothpaste, one toothbrush, soap, razor, shampoo, aftershave and some ibuprofen. Towels, folded to Benetton-standard, resided in a long cupboard alongside a huge, blue fluffy robe. There was a family of yellow rubber ducks sitting in a line on the side of the bath typical.

There were richer pickings in the bedroom. Again, there were things in boxes not yet unpacked, but still, there was a veritable treasure trove of information available from what was.

'Oh, this is more like it,' laughed Eve, opening up a huge chunky wardrobe and seeing his clothes. Because on one side were shelves of jeans and jumpers, and on the other side were military uniforms encased in plastic. 'My God, would you look at this?'

She lifted a red uniform out of the wardrobe. It weighed a ton. The word Major came hurtling back to her mind with all the force of a landing airplane. What on earth was he doing with this in his wardrobe? She recognized it as an officer's ceremonial uniform. A very large uniform which must have fitted him.

Eve shuddered as the vision of Jacques Glace strutting up and down in front of the mirror dressed as an officer rose in her head. And oh boy, what was this? She replaced the uniform and lifted out another encased in plastic also: a green, female officer's uniform. It looked very sizeable too. There were other uniforms in there as well, all military ones, but Eve had seen all she needed to of those. She moved over to the chest of drawers at the side of his bed.

The top drawer was full of underwear very male underwear no sign of very large stockings or suspenders, thank goodness. The second drawer housed socks, a small box with a watch in it, and some cufflinks. The drawer below though was much more interesting because it was full of military memorabilia. Caps, hats, flat boxes, which Eve opened to find an array of old medals and in a beautiful red box on a bed of velvet was a new shiny one: a cross suspended from a ribbon of white and purple. She wondered what the story was behind that one. And most worrying of all, underneath the cross, she found an instantly recognizable battered brown box.

Eve's fingers started to tremble as she opened it up, but she knew what was in there already: Stanley's medal. Why would Jacques Glace have this?

Why weren't there any photographs anywhere? she mused, too. She wondered if they were in the sealed boxes, but they would have been impossible to open secretly. Then again, she had seen quite enough for one day. She had been right, surely. The presence of Stanley's medal alone proved that. Talk about catching someone red-handed.

She checked that all was as she found it, wiped as many touched surfaces as she could with her sleeve, just in case Mr Glace wore a detective's uniform at weekends and did a spot of fingerprinting, and exited quickly with her head bowed and the curtain over one arm and the clipboard in the other hand.

Back at Winterworld, Violet was disappointingly dismissive about the 'evidence'.

'It's Stanley's medal, Violet,' Eve emphasized. 'Why would Jacques Glace have it?'

'Well, Evelyn obviously gave it to him,' said Violet.

'She wouldn't have given it to him,' growled Eve. 'She would either have given it to me or to the military museum at Higher Hoppleton. He has to have stolen it I bet you anything.'

'Oh, now, wait,' said Violet. 'You don't know that for definite. And just because he collects all this memorabilia, doesn't make him a charlatan or a cross-dresser.'

'Oh, come on, V, even you have to admit that there are some things that just don't add up.'

'Have you considered that he might have been in the army and those uniforms are his?'

'Even the female one?'

'Apart from the female one,' huffed Violet.

'Violet, we're talking about a man who keeps his phone in a SpongeBob SquarePants sock.

'It still doesn't prove anything.'

'I'll tell you what I think, shall I?' Her theory had come to her on the drive back to Winterworld. 'I think he managed to worm his way into Aunt Evelyn's affections using some military knowledge. Look.' She opened the locket around her neck and showed Violet the faded photograph of Stanley. Don't you think there's more than a passing resemblance between him and Jacques?'

Violet looked at the picture and yes, she could see that. Both Stanley and Jacques had very short hair, big shoulders and large bright eyes.

'Someone as lonely as Aunt Evelyn would have been putty in his hands,' said Eve, nodding to herself in a self-congratulatory manner. Move over, Hercule Poirot.

Eve then went over to her computer and googled Dr Khan at Norgreen hospital to find there were actually three Dr Khans working up there a Dr C Khan in the prosthetic limb department, a Dr C Khan in gynaecology so that ruled both of those out but the third, a Dr G Khan was a psychiatrist. Why would Jacques be going to see a psychiatrist? Was he a nutter or a con man? Or perhaps both.

'The plot thickens, Violet,' Eve beckoned her cousin over to look at the screen. 'And I'm telling you, if this plot gets any thicker we'll have to hack it with a chainsaw.'

Chapter 33.

After work that night, Eve called in at Alison's house to drop off her birthday card. It was bitterly cold and there was some light, slushy snow on the road. Alison answered the door looking like a sumo wrestler. She seemed to have doubled in size in the six weeks since Eve had seen her last.

'My God,' gasped Eve, pointing at the huge mound pushing out the material of Alison's maternity dress. 'Where did that come from?'

'I honestly don't know,' laughed Alison, leaning over to receive the kiss from her friend. 'Rupert reckons the baby's going to come out riding a horse. Rather worryingly, he's finding me very attractive at the moment, if you know what I mean.'

'Well, of course he does.' Eve followed Alison into her beautiful home. 'You're absolutely blooming.'

'Blooming knackered,' said Alison. 'He's told me I should aim to keep a few of these pounds on when little Lone Ranger comes out. I think he'll be devastated if my boobs shrink back to nothing.'

'If only all women could find a man who tells them stuff like that,' smiled Eve. 'I presume he's still slaving away in his laboratory earning a crust?'

'Well, he's due back within the next hour or so. He's trying not to work late whilst I'm in my advanced state,' said Alison, opening the door to her amazing window-heavy, south-facing kitchen. The room was bigger than the whole of the downstairs of Eve's house. 'Tea, coffee, glass of wine?'

Eve was going to plump for a tea, but she found herself asking for a glass of red. Alison poured her one whilst having a glass of Sprite herself, and a Gaviscon chaser.

'I tell you, the worst thing about pregnancy is the bloody heartburn. It's a killer,' said Alison. 'I can put up with having to be rolled down to the bathroom fourteen times a night for a wee, and the niggles in my back, but the heartburn is something else.'

'Well, you don't look as if you're anything less than in sublime good health,' said Eve, lifting up a strand of Alison's long golden hair. Would I have been so serene and beautiful carrying Jonathan's baby? Eve thought then. Would Jonathan have put his arms around me and squeezed me, his hands resting on my giant tum, loving us both? She blinked quickly as the vision crumbled as quickly as it had formed.

'You okay?' asked Alison, seeing a dark shadow pass her friend's face.

'Yep,' replied Eve, over-brightly.

Alison nodded 'good', but she wasn't fooled. Oh, how she wished she could reach into Eve and pull out that black sadness that had taken root in her friend's heart. When they were at school together, Eve was the last person that Alison would ever have thought would lose the joy in her soul. Crazy, giggling, funny Eve the essence of her choked by unspent grief. Jonathan wouldn't have wanted to find her like this it would have hurt him so much to see Eve's once shiny green eyes as dull as algae on a forgotten pond.

'Bit of light reading?' Eve picked up a huge tome on the work surface: The Secrets of the Six Wives of Henry VIII. It wasn't so much a book as a lethal weapon.

'It's very good,' nodded Alison. 'And actually it is a very light read considering the length of it. I'm halfway through Jane Seymour.'

'Ah, the love of his life.'

'Well, you say that, but the book makes the point that they weren't really long enough together for the rot to set in. The author's theory is that if she hadn't died after childbirth, her head might have ended up on the reject pile as well. I still maintain that Anne Boleyn was the love of his life. Janey just happened to push out a male sprog and then pop off before all the euphoria had worn thin.' Alison took another long slug of Gaviscon and sighed with relief.

'We'll never know how right or wrong that theory is,' said Eve, convinced the book was talking tosh. 'Where's Phoebe? In her bedroom?'

'She's gone out to her friend Elsie's house for tea,' replied Alison. 'She's due back any time, actually. I wish she'd hurry up, I think it's going to snow.'

'Elsie? Is that an old lady or one of those old names doing a comeback?' Eve laughed.

'It's one of those old names trying to do a comeback,' chuckled Alison. 'Except it doesn't quite work, does it? Like Edna or Ernest. Some names are meant to have a renaissance, but a lot most definitely aren't. Anyway, please don't get me on the subject of names. I'm up to here with names.' And she tapped her forehead with the side of her index finger. 'Elisabeth, my mother-in-law, thinks we should name the new baby something singular and Greek. She's been reading this stupid book that intimates if you name your child after an ancient god, that child will inherit the qualities of that deity. Rupert has been less than helpful, actually fooling her into believing that Poseidon is on our list of possibles. He can be so naughty.'

Eve laughed. Rupert sounded as if he had dropped out of a posh tree with a mouth full of plums, but in reality he had no airs and graces about him at all. His mother, however, was a different kettle of fish. Alison had regaled Eve with enough stories about Elisabeth Derby-Tinker (Rupert had dropped the double-barrel) for her to write a book. Eve had only met the woman once at Alison's wedding and that was enough to last a lifetime. She was the perfect woman to give redheads a bad name. But awful old bag as she was, she still wasn't in the running to compete with Pat Ferrell.

'I'm terrified Phoebe will turn out just like Elisabeth one day,' said Alison with a shudder. 'I have nightmares about it.'

'Don't be daft,' said Eve. 'Phoebe has you and Rupert to make sure that never happens. It's such a shame she wasn't here. We have a baby reindeer that hasn't got a name and I was hoping she would help me with that.'

'Oh, she'd love to do that,' said Alison.

'None of us can agree on anything,' said Eve. 'We named the other one more or less on the spot Blizzard but his brother remains without one.'

'Call him Poseidon,' tutted Alison, breaking open a packet of butter biscuits and tipping them onto a plate. 'Try these, they're gorgeous. I've had such a craving for them through my pregnancy. Spread with Nutella.'

'Do you remember when we first discovered the joy of Nutella?' smiled Eve. 'When we went to that horrible camp in the third year. It had no hot water in the showers, but at least they had Nutella to spread on the toast for breakfast.'

'Oh yes, I'd forgotten all about that God-awful place.' Alison chuckled at the newly awakened memory.

'Forgotten? Blocked out more like. You had the bunk above me and I was crying because I wanted to go home.' And it must have been bad if I wanted to go home, Eve added to herself. 'We got told off for talking in the night.'

'Wasn't it then that we planned to go and live in America when we left school?'

'Yes. New York.'

'We never did manage to get there even on holiday, did we?' Alison sighed. 'I don't know, all those plans you make which you think are set in cement, and really they dissolve when the wind changes.' Then she burst into tears.

'What in God's name . . .' Eve sprang from her seat to put her arms around her friend.

'Sorry. Hormones,' laughed Alison. 'I sometimes worry that I was a crap friend, meeting Rupert so young and not doing all those things we said we were going to do together.'

'That is so ridiculous I could slap you,' said Eve, ripping off some kitchen roll and passing it to Alison to dab her eyes with.

'I feel like I let you down.'

'Alison Tinker. If you are telling me that you feel guilty that you're happy, you're in big trouble.'

'That's what I do feel.' A fresh wave of tears spurted out of Alison's eyes.

'Oy, have you noticed that I'm not doing so bad. You're talking to the owner of a multi-million-pound theme park.'

'Oh, Eve,' said Alison, not saying what was obvious to them both that money didn't keep you warm at night. And she so wanted Eve to be as warm at night as she was.

'Moving on from your very silly crying episode,' Eve nudged her friend, 'have you thought of any names at all for the baby?'