'He liked you enough to tell you he hated them.'

'Okay, then, I'm a bit too old for holiday romances,' parried Lara.

'And yet I'm two months older than you and you're encouraging me to have one,' May threw back at her. 'Always harder to take your own advice than give it, isn't it, Lara Rickman?'

'The difference is that Frank Hathersage and you have an obvious attraction to each other. Gene Hathersage, on the other hand, is about as far away from "my type" as it is possible to get.'

'Maybe that's the point,' said May. 'The types you seem to pick have turned out to be rather c.r.a.p, haven't they? You even manage to make me look like a good judge of character.'

'The answer is still no,' said Lara, decisively. As if.

Chapter 79.

They had a super-lazy day. May and Lara read their books and Clare cooked them all cheese and red onion toasties for lunch before going for yet another swim in the lagoon. How could Raine bear it that this beautiful water was below her cottage and she could no longer get to it? Clare pictured Raine and Seymour, young and beautiful, kissing here, maybe even making love in the sea. How lonely she must be without him.

She swam out of the lagoon into the cooler grey waters of the sea and looked up but Raine was not outside her cottage this time. In the hazy distance was a container ship on its way to a far-flung sh.o.r.e. How weird it was that so much weight could float, she suddenly thought. The sea really was a thing of mystery. She had often wished she could see the bowls of every ocean, lake and loch completely drained, yielding up their secrets: the treasures, the bodies, the shipwrecks. Even the creatures that had never yet been seen by human eye new varieties were being discovered all the time, so maybe sea serpents really did exist. And the Loch Ness monster. And mermaids. Maybe some of those sightings of manatees and dolphins were actually the real thing. Though surely even Lara with her specs off could tell the difference between a woman with a tail and a rather plump sea-lion-type animal or a fish with a long nose squirting water out of the top of its head?

You might have had sisters had it not been for me. Raine's voice slipped into her reverie. She had been talking to her friend Gladys when Clare was outside the tunnel door. A picture of the young Raine flashed again in her head. A Raine with long golden hair, the face of an angel . . . and the tail of a fish. Wouldn't that just be magic if it were true?

Lara had just finished the last words of her novel when Clare arrived on the terrace.

'Good swim?'

'Lovely,' Clare replied. 'I'm going to miss the lagoon so much. If I die, will you have my ashes sprinkled there?'

'Shut up,' said Lara. 'That's morbid.'

'I'm serious. Ask Gene if he'll let you.'

'Nothing is going to happen to you, Clare Salter. You're going to go home, conquer the world and die a very old lady in the Ritz.'

Yes, one of those old dears who are rich, alone and cared for by strangers, thought Clare, swallowing hard. Not dissimilar to Raine.

She hadn't been able to get the picture of Raine out of her head since she thought of her as a half-woman. You might have had sisters had it not been for me. Then May's voice: If there was a run of boy births it was because a mermaid was in nearby waters.

Then she heard her own voice: Clare Salter, even with your over-imaginative delusions, please get a grip.

'Pub, anyone?' asked May. 'I know it's a bit early, but we could get some food there and-'

'Sold,' said Lara. 'I'll get my shoes.'

'Let me put some more make-up on first,' said May, going into her bedroom. She was conscious of the scratches as well as her scar now. She couldn't do much about the swelling, but at least she could make herself look a bit less like she'd had a fight with the heavyweight champion of bramble bushes. As they pa.s.sed La Mer, Lara found herself looking up the path to see if Gene's truck was there. It was. She wondered what he was doing; if he was carving or eating or making things ready for Gracie the greyhound's arrival. She hadn't seen him today at all, but she had found herself thinking about him quite a lot. Her thoughts had drifted off in his direction when she was reading and she'd had to start at the top of the screen again. Going out to breakfast with a man was something she had never done before. Or picking out a puppy. And no man had ever made her a crutch. Come to think of it, no man had made her anything. Except cry. She was shocked to think that she might actually miss Gene Hathersage. Just as well she wasn't staying in Ren Dullem for any longer. Her heart was obviously looking to stuff up the wound it had suffered with any big old hairy rag.

The sun was still blazing on that late afternoon. The strange clouds in the air were mere wisps as if whatever machine was producing them had run out of materials. So, for once, the sky was a barely interrupted ma.s.s of blue. The lemon-coloured honeysuckle on the crumbling cottages was releasing its sweet, heady scent. Lara wished she could bottle it and uncork it whenever she felt the need to teleport her brain back to this lovely, blissful, lazy day. May inhaled it and felt a pang deep inside her, as if it had poked an old memory of playing swing-ball with her dad in their Leeds back garden whilst her mum potted plants. Clare took it in and thought of the cottage she and Lud had one day been going to buy beside the sea: covered in honeysuckle and pink roses.

They ordered three steak and ale pies, mash, gravy and peas. Three gargantuan portions arrived.

'I don't care if Daisy Unwin comes in, I am not leaving this before I have finished,' announced Clare.

'I think this is going to finish me off, not the other way around,' May said, getting ready to dive in.

Seconds later, the door to the pub opened and their three heads swung round in unison to check who it was. To Clare's horror, it was worse than seeing Daisy Unwin. In strode Val Hathersage, his green eyes sparkling.

Chapter 80.

'Evening, ladies,' he said.

Lara and May returned the greeting wholeheartedly; Clare mumbled. Val stood at the bar, his bottom stuck out. It might as well have had a label on it saying, Look at this, girls, and scream for me. But all Clare could see were the scruffy trainers, the shapeless bottom and the leather jacket. Again she saw the image of herself in her bra being shouted at by an old man. She was no Colleen Landers, she was made for lovemaking in a nice bed with a man who cared about her pleasure, who was considerate and never kept her waiting, who brought her tea in bed and who would have gone back for her shoe had it dropped off. She liked the comfort of a nice car, not the discomfort of freezing her t.i.ts off on a bike. And she derived as much thrill from that one-hundred-mile-an-hour bike ride as she would have had from eating a kangaroo's a.n.u.s on I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

Oh how she missed the old attentive, respectful, sensitive Lud. More than ever.

'I'm moving on, Shirley,' Val Hathersage said to the barmaid, loudly enough to be overheard by Clare. 'I'll presume this pint is on the house, then, shall I?' He was flirting with Shirley who was curling her hair around her finger. If that was an effort to make Clare jealous, it fell on stony ground. She was worth more. Much more.

'No more trips planned with Gene, then?' May asked, chewing on the crumbly pastry of her pie.

'No, why should there be?' returned Lara.

'Because there's a spark between you and, right or wrong, if you'd had a little holiday romance it would have driven that t.o.s.s.e.r James right out of your head.'

'It wouldn't work,' said Clare.

'Universal fact. Bonking another bloke does work,' May insisted.

'Trust me, it doesn't.'

May let loose a hoot of laughter. 'And how have you become such an expert, Miss Salter?'

'Because that's what I nearly did whilst I've been here and, if anything, it's made matters worse,' said Clare, watching the jaws of her two friends drop to the floor. 'Now eat up and I'll tell you the rest when we get back to the cottage.'

Clare refused to say any more on the matter in the pub, so they gobbled down their dinners, drank up quickly, bought a couple of bottles of wine over the bar from Shirley and left her to flirt with the green-eyed man with the fair wavy hair and the sticky-out b.u.m. Lara found she could walk faster now without the crutch than with it, and virtually took the hill at a sprint. They threw themselves into the cottage, May grabbed the corkscrew, Lara found the gla.s.ses. Once they were all sitting with a red wine in front of them, Lara gave Clare the signal.

'Shoot.'

'The guy in the pub who was flirting with Shirley is Val Hathersage,' began Clare.

'Oh.' May was surprised. 'He isn't much like his brothers, is he?'

'And the reason I didn't want to talk about it in the pub is . . . he's the one I've been seeing on and off.'

May and Lara looked dramatically at each other.

'You wouldn't do that behind Lud's back,' said Lara. 'No way.'

Clare decided the time was right to tell them the rest. 'What I also haven't told you is that Lud and I finished our relationship just before I came on holiday.'

'Oh, Clare.' Both May and Lara broke into a symphony of sympathetic noises.

'It was my choice. Lud got the chance to go to Dubai and be mega rich and important at the same time as Blackwoods and Margoyles offered me the partnership. It wasn't fair on him. He wanted me to go there with him and I couldn't turn the job down. So I thought it would be better if we ended things.'

May moaned. 'Oh, this is awful. You should have told us.'

'Well, I'm telling you now. I had to finish it with Lud. I felt second best to his work.' Clare shrugged. 'He didn't exactly fight to get me back, so I reckon I made the right call. So when we came here and this green-eyed man started paying me some attention, I suppose my damaged ego was flattered. We only kissed. Although, in my head, I did quite a bit more.' And she let loose a laugh that had nothing to do with humour.

'So when you told us you were popping out for some milk and taking an hour over it you were with him?' said Lara with a lascivious smirk. 'You dirty minx.'

'Yeah, precisely. That's exactly what it felt like. Dirty and not in a good way. It's not for me, all that risking my life on the back of a motorbike and snogging in woods.'

'You did nothing wrong, though,' said Lara. 'You were single, he was single. You weren't hurting anyone.'

'I hurt my b.u.m on the forest floor,' grumbled Clare, making the others chuckle. 'Forget all that rubbish you read in romance novels about it feeling like a velvet cushion on your back, it doesn't. I can't get the squirrel c.r.a.p out of my skirt and I'm sure I've still got an acorn up my jacksy.'

May was laughing so much she got a st.i.tch.

'And that's how I really lost my shoe it fell off when I was on his bike and he was taking corners like b.l.o.o.d.y Barry Sheene.'

'Stop, Clare, I'm going to wee myself,' gasped May.

'Ah, so it didn't fall off a cliff.' Lara punched her playfully on the arm. 'Liar liar, pants on fire.'

'I don't think Casanova has anything to worry about. I think Mrs Hathersage gave him the wrong name,' drawled Clare. 'Narcissus might have been more appropriate. Yep, I'm proudly on the reject shelf with you two.'

Lara filled up their gla.s.ses. 'Here's to singledom then, girls. And friendship. We might not have men but we've got each other.'

And, that, at that moment, was all any of them needed.

Chapter 81.

Joan switched off the light and turned her head into her pillow. That was it, then. She needed to return to plan A: seduce Edwin Carlton, get him to marry her and leave her his fortune. There was no world-exclusive scoop that would bring her a huge wodge of easily earned wonga and save her the effort of having to wh.o.r.e herself with another old man.

She closed her eyes and began to drift off. The facts in her notebook swirled around in her mind, roaming freely as she started to release her hold on her consciousness. Seymour Acaster, 1928, rain and reines and Raine. Sirens and ships and thirteen men sewn into a tapestry in the library. Dolphins rescuing sailors, incompetent accountants paying out stipends to widows. R. Rain. Reine de la Mer. Queen of the Sea. The tapestry . . .

Her eyes snapped awake. The tapestry. Could that tell her anything she didn't already know?

Joan sat up in bed. Now would be an ideal time to go to the house and see. Lord Carlton didn't have a burglar alarm, just a panic b.u.t.ton at the side of his bed, and he would be fast asleep. He went to bed at nine and it was after midnight.

Quickly Joan dressed, in black to be on the safe side. She collected the huge prehistoric torch from the kitchen shelf, picked up the key for the back door of the manor house and stuffed her camera into her pocket. She stole across the gra.s.s so her feet wouldn't crunch on the gravel, and also to avoid stumbling over any of the stone planters that were dotted around. She inserted the key into the lock and turned it as slowly as she could. Every slight sound seemed amplified by a thousand decibels. The door squeaked as she pushed it open by tiny degrees and made as much noise on the way back to the jamb. She stepped carefully over to the library and tried the door, but it was stiff and needed a firm hand. She winced as the door whined open; luckily it shut silently. Now she could switch on her torch to full beam. The tapestry was too high, though, and she needed to get up close and personal.

A ladder was fixed to a rail that ran along the wall of books to give access to the higher shelves and the tapestry above them. It was presently situated in the middle and she just knew it was going to make a noise like a banshee on heat when she pulled it across. Oh, for some WD40. The ladder was stiff and needed a hefty tug to set it rolling, resulting in an ear-grating squeal. Joan's heart leapt into her mouth. But then it glided smoothly to the end and she climbed up, the torch stuffed down her top.

The images in the tapestry were crudely drawn. She pulled herself along, shining the torch on the picture. The 'action' started in 1850 Anne and Henry Carlton married. What a pair of mingers. It had to be an arranged marriage. In the next frame a baby was born but it was sewn into an angel's arms. Not good news, then. There was another date, which she couldn't make out, and a woman with her arms crossed and looking a bit dead. Joan pulled herself along past a tapestry semblance of Carlton Hall and some men with large skinny dogs, obviously hunters. More married people, another baby . . . blah blah. And now we come to the headline act, she thought. She smiled, seeing the half-submerged boat. Fish were leaping out of the sea between thirteen male figures some in the air having just leapt off the boat, others in the sea. The words Reine de la Mer could just be made out but only because they were picked out in holes. Someone had removed the st.i.tching.

Joan pulled herself along to find a large blue dolphin emerging from the sea. She pulled further on. Thirteen men were standing in a line, a golden light behind them. And there the tapestry ended.

She rolled herself back to the boat part again. There was something not right about that dolphin. She put her fingers on it and found that it stood too proud and was sewn with a thicker, wool-type thread that wasn't as faded as the rest of the tapestry. This was added later, she surmised, poking at it. Then she nipped it to see if it could be pulled off, but it was sewn firmly. She felt about herself for anything sharp; the only thing she could find was her hair slide. She used it to saw the middle of the threads but they weren't giving. Then one thread broke. This was taking some time, but it was working. With renewed vigour she sawed again and more threads snapped. There were hundreds of them so no wonder the dolphin bulged. Someone had gone to a lot of effort to cover whatever lay beneath the dolphin.

Back and forth the edge of the hairclip sliced into the threads until they were all severed. Joan pulled out as many as she could then she lifted the torch to see what was there.

Reine de la mer.

Under the dolphin was a neat needlepoint figure: the top half of a woman with long golden hair emerging from the waves.

Chapter 82.

Lara walked past the warning sign, with its dire threats to trespa.s.sers, thinking that Gene Hathersage was no more capable of shooting them than she was capable of joining the Bolshoi Ballet. She knocked on the door and it was s.n.a.t.c.hed open. It was his natural heavy-handedness rather than an indication of how the visitor would be received, she knew.

'I brought your crutch back,' she said. 'I didn't know whether you meant me to keep it or not.'

'Well, obviously I didn't,' said Gene. 'I have such a procession of short women falling down holes here that it's bound to come in handy again.'

He moved aside to let her in. He had a bag of well-loved dog toys on the table and also the old chewed bed which had been at the side of the wood-burning stove.

'I thought I'd have a clear-out for Gracie's arrival on Sunday,' he said, with a cheerless laugh. 'But I don't think I can let them go.'

'Why don't you take his favourite toy and bury it with him?' suggested Lara. 'Burn the rest. I always used to burn my letters to Santa because my dad told me that smoke finds its way to where it's meant to be going.'

Gene nodded slowly. 'That's a nice idea. Thank you.'

'So, should I keep this?' She held up the crutch.

'That's up to you. Are you likely to fall down any more holes?'

'G.o.d knows what's in store for me.' Lara shrugged. 'I'd better keep it, then. As a souvenir.'

She turned to go.