Property of a Lady

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I think we need to find out who – or what Elvira is. The first thing to do, is for me to ask Jack a bit more about Ellie’s dreams.’


‘Don’t alarm them unnecessarily,’ said Nell. She liked the sound of Liz Harper and her family, and it would be terrible to put needless fears in their minds.

‘I won’t,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll email them as soon as I get back to Oxford.’ Then, as the waitress hovered, ‘Would you like anything else to eat? No? A cup of coffee?’

Nell shook her head. When the waitress had gone, she said, ‘I was thinking you could email from the flat if you like. You’re welcome to use my computer – I’ve got Liz Harper’s email address on it.’

‘It’s a bit late to do that now,’ he said slowly.

‘It needn’t take long. And if you send something tonight there might be a reply as soon as tomorrow.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘But I’ll use my own laptop – I brought it with me thinking I might do some work and thinking the Black Boar would have Internet connection, but it doesn’t, at least not for customers. There might be an email from Jack to pick up, as well. Wait here, will you, and I’ll get it from my room.’

If it had felt odd to dine with a man again, it felt even odder to be unlocking her own door and going up to the sitting room with him. There was a moment when Nell wondered if she was being stupid, inviting this near-stranger into her home late at night. But it was not so very late – barely ten o’clock – and in a way this was a semi-business arrangement. The trouble was that she was out of practice at dealing with a situation involving herself and a single man. On the heels of this thought came another one: that Michael Flint was actually quite attractive – the dark hair and eyes, and the diffidence mingled with undoubted intelligence. And the vague impression that in certain situations he might be very far from diffident . . .

She was instantly horrified and sickeningly aware of disloyalty to Brad. It would be gratitude to Michael she was feeling, nothing more. Relief that Beth was safe. There was some German phrase about immense emotion being churned up towards people with whom one shared a danger or a difficult situation – this would be an example of that.

She pointed out the Internet connection so he could plug in the laptop and, as he sat down at the desk, headed for the kitchen to make coffee. As the percolator hissed and bubbled, Nell’s thoughts strayed again and she found herself wondering if he was linked up with anyone. He had said he was not married, but he would be sure to have some incredibly learned female don eagerly waiting for him at Oxford. Someone who was fluent in five or six languages, or wrote papers on ancient Sanskrit or obscure corners of medicine, and who lectured to immensely scholarly societies. One of those women who wore infuriatingly-flattering glasses and scooped their hair into loose chignons with apparent carelessness, but looked fantastic. Thinking man’s crumpet. Was it Joan Bakewell who had originally inspired that phrase? The coffee blew a series of loud raspberries, and Nell reached hastily for the jug and poured the steaming brew into mugs.

Michael had tangled up the laptop’s power lead with the Internet cable and was half lying under the desk, frowningly trying to sort them out.

He looked up as she came in. ‘I don’t think this is right, do you? I’m not actually terribly good at mechanical things or electronic things.’ He looked so perplexed that Nell laughed properly for the first time in twenty-four hours and said, ‘It looks as if you’ve been trying to plug the phone cable into the mains. Come out of the way and let me do it. If the battery’s sufficiently charged, you don’t really need to connect to the mains, not for the few minutes it’ll take to type an email.’