Rumours. Freya North

have a John Piper etching,’ he told her with an almost-smile.

      They had just pulled up outside the Victorian conversion, where the one-bedder was on the second floor.

      ‘A Piper?’

      But Geoff pressed the doorbell before Stella could coax a reply.

      Forty minutes later, Geoff really couldn’t fault her – they had a new vendor on their books, her valuation had been spot on. The client had liked her and Geoff had liked Stella’s manner – chatty, enthusiastic, supportive. He sensed if she took a potential purchaser around, they’d be lining up a second viewing just as soon as they’d seen the place. He had to concede that she’d probably sell a place like this faster than he could.

      ‘Nicely done,’ he said when they headed back to the car.

      ‘Thank you.’

      ‘We’d heard all sorts of things about you,’ he said, as if disbelieving that reality could be so very different. She looked aghast. ‘I doubt whether there was much truth in any of them,’ he told her. ‘Ignore them – Those Three, back in the office – they’re harmless.’ He paused. ‘Relatively.’

      The trouble with rumours, thought Stella, is that once the seed is planted, roots spread and the whole thing rampages like ground elder. As fast as you pull it up, renegade shoots are already off on tangents.

      But then she thought, it’s impossible for something to grow from nothing. However tiny, there’s always a seed of truth that starts it all off.

      A bit like Love really.

       Chapter Two

      Jesus, do I not feel like doing this.

      Xander reached over to whack down the alarm clock as if it was a bluebottle that had been bugging him for hours. Lying next to him, Siobhan mumbled in her reverie. He looked at her, naked and so very tempting. Outside, grey and raining. Inside, warm and cosy. Inside Siobhan, downright hot and snug. He lay back on his side of the bed, his hand lolling over his morning erection, trying to persuade himself that he had a true dilemma on his hands. But the truth was, Siobhan wasn’t really the distraction and he wasn’t really all that horny – he just craved any excuse not to go. He didn’t want to do ten miles. Not today. Not in the rain. But it wasn’t a choice; there really was no decision to make. He had to do it. And that was that. Half-marathon at the end of the month, all the won-derful people in his life effervescing on his justgiving.com page, pledging money for his chosen good cause. He dressed, steeled himself and headed out into the rain. More fool him for having believed in all that mad March sunshine yesterday. iPod on, he headed out of his house, past the other estate cottages in his terrace, and headed up Tramfield Lane at a sprint as if to prove wrong the Xander who’d woken thinking he didn’t want to run today.

      Within two miles he felt good. Really good. He headed his loop up Bridgeback Hill and through Dansworth Forest, pushing on hard until the gradient levelled out and he was looking down on the Georgian beauty of Longbridge Hall; the arable fields, noble woods, rolling parkland and manicured gardens of the Fortescue estate. The rain had stopped and sudden sunlight elicited caramel tones from the mansion’s brickwork, glints of silver from the expansive slate roof; the high floating hornbeam hedge sparkled like a soft chuckle and the gravel driveway, from this angle, was like a swooping butter-coloured smile. Xander thought, it’s been a while since I saw Lady Lydia. His instinct was still to refer to her thus if he hadn’t seen her recently – though he’d been invited to call her Lydia once he’d graduated from university almost two decades ago.

      I must drop her a line. It’s been over a month.

      He ran on and laughed out loud – remembering a conversation so clearly she could very well be running alongside him just then.

      ‘Have you heard of eel mails, Xander?’

      ‘Email?’

      ‘What a ghastly notion. Lady Ranchester told me she is now called dorothy at ranchester dot com. All lower case. How preposterous! Dot Common – that’s what she is now.’

      ‘Handwritten letters are now known as snail mail, Lydia.'

      ‘Nonsense. If one can write – it’s downright wrong not to.’

      Ten miles in sixty-eight minutes. Not bad. Not bad.

      ‘Xan?’

      He wished Siobhan wouldn’t call him that. Laura used to call him Xan. And that experience had shown him how familiarity bred contempt. Also, with his mind now alert and his body charged by endorphins, he just wanted to shower, have a quick, quiet coffee with his bowl of muesli and be gone. Siobhan didn’t need to be here – not in his bed, not on the scene. He had to do something about it, he really did. Just not now.

      ‘Xan?’ she called out.

      God!

      ‘I need a shower!’ he called back.

      ‘I need to go.’

      Thank God!

      ‘OK.’

      ‘Call me.’

      ‘OK.’

      Xander always marvelled at the transformation. All it took for his Lazy Git alter ego (the duvet-muffled bloke who’d had too much red wine the night before) to morph into Xander Fletcher with all traces of sleep, sex, stubble and sweat erased, bright and eager to greet the day, was a ten-mile run in under an hour and ten minutes. Dressed neatly in dark trousers and a pale shirt, driving sensibly through his beloved village of Long Dansbury to his office in Hertford twenty-five minutes away, he thought of the process as a sort of protracted Superman turnaround. Well, if not a super man, a good bloke at any rate. Heading for forty in a couple of years, Xander had no complaints at all. He lived in a lovely cottage, he had an OK bank balance and his own business keeping its head above water, a close family, great friends and a woman called Siobhan who didn’t mind things being casual. Doing those ten miles in sixty-three minutes would ice an already tasty cake. He thought about it as he headed out for his car. It was doable. Xander had been brought up to believe anything was doable. Apart from Love, which was beyond one’s control. Accordingly, he’d decided not to entertain it in his life, not since Laura.

      He drove through a landscape which rolled and tumbled like a soft green rucked-up quilt. Born and bred here, Xander had never fallen out of love with his environs and never stopped noticing its beauty or the changes, for better or worse. That’s why, after interludes in Nottingham and London, he’d returned home at thirty.

      His route took him through a handful of small villages, a few still with a shop clinging on for dear life to the local economy like a limpet to a storm-lashed rock. Most supported a pub and all of the villages heralded their approach with a profusion of daffodils along the verges in spring. Beyond each community, pastureland subtly cordoned off by barely visible electric fencing supported little gatherings of horses in weatherproof rugs, looking like the equine relatives of the Michelin Man. Woodland interrupted the swathes of fields like a patchy beard and the rivers Rib, Ash and Beane coursed through the landscape as if on a mission to deliver goodness straight to the Lea, the main artery of the area.

      ‘Good morning, Xander.’

      Pauline Gregg, his PA of eight years, still wished he’d let her call him Mr Fletcher or Alexander at the very least. To her, it seemed too casual, unseemly somehow. When she’d been at secretarial school all those decades ago, she’d been trained, along with other girls, in the correct way to address their future employers and their clients. Formality is fitting; that’s what they learned. She felt it somehow downgraded her qualification to call her boss ‘Xander’. Her daughter, who was Xander’s age, told her it was a generational thing. But there again, her daughter had sent her children to a school where the pupils called their teachers by their Christian names. Moreover, the school didn’t classify it thus, but as ‘given names’. There again, that school