‘Oh hell.’ Maxine shook her head in despair. ‘Now I do wish you were a door-to-door salesman. Then I’d be able to say no.’

Josh and Ella were safely tucked up in bed by the time Bruno arrived at Trezale House.

Since Maxine’s idea of a romantic dinner à deux was spaghetti hoops on toast, he had brought the ingredients for a decent meal with him. Whilst he busied himself in the kitchen, slicing onions and mushrooms for the stroganoff, she sat happily drinking lager and relaying to him the events of the afternoon.

‘Yeeuk! What are you doing?’ she screeched as Bruno, having listened in silence for a good ten minutes, abandoned washing the leeks in order to cup wet, cold hands over her ears.

‘The rest of your brain,’ he explained carefully. ‘I thought maybe we should save it. These medical experts can do wonders nowadays ... if you’re lucky they might be able to slide some of it back in.’

‘Ha ha, very funny.’ Unabashed, Maxine wriggled out of reach. ‘OK, so when Guy finds out he’ll have me hung, drawn and quartered, but wouldn’t anyone else in my position have done the same?’

‘You still don’t get it, do you?’ Standing back, gazing down at her with a mixture of amusement and disbelief, Bruno drawled, ‘You really are full of surprises, my angel. How can anyone so smart be so incredibly dumb? How could you – of all people – fall for a line like that?’

‘Like what?’ The tiniest of frown lines bisected her eyebrows. Confusion registered in her dark brown eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘And you told me Janey was the gullible one.’ He couldn’t resist it. The fact that razor-sharp Maxine had a hitherto unsuspected weak spot was totally, blissfully endearing. She was, he thought with a triumphant grin, never going to live this down.

‘Oh come on,’ she protested, as realization finally dawned. ‘Bruno, no! That’s sick.’

‘Maxine, yes!’ Mimicking her outraged tone, he stepped smartly back to avoid a kick on the shin. ‘Look, I might not have met the man but you’ve already told me what he’s like. What did Guy say – his father was a ruthless businessman who’d stop at nothing to get what he wanted? If he wants to see his grandchildren and you’re telling him he can’t, then he’s going to have to come up with something spectacular to make you change your mind. What could be simpler than the old imminent-death routine? It might not be terribly original, but it usually does the trick.

And it worked, didn’t it?’ he concluded with a cheerful I-told-you-so grin. ‘My poor darling, you’d better dig out that bulletproof vest and superglue yourself into it. There’s no telling how Guy Cassidy’s going to react when he finds out what you’ve done this time.’

‘Oh shit!’ wailed Maxine, appalled. What she’d done this time had undoubtedly cost her her job. Travelling with Oliver Cassidy in the unimaginable luxury of his silver-grey Rolls, she had longed to ask more questions about the illness which was soon to rob him of his life. But she hadn’t, for fear of appearing nosey and because it simply wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed with a virtual stranger. Instead they had talked abut Josh and Ella; her soon-to-be-screened toilet-roll commercial; the wild beauty of the Cornish coastline; the stupid, sodding totally uninteresting weather . . .

Josh and Ella had been thrilled, of course, to see their grandfather waiting at the school gates. Maxine, quite choked by the poignancy of the situation, had almost been forced to blink back tears. How could anyone with even half a heart, she thought, possibly deny a dying man the chance of a last meeting with his only grandchildren?

They had returned to Trezale House to spend four blissfully happy hours together. Oliver Cassidy had even professed to adore the fish fingers and alphabetti spaghetti she’d served up, although he hadn’t been able to eat a great deal of it. At the time, she had assumed his lack of appetite must be connected with the illness.

And at eight o’clock in the evening he had left. With heartbreaking innocence Ella had cried, ‘Will we see you again soon, Grandpa?’ and Maxine, a lump in her throat the size of an egg, had turned away. Josh, handling yet another fifty-pound note with due reverence, had said,

‘When I buy my computer, Grandpa, I’ll teach you to play Pokémon. If you practise long enough you might even get as good as me.’

‘Maxine, how can I ever thank you?’ Oliver Cassidy had smiled and rested his hand on her shoulder as she walked with him to the front door. Tilting his grey head, planting a brief, infinitely gentle kiss on her cheek, he added quietly, ‘You’re a very special girl and I’m truly grateful.You’ll never know how much this afternoon has meant to me.’

And the fact that Guy was bound to find out what had happened – because with the best will in the world Ella was too young to keep a secret for anything exceeding fifteen seconds –

didn’t bother Maxine in the least. She knew she’d done the right thing, and furthermore she was going to tell him about his father’s fatal illness. Surely, she thought as she stood on the step and watched Oliver Cassidy disappear down the drive in his Rolls, surely even Guy would be jolted into remorse when he learned the truth.

‘Oh shit,’ said Maxine again, as the irony of the situation struck her. For the last eight hours she had thought over and over again how desperately unfair it was that such a charming man should have to die. Now, riddled with self-doubt and the growing fear that maybe, after all, she had been conned in the most underhand manner possible, she found herself almost hoping he would. At least then, she thought fretfully, she’d be proved right.

On the way to school a week later, Maxine – hardly daring to raise the subject for fear of breaking some miraculous spell – turned to Josh and Ella and said in ultra-casual tones, ‘You didn’t tell Guy about your grandfather’s visit, did you?’

It was a statement rather than a question. Maxine knew they couldn’t have told him. She was still alive.

Behind her, Ella promptly erupted into fits of giggles. Josh, in the passenger seat, looked immensely proud. ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s a secret.’

‘Oh come on, you can tell me,’ said Maxine.

Emma mimed zipping her mouth shut. ‘We can’t tell anybody. It’s an even bigger secret than the one about you smashing Daddy’s car into the gatepost.’

‘Look, I’m glad it’s a big secret,’ Maxine explained patiently. ‘But I should be in on it. I was there, wasn’t I?’

Josh considered this argument for a moment. After exchanging glances with Ella, he said, earnestly, ‘OK, but you mustn’t tell anyone else. Swear you won’t, Maxine.’

‘Bum,’ said Maxine, and Ella giggled again. It was her favourite word.

‘Grandpa said it had to be a secret,’ Josh explained, ‘because if we ever told anyone else, you’d get the sack and we’d never see you again for the rest of our lives.’

‘Oh.’ Overcome with emotion, Maxine’s eyes abruptly filled with tears.Thankfully, they had by this time reached the school so she didn’t risk killing them all.

‘Well, it’s nice to be appreciated,’ she said gruffly, curbing the urge to fling her arms around them and smother them in noisy kisses. If she did that in front of their schoolfriends, Josh would certainly die of shame. She cleared her throat instead and attempted to turn the situation into a joke. ‘So that must mean you like me a little bit, then?’

‘I do,’ Ella declared lovingly. ‘And Josh was glad too.’ Maxine smiled. Was he, sweetheart?’

‘Ella,’ Josh murmured, his expression furtive.

But the sheer relief of having finally been allowed to break the silence proved too much for Ella. Having extricated herself from her safety belt she climbed forward between the front seats and adopted a noisy stage-whisper. ‘Because Grandpa gave us extra money for not saying anything,’ she confided, blue eyes shining. ‘Lots of money you didn’t even know about, but if we told the secret to anyone ... except you, now ... we’d have to give it all back.’

‘Oh.’ So much for thinking she’d been the one they couldn’t bear to lose, thought Maxine.

Mercenary little sods.

‘Josh is going to buy a computer.’ Ella’s nose wrinkled in evident disgust. ‘Ugh, computers are stupid. I don’t want one!’

‘That’s because you’re a girl,’ he sneered. ‘You want a stupid horse.’

Ella pushed him, then turned to Maxine, her smile angelic. ‘A real, live horse,’ she said happily. ‘Called Bum.’

Chapter 50

Janey, lying in the bath, told herself she was being stupid. She was a mature adult, after all, not a child for whom a birthday was a real landmark. The importance of birthdays worked according to a sliding scale; as you grew older, their significance decreased. Heavens, it was almost fashionable to forget your own birthday .. .

It was downright depressing, on the other hand, if everyone else forgot it too.

But she had dug herself into a hole from which, it now seemed, there was no face-saving escape, because her birthday was tomorrow and to mention it casually in passing at this late stage would be too humiliating for words. The trouble was, Janey thought with a pang of regret, she hadn’t bothered earlier because she’d stupidly assumed everyone else would remember.

She was still in the bath when the telephone rang. Seconds later, Alan opened the bathroom door. ‘Phone, sweetheart. It’s Maxine.’

Superstition told Janey that if she climbed out of the water and went to answer it, Maxine wouldn’t have remembered her birthday. If she stayed where she was, on the other hand, it might suddenly click.

‘Ask her what she wants.’ Slowly and deliberately she began to soap her shoulders. ‘Take a message, or say I’ll call back.’