The Love Letter.

Fiona Walker.

For the Boddington Bon Vivant, the flame-haired Freudian and the High Peaks academic, whose kinship and company is such a joy, and who enjoyed the 'real' Spywood; with love and gratitude.

Prologue.

From: Kelly.

To: Allegra North.

Re: PFEF Finland.

Dear Allegra, Thank you for forwarding the Finnish edition of Ptolemy Finch and the Emerald Falcon for Gordon; I will mark one for his attention.

Kind regards, Kelly From: Gordon Lapis To: Allegra North Re: PFEF Finland Allegra, Kelly has just put this in front of me and once again I am astonished by the liberties taken in translation. I have been working my way through it with the aid of BabelFish and a Finnish dictionary and see that in Chapter 5 when Ptolemy suffers a reaction to the sting from the dune wasp, Purple tells him 'your dick is swollen'. Later, in Chapter 18, when Rushlore asks Ptolemy where his sidekick is, he replies 'I had sex with Purple yesterday'. I know the Finnish are liberal sorts, but I will remind you that this is a children's book.

GL.

From: Allegra North To: Gordon Lapis Cc: Kelly Re: PFEP Finland Dear Gordon, I believe that in Finnish the phrase for 'swollen tongue' is very close to 'swollen dick' and there may be a small typo, which we trust will not affect the reading pleasure of your many Finnish fans. Similarly, I am told that 'I saw her yesterday' only requires a missing umlaut to become a far more intimate statement. Again, I'm certain it won't affect readers' enjoyment.

Regards, Allegra From: Gordon Lapis To: Allegra North Re: PFEF Finland Allegra, It's essential that Ptolemy remains asexual. Perhaps this is why in Chapter 21 of the Finnish version, when he and Purple are sitting on the clifftop above the Sea of Sand, he says 'I am a parasite'? Parasites reproduce asexually, so no doubt you will reply assuring me that I should be grateful to my Finnish translator.

GL.

P.s. I cannot get through to Conrad. Where is he?

From: Allegra North To: Gordon Lapis Cc: Kelly Re: PFEF Finland Dear Gordon, I gather 'iloinen' (happy) and 'loinen' (parasite) are easily muddled, but of course I will take this up with your Finnish publisher as a matter of urgency.

May I take this opportunity to apologise profusely on behalf of Conrad, myself and all at Fellows Howlett for any distress this is causing you.

Conrad is out of the office all day, I'm afraid, and not contactable on his BlackBerry. I haven't seen him since yesterday, but I will make sure he's apprised of this.

Regards, Allegra Allegra, Is that 'seen him' with or without an umlaut?

GL.

P.s. Please do not always cc our correspondence to Kelly; displacement activities like re-translating translations are an author's secret vice, and my assistant is my guilty conscience.

Gordon, Nothing umlautish about Conrad, as you know.

As secret vices go, I believe teaching yourself Finnish is deeply noble. I have heard back from your publisher in Helsinki who reassures me that the translation is perfect and that BabelFish is leading us both astray. I trust that makes you feel parasitic.

Allegra Indeed, my tongue is swollen with delight. I think Conrad has a great deal of the lout about his accent. In diacritic terms, I am regrettably grave.

With apologies for antagonism, GL.

No apology needed.

A.

P.s. I'm acute.

Fellows Howlett has an imposter in its midst; a sense of humour is surely against company policy. I believe you are also a fan of detective fiction?

GL.

It's my dream to discover a bestselling crime writer from the agency's slush pile.

A.

What future would you suggest for a Finnish detective named Iloinen Loinen?

GL.

A name change. While you were quite right to insist 'Ptolemy with a silent P' could be loved and understood by the public, Iloinen Loinen is never likely to be big in Japan.

A.

P.s. Scandinavian detectives are very last year.

And what do you predict will be big in Japan, Allegra?

A young, gutsy female detective from west London; you can feature popular tourist attractions interspersed with violence, murder and Knightsbridge department stores. Think rumpled, blonde, big smile, kind heart. Incredibly sharp, witty and courageous.

I take it the grizzled, hard-drinking man with a broken marriage is also 'last year', along with monochrome landscape of high rises, dingy pubs, back alleys and sex workers ... ?

That's still a good formula. How about a double act? She = rumpled and feisty; he = grizzled and boozy. Mismatches are always a hit; readers will love the sexual chemistry.

I'll remind you that sexual chemistry is not within my literary canon.

Untrue! Ptolemy Finch always makes me v hot under the collar when chatting to Purple on clifftops. You totally understand the secret of building sexual tension over soooo long it makes your readers ache.

You must moderate these urges if you are to remain as my research assistant. You must also stop discussing our communications with Conrad, in or out of work.

I shall call my detective duo Julie Ocean and Jimmy Jimee. Their relationship will be entirely professional, a concept you will need to use your undeniably vivid imagination to grasp.

GL.

P.s. Please forward IM+ name and keep an open line at all times.

Is IM+ name like porn star name (first pet and street name)?

Gopher Kew.

A.

From: Kelly To: Allegra North Cc: Gordon Lapis; Conrad Knight Re: From Gordon Lapis Dear Allegra, Gordon asks that you stop sending emails direct to him because he is working on a new project entitled The Girl with the Parasite Ache all afternoon. You can direct any further emails via my address as usual.

Kind regards.

Kelly.

From: Conrad Knight.

To: Allegra.

Re: Gordon.

Legs.

DO NOT encourage Gordon to write detective fiction; we have enough problems keeping him focused on Ptolemy. You must remain professional. Think 'Reveal'.

It has been brought to my attention by Human Resources that your personal mobile phone is inadequate for your enhanced professional role. Fellows Howlett are therefore providing you with a company cell-phone which will be carefully monitored for use. Do not play games on it.

Conrad.

P.s. Book our usual table for dinner.

Booked! A xxx.

P.s. We don't have an HR department, do we ... ?

Chapter 1.

'Breathe in, Legs!'

Allegra North breathed in deeply as her sister hauled at the corset laces in the satin bodice. As her waist narrowed, her chest expanded and her white bra rose out of the square Elizabethan cleavage and burst through the delicate lace bib like airbags popping through a car windscreen.

'I knew you should have put on the whalebone basque.' Ros's reddened face appeared over her sister's shoulder as Legs crammed the offending spheres back in and peered down at the broken stitching.

'I can't believe you thought this would fit me. You were only a size eight when you married. We all remember the raw fish diet; you were sucking Smints all the way up the aisle.'

'But it was worth it,' Ros sighed, glancing down to her size fourteen curves before gazing wistfully at her sister's reflection in the mirror ahead of them. 'I love this dress.'

Legs also regarded the huge meringue that she was now uncomfortably sporting, modelled on the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I. It had never been to her taste, especially the high lace ruff and wired collar which she'd secretly thought made her sister look like Cruella de Vil posing as a butterfly when Ros had married Will twelve years earlier. But it was undoubtedly a spectacular creation, meticulously hand-embroidered. Now, carefully released from the plastic cocoon in which it had been resting on the back of the spare room door for over a decade, it had just been lowered onto Allegra with the reverie of a queen's coronation robes being fitted to a maid to enable a royal escape from treachery. She was at least a dress size too large and six inches too tall for the made-to-measure creation, and her familiar pink-cheeked outdoors complexion looked faintly ridiculous peering into the mirror above such delicate stitch-work and intricate detail. She fingered one of the embroidered flowers, seeded with pearls, which had been a labour of love for the designers who'd attached two hundred of them ready for The Big Day.

Ros swatted her hand away from the precious little four-petal motif and then reached behind her sister to tuck the corset laces into the skirt waist.

'I so love this dress.' She sighed again as she began buttoning up the lace panel over the stays. 'I'd always hoped you might want to wear it when you and Francis ...' She stopped herself, face ducking out of sight behind the huge ruff. 'You do look beautiful in it.'

Rosalind's wedding day had been a no-holds-Bard Elizabethan extravaganza. Despite marrying into one of London's oldest Catholic families whose heritage dated back to before the Reformation, she'd somehow pulled it off. If they could have feasted on roast swan, Legs knew her sister would have ordered it. The occasion had been spectacular, theatrical and fun, as so much surrounding Ros had been in those days. A vivacious, clever musician still studying at the Royal Academy, Ros had been playing harpsichord in the foyer of the Barbican when Will Herbert first spotted her, her energy and passion causing him to miss the play he was supposed to be reviewing for Time Out and ask her for a drink instead. A year later, they were married at Brompton Oratory and Allegra and Ros's father Dorian had literally sold the family furniture to pay for it, some of the best pieces he'd collected over the years suddenly finding themselves relocated from the family's tall, Victorian Kew townhouse to his Richmond antiques shop in what he had tactfully referred to at the time as a 'much-needed declutter'.

The dress Legs was now sporting had cost Dorian a matching pair of George III Sheraton armchairs and a marble-topped Louis XV bombe and had been just as awkward to fit in the back of a vintage Rolls Royce.

Still only nineteen at the time, Ros had been a radiantly happy bride, her conversion to Catholicism as all-consuming as her love for Will. That day, bursting with joy, the new Mrs Herbert performed in public for the last time. As a personal gift bestowed from wife to husband alongside the wedding list dinner service, silverware and crystal from their guests, Ros insisted that she must give up her musical training and dedicate herself to becoming a home-maker.

To bridesmaid Legs, poised to begin studying for her A levels amid dreams of globe-trotting and career-building, such devotion to domesticity had been anathema and she'd dived out of the way when the skilfully tossed pomander bouquet had flown in her direction. But Ros firmly believed that the holy trinity of happiness lay between the altar, the kitchen sink and the font.

Within weeks, she'd fallen pregnant amid frantic nesting in the Fulham flat the newlyweds shared. When Nico was two, the family moved to a Regency villa in Ealing, meaning that Will forfeited his dreams of freelancing while writing a novel, and instead let the Herbert family pull one of their many old school ties to secure him a well-paid editorship of a worthy but dull financial journal which bored him rigid but paid the monthly mortgage interest. Once Nico started school, Ros took on private piano tuition to help ends meet, but the money and the marriage wore increasingly thin, and that Elizabethan feast which had united writer and musician seemed a world apart as husband and wife slowly became affection-starved enemies under the same roof.

The cherished wedding dress had remained in the house long after Will's tenancy ended. Five years earlier, he'd run away with the part-time nanny (and tenant of their ground floor flat), struggling scriptwriter Daisy, this betrayal made more awkward still by the fact that Daisy was a family friend who had been thick as thieves with Allegra since childhood. After a brief spell of utter disbelief followed by inconsolable fury, Ros had retreated into martyrdom, a state in which she still existed, refusing to acknowledge the second life her son now had with his father and his half-siblings.

These days, Will and Daisy lived in glorious chaos in Somerset with two more children and a third on the way, their rural idyll funded by Daisy's runaway sitcom success Slap Dash. Although Will picked up occasional freelance work in between cooking, childcare and chicken rearing, this house-husband role was a cause of much criticism from Ros, who thought he'd 'wimped out'. His income barely covered the maintenance, and finances remained the biggest clash-point between the sparring ex-spouses and they were the reason Ros had decided to clamp her younger sister in the dream dress today.

'I knew it would suit you perfectly,' she sighed, on tiptoes again and looking over Legs' shoulder, their matching dark grey eyes lined up, Ros's features sharper and framed with hair the colour of cinnamon roast coffee beans cut into a neat urchin bob like a principal boy, making Legs resemble a rather blousy Cinderella by contrast, with smudges of last night's mascara beneath her wide eyes and her cloud of wild blonde hair on end, showing too much dark root.

'It's a bit short.' Legs peered at her flip-flopped feet poking out, complete with the three star tattoos on the left ankle she now regretted getting during her first term at university. Francis had made such a fuss when he saw them. At the time she'd been rebelliously unapologetic, but now she hated them, their zig-zag blue permanence a perpetual reminder of her unofficial catchphrase, that if you live for the moment, you also have to live with the consequence.

She'd been determined not to think about Francis, but now that she did, his face appeared beside hers in the mirror, seeing her in a wedding dress, blue eyes softening with pride, blonde hair swept back from that fallen-angel face. He'd make the most debonair of bridegrooms, so tall and handsome and charming. Ever since they'd first got together as two dare-playing teenagers who'd agreed to practise their kissing techniques on each other, she'd been fantasising about their wedding, remodelling it in her mind as the years passed. At first, it had been a sparkling Cinderella dress and a horse-drawn carriage; in her later teens the plan had changed to rock and roll Chelsea Registry Office and clubbing around London all night; then when they travelled together after university, she'd fallen for exotic white sand beaches, sarongs, sandals and simplicity. A decade after their first kiss, Francis had made the fantasy real by popping the question in the tiny Ladbroke Grove flat they shared together, both by then carving careers in publishing. Together, they had planned a simple ceremony in the chapel at Farcombe within earshot of the Celtic Sea off the North Devon coast in which they had swum together since childhood, the gulls calling above the cliff walks they'd known all their lives and the coves they'd spent so long exploring. In the evening, they planned to host a huge party in the main hall, Francis's childhood holiday home, with his father playing the bassoon and Ros the piano, other musician friends joining in, the arts-festival crowd adding eccentricity and colour, their school and university friends, the families that knew one another so well, village pub the Book Inn running the bar and the locals from Eascombe and Fargoe invited, all hell-bent on enjoying the celebration of the decade. It would be a party never to forget, and it was several years in the planning, with the couple's families eagerly adding their input, including the offer of the dreaded Ditchley dress.

Legs looked at her reflection again, the dress totally unsuited to her, its corset now so tightly laced that her waist was freakishly pinched above the farthingale and her face was turning red. She looked like a wild poppy drooping in a square jewelled vase.

Yet there was something about wearing a wedding dress that suspended her customary sardonic streak and forced a wellspring of sentiment through her protective shield. Just for a moment she let herself imagine the past year had not happened and that she was getting married after all. The thought made her giddy.

'I was the happiest I've ever felt in my life when I wore this dress.' Ros had tears in her eyes. 'It makes you feel ethereal, doesn't it?'

'It's not too late to change your mind about it, you know,' Legs said kindly, reminding herself that any ethereal, giddy feelings were due to lack of oxygen. She was growing increasingly light-headed because she couldn't breathe properly.

'Nonsense! The photographer is waiting and we must press on. I'm needed at the abbey to help arrange the altar flowers. What are you going to do about your hair?'

'What's wrong with it?

'You can't leave it like that.' Ros reached into a drawer of her dressing table. 'It's hanging all over the ruff here!' She scraped her sister's uncombed blonde hair into a topknot and anchored it so tightly with a jewelled scrunchy that Legs winced at the impromptu Essex facelift. 'Much better. You can go into the garden for pictures I think. You'll have to bend your knees so those flip-flops don't show.' She turned to march from the room, calling 'Nicholas! Nicholas! We're ready for you!'

Lagging behind and still fighting for breath, Legs picked up her new mobile phone to check whether Conrad had texted yet to say whether he'd make it. He hadn't. Gordon Lapis, meanwhile, had sent several emails very early that morning, complaining about the Portuguese translation of Emerald Falcon and asking her what Julie Ocean's typical breakfast routine might be.

When Conrad had insisted that the company fund the newest, whizziest iPhone for his PA quite unprecedented at Fellows Howlett, where one got to take home an office laptop about as often as a school guinea pig and at least one director had yet to go digital at all Legs had excitedly assumed this meant that he wanted a hotline to her at all times. She now realised that he just wanted to get the agency's most awkward author, Gordon Lapis, off his back and onto hers.

She tucked it into her sleeve and followed her sister along the landing.

Predictably, there was no answer from the room at the far end of the corridor covered with 'keep out' signs.

Ros knocked hard. 'Nicholas!' She always pronounced the last two syllables of her son's name 'alas', as though he was something to regret. He'd recently announced that he would answer only to 'Nico', a fact his mother chose to completely ignore.