far, and of course by email. I could give you my personal impressions...’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘Can’t be bought off,’ Harold said bluntly, instantly killing Art’s first line of attack.
‘Everyone has a price,’ he murmured without skipping a beat. ‘Have you any pictures of her at all?’
‘Just something in one of the articles printed last week about the development.’
‘Let’s have a look.’ Art waited, thinking, as Harold expertly paged through documents in his pile of folders before eventually showing him an unsatisfactory picture of the woman in question.
Art stared. She looked like a Ms. The sort of feminist hippy whose mission might be to save the world from itself. The newspaper article showed him a picture of the sit-in, protesters on his land with placards and enough paraphernalia to convince him that they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. All that was missing was a post office and a corner shop, but then summer was the perfect time for an impromptu camping expedition. He doubted they would have been quite as determined if those fields had been knee-deep in snow and the branches of the trees bending at ninety-degree angles in high winds.
Whatever the dark-haired harridan had said to them to stoke up public outrage at his development, she had succeeded because the untidy lot in the picture looked as self-righteous as she did.
The picture he was now staring at, of Ms Rose Tremain, showed a woman jabbing her finger at someone out of sight, some poor sod unfortunate enough to be asking her to answer a few questions she didn’t like. Her unruly hair was scraped back into something, leaving flyaway strands around her face. Her clothes beggared belief. Art was accustomed to dating women who graced catwalks, women who were best friends with cutting-edge designers and spent whatever time they had away from their modelling jobs in exclusive salons beautifying themselves.
He squinted at the picture in front of him and tried to get his head around the image of someone who looked as though she had bulk-bought her outfit from a charity shop and hadn’t been near a hairdresser in decades.
No. Money wasn’t going to get her off his back. One look at that jabbing finger and fierce scowl was enough to convince him of the rashness of going down that road.
But there were many ways to skin a cat...
‘So, she can’t be bought,’ Art murmured, half to himself. ‘Well, I will have to find another way to convince her to drop her case against me and get those protestors off my land. Every day lost is costing me money.’ With his dark eyes still on the picture in front of him, Art connected to his PA and told her to reschedule his calendar for the next fortnight.
‘What are you going to do?’ Harold asked, sounding alarmed, as if he couldn’t make sense of his workaholic boss taking two weeks off.
‘I’m going to take a little holiday,’ Art said with a slow smile of intent. ‘A busman’s holiday. You will be the only one privy to this information, so keep it to yourself, Harold. If Ms Tremain can’t be persuaded to my way of thinking by a generous contribution to whatever hare-brained “Save the Whale” cause she espouses, then I’m going to have to find another way to persuade her.’
‘How? If we’re talking about anything illegal here, Art...’
‘Oh, please.’ Art burst out laughing. ‘Illegal?’
‘Maybe I don’t mean illegal. Maybe a better word might be unethical.’
‘Well, now, my friend. That depends entirely on your definition of unethical...’
* * *
‘Someone here to see you, Rose.’
Rose looked up at the spiky-haired young girl standing by the door of the office she shared with her co-worker, Phil. It was little more than a large room on the ground floor of the Victorian house which was also her home but it was an arrangement that worked. The rent she got from Phil and from the occupants of the other two converted rooms—who were variously the local gardening club twice a week, the local bridge group once a week and the local children’s playgroup twice a week—covered the extensive running costs of the house she had inherited when her mother had died five years previously. Well, alongside the sizeable loan she had had to take out in order to effect urgent repairs on the place.
She occasionally thought that it would have been nice if she could have separated her work life from her home life but, on the other hand, who could complain about a job where there was no commute involved?
‘Who is it, Angie?’ Bad time. Middle of the afternoon and she still had a bucketload of work to do. Three cases had cropped up at precisely the same time and each one of them involved complex issues with employment law, in which she specialised, and demanded a lot of attention.
‘Someone about the land.’
‘Ah. The land.’ Rose sat back, stretched and then stood up, only realising how much she’d cramped up when she heard a wayward joint creak.
The land.
No one called it anything else.
Between Phil’s property law side of the business and her labour law, the land had become the middle ground which occupied them both, far more than either had expected when the business of some faceless tycoon buying up their green fields to build yet another housing estate had reared its ugly head.
Phil was a relative newcomer to the area, but she had lived in the village her whole life and she had adopted the cause of the protestors with gusto.
Indeed, she had even allowed them to use her sprawling kitchen as their headquarters.
She was unashamedly partisan and was proud of her stance. There was nothing that stuck in her throat more than big businesses and billionaire businessmen thinking that they could do as they pleased and steamroll over the little people so that they could make yet more money for themselves.
‘Want me to handle it?’ Phil asked, looking up from his desk, which was as chaotic as hers.
‘No.’ Rose smiled at him. She could never have hoped for a more reliable business partner than Phil. Thirty-three years old, he had the appearance of a slightly startled owl, with his wire-rimmed specs and his round face, but he was as sharp as a tack and won a breathtaking amount of business for them. ‘If they’ve actually got around to sending one of their senior lawyers then I’m ready for them. It’s insulting that so far they’ve only seen fit to send junior staff. Shows how confident they are of being able to trample us into the ground.’
‘I like your faith in our ability to bring a massive corporation to its knees,’ Phil said with a wry grin. ‘DC Logistics pretty much owns the world.’
‘Which,’ Rose countered without skipping a beat, ‘doesn’t mean that they can add this little slice of land to the tally.’
She tucked strands of her unruly hair into the sort of bun she optimistically started each and every day with, only to give up because her hair had a will of its own.
She glanced at the sliver of mirror in between the bookshelves groaning under the weight of legal tomes and absently took in the reflection that stared back at her every morning when she woke up.
No one had ever accused her of being pretty. Rose had long accepted that she just wasn’t, that she just didn’t fit the mould of pretty. She had a strong, intelligent face with a firm jaw and a nose that bordered on sharp. Her large eyes were clear and brown and her best feature as far as she was concerned.
Everything else...well, everything else worked. She was a little too tall, a little too gangly and not nearly busty enough, but you couldn’t concern yourself with stuff like that and she didn’t. Pretty much.
‘Right! Let’s go see what they’ve thrown at us this time!’ She winked at Phil and made approving noises when Angie said that she’d stuck their