Fiona Harper - Best of Fiona Harper

Adam, however, wasn’t gazing anywhere but straight back into the eyes of those judging him, not perturbed in the least about the lack of enthusiasm for his chosen profession.

‘Actually,’ he said, shooting a meaningful glance at me, ‘it would be more accurate to say that my company specialises in custom-built wooden structures—lodges, garden buildings. Our most popular range is luxury treehouses.’

‘Treehouses?’ Louisa’s immaculately plucked eyebrows almost disappeared under her hairline. ‘How quaint! For children, I presume…?’

All eyes now turned to Adam.

‘Some,’ he replied, with the trademark twinkle in his eye. ‘But you wouldn’t believe how many grown-ups harbour fantasies about having a treehouse all of their own, somewhere to escape when life gets too hectic.’

There was a general murmur of agreement and nodding of heads.

‘But surely you don’t mean luxury luxury?’ Louisa said.

Honestly, I didn’t know what her problem was. Couldn’t she just let it drop and admit she’d been a wee bit patronising about Adam’s ‘hobby’?

Like you’ve been, a needly little voice in the back of my head whispered. You don’t really take much interest any more, do you? Too full of your own business, your own enterprises.

I silenced the voice with a swig of vintage port.

Adam’s twinkling eyes turned steely. ‘That’s what luxury usually means, doesn’t it?’

Louisa gave a fake little laugh. ‘But a treehouse is always going to be a bit…basic, isn’t it?’

‘Hang on a second…’ Izzi said, forgetting to stay in character for the first time that evening. ‘Do you mean the kind of thing Michael Dove has just had built? There was a feature on his new mansion in one of the Sunday magazines the other week.’

Jos leaned forward. ‘Michael Dove? The rock star?’ she asked in a breathy, hallowed kind of voice.

Adam nodded. ‘That was one of mine. And it was great fun to build—two rooms, complete with bathroom, kitchenette, home cinema system and audio gear that will wake the neighbours three miles away. He said he wanted a guest house with a difference.’

‘Up a tree?’ Louisa said, still not quite getting it.

Adam helped her out. ‘Up several trees, actually. We set it between three large pine trees at the bottom of his lawn.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Marcus rumbled. ‘How much would a pad like that set you back?’

Izzi, with the extensive knowledge gleaned from the magazine article, mentioned a price that rivalled the cost of my one-bedroomed broom cupboard in Lewisham.

I took a sip of my port to steady myself, and ended up inhaling rather than swallowing. The choking fit that followed was in no way ladylike. Adam gently led me outside into the hall, so I could hack my guts up without an audience, and motioned for Robert to fetch me a glass of water quick-smart.

When I could finally breathe again, I straightened and looked at the man I’d thought I knew everything about. ‘Why didn’t you tell me business was going so well?’ I croaked.

Adam gave me a look that was half-sad, half-affectionate. ‘Coreen, I’m always telling you about my work.’

‘But you’ve never boiled it down to a hard figure like that before. If you’d done that I would have paid a bit more attention!’

He pursed his lips slightly. ‘You’ve never asked… Anyway, if you actually listened, instead of nodding and pretending you were, you’d have worked it out for yourself.’

My insides slumped like a fallen soufflé. With great effort I looked my Best Bud in the eye. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have listened. I should have known you’d take something ordinary like a garden shed and do something wonderful with it. And I should have paid attention—I’m supposed to be your friend.’

Robert chose that moment to return with my glass of water, and I took it from him, all the while looking at Adam, who was regarding me with a very un-Adam like expression.

Finally he bent down a little and kissed me softly on the forehead. ‘It’s time you ripped those polka-dot blinkers off. You’d be surprised what you’d see.’

And then he walked back into the drawing room, leaving me clutching the cold glass against my stomach.

I was right about there being a lake at the Chatterton-Joneses’ estate. It lay beyond the formal gardens in artfully landscaped parkland. To the unobservant eye the small body of water might have seemed like a natural feature, but the diminutive island in the centre was almost painfully picturesque, and the weeping willows on the undulating banks were grouped together a little too harmoniously.

The blissful summer’s afternoon only intensified the sense of perfection. The breeze was just right: cool enough to take the edge off the bright sun, but only just strong enough to whisper through the reeds and willows. Dragonflies flitted happily around us, tiny iridescent flashes above the water’s surface.

I didn’t care if all that beauty was man-made and planned. Primped and preened a little. Mother Nature is a woman too, and us girls know we need to emphasise our best assets. I didn’t care if it was too perfect, either. Perfect was what I was here for, after all, and after the disastrous morning I’d had perfect was what I was determined to have.

After breakfast Izzi had frogmarched us through the woods on what was supposed to have been a restful country walk. There had been no mist—the clean sunshine had cut through the summer morning too well. There had been no bluebells—too late in the year, I discovered. No convenient rabbit hole. No being scooped into Nicholas’s arms as if I weighed nothing more than a feather.

Instead Limpet Louisa had monopolised him the whole time.

I had to give her credit, though. She was good.

If I could have been objective, I might have applauded her strategy—one scheming woman saluting another. But I wasn’t in the mood for being objective about that. Not in the slightest.

Izzi, meanwhile, had complained about all the ‘out of character’ chatter and behaviour the entire morning, and had moaned at us periodically for not having uncovered any significant clues yet. After lunch she’d announced her solution: a spot of boating, pairing us up with people we hadn’t talked to much yet, so we could interrogate each other further. And that was how I came to be sitting in the stern of one of a row of beautifully varnished little rowing boats tied to a short wooden jetty.

As the boat bobbed up and down I could barely contain my excitement. Perfection was within my grasp. Izzi had finally done something right! She’d paired me up with Nicholas, and in a few moments he would step into our little craft and row us off into Happily Ever After.

The setting couldn’t have been more romantic if it had tried. There was warm sun, a cloudless forget-me-not sky, and all this achingly perfect scenery. There was even a pair of devoted swans orbiting each other at the edge of the dark green water. Surely this was a sign? Surely the scales would fall from Nicholas’s eyes after this?

He walked along the jetty towards me, his long legs easily covering the distance in a matter of seconds, and then it was happening, just as I’d dreamed it would. Nicholas stepped into the boat and cast off, sat down, grasped the oars and rowed away from the jetty, leaving the others behind.

Nicholas and I were finally alone together.

I fixed my gaze on his strong arms and waited for that delicious tingle to skip from the base of my spine to the nape of my neck. Any moment now…

Okay, in a few seconds, maybe. Once we were away from the bank and he could build up speed, really pull on the oars…

I frowned and concentrated harder on his hands and wrists, since the rest of his arms were covered by his shirt and an off-white linen jacket, and I thought I felt a flicker of something. Unfortunately, after another few minutes, that flicker began to itch. The something turned out to be a mosquito bite.

Flickers and tingles don’t mean anything, I told myself. They weren’t what I was there for. I was there to make Nicholas realise how irresistible I was, remember? The only one who should be tingling was Nicholas, and I needed to focus on that objective without getting distracted.

I decided my next step was to engage Nicholas in conversation, to show him I had brains as well as beauty. In fact, since the ‘beauty’ bit of me was still well hidden underneath Constance’s tweed suit and specs, this was probably the perfect time.

We’d been told by the murder-mystery weekend organisers that we could reveal a piece of confidential information about our characters now, and I decided to set the ball rolling. I gave Nicholas a particularly enticing look and lowered my voice. ‘I can tell you one of Constance’s deep, dark secrets, if you like?’

For the first time since we’d left the jetty Nicholas took his focus off the oars and looked at me. ‘Okay.’

I scanned the small lake, keeping an eye on the other couples in their boats. I suppose it might have looked as if I was being careful who overheard us, but actually I wanted to make sure the other couples were at a safe distance and that I still had Nicholas all to myself.

I looked into his deep blue eyes and my voice became even more husky. ‘Well, this doesn’t seem like anything much, but here goes… I have—or I should say, Constance has—a travel book about India hidden in her luggage. Apparently, she wants to go there to help the poor and needy, but her brother, Harry, has refused to help her raise cash for her passage or give a reference to the missionary society on her behalf, so she’s planning it all in secret.’

Nicholas frowned. ‘I presume she needs significant funds?’

I nodded. ‘The missionary society will sort her out when she gets there, but she needs money for the boat—which I’m guessing must have been an arm and a leg in those days.’

He paused briefly, before taking another stroke with the oars. ‘Could be a motive, I suppose…’ He glanced over at Adam and Izzi’s boat, which was gaining on us a little. Adam had taken his jacket off and rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, and their little boat was zipping through the water. I could tell just by looking at Adam’s back, just by the smooth grace of his oar-stroke, that he wasn’t even rowing at full capacity.

Suddenly I felt all hot and unnecessary. I dabbed at my forehead with Constance’s lace-edged hanky.

‘Is the sun getting to you? You’re quite fair-skinned, despite being a brunette,’ Nicholas said, looking deliciously concerned. ‘I can row into the shade near the bank, if you’d prefer?’

I smiled demurely back at him. ‘That would be marvellous,’ I replied. Not only would I avoid looking all pink and sweaty, but it would take us away from the other boats—especially Marcus and Louisa, who had also started to head our direction.

Nicholas and I chatted about the murder-mystery weekend as he guided the boat into the shadows cast by the willows. I liked listening to him. He had a very analytical way of thinking. Not like me at all. My brain seems to flit from one subject to the next with worrying frequency—although I suppose the compensation is that I have the odd flash of right-brained brilliance now and then.

Nicholas frowned. ‘So, why won’t Harry hear of you going to India? And what has all of that got to do with Lord Southerby’s murder?’ he asked as he lifted the oars out of the water and let us drift further into the shade.

‘I don’t know.’

I tried to drape, but it just wasn’t working. No matter what position I got myself in, it just wasn’t comfortable. I glanced across at Izzi and Adam’s boat. They were closer now. It wouldn’t be long before they swept past us, making a circuit of the lake.