Boot Camp Bride (10 page)

Chapter Fourteen
I Didn’t Know You Cared

Momentarily, Charlee was rooted to the spot. But once the front door closed, she unglued her feet from the carpet and ran across the hall to watch Ffinch’s camper van spin the gravel and zoom off down the lane.

Just who did he think he was? Some second-rate cognitive behavioural therapist dishing out strategies to help her deal with her family and move herself forward? Maybe he should concentrate on confronting whatever demons haunted him instead of giving her advice and tossing platitudes around. Demons! With a flash of insight, she wondered if his sudden interest in brides, boot camps and Norfolk was in some way connected to what had happened in Colombia.

 Damn! Now she’d never know; she’d given him everything without gaining any guarantees she’d have further involvement in the story.

‘Charlotte Montague, Ffinch has played you for a fool,’ she berated herself.

Instead of returning to the kitchen, she went back into the study, flicked on the iPad and logged onto Google Earth. Typing Thornham, Norfolk, in the search bar, she waited as the app loaded and then zoomed in on the topography. Thornham appeared as a village divided by a road and surrounded for the most part by cultivated fields. The larger portion of the village lay to the right of the road and beyond that there was the blue-green expanse of the sea. Pinching the image between her thumb and fingers Charlee rotated the view through one hundred and eighty degrees and homed in on Thornham Beach. In front of the beach lay marshes, mudflats and sandbanks. The satellite had obviously taken the photograph at low tide and in high summer because tiny boats leaned against the bank of the creek waiting for the tide to turn and take them out to sea.

The whole place looked wild, abandoned and yet at the same time, unremarkable.

Unremarkable?

Charlee moved the image around and located Thornham Boot Camp for Brides. To the unpractised eye, it looked like any other large manor house set back from the road and surrounded on three sides by trees. The marshes butted right up to the other side of the property and a couple of small boats, moored by a large boathouse, were visible.

Charlee frowned. What wasn’t she seeing?

There had to be something more; something that had made Ffinch light up with excitement when she’d mentioned Norfolk. On impulse, she typed Boot Camp for Brides + Thornham into the browser bar and a website opened up. One shot showed Amazonian women in fatigues and baseball caps trudging through the wooded area that led to the marshes. In another, a blushing bride gazed dewily at her hand tied bouquet of lilies and roses.

 ‘Get rid of bloated tum, fat arms and chubby back,’ it read. ‘Enhance your pelvic floor muscles in anticipation of THE BIG DAY - Learn how to cope with the mother-in- law.’ Charlee’d settle for learning how to cope with her mother! She read on and learned that the bride-to-be and her bridesmaids could also participate in aqua-aerobics, morning PT, Fartlek Training and stretcher runs.

Stretcher runs?

‘Sounds like they’re preparing for war - not their wedding day,’ she remarked as she scanned further down the web page. ‘And what the hell is Fartlek Training?’ Refraining from making the obvious joke, she typed Fartlek Training into the browser bar and discovered that it was Swedish for ‘Speed Play’.

‘Fartlek,’ she read aloud in an accent that was pure Sara Lund from
The Killing
, ‘
allows you to run whatever distance and speed you wish, varying the pace and occasionally running at high intensity levels.
’ Sounded like her idea of torture. As far as she was concerned, Fartlek Training, Boot Camps for Brides and everything they entailed, could feck off.

When it was her turn to get married, she’d take off on a long girly weekend with Poppy and a couple of other good mates to some gorgeous spa in Italy - Positano or Portofino, for choice. Relaxation, rude jokes about the wedding night and promises never to let anything break their friendship were more up her strasse. Boot camp brides, Russian models and secretive journos could all go hang, she decided, flipping the protective cover over the iPad.

 It was Christmas Day, after all.

And yet, she couldn’t let it go.

Why was stick thin Anastasia Markova and her skeletal BFFs so keen to attend the boot camp? They needed to lose weight about as much as a fish needed a bicycle. What was there about this seemingly non-story that made every journalistic instinct she possessed stand to attention? She’d read how divvies in the art and antique world could tell if a painting or object was a fake simply by looking at it. Just imagining what Ffinch was keeping from her sent a shot of adrenalin coursing through her veins, leaving an unsettling echo behind.

The scrunch of tyres on gravel drew her back to the window and her stomach gave an excited lurch; maybe Ffinch had had second thoughts and was returning to renew their partnership. She’d make sure that she pinned him down this time.

She smoothed down her shirt and raked her fingers through her hair. Not that she cared what she looked like; she simply didn’t want Ffinch to think for one moment that he’d bested her. She’d play it cool and let him do the running, she decided as she went back in to the hall. Her whole body slumped when she discovered that, instead of Ffinch, it was the other three Montague brothers Jack, Tom and Wills arriving for Christmas lunch.

Damn Christmas Day and all it entailed. She longed to be back at work snooping around the offices, finding out what was behind Sam and Ffinch’s sudden interest in boot camps in Norfolk. However, the next edition of
What’cha!
had been put to bed and was ready to print at the press of a button on January 2
^nd
. Until then, a skeleton staff would man the offices and she had no legitimate reason for calling in without arousing suspicion.

Frowning, she walked back into the kitchen. Something was going down, the divvy in her was sure of it. She deserved to be in on it after everything she’d done. And if Ffinch thought he’d shaken her off, then he’d seriously underestimated her.

After Christmas lunch, the four Montague brothers cleared up and loaded the dishwasher before joining the rest of their family in the sitting room by a roaring log fire. They entered, pushing and jostling for position on the large squashy sofa just as they had done as teenagers. Charlee, relegated to sitting on the padded needlework fender as usual, noted her mother’s indulgent expression as she half-heartedly remonstrated with them for their boisterous behaviour.

‘Boys. Boys! You’ll break something. Henry, tell them,’ she commanded her husband who was happily cracking Brazil nuts with an ancient wooden nutcracker.

‘Boys, you’ll break something. Do you have to revert to childhood every time you come home? You’re getting the dogs overexcited; stop before your mother’s prophesy comes true.’ Barbara Montague cast her eyes up to the heavens as George, Wills and Jack squashed onto the sofa and Tom sat on the other end of the fender to Charlee - rocking it like a seesaw and trying to unseat her.

‘So, Charlotte,’ Tom began, using her Sunday name. ‘Who was that driving down the lane in a classic VW camper van?’ He reached across and ruffled her hair. ‘Don’t tell me young Charlee’s got a boyfriend,’ he raised an eyebrow and the others laughed.

‘Actually,’ Charlee said, moving beyond his reach and smoothing her hair. ‘It was my partner - in the non-boyfriend sense of the word - if you must know.’

‘Non-boyfriend sense of the word?’

‘Oo - Charlee’s got a partner,’ Wills and Jack chorused in camp voices, elbowing each other in the ribs. ‘Get ’er.’

‘He’s Rafael Fonseca-Ffinch,’ Miranda put in, seemingly not enjoying Charlee being the focus of the brothers’ attention. ‘Charlotte has given his bestseller
The Ten Most Dangerous Destinations on the Planet
to George as a Christmas present. Signed, too.’ She held the book out so Tom could inspect it.

‘Signed?’ Tom left his place on the fender to examine the book more closely. ‘Do you really know him, Charlee?’ he asked, giving his sister a serious, and very uncharacteristic, respectful look.

‘Noo-oh. He was lost, drove up to the house to ask for directions and dropped a signed copy of his book - ready-wrapped in Christmas paper and with George’s name on the flyleaf - onto the kitchen table. Of course I know him you idiot. Didn’t I say we’re partners?’ Surreptitiously, Charlee crossed her fingers behind her back to counter the lie.

‘Ouch, you’ve grown teeth since you left home, Charlee. Hard-bitten hack these days is it? God, I wish we’d arrived earlier,’ Wills, a green activist, said to Tom. ‘I would give anything to discuss his journey along the Amazon with him.’ Wills spent most of his life trying to conserve the rainforest and prevent governments from clearing it for logging or to raise cattle to provide beefburgers for food chains around the world.

‘Wouldn’t have done you much good,’ Charlee replied, fondling the black lab’s ears. ‘He refuses to talk about it. I expect he wants you to buy his book instead.’

‘Cynical as well as waspish,’ Tom put in. ‘I’m with Wills on this one. If I remember the story correctly he contracted dengue fever after his team were kidnapped and held to ransom.’

‘Yes; I remember now,’ trainee vet Jack added. ‘Trouble is, the story was in the headlines, briefly, and then sank without a trace - overshadowed by the Queen’s Jubilee and then the Olympics.’

‘I wonder if he’d consent to giving me some blood samples,’ Tom added. A registrar at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in London, he hoped to become a consultant specialising in parasitic diseases acquired in the tropics. Perhaps an armful of Ffinch’s blood would clinch it for him. ‘I believe he was treated by an indigenous tribe and hidden from the drug smugglers who patrol the area, before being transferred to a hospital boat. Just thinking about the homeopathic remedies they’ve tried and tested over the years and which the west knows nothing about, makes me long to go there.’

‘They took a great risk helping him,’ Wills observed. Charlee was reminded of her crass remarks on the night of the book launch and hoped they’d put her burning face down to the heat of the fire - not shame and mortification.

‘It says on the dust jacket that all royalties from the book are being donated to raising funds to help the people who helped him,’ Miranda said, clearly not wishing to be excluded from the discussion.

‘The Cat People,’ Charlee said. ‘The Cat People found him on the banks of the Amazon and nursed him back to health.’ She vowed to take the iPad upstairs and get up to speed on Ffinch’s lucky escape in Darien. She’d always left revising for her exams until the last minute. Now she was in the real world that attitude would have to change … thoroughness would become her watchword.

‘Oh,’ Miranda sat bolt upright. ‘You don’t think he’s still infectious, do you? George and I are trying for a family.’

Barbara Montague patted Miranda’s arm while the other Montagues rolled their eyes. Miranda had been like a broken record all through Christmas lunch, banging on about George’s parliamentary ambitions, or their reproductive trials and tribulations.

‘The disease is transmitted by mosquito, Miranda, so I think it’s safe to assume that you’re not in any danger,’ Henry Montague said dryly. ‘Although, naturally, I bow to Tom’s superior knowledge in this matter. Charlotte?’

‘Yes, Dad?’

‘Partners? You haven’t mentioned Fonseca-Ffinch before.’

‘It’s a recent development,’ Charlee prevaricated, sensing her father’s unease and not wanting to reveal just how recent it was. Or how he’d terminated their partnership earlier in Henry’s study.

‘Do you think we ought to ask him for dinner? Get to know him better?’ Barbara suggested, her look of concentration suggesting that she was already planning menus in her head.

‘For goodness sake, Mum! He’s a work colleague, that’s all - not a potential boyfriend. I really can’t say any more at the risk of ruining our scoop.’

The four brothers exchanged another look, one that conveyed Charlee was living in cloud cuckoo land. A rookie and someone as experienced as Rafa Ffinch working together - how likely was that? Catching their look, Charlee stood up and the two Labradors looked at her expectantly.

‘Think I’ll take the dogs for a W-A-L-K.’ Hiding her bruised feelings beneath a bright smile she spelled out the word so the dogs didn’t go ballistic. It rankled that her family treated her like she was still in primary school and in danger of losing her sweets to sharper kids in the playground.

‘Sit down a minute, Charlotte,’ her father forestalled her. ‘I’m a little concerned, to be honest. If what Wills says is true, Mr Fonseca-Ffinch ignored Foreign Office advice to give Darien a wide berth due to the risk of kidnap by drugs gangs plying the Amazon.’

‘Maybe it was his casual regard for safety which put his team at risk. Weren’t two of them thrown overboard when they became too ill to travel and only Mr Fonseca-Ffinch made it to the shore?’ Barbara Montague actually looked concerned for Charlee’s welfare. ‘Charlotte?’

‘Rest assured I - we - won’t be travelling the length of the Amazon any time soon.’ Charlee looked round at their anxious faces and wondered what was going on. They’d always made her feel the runt of the litter, treating her enthusiasms and projects with: ‘Oh, Charlee’s chasing rainbows, again,’ accompanied by condescending, exasperated smiles. This was the first time in her life she’d been taken seriously, so perhaps she had something to thank Ffinch for after all.