LITMIR.BIZ

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Obviously! It happens all the time. It’s random! Don’t you dare—!’

      Gabe interrupted, voice soft. ‘But slates and doors, fireplaces and tiles … how could a hacker remove those?’

      Jodie stared at him dumbly, horror written on her face.

      Alexia swallowed painfully. ‘Has Shane had access to your Internet banking app, Jodes?’

      With a wail, Jodie leapt up and fled from the room.

      Alexia covered her eyes. Could this day get any worse?

      That night, Alexia tossed and turned long after Jodie had shut herself in her room and Gabe had gone home. Though she was exhausted, her gritty eyes refused to stay closed and her brain wouldn’t sleep. It flipped from anxiety to disbelief to guilt. She was one of the people the village had trusted with the money they’d raised. And now the money was gone.

      With a need to do something constructive, she sat up and switched on the light, then balanced her laptop on her legs to type an exhaustive list of what had been stripped out of The Angel. Together with the ‘before’ and ‘during’ photos she’d taken of the building, the list would go to the police, and to every reclamation yard she knew of in Cambridgeshire.

      As she laboured on in the still hours, the phrase ‘All the money’s gone’ echoed through her mind, last heard fifteen years ago in her mother’s horrified whisper. They hadn’t needed the police on that occasion. The culprit had been well known to them. Alexia’s dad, Cliff, had run up debts faster than Heather, Alexia’s mum, could pay them off.

      To prevent his credit card companies taking the family home Alexia had had to stop attending uni and let her mum use her student loan. A debt Alexia was still repaying as Heather wasn’t well-off and Clifford was on to a whole new lot of debts, probably. Unless his current wife had him well in hand.

      Her parents’ marriage hadn’t made it past the crisis and Alexia and Reuben had been more relieved than distraught when Clifford had moved out. They’d all suffered by being hitched to the same financial wagon as him but at least he’d accepted Heather’s rejection, just at he’d later accepted Grandpop leaving his cottage to Alexia and Reuben, philosophically acknowledging his total lack of money management. It was an endless mystification to his children that he could apparently see the truth yet never mend his ways.

      Alexia and Reuben heard from him mainly on birthdays and at Christmas now.

      Last night had felt like a return to the old financial nightmare and as Alexia grimly tapped at her keyboard she made a series of fruitless wishes.

      That Jodie had never met Shane. Jodie might have been resolute in refusing to join the dots of the money and goods disappearing at the same time as Shane and Tim, but Alexia didn’t believe in that kind of coincidence.

      That Alexia had never agreed to Shane and Tim being the main contractors at The Angel. But once they’d shown her their work was good enough she’d decided to give them a chance. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask for evidence of their honesty.

      If she had access to unlimited wishing wells, fairy godmothers and wishbones, top of her wishiest wishlist would be the wish that she hadn’t spent Saturday night in Ben’s bed. On his rug. In his bath.

      She so wished that.

      But he’d seemed likeable in his offbeat way – what was it he’d called himself? An oddball? – and she’d been attracted to his dishevelled good looks and slightly brooding air. The tenderness he’d exhibited with Barney had made her feel all warm and fuzzy, as had his vulnerability over his divorce and bashful confession that he’d forgotten how the seduction game went – though he’d pretty quickly got the hang of it again.

      Alexia had been a prize fool. Carefree with singledom, she’d seen no reason for caution. She’d never before indulged in a one-night stand but, hey, they were adults.

      It had felt like a triumph every time she’d made him smile. He hadn’t looked at her then as if he didn’t know who she was. It had been a special connection! It had! Though new and exciting, they’d seemed to know each other in the private world they’d created in his cottage in the woods. It had even led her to assume there would prove to be a perfectly good reason for him leaving before she woke.

      That should have been a clue to what kind of man he was, because who did that?

      Benedict Hardaker. That was the name he’d provided to the police officer. His relationship to Gabe Piercy must be on his mother’s side. Fancy him being related at all to lovely warm Gabe, familiar to everyone as he clippity-clopped through the village with his blue cart and little black pony, Snobby.

      Benedict gitty shitty Hardaker, she typed into her list after 4 Victorian toilet cisterns, black, thumping the keys so hard it made her fingertips burn. Then she went back and deleted the words with slow, deliberate taps. Gone. She wished he’d go as easily from Middledip, or at least crawl back into his lair in the woods so she never had to see him again.

      It was light by the time she’d finished so she gave up on sleep, freshened up under the shower and trailed downstairs to make a huge mug of tea.

      She tried to put some hours in on her real job, the interior decorating she actually charged for and which paid the bills, but couldn’t concentrate. She should be putting the finishing touches to the scheme of works for a basement kitchen-diner conversion with utility room and shower room, the old ground-floor kitchen being knocked through to the sitting room to make ‘a generous living space’. She’d thought it would be the last substantial job she’d schedule before leaving the village, but now she wondered if what had happened to The Angel would put her new role with Elton back a bit.

      In any event, her heart wasn’t in it today. She grabbed the key to The Angel’s temporary front door, which Dion had dropped off, picked up her jacket and went out.

      She found The Angel dreaming under a sun that glowed through the merest suggestion of September mist and paused outside. The front view was misleadingly intact. The thieves had been smart enough to resist even the beautiful moulded brickwork between the windows so their crime wouldn’t be immediately obvious. She supposed she ought to be grateful for small mercies instead of standing in the road, her heart a tonne weight. Now she was here she found it hard to go inside and confront again the indignity the gracious old building had suffered.

      She reversed her route and crossed back to Main Road, ignoring her own home and taking instead the track that led to Gabe’s.

      Gabe was feeding his chickens and collecting eggs, a waistcoat over a shirt that used to have a collar. He took one look at her and said, ‘Want to take Snobby a couple of carrots for me? He’s a good listener.’

      Alexia laughed. ‘Do I look woebegone enough to need Snobby’s listening ear?’ But she took three carrots from the feed store by the back door and set off for the paddock. Snobby, black all over, his long mane blowing in his eyes, looked like the pony equivalent of an emo. Planted in the middle of the field he regarded her unmovingly until she waved his snack and he knew it was worth the trip to the gate to meet her. He arrived with his neck extended and his mouth already open.

      ‘Life sucks,’ she told him, holding a piece of carrot in her palm and feeling his velvet muzzle shiver over her skin as he hoovered it up. ‘And I think it’s going to get a lot suckier.’ Breaking the carrots into the smallest pieces she could, she fed the thick-coated pony slowly, running her free hand down his smooth neck, letting his coarse mane slither soothingly between her fingers as she told him her woes. Snobby’s ears flicked back and forth as if paying close attention. Until the carrot supply dried up, then he tossed his head out of her reach and ambled back into the middle of the field to graze.

      Alexia sniffed. ‘So now you’ve had what you want, you don’t want to know me? Reminds me of someone else I know.’ She stayed for a while, deriving comfort in Snobby’s serenity as he tipped up one hoof to rest his leg, tail streaming in the quickening breeze.

      At length she headed back, finding Gabe still in the chicken

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