‘No,’ I said, as firmly as I could, removing a piece of fake fur from my mouth.
‘Come on!’ Ashley pleaded. ‘You promised you’d help. We can’t give up after one go.’
‘I think one go was enough to demonstrate that, yes, we can and most definitely should give up.’
‘Rubbish! We just need to learn from it, so we don’t make the same mistakes again.’
‘No, this time we would only make new ones. We don’t know what we’re doing, Ashley.’
‘Wrong!’ She pulled out a piece of paper from her pocket. ‘I knowexactlywhat we’re doing. This time I have a cover story all planned out and everything.’
‘An innocent dog-walker, by any chance?’
‘Who’s lost her dog, and thinks her poor Labrador has strayed onto the property of Birch House!’
‘Birch House?’ Birch was the name of the hero in Hillary West’s latest book.
Ashley looked smug. ‘Precisely! Plus, it is bordered by two streams, each heading in different directions.’
Birch’s childhood home had also been bordered by two streams. The book was calledThe Space Between the Waters.
‘It sounds a real contender. I don’t think you need me,’ I replied. ‘Which is good, because I’m in the middle of something.’
‘Well, that’s not a problem. I’ll help you finish it off and then we’ll go.’
There was the sudden sound of high-pitched laughter, and Mack and his wife appeared around the corner of the building. She was hanging onto his arm, a straw hat perching merrily on her apple head.
I jumped back out of view. ‘Fine, I’ll come. I just need to get changed and brush the worst of the grime out of my hair.’
Five minutes later, I scurried past Mack’s kitchen window, tugging Ashley behind me, and set off on another Hillary hunt.
* * *
Birch House was just a few miles away. At the end of a long, unpaved track. It was clear nobody in their right mind would walk a dog in that direction.
‘We’ll say she spotted a rabbit and was off before we could stop her.’ Ashley started marching up the track.
We arrived at another high wall, this one brick, with a broad pair of iron gates sporting a perfectly dog-sized gap at the bottom. ‘Florence!’ Ashley started shouting. ‘Come here, girl! FLORENCE!’
She leant close to whisper at me, ‘The best lie is the one closest to the truth. If anyone asks, we’re walking the dog for our poorly friend.’
We yelled a couple more times, before I got bored and tried the gate. To my surprise, and dismay, it creaked open.
‘Let’s knock on the door and ask if they’ve seen Florence,’ Ashley said, way too loud. ‘Frances will be devastated if we’ve lost her.’
We made our way across the large, circular driveway, making a slightly ridiculous show of looking for the dog, no doubt currently curled contentedly at her owner’s feet.
With no street lights or other illumination the garden was already a mass of jumbled shadows. Ashley took a fortifying breath, stepped up onto the porch and banged the brass knocker on the large black door.
‘Oh, no!’ She gasped, horrified. I clutched her elbow, spinning around in alarm.
‘What?’
‘I forgot to touch up my lipstick!’
My clutch turned into a shove. ‘For goodness’ sake. I thought you’d spotted something awful.’
‘Itisawful!’ She pouted. ‘I’m about to meet my heroine. She’s not going to invite us in if we look like riffraff.’
