SEVEN DEADLY THINGS (Henry & Sparrow Book 3), A FOX [good books to read for adults .TXT] 📗

at him. In her forties, she was well preserved and attractive, with a regal nose and jawline, and a haughty mouth. She tended to dress in pastels and pearls and was almost a dead ringer for Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds, give or take a few lines around the eyes.

‘Sue you?’ He shook his head. ‘They were trespassing on your land!’

‘Doesn’t make a jot of difference,’ she said, cradling a glass of Merlot in her fingers and rolling her eyes. ‘It’ll be my fault for not securing the boundary and stopping them coming in — you’ll see. It’s happened before. A farmer around here got sued to fuck by a burglar after his dog bit the bastard in the balls.’

Lucas laughed. He loved the way posh folk swore with such refined alacrity. Grace had the knack of enunciating ‘fuck’ so properly, it sounded like Latin. He had dined with her for the past two evenings, much to his initial surprise. When he had been invited to the Stokeley Lodge estate by Grant, he’d been told his bed and board would be provided, but he hadn’t expected a room in the stately home itself. It turned out that the place was all faded elegance and the current Lord and Lady Botwright were taking desperate steps to raise funds to stop the roof falling in. This meant playing host to paying guests in the east wing for the past three years and the plan for twelve holiday cottages in the grounds, to be built as soon as Lucas had advised on the water table.

The River Waveney passed along the boundary of the 2,000-acre estate and the hope was that the holiday lets could be built close to its banks, for the view. Lucas had ruled out part of it already but was sensing that a good half-kilometre along the more easterly stretch would prove to be suitable. He hadn’t told Lady Botwright yet. He wanted to be sure before getting her hopes up. Not that she hadn’t asked — daily. She was agog at his dowsing talents and he knew she was only just restraining herself from asking for party pieces.

‘So… we can rule out the lower field,’ said Grace — who had instructed that he call her Grace when she first insisted he join her for dinner earlier that week. Her husband was away in France and she was desperate for intelligent company, she said. ‘Maybe we should just dig it up and plant watercress!’ she sighed. ‘I swear half the country estates in Norfolk and Suffolk will end up as water sports resorts one day.’

‘Probably not in our lifetimes,’ said Lucas.

‘So… Lucas… you know I am not the type to pry,’ she said, taking a sip of wine and twinkling at him over the fine crystal goblet. ‘But I feel as if we know each other well enough now…’

‘Oh my,’ he said. ‘Where is this leading?’

She put down the glass and leant forward, forearms resting on the damask table cloth, affording him a pleasant view of nicely presented décolletage. ‘Mariam told me not to ask you… and I absolutely won’t if you don’t want to talk about it.’

Lucas sighed. Mariam, his friend and mentor back in Salisbury, had helped him out a lot over the past year — first by commissioning an exhibition of his abstract art for her gallery, then by selling his works at a very good price. She’d also once distracted the police from hunting him down in her roof space… More recently, she’d put Lady Grace in touch with him, realising that despite his burst of artistic success, he was running low on funds again and so a week of East Anglian water divining for a good fee was worth pursuing. Lucas hadn’t been keen. He told her he’d sworn off dowsing of any kind for the foreseeable future, but Mariam had worn him down by pointing out that there were openings for customer service assistants in the NatWest call centre and if he wasn’t going to dowse, he might as well fill out the online form. He thought he would probably make some more money from his next collection, but it was coming on slowly and not slated for the gallery until September. The electricity bill would need to be settled in a fortnight and at present he had no income.

So he had sighed, got Sid a brand new steel chain, and ridden up to the Fens two weeks later on his Triumph Bonneville, recently restored and running nicely.

In checking out his credentials on Google, Lady Grace would certainly have found some interesting reading matter, so in many ways he was impressed that she had managed to hold off asking this long.

‘Your crime solving!’ said Lady Grace, a little breathlessly. ‘Is it true you hunted down the Wiltshire Runner Grabber last year?’

‘I helped,’ he said. ‘The DS on the case found her first.’

‘You mean she got herself kidnapped and nearly killed first,’ pointed out her ladyship. ‘I read all the coverage, you know. If you hadn’t dowsed her location she’d be a piece of desiccated art by now, along with plenty more lost lady runners, I don’t doubt.’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. She was doing a good job of escaping when I found her.’

‘And then the Gaffer Tape Killers!’ went on Lady Grace, adopting the tabloid title with enthusiasm. ‘That was just extraordinary. Did you really hunt them down with a tin of flapjacks?’

Lucas laughed and shook his head again. ‘It was a bit more involved than that. The killer had touched the tin. I just picked up on that when I saw it. It was useful in helping us find him… and his partner.’

‘You’re being annoyingly modest,’ she scolded. ‘You and your detective friend saved that poor young man from being electrocuted — and you got knocked out with a spade and stamped on the head for your trouble.’

‘Yeah, well… Kate got shot for her trouble,’ he said, picking up his own glass now and staring into