'Well, I took a leap of faith starting it up so I'm just going to have to take another one letting it go,' Eve sighed, reaching for a biscuit. 'Oh and I haven't told you the best bit. Aunt Evelyn only left me half of it. The other half she left to a total stranger A Mr Jack Glass. I can't wait to find out who the hell he is.'

'Pardon?' Alison stopped mid-biscuit chew.

'You heard right. Aunt Evelyn never mentioned him at all. But yet he's one of the main beneficiaries of her will. And that is as much as I know about him. Until I meet him in a few days.'

'And she never mentioned the name to you?'

'Not once.'

'When was the last time you saw her?'

'Two months before she died,' replied Eve with a small cough. Usually she visited her aunt once a month but her work commitments had been so heavy recently she'd missed a visit and rang Aunt Evelyn instead. She felt rather ashamed of that now especially as it would only have cost her a couple of hours of her time and she could have spared that really if she'd tried. Her Aunt Evelyn looked forward to seeing her so much.

'Dear God,' said Alison, resuming scoffing of biscuit. 'Your aunt really did have a lot of secrets in her life, didn't she?'

'So many that I don't think I knew her a quarter as well as I thought I did,' sighed Eve.

As soon as Eve got home, she unfolded her aunt's simple plans and those far more detailed drawings by the architect over her large dining table; she saw more possibilities every time she did so. In the middle of the land, her aunt had foreseen 'an enchanted forest' of Christmas trees with a twirly path cutting through the middle. Evelyn had drawn a horse and trap on the path along the route with the word 'snow ponies' written above it, and a miniature railway line was also present. At the left side of the forest was a reindeer enclosure and stables. To the right were a collection of log cabins, one labelled gift shop, one a restaurant and some unnamed. At the far end of the development was a funfair dominated by a sketch of a huge carousel. Santa's grotto was one of five more log cabins next to the funfair. Three of the cabins were bracketed together and called 'honeymoon cabins'. One was marked as 'the wedding chapel'. Eve peered at it while shaking her head. Surely her aunt wasn't that batty as to think that anyone would seriously want to be married in a theme park? This was South Yorkshire, not Las Vegas after all. A vision of Santa in black sunglasses and tassels, singing 'Suspicious Minds' whilst smelling of peanut butter and burgers, suddenly came to mind. It wasn't a pretty image.

Eve put her pen down and closed the book. Organizing a black-tie corporate event with dancing waterfalls was one thing seeing that this ridiculously ambitious theme park was built, marketed, advertised and managed was another.

Eve looked up at the ceiling and imagined beyond it, right up into the stars, where her aunt would be sitting with Stanley looking down at the havoc she had caused in her great-niece's brain. She would know that Eve wouldn't be able to resist the challenge she had set her.

'You wicked old bird,' said Eve to the sky. 'What the hell have you done to me?'

Ideas were crowding to get into her brain. She needed that smoking elf to keep them at the door and let them enter one at a time. But first things first she better meet up with this 'Jack Glass' and suss him out as a business partner. Eve worked alone as a rule, but for 'quite a few million pounds' she just might be persuaded to see if she could put up with the man.

Chapter 5.

Over the next few days Eve worked on tying up the future of Eve's Events, as well as overseeing a fortieth birthday party and sourcing a consignment of green-tinged champagne for an Irish wedding. If she were going to sell up, she wanted to make sure that the right people took over and things went as seamlessly as possible for her clients. She met with the three companies who had expressed interest in buying her out. By far the best offer was from the biggest of the three: 'Paul's Parties'. Paul Hoylandswaine was a local entrepreneur with his finger in more pies than a room full of Little Jack Horners. He was a bruff but straight man who didn't do bidding wars or time-wasting: he knew what he wanted and went straight for the jugular. He said that if Eve was serious about letting her enterprise go, she wouldn't find anyone who would look after it and continue to build it up more than he would, and he'd have contracts drawn up in two days for her to sign. Eve hadn't wanted to move quite that fast, but Paul Hoylandswaine said he wasn't going to 'fanny about' whilst she hummed and ha-ed. The deal was on the table with a now or never sticker on it; he didn't stop balls rolling when they were in motion. Eve had a massive moment of panic. If Winterworld folded, she would have nothing. She knew where she was running Eve's Events, but Winterworld was a trip into the dark, scary unknown. But the moment passed and Eve found her hand extending to shake his and the deal was done.

Winterworld would have to be a success, because Eve didn't go backwards at least not in business. She might have been stuck in the past in her personal life, but in her career, she would only ever allow herself to move forwards. She wasn't a natural gambler but this was an extraordinary business which merited out-of-the-box thinking. As she signed on the dotted line she knew that however much of a knobhead this Jack Glass turned out to be, she would have to get on with him now.

Eve loved working for herself with no boss to answer to and she was disciplined enough to do that. Winning new clients excited her; earning lots of money thrilled her. People liked her and trusted her and found her easy to deal with that was indicative in the repeat custom she received. She knew she was taking a massive gamble on Jack Glass being the same. What if he was an obnoxious cretin whom no one wanted to do business with?

She remembered taking Jonathan off to a very expensive hotel in Denmark for the weekend after banking a particularly massive cheque. These days she hadn't anything as exciting to spend it on though. All her money went into the bank and sat there twiddling its thumbs.

She had scribbled quite a few alterations on Aunt Evelyn's plan for the park as well. The wedding chapel had been changed to a second gift shop and cafe, for a start. Food, that's where the money was not in silly whimsical chapels that would probably bring in one booking a year and be a total waste of a building. The reindeer enclosure had been changed into a coffee shop and picnic area. Livestock only ran up vets' bills although it did, she supposed, make some commercial sense to have the ponies, if they were to be working and earning their hay or straw or whatever they ate pulling hired carriages and were not just stuck in a field pooing. She even wondered if there was any mileage in the idea of selling snow-pony poo to gardeners (it was just a thought). She had also claimed one of the log cabins near the restaurant as an ice-cream parlour. If she could get Violet on board that would be fantastic. Not just because she made the best ice cream in the world, but because she would have an ally firmly in her camp in case Mr Glass turned out to be a right old tosser with no business acumen at all. Any friendly weight on her side would help in levering him out. She would be meeting him tomorrow anyway. And all the many questions she had about him were at last going to be answered. Or so she thought.

Chapter 6.

Sitting in Mr Mead's office, Eve rolled his name around in her mouth. The spelling, she had learned, was Jacques Glace, not Jack Glass. She imagined a number of personalities which that name would suit. A fifty-something French fop with frilly cuffs, a giant quiff and a blue rinse. Carrying a toy poodle. Or a very young, arrogant, nerdy-student type with a big coat and a Masters in philosophy, a long Dr Who scarf wound around his neck. Eve still couldn't work out how Jacques Glace had managed to jointly inherit a very valuable chunk of land from her aunt. She considered the possibility that Aunt Evelyn had acquired a young, slim, six-packed Jacques Glace as a gigolo, and the land was his payment for 'services rendered'. She dismissed that immediately as being totally daft and so out of character for Aunt Evelyn it couldn't be taken seriously for a second. Then again, everything she had learned about her aunt recently was out of her character did she really know old Evelyn that well? The disclosures of the past couple of weeks had made her wonder. The sweet, quiet Aunt Evelyn who lived surrounded by very old sepia-coloured memories and had a penchant for Mr Kipling cakes was not the woman she recognized from all the recent revelations. It was how Lois Lane must have felt when she discovered who Clark Kent really was.

Eve had thought of nothing else but plans for the park since she had visited White Christmas. But she wanted to run it her way and not have to make joint decisions. Maybe she hoped he'd be willing to act as a silent partner and let her get on with it. With two cooks, the winter broth was more than likely to get spoiled. Anyway, Mr Glace would soon realize that he couldn't be as imaginative or good at organizing as she was; and when he saw that he would recede into the shadows and go and buy a boat to live on and ring up every year to check on the profits. She could live with that arrangement, she supposed.

Eve looked out of the window at a very rainy, bitter October day as they waited for the arrival of Jacques Glace. The Christmas lights were already up, strung across the central Barnsley street. If the start of Christmas became any earlier, Britain was going to end up being like Aunt Evelyn's house and not bother taking its decorations down. The shops had been filling up with Christmassy things since early September, forcing everyone to start feeling the pressure. Eve could have quite happily taken a flight to somewhere hot and sunny as soon as she saw the first Christmas card on a shelf and not returned until 2 January. However, Christmas for Eve's Events was a lucrative time she had to stick around and be tortured by it.

As she sat waiting for Mr Glace to turn up he was already late by an annoying ten minutes she mused about Christmases past. She supposed she must have had some happy memories about the season, but they were buried beneath the weight of the unpleasant ones. For every recollection of being at her Auntie Susan's, stuffed full of good food, there were five of her mother either drunk, sleeping off a party or snogging like a teenager on the sofa with a transient boyfriend. Eve remembered having fish fingers for Christmas lunch once because her mother was too stoned to cook anything else. Ruth Douglas flitted from man to man and home to home like a not-altogether-there butterfly and Christmas was an excuse to become even more of a sybarite than usual. Eve always felt as if she were outside a huge snow globe looking in at other people's merriment and enjoyment of Christmas whilst being unable to be part of it. The memories of her Christmases past were scented with cannabis, stale beer, and cheese and onion crisps. And the one Christmas which she felt might herald her entrance into that giant snow globe was the unhappiest and most terrible of them all.

Footsteps thundering up the stairs disturbed her reverie and ruled out the possibility that Mr Glace was a light French fop. He sounded more like a carthorse with Dutch clogs on.

Whatever she expected Jacques Glace to be like it wasn't the man who blustered into Mr Mead's office with a knitted hat on, complete with ear flaps and woven woollen plaits. He had an Arctic explorer coat on, the collar pulled up to his nose, and the biggest padded gloves that Eve had ever seen. The weather, however bad it was, didn't warrant that amount of anorak. This was Barnsley town centre, not Antarctica.

'Ah, Mr Glace,' said Mr Mead, standing and holding out his hand. 'Isn't it a cold one today?'

'Oui,' said Mr Glace. So he was French then. How the hell did Aunt Evelyn end up leaving half a theme park to a French man with hypothermia?

Eve took him in from top to bottom, and then back up again, where she found his eyes waiting for her. And very blue they were too. That was a bit embarrassing, she thought, him watching her watching him.

'Mr Glace, this is Miss Douglas.'

'Bonjour,' he said, holding his huge gloved hand out. Eve held hers out and his mitten totally engulfed it. And it was puddle-dropped-in soggy. His handshake was energetic to say the least she was surprised her arm was still in its socket by the time he had released her. Eve pulled her hand back and tried to dry it surreptitiously on her trousers but she wasn't subtle enough and she heard a muffle of three syllables which could have been 'so sorry'.

'Do take a seat,' said Mr Mead, indicating the chair next to Eve.

'Muffle muffle,' Mr Glace replied, but no one could understand what he said. Eve felt herself sighing impatiently as Mr Glace wrestled with the zip on his coat, then decided that he might need to take his gloves off first, but seemed to be having some difficulty doing that. Eve wouldn't have been surprised to find that his gloves were threaded on a string through his sleeves. Mr Mead and Eve waited until the ridiculous Mr Glace tried to gain some purchase on one glove with the other. He tugged hard to no avail, then harder, with the result that the glove flew off and hit Eve square in the face.

'Mom mom mom mom,' was the sound that came out of the big coat.

'It's fine,' said Eve, in a voice that intimated it was anything but fine. She lifted the glove with one finger and handed it back to Mr Glace as if she had just picked up a dead rat. Then she dabbed at her face to dry it whilst Mr Glace took off his other glove and unzipped his tent of a coat.

Eve's brain had not been in appraising mood for a long time. If it were, she might have found her pupils dilating at the face of the newly uncovered Jacques Glace, because he was a handsome man. His eyes were indeed very blue and there was a mischievous light dancing in them. His mouth was generous and rested in an upward curve as if he had laughed so much it had become its normal set. There was just the right amount of deliberate stubble on his strong jaw to say 'very well groomed' and it was greying, like his cropped short hair, and both suited him well. Oh yes, he had 'charmer' written all over him. She had yet to find out if he had charmed or conned her great aunt or both. As he pulled off his coat to reveal a pair of big shoulders, a waft of aftershave passed over Eve. Something foresty and yeurch reminiscent of Christmas.

Jacques sat down on the chair and rubbed some life into his hands. They were the size of shovels, Eve noticed. He wore a ring on the third finger of his right hand. She wondered if that was a wedding ring and maybe the French wore them on that finger?

Mr Mead pressed the button on an intercom on his desk.

'Barbara, would you bring the coffee through now. Mr Glace has arrived.'

'Ooh, lovely,' said Jacques Glace, in a voice as French as a Yorkshire pudding. 'I'm parched.'

It made Eve's head jerk towards him. 'You're not French?' she asked.

'Half,' he said with a sparkle in his eye. 'The bottom half.'

Eve felt her top lip twitch into a sneer. One of those men who thought he was really funny and God's gift to women. Well, he wasn't. She wondered if his real name was Jack Glass after all and he was just being a pretentious prat with the spelling.

Mr Mead's secretary pushed open the door holding a tray of three tall china mugs of coffee with impossibly tiny handles. Eve foresaw a disaster and tried to move her chair ever so slightly further away from the half-Frenchman before he ended up spilling his drink all over her skirt.

He didn't even attempt the handle though, she noticed. His hand circled the top of the cup and he lifted it to his lips. She was most surprised that he didn't slurp, or pour the coffee into the saucer and drink it that way.

'Sorry if I've held you up by not being able to meet earlier in the week,' said Jacques both to Mr Mead and Eve. 'I've been away.'

Eve wondered if he'd been at a slapstick convention.

'So, how do you know my aunt so well that she left you in joint possession of a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre plot of land?' asked Eve, trying but failing not to sound cross about that.

Jacques Glace had the audacity to ever so slowly raise his finger to his nose and then tap it twice. How dare he, thought Eve. It wasn't exactly an unreasonable question in the circumstances.

'Mr Glace, you've looked in more detail at the plans for Winterworld, I presume?' said Mr Mead.

'Oui,' said Jacques. 'And I've got some great ideas to contribute. I can't wait to start working on it with you, Miss Douglas,' he added, turning towards Eve and giving her a wide smile which showed off nice, even white teeth. The smile of a charming crocodile, thought Eve to herself. Well, any attempt to seduce her with soft words would fall on deaf ears. She knew his type. She came across them in her job often: men who thought a big smile would get them a massive discount. The only thing they actually did get was a 'dream on, buster' smile in return.

'Do you have any experience of theme parks, Mr Glace?' Eve wondered what line of business he was in. She couldn't imagine he was running ICI.

'Only going to them,' came the reply. She wasn't surprised. She could imagine Jacques Glass sitting on a roller coaster like a big kid, with his giant hands raised above his head, shouting 'wheee'.

'So you're not a builder then?' Eve tried to pry subtly.

'Non.'

'Or an engineer.'

'Non.'

He was being deliberately obstructive. Enjoying it too, judging from the twinkle in his eye as he delivered his monosyllabic answers.

Eve went for the direct question.

'So what exactly is your line of work, Mr Glace?'

Jacques Glace swivelled in his seat. 'I haven't worked in ages,' he said, clearly delighting in the look on her face.

Eve was shocked: her aunt had left half an unfinished theme park to a jobless joker. She wondered if this might contravene the 'being of sound mind' part of writing a will.

Mr Mead pushed two sheets of paper across the table. 'These require your signatures to officially allow you to be in charge of Winterworld Ltd,' he explained. 'All funds will then be available, although as I said, you do need both parties' approval as well as my own on items of major spending.'

Good, thought Eve. Jacques Glace didn't look trustworthy with money. She had visions of him running amok with a chequebook and spending it all on sweets.

Jacques politely indicated that Eve should sign first.

'Your aunt ran Winterworld from the Portakabin on site until the staff quarters were completed,' said Mr Mead, taking the signed papers and sealing them in a brown envelope. 'The grounds are patrolled by Pitbull Securities. They've been expertly secured.'

'Yes, they would be,' said Eve, half in the open, half to herself. Pitbull Securities had been in the game a long time. Keith Pitt the younger was an ex-boxer and local hard man whom anyone would be an idiot to cross. Keith Pitt the elder used to have a scrapyard in the seventies, patrolled by a lion that he'd bought from a circus because he was sick of stuff getting nicked and his Alsatians couldn't keep up. He'd got the idea from someone who kept a bear in his yard, but he couldn't find one of those. No wonder some people thought Barnsley was a bit rough. Her Uncle Jeff once told her that the lion kept getting out and was often to be found leisurely walking down Burton Street. Keith Pitt used to freeze sheeps' heads for the lion to nibble on in the summer like big ice-pops, and it would play football with a box around the yard. On occasion it even went in the car with him, hanging over the back seat watching the scenery pass by. 'Leo' made the Barnsley Chronicle on quite a few occasions over the years. Funnily enough, no one ever robbed the Pitt scrapyards again.

Eve shook her head at the thought of her aunt having an office, which was even more insane than the idea of guard-lions. The vision of Evelyn going into work with a briefcase was totally unbelievable. She laughed aloud, not meaning to.

'I'm sorry,' she excused herself. 'I still can't take it all in.'

'I understand,' nodded Mr Mead. 'It must have been quite a shock.'

'I mean, Aunt Evelyn doing all this. It's unthinkable really.'

'I can imagine it quite well,' interrupted Jacques. 'She was a sprightly old bird. Sharp as a razor with an incredible head for business. If only she had known she had that potential earlier in her life. She could have been President of the USA.'

Eve gave a half-gasp, half-dry chuckle, and felt a spiral of fury course through her. How dare he intimate he knew Aunt Evelyn better than her own flesh and blood did? The cheek of the man. She sat on her anger and tried to talk sweetly.

'And from where did you gain your insight of my aunt?' she asked with a deadly smile.

'From many, many hours of conversation,' was all Jacques Glace gave away. He spoke teasingly slowly as if delighting in keeping Eve in the dark.

Mr Mead handed over two identical sets of keys.

'These are for the Portakabin,' he said. 'And the front gate. I don't know what the others are for I'm afraid, nor can I tell you how far she was in the project; but as I understand it, her files were expertly kept and, knowing Miss Douglas, all should be very straightforward.'

'You're telling me,' said Eve. In the files she had so far studied, everything was documented down to when the snow machines were arriving, the staff she had set on via an agency, how much they were to be paid, even where she had bought the reindeer from, although Eve had every intention of getting a refund on the animal.

'So, we need to go into the office and pick up where she left off,' Jacques stated. 'I suggest we synchronize our watches and meet at nine a.m. on Monday morning.' He turned to Eve for affirmation.

'Yes, I was going to say the same,' said Eve. 'I'll be there at eight a.m.'

'Oh, make it nine,' Jacques responded with a flap of his hand. 'Don't want to kill ourselves, do we? And it will be Monday morning. Yuk.'

Eve doubted that Jacques Glace would be in danger of killing himself with work.

They exited Mr Mead's office together, both holding their set of keys.

'Where are you parked?' asked Jacques.

Eve pointed to the left. Thank goodness he was parked to the right, so she wouldn't have to endure walking beside him.

'I'm looking forward to working with you, Eve,' Jacques sparkled.

'I'm looking forward to picking up the project,' said Eve, unable to make it plainer that working with him was not something she was relishing.

He let loose a low peal of laughter then pulled in a lungful of cold air and noisily let it go. 'Ah, it's going to be fun one day,' he said. 'Full of sparks and fire.'

'What is?' said Eve.

'Being married to you, because nothing surer, it will happen. Please remember that,' he said. 'See you on Monday, Miss Douglas.' And off he went, leaving a stunned Eve in his wake.

Chapter 7.