jumped, blinked and when she looked again he’d gone and for a moment she was afraid that he was coming back. Hoped that he was coming back, but a moment later he reappeared further along the street and she turned her back on the window before he felt her eyes boring into the back of his head and turned again to catch her looking.
‘Have you spoken to the Chronicle?’ she asked; anything to distract herself.
‘The first thing I did when Mr Hadley’s solicitor contacted me early this morning was to call the Chronicle’s advertising manager.’ Miles walked across to his desk and removed a sheet of paper from a file and handed it to her. ‘He sent this over from his office. Hadley hasn’t seen it yet but it’s only a matter of time before his lawyer contacts them.’
It was a photocopied proof of the ad for Hadley Chase—exactly as she’d read it out—complete with a tick next to the ‘approved’ box and her signature scrawled across the bottom.
‘No, Miles. This is wrong.’ She looked up. ‘This isn’t what I signed.’
‘But you did write that,’ he insisted.
‘One or two of the phrases sound vaguely familiar,’ she admitted.
She sometimes wrote a mock advertisement describing a property in the worst possible light when she thought it would help the vendor to see the property through the eyes of a potential buyer. The grubby carpet in the hall, the children’s finger marks on the doors, the tired kitchen. Stuff that wouldn’t cost much to fix, but would make all the difference to the prospects of a sale.
‘Oh, come on, Tash. It sounds exactly like one of your specials.’
‘My “specials” have the advantage of being accurate. And helpful.’
‘So you would have mentioned the leaking roof?’
‘Absolutely. Damaged ceilings and pools of water are about as off-putting as it gets,’ she said, hating that she was on the defensive when she hadn’t done anything wrong.
‘What about the stairs?’
‘I’m sure they’d be lovely if you could see them for the dust and dead leaves that blew in through a broken window.’ The house had been empty since the last occupant had been moved to a nursing home when Alzheimer’s had left him a danger to himself a couple of years ago. ‘The caretaker is worse than useless. I had to find some card and fill the gap myself but it’s just a temporary solution. The first serious gust of wind will blow it out. And, frankly, if I were Darius Hadley I’d put a boot up the backside of the estate executor because he’s no help.’ He didn’t reply. ‘Come on, Miles. You know I didn’t send this to the Chronicle.’
‘Are you sure about that? Really? We all know that you’ve been putting in long hours. What time was your first viewing this morning?’
‘Eight, but—’
‘What time did you finish last night?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer but consulted a printout of her diary, no doubt supplied by Janine. No wonder she’d been smiling. This was much more fun than an office party. Gossip city... ‘Your last viewing was at nine-thirty so you were home at what? Eleven? Eleven-thirty?’
It had been after midnight. Buyers couldn’t always fit into a tidy nine-till-five slot. Far from complaining about the extra hours she put in, that they all put in—with the exception of Toby, who never allowed anything to interfere with rugby training, took time off whenever he felt like it and got away with murder because his great-aunt was married to Peter Black—Miles expected it.
‘They flew from the States to view that apartment. I could hardly tell them that I finished at five-thirty,’ she pointed out. They’d come a long way and wanted to see every detail and she wasn’t about to rush them.
‘No one can keep up that pace for long without something suffering,’ he replied, not even bothering to ask if they were likely to make an offer. ‘It seems obvious to me that you attached the wrong document when you emailed your copy to the Chronicle.’
‘No—’
‘I blame myself.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve pushed you too hard. I should have seen it coming.’
Seen what coming?
‘I didn’t attach the wrong anything,’ she declared, fizzing with indignation, her pulse still racing but with anger now rather than anticipation. How dared anyone tamper with her carefully composed ad? ‘And even if I had made a mistake, don’t you think I’d have noticed it when the proof came back?’
‘If you’d actually had time to look at it.’
‘I made time,’ she declared. ‘I checked every word. And what the hell was the Chronicle thinking? Why didn’t someone on the advertising desk query it?’
‘They did.’ He glanced at the ad. ‘They called this office on the twentieth. Unsurprisingly, they made a note for their records.’
‘Okay, so which idiot did they speak to?’
He handed her the page so that she could see for herself. ‘An idiot by the name of Natasha Gordon.’
‘No!’
‘According to the advertising manager, you assured them that it was the latest trend, harking back fifty years to an estate agent famous for the outrageous honesty of his advertisements.’ His tone, all calm reason, raised the small hairs on the back of her neck. Irritable, she could handle. This was just plain scary. ‘Clearly, you were angry with the executors for not taking your advice.’
‘If they didn’t have the cash, they didn’t have the cash, although I imagine their fees are safely in the bank. Believe me, if I’d been aping the legendary Roy Brooks, I’d have made a far better job of it than this,’ she said, working hard to sound calm even while her pulse was going through the roof. ‘There was plenty to work with. No one from the Chronicle talked to me.’ Calm, cool, professional...
‘So what are you saying? That the advertising manager of the Chronicle is lying? Or that someone pretended to be you? Come on, Tash, who would do that?’ he asked. ‘What would anyone have to gain?’
She swallowed. Put like that, it did sound crazy.
‘You are right about one thing, though,’ he continued. ‘The phone has been ringing off the hook—’ her sigh of relief came seconds too soon ‘—but not with people desperate to view Hadley Chase. They are all gossip columnists and the editors of property pages wanting a comment.’
She frowned. ‘Already? The magazine has been on the shelves for less than two hours.’
‘You know what they say about bad news.’ He took the ad from her and tossed it onto his desk. ‘In this instance I imagine it was given a head start by someone working at the Chronicle tipping them off.’
‘I suppose. How did Darius Hadley hear about it?’
‘I imagine the estate executors received the same phone calls.’
She shook her head, letting the problem of how this had happened go for the moment and concentrating instead on how to fix it. ‘The one thing I
