Risk

15

Jossie drove off to some party or other in London, and I, mindful of earlier unscheduled destinations after racing, took myself circumspectly down the road to the nearest public telephone box. No one followed, that I could see.

Hilary Margaret Pinlock answered at the twentieth ring, when I had all but given up, and said breathlessly that she had only that second reached home; she’d been out playing tennis.

‘Are you busy this evening?’ I said.

‘Nothing special.’

‘Can I come and see you?’

‘Yes.’ She hesitated a fraction. ‘What do you want? Food? A bed?’

‘An ear,’ I said. ‘And baked beans, perhaps. But no bed.’

‘Right,’ she said calmly. ‘Where are you? Do you need directions?’

She told me clearly how to find her, and I drew up forty minutes later outside a large Edwardian house in a leafy road on the outskirts of a sprawling Surrey town. Hilary, it transpired, owned the ground floor, a matter of two large high-ceilinged rooms, modern kitchen, functional bathroom, and a pleasant old fashioned conservatory with plants, cane armchairs, and steps down to an unkempt garden.

Inside, everything was orderly and organised, and comfortable in an uninspired sort of way. Well-built easy chairs in dim covers, heavy curtains in good velvet but of a deadening colour somewhere between brown and green, patterned carpet in olive and fawn. The home of a vigorous academic mind with no inborn response to refracted light. I wondered just how much she would wear the alien scarlet cloak.

The evening sun still shone into the conservatory, and there we sat, in the cane armchairs, drinking sherry, greenly surrounded by palms and rubber plants and Monstera deliciosa.

‘I don’t mind watering,’ Hilary said. ‘But I detest gardening. The people upstairs are supposed to do the garden, but they don’t.’ She waved disgustedly towards the view of straggly bushes, unpruned roses, weedy paths, and dried coffee-coloured stalks of last-year’s unmown grass.

‘It’s better than concrete,’ I said.

‘I’ll use you as a parable for the children,’ she said, smiling.

‘Hm?’

‘When things are bad, you endure what you must, and thank God it’s not worse.’

I made a protesting sound in my throat, much taken aback. ‘Well,’ I said helplessly, ‘what else is there to do?’

‘Go screaming off to the Social Services.’

‘For a gardener?’

‘You know darned well what I mean.’

‘Endurance is like tax,’ I said. ‘You’re silly to pay more than you have to, but you can’t always escape it.’

‘And you can whine,’ she said, nodding, ‘or suffer with good grace.’

She drank her sherry collectedly and invited me to say why I’d come.

‘To ask you to keep a parcel safe for me,’ I said.

‘But of course.’

‘And to listen to a fairly long tale, so that...’ I paused. ‘I mean, I want someone to know...’ I stopped once more.

‘In case you disappear again?’ she said matter-of-factly.

I was grateful for her calmness.

‘Yes,’ I said. I told her about meeting Vivian Iverson at the races, and our thoughts on insurance, springboards, and rocks. ‘So you see,’ I ended, ‘you’ll be the rock, if you will.’

‘You can expect,’ she said, ‘rocklike behaviour.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve brought a sealed package of photocopied documents. It’s in the car.’

‘Fetch it,’ she said.

I went out to the street and collected the thick envelope from the boot. Habit induced me to look into the back seat floor space, and to scan the harmless street. No one hiding, no one watching, that I could see. No one had followed me from the racecourse, I was sure.

Looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.

I took the parcel indoors and gave it to Hilary, and also the negatives of her photographs, explaining that I already had the extra prints. She put everything on the table beside her and told me to sit down and get on with the tale.

‘I’ll tell you a bit about my job,’ I said. ‘And then you’ll understand better.’ I stretched out with luxurious weariness in the cane chair and looked at the intent interest on her strong plain face. A pity, I thought, about the glasses.

‘An accountant working for a long time in one area, particularly in an area like a country town, tends to get an overall picture of the local life.’

‘I follow you,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

‘The transactions of one client tend to turn up in the accounts of others. For instance, a racehorse trainer buys horse food from the forage merchants. I check the invoice through the trainer’s accounts, and then, because the forage merchant is also my client, I later check it again through his. I see that the forage merchant has paid a builder for an extension to his house, and later, in the builder’s accounts, I see what he paid for the bricks and cement. I see that a jockey has paid x pounds on an air-taxi, and later, because the air-taxi firm is also my client, I see the receipt of x pounds from the jockey. I see the movement of money around the neighbourhood... the interlocking of interests... the pattern of commerce. I learn the names of suppliers, the size of businesses, and the kinds of services people use. My knowledge increases until I have a sort of mental map like a wide landscape, in which all the names are familiar and occur in the proper places.’

‘Fascinating,’ Hilary said.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if a totally strange name crops up, and you can’t cross-reference it with anything else, you begin to ask questions. At first of yourself, and then of others. Discreetly. And that was how I ran into trouble in the shape of two master criminals called Glitberg and Ownslow.’

‘They sound like a music-hall turn.’

‘They’re as funny as the Black Death.’ I drank some sherry ruefully. ‘They worked for the council, and the council’s accounts and audits were done by a large firm in London, who naturally didn’t have any intimate local knowledge. Ownslow and Glitberg had invented a construction firm called National Construction (Wessex) Limited, through which they had syphoned off more than a million pounds each of taxpayers’ money. And I had a client, a builders’ merchant, who had received several cheques from National Construction (Wessex). I’d never heard of National Construction (Wessex) in any other context, and I asked my client some searching questions, to which his reply was unmistakable panic. Glitberg and Ownslow were prosecuted and went to jail swearing to be revenged.’

‘On you?’

‘On me.’

‘Nasty.’

‘A few weeks later,’ I said, ‘much the same thing happened. I turned up some odd payments made by a director of an electronics firm through the company’s computer. His name was Connaught Powys. He’d taken his firm for over a quarter of a million, and he too went to jail swearing to get even. He’s out again now, and so are Glitberg and Ownslow. Since then I’ve been the basic cause of the downfall of two more big-time embezzlers, both of whom descended to the cells swearing severally to tear my guts out and cut my throat.’ I sighed. ‘Luckily, they’re both still inside.’

‘And I thought accountants led dull lives!’

‘Maybe some do.’ I drained my sherry. ‘There’s another thing that those five embezzlers have in common besides me, and that is that not a penny of what they stole has been recovered.’

‘Really?’ She seemed not to find it greatly significant. ‘I expect it’s all sitting around in bank deposits, under different names.’

I shook my head. ‘Not unless it is in literally thousands of tiny weeny deposits, which doesn’t seem likely.’

‘Why thousands?’

‘Banks nowadays have to inform the Tax Inspectors of the existence of any deposit account for which the annual interest is £15 or more. That means the Inspectors know of all deposits of over three or four hundred quid.’

‘I had no idea,’ she said blankly.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I wanted to know if it could be Powys or Glitberg or Ownslow who had kidnapped me for revenge, so I asked them.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘Yeah. It wasn’t a good idea. They wouldn’t say yes or no.’ I looked back to the night at the Vivat Club. ‘They did tell me something else, though...’ I said, and told Hilary what it was. Her eyes widened behind the glasses and she nodded once or twice.

‘I see. Yes,’ she said.

‘So now,’ I said. ‘Here we are a few years later, and now I have not only my local area mental map but a broad view of most of the racing world, with uncountable interconnections. I do the accounts for so many racing people, their lives spread out like a carpet, touching, overlapping, each small transaction adding to my understanding of the whole. I’m part of it myself, as a jockey. I feel the fabric around me. I know how much saddles cost, and which saddler does most business, and which owners don’t pay their bills, and who bets and who drinks, who saves, who gives to charity, who keeps a mistress. I know how much the woman whose horse I rode today paid to have him photographed for the Christmas cards she sent last year, and how much a bookmaker gave for his Rolls, and thousands and thousands of similar facts. All fitting, all harmless. It’s when they don’t fit... like a jockey suddenly spending more than he’s earned, and I find he’s running a whole new business and not declaring a penny of it... it’s when the bits don’t fit that I see the monster in the waves. Glimpsed, hidden... But definitely there.’

‘Like now?’ she said, frowning. ‘Your iceberg?’

‘Mm.’ I hesitated. ‘Another embezzler.’

‘And this one — will he too go to jail swearing to cut your throat?’

I didn’t answer at once, and she added dryly, ‘Or is he likely to cut your throat before you get him there?’

I gave her half a grin. ‘Not with a rock like you, he won’t.’

‘You be careful, Roland,’ she said seriously. ‘This doesn’t feel to me like a joke.’

She stood up restlessly, towering among the palm fronds, as thin in her way as their stems.

‘Come into the kitchen. What do you want to eat? I can do a Spanish omelette, if you like.’

I sat with my elbows on the kitchen table, and while she chopped onions and potatoes and green peppers I told her a good deal more, most of it highly unethical, as an accountant should never disclose the affairs of a client. She listened with increasing dismay, her cooking actions growing slower. Finally she laid down the knife and simply stood.

‘Your partner,’ she said.

‘I don’t know how much he’s condoned,’ I said, ‘but on Monday... I have to find out.’

‘Tell the police,’ she said. ‘Let them find out.’

‘No. I’ve worked with Trevor for six years. We’ve always got on well together, and he seems fond of me, in his distant way. I can’t shop him, just like that.’

‘You’ll warn him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell him of the existence of... the rock.’

She started cooking again, automatically, her thoughts busy behind her eyes.

‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘that your partner knew about the other embezzlers, and tried to hush them up?’

I shook my head. ‘Not Glitberg and Ownslow. Positively not. Not the last two, either. The firms they worked for were both my clients, and Trevor had no contact with them. But Connaught Powys...’ I sighed. ‘I really don’t know. Trevor always used to spend about a week at that firm, doing the audit on the spot, as one nearly always does for big concerns, and I went one year only because he had an ulcer. It was Connaught Powys’s bad luck that I cottoned on to what he was doing. Trevor might genuinely have missed the warning signs, because he doesn’t always work the way I do.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, a lot of an accountant’s work is fairly mechanical. Vouching, for instance. That’s checking that cheques written down in the cash book really were issued for the amount stated or, in other words, if the cashier writes down that cheque number 1234 was issued to Joe Bloggs in the sum of eighty pounds to pay for a load of sand, the auditor checks that the bank actually paid eighty pounds to Joe Bloggs on cheque no. 1234. It’s routine work and takes a fairly long time on a big account, and it’s often, or even usually, done, not by the accountant or auditor himself, but by an assistant. Assistants in our firm tend to come and go, and don’t necessarily develop a sense of probability. The present ones wouldn’t be likely to query, for instance, whether Joe Bloggs really existed, or sold sand, or sold eighty quids worth, or delivered only fifty quids worth, with Joe Bloggs and the cashier conspiring to pocket the thirty pounds profit.’

‘Roland!’

I grinned. ‘Small fiddles abound. It’s the first violins that threaten to cut your throat.’

She broke four eggs into a bowl. ‘Do you do all your own... er... vouching, then?’

‘No, not all. It would take too long. But I do all of it for some accounts, and some of it for all accounts. To get the feel of things. To know where I am.’

‘To fit into the landscape,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘And Trevor doesn’t?’

‘He does a few himself, but on the whole not. Don’t get me wrong. More accountants do as Trevor does, it’s absolutely normal practice.’

‘You want my advice?’ she said.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Go straight to the police.’

‘Thank you. Get on with the omelette.’

She sizzled it in the pan and divided it, succulent and soft in the centre, onto the plates. It tasted like a testimonial to her own efficiency, the best I’d ever had. Over coffee, afterwards, I told her a great deal about Jossie.

She looked into her cup. ‘Do you love her?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. It’s too soon to say.’

‘You sound,’ she said dryly, ‘bewitched.’

‘There have been other girls. But not the same.’ I looked at her downturned face. My mouth twitched. ‘In case you’re wondering about Jossie,’ I said, ‘no, I haven’t.’

She looked up, the spectacles flashing, her eyes suddenly laughing, and a blush starting on her neck. She uttered an unheadmistressly opinion.

‘You’re a sod,’ she said.

It was an hour’s drive home from Hilary’s house. No one followed me, or took the slightest interest, that I could see.

I rolled quietly down the lane towards the cottage with the car lights switched off, and made a silent reconnoitre on foot for the last hundred yards.

Everything about my home was dark and peaceful. The lights of Mrs Morris’s sitting-room, next door, shone dimly through the pattern of her curtains. The night sky was powdered with stars, and the air was cool.

I waited for a while, listening, and was slowly reassured. No horrors in the shadows. No shattering black prisons yawning like mantraps before my feet. No cut-throats with ready steel.

To be afraid, I thought, was no way to live; yet I couldn’t help it.

I unlocked the cottage and switched on all the lights; and it was empty, welcoming and sane. I fetched the car from the lane, locked myself into the cottage, pulled shut the curtains, switched on the heaters, and hugged round myself the comforting illusion of being safe in the burrow.

After that I made a pot of coffee, fished out some brandy, and sprawled into an armchair with the ancient records of the misdeeds of Powys, Glitberg and Ownslow.

At one time I’d known every detail in those files with blinding clarity, but the years had blurred my memory. I found notes in my own handwriting about inferences I couldn’t remember drawing, and conclusions as startling as acid. I was amazed, actually, at the quality of work I’d done, and it was weird to see it from an objective distance, as with a totally fresh eye. I supposed I could understand the comment there had been then, though at the time what I was doing had seemed a perfectly natural piece of work, done merely as best I could. I smiled to myself in pleased surprise. In that far-off time, I must have been hell to embezzlers. Not like nowadays, when it took me six shots to see Denby Crest.

I came across pages of notes about the workings of computers, details of which I had forgotten as fast as I’d learned them on a crash course in an electronics firm much like Powys’s. It had pleased me at the time to be able to dissect and explain just what he’d done, and nothing had made him more furious. It had been vanity on my part, I thought: and I was still vain. Admiring your own work was one of the deadlier intellectual sins.

I sighed. I was never going to be perfect, so why worry.

There was no record anywhere in the Glitberg/ Ownslow file of the buying of the warehouse, but it did seem possible, as I dug deeper in the search for clues, that it actually had been built by Glitberg and Ownslow, and was the sole concrete fabrication of National Construction (Wessex). Anyone who could invent whole streets of dwellings could put up a real warehouse without much trouble.

I wondered why they’d needed it, when everything else had been achieved on paper.

A tangible asset, uncashed, gone to seed, in which I had been dumped. The police had been told I was there, and the estate-agent trail had led without difficulty straight to Ownslow and Glitberg.

Why?

I sat and thought about it for a good long time, and then I finished the coffee and brandy and went to bed.

I picked Jossie up at ten in the grey morning, and drove to Portsmouth for the hovercraft ferry to the Isle of Wight.

‘The nostalgia kick?’ Jossie said. ‘Back to the boarding house?’

I nodded. ‘The sunny isle of childhood.’

‘Oh yeah?’ She took me literally and looked up meaningfully at the cloudy sky.

‘It heads the British sunshine league,’ I said.

‘Tell that to Torquay.’

A ten-minute zip in the hovercraft took us across the sea at Spithead, and when we stepped ashore at Ryde, the clouds were behind us, hovering like a grey sheet over the mainland.

‘It’s unfair,’ Jossie said, smiling.

‘It’s often like that.’

The town was bright with new spring paint, the Regency buildings clean and graceful in the sun. Every year, before the holiday-makers came, there was the big brush-up, and every winter, when they’d gone, the comfortable relapse into carpet slippers and salt-caked windows.

‘Ryde pier,’ I said, ‘is two thousand, three hundred and five feet long, and was opened in 1814.’

‘I don’t want to know that.’

‘There are approximately six hundred hotels, motels and boarding houses on this sunny island.’

‘Nor that.’

‘Nine towns, two castles, a lot of flamingoes and Parkhurst Prison.’

‘Nor that, for God’s sake.’

‘My Uncle Rufus,’ I said, ‘was chief mucker-out at the local riding school.’

‘Good grief.’

‘As his assistant mucker-out,’ I said, ‘I scrambled under horses’ bellies from the age of six.’

‘That figures.’

‘I used to exercise the horses and ponies all winter when the holiday people had gone home. And break in new ones. I can’t really remember not being able to ride, but there’s no racing here, of course. The first race I ever rode in was the Isle of Wight Foxhounds point-to-point over on the mainland, and I fell off.’

We walked along the Esplanade with the breeze blowing Jossie’s long green scarf out like streamers. She waved an arm at the sparkling water and said, ‘Why horses? Why not boats, for heaven’s sake, when you had them on your doorstep.’

‘They made me seasick.’

She laughed. ‘Like going to heaven and being allergic to harps.’

I took her to a hotel I knew, where there was a sunny terrace sheltered from the breeze, with a stunning view of the Solent and the shipping tramping by to Southampton. We drank hot chocolate and read the lunch menu, and talked of this and that and nothing much, and the time slid away like a mill-stream.

After roast beef for both of us, and apple pie, ice-cream and cheese for Jossie, we whistled up a taxi. There weren’t many operating on a Sunday afternoon in April, but there was no point in being a native if one didn’t know where to find the pearls.

The driver knew me, and didn’t approve of my having deserted to become a ‘mainlander’, but as he also knew I knew the roads backwards, we got a straight run over Blackgang Chine to the wild cliffs on the south-west coast, and no roundabout guff to add mileage. We dawdled along there for about an hour, stopping often to stand out of the car, on the windswept grass. Jossie took in great lungfuls of the soul-filling landscape and said whyever did I live in Newbury.

‘Racing,’ I said.

‘So simple.’

‘Do you mind if we call on a friend on the way back?’ I said. ‘Ten minutes or so?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Wootton Bridge, then,’ I said to the driver. ‘Frederick’s boatyard.’

‘They’ll be shut. It’s Sunday.’

‘We’ll try, anyway.’

He shrugged heavily, leaving me to the consequences of my own stupidity, and drove back across the island, through Newport and out on the Ryde road to the deep inlet which formed a natural harbour for hundreds of small yachts.

The white-painted façade of the boatyard showed closed doors and no sign of life.

‘There you are,’ said the driver. ‘I told you so.’

I got out of the car and walked over to the door marked ‘Office’, and knocked on it. Within a few moments it opened, and I grinned back to Jossie and jerked my head for her to join me.

‘I got your message,’ Johnny Frederick said. ‘And Sunday afternoon, I sleep.’

‘At your age?’

His age was the same as mine, almost to the day: we’d shared a desk at school and many a snigger in the lavatories. The round-faced impish boy had grown into a muscular, salt-tanned man with craftsman’s hands and a respectable hatred of paperwork. He occasionally telephoned me to find out if his own local accountant was doing things right, and bombarded the poor man with my advice.

‘How’s your father?’ I said.

‘Much the same.’

A balk of timber had fallen on Johnny’s father’s head in days gone by. There had been a lot of unkind jokes about thick as two planks before, three planks after, but the net result had been that an ailing family business had woken up in the hands of a bright new mind. With Johnny’s designs and feeling for materials, Frederick Boats were a growing name.

I introduced Jossie, who got a shrewd once-over for aerodynamic lines and a shake from a hand like a piece of callused teak.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, which was about the nearest he ever got to social small-talk. He switched his gaze to me. ‘You’ve been in the wars a bit, according to the papers.’

‘You might say so.’ I grinned. ‘What are you building, these days?’

‘Come and see.’

He walked across the functional little office and opened the far door, which led straight into the boatyard itself. We went through, and Jossie exclaimed aloud at the unexpected size of the huge shed which sloped away down to the water.

There were several smallish fibreglass hulls supported in building frames, and two large ones, side by side in the centre, with five foot keels.

‘What size are those?’ Jossie said.

‘Thirty-seven feet overall.’

‘They look bigger.’

‘They won’t on the water. It’s the largest size we do, at present.’ Johnny walked us round one of them, pointing out subtleties of hull design with pride. ‘It handles well in heavy seas. It’s stable, and not too difficult to sail, which is what most people want.’

‘Not a racer?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Those dinghies are. But the big ocean-racers are specialist jobs. This yard isn’t large enough; not geared to that class. And anyway, I like cruisers. A bit of carpet in the saloon and lockers that slide like silk.’

Jossie wandered off down the concrete slope, peering into the half-fitted dinghies and looking contentedly interested. I pulled the envelope of enlarged photographs from my inner pocket and showed them to Johnny. Three views of a sailing boat, one of an out-of-focus man.

‘That’s the boat I was abducted on. Can you tell anything about it from these photos?’

He peered at them, his head on one side. ‘If you leave them with me, maybe. I’ll look through the catalogues, and ask the boys over at Cowes. Was there anything special about it, that you remember?’

I explained that I hadn’t seen much except the sail locker. ‘The boat was pretty new, I think. Or at any rate well maintained. And it sailed from England on Thursday, March 17th, some time in the evening.’

He shuffled the prints to look at the man.

‘His name is Alastair Yardley,’ I said. ‘I’ve written it on the back. He came from Bristol, and worked from there as a deckhand on sea-trials for ocean-going yachts. He skippered the boat. He’s about our age.’

‘Are you in a hurry for all this info?’

‘Quicker the better.’

‘O.K. I’ll ring a few guys. Let you know tomorrow, if I come up with anything.’

‘That’s great.’

He tucked the prints into their envelope and let his gaze wander to Jossie.

‘A racing filly,’ he said. ‘Good lines.’

‘Eyes off.’

‘I like earthier ones, mate. Big boobs and not too bright.’

‘Boring.’

‘When I get home, I want a hot tea, and a cuddle when I feel like it, and no backchat about women’s lib.’

When I got home, I thought, I wouldn’t mind Jossie.

She walked up the concrete with big strides of her long legs, and came to a stop at our side. ‘I had a friend whose boyfriend insisted on taking her sailing,’ she said. ‘She said she didn’t terribly mind being wet, or cold, or hungry, or seasick, or frightened. She just didn’t like them all at once.’

Johnny’s eyes slid my way. ‘With this boyfriend she’d be all right. He gets sick in harbour.’

Jossie nodded. ‘Feeble.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Be my guest.’

We went back through the office and into the taxi, and Johnny waved us goodbye.

‘Any more chums?’ Jossie said.

‘Not this trip. If I start on the aunts, we’ll be here for ever. Visit one, visit all, or there’s a dust-up.’

We drove, however, at Jossie’s request, past the guest house where I’d lived with my mother. There was a new glass sun lounge across the whole of the front, and a carpark where there had been garden. Tubs of flowers, bright sun-awnings, and a swinging sign saying ‘Vacancies’.

‘Brave,’ Jossie said, clearly moved. ‘Don’t you think?’

I paid off the taxi there and we walked down to the sea, with seagulls squawking overhead and the white little town sleeping to tea-time on its sunny hillside.

‘It’s pretty,’ Jossie said. ‘And I see why you left.’

She seemed as content as I to dawdle away the rest of the day. We crossed again in the hovercraft, and made our way slowly northwards, stopping at a pub at dusk for a drink and rubbery pork pie, and arriving finally outside the sprawling pile of Axwood House more than twelve hours after we’d left.

‘That car,’ Jossie said, pointing with disfavour at an inoffensive Volvo parked ahead, ‘belongs to the detestable Lida.’

The light over the front door shone on her disgruntled face. I smiled, and she transferred the disfavour to me.

‘It’s all right for you. You aren’t threatened with her moving into your home.’

‘You could move out,’ I said mildly.

‘Just like that?’

‘To my cottage, perhaps.’

‘Good grief!’

‘You could inspect it,’ I said, ‘for cleanliness, dry rot and spiders.’

She gave me her most intolerant stare. ‘Butler, cook, and housemaids?’

‘Six footmen and a lady’s maid.’

‘I’ll come to tea and cucumber sandwiches. I suppose you do have cucumber sandwiches?’

‘Of course.’

‘Thin, and without crusts?’

‘Naturally.’

I had really surprised her, I saw. She didn’t know what to answer. It was quite clear, though, that she was not going to fall swooning into my arms. There was a good deal I would have liked to say, but I didn’t know how to. Things about caring, and reassurance, and looking ahead.

‘Next Sunday,’ she said. ‘At half past three. For tea.’

‘I’ll line up the staff.’

She decided to get out of the car, and I went round to open the door for her. Her eyes looked huge.

‘Are you serious?’ she said.

‘Oh yes. It’ll be up to you... to decide.’

‘After tea?’

I shook my head. ‘At any time.’

Her expression slowly softened to unaccustomed gentleness. I kissed her, and then kissed her again with conviction.

‘I think I’ll go in,’ she said waveringly, turning away.

‘Jossie...’

‘What?’

I swallowed. Shook my head. ‘Come to tea,’ I said helplessly. ‘Come to tea.’