Page 7 of Never Gonna Happen

‘You look like you’ve had some good news,’ said Mark as she sat back at the table, her cheeks flushed from the October chill and her thoughts a million miles from his offer to screw her over the table.

‘I have,’ said Emily, opting not to elaborate. The less Mark knew about her future plans, the better.

‘Whatever it is, are you sure you don’t want to come back to mine and celebrate?’ he asked, trying to recapture the playful mood from earlier.

‘I’m absolutely sure,’ said Emily, looking at him intently. She loved flirty Mark, but it was time to draw a line, one way or the other. ‘Look, Mark, I know I wasn’t very happy about your decision to end things, but now I’ve realised it was definitely for the best.’

‘Oh,’ said Mark, his eyes wide with surprise.

‘I hope we can be friends, but that’s all I can offer.’

‘I see,’ he said, chewing the inside of his cheek. It was something he did when he was annoyed but trying to keep a lid on it. Emily had seen him do it a hundred times.

The waitress put two burgers in front of them and rattled through the usual offers of sauces and condiments. Emily picked hers up with both hands and took a huge bite. Mark stared at her, his face confused and uncertain. Clearly this lunch hadn’t gone the way he’d hoped.

Chapter Six

‘No sign of the car yet,’ Carol called through from the lounge as she peeked through the net curtains. ‘Do you think he’ll send a Rolls-Royce?’

‘For God’s sake, Mum,’ said Emily, ‘it’s not due for half an hour, and of course he won’t send a Rolls-Royce.’ She paused with a slice of Marmite toast halfway to her mouth, realising she had no idea what kind of vehicle Charles Hunter would send. She’d assumed it would be a normal taxi, but what if it was a fancy limo? They lived in a seventies cul-de-sac with beaky neighbours who would wet their pants in unison.

‘I prefer a Bentley, personally,’ said Martin, with all the authority of a man who’d driven the same Ford Focus for over a decade.

‘Are you sure you’re going to be safe, Moo?’ asked Carol, plucking a few dog hairs off the back of Emily’s jumper. They’d gone shopping together on Saturday and Emily had spent £150 on a pair of skinny black jeans, a slouchy fawn roll-neck and some brown suede ankle boots with a cowboy heel. It was the kind of outfit she’d wear any weekend, so it felt like a good investment. Her mum had loved the jumper so much Emily had ended up buying her the same one in blush pink.

‘I’ll be fine, Mum,’ said Emily, for the umpteenth time.

‘It’s just you hear things, don’t you?’ said Carol, wringing her hands. ‘About rich men using their power, taking advantage of innocent girls. Before you know it one of the servants has given birth to his bastard child and gets kicked out on the street with barely tuppence to her name.’

‘Bloody hell, Carol,’ said Martin. ‘You really need to stop reading those books.’ Emily’s mother was a voracious reader, and her tastes leaned towards bodice-ripping period bonkbusters and true-life tales of people who had survived terrible circumstances, like being locked in an attic or giving birth in a puddle outside a workhouse.

‘I think one of us should come with you, Moo,’ said Carol, ‘just to be on the safe side.’

Emily stood up and rinsed her plate in the sink, taking solace in the knowledge that by the end of the day she’d have a job, either for a Korean steel magnate called Ye-jun Lee, or a Norfolk software millionaire called Charles Hunter. ‘You and Dad have both got work. And anyway, I’m twenty-nine. I’ve spent eleven years in this kind of job, I know what I’m doing.’

‘I just wish your brothers were here,’ said Carol, like they were the Mitchell brothers rather than a structural engineer and a media executive. Emily took a deep breath and went back upstairs to clean her teeth and fetch her handbag.

While she wrestled her hair into a plait, a hairband clamped between her teeth, Emily mentally went through everything she’d learned about Charles Hunter. A quick google had established that he’d sold his online gaming empire to a huge US corporation three years before, in a deal that had been worth hundreds of millions of dollars. She’d found press pictures of him at various charity events and conferences, accompanied in the less recent shots by a glamorous blonde of indeterminate age with unfeasibly perky boobs. Further investigation had revealed she was his ex-wife Tanya Hunter, who had rinsed him for millions in the divorce and now lived in LA. Mr Hunter had a son too, a dark-haired, pale-skinned property developer called Adam who had mean, piggy eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones.

Emily had stopped short of finding out everything she could about Charles Hunter’s Norfolk house, Bowford Manor, even though she was tempted. Being chauffeured to a country pile wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to women like her every day, so the least she could do was let some parts of it be a surprise.

The car turned out to be nothing more than a sleek black Audi saloon, albeit one that was immaculately clean with buttery leather seats. The driver was called Leon, a bearded, olive-skinned bear of a man in his mid-thirties who was originally from Croatia. He told Emily that he’d been Mr Hunter’s driver for three years and lived in an apartment above the garage at Bowford Manor, although he’d stayed in a very nice pub in Chichester last night so he could pick Emily up.

They chatted companionably as Leon navigated the Chichester ring road, about how he drove Mr Hunter everywhere and maintained all the vehicles on the estate. He’d been a car mechanic in Zagreb before he moved to the UK and worked as a taxi driver in Norwich, then one day he’d picked up Mr Hunter’s son from the station and they’d got chatting. Leon had given him his card so he could book his taxi whenever he was in the city, and when Mr Hunter was looking for a new driver his son suggested Leon apply for the job. Perhaps Mr Mean Piggy Eyes isn’t so bad after all, thought Emily.

She asked Leon if he ever had to wear a full chauffeur’s outfit with a hat, and he thought that was very funny. It was very casual at Bowford Manor, apparently – none of the staff wore uniforms. He knew Andrea, Mr Hunter’s former assistant, very well, and described her as a ‘very nice lady’.

‘Are you going to be the new Andrea?’ he asked Emily, beaming at her in the rear-view mirror.

She couldn’t help but return the smile, although she felt the flutter of butterflies in her stomach again. ‘Maybe. Today will help me decide.’

‘They are very interesting family, but Mr Hunter is a good man, a good boss. That is all I will say.’

‘Thank you, Leon.’ She quietly registered the ‘but’ in Leon’s comment and resolved to get to the bottom of what made the Hunters so interesting before the day was out.

The drive to Norfolk was four hours of tedious motorway, from the South Downs to the M25, then north-east through Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and finally into Norfolk. It was a part of the country that Emily didn’t know at all, and at first glance it didn’t seem to have much going for it unless you liked miles and miles of flat, featureless farmland. After a couple of hours they stopped for a quick break at a service station, and Emily took the opportunity to move from the back of the car into the passenger seat – it made her feel less car sick, and it was easier to chat to Leon.

As they drove deeper into Norfolk and left the motorway for slower roads, she began to notice some of the small details of the landscape – the pretty farms, the clusters of red-brick houses, the churches built from flint. The towns and villages signposted from the main road seemed strange too – Snetterton, Hethersett, Spooner Row, Cringleford. They sounded like place names from a children’s story book.