Natasha’s injuries looked worse than they were, but they didn’t, according to the disapproving and pessimistic doctor, look as bad as they would in a couple of days. Bruising took time to ripen, he told Jess with an unsuppressable quotient of glee in his voice, and after twenty-four hours or so Natasha would be wanting to keep well out of the public gaze for a while. The stitches on her forehead, he warned, would also become sore as the swelling continued, her limbs would feel stiff and her body would ache as if she’d got flu and for all this she’d have to make do with nothing stronger than a couple of paracetamol.
‘She was lucky to have got away without any broken bones,’ he said, scowling at Jess across the bed in the treatment room at St Michael’s accident and emergency department. ‘These kids …’ He shook his head slowly, leaving Jess in no doubt that in his opinion the long years of expensive medical training had definitely not been for the purpose of treating a bunch of young vandals who deserved all they got.
‘What about “these kids”?’ Matthew said with quiet anger.
The doctor removed his glasses, braced himself on the end rails of the bed (in readiness, Jess assumed, for when Matthew gave him a furious shove) and continued, ‘Without people like these kids, who are here as a result of criminal behaviour and carelessness, the waiting times that everyone’s forever beefing about in these places would be at least half what they are. You wouldn’t believe how many drunks, louts, aggressive cretins who’ve punched each other senseless …’
‘Er, so where do you stand on sports injuries then?’ Matthew was smiling now. ‘Do you make these irresponsible idiots who’ve chosen to risk their all in a rugby match wait at the back of the queue, just to teach them a lesson?’
‘Sport is different. Sport is good for you. It would keep young yobs’ minds off the so-called thrills of crime.’
The doctor was on a roll. Jess could see that Matthew, now reassured that Natasha was going to be completely all right, was about to move into a full-scale debate and needed distracting. ‘Come on, Matt, let’s get Tasha home. We don’t want to keep the doctor from his more deserving patients, do we?’
Natasha slid down from the bed and staggered slightly. ‘Did the nurse ask you if you’ve been drinking?’ the doctor said, loading an additional dose of contempt into his voice.
‘Yes and I haven’t,’ Natasha snapped. ‘I’m just …’ She burst into tears at that point.
‘It’s all right Tash, let’s get you home.’ Jess took hold of her arm and led her out of the cubicle and back towards the way out. Zoe was in the waiting area, reading Marie Claire and keeping an eye on a gaggle of police officers who were hanging around the coffee machine and telling each other jokes.
‘They’re waiting to talk to Tom,’ Zoe whispered as they walked towards the car park.
‘What, all of them?’ Matt said. ‘I mean how many does it take to arrest one young boy?’
‘One young boy with a broken arm and possibly serious head injuries,’ Jess added. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll be doing any twocking for a while.’
‘Twocking?’ Zoe said as she got into the back of the Golf. ‘What’s that?’
‘Taking Without Owner’s Consent. Nicking cars, basically,’ Natasha said.
She sounded weary. Zoe glanced at her warily as they sat together in the car. Natasha was staring straight ahead, looking as if she wanted to sleep for about a year. Her face was smeary from dried-out tears and her hair looked as if she hadn’t brushed it for a week.
‘Does it hurt?’ Zoe asked quietly.
‘Yes.’ The reply didn’t invite any more questions and Zoe gazed out of the window feeling tearful. It was all her fault. She should have refused to tell the lie about Natasha going to Claire’s. All the way home on the bus she’d been so sure this was one secret too many and that it would be the one that made the most deeply serious trouble. When she’d got home, she’d just prayed that no-one would say, as Jess had, ‘Oh just you, is it? Where’s Tash?’ If Zoe had only said, ‘Actually, she’s gone off with Tom in a car that can’t possibly be his,’ all this might not have happened. Or it might have been even worse, she thought. Because either way, the police knew about Tom taking the car and were going to chase it. Natasha could have been killed. Tom couldn’t drive that well, no-one of sixteen could drive well enough to outrun three police cars who seemed, according to her dad, to be in some kind of competition to make the arrest.
Zoe had heard the crash from her bedroom. It was a horrible, sickening sound, all huge metallic crunch and shattering glass. It was the kind of sound that made you sure no-one in the middle of it could have survived. She’d sat on her bed feeling sick, waiting for someone to tell her the worst. She wasn’t even slightly surprised when Ben called from the Leo to tell her mum that Natasha was being taken to the hospital, with Matt in the ambulance.
There was a strange calm hush in the house. Natasha, looking deeply sad and more battered by the minute (the doctor would be delighted, Jess thought), asked for a bowl of tomato soup, some hot chocolate and then went to have a long hot bath and get into bed. Jess wouldn’t ask her any questions. There was no point: she was pretty sure they knew all they needed to know about what had happened. If there was anything to add, it would come out when the police questioned Natasha. At least, she thought, as she prepared a simple pasta carbonara for the rest of them, Tom would be off the scene. Permanently, if Jess had anything to do with it.
‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’ Matt said as soon as Zoe had gone to watch television after a quiet and morose supper.
‘What, all this? No of course not, why do you think so?’
‘I’ve not exactly been a shining example of upright citizenship since the job went. I could have been a bit more of a support, backed you up when you grounded Tasha. I could have picked her up from school in the afternoons, made sure she knew we were serious about her not seeing Tom – especially after the burglary. How is she supposed to toe the line when I spend all my time avoiding responsibility?’
Jess thought about what he’d said. There was more than an ounce of truth in his words, but not much more. Teenagers made their own choices, it was part of the process. And because they were teenagers they tended to pick the thrill option. You couldn’t put them on reins like toddlers.
‘You can’t blame yourself. We trusted her. If we said she couldn’t do something, we assumed, perhaps naively and lazily, she’d do as we said. But she’s nearly sixteen, it’s a breakaway age. Hell, we haven’t given her a lot to rebel about, we’re pretty easy-going. Perhaps she just had to kick against the grown-up world one way or another and this was her way.’
‘You mean you don’t know all there is to know about teen life?’ Matt leaned across and kissed her. ‘You’re actually fallible?’
‘Of course I am!’ Jess laughed. ‘And come on, he was an attractive boy. She’s a girl with imagination; it must have been a massive thrill that someone like him wanted to go out with her. He represents danger, the forbidden, something way beyond the boring selection on offer at St Dominic’s. I just hope …’
‘Hope what?’
‘I hope she’s got it out of her system.’
George waited till the morning to come and see Natasha. When Jess had phoned the night before and told him what had happened to her he’d felt quite weak with distress. It was all so stupidly unnecessary. In delaying telling the police about the stolen goods in the Sierra, it could be that he’d put the life of his adored granddaughter at risk. That was what came of putting things off, wishing that things were different from the way they were instead of facing reality and acting on what was actually true. Now, he couldn’t think why he’d waited before making that call to the police. Perhaps he’d been hoping that things would be different when he’d had a night’s sleep. However old you got, he thought as he walked up the Grove with the huge bunch of flowers for Tash, you never stopped hoping that the president of the immortals would make things all right overnight.
‘Hallo Grandad.’ George was surprised when Natasha opened the door. ‘Ooh are those for me? No-one’s ever given me flowers before! Come in.’
‘Well you poor girl, you do look a bit battered around the edges.’ George gently kissed her swollen, purple cheek. ‘I’m glad you’re up and about though, I thought you’d be lying around in bed and resting.’
‘It’s only because I didn’t have to get up,’ she said, grinning at him. ‘I’m a teenager, I only stay in bed when it annoys people, like most of Saturday mornings when Mum wants me to tidy my room or do homework or something truly gross like that. Come and have a cup of coffee, Mum’s in the kitchen, sorting through all her old work stuff.’
‘Hi Dad, come to see our invalid?’ Jess, glancing at her father, couldn’t miss the change in him. He looked older, more frail somehow, as if he’d shrunk slightly in the past couple of weeks.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked, looking through the cupboard in search of a packet of biscuits, as if just the smallest amount of quick-fix food would restore him to his former vigour.
George sat at the table, idly turning over the loose pages from Jess’s file of past work. ‘I’m well in myself. I’ve got a confession to make though.’ He hesitated, coughed a little and then rallied. ‘I found all your stolen stuff the night before I rang the police. If they’d known, they might have caught … you know, before …’ He hesitated, unable to continue. Jess sat down next to him and put her arm round him. ‘It’s all right, they were already looking for Tom. The stuff wasn’t really relevant – and we got it back, so it made no difference in the end. You really mustn’t worry about it.’
‘The crash wasn’t anyone’s fault,’ Natasha said. ‘Except the police, they just panicked Tom, I mean there were three lots of them all with the sirens going. All he could do was go faster.’
‘Well, he could have stopped.’ George, let off the hook, seemed instantly more sprightly, almost back to his normal rather confrontational self. ‘I mean that would have been the honest thing to do, wouldn’t it? Or just not steal things in the first place?’
‘Yes, but …’ Jess began then stopped. What was the point? They all knew, even Natasha, where honesty ranked with Tom.
It was all over the school. Girls Zoe had never spoken to in her life, even girls from the sixth form, kept coming up to her and asking if it was true that her sister had been in a crash in a stolen car. It was that day’s sensation. Girls from Julia Perry’s occasionally became pregnant, frequently severely anorexic and sometimes went in for a little light shoplifting. They didn’t tend, generally, to go out with genuine hard-case criminals. The fact that Natasha had done so, blatantly and disastrously, had sent a vicarious collective thrill through much of the school. Guiltily, Zoe couldn’t help at least half-enjoying the second-hand glamour of the situation.
‘So is she OK, like she’s not going to be scarred or anything?’ Claire asked Zoe in the lunch queue. ‘Shall I come and see her? Will after school today be all right?’
‘I suppose so.’ Zoe shrugged. ‘Why don’t you ring her?’ In fact, why haven’t you called for absolutely bloody ages, she wanted to ask, not at all taken in by Claire’s renewed enthusiasm for her sister’s company and welfare. Zoe wasn’t stupid, she knew there’d been a rift. Claire and Natasha, in the past weeks, had definitely not been together so much. Claire had started hanging around with the group in her year who were known as the ball girls. This was nothing to do with tennis but was all about attending as many upmarket parties as possible and keeping a coloured-in chart listing the leading boys’ boarding schools and the best snoggers therein. Only a few weeks before, Natasha and Claire had been equally damning in their scorn for this childish and silly-girl pursuit, but as Zoe listened to Claire’s avid questioning for details of Tash’s accident, she could see the unmistakeable blotching of a love-bite on her neck. Claire probably couldn’t remember, Zoe assumed with possibly overjudgemental contempt, who it was who’d given it to her: she knew quite well that with the ball girls it was a matter of clocking up the numbers. Pondering the girls in her own year at the school, she could think of only a handful, apart from herself, who definitely wouldn’t be a ball girl in a couple of years’ time. It didn’t seem a lot to look forward to.
The fortune-teller was everything Paula had promised, although her premises were uncompromisingly domestic. Jess had anticipated being shown into a musky, exotic den, festooned from ceiling to floor with splendid drapes of moss green velvet, and offered a seat at a table hung with gold-fringed cloth. Instead she was ushered into a shabby sitting room with a faded floral carpet in shades of orange and blotchy hessian wallpaper, the colour of ground ginger, which must have been up since the mid-Sixties. The fire was a gas-effect one, ruling out, Jess assumed, any staring into it to read pictures in the flames. A pair of massive scuffed leather chesterfield sofas took up most of the space. Between these was a low table covered with a purple satin cloth, which, reminding Jess of Matthew’s choice of coffin lining, rather unnerved her. On the cloth was a gratifyingly archetypal selection of the tools of a fortune-teller’s trade: a pack of tarot cards, a crystal ball (into which Jess peered, hoping she might discover she had The Gift) and a little silver dragon figure which contained something that was causing whiffs of scented smoke to come from its mouth. Even pessimism-supremo Robin, who’d been in earlier to photograph the set-up, must have found something to please him here.
‘Coffee? Herbal tea?’ Bella the mystic (in jeans and a tight pink tee shirt) offered as Jess settled herself next to a massive tabby cat.
‘Er, no thanks, I’m OK.’ Jess smiled and stroked the cat which stretched itself out to its full length and took up most of the sofa.
‘This must be about the biggest cat I’ve ever seen,’ she commented as Bella sat down opposite her and started shuffling the tarot cards. Her nails were spectacularly long, Jess noted, and painted with pale blue shimmery varnish and her hands were loaded with thick silver rings studded with chunky opals and amethysts.
‘He wasn’t very well, as a kitten.’ Bella smiled fondly at the cat. ‘So I treated him with reiki healing. It makes them grow, you see, all that stroking. Would you like to try it? Reiki? It helps with emotional problems as well as physical.’ Jess turned the offer down as politely as she could, making a light joke about not wanting to grow any more thank you, which seemed to go right over Bella’s head. She did wonder though if it was really that obvious that she wasn’t currently in the most settled frame of mind, or if Bella was truly psychic. Ashamed of her cynicism, for Bella was gentle, hospitable and genuinely certain of her powers, Jess found herself seeking out the party-trick aspect of the business: surely it was easy enough to guess that any suburban working mother/journalist was going to have the odd emotional problem. There were whole hospitals in the area set up for just that kind of sorting out; Yellow Pages had several pages of private counsellors well able to afford the cost of the advertising.
‘I can’t tell you anything you couldn’t work out for yourself really,’ Bella said as she laid the tarot cards out. ‘We lose the habit of trusting our intuition far too early. It needs nurturing, just like other skills do. We’re all born with the ability to see into the future. Those people who somehow didn’t get on that plane that crashed, the ones who say “I had a feeling about that”, they’re clinging onto the last of their power.’ She looked up suddenly at Jess. ‘You have a man in your life who is a very powerful support to you. He is on your side, an indispensable help.’
‘My husband?’ Jess couldn’t help sounding incredulous. ‘Quite possibly.’
Bella nodded solemnly. ‘You would be the one to know, not me.’ She gave a little smile, full of suggested mystery, and Jess again felt guilty for her lingering doubts. Bella had seen Matthew drop her off at the house on his way to take Natasha to the doctor to have her stitches out. It could easily be an exaggeration of how ‘helpful’ that could be.
The cards did not promise massive unexpected riches, that the girls would be married off into the royal family or that Matthew would be any nearer finding something useful to occupy his time after the next few months. ‘Money will not be a problem for you,’ Bella told Jess as, the cards finished, she began backing up her findings with a palm reading.
‘Is that because I’ll be so rich I won’t need to worry or because I’ll be so poor I won’t have the burden of wondering how to deal with wealth?’
Again came the smile full of secret knowledge, as if the information could be trawled out of Jess’s own brain if only she could kick-start the right dormant cells.
‘Oh and there’ll be travel,’ Bella said, by way of a farewell.
‘Isn’t there always?’ Jess laughed, wondering if she should start thinking about booking a holiday, which would be more than rash with Matt no nearer to thinking about finding a job, or if the four-mile journey home counted. It was certainly all the travelling she’d be doing for now.
‘It’s just like on Casualty. They move pretty fast when you get brought in by ambulance,’ Matt was telling his usual audience at the Leo.
‘They do but I don’t recommend dialling 999 if you’ve only got a cut finger though,’ Micky said.
‘I feel a bit sorry for the kid, Tom, you know,’ Matt admitted over his first beer of the day.
‘Why? He nearly killed your Natasha. I’d want to wring his evil little neck.’ Eddy made wringing movements with his hands, then grimaced. ‘Bloody arthritis,’ he said, ‘I’m awash with glucosomites and cod liver sodding oil and it’s still a bloody pain in the morning. If Paula gets frisky before the first Nurofen kicks in it’s fucking agony. So why do you feel sorry for him? You turning into a social worker?’
‘No, it’s because he’s got to go back into custody. Turns out he was on the run from a sort of young offenders’ halfway house and had a string of previous going back to sometime around his twelfth birthday. Now he’s gone into a serious lock-up. Young lads kill themselves in those. You always imagine kids like him, you think they’re some kind of alien beings that you’ll never come into contact with, but well, he was quite nice really. It’s a shame.’
‘Jesus Matt, you’re softening up in your old age.’ Micky shook his head in despair. ‘You’ll be looking for a proper job next.’
‘Me? Never! I want something where I can do just what I’m doing now.’ He raised his glass in a toast to Ben behind the bar.
‘You should take over from Micky then; he’s off to see the world at the end of this summer. I might have to sell up,’ Ben said gloomily.
Natasha didn’t want to go back to school. The bruises had started to go down and she could now bear to touch her skin enough to cover the worst of the marks with make-up. But it was a strain, the way her parents were being so perpetually nice to her, and she really needed to escape. She could understand that they were hugely relieved that she hadn’t been killed but there hadn’t been even the slightest bit of blame, not even the hint of a telling-off. Somehow it made her feel worse – a massive row would have been better all round; there wouldn’t be this strange whispery atmosphere in the house. They kept asking her if she was all right. All she could say was ‘Yes I’m fine, honestly,’ and hope they wouldn’t give her that look, that probing, ‘how do you really feel’ look that was pushing her to confide things that she was quite sure they didn’t really want to know.
There was nothing to confide, that was the truth. Tom had gone now, so end of story. There wasn’t much chance of her ever seeing him again. For the first few days after the crash she’d made sure she was the one who picked up the mail from the mat in the mornings, but he hadn’t written. It was his left arm that would be in a sling, and she didn’t even know if he was left- or right-handed. Perhaps he hadn’t had much of an education though, she thought, perhaps writing wasn’t something he was good at. She hardly knew anything at all about him, really, when it came down to it.
Natasha was glad to have Zoe with her when the next Monday came and she couldn’t put off going back to school any longer. On the bus, one or two of the younger girls nudged and whispered and pointed but they were easy to ignore. Zoe was doing her best, chatting away about Oliver and trying to imagine where he was and what he was doing. When they arrived, Claire was waiting by the gate, claiming Natasha as her friend again in a way she hadn’t done for quite a while now.
‘You don’t actually look too bad.’ Claire scrutinized her closely, gently running a finger over the bright pink scar just above her eyebrow where the stitches had been.
‘You sound disappointed! Did you hope I’d look all beaten up and be walking on crutches?’ Natasha laughed. ‘Tell me what I’ve missed.’
Claire shrugged. ‘Nuffin. Usual stuff, a new maths investigation and they’ve sorted out a geography field trip for next term: Swanage, surprise, surprise. My sister went there and she said the whole place is stuffed with geography field-trip people trying to accost the residents for stupid surveys and counting cars.’
‘Can’t wait.’
Jess had been half-expecting the phone call. She knew this was going to be one deed of misbehaviour too far for the Julia Perry School. The school was very keen on ‘standards’, the head said as Jess doodled on a Post-it note and only half-listened. Standards were to be ‘upheld’, which inspired Jess to draw a flagpole with a skull and crossbones at half mast. Natasha’s position in the school was to be reviewed, apparently. Jess and Matthew would be informed in ‘due course’ (she added a pirate ship) of the decision that came out of this process.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jess heard herself say as she sketched in Captain Pugwash. ‘She and Zoe will be leaving the school at the end of the summer term.’
After she’d hung up, Jess went into a sweaty panic. ‘Where did that come from?’ she asked Matt, who’d just strolled in from the Leo. ‘I’ve just told the head of Julia Perry that Tash and Zoe will be leaving the school.’
‘What, before they’re publicly flogged and thrown out? Good thinking,’ he laughed.
‘But what about them? Where will they go? Won’t they be furious?’ She shouldn’t have done this, she thought, not without consulting the girls. Natasha was halfway through her GCSE courses. But then no-one had ever questioned the assumption that she was likely to get the desired full-house score of nine A* grades, so surely she’d be all right anywhere.
‘Furious? Those two? You really haven’t been keeping your eye on the ball have you, Jess, they hate it there. They’re only sitting it out because that’s where all the nice rich little middle-class girls like them go to school from round here. Though, where did you have in mind for them?’
‘Briar’s Lane, they mostly seem to do OK there.’
‘Good idea.’ He hugged her. ‘And your dad will be delighted. It’s one small step towards your party membership card.’
At least that day was over. Hundreds more to go. Natasha trudged home, lugging the eternally bulging bag of homework. She made her way from the high street into the square. Mel was there, sitting by herself on the twisted and battered bench opposite the Leo that had been restored to its approximate right way up by Eddy and Ben after the crash.
‘Y’all right Tash?’ Mel called. ‘Want a cig?’ She offered the packet. Natasha shook her head but went to sit beside her.
‘I’ve got a message for you. I saw Tom,’ Mel told her.
‘Where? At the prison?’
‘He’s in a Young Offenders, quite a long way out. I went on a visit.’ Mel crossed her long pale legs and stared at the floor.
‘How did you manage that?’
‘He wrote and asked me, sent me a VO.’
‘And that’s a …?’
‘Visiting Order.’ Mel giggled. ‘I felt like one of those women off Birds of a Feather lining up with all the mums and girlfriends.’ Then she looked at Natasha. ‘Er, he says he’s really sorry and he hopes you’re all right.’
‘Does he want me to see him?’ Natasha’s voice, even to her own ears, sounded flat and dull.
‘Er no, that’s the bit you might not like. He says it was just for then, it was great but you should find someone else.’
Natasha stared at the mottled grey paving stones. She felt tears pricking. ‘So he was with you, as well as me, all the time.’
Mel put her arm round Natasha and hugged her close. ‘No. We were just mates. Truly. I think he really loved you, but he’ll be gone for ages. And we’re young.’ She grinned at Natasha. ‘Come on, you’ll be OK. And so will he in the end. He’s got a nice mum, you know, I met her up the prison. He’s just a bit wild.’
‘A bit!’ Natasha giggled.
‘OK, a lot!’ Mel laughed.
‘… a helpline for those who think they’re the Worst Parents in the World. We suffer in silence, too scared of being judged to confess our failings to even our closest friends, lying that everything’s fine and keeping all the problems locked up behind the prim suburban windows. We are isolated and nail-biting, sure that everyone else’s fifteen-year-olds are immersed in coursework, intent on cracking the central dilemma in Macbeth while ours are marauding the streets up to all kinds of no good. We wonder will tonight’s collection point be the police station again, or perhaps the hospital this time for a welcome change of venue …’
Well, Paula had wanted the truth. This would be the last Nelson’s Column that involved Jess’s family. It wasn’t a confessional, certainly not in the sense that she’d shopped Natasha to the Sunday-paper-browsing public, but it was an admission of parental imperfection on an uncomfortably grand scale. It would, she knew, ring a lot of bells. The broadsheet readers of Britain surely shouldn’t have to do their agonizing all in secret, having to put up with jolly columnists like her pretending that the worst that could happen after a teenager’s night out was that they’d use the parental minicab account to ferry five friends to various homes over a forty-five-mile radius. Everyone knew, deep down and in the turbulent cage of their own homes, that things got an awful lot worse than that.
… After all that’s happened the girls shouldn’t have to wait till they hit nineteen and have done their A levels to see this place. Tash and Zoe would love the surfing. Even you and Dad could do it here. Western Oz is just the best place. I’m running low on cash so if you feel like getting on a plane I could show you round for a price (short term only, I got stuff to do, people and places to see) …
‘It’s a bugger of a long way. Tell me you won’t die of boredom or thrombosis before we get there,’ Matt said to Jess as the safety-belt sign went off.
‘I promise I’ll try not to,’ she reassured him. It was a long way, just about the furthest you could go in the world. Jess could hardly wait to see Oliver again; he’d be there, he’d told them, with a car to take them to the hotel. Natasha hadn’t been sure: will he want us lot turning up, really, she’d wondered? Good question; but Oliver was easily bought with the promise of temporary escape from the privations of hostel life, with the temptation of hotel rooms with constant water supplies, with not having to eke out his precious savings for a few weeks. Then he’d be on his way again, on the backpack trail onwards to New Zealand and the snowboard season. Jess wondered what he’d look like now, how tanned he’d be, how much the sun would have bleached his hair.
From the seat behind, Jess could hear the pecking sound of Zoe’s Gameboy. There was the familiar bass thud-thud of music from Natasha’s headphones. She sipped her champagne (so you should avoid alcohol on long-distance flights, she’d read, but this was such a one-off) and looked at the menu.
‘We’re doing the right thing you know,’ Matt said, taking her hand.
‘I know. No doubts at all. They can go to school again in September. They won’t miss much. And it was obvious the Julia Perry High School were highly relieved to see the back of them.’
Matt chuckled. ‘“We have to think of their peers. Influences, you know, so important.”’ He mimicked the ponderous tones of Natasha’s form tutor who had found it so hard to pretend she was sorry Tash was leaving.
The stewardess approached with the drinks trolley. ‘Any thin Celts?’ she asked Matt.
He turned to Jess, perplexed, for a translation. ‘It means “Would you like another drink?”’ she told him.
‘Oh right, er, no thanks,’ Matt said, trying not to laugh.
‘When you’re doing your stints in charge at the Leo, you won’t say that to your customers will you?’ she said. ‘Promise?’
‘Promise? Certainly not. Now I own half the bar, I shall do exactly what I like in it,’ he told her with a grin. ‘It’s a glorious phrase and I shall make a point of using it whenever I can.’
THE END