A Winter Flame (17 page)

Violet felt a sudden rush of happiness. Today had been a sweet day with Eve trying not to be gooey and maternal over the new reindeer babies, but pride was oozing out of her every pore. It was
as if they had defrosted her poor cousin a little – given her something to smile about on a day when she wouldn’t have thought it possible. If only Jacques would move into her heart.
Because Violet felt sure that if Eve let him, he would. He was just lovely.

When she pushed open the outside door, Violet could hear Pav’s voice talking to someone in the lounge, but when she walked into the room it was to see him quickly slam down the phone.

‘Wrong number,’ he said, smiling at her, and she knew he was lying. She didn’t accuse him outright. But when he nipped to the loo after the meal, she rang the redial button and
heard a merry female voicemail announcement.

‘Hi, this is Serena. I’m obviously not in at the mo, so please leave your name and number after the three beeps. Thank you.’ A trilling, ditzy voice that Violet could imagine
belonging to a Marilyn Monroe clone. Then Violet tried 1471 and the same automated voice answered.

Violet didn’t leave a message.

The vet was very pleased with the reindeer babies, two little boys. They were tiny and gauche, with long angular legs, but able to stand on them in order to shadow their mother
and drink her milk. Eve made them her first port of call the next morning. She had slept solidly for the first time in a long while – no dreams about Jonathan, no nightmares about his
parents. That was both unexpected and welcome.

Tim, the keeper’s wife, had given birth to a little boy, too. A temporary keeper had been found for now until he came back to work, totally gutted that he had not been there for Holly.

‘Great, aren’t they?’ said Jacques, coming up behind Eve as she hung over the fence and watched the calves unsteadily walking behind their mum. ‘Our boys.’ He made
it sound as if Eve had just given birth and he was cooing over their twins.

‘I think you’ll find they are
her
boys,’ said Eve, moving her hand towards Holly.

‘Of course, but they’re ours too. I’ve come over all paternal,’ laughed Jacques. ‘What shall we call them? I don’t think Holly’s forte is going to be
picking their names out of a hat.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Eve. ‘I really don’t want the responsibility.’

Jacques’ blue eyes began to twinkle. ‘Why’s that then? In case you pick a wrong one and they grow up with a complex?’

‘No, I didn’t mean that at all.’ Eve flicked a loose strand of hair behind her shoulder.

‘You do that a lot,’ said Jacques.

‘What?’ Eve half snapped, suspecting he was going to start his daft flirting.

‘Flick your hair back.’

‘How can I? It’s tied up,’ and Eve pointed behind her back at her long French plait.

‘I know. But strands work loose and you flick at them. They say if you play with your hair, you’re flirting.’

Eve hadn’t a clue if she did do that with her hair or not, but she wouldn’t be drawn deeper into the conversation and give him the satisfaction of having banter with him.

‘Maybe it’s just annoying me and in my way,’ she said, turning away from him and making a full-stop statement.

‘Me or your hair?’ Jacques said.

‘Both,’ replied Eve, and Jacques laughed his big infectious laugh, and Eve had to bite her lip to stop herself smiling because she really, really didn’t want to.

Then there was an almighty whoosh sound and they were both suddenly covered in snow.

‘Sorry,’ called a voice in one of the trees. ‘Adjusted the bloody thing too high.’ One of Effin’s men was fixing a snow machine to the trunk.

In the paddock, Holly and her two little boys raised their heads to the snow drifting down. The way they were closing their eyes made it look as if they were smiling.

‘Think you just found a name for one of the twins,’ smiled Jacques.

‘Silly bloody snow machine?’ asked Eve, brushing the wet snow from her skirt.

‘Blizzard,’ said Jacques, and winked at her.

‘I have to go out,’ said Pav, wiping his hands on a towel after tea that night. ‘I may be some time.’

He sounded so much like Captain Oates that under normal circumstances Violet would have joked about it.

‘Okay,’ she said, a lump rising to her throat. Who was he going to see?
Serena with the nice voice? Wrong-number Serena?
She had a sudden moment of panic. She wanted to throw
herself onto him and hold him tightly, but she fought against her desperation. She had been in a relationship once with a man she did not love, whom she stayed with because she knew she would break
his heart if she left. She did not ever want to have Pav stay unless he wanted to be with her. But just for a moment, she felt the panic that her ex must have felt on a daily basis, knowing that
she was slipping away from him.

‘Is there anything you want whilst I am out?’ he asked. ‘Milk, bread?’

‘Not that I can think of,’ said Violet, pinning on a smile. Come on Violet, get a grip, said a voice inside her. You’re growing a big tree from a little seed. It may have been
a wrong number after all and Pav rang it back to see who it was. But the other half of her brain was shrugging its shoulders.
If that was a wrong number, I’m Gwyneth Paltrow.
She took
a deep breath and tried to deliver the question casually. ‘Where are you off to then?’

‘I just have somewhere to go,’ said Pav. ‘Something to do.’

And he kissed her on the head and was gone. The sort of kiss that David Beckham gave Victoria in that first photoshoot after his affair allegations.

The next morning the Portakabin was freezing because the fire needed a new gas cylinder. One of Effin’s men had gone out for a new one and Eve stood huddled in her old
black woollen coat by the window, watching Jacques talking to a couple of the ‘elf-people’ as they liked to call themselves.

Her coat afforded her plenty of warmth but it really needed to go in the bin. The sleeves were going at the elbow and there was a pull at the back. And she couldn’t remember how many times
now she had had to stitch a button back on. She had bought it new to go out with Jonathan on their first dinner date. That March was freezing and she had been delighted to find a coat that looked
smart and was in the sale because she didn’t have a lot of spare money to spend on herself in those days. Then again, she was a damned sight happier and warmer back then than she ever was
now.

Jonathan had held both sides of the collar when he kissed her for the first time as girlfriend and boyfriend, before his hands had slipped around her back. Her memories were tied up in the
threads. The thought had crossed her mind more than once, when she opened up a bin bag to throw in the coat, that she would be throwing a part of Jonathan away if she got rid of it.

But as she tried to recall that first kiss, she found that as soon as Jonathan’s hands touched her, they changed into those of Jacques Glace yesterday, holding her as she shook with
aftershock from delivering a baby reindeer. Why had she let him cuddle her? Why hadn’t she extricated herself from him? Why had she needed to feel someone’s arms around her so much
– and not just anyone’s arms – but
his.
Jonathan was a man of honour; God knows what Jacques Glace was and she had let him hold her like a lover.

She stood at the Portakabin window and watched him holding court with the elf-people. He was amusing them with a tale, claiming their attention as he gesticulated wildly with his long arms. Then
his audience fell about laughing together, real laughter, not fake laughter to get on the right side of the boss. Had Eve looked at herself then, she would have seen she was smiling too. She
wasn’t aware that she was touched by the ripple effect of Jacques’ charm. Then one of the elf-people saluted Jacques and he returned that salute, and Eve’s jaw tightened.
What
right did he have to do that?
Any softening she had done towards Jacques Glace hardened right on up again. He was using a military gesture in a light-hearted, mocking way. She knew she was
over-reacting but she couldn’t help it. The military was a hair-trigger as far as she was concerned.

Eve knew she needed to get inside his house sooner rather than later, and find out who Jacques Glace was and where he came from. The man was a one-man charm offensive and she didn’t want
anyone else getting close to him until she had worked out what his game plan was. Charlatans often played a long and sneaky game – she’d watched all the series of
Hustle,
so she
knew how polished they could be. But con men in real life weren’t nice people turning the tables on the greedy. They knew that people were pre-disposed – wanted – to trust and
they used that trust to trample all over people’s lives.

So whilst Jacques was still regaling a crowd with his raconteuring skills, Eve quickly rang Barbara, Mr Mead’s secretary, to ask for Jacques Glace’s address.

‘He’s asked me to order a chair for his house, and do you know, I can’t put my hands on my address book and he’s not answering his phone,’ she lied with a tinkly,
innocent laugh. She felt a soupçon of guilt that Barbara believed her rubbish lie and trustingly recited the address, but still she wrote it on her hand, grabbed her car keys and sneaked out
to the innocuous enough address: 1, May Green, Outer Hoodley.

The village was situated off the Barnsley–Wentworth road, although the word ‘village’ was pushing it a bit. Really, it was more of a hamlet, consisting of a
shop, a pub at the side of the river – Dick Turpin’s Arms (as if it could be anything else, thought Eve when she saw it) and some very old cottages. Eve pulled up in the village car
park and looked round for the presence of a wicker man. These places were curtain-twitching heaven.

She grabbed an old envelope from the car so she could look as if she were posting a letter if anyone asked her ‘what she was doing in these parts’. Blimey, it was only a few miles
from Barnsley town centre and yet she could have been forgiven for believing that it was
The Hills Have Eyes
territory. It was too quiet, too pretty, too still. Like
Midsummer Murders
land.

May Green was easy enough to find. She guessed that he lived in one of the five houses around a central square of grass with an ornamental maypole in the centre. Each one very different, too:
number 5 was a tall, three-storey construction; number 4 had large picture windows and a roof terrace; number 3 was a bungalow, hidden by tall trees; number 2 was a medium-sized house painted
white, decorated with lots of hanging baskets; and then there was number 1. Eve hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about what sort of house a man like Jacques Glace might live in, but it
wouldn’t have been this. It was a double-fronted, but tiny, cottage with a bright-red front door. She noticed that the door knocker was a brass soldier, which made her bristle.

Cream linen curtains hung at all the windows, the paintwork looked fresh, and when she went around the rear, she found a small but impeccably neat garden. She peered in through the back window
and saw a tidy kitchen with a wooden work surface. Through the second window she saw a beamed lounge with a battered, but chic, leather Chesterfield sofa opposite a stone inglenook fireplace. There
didn’t seem to be much furniture in it at all.

‘Can I help you?’

A voice cut into Eve’s reverie and scared her to death. She jumped and yelped at the same time, and patted her chest to still her heart. For a moment, Eve turned into a human beat-box.

‘I’m looking for Mr Glace’s house,’ said Eve, growing menopausally hot under the little old lady’s hawk-like gaze.

‘This is Mr Glace’s house, yes,’ came the scratchy, suspicious reply.

‘I was hoping to catch him in rather than just post this, so I came around the back because I couldn’t hear anything when I knocked at the front,’ said Eve, all too aware that
she was over-explaining. She must have looked as guilty as a Great Train Robber with a bag full of loot and a Ronnie Biggs name-badge.

‘He’s not in,’ said the pint-sized village guard dog.

‘No, well, I’ll . . . er . . . call back,’ said Eve, backing away. ‘Thank you.’

‘Who shall I say called?’ said the old lady, padding towards Eve at an alarming pace.

‘No, it’s fine,’ said Eve. ‘He doesn’t know me. Thank you, bye.’

She walked off as fast as she could without making it look as if she was running. She was slightly worried the villagers would appear with burning torches if she didn’t get out of Outer
Hoodley quickly. She slid her key in the ignition and twisted it, thinking that this was the point in horror films when the engine made a tired cough and died. But instead, her car vroomed into
life and Eve crunched over the gravel and out of the car park, and in her rear-view window was the little old lady watching to make sure she went.

It wasn’t going to be easy to get inside that house if the chance arose. Not if May Green had its own Leo the lion patrolling it. It needed a little planning. And a disguise.

The chance to suss out Jacques Glace fell so beautifully into Eve’s lap, she was almost suspicious that he had planned it himself.

Four days after the little old lady had badgered Eve, Jacques burst into the Portakabin office as he always did. The man was incapable of opening the door and walking in, he had to throw himself
in as if he was finding sanctuary from a minus forty-eight blizzard.

‘Eve, are you leaving the park today?’ he asked.

‘Only at home-time,’ replied Eve.

‘I’ve got to go out for a few hours, but I’m hitching a lift with Effin. My car needs a new battery and a mechanic in Maltstone is dropping one off and fixing it in for me. If
I leave you my keys, would you hand them over to him for me, please?’ And he fished in his coat pocket and put his ridiculously loaded key ring down on her desk.