Free Deep Blue Sea by Tasmina Perry Page B

shut and pressed her fingers against her temples. ‘I can’t cope, Adam. I’m going mad.’
    ‘You’re not going mad. You have lost your husband.’
    She opened her eyes and looked at him through her tears, and for the first time noticed how pale he was. It was a standing family joke that Adam was always tanned and sun-kissed from somewhere glamorous, but today he looked as drained as she knew she did.
    A sharp rapping on the window startled her and she turned to see her mother’s face pressed up against the window.
    ‘Can’t we just get out of here?’ she whispered.
    ‘I was going to say the same thing,’ he replied as he instructed the driver to take them back to his parents’ house.

6
    Hanley Park – the main house, as Barbara Denver liked to call it – was just a couple of miles away from the church, although the actual boundary of the property was practically next door. Diana had always thought of the Denvers’ collective portfolio of homes as a set of Russians dolls, a series of ever-larger properties each designed to make the last one appear small. Hanley Park made Somerfold look like a doll’s house. One of the biggest estates in the entire country, it was just a shade smaller than Castle Howard, with the same grand and chilly beauty – a slate-coloured dome that soared up into the sky and vast baroque-style gardens designed to impress the highest of society. In the 1940s it had been used as a military hospital and still had room to spare, before it was sold to an American entrepreneur and finally to Julian’s grandfather, which made it, by the skin of its teeth, an ancestral family seat.
    Quite why anyone needed a property this size was beyond Diana, although she recognised the irony in even thinking that. Growing up, she had always thought their three-bedroom house in Ilfracombe was perfectly sufficient for the Miller family, provided she wasn’t allocated the box room, and yet she had twisted Julian’s arm to buy Somerfold.
    As the car proceeded down the avenue of lime trees she watched Hanley Park get bigger and bigger. She knew it wasn’t the ideal place to seek refuge. Diana just wanted to curl up somewhere warm and cosy, to pull a soft blanket up to her chin and sink into a silent, untroubled sleep. But coming here was better than staying at the funeral. On the journey over, Adam hadn’t discussed her panic attack any further. She couldn’t even make sense of it herself. But her cheeks were still hot from the embarrassment of it all.
    The car stopped outside the impressive pillared entrance. As her foot crunched on to the gravel drive, a fleet of butlers appeared from nowhere, like genies from a lamp, clearly anticipating the arrival of the first guests for the wake. Adam straightened his thin black tie and waved them back inside.
    ‘Thank you,’ whispered Diana, grateful that Adam had read her mind that she wanted absolutely no fuss. Behind them they could hear another car speeding down the driveway. She tensed, and knew she should have insisted on being taken back to Somerfold rather than the closer Hanley Park.
    ‘This will be Elizabeth’s event planners come to tell me off for running away. Tell me you’ve got a secret passageway we can escape into.’
    Adam put his hand on her shoulder in reassurance.
    ‘Funnily enough, there’s a priest hole in the kitchen. It takes you to the catacombs beneath us and comes out by that woodland over there. I used it plenty of times when my mum and dad were on the war path.’
    Diana managed a smile at the thought of the young, mischievous Adam Denver, whose boyhood and teenage antics were the stuff of family legend. Flushing his nanny’s slippers down the toilet, poking beehives to extract his own honey, taxiing his friends to the pub on a tractor liberated from the estate’s farm.
    ‘Do you think there’s time to make a run for it?’ she grimaced.
    ‘Not in those heels. Come on, let’s get inside,’ instructed Adam.
    They made it as