Chapter 2

“Is that the fastest the wipers will go? I can’t see the road, and if I can’t, you can’t, which fills me full of confidence,” said Charlie, for once not the happiest of passengers.

“Yes, it is the fastest they will go, Charles,” replied Robin, a pronounced and annoyed space between each word. Plus he only ever called Charlie “Charles” when he was in a heightened state of emotion.

“I’m only saying—”

“Do you want to drive?” Robin snapped. “I can stop the car and we can swap places. Or rather you can drive and I’ll get a taxi, because your driving is bound to see at least one of us off before our time.” He took a deep breath in an effort to deflate his rising temper. “Please sit back and let me handle the wheel and all the other instruments.” He huffed, then restarted the argument. “The cheek of you, Charles Glaser. How long have I been your chauffeur? How many crashes have I had? Speeding tickets, parking fines? Not one. I wish this car had an ejector seat sometimes. I’d press it and gladly see you blasted into orbit.”

A charged silence hung in the air for a few seconds, and then both men burst out laughing. Life had always been too short for serious disagreements between them, but gentle squabbling was part of their relationship’s DNA and had been for the last thirty-two years. Thou shalt bicker to thy heart’s content was written into their constitutional ten commandments, along with Thou shalt not hold grudges and Thou shalt compromise wherever possible.

“I can’t see a thing,” conceded Robin. “This is total madness.”

“Who’d have known this was going to happen?” said Charlie.

“The bloody meteorologists should have,” replied Robin with more than a touch of impatience. “It’s the 1987 debacle all over again. How come they can send people to the moon but they can’t predict this?” He threw one hand up, and then quickly replaced it on the wheel as the car threatened a rogue skid.

Charlie cleared his throat before speaking next. “It’s probably not the time to tell you that there’s none in Scotland.”

“None of what?”

“Snow.”

Robin’s grip of the steering wheel increased as if he was holding on to something that might stop him falling off the edge of the world. He really hoped he’d heard Charlie wrong.

“Please tell me you’re joking.”

“I’m not.”

Robin’s neck started to mottle red, Charlie noticed. This usually signified his partner was about to enter meltdown mode.

“And when were you going to let me in on this particular nugget of information, Charles? When we got up to Aviemore and noticed everyone in bikinis?”

“I don’t mind about the snow, it didn’t matter anyway.”

Robin knew that was a lie. “It was the most important thing of all, Charlie.”

“It’s forecasted, though. For the New Year apparently.”

“Yes, and the whole of England was ‘forecasted’ to be mild and dry for Christmas. They obviously couldn’t forecast a puddle if they were standing in it. Are all the weathermen on acid trips?”

Robin growled like a frustrated bear, then his attention was snatched away by the GPS, which picked that moment to freeze. “Oh, great, that’s all I need.” He stabbed at it with a demanding index finger, spoke nicely to it, then swore at it, but nothing would coax it to work.

“Charlie, get maps up on your phone. Look for the nearest town, pub, hotel, anything.”

Charlie tried, but maps couldn’t seem to pick up where they were as a starting point. “This is the trouble with modern technology,” he said. “It works until it doesn’t.”

“Very profound, my love, and so helpful.”

“You can’t go wrong with a paper map. I would have known where we were if you hadn’t thrown the road atlas away.”

“It was years out of date, Charlie. It showed the M1 as a mud path.”

“Oh, very funny.”

Robin braked and felt the car struggle for purchase on the road. There was no way he could drive up to Aviemore in this; it wasn’t safe.

“Mad fools and Englishmen,” he said, not quite under his breath.

“That’s midday sun. And it’s dogs.”

“What?”

“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, and it’s by Noel Coward.”

“Mad fools and bloody Englishmen go out in the bloody snow two days before bloody Christmas, heading for the bloody highlands of bloody Scotland, and that’s by Robin bloody Raymond.” Robin’s neck was now completely red.

“Shh, having a fit won’t get us anywhere sooner,” said Charlie, attempting to pour some oil on Robin’s troubled waters. “What’s that over there?” He squinted at something in the distance. “You know, I think it’s a sign.”

“What? Like a burning bush?” replied Robin dryly.

“A wooden signpost, I mean, as well you know. Drive on a touch.”

For a man six months short of his eightieth birthday, Charlie had eyes like a hawk.

Robin pressed down the accelerator softly, crawled forward: “Oh yeah, I see it now. What does it say?”

Charlie opened the window and snow flew in, so he read quickly and closed it again.

“It said Figgy Hollow, half a mile, and a right arrow.”

“What’s that? A village?”

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Charlie. “And I know these parts like the back of my hand.”

“It’s a no-brainer, we’ll have to go there, then.” Robin just hoped the car would make it and not choke, splutter, and stop as if they were in an old horror film, leaving them stranded at the mercy of some Yeti-like creature. “Someone’s bound to take pity on us and invite us in for some soup. Practice looking old and vulnerable.”

“I am old and vulnerable. Figgy Hollow, here we come, then,” said Charlie, annoying Robin even more by making it sound as if they were about to embark on a jolly adventure with the Famous Five and lashings of ginger beer.

---

Mary Padgett tried to concentrate on the road and not on her boss talking on the phone in that way he had when he was trying to hang on to his temper. She flashed a look at him in the rearview mirror. Driving gave her the perfect excuse to glance at him every few seconds, and she doubted she’d ever get tired of the sight. Jack Butterly was ten years her senior, just developing silvery sprinkles in his dark, cropped hair, and crinkles around his gorgeous gray eyes. He seemed to grow more handsome with each year that passed, as she seemed to grow more invisible. She loved her boss. Loved him with all her heart and not in an “I like working for him” way, but an “I wish he’d lock the door, shove me onto his desk, and have his wicked way with me” way, which is why she offered to drive him to a hotel in the North East when Jack’s chauffeur, Fred, went off sick with his back—again.

Jack had been trying for months to fix up a meeting with the head of the Chikafuji Bakery company in Japan, and the only time in the calendar Mr. Chikafuji and Jack were both free was the early morning of Christmas Eve. Despite being very keen to hook up and make beautiful bun business together, Mr. Chikafuji had been more difficult than a greased eel to pin down, so Jack wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to meet with him when he was over on a flying visit to the UK. Mary seized her chance to spend an evening in a gorgeous country house four-star hotel with Jack Butterly, an opportunity that looked set to crumble into dust, from what the fragments of conversation she’d overheard had intimated.

“Yes, I can come over to Japan instead. Do you have some dates… May? Is Mr. Chikafuji not free before then?… Oh, I see, he’s very busy, is he?…”

Jack ended the call on his cell with as much annoyance as it was possible to execute with one finger. It was an end to a call better suited to a heavy desk phone with a receiver that could be crashed down onto its cradle.

“Would you believe it?” said Jack. “Chikafuji’s plane has been canceled from Brussels, so he’s going back to Japan instead and he hasn’t got space in his calendar for a face-to-face meeting until May. We might as well turn back. Ha.” The note of laughter was anything but one of amusement.

Mary didn’t suggest that they should have had a video call. She had learned over the years that Jack needed the whole meet-and-greet experience, to make that initial face-to-face connection with a potential client, in order to absorb their essence, especially one of Mr. Chikafuji’s caliber, and he was adamant that he couldn’t do that via a screen. Mary thought he could have made an exception in this case, seeing as Mr. Chikafuji was so hard to get hold of in person, but she kept quiet so as not to exacerbate his mood. Jack scared some people, she knew. He was physically imposing—tall, with broad shoulders, a man who looked after himself and spoke with an impeccable private school accent that had a tendency to make those with a dent in their confidence feel inferior. He was a hard-nosed, hardworking businessman who believed in his product and gave off an air of self-assurance like expensive cologne. His face had a default serious set; Mary had heard a few people say that it would shatter like stressed glass if he smiled, but she didn’t think that was true, and how she wished she could be the one who made him smile. He didn’t scare her in the slightest either, because she could read him like a favorite book and she knew under that stiff, polished veneer was someone lonely, vulnerable, sad, mixed up.

Mary dabbed her foot gently on the brake, felt the Maserati skid slightly as it tried to hold traction. There were no other cars in sight, but she wasn’t sure anymore how much was road and how much was ditch. She made a measured five-point turn, set off back down the road they had just traveled, their freshly made tracks half filled with snow already. She tried to keep her focus on driving and not on lamenting that her big chance to make Jack see her as something other than the PA who brought him coffee, fielded his calls, and organized his calendar and his dry cleaning was now gone.

She’d bought a stunning red dress especially for the dinner they’d have had together in the hotel restaurant. She’d chosen it with care to make the best of her slender frame, to color-contrast with her long pale blond hair and make her large green-blue eyes pop. She’d bought red suede boots with heels that elevated her five-foot-three height without reducing her ability to walk in them. She’d blown almost the equivalent of her month’s wages on clothes for this one night, a stupid gamble. Thank goodness they were still in the bags with the tags and stickers on them so she could get a refund. But she didn’t want a refund, she wanted to wear them and have her night in the Tynehall Country Hotel ripping the scales from Jack’s eyes.

She had known it was “now or never,” and so it seemed that it was going to be never, thanks to the double whammy of the ever-unreliable Mr. Chikafuji and the damned weather. She had known it was too good to be true: an all-expenses-paid night in a swanky hotel, Jack all to herself for a full twenty-four hours. One of her dad’s many sayings was that if a thing looked too good to be true, then that’s because it probably was, and once again he was right. Mary sighed audibly, then quickly checked the mirror to see if Jack had heard her, but he was too busy hunting for something in his briefcase to have noticed.

Mary carried on down the road steadily. Her dad had taught her and her siblings to drive when they were fifteen on a patch of nearby farmland. By the age of sixteen, she could throw cars around corners and handle any motor with the skill of a copper chasing a drug dealer up the wrong side of the motorway. She drove much better than Fred did, who tended to press down on the pedals as if he was stamping on a cockroach with a lead boot. He’d been Jack’s father’s chauffeur, employed more for being in the old boys’ network rather than for his abilities, which was par for the course with Reg Butterly. Mary’s eyes flicked toward the GPS when it gave her an instruction to leave the motorway at the next junction and follow the A379 to Exeter. On the screen was a map of the South West. Even brand-new Maseratis had their glitches, she thought. Luckily she knew she was heading in roughly the right direction, back to South Yorkshire, not Devon. Sadly.

Less than a mile along the way, Mary could see there was a problem in the shape of a rockfall ahead. The weight of snow on the hillside must have dislodged stones and boulders at the inconvenient point where the road narrowed to a single lane. There was no way around the obstruction; she could tell that even from a long distance away. Jack’s attention was dragged to the scene framed by the windshield when he felt the car slowing.

“Oh, please tell me this isn’t happening,” he said.

“I’ll have to turn back,” said Mary, stating the obvious. What else could they do? The road was completely blocked.

“Goodness, the snow really is bad, isn’t it,” said Jack. He’d raised his head at various points and glanced at the weather, but his mind was more on the presentation to Chikafuji; now he was seeing the whiteout. “I think it would be sensible to pull in at the first place we can, Mary.”

Mary did another about-turn and headed for Tynehall yet again, even though they had no chance of making it that far. There had to be somewhere nearby. They were in Yorkshire, not an Arctic tundra, even if it did look like it. Then, in the midst of all the white in front of her, she spotted a wooden arrow-shaped sign coming up on the left, pointing across to a turning that wasn’t showing up on the GPS, with crude black lettering: FIGGY HOLLOW 3/4 MILE. She couldn’t remember seeing it on either of the two times she’d passed this spot before, but she hadn’t been looking for shelter then.

She hadn’t a clue what Figgy Hollow was: a local beauty spot, a farm, a hamlet with a welcoming hotel and a cozy log fire, she hoped, but in case there was nothing else around for miles, she took the risk and swung a right. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Another gem from her father’s book of sayings.