Guilty Pleasures (31 page)

‘Still with his wife,' I said firmly.

‘He never! Oh, sweetheart, what a shame. When will you get a nice young man you can call your own?'

‘All in good time,' Griff said helpfully. ‘And you know I can't spare her yet.'

She looked him in the eye. ‘You'll have to let her go one day, Griff. Tell you what, you and I can move in together. You, me and Aidan. How about that?' she cackled.

Although it was two weeks since Morris had left for Lyon, Griff still treated me as an invalid. Today he had decided we were having a treat. We'd packed up our stall after a quite profitable fair in Beaconsfield and by rights should have headed for home. But he'd booked us into an hotel – ‘I hate the M25 on Sundays,' he said, by way of an excuse – and promised that we'd travel slowly on Monday, after the beginning of the week rush had died down.

By now I was smelling a rat, but I'd always indulged Griff, so why change? I was a bit surprised, however, when he navigated us in the opposite direction from home – north-west, to Aylesbury, and then a bit further.

‘Claydon House?'

‘Why not? You've never been there, and it must be twenty years since I last came.'

I thought of the lengthy queue of repairs and said nothing. I didn't even say anything when he burrowed in the back of the van and produced a large carrier bag, which he parked on the front step while he produced a chiffon scarf to tie over my eyes. We were to play Blind Man's Buff, were we?

But once inside, suddenly able to see again, I could see why we were here. Whoever had designed the items in that poor, tatty folio, had designed everything here.

‘Here you are. Luke Lightfoot heaven,' Griff said, as if he'd done all the wonderful carving, all the exquisite plasterwork himself.

So it was. We wandered round laughing like kids.

I found we were to have lunch with the regional administrator, all very formal, with excellent food and wine. Then there were photos for their national magazine. Why not? The folio had come home, and here it would stay.

We toasted it with champagne at home that evening. We toasted Luke Lightfoot and his weird ideas. We toasted Freya and Robin and their wedding by special licence the next weekend. Talk about marrying in haste! All his friends must have prayed that neither would ever have cause to repent at leisure. But Robin had got it into his head that the baby must be born in wedlock, and Freya was equally insistent that she wouldn't walk down the aisle or even into a registry office with a visible bulge. Tom, the rural dean who'd been so kind to me, would officiate. Half of me was almost surprised he was a real person, not some sort of guardian angel. Although they wanted a small, private ceremony, I couldn't see them getting away with that, not with Fi to organize all the parishioners in the benefice.

We didn't so much toast as raise a glass to poor X, as I still thought and spoke of Graham Parker. As soon as the coroner released his body, he would be buried yards from where he'd been killed. Robin would take the service, of course. While Griff insisted he would keep his promise and pay for the funeral itself, a number of other dealers he'd provided with car-boot bargains had chipped in for a memorial stone.

Then, as if to shake off our sudden gloom, we toasted the snuffbox, and anything else we could think of. Eventually, with a cautious eye in my direction, Griff toasted Morris and me. There wasn't very much champagne left in my glass, but I lifted it anyway.