Free (1990) Sweet Heart by Peter James

the petals of a pink orchid.
    ‘Got your green wellies out yet?’
    ‘It’s too hot.’
    ‘You’re lucky you’re not in London. It’s sweltering. No one’s buying any winter clothes. How did the move go?’
    ‘Fine. Great. You must come to Tom’s birthday a fortnight on Saturday. We’re going to have a barbecue, if it’s warm enough.’
    ‘Any dishy bachelors around?’
    ‘Actually there’s a rather nice chap down the lane.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘I have a feeling he’s single. If he is, I’ll invite him.’
    ‘Tom’s going to be thirty-eight, isn’t he?’
    ‘And not very happy about it. Someone told him middle age starts at forty.’
    ‘He doesn’t look middle-aged.’
    Hammering echoed around the house. ‘Laura,’ Charley began. ‘Do you know when Flavia Montessore is going to be back in England?’
    ‘In the autumn sometime.’ Laura sounded surprised. ‘Why?’
    Charley toyed with the green tag hanging from the phone. ‘I — I just wondered, that’s all.’ There was a clatter outside the window and the rungs of an aluminium ladder appeared. ‘You know I said I was in a car?’
    ‘Bonking. Yes.’
    ‘I was chewing a bit of gum. I took it out of my mouth and stuck it under the dash —’
    A pair of legs climbed past the window.
    ‘I found …’ Her voice trailed off, and she left foolish.
    ‘Found what? Charley, what did you find?’
    The ladder was shaking. ‘The autumn. Do you mean October? Next month?’
    ‘She usually calls me. I’ll let you know.’
    Rude, Charley thought, suddenly. Mrs Letters. Rose Cottage. Very rude to slam a door.
    ‘If you want to see someone sooner I know a very good man called Ernest Gibbon. He does private sessions.’
    She’d gone out of her way to give Mrs Letters the message, and she’d turned her back and slammed the door. Rude. Except it hadn’t felt rude at the time, just odd. The woman had seemed upset. Upset by something more than a husband being late.
    ‘I can give you his number,’ Laura said. ‘He’s in south London.’
    ‘Is he as good?’
    ‘He’s brilliant. Give him a try.’
    ‘I might,’ she said distractedly, and wrote the number down on the back of an envelope.
    Tom arrived home in the evening and changed into a T-shirt and jeans. He thought three pounds an hour was fine for the gardener, but he would look after the lawn himself. Part of the fun of moving to the country was to work in the garden, he said.
    He went in the barn and managed to get the huge old mower started, then sat on the seat and drove it with a terrible racket across the gravel and up the bank. It farted oily black smoke and the engine kept cutting then racing, jerking him about like a circus clown. Finally there was a loud bang and the engine stopped and would not start again. Tom climbed off doubled up with laughter and she felt, almost for the first time, that everything was going to work out.
    ‘Let’s find a pub,’ Tom said. ‘I fancy a beer and a steak.’
    ‘The chap up the lane said the George and Dragon was the best for food.’ She brushed hairs back from his forehead, and the evening sun danced deep in his slate blue eyes. He didn’t look thirty-eight and she didn’t feel thirty-six; she felt twenty-six, or maybe sixteen, when she’d first seen those eyes, gazed up at them from the sticky carpet where she’d fallen sloshed in the pub and seen them grinning down at her. ‘Hallo, Joe Cool,’ she’d said to the stranger, and then passed out on his shiny Chelsea boots.
    The George and Dragon was an old coaching inn and the glass panel in the door displayed its credentials: ‘Relais Routiers’, ‘Egon Ronay’, ‘Good Pub Guide,’‘Good Beer Guide’. The thin licensing strip across the lintel proclaimed the proprietor to be Victor L. Lubbin.
    A roar of laughter froze as they went in. A bunch of labourers around a table glanced up then one said something and the laughter resumed. A solitary fruit machine stood against a wall. It