Tempted by Trouble

‘Fortunately, I don’t have to eat it all myself. He brought Rosie along to a family birthday party fully loaded with ice cream and toppings. The brownie points I earned for that were worth their weight in brake liners.’

‘Family? You have children?’

‘No. The party was for my niece. Half-niece.’ He shrugged. ‘I have a complicated family.’

‘Don’t we all,’ she said wryly. ‘But that’s a lot of ice cream for one little girl’s birthday.’

‘It was a big party. My family don’t do things by halves,’ he said.

‘No?’ They had that in common, only in her case it tended to be dramas rather than celebrations. ‘How do you know him?’

‘Basil? He’s a tenant on the Haughton Manor estate.’

‘Keeper’s Cottage. It’s on the vehicle logbook,’ she said. ‘It’s so near. I went there once on a school trip when we were doing the Tudors. It’s beautiful.’

‘So people keep telling me.’

‘You live there too?’ she asked.

‘Live there, work there, for my sins. Or, rather, my mother’s,’ he said, before returning to the letter. ‘Lally? Is that what people call your grandmother?’

‘Yes.’ She’d much rather hear about his mother’s sins, but he’d changed the subject so emphatically that she didn’t pursue it. ‘I doubt many people know her real name.’

‘Or yours?’

‘Or mine,’ she admitted.

‘Well, Basil certainly does, and he’s got a photograph of her on his mantelpiece to prove it.’

‘You’re kidding! A picture of my grandmother?’

He took a phone from his pocket, clicked through it and held it out to her. ‘I took this yesterday when I let myself in. Just to be sure that he hadn’t done anything … foolish.’

‘Killed himself, you mean?’ she said pointedly.

He didn’t answer but that was what he’d meant. It was why he was here now. Why he’d wanted to see the letter.

‘You have his keys?’ she asked.

‘Not personally. There are master keys in the estate safe. For emergencies.’

‘Or when a tenant does a runner,’ she said, taking the phone from him.

‘It is her?’ he asked about the woman in the photo.

She nodded. ‘It was taken in the late sixties, before she married my grandfather.’

Her grandmother had been the height of fashion with her dark hair cut in a sharp chin-length bob by a top London stylist, her huge eyes heavily made-up, her lips pale. And the dress she was wearing was an iconic Courrèges original design.

She handed it back to him. ‘How did you know this was gran?’

‘I didn’t until I saw her last night, but it was obvious she was related to you. The likeness is unmistakable.’

‘But she was …’

She stopped. Her grandmother had been the pampered daughter of the younger son of the Earl of Melchester. A debutante. An acknowledged beauty.

One of the girls in pearls who’d featured in the pages of Country Life.

While the Amerys were a solid middle-class family, it hadn’t been the marriage her father had planned for his daughter. No minor aristocracy to offer inherited wealth, park gates, maybe a title, so Elle’s grandmother had been pretty much cut adrift from her family when she’d married Bernard Amery.

‘I don’t look a bit like her,’ she said instead.

‘Not superficially, maybe, but you have her mouth. Her eyes. Basil recognised you,’ he pointed out. He looked again at the letter. ‘Is your grandmother about?’ he asked.

‘No!’ She shook her head. ‘You can’t bother her with this, Sean.’

‘You haven’t shown her the letter?’

‘Not yet.’ Once her grandmother had read it, Elle would be well and truly lumbered. And not just with an old crock that would cost a fortune to tax, insure, keep running. There were the obligations, too.

Oh, no, wait.

The connection had been made. He knew he’d brought Rosie to the right place and as far as Sean McElroy was concerned there was nothing more to be said.

She was already lumbered.

It was true, nothing good ever came out of a brown envelope. Well, this time it wasn’t going to happen. She wasn’t going to let it.

Whatever her grandmother had done for him in the past, Basil was going to have to sort out his own problems. They had quite enough of their own.

‘They seem to have been very close,’ he said, looking again at the letter. ‘He says she saved his life.’

‘He’d have had a job to end it all in the village pond,’ she told him dryly. ‘No matter what time of day or night, someone would be sure to spot you.’

‘Your grandmother, in this case. No doubt it was just a cry for help, but she seems to have listened. Sorted him out.’

Her ditzy, scatterbrained grandmother?

‘If that’s the case, why haven’t they seen one another for forty years? Unless …’ She looked up. ‘If she married his brother, maybe they fell out over her. She was very beautiful.’

‘Yes …’

‘Although why would Grandpa have removed every trace of his brother’s presence from the family home? After all, he got the girl,’ she mused.

‘Of course he got the girl. Basil is gay, Elle.’

‘Gay?’ she repeated blankly.