Celebrate the legend that is bestselling author

PENNY JORDAN

Phenomenally successful author of more than two hundred books with sales of over a hundred million copies!

Penny Jordan's novels are loved by millions of readers all around the word in many different languages. Mills & Boon are proud to have published one hundred and eighty-seven novels and novellas written by Penny Jordan, who was a reader favourite right from her very first novel through to her last.

This beautiful digital collection offers a chance to recapture the pleasure of all of Penny Jordan's fabulous, glamorous and romantic novels for Mills & Boon.

Penny Jordan is one of Mills & Boon's most popular authors. Sadly, Penny died from cancer on 31st December 2011, aged sixty-five. She leaves an outstanding legacy, having sold over a hundred million books around the world. She wrote a total of one hundred and eighty-seven novels for Mills & Boon, including the phenomenally successful A Perfect Family, To Love, Honour & Betray, The Perfect Sinner and Power Play, which hit the Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Loved for her distinctive voice, her success was in part because she continually broke boundaries and evolved her writing to keep up with readers’ changing tastes. Publishers Weekly said about Jordan ‘Women everywhere will find pieces of themselves in Jordan's characters’ and this perhaps explains her enduring appeal.

Although Penny was born in Preston, Lancashire and spent her childhood there, she moved to Cheshire as a teenager and continued to live there for the rest of her life. Following the death of her husband, she moved to the small traditional Cheshire market town on which she based her much-loved Crighton books.

Penny was a member and supporter of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Romance Writers of America—two organisations dedicated to providing support for both published and yet-to-be-published authors. Her significant contribution to women's fiction was recognised in 2011, when the Romantic Novelists’ Association presented Penny with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Perfect Match?
Penny Jordan

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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The Crighton Family

BEN CRIGHTON: Proud patriarch of the family, a strong- minded character in his seventies, determined to see his dynasty thrive and prosper.

RUTH REYNOLDS: Ben’s sister, a vibrant woman now happily reunited with Grant, the man from whom she was tragically separated during the war years—and also with the daughter she gave up for adoption. Ruth is a caring, perceptive woman and she holds the Crighton family together.

JON AND JENNY CRIGHTON: Steady, family-oriented couple. Jon keeps the Crighton law firm running smoothly, and Jenny is a partner in a local antiques business with Guy Cooke. Guy helped Jenny through difficult times in her marriage. He has always been close to Jenny, and they have a strong friendship.

MAX CRIGHTON: Son of Jon and Jenny, a self-assured, sexy, ruthlessly ambitious lawyer who married his wife, Madeleine, a gentle woman and daughter of a High Court judge, to advance his career. The couple lives in London with their two children, but Madeleine has concerns about the stability of their marriage....

ROSE OLDHAM: Rose had connections with the Crighton family when she was growing up—as did her mother and grandmother. But she’s since moved away from the area and is reluctant to return to Haslewich when her brother dies, sending her daughter Chrissie instead.

CHRISSIE OLDHAM: Rose’s daughter, a spirited but romantic English teacher who is convinced her ideal hero just doesn’t exist. She longs for a passionate, unconventional man—and is astonished when she arrives in Haslewich to be swept off her feet by the broodingly sensual Guy Cooke....

GUY COOKE: Jenny’s partner in a successful antiques business, Guy is close to the Crighton family and very loyal to Jenny. He has Gypsy ancestors and is devastatingly sexy and adored by women. Fiery and impetuous, he’s the exact opposite of gentle Chrissie—but feels an instant bond when he meets her.

CHAPTER ONE

‘AND you’re sure you don’t mind going to Haslewich to sort out everything...?’

‘No, Mum, I don’t mind at all,’ Chrissie assured her mother quietly, exchanging looks over her head with her father as she did so.

It was no secret in their small, close-knit family unit just how much her younger brother’s irresponsible behaviour and alcoholic lifestyle had upset Chrissie’s mother.

In the early years of her marriage she had tried her best to help Charles, naively believing that he was genuinely trying to mend his ways. But eight years ago, following a short custodial sentence after he had been convicted of stealing several small items from the home of an acquaintance, which he had later sold to pay for the drink on which he was by then dependent, Chrissie’s mother had decided that enough was enough and had cut herself off from him completely.

Chrissie understood just why she had felt compelled to do so.

Her father was a hard-working heart surgeon in a busy local hospital in the small Scottish border town where they lived and her mother was a member of the local town council and involved in several local charities.

Her brother’s unsavoury reputation and dishonest behaviour was so completely opposite to her own way of life that it was very hard for her to deal with the situation.

Now though, Uncle Charles was dead and someone, one of them, would have to travel to Cheshire to sort things out, dispose of the small property he had owned in the centre of the town of Haslewich—all that was left from his share of the farmhouse and land that he and Chrissie’s mother had inherited from their parents, and Chrissie had volunteered to take on the task.

‘Heaven knows what kind of state the house will be in.’ Chrissie’s mother gave a small shudder. ‘The last time I was there the whole place was filthy and you couldn’t open a single cupboard door without an empty bottle falling out.

‘I just wish I knew why he...’ She closed her eyes. ‘Even as a child he was different...awkward...selfdestructive, very different from our father. He was such a kind, gentle man like my grandfather, but Charles... We were never very close as children, perhaps because of the big age gap between us.’ She shook her head.

‘I feel guilty about letting you go down to Haslewich on your own but we’ve got this conference in Mexico followed by your father’s lecture tour.’

‘Look, Mum, it’s all right,’ Chrissie reiterated. ‘I don’t mind, honestly, and it isn’t as though I don’t have the time.’

There was a big reshuffle going on in the English department of the school where Chrissie worked as a teacher and she had already warned her parents she had heard on the grapevine that the department was looking to cut costs and shed some staff.

‘Well, I’m not entirely happy about your having to stay in Charles’s house,’ her mother told her.

‘But that is the whole point of my going,’ Chrissie reminded her wryly. ‘The house has to be sold to help pay off Uncle Charles’s debts and you said yourself that there was no way it could be put on the market until it had been cleaned from top to bottom.’

‘I know. Which reminds me, I’ll have to get in touch with the bank and the solicitors to make sure you’ve got my authority to deal with all the necessary paperwork.’

Once again Chrissie and her father shared a look over her mother’s head.

Charles Platt had not just left behind him an untidy house and an unsavoury reputation; there was also a large number of outstanding debts.

In truth, she wasn’t particularly looking forward to being the one to sort out the mess Uncle Charles had left behind, Chrissie admitted, but someone had to do it and she certainly wasn’t going to let her mother be even more upset than she was already by letting her see her own distaste for the task.

The last time she had visited Haslewich had been following her grandmother’s death, and her memories of the occasion and the area were coloured by her mother’s grief.

Her Uncle Charles had been living with his mother in the old Cheshire farmhouse that had been passed down through many generations of their family, but her grandfather, disappointed in his son and well aware of his weakness, had sold off the land to another farmer, and following his wife’s death the farmhouse itself had been sold, as well.

She could still remember the searing shame she had felt on seeing her Uncle Charles staggering from one of the town’s many public houses whilst she had been shopping there with her mother. When a group of children had jeered at him and mocked him, her mother had drawn a quick, sharp breath and gone white before turning round and abruptly walking Chrissie off in the opposite direction.

That had been the first time she had become aware of the reason for the pain in her mother’s face and voice whenever she mentioned her brother.

Now, as an adult, Chrissie was, of course, fully au fait with the history of her uncle’s addiction to alcohol and gambling.

Weak and vain, he was something of a misfit in the local farming community in which he had grown up, and it had been obvious even before he reached his teens that he was not going to follow in the family tradition of farming.

‘He broke my father’s heart,’ Chrissie’s mother had once told her sadly. ‘Dad did his best, selling off small pieces of land so that he could give Charles an allowance. He tried to understand and support him when he said that he wanted to be an actor. But it was all just an excuse to get money out of Dad and spend his time gambling and drinking, initially in Chester and then, when his cronies there got wise to him, back in Haslewich.’

And as they had talked, Chrissie had recognised how hurt her grandparents and her mother had been by her uncle’s behaviour, how his attitudes to life, which were so very different from theirs, confused them. How impossible they found it to understand how he could so easily and carelessly flout the moral laws they lived their lives by and, most painful of all perhaps, how shamed they felt by him.

And now he was dead and with him had died a small piece of Haslewich history. Platts had farmed the land around Haslewich for over three centuries as the headstones on their graves in Haslewich’s churchyard testified, but no longer.

‘Don’t get upset,’ Chrissie urged her mother, going over to put her arm round her and kiss her.

Facially they were very similar, with wide-set, almond-shaped eyes and high cheek-bones in a delicately feminine face, but where her mother was small, barely five foot two and softly rounded, Chrissie had inherited her father’s height and leaner body frame.

She also had, quite mysteriously since both her parents were dark-haired, hair the colour of richly polished chestnuts, thick and straight and healthily glossy.

At twenty-seven going on twenty-eight, she considered herself mature enough to be above being flattered by those men who did a double take when they saw her for the first time, plainly expecting her to feel complimented by their admiration of her face and body without having bothered to take the time to learn anything about her, the person. Physical attractiveness was not, in her opinion, the prime factor in motivating a new relationship. For her there had to be something far more compelling than that. For her there had to be a sense of being instinctively drawn to the other person, ‘knowing’ that the magnetic pull between the two of them was too overwhelming, too powerful, to be ignored. She was, in short, a true romantic, although she was very loath to admit it.

‘It’s not fair,’ one of her friends had told her mockcrossly the previous summer.

‘If I had your looks I know I’d make much better use of them than you do. You don’t know how lucky you are.’

‘True beauty comes from within,’ Chrissie had told her gently—and meant it.

Whilst she had been at university, she had been approached by a talent scout for a modelling agency but had refused to take them seriously.

There were those who had wondered if her irrepressible sense of humour was quite the thing one wanted in a schoolteacher, but Chrissie had proved that the ability to see and laugh at the humorous side of life was no bar to being able to teach—and to teach well.

‘I’m still not entirely happy about the idea of your staying in Charles’s house,’ her mother repeated.

Chrissie sat down opposite her.

‘Mum...we’ve already been through all this,’ she reminded her. ‘The whole point of my going to Haslewich is to prepare the house for sale and the best way I can do that is if I’m living there.’

‘Yes, you’re right, of course. But knowing how Charles lived...’ Her mother gave a small shudder.

She was a meticulous housewife, a wonderful cook, the true daughter of ancestors who had spent their lives scrubbing dairies and stone floors, polishing, washing and waging war on dirt in all its many forms.

‘I’ve got my own bedding and my own towels and utensils,’ Chrissie reminded her mother.

‘I should be doing this,’ Rose Oldham protested. ‘Charles is... was my brother....’

‘And my uncle,’ Chrissie pointed out, adding, ‘And besides, you can’t You don’t have the time right now and I do.’

Although she wasn’t going to say as much to her mother who she knew, despite her modern outlook on life, was still eagerly waiting for the day when Chrissie became a wife and mother, she had been rather glad of the excuse of having to go to Haslewich. It had enabled her to turn down an invitation from a fellow teacher who had been pursuing her all term to join him and a group of friends in Provence for the summer.

Provence had been very tempting, but the teacher had not. Privately, Chrissie had always been a little wary of her weakness for men of a distinctly swashbuckling and impetuous nature and more suited to the pages of an historical romance than modern -day society and it was one she very firmly squashed whenever she felt it stirring.

The fellow teacher had not come anywhere near creating any kind of stir within her and would, no doubt, have made excellent husband and father material, but he certainly wouldn’t have done anything to satisfy that quirky and rather regrettable feminine desire she knew she had for a man who would excite and entice her, a man who would challenge her, match her, a man with a capital M.

Well, one thing was for sure, she certainly wasn’t likely to find him in Haslewich, which by all her reckoning was a sleepy little market town, a quiet backwater where nothing much ever happened.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I TAKE it they still haven’t caught whoever broke into Queensmead?’ Guy Cooke asked Jenny Crighton as she came into the small antiques shop in which they were co-partners.

‘No,’ Jenny told him, shaking her head as she responded to his enquiry about the recent theft and break-in at her father-in-law’s home.

She smiled warmly at Guy as she spoke. He really was the most extraordinarily good-looking man and if she wasn’t so firmly and happily married to her own husband she had to admit that it could have been all too easy to join the long queue of women who sighed dreamily over Guy’s very masculine blend of a virilely powerful and tautly muscled male body—the kind of body that would have allowed him to pose for a trendily provocative jeans advert any day of the week—allied to enigmatically hooded eyes set above high cheek-bones and a certain way of looking at you that was completely irresistible, virtually resulting in a complete meltdown. Add to that highly sensual cocktail the intensely masculine genes he had inherited from his Gypsy forebears and the reputation that went with them and it was easy to understand why the word ‘sexy’ accompanied by a longing look was the way most of her sex would quite freely have described him.

Not that Jenny was totally immune to Guy’s looks or the unexpected and even more dangerous generosity and warmth of character that went with them, but she loved Jon and she thought it was very sad that with all he had to offer a woman, Guy had not yet found the right one for him.

‘At least they didn’t harm Ben,’ she added. ‘But it has shaken him. You know how stubborn he can be normally and how hard Jon and I have found it to try to persuade him to have someone to live in.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Guy invited. ‘When I went up there to do a valuation on the antiques for his insurance company, he practically hit the roof when I told him that he was going to need to have an alarm system installed. I take it he never did?’

‘Well, you know Ben,’ Jenny sighed. ‘Luckily they didn’t take very much and the police think they must have been disturbed either by the phone ringing or by someone arriving at the house.’

‘It’s so hard to contemplate that someone would actually break in in broad daylight and calmly proceed to remove not just small items but actual pieces of furniture, as well.’

‘The police did warn us that there’s very little chance of our getting anything back. Apparently there’s been a spate of these kinds of robberies recently and they think it’s gangs coming out from the city wanting to make money to buy drugs. The new motorways, of course, facilitate a quick getaway and make them and the stolen property so much harder to trace.’

‘But you’ve managed to persuade the old boy to have someone living in?’ Guy questioned her as he started to check through the contents of a large packing case that contained goods from a house clearance. Junk in the main, he suspected, but you never knew....

‘Well, unfortunately, no,’ Jenny replied. ‘But Maddy is due to arrive at the end of the week. You know she always comes up from London to spend a few weeks here in the summer.’

‘Will Max be coming with her?’ Guy asked, referring to Jon and Jenny’s elder son and Maddy’s husband.

Jenny bit her lip. ‘No...no, he won’t. It seems he’s heavily involved on a case at the moment and he’s going to have to fly out to Spain to see his client. She’s got a yacht that’s apparently in a marina out there.’

Max was a barrister working from a prestigious set of chambers in London. He specialised in divorce work and it hadn’t escaped Guy’s notice that most of his clients were women. Max liked women, or rather he liked the boost to his ego that deceiving them gave him.

Guy did not have a very high opinion of Max but he cared far too much for Jenny to let her know it.

Life hadn’t always been easy for Jenny and although she and her husband, Jon, were happy together now...

Unlike Max, Guy genuinely did like women, all women, but some women especially so. Women like Jenny—warm, gentle, womanly women with quiet, understated beauty. Their more flashy, visually eyecatching counterparts held very little allure for Guy. He was a physically good-looking man himself and well knew how worthless mere good looks could be. A warm, loving, caring nature, though, now that was something that time could never erode, something enduring and worthy of loving, cherishing...

But he had long ago come to accept that Jenny was not for him; that she loved her husband and would never see him as anything more than a friend. ‘A much younger friend’ as she had once stressed to him, reminding him of the age gap between them. At thirty-nine Guy no longer considered himself to be particularly ‘young’.

‘Apart from the shock of the burglary itself, the thing that’s upset Ben the most,’ Jenny was saying, ‘is losing the little yew desk. His father apparently had it copied from the French original that belonged to his grandmother. It was a very pretty little piece, but being a copy, not really of any great financial value.’

‘But a good deal of sentimental value,’ Guy suggested.

‘Very much so,’ Jenny concurred. ‘When I was talking to Luke about it the other day, he told me that the Chester side of the family owned a matching pair of the original from which Ben’s desk was copied and that they had been gifts brought back from France for the twin daughters of the Crighton who bought them. His father now has one of them and his uncle the other.’

‘Mmm...well, perhaps the thief or thieves didn’t realise Ben’s was a copy.’

‘Maybe not, although the police seem to think they probably took it because it was in the hallway and easy to move like the silver and jewellery they took.

‘Ruth and I had to spend virtually a whole day checking over the house and listing what was missing. Ben certainly wasn’t in any fit state to help and although, of course, I had some knowledge of what should have been there, Ruth, as Ben’s sister, was naturally much more accurate.’

‘She’s back from the States, then?’

‘Yes, she and Grant flew in on Saturday.’ Jenny laughed. ‘I think it’s wonderful how the two of them have stuck to their agreement to spend alternate three months in one another’s countries.’

‘It’s lovely to see them together. They’re so much in love, even now.’

‘Well, I imagine all that they’ve been through must make the time they’re having together now all the more precious.’

‘I agree. Real confirmation that fact can be stranger than fiction.’

‘And real love so strong that nothing can diminish or destroy it,’ Jenny added softly. ‘In all the years they were apart, neither of them was ever tempted to marry someone else.’

‘But at least they’re together now and so deeply in love that Bobbie complains that despite the fact that they were all married at the same time, Ruth and Grant are a far more romantic couple than her and Luke.’

‘Well, Bobbie and Luke do have a young child and two busy careers,’ Guy commented, ‘while her grandparents are both retired and free to concentrate exclusively on one another.’

“They may both be retired but Ruth is still on half a dozen local committees as well as running her single-parent units,’ Jenny reminded him. ‘And Grant has an extraordinary spread of business interests to keep him busy. I sometimes feel exhausted just listening to what they’ve been doing. I can’t help comparing their energy and the enjoyment they get out of life with Ben’s growing lack of interest in everything.’

Jenny’s forehead pleated in a worried frown as she reflected on her father-in-law.

‘Is he still going ahead with his hip-joint replacement operation?’ Guy asked her.

‘I hope so,’ Jenny told him feelingly. ‘It’s scheduled for the end of the summer and the plan was that Maddy would be there when he comes out of hospital to look after him. He responds far better to her than he does to any of us. partially because she’s Max’s wife, of course, and so far as Ben is concerned, Max can do no wrong.’

‘But not so far as you, Max’s mother, are concerned,’ Guy offered shrewdly.

Jenny shook her head. ‘Ben has always spoiled Max and Max has never needed any encouragement to believe he deserves to receive preferential treatment. I did hope that when he and Maddy married...’ She stopped and shook her head, changing the subject to ask, ‘Anything interesting in that lot?’

‘Not really,’ Guy replied, taking his cue from her and letting the subject drop, switching from discussing personal matters to their shared business interests. ‘I’ve had a call to do another house clearance this morning although I doubt that there’ll be anything there of any interest. Charlie Platt,’ he added grimly.

‘Charlie Platt?’ Jenny queried, frowning again, then her expression clearing. ‘Oh yes, I know who you mean.’

‘Yes,’ Guy went on. ‘By all accounts he virtually drank himself to death.’

‘Oh, poor man,’ Jenny sympathised compassionately.

‘Poor man nothing,’ Guy told her grimly. ‘He was the biggest con man in town. His parents publicly disowned him. He died leaving debts all over the place.’

From the tone of his voice, Jenny wondered if Guy was one of the people he had owed money to. If so, she doubted that Guy would admit, even to her, that he had been taken advantage of.

Normally an easygoing, compassionate man, generally inclined to judge others gently rather than harshly, he also possessed a surprisingly fierce streak of pride, accentuated, Jenny suspected, by the fact that his family, the Cooke clan, various members of whom were spread throughout the town, had originated, so local history had it, from the unsanctified union of one of a band of travelling Romany Gypsies and the naively innocent daughter of a town schoolmaster. They were generally held in a mixture of awe and contempt by their less enterprising and energetic peers.

The girl had been married off in haste and disgrace to a local widowed tavern keeper desperately in need of someone to take charge of his sprawling brood of existing children.

Dependent upon where you stood in the local hierarchy, there was a tendency to regard the activities of the Cooke clan, both professionally and privately, as extremely suspect or extremely enviable.

Over the generations, the name Cooke had become synonymous, not just with the local taverns and public houses that they ran, but also with such disparate activities as poaching, gaming and other enterprising methods of increasing their income, a habit the more God-fearing local folk were inclined to put down to the genes they had inherited from their roving-eyed Gypsy forebears.

Not that any members of the family went in for poaching or its equivalent these days. That practice had died out with his grandfather’s generation, Guy had once wryly told Jenny, along with the bulk of his then-adult male relatives, most of whom had been with the Cheshire Regiment during the First World War.

‘But that kind of reputation is hard to lose,’ Guy had told Jenny. ‘Once a Cooke, always a Cooke!’

‘And having those brigandish dark good looks of yours doesn’t help,’ Jenny had teased him gently.

‘No,’ Guy had agreed shortly. He had lost count of the number of fathers who had sternly admonished their daughters against dating him when he had been younger. He thought now that he must have been the only teenage boy in the locality to have gained the reputation of being wild and dangerous whilst still possessing his virginity.

It was half-day closing, and after Jenny had left and Guy had locked up the shop, he went home to work on his other business interests, which ranged from a half share in the very popular local restaurant owned by one of his sisters and her husband to a smaller share in a firm of local builders owned by yet another relative.

He had recently been considering the validity of investing in small local properties that could be renovated and then let out on short-term leases to employees of one of the large multinationals that had recently started to move into the area.

Antiques, especially furniture, were his first love but the business he shared with Jenny was hardly sufficient to keep him fully occupied.

He frowned as he studied the post. He and Jenny were the prime motivators behind the Antiques Fair that was due to be held at Fitzburgh Place the following month, a combined event to promote the area and hopefully raise money for Jenny and Ruth’s pet charity, the single mothers homes scheme, which Ruth had started as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried mother.

As Guy started to check off the list of exhibitors to the fair against the list of invitation letters he had sent out, he remembered what Jenny had said about Charlie Platt.

He and Charlie had been at school together... just. Guy had entered the school just as Charlie was on the verge of leaving it to move up to the seniors.

A thin, pale boy, who had suffered badly from childhood asthma, which thankfully he had later outgrown, Guy had shown no signs then of the fact that as an adult male he would grow up to be strong and muscular. He had been small and vulnerable-looking, the youngest of his mother’s brood, a quiet, studious boy whom his female siblings had mothered and whom Charlie Platt had immediately and instinctively focused on as an ideal victim for his practice of blackmailing the vulnerable into parting with their dinner money.

Guy had tried to resist, refusing trenchantly to hand over the money—he was, after all, well used to being cuffed and teased by his much larger and far more boisterous male cousins—but he had had one fear he kept hidden from his family and that was of water. Because of his asthma, he had never been allowed to learn to swim or to play in the river that bounded the town in case the cold water brought on an attack.

Charlie Platt had very quickly discovered Guy’s fear, both of the river and, even more importantly, of other people’s discovering how he felt. Predictably he had made use of it.

Guy knew he would never forget the day Charlie Platt had held him under the water for so long that Guy had really believed he was going to die, probably would have died if one of his bigger and older cousins hadn’t happened to come along, seen what was happening and treated Charlie Platt to the kind of rough justice that boys of that age could mete out to one another, blacking his eye, bruising his pride and putting an end to Guy’s torment.

That summer, Guy had taught himself to swim, and after Charlie had left the school Guy hadn’t come across him again until they were both adults, by which time Charlie was already drinking heavily and gaining something of an unsavoury reputation for himself.

And now Charlie was dead. Guy couldn’t feel surprised, nor sorry, and he certainly had no desire to accommodate the terse telephone instructions he had received via his answerphone from the young woman who had announced herself as Chrissie Oldham.

Who exactly was she? She had sounded too crisp and businesslike to be one of the steady stream of women who, at one time or another, had shared Charlie’s roof. She must have been employed to sort out the estate.

Guy’s frown deepened. One thing Charlie’s death had done was to focus his own mind on the fact that he was close to forty with little to show for his life other than a healthy bank balance and a small group of friends.

Avril, his next to eldest sister, had complained to him at Christmas that it was high time he got married and produced a family of his own, as she watched him playing with her own grandchildren. Grandchildren!! But then Avril was fifteen years his senior.

He had no plans to follow her advice, though. There was no way he could share his life, commit his life...his self to another person without loving her to the point where life without her would quite simply be an untenable option.

And he had only once come even close to feeling like that and she... He got up and walked across to the window, then stood staring out at the view in front of him.

He had moved to his present house six months earlier. In a prestigious part of town, it was one in a small close of similar properties originally built to house local members of the clergy. Ruth, Jenny’s aunt-in-law, lived there, three doors down; several highranking executives from the town’s largest corporate employer, Aarlston-Becker, owned adjacent properties.

There were those who, Guy suspected even now, felt that such a house was far too grand, far too good, for a mere Cooke, even one like himself who had gone from grammar school to university and from there to all the art capitals of Europe before returning home to set up in business.

He glanced at his watch. He still had another hour before he needed to leave for Charlie Platt’s house, but he had a good two hours’ worth of paperwork on his desk in front of him, he reminded himself sternly.

Chrissie groaned as she straightened up and her aching back muscles protested. She had spent virtually the whole of her time since arriving in Haslewich cleaning her late uncle’s small house, a task she could only relate, in terms of stress levels, to the mythical job of cleansing the Augean stables.

Every racing paper that Charlie had bought during his tenure in the house—and there had been many of them—instead of being thrown away had simply been tossed in an untidy pile on the spare-bedroom floor. This was the very room that Chrissie had planned to occupy during her hopefully brief stay. And that was just for starters. Letters, bills, in the main unpaid, junk mail, you name it—Uncle Charles had kept it.

Chrissie suspected they must have grave doubts about her at the local supermarket when she had very nearly cleaned them out of their supply of rolls of black plastic refuse sacks.

Her initial idea had been to burn the waste paper on a bonfire in the terraced cottage’s small back garden, but she had soon recognised that there was far too much of it for such easy disposal and instead she had been forced to apply to the local authority for their advice and assistance on its disposal.

This morning, a couple of friendly workmen plus an open lorry had arrived in the street to remove the sacks of paper she had prepared for them.

The cottage was one of a terrace of similar properties built into what had originally been one of the town’s boundary walls using, Chrissie suspected, stone ‘reclaimed’ from the walls themselves and the castle, which had been virtually destroyed during the Civil War.

It could, she admitted judiciously, with a little imagination and an awful lot of determined hard work, be turned into a very attractive home for a single person or a young childless couple.

Several of the other cottages in the street had already undergone or were undergoing this process and the shiny brightness of their painted front doors highlighted the air of shabby neglect that hallmarked her uncle’s cottage.

Now that she had emptied the small second bedroom, she did at least have somewhere to sleep. Her mother would have been grimly approving, no doubt, had she seen the fervour with which she had scrubbed and sanitized both the bathroom and kitchen before allowing herself to use them. She still had her reservations, though, about the wisdom of using the ancient fridge, which had formerly been home to various, thankfully unidentifiable, mouldy pieces of food.

But the worst ordeal of her visit still lay ahead of her and that was her appointment tomorrow with her late uncle’s solicitors.

His clothes she had already consigned to another much smaller collection of plastic liners ready for collection by a representative of a local charity.

The house had, as she and her parents had already guessed, revealed no material assets likely to provide enough money to help to settle his debts, with the exception of a rather attractive small yew desk.

When Chrissie had mentioned this item to her mother, she had said instantly that the desk had originally belonged to her grandmother, Chrissie’s great grandmother.

‘Don’t arrange for it to be sold, Chrissie,’ she had begged her daughter. ‘We’ll have it valued instead and I’ll buy it from the estate. I asked Charles what had happened to it after Mother died and he said he didn’t know.’ She had given a small sigh. ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed that he’d keep it for himself. I’m just glad that he didn’t actually sell it. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he kept Nan’s Staffordshire figures, as well?’

‘I’m sorry, Mum, but they’re definitely not here,’ Chrissie had told her, promising that she would have the desk appraised independently as well as by the dealer she had arranged to come and value the small, and she suspected, mainly worthless bits and pieces she had found round the house.

The desk certainly was a very attractive piece, all the more so now that she had cleaned and polished it; sturdily made it was, at the same time, very prettily feminine.

Chrissie glanced at her watch. The dealer she had been recommended to contact by her late uncle’s solicitors would be here any minute. Once he had checked over and removed the bits and pieces she had placed on one side along with all the cottage’s furniture—apart from the desk that was in the front room—she could arrange for the estate agent to view the cottage and put it on the market.

Tiredly she stretched her body but at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that every single nook and cranny of the small house was now clean. She still had the remnants of some of the cobwebs on her person to prove it, she acknowledged ruefully as she caught sight of the small grubby mark on her once pristine white T-shirt.

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