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“Do you think they believed you?”
Arthur shrugs. “Probably not, seeing as I didn’t have any friends at school.” The barman passes him his tacky cocktail, and he picks it up and takes a sip. Polly regards his hands, notes that they are elegant, that his fingernails are clean and neat. She feels a sudden and bizarre compulsion to touch them.
“You could go to college here?” she suggests. “You don’t have to move away?”
He glances at her. “It’s not just about being at home. We need the money too.”
She sighs. “Well, for what it’s worth, unless you have ambitions to one day be the CEO of Shoe Fayre, I think you’re wasting your life.”
He shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess.”
“You’re letting yourself be trapped.”
“Yeah. I know. But—”
“I can help you.”
“How?”
Polly bites her lip and moves her face closer to his. She sees him blink, notices the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple. She lowers her voice so that it is breathy and raw. “I’m getting out of here,” she says, her eyes fixed on his, “and I think you should come with me. Are you in, or are you out?”
FOURTEEN
THE CAR ARRIVES at Jessica’s hotel at nine a.m. She hands her backpack to the driver and slides into the back seat. She pulls out the paperwork from the folder that Amber gave her about her ex-husband. In the photos that she gave Jessica, Sebastian Randall has a large head that houses small features. He wears trendy tortoiseshell glasses and has thick dark hair that recedes at the temple, making his head look even bigger. He has the satisfied air of a man who was told by his mother that he was the most handsome boy in the world and has believed it all his life.
Sebastian Randall is a trust fund millionaire via Janet and David Randall, who own a global casualwear company. Over the course of his fifty years, he has variously been an actor, a dancer, an art dealer, an antiques dealer, a novelist, and a public speaker. And is of course currently overseeing the restoration of a seven-bedroom Jacobean manor house in the middle of Barton Wallop called Barton Manor.
Jessica is booked into the hotel in the village, where the rooms, according to their website, start at £225 a night. It has a topiary garden and a champagne bar.
“Won’t I be kind of conspicuous?” she’d asked Amber.
“I want you to be conspicuous,” the birdlike woman replied. “I want Sebastian to notice you. He loves America, he loves good-looking women, and he loves writers. He’ll be all over you. And that’s what we want. To get you into his inner sanctum.”
The car pulls up on a small carriage driveway in front of a pretty hotel. On the other side of the narrow street is a pub, a clothes shop, a deli, a pharmacy, and a veterinarian.
Everything in the hotel is tiny—tiny windows, narrow doorways, low ceilings. An inscription etched into the stonework says it was built in 1687, when people, Jessica assumes, were very small. She checks in and takes her bag to her room—it’s housed in a new addition at the back of the hotel with a normal-sized door—and then she heads out into the village.
Mild for October, the sky is clear and blue. In the deli she gets herself a black coffee and a ham salad baguette and takes them to a bench at the end of the main road overlooking Sebastian Randall’s house, which does indeed have a moat, around which ducks float in a clockwise direction.
Jessica eats the sandwich and drinks the coffee and practices her spiel in her mind. She is Jessica Allan, a writer from New York doing research for a detective novel about a murder in an English village. It’s her first novel, she hasn’t had anything published, and before this she was an administrator for the NYPD for ten years, which is what turned her on to the idea of writing about crime. She’s recently divorced and here for a week. A simple, virtually foolproof cover story. Less is always more when it comes to a backstory. And men always think a divorced woman is eager for company.
After fifteen minutes there is no sign of life at the Randall mansion and Jessica stuffs her empty coffee cup and paper bag into a garbage can and heads back into the village proper. Outside the tiny wobbly pub, with windows so low down the frontage they almost touch the sidewalk, a chalkboard says that there is live music tonight: THE MIKE MILLER BAND + GUESTS. It kicks off at seven p.m. Which gives Jessica just over six hours to sleep and make herself look like an aspiring novelist.
She is about to turn back toward her hotel when her eye is caught by the next shop along, the pharmacy. Going over, she pauses for a moment at the threshold and then pulls in her breath and opens the door. Like everything else here, the shop is tiny, two aisles wide. At the far end is a tall mahogany counter, behind which sits a very young boy, surely not much older than seventeen. He stares at a textbook open in front of him and then looks up and smiles lazily when he sees Jessica. “Good morning,” he says.
“Er, hi.” Jessica throws him a sideways smile and heads down the first aisle. Here, between the birth control and the deodorants, is what she needs. Pregnancy testing kits. She picks one up and turns it around in her hands.
“Need any help?”
She drops the box and quickly scans around for something else to pick up. A can of Dove deodorant.
“No,” she calls back. “I’m good. Thank you.”
She takes the deodorant to the counter and pays for it.
“Are you American?” asks the boy.
“Yup.”
