LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER ONE

      FIVE MILES FELT a lot further than it had used to. The final hundred yards of Drew Taylor’s morning run left him feeling dizzy and sick from exertion.

      ‘Morning.’

      If he hadn’t been so keen to gulp down a pint of water and collapse into a chair, Drew would have noticed the canary-yellow sports car parked across the street from his house and reckoned that Charlie would be around somewhere. As it was, the voice behind him came as a surprise.

      ‘Morning…’ Now that he’d reached his destination, Drew’s body gave up and bent double, his lungs craving air.

      ‘You’re out of shape, old man.’

      ‘Very probably. Is that what you came to tell me?’ Drew gripped his knees, staring hard at the paving stones at his feet, gasping for air.

      ‘Nah.’ Charlie shrugged and waited until Drew had recovered sufficiently to let them into the house. ‘I have a proposition for you.’

      Charlie’s propositions were liable to get him into trouble. Their friendship had lasted since their university days on the basis that Drew was choosy about which of them he took seriously. ‘What?’

      ‘Hydrate first. You look as if you need it.’

      ‘That sounds ominous.’

      ‘Nah. This one’s a stroke of genius.’

      ‘Yeah. They always are.’ Drew poured himself a glass of water, while Charlie flipped open the kitchen cupboard, looking for coffee.

      ‘You’ve only got one coffee pod left.’

      Drew shrugged. ‘Take it. I’m not drinking coffee at the moment.’

      Charlie twisted the edges of his mouth down, and put the pod into the machine. ‘Not sleeping?’

      ‘I’m not used to doing nothing…’ Drew took a mouthful of water. That was only half the story and they both knew it.

      It was his own stupid fault that he was stuck at home with nothing to do. When the hospital he’d worked in—actually lived for—had first been threatened with closure, Drew had spearheaded the campaign to keep it open. It had been a two-year struggle, culminating in failure and defeat.

      When he’d finally faced the inevitable, and begun to look for another job, he’d landed one with relative ease. Head of a new memory clinic in London, which was due to open in three months’ time. In any other circumstances it would have been the job that Drew’s dreams were made of but now it was tainted by loss, and he was having difficulty working up much enthusiasm for it.

      ‘You’ll be thanking me in a minute, then.’ Charlie smiled beatifically.

      Drew gave up. When Charlie got hold of an idea, he didn’t let go. They weren’t always good ideas, but enough of them had been great to make his friend a millionaire before his thirtieth birthday.

      ‘Okay. What am I going to be thanking you for?’

      ‘Someone I know has asked me for a favour, and I think it could work out perfectly for you. It’s a job…’

      ‘I have a job, remember?’

      ‘This is temporary. It’s a fantastic opportunity to get away from it all, take a bit of a break. Two weeks, a month tops…’ Charlie stopped, pressing his lips together. ‘This is absolutely top secret. Totally confidential and between ourselves.’

      Generally Charlie’s idea of confidential was that it didn’t get as far as the newspapers quite yet, but it appeared this really was a secret. Drew chuckled. ‘Understood.’

      ‘Okay. Well, you’ve heard of Sophie Warner?’

      Drew thought for a moment. The name rang a bell, but he couldn’t place it. ‘I don’t think so.’

      Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘She’s a big star. Gorgeous. Didn’t you see MacAdam on TV?’

      ‘I doubt it. Look, I’ll take it as read. Sophie Warner, brightest star in the firmament. What’s that got to do with me?’

      ‘Well, a friend of mine from America has contacted me. Carly’s an assistant director and she’s known Sophie Warner for years, since before she was famous. The two of them are working on a film together down in Devon at the moment.’

      Friends of friends of friends. In Charlie’s world it was all about who you knew, not what you knew. Drew bit back the comment, reckoning that Charlie would get to the point quicker if he didn’t interrupt.

      ‘So they did the first lot of filming over here last winter. Just caught that heavy fall of snow we had, which was a bonus, and everything went like clockwork. Now they’re back again to do the summer scenes, and they’ve run into trouble.’

      ‘What kind of trouble?’ Drew couldn’t think of anything that his particular skills might help with on a film set. Apart from an outbreak of food poisoning, and a local doctor could deal with that.

      ‘There’s something the matter with Sophie. She’s acting like a diva—tantrums on set, turning up late, not learning her lines. She’s had a load of bad press in the last couple of months…’ Charlie shook his head. ‘We won’t go into that.’

      It must be very bad if Charlie’s sense of discretion had kicked in. The woman sounded like a nightmare. ‘And what’s that got to do with me? I’m a neurologist, not a minder for spoilt children.’

      ‘That’s just the thing. Carly knows Sophie and she swears that this is not just the usual film star bad behaviour. She’s sticking her neck out here, and putting her own job on the line to protect Sophie, because she thinks there’s something wrong with her.’

      ‘What sort of something?’

      Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘If we knew that, we wouldn’t ask you, would we? Apparently Sophie was in a car accident a few months back and she just hasn’t been right since. She’s been shutting herself away for days, running off no one knows where.

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