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  He passes me a card with his number on it.

  “Can I have my lighter back?”

  “I think we’ll hang onto in for now if you don’t mind.”

  I decide not to push my luck.

  I almost send Sonya flying as I walk out of the office. She must have been standing with her ear pressed right up against the door.

  “Well?” she demands. “How did it go?”

  “Well, they didn’t arrest me.”

  “No?”

  “No. Of course they didn’t. I mean why would I burn down the caravan park? What possible motivation could I have?”

  I march through the store, ignoring the prying eyes that follow me. I need to speak to Alicia, but she’s on her break. Eventually, I go back to the office. The police have gone now and Stu is sitting at Sonya’s desk, talking and laughing with a couple of his buddies from the warehouse.

  “What do you call an Essex girl without a fake tan?” he chuckles.

  “I don’t know?” I say, walking into the room. “What do you call her?”

  “Hey, Isabel! I hear you’ve been a bad girl,” he smirks. “Let me know if you need me to bail you out.” He makes an obscene gesture and the others laugh. I ought to report him to HR, but I couldn’t bear the paperwork.

  It is a long, long day of ridiculous jokes and innuendos. Not to mention the fact that half the checkout staff are still poised to go on strike. Finally, at a quarter to five, I grab my stuff and charge out the door. It’s a little early, but I don’t care. I’ve had enough.

  I drive straight round to the Beach House. Alicia is already in the kitchen, setting the table for dinner. She blanches when she sees me. She knows she’s done me wrong.

  “What did you say to the police?” I ask, unable to hide my fury.

  She ignores me and continues to set the table.

  I grab the knives and forks from her hand and slam them down.

  “What did you tell them?” I shout, my voice shaking.

  “Who?”

  “Who do you bloody think? The police! What did you tell them about me?”

  “Just the truth,” she whimpers, her eyes impossibly wide.

  “You told them I left the party, didn’t you? Why did you do that?”

  “But why did you leave the party, Isabel?”

  Suddenly, I explode.

  “Are you’re trying to set me up?” I grab her by the shoulders, ready to give her a good hard shake.

  “Isabel! Get off her!” Deacon steps in between us. He looks from one to the other. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “She told the police I left the barbecue!” I fume. “Now they think I’m the one who started the fire.”

  “Isabel, you’re blowing this all out of all proportion,” Deacon says, calmly.

  “The police were here this morning and they talked to all of us. No one said anything that would have made them think you were the culprit.”

  “Well, thanks for giving me a heads up,” I say bitterly. “Great friend you are!”

  I stalk out to my car and sit there for a while, breathing heavily, too angry to drive. Now that I’ve yelled at Alicia, I ought to feel better, but I don’t. She hasn’t given me any of the answers I need, and now I’m feeling guilty all over again.

  There is a soft knock on the window. It’s Deacon. I wind it down.

  “You were out of line, talking to Alicia like that.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  But I can’t. He doesn’t see Alicia the way I do. None of them do.

  Robertson’s - Tuesday Morning

  I get to work early. Alicia is already on the shop floor.

  I call out her name, but she pretends to be engrossed in what she’s doing. She looks… scared when she sees me. I furrow my brow. Is it really plausible that she has nothing to do with all the strange events going on in my life? I just don’t know anymore, it’s all too confusing.

  “Look Alicia,” I say, walking over to her. “I’m sorry about last night, OK? I was just a bit upset. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  Alicia pats my arm. Her touch is surprisingly warm, considering how cold the shop gets.

  “Don’t worry about the police,” she says. They’re just trying to scare you.”

  Well, they’re doing a pretty good job.

  I join Sonya at the checkouts, where she is still taking grief about the automated tills. If Stu doesn’t give us some solid answers soon, I think we should feed him to this lot, let them eat him alive like piranhas. A number of them have already told me they have unexpected dentist or doctor’s appointments this week. I strongly suspect that they’ve been applying to Filbert’s en masse.

  “You’re doing it again, Sonya,” I say, pulling her hand down from her hair.

  She has this horrible habit of pulling her hair out, strand by strand. It’s a stress thing. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. She’ll have a bald spot the size of the Grand Canyon if she carries on like this.

  “We’ve got to do something,” she says in exasperation. “At this rate, Filbert’s is going to take all our best people.”

  “I know,” I agree. “If only we were allowed to run this place properly, without interference from that idiot.”

  *

  I pop round to Kate’s house for a cup of tea on the way home. I’m thinking about sharing my concerns about Alicia with her. Maybe she can tell me if I’m worrying over nothing.

  “Come on in!” she says, as she answers the door. “Alicia’s just made some tea.”

  “Alicia’s here?”

  I don’t know why I’m even surprised anymore. She seems to pop up everywhere I go these days. I’m tempted to leave, but I make myself sit down at the table. I’m determined to play nice.

  Alicia smiles at me.

  “Would you like a cup, Isabel?”

  For a moment, my suspicious mind works overtime, wondering if she’s somehow poisoned the tea, or if she wants me to leave fingerprints on the cup so that she can plant more evidence at crime scenes. Given my misgivings, I should just say no, but instead I nod, numbly.

  I watch as she pours the tea and swirls the leaves around in each cup, muttering something incomprehensible.

  “What’s she doing?” I whisper to Kate.

  “She’s going to read our tea leaves.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’ll be fun!”

  Reluctantly, I agree. I’m not sure I trust Alicia as far as I can throw her, but what harm can she do with a few tea leaves? And besides, it would be good to know what fate has in store for me, for a change.

  We gulp our tea quickly, eager to get to the leaf reading. I’m not used to drinking tea made with loose leaves, and I splutter a bit as some of it goes down the wrong way. Kate pats me on the back.

  “Do me first,” she says eagerly, once I’ve stopped coughing.

  Alicia leans forward and examines the little patterns in her teacup.

  “What can you see, Kate?”

  Kate scrunches up her face in concentration.

  “Looks like a present?” she says, hopefully.

  “Yes!” Alicia takes a closer look. “A parcel. That means a surprise.”

  “A good surprise or a bad one?” I ask.

  Alicia shrugs. “It doesn’t say. Maybe that depends on you.”

  Kate raises her eyebrows at me and I smile.

  “So what about yours?” I ask.

  Alicia gazes down at her own cup and a slow smile spreads across her face.

  “I see a lover,” she says, blushing.

  “Ooh!” Kate claps her hands together. “Maybe it’s that hot new pizza guy!”

  Alicia giggles. “Let’s do yours, Isabel.”

  I offer her my cup.

  “What can you see?” she asks, as the three of us pore over the splattered tea leaves in the bottom of my cup. Mine looks a bit messier than the other two.

  “Well, that b
lob looks a bit like Fluffy,” I say eventually.

  “Yes, a cat.” Alicia confirms. “And next to it is a wolf.”

  “What’s that, then?” asks Kate, pointing to the biggest shape of all.

  “That’s an hourglass.”

  “So what does it all mean?”

  Alicia takes a deep breath. “Well, the cat is for deceit, or a false friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the wolf?”

  “The wolf is for jealousy.”

  “And what about the hourglass?”

  “Yes, the hourglass,” Alicia looks me right in the eye. “That means that time is running out.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it means you need to make a change in your life, or get something done. The signs can be very vague.”

  “You couldn’t magic up a couple of lovers for us then?” I ask. “Not that I’m not grateful for my assortment of strange animals and warnings about punctuality.”

  Alicia laughs her squeaky little laugh. “Maybe next time. I can only work with the what the tea leaves give me.”

  “What do you think?” I ask Fluffy that night, as we watch Neighbours together.

  “Can she really read tea leaves, or was she making it all up? ‘The cat is for deceit, or a false friend,’” I say, mimicking her high-pitched voice. “She’s obviously not a cat lover then.”

  Knock! Knock!

  Who’s that?

  “I’m coming,” I yell. I don’t know why people don’t just use the doorbell. There’s nothing wrong with it.

  I undo the latch and the door swings back.

  It’s the police. DS Penney and the other one.

  “Who were you talking to?” Penney asks, looking around.

  “Oh, just my cat,” I say, gesturing towards the sofa, but Fluffy has already gone into hiding, the false friend that he is.

  “So how can I help you?” I ask, glancing at my watch. It seems a bit late to be making house calls.

  “We just have one question for you, Isabel. What happened to Rose Cottage?”

  Chapter Six

  The summer I turned eighteen, Kate and I worked as play leaders at a children’s holiday camp called Camp Windylake. While Kate’s group charged up and down the football pitch, mine were more stylish and artistic. We had the best times in the arts and crafts tent, fashioning intricate hats and gloves from old scraps of material and decorating them with sequins, buttons and beads. We customised jeans and T-shirts with safety pins, ribbons and lace. Every one of my charges made something they could be proud of that summer, culminating in a big fashion show on the last day, where the kids strutted their stuff down a makeshift catwalk to Right Said Fred.

  I started smoking that summer, actually. I know, most people start much younger than eighteen, but smoking had never interested me before. Yet somehow, sitting round the camp fire one night, I found myself accepting a cigarette. And despite many, many failed attempts, I’ve never managed to quit since. Not even after what happened to Rose Cottage.

  The day camp finished, Julio picked us up in a cherry-red convertible he’d been working on, drawing numerous wolf-whistles from the girls, fellow camp leaders, and even one or two of the mums. This was way before he and Kate were ever an item, of course.

  After dropping Kate off home, we returned to Rose Cottage, the holiday home Dad rented every summer since we were little. I dumped my bag in the hallway and ran upstairs to take a shower. Dad was out on a date that night (what can I say? Like father, like son) and Julio suggested we go out for a few drinks and catch up.

  “How about here?” he said, as we walked down the High Street, in the direction of the Millennium nightclub.

  “No,” I said, glaring at the long-haired bouncer. He looked particularly smug that night, organising the crowd into an orderly queue and deciding who could go in and who couldn’t. “I hear there’s a new Turkish place that’s just opened across the road. Let’s go and have a look.”

  The raki poured freely that night, and it was gone midnight by the time we finally stumbled home along the beach.

  Julio sniffed the air. “Hmm, smells like barbecue.”

  I blinked at the unfriendly lights ahead of us. “I don’t think that’s a barbecue. Something’s on fire!”

  We strained our eyes to see, and, perhaps because we’d had quite a bit to drink, we still failed to realise that the source of all the commotion was our very own Rose Cottage. Until we saw Dad, that is. He was walking across the sand towards us, his arms crossed, his expression as dark as the thunderous clouds of smoke above us.

  “OK, which of you did it?” he demanded. “I’ve just been speaking to the fire crew and they think it was probably started by a cigarette.”

  Julio and I looked at each other in horror. We had each had one before heading out that night. But I’d stubbed mine out, I was certain of it. Poor Dad, he had no idea either of us smoked.

  “It wasn’t me!” Julio said indignantly, his body language mimicking his father’s.

  “Well, it wasn’t me, either!” I defended myself. “I wouldn’t be that careless!”

  And so it went. I blamed Julio, and he blamed me. We never did get to the bottom of it. That was the end of our holidays at Rose Cottage though. The place was damaged beyond repair.

  *

  “So you admit that you started the fire at Rose Cottage?” Penney asks. The man has ants in his pants. He keeps pacing up and down, seems unable to sit for longer than ten seconds. His partner, meanwhile, lounges back on my sofa, taking in the stack of fashion magazines on the coffee table and the orderly row of shoes, lined against the wall. These are not all my shoes, by the way, just the ones that don’t fit in the shoe cupboard.

  “We never found out for sure,” I say cagily. “It could have been me, but it could equally have been my brother. It was a long time ago and an accident at that. I really can’t see what it has to do with the fire at the caravan park.”

  “Except that it’s another unexplained coincidence,” Penney points out.

  “Look Isabel, we don’t want to do this, but if we find any more of these little ‘coincidences’, I’m going to have to turn you over to my boss, and she’s not into these cosy little home visits, if you get my drift. She’ll want to question you properly.”

  “Down the station,” adds his partner, as if I’m an imbecile.

  “Look, I know this looks bad,” I say, in exasperation, “but there’s really nothing more to tell.”

  “So this is going to be the last time we’ll need to speak to you then?”

  “Yes. Absolutely the last.”

  Next morning, I am awoken by the sound of the phone ringing.

  Groggily, I reach for it.

  “Hello?”

  “Isabel? It’s Sonya. Are you OK?”

  “Yes, fine. Why?” I ask, rubbing my eyes.

  “It’s gone half past nine. Are you still in bed?”

  “Oh, bollocks!” I glance at my bedside clock. “I must have overslept. Sorry, Sonya – I had trouble getting to sleep last night.”

  “You OK?”

  “Yes, fine, just had the police sniffing round again last night.”

  I don’t know why I told her that, Sonya isn’t exactly the soul of discretion.

  “About the fire?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s crazy! They should stop wasting your time and catch some real criminals.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re all right, anyway. I’ll see you at work then.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be as quick as I can. Sorry about oversleeping.”

  “Not to worry, it’s kind of dead today, anyway.”

  I thought she was just trying to make me feel better, but I get a bit of a shock when I walk through the door of Robertson’s an hour later.

  “Hey, where is everyone?”

  Stu walks out of his office.

  “Something’s not right,” he says, poin
ting out the obvious. “Maybe you should go over to Filbert’s, Isabel and see if it’s quiet there too.”

  “I really don’t see how checking out the opposition is going to help,” I object. “Wouldn’t my time be better spent helping with the inventory?” I glance at Sonya for support.

  “No, I think they’re up to something,” Stu insists. “Just go and have a look.”

  “I suppose it can’t hurt,” Sonya agrees.

  I didn’t want Stu to be right, but when I reach Filbert’s, the car park is so packed that I have to drive round in circles for ten minutes before I can get a space. What’s more, their trolley bays are all empty. Meaning either they’ve had a major trolley theft, or every single one of them is in use.

  What’s going on here?

  That’s when I see the sign: ‘Half price Friday! Everything half price!’

  How did I miss this? How did we all miss this?

  Why are they doing this? They must be making a massive loss!

  But look how many people there are! They’ve taken most of our customers and then some! I fight my way into the store and look around. Shelf stackers work furiously to replenish the stock, but they’re no match for the bargain hungry shoppers, some of whom have taken more than one trolley. I’m tempted to do a little shopping myself.

  I follow the crowd towards the checkout. No zombies here. They have fully automated tills, with helpful assistants on hand to advise people on how to use them. All the staff seem ultra smiley and efficient. They must invest a lot more in staff training than we do.

  Hey - I wonder if they pay more than Robertson’s?

  Boldly, I walk over to the customer service desk.

  “Hi, do you have any vacancies?” I ask.

  “Yes,” says the smiling assistant. “We’re currently looking for customer service personnel and shelf stackers.”

  “What’s the pay like?”

  “Very competitive,” says a voice behind me. I turn round and find myself looking at Bernie Greengrass, the store manager. He needs no introduction - his picture is in the local paper just about every week.

  “But I’d have thought junior manager would be more suitable for you, Isabel?”

  “You know my name?”

  “I make it my business to know,” he says with a smile. “If you’re really interested in a position here, just let me know. Our pay and conditions are very generous.”