LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Five years ago, my sister and I were skiing together (Val d’Isère, a chalet full of our friends and a case of Grey Goose vodka to get the party going) and Jassy took a tumble and dislocated her knee. Apart from the pain – which must have been awful – she was furious. She’d made us get new salopettes for the holiday too, really attractive, and matching fur-bobble hats. There were paparazzi all over the place photographing some Swedish princess and her family, but instead we attracted all the publicity, the sort Jassy wasn’t used to.

      After several weeks of medical attention and physio we thought her knee was healed, but then in January she was on the ice rink at Somerset House, fell over and as a result needed an operation. Leg in plaster, the works.

      The trouble was, with Jassy’s knee and with me going through a bad patch with Benedict after a rather disappointing Valentine’s Day, both of us had lost focus. We needed a break. Jassy came up with a plan and as usual she was very persuasive; she had a first draft of her latest book to finish while her husband was away in the West Indies, commentating on some mind-numbing cricket matches, and from all the media evidence, enjoying himself a bit too much out of the commentary box.

      I had some structural edits to do on Choose Yes (okay, more of a rewrite if I’m honest) and a partner who was starting to get on my nerves. I know Benedict was stressed at work and I did sympathise, but all he ever seemed to do was complain loudly and at length about colleagues who were being more annoying and incompetent than usual. I really needed some peace and quiet, no arguments about whose turn it is to put the recycling out or when the water filter was last changed. Benedict is very particular about the water filter, you’d think what came out of the tap was poisonous.

      And so, there were lots of reasons why we had borrowed our literary agent’s holiday house near Dartmoor. Jassy thought it was a good idea and it sounded fun. We would take some time out to get our writing wagons into a circle, do some proper work and recover after the alcohol-fuelled madness that had been our Christmas and New Year.

      Sally had described in mouth-watering detail the glorious view across pretty fields and opening the diamond-paned windows to breathe in great lungfuls of clean air. Which is a joke as she smokes like a chimney.

      We pictured ourselves sitting in comfortable armchairs next to a gorgeous fire. Jassy would be wrapped up in her pink cashmere robe, with her laptop open on her good knee. I’d be flicking through my proofs, ticking things off with the silver propelling pencil Jassy gave me for Christmas. Occasionally we would look up and grin at each other, pleased with the way things had worked out.

      Peace, quiet, rest, lovely meals, large glasses of Merlot glowing like rubies in the firelight. I imagined a bird feeder in the window with all sorts of little birds fluttering around it.

      Well it wasn’t a bit like that.

      *

      For a start the weather was rubbish. But then it was February in Devon. I suppose we should have expected horizontal rain and red mud everywhere.

      One week in and I wanted to go back to London with just about every atom in my body. Back then my idea of a breath-taking view was the glass canyons of Knightsbridge. I’d been invited to a really brilliant birthday party at the V&A and turned it down to come here. What was I doing there with only sheep and my sister for company?

      You might well ask.

      I write romances – the sort where ditzy girls take over cafés or inherit cottages from their godmothers and find a wonderful and passionate love with the local surfer dude. I’ve written a whole series of medical romances too where the handsome surgeon falls in love with the feisty little nurse. Don’t sneer, you’ve read them, you’ve heard of me: Lulu Darling. I’ve sold millions of books; I know what I’m doing.

      I look like one of my sweet-faced heroines too. Blonde and cute, and almost tiny enough to tuck in your pocket.

      Just try it, Buster – all those years of writing about something that didn’t exist had knocked my corners off a bit. And the last few years had reinforced my rather jaundiced view of men, relationships, love and all that sort of thing.

      My sister is pretty. She looks clever too, in a dark-haired, high-cheekboned sort of way that makes people assume she’s pondering deep thoughts when in fact she’s probably wondering if it’s possible to drown someone in a kitchen sink or poison a husband with household products without leaving evidence. That’s the sort of book Jassy writes you see, and she’s very successful too. But by the end of last year she was seriously behind with her latest book and her publisher was starting to nag. In a polite way, of course, because Jassy sells almost as many books as I do.

      We were the Darling sisters after all: a brand, a sparkling little oasis of success in the middle of the dark scramble for sales. We were photographed at glossy events. We went to glamorous parties. Designers lent us stuff.

      Jassy was asked to go into the last Big Brother House. Of course she refused; we do have some standards. I’ve been on Have I Got News For You because apparently my ample chest made them think I’d be an easy target for mild sexist banter. They were so wrong. They won’t try that again.

      *

      Very quickly I realised coming to Devon had been a mistake and while she didn’t say much I could tell Jassy thought the same. I think she felt more responsible because she had talked me into it. Not that she would ever admit it.

      The house was lovely though. Sally had spent a fair bit of money doing it up – you know the sort of thing, Crucial Trading floor tiles, a pink Aga in the huge kitchen, and in the beamed sitting room, velvet sofas that were really comfortable. But it felt literally bloody miles from anywhere.

      I wasn’t used to that; I was used to corner shops that were open all hours of the day and night, takeaway cafés and patisseries, wine merchants who deliver, Ubers at the touch of a phone. Barracane House was stuck on a sloping field in the middle of nowhere. As for the magnificent views, we couldn’t see them through the rain and the low cloud. The road to the house was an unmetalled track that had turned into a mudslide and the wind (which never seemed to slacken) howled up the hill straight towards the front door. Benedict would have been horrified.

      We didn’t sit and work next to a glorious log fire because the wind kept blowing down the chimney the wrong way, puffing smoke into the room. There was intermittent mobile phone signal, pathetic or no broadband, and Jassy had forgotten her laptop cable so it ran out of charge after three days.

      As far as the delicious meals went, we’d forgotten that we would have to prepare them and neither of us knew 1) how to cook the sort of meals we had imagined or 2) use an Aga. So the whole experience had been an unqualified disaster.

      On top of that it was getting colder by the day.

      And then I got a puncture.

      *

      I’d been looking out of the window, sick to death with my latest work in progress, not even able to email Benedict because of the rubbish Wi-Fi, wondering if I knew enough about vicars to work one into the story, when I noticed my car was on a slant. I tried to persuade myself I had parked on an uneven bit of

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