CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER ONE

      AS THE DOOR CLICKED gently shut behind her the quiet sound registered with all the force of a thunderclap on Beth Marton’s ears. For a second she froze, unbelieving; then she turned, gingerly pushing against the unyielding wood. Of course it didn’t budge—but then it wouldn’t with the latch having sprung shut.

      ‘Oh, no, no.’ Beth pushed again, harder this time, even as she told herself it was pointless. She was locked out. If she had been standing outside her flat in London that wouldn’t have mattered. There were at least a couple of neighbours always around that she could have called on in the block in which the flat was situated, and one of them could have telephoned her sister who had a spare key for emergencies. But this was not London…

      She glanced somewhat wildly about her, vitally aware she was clad in nothing but bubblegum-pink silk pyjamas with spaghetti shoulder straps. The dark windy night was not encouraging. And rain was forecast.

      When a cold nose nudged one hand she glanced down at the big dog who was surveying her with impatient eyes. ‘I know, I know,’ she muttered. ‘We’re out here and your dinner’s in there, but it was you who insisted you needed the loo a minute ago.’

      And it was her who had followed Harvey outside with the torch so she could make sure he didn’t disappear into the blackness. Which was doubly daft in hindsight, considering he knew it was dinner time—Harvey’s favourite moment of the day—and also that there was nowhere he could really go. The garden surrounding the little cottage she was renting was all neatly fenced.

      A gust of wind brought the smell of smoke on the air, reminding Beth she had lit the fire in the sitting room a few minutes before. And the guard wasn’t in front of it but standing to one side of the slate hearth.

      Panicking now, she scurried round the outside of the cottage to see if any of the windows just might be on the latch, although she doubted it. When she had arrived at the place half an hour ago, travel weary after a journey she wouldn’t have wished on her worst enemy but hugely relieved to have found the isolated building in the dark, everything had appeared shuttered and closed. After retrieving the front door key which had been hidden under a plant pot as the agent had told her, she had lugged all her stuff inside, only stopping to bung perishable food into the little fridge before she had stripped off for a wonderfully welcome shower.

      Once the stickiness of the tortuous journey—which had consisted of traffic jam after traffic jam—had been removed she hadn’t been able to face the thought of dressing again, and so had pulled on her pyjamas before opening a bottle of wine and lighting the fire. Harvey’s enormous basket established in a handy corner, and a tin of his favourite food open in the tiny cottage kitchen, she’d been about to feed him when he’d made it plain he needed to be let outside for a moment.

      ‘Ow!’ As she slipped on something squelchy and ended up on her bottom in something which smelt utterly disgusting, her eyeballs rattled with the jolt to her system. The urge to cry was suddenly and very childishly paramount, but instead she recovered the torch which had fallen out of her hand and struggled to her feet. Harvey seemed to have quite forgotten about his dinner and was entering into this new game with gusto, jumping about her and barking delightedly. He’d found the long journey from London to Shropshire boring but this was altogether more like it.

      Thankfully the torch still worked, but Beth didn’t need its light to tell her a fox or badger obviously skulked about the cottage garden at night. The smell on her pyjamas and fluffy mules did the job more than adequately.

      Walking round the building to the front door again, she stood for a moment, shivering in the cold May night. The day itself had been quite warm, too warm in view of the hours spent stuck unmoving in traffic, but the night air had a bite to it which said summer wasn’t quite round the corner yet.

      She would have to smash a window and climb in somehow; there was nothing else for it. Beth gazed at the beautiful old leaded lights in the sitting room windows. All the glass was the same, and when she had drawn up earlier and admired the mullioned effect she had thought then they must be quite valuable. The cottage was tiny and chocolate boxy, complete with thatched roof, wooden beams throughout and all the charm one would expect considering it was a couple of centuries old. But charm didn’t help her right at this minute.

      Harvey’s stomach was rumbling and the game had lost its appeal. He began to whine and when an enormous long-haired German shepherd dog whined it wasn’t the same as a poodle. Beth couldn’t hear herself think. ‘All right, all right.’ She shushed him with a click of her fingers. She was going to do a considerable amount of damage if she smashed one of these lovely old windows but she couldn’t think of any other course of action. As far as she could recall, she hadn’t passed another dwelling place for some miles once she had turned into the long lane which had eventually led to the cottage. Besides which, she was hardly dressed to go tramping round the Shropshire countryside.

      She shone the torch on the window as she pressed the glass. Each window was stone mullioned and the leaded lights appeared to be supported by steel bars behind them. She wasn’t even sure she could climb in if she did manage to break the glass. Of course she could smash one of her car windows but she’d freeze to death in there tonight, and in the morning she’d still have the same problem, her car keys and everything else being in the cottage.

      ‘Oh, Harvey.’ The urge to cry was back. This, on top of everything else that had happened lately was too much. Why, when she was trying to pick herself up and sort herself out, was she hampered at every turn? It just wasn’t fair. She sniffed miserably and Harvey, now sensing all was not well, pressed protectively against her legs. She plumped down on the doorstep and put her arms round the shaggy neck, tears running down her cheeks. And it was like that, huddled into the warm animal fur, that she first noticed moving lights on the hillside.

      Someone was driving down the lane leading to the cottage!

      Jumping up, she dashed past her car and the small area of lawn which made up the front garden and opened the big swing gate, holding Harvey’s leather collar as she waited for whoever it was to reach them. She shone the torch anxiously into the road, hoping the vehicle owner wouldn’t just drive straight past. It wasn’t as if she looked as though she might be a dangerous mugger or something, she reasoned frantically, not in her pyjamas. But for that same reason she wanted any potential rescuer to see Harvey and know she had the sort of guard dog it wasn’t wise to ignore. You heard such horrible things these days about women being attacked when they asked strangers for help.

      It seemed an eternity before the car reached them but it could only have been a minute or two. Then brilliant headlights lit up the darkness, swallowing the meagre light from the torch. A large estate car swept by before Beth could blink. For an awful moment she thought the driver hadn’t noticed them standing on the grass verge, but then she heard the screech of brakes after the car had disappeared from view round a bend in the road. A few seconds later it reversed and came to a stop at the side of them.

      The window wound down and a deep male voice, in tones of