Twelve Days of Christmas: A bestselling Christmas read to devour in one sitting!. Trisha Ashley

extra cash since my Kevin’s been laid off. Not that he pays me the going rate, he’s too mean.’

      ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

      ‘Cash in hand, innit? He’s got me over a barrel. You’d better watch out you get your money.’

      ‘Oh, that’s okay, the agency pays me.’

      ‘You won’t see me no more after today, because I’m starting behind the bar in the pub in Great Mumming after Christmas, a regular job. So Jude Martland can stick his miserly money and his smart-arse comments where the sun don’t shine.’

      ‘Right,’ I said noncommittally, reeling slightly under this information overload. ‘So … Mr Martland knows you’re leaving?’

      ‘I told him I wasn’t doing Christmas and no-one works over New Year,’ she said sulkily, ‘especially if they don’t get a bonus. Then he said since he could never tell whether I’d been in to clean or not, I didn’t even deserve what he paid me, let alone any extra. He’s such a sarky bugger!’

      ‘I see.’

      ‘So if I’ve took another job, it’s his own fault, innit? I’m not bothered.’

      ‘I expect it is.’

      ‘If he rings, you can tell him I’ve had a better offer.’

      ‘If he should ring, I’ll certainly tell him you’ve resigned from your job,’ I agreed. ‘Now, before you go, do you have time to quickly show me over the house and where everything is?’

      ‘I don’t know where everything is, do I? I only vacuum and dust, and that’s too much for one person. An old couple used to do the cooking and see to the house and generator, but they retired after the old gent, Jude’s dad, died. January, that was.’

      ‘So I’ve heard … and did you say there was a generator? I thought the house had mains services.’

      ‘It does, but the electric’s always cutting out and the phone line is forever coming down between here and the village because the poles need replacing. The TV doesn’t work very well either, because there’s no Sky dish, though they’ve got one at the lodge. It’s a complete hole, I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself.’

      ‘That’s all right, I’m not bothered about TV. I’ve brought my radio with me and lots to read.’

      Sharon looked at me as if I was a strange and alien species with three heads. ‘There’s no mobile phone reception either, unless you walk halfway up Snowehill, or down past the lodge,’ she informed me as a clincher.

      ‘Well then, if the phone line goes dead, the exercise will do me good,’ I said pleasantly. I have worked in remote places before – the house I should have been minding in Scotland was much more isolated than this – though I had not, admittedly, previously had to cope with a generator. I only hoped the electricity didn’t cut out before I found the instructions on how to operate the thing!

      I smiled encouragingly at her. ‘Now, I’d really appreciate it if you could quickly show me round? Normally we try and visit a property beforehand to meet the owners and get the lay of the land, as it were, but obviously in this case it wasn’t possible.’

      Sharon sullenly and reluctantly agreed and stood back to let me past her into a long stone entrance chamber. It had a row of heavily-burdened coat hooks, a brass stand full of walking sticks and umbrellas, and a battered wooden bench, under which was a miscellaneous collection of wellingtons and walking boots.

      ‘Go through the door at the end,’ she directed and I found myself standing in a huge, high-ceilinged sitting room the size of a small barn with an open fireplace practically big enough to roast an ox in. A worn carpet in mellow, warm colours covered most of the stone floor and an assortment of occasional tables, velvet-covered sofas and chairs was grouped on it. A dogleg staircase rose from one corner to a balustraded gallery above, that ran around three sides.

      ‘What a lovely room! It looks as if it started out as a great hall in a much older building?’

      ‘They say this is the really old bit in the middle, the rest was added on later,’ she said indifferently. ‘There’s two wings – the kitchen one is set back, you go through a door behind that wooden screen over there. This other side is bigger, with the family rooms and another staircase. Come on, I’ll show you.’

      She ushered me briskly through a series of dark-oak-panelled rooms with polished wooden floors. Some had elaborate white-stuccoed ceilings, but they all looked dusty, dull and neglected. There was a small morning room with a TV, a long dining room sporting a spectacular, if incongruous, Venetian mirror over the hearth, and a well-stocked library with a snooker table in the middle of it.

      She paused at the door next to it. ‘Jude uses this room to work in and he locks it when he’s away.’ She sniffed. ‘You’d think he didn’t trust me.’

      He probably didn’t, though actually I’d found that there were quite often one or two mysterious locked rooms in houses I was looking after: Bluebeard’s chambers, as Laura had suggested, though their secrets were probably only of the mundane kind.

      But this room revealed its secrets, for the top of the door was glazed – perhaps it had been the land agent’s office, or something like that. It held a tilting draughtsman’s table, a large wooden easel and several tables bearing a silting of objects, including jars of pencils, brushes and lots of small models, presumably of sculptures. It was hard to make out what they were from that distance. There was also what looked like one of those hideaway computer workstations – but if so, then it must be dial-up, because there was no broadband here and, given the apparent unreliability of the phone lines, being able to connect with the internet must be a matter of luck. But that was okay – Ellen was the only person who ever emailed me much, with details of jobs.

      ‘There’s never been anything of value to lock away in Old Place anyway,’ Sharon was saying scathingly, though I noticed a wistful look on her face like a child at a sweetshop window. ‘Though Jude’s that famous now, they’re saying that even his little drawings of horses for those weird sculptures of his can fetch hundreds of pounds.’ She nodded through the glass door. ‘And he just crumples them up and tosses them in that waste-paper basket!’

      ‘Well, that’s up to him, isn’t it? Presumably he wasn’t happy with them.’

      ‘You’d think he’d leave the basket for me to empty, but no, he takes them outside and puts them in the garden incinerator!’ She obviously bitterly regretted this potential source of income going up in flames.

      ‘That does seem a little excessive,’ I agreed, amused.

      Apart from a couple of china and linen cupboards, the only other door from the passage was to a little garden hall with French doors leading outside. The trug of garden tools on the bench looked as if they hadn’t been touched for half a century and were waiting for Sleeping Beauty to wake up, don the worn leather gauntlets, and start briskly hacking back the brambles.

      ‘Is that a walled garden out there?’ I asked, peering through the gathering gloom.

      ‘Yes, though no-one bothers with most of it since Mrs Martland died …’ She screwed up her face in recollection. ‘That would be ten years ago now, thereabouts.’

      ‘Is there a gardener?’

      ‘An old bloke called Henry comes and grows vegetables in part of it, though he’s supposed to have retired. He lives down in Little Mumming, in the almshouses – those three funny little cottages near the bridge.’

      ‘Oh yes, I noticed those. Victorian Gothic.’

      ‘I wouldn’t know, I hate old houses,’ she said, which I could tell by the state of this one.

      There was a little cloakroom off the hall, with a splendid Victorian blue and white porcelain toilet depicting Windsor Castle inside the bowl, and I was just thinking that peeing