Page 27

‘With?’

‘With all this,’ she said. She waved her hands in the air, indicating the entirety of the study at the same time as driving her toe into the bottom of the jammed filing cabinet drawer. It was stupid – for the last four days she had worked solidly on trying to clear this space, but on the face of it, it was still a disaster. ‘All of this.’

In the corner of the room, Ruby let out a light whine before moving across to Bex and nuzzling against her knee.

‘Well, obviously, I’m not pissed off at you, girl,’ she said, rubbing the dog’s ears. ‘But I won’t lie. It would be helpful if you could help me sort some of this stuff out.’

She didn’t realise that Duncan had moved until she felt him beside her, his hand slipping into hers. An unwanted tingle spread through her palm.

‘Come on, you’ll get through it. I might not know you well, but I sure as hell know you’re not going to let a load of paper beat you. Besides, I’m free this afternoon. I can help you for the rest of the day.’

‘You can?’ she asked, aware of just how high her voice hitched when she spoke.

‘Yes. Actually, I’d like to. It’s a darn sight cooler in here. Now tell me, where do you want me to start?’

It was a difficult question to answer. All the obvious pieces of rubbish had already been binned – now everything had to be checked thoroughly to see if it was some sort of statement, bill, or receipt, or just a takeaway leaflet. She let out a long sigh when her eyes fell on the coffee in Duncan’s hand. She’d already had two cups today, but the instant granules weren’t anywhere near as good or as strong as she needed right now.

‘Well, you can start by handing me that coffee,’ she said, at which point she took it from him and practically inhaled a third of the cup in one go. ‘And this only counts as one day of helping me, got it?’

‘You’re really going to make me work for that date, aren’t you, Barker?’

‘Yes,’ Bex said. ‘I am. And it’s a drink, remember. It is not a date.’

28

‘That’s an invoice from one of the gamekeepers,’ Duncan said, picking a piece of paper out of the ‘binned’ pile where Bex had put it only a moment before.

‘How do you know?’ Bex asked, squinting. ‘There’s nothing written on it that says that. It’s just a couple of numbers.’

‘There.’ Duncan pointed to a scrawl at the bottom of the page. ‘That’s Turlough’s signature.’

‘God, I thought someone was just trying to make a pen work,’ Bex said, grimacing at her mistake, before picking up the rest of the scraps she had placed in the bin pile. ‘In that case, maybe you could go through these as well.’

They were an efficient team. Impressively so. With all the obvious rubbish sorted, they were now riffling through the rest. After the first two hours, they had all the ledgers stacked together in one corner of the room, though Bex hadn’t dared open any of them. If she did, those tears of pure frustration which had been teetering on the edge of release all morning might well appear, and there was no chance she was going to let that happen.

‘Duncan, I’ve found a couple of handwritten notes here,’ she said. She was crouched at the bottom of a bookshelf, which housed dozens of meaty tomes on farming. Though trapped between them had been a small stack of papers. ‘They look to be legal things. I don’t think it’s money, but I’m not sure. It’s got information about hospitals on it? Correspondence from them to Fergus, I think. Do we already have a pile for legal stuff?’

Duncan’s face pinched. ‘Hospitals, you say? That’s weird. I found a notebook in here with a list in it. I wasn’t sure what they were, but come to think of it, they might have been hospitals too.’

‘Can I see?’ Bex asked.

‘Sure.’

He handed her the small leather notebook, open on the first page. There was a long list of names, all of which had been struck through with a single line, leaving them perfectly legible.

‘Edinburgh Royal, Queen Charlotte, Maryfield.’ Bex read the first few aloud, although the list went on. While she didn’t recognise all of them, she agreed with Duncan that they could well be hospitals. ‘Let’s put this together with the letters I found. There’s a ton of legal ones too. They can go in the same pile. That way, Fergus will know they’re all together. Not that I expect him to look through any of it.’

It would be helpful if he would though, she thought. Some of the ones that were full of legal jargon may well be to do with loans or invoices, in which case she would need to come back to them later. So maybe it was better if she put those in a pile of their own.

Her thoughts about the old man continually switched between feeling sorry for him – he was obviously incredibly lonely, after all – and being angry and frustrated. He had access to the type of funds most people could never dream of. There was really no excuse for letting his accounts get into this type of state. Just like there was no excuse for the way he had spoken to her about Duncan when he had no idea of the situation. If he was going to be mad at her for anything, it should be the fact that Ruby very much preferred her to him. That she would understand.

With her thoughts on Fergus, she remembered the jumble of keys he had given her earlier in the day.

‘Can you see if you can unlock the desk drawers?’ she said to Duncan. ‘I’m pretty sure there’s some stuff I need access to in there, but I think Fergus’d be happier if you went through them rather than me.’

‘Sure,’ Duncan said.

Bex held out the keys for him. Yet as Duncan moved to take them from her, his fingertips brushed against her palm. An electric tingle shot out from the place he touched her, and a rush of heat flooded the rest of her body. The tiniest of gasps escaped her lips before she stumbled back, trying to make sense of what had just happened. It was just like the first time they had touched.