But he hadn’t waited and the would-be nanny hadn’t phoned. By eight-thirty, when there was still no sign of her, he dialled the London number she had given him.

‘Oh dear,’ said Berenice, thankful that at least Ella, whom she had put to bed half an hour earlier, wasn’t there to witness his language.

Josh, who was used to it, wondered if this meant his prayers had actually been answered.

‘What is it, Dad?’

‘No wonder she was in such a hurry to come and live down here,’ Guy seethed, pouring himself a hefty Scotch and downing it in one go. ‘I’ve just spoken to her mother. The lying, conniving bitch was arrested this morning and charged with credit-card-fraud! This is all I bloody need ...’

‘Does that mean she isn’t going to be our nanny?’ said Josh, just to make absolutely sure.

Guy raised his eyes to heaven. ‘I knew that expensive private education of yours would come in useful one day. Yes Josh, it means she isn’t going to be your nanny.’

Hooray, thought Josh. Aloud he said, ‘Oh. So what are we going to do?’

‘Only one thing for it.’ It was Wednesday night, Berenice was getting married on Saturday and he had to fly to Paris for a prestigious calendar shoot on Monday morning. ‘We cancel Berenice’s wedding.’

‘You’ll have to answer it,’ said Maxine, when the doorbell rang. She was wearing bright orange toe separators and the crimson nail polish on her splayed toes was still wet. ‘I look like a duck.’

‘You look like a duck,’ Guy Cassidy remarked when Janey showed him into the sitting room two minutes later. Maxine, sitting on the floor with her bare legs stretched out in front of her, carried on eating her Mars bar. ‘Just as well,’ she replied equably. ‘It means your insults roll off my back.’

Mystified by his unexpected appearance on her doorstep, Janey said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her and lowered himself into an empty armchair. To Maxine, whose attention was fixed upon an old re-run of Inspector Morse, he said, ‘Haven’t you seen this one before? Lewis did it.’

Her gaze didn’t waver from the television screen. With thinly veiled sarcasm she countered,

‘Who’s lying now?’ Janey fled to the safety of the kitchen.

‘Go on then,’ said Maxine eventually, when she had finished the Mars bar and dropped the wrapper on to the coffee table. ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

There wasn’t much point in beating around the bush. Guy said, ‘The job. If you still want it, it’s yours.’

‘You’ve been stood up, then.’

He nodded.

‘Gosh,’ said Maxine, her expression innocent. ‘You must be desperate.’

His mouth twitched as he allowed her, her brief moment of triumph. ‘I am.’

‘And here am I, such an all-round bad influence ..

‘You might well be,’ he replied dryly, ‘but your sister put in a few good words on your behalf and for some bizarre reason my son has taken a liking to you.’

‘And you’re desperate,’ Maxine repeated for good measure, but this time he ignored the jibe.

‘So are you interested, or not?’

‘We-ll.’ Tilting her head to one side, she appeared to consider the offer. ‘We haven’t discussed terms, yet.’

‘We haven’t discussed your funny webbed feet either,’ he pointed out. ‘But live and let live is my motto.’

Janey had been eavesdropping like mad from the kitchen. Unable to endure the suspense a moment longer, she seized the mugs of tea and erupted back into the sitting room.

‘She’s interested,’ she declared, ignoring Maxine’s frantic signals and thrusting one of the mugs into Guy Cassidy’s hand. ‘She’ll take the job. When would you like her to start?’

Chapter 6

Guy Cassidy was twenty-three years old when he met Véronique Charpentier. It was the wettest, windiest day of the year and he was making his way home after a gruelling fourteen-hour shift in the photographic studios where his brief had been to make a temperamental forty-four-year-old actress look thirty again.

Now the traffic was almost at a standstill and his car was stuck behind a bus. All he could think of was getting back to his flat and sinking into a hot bath with a cold beer. In less than two hours he was supposed to be taking Amanda, his current girlfriend, to a party in Chelsea. It wasn’t a prospect that particularly appealed to him but she had insisted on going.

There was no room to overtake when the bus came to a shuddering halt and began to spill out passengers. Guy amused himself by watching them scurry like wind-blown ants across the pavement towards the relative shelter of the shop canopies lining the high street.

The last passenger to disembark, however, didn’t make it. As her long, white-blond hair whipped around her face she struggled to control her charcoal-grey umbrella. At the exact moment the umbrella flipped inside out, she stumbled against the kerb and crashed to the ground.

Her carrier bag of shopping spilled into the gutter. The inverted umbrella, carried by the wind, cartwheeled off into the distance and a wave of muddy water from the wheels of the now-departing bus cascaded over her crumpled body.

By the time Guy reached her, she was dragging herself into a sitting position and muttering

‘Bloody Eenglish’ under her breath.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, helping her carefully to her feet. There was a lot of mud, but no sign of blood.

Her expression wary, she shook her wet blond head, then cast a sorrowful glance in the direction of the spilled carrier bag lying in a puddle. ‘Not me. But my croissants, I theenk, are drowned. Bloody Eenglish!’

‘Come on.’ Smiling at her choice of words, he led her towards his car. When she was installed in the passenger seat inspecting the holes in the knees of her sheer, dark tights, he said,

‘Why bloody English?’

‘Eenglish weather. Stupid Eenglish umbrella,’ she explained, gesticulating at the torrential rain. ‘And how many kind Eenglish people stopped to ‘elp when I fell over? Tssch!’

‘I stopped to help you, he remarked mildly, slipping the engine into gear as a cacophony of irritated hooting started up behind them.

The girl, her face splashed with mud and rain, sighed. ‘Of course you did. And now I’m sitting in your car and I don’t even know you. It would be just my luck, I theenk, to get murdered by a crazy person. Maybe you should stop and let me out.’

‘I can’t stand the sight of blood,’ Guy assured her. ‘And I’m not crazy either. Why don’t you tell me where you live and let me drive you home? No strings, I promise.’ She frowned, apparently considering the offer. Finally, turning to face him and looking puzzled, she said, ‘I don’t understand. What ees thees no strings? You mean like in string vests?’

Her name was Véronique, she was eighteen years old and she lived in an attic which had been shabbily converted into a bedsitter but which had the advantage — in daylight at least — of overlooking Wandsworth Common.

As a reward for not murdering her on the way home, Guy was invited up the five flights of stairs for coffee. By the time his cup was empty he had fallen in love with its maker and forgotten that Amanda even existed.

‘Let me take you out to dinner,’ he said, wondering what he would do if Véronique turned him down. To his eternal relief, however, she smiled.

‘All wet and muddy, like thees? Or may I take a bath first?’

Grinning back at her, Guy said, ‘I really don’t mind.’

‘It is best if I take a bath, I theenk,’ Véronique replied gravely. Rising to her feet, she gestured towards a pile of magazines stacked against the battered, dark blue sofa. ‘I won’t be long. Please, can you amuse yourself for a while? They are French magazines, but maybe you could look at the pictures.’

The tiny bathroom adjoined the living room. Guy smiled to himself as he heard her carefully locking the door which separated them. The magazines, he discovered, were well-thumbed copies of French Vogue, one of which contained a series of photographs he himself had taken during last spring’s Paris collections. The thought of Véronique poring over pages which bore his own minuscule by-line cheered him immensely. It was, he felt, a good omen for their relationship.

But the magazines were also evidently a luxury for her. The bedsitter, though charmingly adorned with touches of her own personality, was itself unprepossessing and sparsely furnished.

The sofa, strewn with hand-embroidered cushions, doubled as a bed. Strategically situated lamps drew the attention away from peeling wallpaper and the posters on the wall, he guessed, were similarly positioned in order to conceal patches of damp. Neither the cinnamon-scented candles or the bowls of pot pourri could eradicate the slight underlying mustiness which pervaded the air.

And there was no television; a box of good quality writing paper and a small transistor radio seemed to comprise her only forms of entertainment. Guy, exploring the meticulously tidy room in detail, greedy to discover everything there was to know about Véronique Charpentier, felt an almost overwhelming urge to bundle her up and whisk her away from the chilly, depressing house, to tell her that she no longer needed to live like this, that he would take care of her .. .

And when she emerged from the bathroom twenty-five minutes later, he actually had to bite his tongue in order not to say the words aloud. Mud-free, simply dressed in a thin black polo-necked sweater, pale grey wool skirt and black tights, she looked stunning. The white-blond hair, freshly brushed, hung past her shoulders. Silver-grey eyes regarded him with amusement. She was wearing pastel pink lipstick and Je Reviens.