The Little Clock House on the Green. Eve Devon

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      As Daniel sped around the leafy lanes with the top down on his absolute pride and joy, Monroe – a Triumph Spitfire in phantom grey, it finally occurred to him why his face was aching.

      He was smiling.

      Had been for maybe the last fifteen miles or so.

      Happy days, he thought. As improvements to his state of mind went, smiling had to be right up there with that first gulp of an IPA beer at the start of a hot summer’s evening.

      He shifted gears, pressing down on the accelerator, the dappled sunlight creating fast-moving reflections of the tree-lined country roads in his Wayfarers.

      Two hours before, when he’d been grabbing clothes from a cheap freestanding clothes-rail in his studio apartment and shoving them into a leather holdall, he definitely hadn’t been smiling.

      He’d been swearing.

      Profusely.

      He’d actually managed to shock himself at being able to string so many different swear words together. Granted, the sentences had been neither grammatically correct, nor, he was pretty sure, anatomically possible, but the flow of them had brought a certain sense of surprising satisfaction.

      Don’t get me wrong – Daniel Westlake wasn’t some advocate for anti-profanity. But when he swore it was usually short and succinct and relating to a mild frustration that he determined to quickly get past – and did.

      It had been a really crap year, though.

      The crappiest, in fact.

      At first, he’d dismissed that sly prickle of awareness… that amorphous inkling, that something at his accountancy firm, West and Westlake, was wrong.

      The clients had to be satisfied, the way they kept introducing more business to the firm. The money was coming in and the projections for the following year were great. And he was working sixty/seventy-hour weeks, week in, week out.

      Any real time to pause over a feeling, a premonition, a sense of impending doom, whatever you wanted to call it, was nil. Tinkering-with-Monroe time had dwindled to maybe one afternoon a quarter and the only time available to focus on anything other than his accounts was when he was out running.

      Daniel loved running. Loved the discipline. Loved the rhythm.

      But it had been on one of those early-morning runs – you know, the ones where the sun is just breaking through and the roads are that kind of pre-zombie-apocalypse eerie-quiet, and your mind flits and floats as your feet pound the pavement, that the worry that everything was a little too good at West and Westlake had stretched and yawned, and this time, refused to lie back down, dormant.

      Another mile in and the awakening had become a nasty, sweat-inducing growing suspicion that had had him circling back in the direction of his offices at 5am on a Sunday, letting himself in, downloading every single set of accounts, and back at his three-bed penthouse at 2:17am the following morning, had led him to the very conclusive and very shitty discovery that, yes, his scumbag partner, was, to put it bluntly, cooking the books.

      The betrayal had felt like a herd of elephants doing Buddha-spins on his chest.

      Not least because Daniel and his business partner, Hugo West, had been friends since school.

      Good friends. Even though, to be fair, Hugo had always been a bit of a dick.

      He was that friend, who, growing up, always had to do everything first. First to climb the tree, first to crack the crass joke in class. First to ace a test. First to get fall-down drunk. First to lose his virginity. First to come up with an idea.

      But he had also been the only friend to stand up for, and to stand beside, Daniel, when Daniel’s life had imploded at nineteen.

      It was hard to discount that kind of loyalty and then there was the fact that Hugo teamed playing hard with working hard. The hardest. Maybe he’d had to. That need of his to be ahead in everything, probably. But Daniel had always admired his friend’s drive and determination and, in the beginning, where Daniel might have given up on their fledgling accountancy firm, it had been Hugo’s grit that had seen them through that crucial first two years. Hugo who had the guts to go for the big clients straight off. Hugo who helped the company fly so high.

      So high and, seemingly, so successfully that Daniel had completely forgotten Hugo’s dick-like tendencies. That was on him – and lesson learned. He’d never make the same mistake.

      After the bloody awful court case and the dissolution of their business partnership, Daniel had one priority and one priority only: starting afresh.

      The swear-fest, record-breaking packing-gig had been a result of reconfirming that decision after the letter had plopped onto his doormat that morning.

      Postmarked from Ford open prison, Hugo obviously hadn’t lasted two weeks into his sentence before ‘reaching out’.

      Daniel couldn’t imagine what there was left to say and although opening it would have relieved his curiosity, the letter had sat sealed on the sparse kitchen breakfast bar while he’d consumed bland instant coffee and stared at the offending article, conflicted.

      Swallowing down the last gulp of coffee it had met the choking anger rising up, making Daniel realise there was no room for misplaced loyalty. After what Hugo had done, he was now in the category of forever-dead-to-him dick.

      End of.

      So after the swearing and the packing, Daniel had written ‘Not at this address’ across the front of the letter and tossed it into the first postbox he’d come across after leaving London.

      Driving with no particular destination in mind had eased that grinding knot in his stomach, but now, as he down-shifted to hit an approaching bend in the road, Daniel realised he could hear a grinding noise above the roar of the engine. The smile on his face disappeared. That noise wasn’t a grinding stomach-ulcer noise. That noise was Monroe-speak for ‘Um, Houston, we have a problem’.

      He nursed the car around the corner and felt the engine slow even as he tried to accelerate out of it. ‘Come on Monroe – you can’t fail me now, not in the middle of–’ he twisted his head to try and catch what the signpost he had driven past had read, but was too late. ‘Nowhere,’ he said, not too upset to discover he had no idea where he was.

      It had been the whole point.

      Get in the car and drive.

      Get away from London.

      Away from the last year.

      And end up somewhere where he could think.

      But thinking of any sort was put on hold the instant he saw the woman with the long, incredible legs, hauling a suitcase out of the back of a taxi.

      You didn’t see a soul for miles and then, POW, some Diana Prince goddess was standing at the side of the road in front of a row of stone cottages.

      The thought of stopping and offering help – of getting a chance to meet this gorgeous woman was enough to put the smile back on his face. He was just starting to slow when Monroe chose to emit a put-put-puttering noise.

      ‘Christ, СКАЧАТЬ